Ran into some dudes from Red '99 on Ollo and they had a little thing going - we ran some tradepacks for a couple of hours, no real resistance. Later, we set up in harbor for a little piracy after a few successful runs. The sea fights in the bay were fucking awesome, basically playing defense against incoming trade packs. The game really shined - In one instance we sunk a group of enemies with about 15 trade packs - killing them all and diving underwater to collect our bounty - we had been at it for a few hours and had probably stolen around 15 packs up to that point, but this was the real score. Halfway up from the dive, a team of pirates killed us. They took everything. The chain of events was filled with screaming guild chat, excitement, disappoint, and ultimately the realization that the piracy was legitimately an awesome couple of hours.
The game is of course, a clusterfuck and roadblocking everyone, but I can say that it can be fun as shit and worth all the rage, if you can bear it.