So it’s been about two and a half years since I’ve played (before my daughter was born), so take this with a grain of salt. I think last big update I experienced was the addition of the Reapers’s equivalent of the Athena’s Fortune faction.

Unless they’ve changed how captained ships work, every time you log in your ship only has a basic set of resources (wood, canonballs, fruit). Stocking up from the outpost barrels is an every session thing. The whole captained ship thing was originally just a way to save your ship cosmetics and adding a bunch of ship specific achievements. Also gave access to a convenient one stop sell location and some “captain” exclusive quests.

Regarding PVP, natural “emergent” PVP has really dried up since they added in the hourglass (dedicated PVP match queuing) and the ability to server hop (lose all your sellable loot and active quest progress, keep the barrelled resources on your ship). So people up for scrapping usually hop servers until they find a popular and lucrative server event happening where there are likely to be other players. There already was the Reaper’s flag and emmisary to imdicate you were up for/looking for PVP too (both make you visible on the map to the whole server). So a lot of players left running around aren’t as bloodthirsty.

Also, unless they changed server limits again, each server has an absolute max of six ships. It’s a big sea for so few ships. Especially when we stayed around The Roar (volcanoey area at the east side of the map) we could go entire sessions without running into other players.