sugarplumkitty | I miss Puzzle Pirates

I've only played a few hours over the last two weeks because I'm focused on my studies. The few hours I did play were when my brain was fried and was only to try to keep my iron monger shop and my senior officer's distilling shop going. He moved IRL and doesn't have a hookup yet. I'm the captain of a crew and self-proclaimed queen of a flag! LOL

There's a bit of controversy on the oceans. They created a new ocean at the start of this year because they'd advertised on a British children's website and we had a huge influx of extremely rude children. The new ocean was created to separate them from the old-timers who didn't want to deal with lazy, insolent crew members. If your crew won't do their work, you lose battles because your ship is in bad shape. There's a new complaint system to report abusive players, created just for them. They also have a bot come fight in battles if a player leaves the ship once the ship is engaged. You can't add human players in that situation. The brats were notorious for sabotaging other crews by doing that on purpose.

A dear friend of mine from my early days playing the game has a crew on the new ocean and asked me to join it. For a week or so I was keeping his distilling shop open and got really frustrated with the kids. I chatted with a nice captain, a British gentleman who gave me his strategy for dealing with the brats. If they don't do what he says the first time, he planks them. He says after four or five plankings, they work very well. I tend to warn them twice and the third time they're planked. I still avoid that ocean when the British kids aren't sleeping. That worked for a while.

This week I was on the "safe" ocean and have discovered another influx of English speaking brats coming in from somewhere when it's the middle of the night in England. Ugh. It makes me wish I hadn't re-upped for a year a few months ago. It's a much better deal per month if you do it that way. It's about $6/month instead of $10. I get so much enjoyment out of it I went ahead or should I say "got" instead?

One kid kept asking for a handout of 200 poe (pieces of eight) instead of doing a job on the ship. I'd warned him twice and he got belligerent, threatening to leave my crew if I didn't give him 200 poe. I said, "Good" then "Bye" and I planked him. He started cussing at me and then taunted me by calling me "fattie" and "You are a fat animal." This is ludicrous because there's no way he could know I'm fat. It was just the most insulting thing he could think of, I guess. I was laughing at his childishness. I told him to stop or I'd report him to the mods. He didn't. So I finally told him, "Child, I'm a grownup. Stop now." That worked.

Another kid wouldn't do his job either. He spent his time demanding to join my crew. I can tell someone is a kid by the way they expect something for nothing and how they nag. Grownups don't nag. When I warned him I wasn't impressed with his crew behavior so far, he started working and after a few minutes he stopped again even though the ship was damaged and needed everyone working. The third time I simply planked him. He had the nerve to tell me I was a horrible captain, worse than a headmaster and needed an attitude adjustment. LOL The people actually working on the ship thought I'd waited too long to plank him. The funny thing is a few minutes later he begged me to do him a favor and add him to my crew and promote him to officer so he could take his friend's ship out. I explained you had to be an officer on his friend's crew to sail his friend's ship and if his friend wanted him sailing that ship he would have promoted him. He argued by quoting what the help text says about being "an officer" to sail a ship. I told him you only have access to your own crew's ships and there was no way I was giving him access to my ships after the way he'd talked to me. When I mentioned the conversation to the crew working the ship, one of them said there was a guy going around doing that and cleaning out all the ships on a crew when he convinced people to let him in.

I meet a lot of nice people at PP. But these brats drive me crazy. I wonder why they aren't making them all stay on the new ocean?

*shakes cane* Young whippersnappers!

Well, I'd better get back to my studies. Final is tomorrow and I've played too long here as it is.