@Jsteiner:
a) You've changed a bunch of stuff that won't have any effect, e.g. none of the udp settings matter if forceTcpFallback=true. Have you tried your changes one at a time to see which one actually makes the difference?

b) Your steps 8 & 9 should be completely unnecessary. The game reads pirates.ini, then reads pirates_local.ini to override the defaults from pirates.ini.

Are you running Vista? If so, Vista is virtualizing the pirates_local.ini you created. Since the game runs as Adminstrator, it can't see the virtualized file. Run notepad as Administrator to make Vista save the file in the right place.

They don't stack because of the problems of having too much defense (there's already a bit too much out there).

NOs don't have a skill called Defense. They have Defender 1 & 2.

I've been leaning towards making more combat-capable merchants (like the Dromedary) instead, since they fall into the production line specialties of FTs.

There's a speed calculation error that was introduced in a crash that I caught recently. It effects large and huge scout ships.

If you are being kicked back to the server list it isn't a client crash. Is this the case?

In Vista your log files should be under something like "C:\Users\[user_name]\documents\Pirates of the Burning Sea\log"

We resolve the incident back to you telling you to let us know when you're available. Since we have folks on 24x7, we should be able to meet you at your convenience. Sadly, this falls in the category of moving stuck people and we're still too slow at that but much better than we were.
It's not so much bug reports slowing us down as an unexpected number of gold farming/spamming, harrassment, and lost item reports.
I'm not sure this is what you mean but if if Bob is trapped doing mission X and Sam is trapped doing mission X, they're still trapped in different rooms. We do batch things up as far as trying to process all of certain types of incidents at once, though.
I wish! One of our biggest problems is that our tools aren't very good. It takes a significant amount of time to determine whether the player lost the items they claimed to in the way that they claimed to and determine whether and what to refund. Dev's working on improving our tools but they're also working to fix bugs in the game so we have fewer incidents caused by them. It's always a tradeoff what they're working on.
Nope. The form letter takes seconds. The research, as I mentioned, takes a LOT longer.

Because there are severals ways to address it, and we have to discuss what approach to take.

Mat just finished animating a harpsichord player for the new French starter town, so I would expect that as an emote eventually.

An accordian is problematic as we don't have the ability to animate a prop at this time.
Drums and flute are done.

That's not a valid incident number. You're missing a digit in the first part and I haven't been able to guess that what is.

In short, if you have other RP story arc quests in your log, you should do them. The missions aren't necessarily linear and I tried to give the player a lot of freedom in determining the shape of the story, but this has consquences (as Xaphod has noted). Don't think that because one patron has stopped giving you quests, that the arc has come to an end. Look in your log, do the other quests (They have a special icon).