Good Concept, Dreadful Execution
PotBS is a promising concept rife with poor execution: Graphics rendering errors even on a high-end PC detract from the experience, non-crediting quests frustrate the casual player, and a ghost-world of sparsely populated servers makes for a very lonely cruise through the Caribbean in your starter ship. Finding members for the first group quest of the "Naval Officer" class was a quest in itself, as it took almost fifty minutes to find three other people on the server willing to participate.
Don't let the sparseness fool you, though, there are plenty of barely detailed quests available, made even more complicated by the fact that the "Quest Glow" hovers over areas even when a quest cannot be turned in. The end result is that you spend a good chunk of time running between glowing dots, trying to remember where your poorly organized quests came from. A cruel glitch early on led to a fun romp through Jenny Bay as all of my completed quests still bore arrows to the quest-givers past.
This is not to say that PotBS is a bad game, which it ultimately is. My main complaint is the potential of this game and its ability to educate and entertain about such an interesting and fantastical period in world history seems to have been squandered through some of the worst design and coding I have seen in an MMORPG. For all those who view this game as a choice between the similar EVE Online, don't risk it - go with EVE.