The only progression is cosmetics. You'll likely run into more players if you go to the world events. Look for big clouds shaped like a skull or ships. Only one at a time I believe and will be there until a crew clears it. Sometimes it'll feel like an empty server and others you'll get a lot of PVP action.

I haven't played for a while and don't know if safer seas affected high seas players since there were a lot of players mad about the safer seas being added. I always assumed it was players who liked hitting soft PVP targets.

If you really want to have random PVP encounters become an emissary for one of the factions other than reapers. I'd suggest gold hoarders. Any level 5 reaper emissary will be able to see your ship on the map while flying the emissary flag. You'll become bait for them to hunt down.

Also there's the hourglass to do PVP.

Hey, I got back into the game, after trying it out when it was released.

The no progression system, reminds me of old games where people just had fun, no grinding, and that was okay.

From that perspective the game seems pretty simple, but it seems very well made and with a pretty good variety of things to do.

I like the part that all players are "equal" since they have access to the same items from the start, but I also wondered what now? Since the gold is only used for vanity, then we started focusing on having fun and not only grinding to get more gold, this opened the doors for us to sometimes just get a ship and sail away, often stopping by a random islando and exploring it and finding cool stuf. Or maybe we find other player ships and get ass raped by more knowledgeable players and watch all they tricks that we try to reproduce in our next encounters.

The game allows for many different styles of playing, you can go and find treasures, fight skeletons and skeleton ships, go for the tall tales and their puzzles, join the reapers and be rewarded for PVP, tracking down sea monsters and defeating them, joining map events and cooperate/retaliate other players and the environment, you can also go competitive by trying to rank up the leaderboards, there's something for everyone.

We still have many things to try in this game, and the fact that there is no "grind" makes it more appealing to taking the game easy and not fretting over time spent and rushing to the top of the hill.

But at first it is kinda weird getting that: gold serves no real purpose and we have access to everything from the start, what now? Well, just enjoy the adventure! YARR!