So everyone who posts has to have a mandatory Arena Tavern idea. Here's mine: Currently the map is split into 4 regions (Shores of Plenty, Ancient Isles, Wilds, Devil's Roar). Let's put on each of the large islands, in all the regions, a portal. A portal you stand on? A portal you walk through? Who cares, that can be fleshed out later. At any given time, only one island in a region has an active portal; all the others lay dormant. Furthermore, at some predetermined time interval, the active portal in a region randomly moves to another island. Do all the portals change at once? Does only one region shuffle at a time? Who cares, that can be fleshed out later. Where do the portals go? The Glorious Sea Dog. The Arena Tavern will function as a portal hub with four portal doors inside.
Now the islands won't give any indication if their portal is active. You either have to visit islands and check if their portal is active, or go to the Glorious Sea Dog and see what portals are currently active. A couple things this would allow: there's a lot of sentiment about having the GSD be some sort of central social location. But the mechanics of the game make that very hard. If a bunch of different crews pull up to the same island, someone's gonna start shooting, and you can't prevent that without circumventing core aspects of the game. But if four crews could pull up to four separate islands (technically 5 if one goes directly to the tavern), now you can have some interesting encounters. A lot of them will probably be violent and that's fine, but some could be pretty cool.
Furthermore, with some luck, you may be able to make some great plays, or hide particularly valuable treasure by quickly running through a portal and then back out to another island and leaving your opposition to have to guess where you went. I think it'd add a lot of fun to the game and isn't really overly exploitable since anyone traveling through portals is basically fighting with one life.
