The orc ship idea was a great introductory idea to help foster teamwork and guild events. You could still earn the pieces solo, but by doing it as a team you could trade with another and complete sets easier. After that, it's a matter of the white dye tub, I guess...and further, whether you feel it is justified to attack merchants to get "more loot." Much like those who want jewelry from Gypsies. Of course, there are those who may have wanted to do pirates until they earned all the certificates...but that, to me, is just too long a process for things that do not have much function other than decor.
Objectively, once you have an orc ship and the white dye tub, there's little reason to fight more pirates. You get the best ship and then your thought is, "what now?" And so the replay value of the content is a bit short sighted. That, and, I often would forget to refresh boats...so I ended up just docking my orc ship.
I would like to see some sort of a gold sink idea to help maintain boats...maybe the development of an NPC crew. There could be a more dedicated tillerman/captain, who could be paid gold to refresh the ship based on the cargo weight, and there could be npc sailors who could man the guns, providing unlimited ammo and fuses and such for the guns you provide (for a fee, of course). You'd still have to do the repairs, like any good landlord, but that would make things more interesting for me. Then again, there still wouldn't be a real reason to sail around. Maybe if you could gain titles for your player by killing off a set amount of pirates...that might be nice. Or a system by which to turn in certificates to earn points toward those titles. I'm not sure.
It's an interesting issue, because they don't want to clog up the ocean with boats, but then, having to play a refresh mini-game is not too fun. Eh. When it first came out, I had a lot of fun hunting with friends to get the orc ships.
