One thing that really bothers me about this game is the AFK timer. Having to constantly be active on the server so that you don't get booted and lose your progress is unhealthy and bad for player enjoyment, especially for newcomers or solo players (I've had to play for 14 hours straight because I didn't want to lose the progress I was making and it left me with migraines).
I appreciate that there are obvious reasons behind the mechanism so I suggest bringing in one possible solution. The beds in ships and on islands should disable the AFK timer. This way the player can take a break for as long as is needed without having any advantage over other players on the server or "cheating" at the game.
I see many people say that not being kicked for going AFK would allow people to abuse the mechanism and get extra points even though inactive, but with sleeping, your senses are disabled so you have no awareness of your surroundings, you stay in real time so it can't be abused by running away from PvP etc. (if your ship goes down, your ship goes down) and most ships/islands only have one bed available so you won't have whole crews sleeping to stay in the game whilst collecting points from a single player.
At the moment the bed is very unnecessary, so I feel this would give it more of a use whilst fixing a major flaw in the game, in my opinion. And even if it wasn't a full disable, just increasing the timer to 30 minutes or an hour whilst sleeping would give most players enough time to take a break and rest their eyes before getting back to looking at a screen for another 2-3 hours.