These need to go or be dealt with, as a newer player I cannot stand these ships. I would not favour in total removal because they actually drop some decent crew if you take on the good ones. However there are way too many all over the place, it feels as if the pvp is mostly with the SotD more than players. I tried to have an ocean battle with some other players and what do you know a fleet appears scrambling the direction both me and the enemy had to take. Not to mention you can cross a border and freeze for a moment just long enough to ram into a SotD and lose everything. These ships are easily killable at green-yellow tier but none the less everywhere and hard to avoid when you don’t want anything to do with them. I cannot travel 2 grid squares without running into a minimum of 1 fleet and 2 red galleons on the way.
Tldr; SotD should have a designated spawn region, be affected by wind, not spawn near server edges, and maybe have a vantage point of sort (sails or killable npc manning their cannons)
They’re really not that hard more of a pain with the red galls but designated spawn regions sounds best to me or perhaps a disguise tactic buyable by gold coins from freeports to disguise half as a SotD for bare minimum to no aggro range for new players trying to avoid them.