Ok, so I feel the need to clarify the "Larger viewing distance (adjustable LOD limits)" request again.
By this I do not mean the maximum render distance. I think the max viewing distance (where islands, ships etc. pop in) is absolutely fine. What I would like is the ability to have higher LODs (higher detailed models) in far distance.
I am not sure how many LODs the game uses and what the distances are for the different object types - I never really looked into this - but as an example let's simply assume it's 3 LODs with a maximum viewing distance for player ships of 2000m like this (numbers are randomly picked - not actual game values!):
0m - 200m: LOD 0
201m - 500m: LOD 1
501m - 2000m: LOD 2
What I would like to see is an extra LOD setting that would change these values to something like:
0m - 500m: LOD 0
501m - 1000m: LOD 1
1001m - 2000m: LOD 2
This would simply make the objects look nicer when they are not too far away.
For the people who are still thinking this would increase server load:
Why should it? The ships still pop in when entering the 2000m range. By the way: The server has to calculate the distance between all dynamic objects and player entities all the time to determine which info the clients need. This calculation will not be affected by viewing distance. The only thing that could change is the amount of data sent to the clients. But in this case this will probably not change either. No matter if the object is 2000m or 500m away, information about position, rotation and move vectors, object type etc. has to be pushed to the client anyway. The only thing that could change is detail information like rotation of canons, status of the sails, which texture set to use etc. But this is a ridiculously small amount of data. Just some vectors and IDs.
The rendering is done by the client. The server does not render anything. It just gives the client the necessary information for each object.
Additionally all static objects will never affect server load in the slightest way. For example the islands. The clients know where exactly the islands are, which models they use etc.
Why should we not load in prettier island models earlier? The server would not even know about it, it would be a client side change. This applies to all static objects (everything that does not change position or rotation during the game).