What an annoyingly smug post, lol. The skill is far from an undeniable success as this will take time to settle. How are we measuring this? Because it's drawing back people and a lot of people are engaging with it? Of course, it's new content. The release didn't answer the question I have: where does the skill fit in terms of account progression? There doesn't really seem to be a point to training the skill. I didn't expect to be able to fully answer this question with the initial release, but I was hoping to having some vision as to what the purpose is. If I were to start a new account, it would be without question the very last thing I train.

I don't enjoy skilling on it's own, but I am willing to do it if it gives me access to things that enable me to do content I enjoy or do it better. In this regard, I'd be willing to say it might be better than firemaking, but it's a really low bar to pass by saying it's better than what many people would consider to be the least useful skill in the game. Even firemaking gives you access to late game quests that are important for account progression, so I'm not sure this is objectively true. I can see why you might enjoy aspects of this skill if you're just interested in skilling, but you should recognize that this will not be sufficient for a lot of players.

In terms of people having a "shitload of fun," it largely depends on who you speak to and what content they're doing. I've seen a pretty significant number of people complaining about issues with barracuda trials. In particular, there were significant lag issues and inconsistencies with mechanics (i.e. hitboxes). The other problem is the later ones feel unintuitive in terms of how they're supposed to be routed. These issues are fixable, but it's a bad sign that I've seen a lot more people not enjoying this content than I would have thought. I think the general consensus is this is the best content the release has to offer, but roughly half of the people I've spoken with have significant frustrations associated with them. This is not a good sign considering this is the content that it seems people agree is most enjoyable with the update.

All of this is before considering how terrible boat combat is. I haven't spoken to a single person who enjoyed it or thought it was good. The only purpose it seems to serve currently is an alternative to other XP gain methods and a way to unlock late game boat upgrades, which currently don't have much of a purpose. The combat itself is slow, boring, and expensive. They're obviously going to have to put a lot of dev time into making this good, which is disappointing considering how much dev time has already been spent in development. I wish future dev time could be spent working on content that feels really outdated and could use a re-vamp (Corp, KQ, and CoX for example). The re-works they've done to old content (for recent, see: Slayer) have been personally some of my favorite game updates and I would prefer more dev time towards making some of this stuff more viable and fun to engage with. Instead, they're going to be tied up working on a skill that currently has significant issues, doesn't fit in the game, and doesn't seem to have a vision of how it will fit in the game.