I have 163 verdant stones which I had been saving to upgrade the old epheria items to +10 to upgrade my forthcoming frigate to a galleass.  You have just basically made these stones pointless and they have no use.  It even states on them that "these stones USED to be used to upgrade epheria items".  What on earth kind of idea is this?

You did not do this to weapon stones or armor stones.. you converted them.  If you had just brought out a new stone and made weapon stones and armor stones useless and worth pittance, how would your playerbase have reacted.  It's easy when it's to do with sailing as we always get nerfed and ignored.

Also, the exchange of frosted and fiery stones failed.  Only one of them changed to tidal stones.  I had 12 frosted and 12 fiery saved up and now just have 12 tidal (not 24).

Please rethink this as it's not helped new captains, it's totally smashing them and making the whole process even harder.

Note:  What do I do with all the starlight powder that I spent hundreds of hours collected and using up worker food?  Do I really sell this hard to get powder for 1000 coins to the merchant????

Edit (I found this missing Tidal Stones in a totally different storage (I keep all the stones in Epheria Port and the replaced stones had been put in Heidel).  So the missing fiery/lunar stone convert did work, just they were put in a different location.  I would still like the verdant issue addressed though, or make them changeable for crow coins or something beneficial.  

Seems like a slap in the face to upcoming captains who had not gotten to enhance thier gear.  They even took away the abilty to easily get the new stones by removing the drop from the sea monster schools south of OE.  Pretty crappy way to treat those who stil needed the Verdants.   I had 450 plus of them figuring they would not do something like this to upcoming sea captains BUT my thinking was not what they did. I sold what I had thinking to myself I feel bad for the folks who REALLY got screwed on this deal. This was really bad community relations IMHO.

They removed the tier 1 goods exchange too.  Feels like a forced barter push and new captains have very limited amount of barters until they get to at least 500 plus barters completed.  It's not a way to help new captains, more a way to make sure no one else ever bothers going to sea.

Or maybe they are trying to get everyone to do the Ravinia 7 day questline at Crows.  They did say that each stage gave 10 Tidal stones (as well as 50% of the other items to upgrade to a T2 ship.  If that is the case, they have made the initial upgrade rather linear by forcing you to do those quests which is really annoying in a slow boat.  Maybe they should move Ravinia's quests to the Ravinia on the docks at Velia (and remove the 7 day wait)... at least then it would feel a bit like they are attempting to help new captains).

They should have left the verdant stones alone.  I can see why they wouldn't want to have them be able to enhance higher level gear, but then they went and did the reverse: now requiring higher level stones to enhance the lower level gear. 

I'm trying to figure the money angle on this one.  "Simplifying" by combining several items into one saves them both storage and bandwidth costs.  They didn't even remove these. 

They can remove the requirement to enhance the Epheria old gear to get the next level gear.  That's all that they were used for anyway, and * that * would be more in line with their other changes that reduce reduction of player effort to get into ocean content.

1300 verdant stones left here, not a huge amount, but that's almost six ship upgrades.  Replacing that will take over 200 tidal stones. Not a huge amount, but still.

Be better if they simply removed the verdant from the game and replaced them with black stones.  Then used black stones to upgrade the old epheria.  The old epheria upgrades do not make sense using items that starting captains will struggle to get.