One of the biggest complaints about The Hungering Deep has been how difficult it has been to fill out a full team of 5 people to take on the shark. The "flag" feature had the right idea in mind (viewing the other ships flags from afar to see what their intentions were), but in execution, the distance that it takes to see what is on the flag made it less useful as a tool.
One way this, and other future server events could be helped is if players could leave "notes" at the tavern, which are replicated across all taverns in the server.
For people who have access to keyboards these would be short, no more than 150 character blurbs that they can input via free-text. Otherwise, it could be selected via an in game dialog message, something like:
First Question: "Meeting Type"
Options:
- "Shark Hunting"
- "Trading"
- "Let's Fight!"
- "Skull Forts"
- "Voyaging"
- (And so on...)
Second Question: Meet at,
Options:
- (List of all outposts here)
What this would accomplish is, as you join a server, or in between voyage turn-ins, you would have a reason to go to the tavern and see if anybody has left a message. You may find that during your travels, somebody has left a message indicating they want to work together with Skull Forts at Plunder Outpost, so you could sail over there, meet up, and work together the next time it pops up! Just like anything in SoT, the groundwork for deception is there: Maybe a group of pirates wants to lure unsuspecting people to the outpost to plunder them, or leaves a message wanting to team up, but plans to double cross in the end.
I think this could have the potential solve a lot of the issues with forming "groups" with other ships in your server, while leaving the UI-light aesthetics of SoT and doing so in a cool, thematic way.