Bugs

Lag
A lot of buggy behaviors right now are probably just the results of the lag. There are several things you can do to minimize your lag and make the game vastly more enjoyable. Lag is going to occur on either your client or the server, with different factors invovled for each case.

Client lag
If your machine/graphics card aren't powerful enough, your client may lag out. Go into the options panel and choose a lower resolution to play at and/or reduce the graphics quality. I'm not sure if there is a way to have the game report on the current FPS, but most modern video card drivers have a way of monitoring your FPS. Of course, there's the usual regimen of closing down all other applications. For the rich, you can always buy more RAM or upgrade your machine!

Server lag
If your server is lagging there's only one thing you can try, and that's to switch to a server with fewer pirates on it! This process is described here on the Maps page.

Menu lockups
Sometimes when talking to an NPC, you'll choose an option, but nothing comes up. You can't walk away from them, because you're stuck talking to them. If this happens, you can press ESC to release from them. However, sometimes pressing ESC will shutdown the entire game, but I can't find other way to disengage from them. Pressing ENTER can also occasionally shutdown the client as well.

Weapon page disappearing
After awhile all pirates seem to get a bug where their weapon screen disappears. This is the screen that's supposed to let you decide which weapon is activated when you press each function key. Once this happens, you just seem to be forever stuck with the same weapons. Short of deleting the pirate and starting over, I haven't found a way to work around this bug yet. Whenever starting a new pirate now, I immediately get the weapons I want and arrange them to my liking the very first thing. I avoid going inside buildings, talking to NPCs, sailing, etc. until this is accomplished, since once it's bugged there's no fixing it. You can still use F1-F4 to select your weapons, you just can't change them around or use any new weapons you later obtain.

Locking up on loading screens
Sometimes pirates get bugged where they can no longer go anywhere that requires a loading screen. The loading screen comes up and just sits there. Often you'll hear the same sounds repeat over and over. Sadly, once a pirate gets like this, the only option seems to be to delete the pirate. A few people have been able to not delete the pirate and the bug was fixed with the next update. However, setting sail and engaging in ship to ship Combat doesn't require any loading screens, so when this happens to one of my pirates, I just send them out to sea!

Ads de-focus the game
When ads are loaded/switched, they force the window to change focus to the ad. Thus if you're holding down W and an ad changes, W will no longer do anything due to the focus being on the ad. Hmmm.. I'm willing to concur this may be a focus issue after all, fix unknown.

Defeated while sailing
If you are defeated while sailing a ship, your sailing timer will still continue to count down even though you're back in the jail. Not sure what happens if the timer runs out, but luckily if you get back to the water and redeploy your ship, it does reset the timer to 30mins. The Timer, when it happens to zero. It instantly makes you sink.

Enemy ships that won't sink
It's very frustrating but sometimes you'll get an enemy ship so low on health it's actually negative, but it still won't sink! The ship is bugged and no amount of futher shooting at it seems to make a difference. The ship will eventually crash minutes later, but you don't seem to get any plunder or skill ups from it. Until they get this bug fixed, you may want to avoid fighting Lvl 6 or higher ships, since you will have spent so much time unloading your cannons into her, only to not get credit for it. This may not be an actual bug, as when the ship reaches negative health icons will show on the ship. Fire the grapple hook at the icons and you will link to the ship. Most likely you need to raid the ship in order to finish it off.

Flying
It is possible to "fly" by walking off of a large sized ship (you have to jump/walk near the edge until the character starts floating) while sailing. Once you leave the ship, you will not fall. You can't get down unless you go back to your own ship. In a related issue, I did have a ship that every time I tried to board it, I wouldn't land on the deck, but rather a few feet above and would be flying. The 'fix' was to just sell that ship off and buy a new one.

Boarding enemy ships
I'm not sure at what point the following turns from intended game play, to outright bugs. You can decide for yourself after reading. You can jump off your ship, swim over to another ship, board it, and start fighting everyone on board. Sometimes if you kill the guy at the wheel you can actually grab it and steer the ship around, even though it's not really your ship. The guards have bad pathing issues and are often really easy to kill. They will often respawn quickly, but sometimes not at all. Sometimes killing them seems to give much higher reputation points than they should be worth. Sometimes you can jump off these ships back into the water, and sometimes you can't, it says you must dock first. If someone else sinks the ship while you're on board, it will say "You've been sunk" and you'll wake up in jail.

Crazy Spinning
When you're sailing a ship, sometimes when moving the camera around, it starts spinning crazy out of control. When this happens, just move your mouse down until it leaves the window, then slooowly move it back up into the window. I think this is caused by the ads defocusing issue above.

Ship Display
If you own more than one ship and you bring up your ships to deploy one, the display window will be all messed up. Simple click one of the arrows to cycle through your ships and it will clear itself up.

Backwards
Sometimes, if you get on a ship just when it sinks, you will end up swimming where the ship is, and afterwards, you will flip upside down and your legs will stick out of the water, I have experienced this glitch on 6/14/09 as the date, and when the glitch occurred, I was thrown into jail with my head facing the back wall. Now, after this, you will be backwards while you run forwards, when you press the down button, you will look like you are walking forward, in the direction the PIRATE(not the player themselves) is looking. Even after teleporting, you will be stuck in this way, until you log out. Even though you are looking backwards, when fighting enemies, the pirate won't look at them, but their weapons still work on them (if you are facing a crab, your pirate will be looking at you, but when you attack, the crab seems to take damage).

Immortal enemy
This happens mainly Port Royal and Kingshead where you attack an enemy with zero Health but he doesn't die or attack you you can't do anything to kill no matter what you try this happens to Undead and Royal Navy [Cadet]s mainly