I have about 600 hours in SOT so I can answer this.
So honestly that’s a TON of progression without risk, but it’ll be slow going. Emissaries allow you to increase your rewards for a particular faction (reapers, hoarders, merchants, order of souls) so you can’t get those bonuses.
You need to be a pirate legend to captian a ship, and you need three of the primary factions at level 50 to become a pirate legend. Literally no difference beyond achievements and cosmetics. Captaincy just let’s you “own” the ship that spawns in, and essentially designates a player as “leader” whereas in normal play its ad hoc on who does what. And a captained ship just has a name and extra cosmetics anyway.
Can’t earn rep for reapers which kinda sucks, but makes sense. It’s the pvp faction. But many players do pve reapers as well.
What is it with clowns like this digging their heels in and blaming literally anything but the precious MBAs that are plaguing and ruining literally everything about modern society.
I play new stuff all the time, but currently what I’ve been rotating through is
Chivalry 2: played the first one competitively and fortunately the second one is a lot of the same concept so many skills transfer easily. It’s a fun game once it clicks.
Thronefall: a newer game revolving around base building and surviving waves of enemies while balancing economy and defense
Pseudoregalia: an incredibly fun platformer/metroidvania style game with really really tight and enjoyable movement controls.
For mobile, I’ve been stuck in Magic Survival, and Orna since my job requires a lot of walking so those pedometer games are worth my time now.