I'd rather see them capitalize on Portals for something like this. As opposed to how they work for the Tall Tales which use them, in this instance there could be a Voyage type that sends you to this place through a Portal but it would be a shared Instance rather than a Private one. Turn it into what the Roar was originally intended to be - a high risk, high reward optional area that pirates can go.
The high risk can be a mix of PvE threat and the fact that a balanced number of Crews would be placed into the same instances to try and help maintain that interaction ratio, maybe going with a higher ratio than is intended on the normal seas. This area can feature a single Outpost type location where any Loot acquired here must be turned in (sort of like the Roar having one Outpost) as since there will be other Crews present there is a chance for theft which means we can have actual loot in this kind of an instance. This makes it have a strong PvP draw to it also which would help for people wanting to get something closer to on demand PvP in their sessions.
So a compact little region that can be accessed knowing that it is going to be a pretty wild ride. Call it an Expedition (instead of Voyage so you can maintain the gimmick of cancelling Voyages when going through Portals to clear what people might have from any of these instance). Stick, say, 4 Crews into a region roughly the size of the Devil's Roar that exists on it's own little instance. Use standard Merge techniques to maintain this balance. Actively break-up and split Alliances when possible on entry to make it much harder for Alliance Server Farming to happen in these areas (potentially letting you make the value of Loot here much higher because it will be hard to mitigate the risk, which would encourage people to consider trying their hand at it and possibly help swing the organic economy back into a place that can compete with Alliance Servers more naturally with the added increased risk that this should actually bring).
You could also make it so everything you do in this area comes with some sort of beacon. Either the loot (Reaper Chests, old Arena Chest) or the Voyages themselves (Fort of the Damned, Legend of the Veil). This plays into the high risk, high reward that these kinds of places could offer.
I would much prefer something along these lines than changing the existing islands to an Arctic type of theme (even a player activated one). They could even potentially do a couple other themes - the player counts are still high enough that populations should be able to support maybe 2-4 of these themed in different ways (say maybe Arctic, Jungle, and Sea of the Damned - maybe even pull the Roar off the core Map and place it in an instance like this to potentially recover some performance on main servers). You could even put a Reputation requirement on being able to even purchase these Expeditions (perhaps even make it a Pirate Legend thing). Lower rank pirates can still participate if they are in a Crew with someone who has access to these like anything else. But in this way you sort of have to really learn the game in order to opt into this much more intense style of gameplay. This would then also fulfill that sense of "end game content" that people have claimed to want for Pirate Legend.
You still have everything the core world has to offer, plus what ever crazy stuff you want to stick over in these instances. This would reduce some of the all out hostility on the main world servers which won't negate PvP on them but would potentially help shift interactions enough that sails on the horizon could mean anything again and interactions get back to being more random rather than just fight or avoid.
I feel like there is a strong, untapped potential here where we have the pieces, we just need to have them combined together with a focus.
