It should be changed so when a compass drops from a mob, the corresponding
ship isnt created.

Compasses should show there colour and number of gems in look.

The "compass" command should create the ship.

Annoying to get compasses during exp only to find they are dead by the time
you in a position to do them.

Simple solution is to make ships cloaked till you get to locate and 'ship
scan' to 'find' them. Would help if they weren't aggro and didn't use
tradelines, so you couldn't just camp a waypoint and attack them without
having/needing a compass!

I agree with you that the situation just sucks sweaty donkey balls if you
still stick only on compasses like a blind mule. But also your suggested
change sucks - Why, you ask?

This tune made it finally possible so that stalking sales for compasses (where
there are n+100 others also waiting greedily for them to get sold) isn't the
only smart way to hunt ships if you just have time to sail around and search
or stalk for them. And this was its purpose too if have understood coders
right.

Just an example from Navy players view: After colorcoded compasses came into
play and amount of red ones dropped significantly on sales I got only aprox.
600 points of rep in over 6-7months of time cause chances of nailing those
compasses from sales was very slim... just cause so many greedy mnavy dudes
also bidding those like ninjas. On the other hand current situation flushes
bit the idea of those compasses.

- What I would like to see is that ship popping would be totally irrelevant to
amount of compasses popping but rather npc-ships keep on spawning on regular
intervals through-out the boot (maybe tied to amount sank). And compasses
changed so that look gives the 'level/target' like you said but typing compass
'locks' it into currently alive one and sticks into that. This way both ways
of hunting would be relevant cause it limits the time your target might attack
someone/get attacked to the time it takes you to hunt it from 'activating'.

Remember that we are still in shallow waters between old system and new system
and last major packs of this ship-conversion isn't even in the game yet... so
we most likely just criticizing a work-in-progress.

Yours,
Z the Navydude