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@brybrymarsh

Glad to see that you improved yourself off of your losses, as all good pirates of the Sea once had to do, and many still do. You're well on your way to their level. For your suggestions on strongholds, they're somewhat unbalanced to their intent, as their treasure hauls were designed with the old respawn timer of 3 hours in mind. Back then, there were a lot more huge battles around them, too. A difficulty increase is likely in order for them, even something as simple as the skeleton ships which visit the active ones actually attacking would be a good way to keep players on their toes. Losing the ship is the main threat for the fleets, and why they're more difficult, after all. If strongholds can't be increased in difficulty, then raising the gold earned from voyages would be a decent alternative, they do scale in map count, treasure density and treasure value with the level of the voyage (changing every 5 levels), and have been increased multiple times before.

Megalodons are a bit too common for my taste, for a shark as big as some of the smaller vessels they fight they really should do more. The kraken is at a decent rarity, it only spawns when the fleet or stronghold are not active and only one at a time during then, on ships in sufficiently open water. That said, they're nearly endangered with how few are supposedly left and likely spend a lot of time surviving off of sea life. A bit more variance in their moves wouldn't hurt, and they're a bit too easy for sloops due to how PvE encounters scale (sloops are tuned for solo play rather than full crew, unlike the other ships), but other than that they're pretty good. As for the Shrouded Ghost, it's supposed to be incredibly rare, it makes the stories of finding it just that much more impressive and the reward that much more worth it. More creatures, be they the huge crabs, phoenixes, sea serpents, whales, or other suggested sea life would all be nice, but I doubt they're quick to develop given they require a complex model, AI, fighting scheme, texture, commendation set, and likely a Bilge Rat Adventure with some cosmetics.

The old original Mercenary Voyages would do well as a weekly or monthly quest, but given how the recent 12 days of daily quests for the Christmas event changed the Sea to become more quiet, I don't know that they'd be a good idea. Players can still buy their own quests to do daily, weekly, monthly or even annually if they don't want to be productive.

There are a few bugs, but Rare fixes hundreds before releasing their updates and only the most deep-rooted issues make it through. Unfortunately, they also often take a couple of months to sort out, like the recently fixed bug with all equipment cosmetics randomly switching upon death or startup - it lasted for 3 months. I've seen island names occasionally not show up, I think it's due to the game being busy loading other things and not prioritizing it. Better than everything loading late, at least. With reputation, there's a rare bug where every now and then you have to leave and rejoin to see reputation update, it resurfaces every now and then but is fixed on relogging. Note that the reputations and especially commendations are always slow to update, usually needing a refresh to display properly in the case of commendations.