@bislo nah.
Kai, I see the dilemma and this has been discussed many times.
However, if we encourage this behaviour, of players using boats to haul gear across the sea, we could soon see larger ships doing this also.
The only thing is, we as a community need to mediate ourselves to encourage this sort of activity, there will always be 1 group of people who ruin it all for the majority, but if we can all try and make this majority much bigger than that of the minority, we will see improvements.
I for one cannot see speeding up boats the solution right now, though a small speed boost could be administered to most small ships if it gathers enough support.
Like bislo says and you note, god gear (doubt the impacts of removing or DE-buffing that though will work), depth strider, vanilla boats and speed boost potions all help reduce use of the plugin boats.
The only plausible thing which would be reduced/removed would be depth strider (2), as that is the only thing which could not impact gameplay as a whole.
The removal of god gear will be unpopular with a large percentage of the server, those who come to be pirates, those who I know have matured enough to support the use of plugin boats e.g. TAS, HYDRA. To which you may disagree with me, but these people love the server also and its community, I also believe that many in either crew would love the increased use of ships, but they know of that small minority which will ruin it for them possibly, as well as the fact that relatively few other players use these ships, and so feel less inclined to do so as there is nothing to combat/attack on the seas.
The removal of vanilla boats- again we cannot do this, new players would be utterly confused and probably would be put off, also I would like everyone who is for this to count how many times they have used a vanilla boat and how its removal could be detrimental to the server, though we could use the plugin boats instead, the vanilla boats are still vital.
And speed potions, they need to be kept also for gameplay aspects, we could perhaps see if we could reduce their effect in water, but I doubt that would get very far.
Unless if we can come up with a solution, which possibly rewards people for using plugin boats but cannot be abused (as it probably would be), then only those people who have been use the plugin boats for what they’re supposed to be used for on rare occasions will be sailing the high seas.
Anyway, just my take and idea of the subject.
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