Now free to play, so why not give it a try? Takes about 20 - 30 hours to get a real feel for it imho.
Several years later I can tell that they improved the quality, but not as much as I had hoped for. I still got a few random crashes while playing. It's apparent that they probably don't have a large budget for continued development of this game and I could see it possibly going the way of the Dodo in a few years. This would be tragic to some degree because the game is just a couple of revamps away from a masterpiece.
They knew the game was going to revolve around ship battles, and a game about pirates should. But when they try to introduce hand-to-hand combat, things fall apart. It feels incredibly canned and childish. It is in no way epic like the large sea battles that can occur. (Think 20 - 30 large naval ships going at it, or more!)
Also, the PVP needs to be made scalable, perhaps in an approach similar to EVE where anyone's ship can be put to some useful niche in the combat regardless of the player's "level". I hear people say that PVP really only exists in its proper form when the player reaches level 50.
If these two issues were addressed, the gameplay would blow other MMOs out of the water. Pun intended. :D