User blog comment:Lord Andrew Mallace/An Era of Downtime/@comment-3526767-20121205150904/@comment-3112181-20121205223247

Not that this concerns me much... But John is right. I've noticed the cycle as well, and have been trying to say the same thing. Pearson loses a war with England, his guild is destroyed, and he claims he's leaving the game forever (and everybody believes it's all over). This doesn't happen. He comes back (usually on a new pirate), his old followers from previous guilds band together to form a new guild, a brief era of peace pursues between England and Pearson, and then something happens to cause war. Then the cycle starts again. This really is the fifth or sixth time this has happened.