@thr-wildwin7 I will have to disagree with the PvP being less aggressive.
So, after having not logged into the game after several months, I decided to take the advice of a lot of people on here and check out the changes to see how toned down the PvP aggression has gotten. I logged in last night and accepted the gold horders guilded quest. Pretty awesome that it gave me 8 maps to check out ... 4 islands with 8 captain treasures, 4 with 3 captain treasures. So I figure it'll be a good night of getting loot.
I will say this ... the AI environment is extremely volatile and challenging. Right after leaving the outpost I run into a kraken (keep in mind that the months prior when I've played I've only encountered the kraken once). It was a challenge to just get away from him and to sail on. Pretty cool. As I was heading to one of the islands in my map list, I see several larger glowing ships in the vicinity. Obviously the skeleton ships patrolling the waters. It was kind of cool to have to figure out an entry to the island I was going for that put me out of their range so they wouldn't attack. I get to the island and after an hour or so was able to dig up the 3 treasures on there. Yes, it takes me a while because not only is the sea more aggressive, the island skeletons are a lot more aggressive as well. I don't know how many times a skeleton with a powder keg killed me. It didn't matter what I did, I would run, shoot behind me while running, go in the water and try to pick it off, the barrel wouldn't detonate unless I got stuck on a tree, rock, or I was within range of dying when trying to shoot it.
Anyhow, I get my 3 treasures and head to an outpost. Along the way, in the distance, I see a sloop battling a kraken. As I veered towards the outpost at a distance, I notice the sloop, after finishing with the kraken, heads towards my direction. I sail a bit longer in various patterns and its clear they are tailing me. So I start sailing in different directions, only to have them get closer and eventually one of them kills me with a sniper. The other guy shoots himself onto my ship and as I spawn I get killed. I try to do all the things I am suppose to do and indicate that I'm not looking for a fight, but they keep spawn killing me anyways. Anyhow, I scuttle the ship, and appear on a different island. So much for a toned down PvP experience, can't even get my one-time treasure chests to an outpost.
I decided to try a different quadrant of the map (apparently the guild maps have locations in all four quadrants of the map, 2 per quadrant). I sail to the first island, dig up the 3 treasures, and decided to go for the other 8 treasures on the island next to it ... not seeing any other ships in the area. After several hours of digging up those 8 treasures (again, the powder keg skeletons are extremely frustrating ... I can't figure out how to deal with them), I head to a completely different outpost. Along the way, I encounter the Meg (which actually leaves me alone), a few skeleton ships on the horizon, which I maneuver delicately to avoid a confrontation, and arrive at the outpost. As I begin to drop the anchor and turn my 11 captain chests in (plus a skull and gold box that I found), I get sniped and see a sloop pummeling my ship with cannon balls. As I spawn back in, my ship is sinking and I see that other sloop sail off. Now I don't know why they just came by and sank me without taking all my treasure, but somehow spawning on my sinking ship kind of shot me towards the outpost island. I then see some, if not all, my treasure chests floating up on the water. I swim out to get one and somehow a shark spawned and killed me in one bite. To add insult to injury, because my ship sank, I spawn on an island on the opposite end of the map. Hoping to find at least a few treasure chests, I spend however long it takes to sail from one side of the map to the other, get to the outpost, and nothing is there.
So this is basically the whole problem I have with this game. I spent a lot of hours digging up treasure, not being able to cash them in. It also seems kind of unfair to lose the quests when logging off the server. I'm guessing that one-time guilded quest is gone because I logged out before completing it all. What a waste!
@jimmy-l1zard thank you for offering to partner up in this game, but I think I'm done with SoT for a while. I've spent a lot of hours in it last night and left frustrated and really not having any fun. Except for the AI battles and challenges ... if I can only deal with that, I'd play this game a lot more. But just like in real life I don't like to be around jerks and be taken advantage of, which it seems one still encounters frequently in this game as it is right now.
So in the spirit of my original question in this post, yes, PvE has changed in that it is extremely more challenging (a good thing), but the PvP aspects of the game is still the same. I hope one day Rare will provide the ability to play this game in a way that allows the player to only be challenged from the game itself, because a lot of us like to "check out" of the real world having to deal with jerky people. We don't want to have to deal with them here too.
I will also end with saying I understand that there are players that love this kind of gameplay. I'm not suggesting to take that away from them, nor, ruin that experience for them. If the new Arena addition provides more satisfaction for those players, I don't see why it's unrealistic to ask for a PvE-only experience with this game. Either way, if you enjoy this game, that's awesome ... keep playing and have fun! But for me this game is not enjoyable, and that is a real tragedy to me because I've always been wanting to have fun with a good pirate game. Who knows, maybe I'll come back here sometime next year and ask about where things have progressed with PvE and PvP. But for now, I'm pretty much checked out of SoT and not really expecting it to change for players like myself. And really, that's ok.