One of the tough parts about being in a coordinated alliance, is only being able to communicate by getting into short range and shouting through a megaphone. I had an idea for a couple ways an alliance could send out even limited comms to other ships in on the team.
idea 1. A Ouija board / Crystal ball system. A Ouija board that allows a player to send out a single word or maybe 10-20 characters out to the alliance. The words could appear on the screen of alliance players much like the ghostly words of some quests emblaze our screens for a moment then disappear. To avoid this being too overpowered, the receiver on the ships could be a crystal ball. So only players within range of the crystal ball on their ship would get the message. A player on an island out of voice range of their ship/crystal ball, might miss the message. The Ouija boards and crystal balls could be a gold sink, so either something like trinkets that need to be purchased and placed on a ship to use, or something like supplies that need to be repurchased every game, if you happen to be doing alliance work.
idea 2. An owl, crow, carrier pigeon, or seabird system. Similarly to the last idea, the message length would be limited. But instead of instant message transmission, there could be a range based delay for the time it takes the messenger bird to fly between ships. This could also be designed so that players would have to physically check the bird cages to see if a message came in. This would allow for inter-ship comms, yet still allow for the chance of not noticing you have an owl waiting. And perhaps the messenger birds could be shot out of the sky by other players, dropping the message in the water for any to read.
Increasing the number of positive player interactions might help cultivate a slightly less toxic community. Also, adding inter-ship communication for alliances, opens the door to more coordinated alliance based questing and events.
