A few questions:

1) Is port influence active?
After using the NPC attack route my flag was changed to pirate. I understand why it happened. When I go to a pirate dominated port there is a charge for crew, cannons, etc. contrary to what the help file on Influence says.

2) If the port influence is active are all features mentioned in play?

3) The domination of "old" timers is respectful but how does one ever expect to over come 14,000,000 influence with even a 1% drop per day. This obstacle is huge for new players to continue and most just go elsewhere from what I have seen so far. What is happening to make this more real?

4) Similarly for the players with billions of gold (or more) (I've on seen one so far) (then it was all stored somewhere very quickly!). But this could be another thread.

If you think 1% is huge for a new player, it is even larger for the players with MILLIONS invested in ports.

Say we compare players, say somebody who has 1,000 influence, somebody who has 1,000,000, and somebody who has 10,000,000.

The player who has 1,000 will simply loose 10 influence, easily replenished for a moderate sum of gold if the player is relatively new. The player with 1,000,000 will loose 10,000 influence, and that is a hit to the pocket for most larger players. And finally, the 10,000,000 influence player will loose 100,000 influence each update, and that is a staggering amount of gold that just disappeared no matter who you are.