After a little evaluation, the new ships don't seem to be a great addition to the game. There are a lot of features that are time intensive, but if you don't want to participate, it's all good. In this case, however, the time required is staggering just to load the ships. Okay, so don't bother with ships. BUT . . .
This is about the only game feature I can think of at this point that non-participation greatly influences your friends, neighbors, and apparently total strangers.
I've been trying to check for ships in ports when I can -- which means when I think about it -- usually two or three times a day. Usually, there aren't any, or maybe one. Tonight when I got home from work, I had a message from someone that their ship was in my port, could I take care of that? I also had five ships -- one of which showed it had been there 15 hours, so it should have been there when I checked it before I left home.
I told the one who sent the message that, in future, when the it's possible, she should probably just remove me from her ports list as I am not able to keep watch on my ports all day. And I also sleep.
Unfortunately, this feature seems to require pretty much constant babysitting of the farm to make sure you can get to the ships in a timely manner. And even with that, the one that had been there 15 hours didn't show up.
Is there any conversation about revising how this works so we can "opt-out" as a port? If we don't have any ships, will we be removed as a port? I could do that.
Otherwise, I love the game, though I can't play as often as I like. I always look forward to the new releases, this one included -- with the one exception. :-)
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