I got curious how long the update sailing system had been in and stumbled on this quote from ActionReplay:
A few small updates from the Approved Suggestions, next reset:
* Ship spawns can spawn as Lieutenants / Uniques now
I had to do a double take since we have done a fair bit of sailing and not encountered any unique ships - realizing this referred to the NPCs on board of it instead. But it brought an interesting concept!
Right now ship encounters are relatively static in difficulty, and the possibility of assigning some more identity - as well as potential difficulty - to these ships might not be a bad idea! Instead of Lieutenants and Captains it would basically be minor ship names of renown. The equivalent of 'yellow-named mobs at sea' like we do with Legendary <Sea Creatures>.
So the suggestion is to somehow hook in the ship encounter/NPC Ships with this system. Some unique names, variance/bump in difficulty/certain stats, similar to add some identity to ship battle. Potential for some harder encounters in the different quadrants.