So here is my concept, it might need some tweaking so if you have any suggestions or constructive criticism please comment below!
With the new cooperative events I think we can all agree that finding another crew and fishing out the griefers at the same time is becoming tedious. I came up with a little idea and wanted to run it by you all.
Rare will never implement any ideas that breaks the games immersion so I don't think a passive mode like in GTA V or a safe haven will ever be added. This is why I think this suggestion could work.
Step 1 Using the spyglass in range of a another ships sail a little note at the bottom says that the ship has been added to the crew ledger along with a little audible scribble noise.
Step 2 In the captains quarters a crew ledger can be accessed that shows the newly added ship, along with an image of the ship and the name and a picture of each crew member on board.
A ledger would be a realistic thing to have on a ship and pirates would use sails to identify nearby ships. It would also be common for a pirate to want to be feared and be notorious, so this is where the idea would come in.
Step 3 A parley request can be sent which the other ship and they would receive a notification, they can use their spyglass to look for who sent it and vote on it in the crew ledger. They can see your crew information in the ledger before voting as well.
Step 4 Next to each crew member would be a notoriety level starting with neutral. Each action in the game would give you either a positive or negative boost resulting in different titles being earned and for all to see in the ledger. Each level would give you different rewards or negative rewards. If you break too many pirate codes your notoriety will drop so low you will not gain any benefits at all. Good actions will raise it enough to get you out of the max negative level.
The levels will look like this (replace the level with cool names)
1 Positive (loot can be sold for more gold, killing players drop less gold)
0 Neutral (normal rewards as they are now)
-1 (traders fear you and will give you less for loot, players drop more gold)
-MAX (you've broken so much of the pirate code you lose any benefits above)
This can be expanded with more levels added. Breaking a parley will give a serious negative impact, doing cooperative events will give you a positive level and killing players, sinking ships and selling stolen loot will give you a negative action.
With this ranking system and new ledger you can see a ship further away than the speaker phone and make your own judgement if they might turn on you etc, if the crew checks out then join them in some cooperative events, if they have lots of feared pirates or max negative notoriety then run!
