devtrackers.gg
Travelling long distances in atlas can be REALLY boring, especially when travelling to far region. This makes people stay closer to their home regions and divides the map into invisible "sections". And the problem with this is that a lot of big tribes in proximity will make alliances and will not do much PVP within that region. Also preventing smaller ones to attack each other, as they don't want to deal with people making too much "noise" around their bases. Therefore people will get bored really fast as they "cant be bothered" to sail 2 hours (this happened to me more than once when our tribe tried to raid further away) just to spend 2-3 more hours on the raid, and again.... sail another 2 hours to get back to their base. Total time around 6 hours for a small raid. This is not fun and it kills the game. People do not go too far to do pvp or to do trading, they can't do these within their region either and eventually get bored and leave (had this issue a lot).
I have a proposed solution that could work. Basically add jet streams (winds that go across the globe) and Ocean Currents (rivers on the ocean surface). These would form some natural "fast tracks" that are not affected by wind, and provide maximum thrust. They would span across many regions in mostly one direction. So now if someone wants to go to some further grids, they could plan their routes to make use of these tracks and get to their destinations faster. This would make sailing interesting as you have to plan ahead and be prepared to take risks. The risks are for example if you are going fully loaded, there might be a "pirate" ship patrolling along the track for possible prey. To counter maybe you could take a battle ship too and have a good ship PVP. Also these streams would kinda pull you towards the centre at all times, so you could take a tea break while the currents are taking you on your journey. The pull towards the centre would not be too strong, so people can enter and exit wherever they like.
A quick illustration I made can be seen below. I am sure it is not perfect, but I think a system like this could potentially make sailing at least a little more fun or at least less time consuming.
I based this idea on real world occurrences that are quite amazing. Here are some links for the people who are interested.
Ocean Currents https://earthsky.org/earth/warm-ocean-currents-are-slowing-down
Jet streams: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_stream
White: Jet Streams, Black: Ocean currents