Aether has posted some information on the likely cause of this (using the Station Launcher beta) in this thread. We're looking into it, and will keep you all updated. We're very sorry for the inconvenience!

We've had reports of people experiencing this trouble- the solution at this point is for you to use Launchpad, as opposed to using beta version of the Station Launcher.

I'm gathering some specifics right now on the best way to do this, and I'll be posting more shortly.

We're sorry for the inconvenience, we'll keep you updated on the fix.

Best,
Aether

We're open with the math behind the combat and sailing systems.

Yes.

/insert more letters here

It gives you a chance to make a second call to the loot tables, which is then dumped into the group loot pool. When you're in a group, it averages out the bonus loot chances of everyone in the group to determine the group's bonus loot chance. Otherwise, there would be lots of ways it could be exploited.

Experience isn't the same as loot. Loot goes into a big pool that everyone draws from. Not everyone in the group gets the same xp, so it's on a per-character basis.

Yes.

A good suggestion, and certainly something we will consider, but:

-It's very hard to say "ships X, Y and Z can go through this part of the map, but ships A, B, and C cannot." That's not to say it's impossible, but it's very hard for our movement model to handle, and it's not something we already do. I have not consulted our Programmers, but that screams 'big month-long project' to me. Certainly this is something we want to spend time on, but we have a lot of other things we want to spend developer time on, and big projects are harder to fit in.

-Laying out those areas would require a lot of careful planning. We have to consider the economy, and what impact placing a critical resource in a small/medium port would have. Shipping times increase (less load per trip) and that will increase cost. We have to make sure we don't end up hurting one nation's economy.

-We would need some way to communicate this visually, and we don't have a good existing way of doing that. Again, it's not something that's insurmountable, simply very time consuming.

Again: we want to do this, or something very like it, but we want to look before we leap on this one and get it right the first time. We also need to balance this feature against all the many other things we'd like to do.

One of the big reasons that we're not rushing 'Open Sea Shallows' out the door is that it opens up a HUGE can of worms. There are a lot of potential design issues with restricting PvP in some part of the Open Sea to certain ship sizes. That is not, by any means, to say that we're not going to do it, we're just not going to do it without very carefully thinking through all the consequences and making plans for all of them.

What happens when a Shallows PvP zone and a regular PvP zone overlap? How do Large/Huge/Colossal ships behave in Shallow PvP zones? What are the implications of that? What does that change about port entry for that port? What potential exploits does that allow.

We're not going to let Large ships become a ticket to PvP free shipping through shallow PvP zones. We're not going to screw nation X by preventing large transport ships from docking at their best iron port. How we're going to do that remains to be seen.

I personally very much like the idea of PvP zones that are reserved for ships below a certain size. I think it's interesting, and it's something I would want to participate in as a player. Implementing zones that function in that manner is not particularly hard. Implementing them so that they don't cause unexpected or unintended consequences is. Design is hard at work figuring out exactly how to do that.

The basic claim skill is changing so that Grease won't be needed.

That video made my day, thank you.

The reason crating works for cannon ammo is that you virtually never want to buy less than 100 of a particular shot type. Unfortunately that is not the case with outfitting and consumables.

I frequently find myself buying single pieces of outfitting, and I don't really want to take away that option. I will grant you that I play the game more casually than many of you (hooray for work), but I still think it would suck to only be able to buy outfitting in sets of 2, 4, or X.

Consumables are less of a concern, but in all honesty I like the fact that I can buy those singly too.

I'm not saying no or never, but that's my concern with crating up outfitting and consumables.

It definitely won't happen in 1.3 (purely for time, it would be a lot of work to go back and crate all those items, the ammo stuff was a 20 minute change).