Me, Spurdo, Lennu and Tyr (from Mercs) are all in Exile. I'll get you in the guild once you've leveled up, because they're not accepting lowbies anymore after the recent incident where we had an actual spy in our guild 
As for subbing: both Spurdo and Lennu have earned enough gold ingame to purchase subscription without actually paying anything - they both made alts and did the main quest then sold the clipper ship design
As for ships: you can get a clipper very easy, this is the small ship (but not rowboat). Getting a warship or a merchant ship is much harder though and is actually a guild effort
As for sailing/pvp profitability: just yesterday we captured some guilds merchant ship that was full of packs, we got about 25 packs, each worth about 7g - so thats 175g just for finding their ship, stopping them and killing them. It can be very profitable with some luck, depends on how many people are doing traderuns and how many other pirates there are around.
Sea warfare is awesome though, last time we had a fight with about 5 galleons on each side. It was both fun and confusing
Yeah that's understandable and right now all I'm really doing is questing so not much help to a guild anyway lol, just thinking ahead for when I do actually hit cap.
Yeah that is a good idea but a months patron costs less than what I get paid at work per hour, so for under an hours wage I don't really mind buying patron, my "Me" time is dotted all over the place and it's rare that I have a long gaming session nowadays as on the days where I could I'm usually with friends or seeing my new bitch, it's just way more convenient for me to buy the patron lol.
I did look into the ships and yeah the clipper looked easy to obtain and the bigger ones not so easy, but that's understandable and is good for guilds. Sounds fun though, PVPing at sea is what I wanna do lol, I already decided I wanted a harpoon clipper so I can latch onto other peoples boats, unless of course a cannon clipper would fit better into the group.
