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I'm sure u/Rare-Sonicbob can help the correct team see how their accessibility improvements has made a difference.
❤️ Will pass this on! ❤️
I'm sure u/Rare-Sonicbob can help the correct team see how their accessibility improvements has made a difference.
❤️ Will pass this on! ❤️
/u/Rare-Sonicbob Any chance here? This would be pretty cool.
This would be pretty cool - love the idea!
The only issue I have with the invite to come to insiders and give feedback, is many of us were directly warning on insider forums that the fix felt broken and clunky pre-S10 without much response. I'm taking a break from the game for a while but I do have love for the franchise and do hope things get resolved in a way that has the players feel heard and the developers happy with their work.
Appreciate the candor, something we need to work on clearly.
Wow, it is actually unbelievable to get a direct response!
I understand that different approaches to a problem have different strengths and weaknesses and I don’t have a perfect solution. I also understand that clarity is extremely important for game mechanics and players need to understand what is going on as much as possible.
I am extremely thankful that what I have written has reached Rare in such a direct manner as one could really not ask for more. This is something I wrote at length about on the Insider forums but it never felt like the feedback reached the appropriate channels. Given that I now know that you know, I won’t write about this topic again.
Huge props for the communication, thanks again for taking the time. We all want Sea of Thieves to be the best it can be and feel great to play for all parties involved!
🤜
If against all odds this thread/comments happens to have something the team didn’t already know or consider u/Rare-Sonicbob
Well - that was definitely a read 😉 I get the push that there are potentially other routes to explore, but I feel we've stepped through these either before or during this current implementation.
We explored the simpler 'Increase the firing delay timer' when we first fixed the double tap a few years ago. For such a core moment to moment mechanic it felt terrible that as a player there was no indicator/reason that you couldn't fire and you'd be clicking furiously waiting for the game to 'let you shoot'. While we clearly have this timer running behind the scenes in other areas like you've called out the result is nowhere near as frustrating as it became with gunplay during our playtesting.
We also have 'time to kill' as a consideration here which is often missed and bringing every encounter naturally down to the current quick switching timing did not feel right for our game, ruling out the opportunity to tighten our animations (which we know would have felt mechanical...
Read moreRead moreThat's great to hear. Thanks for your work! I love when ya'll squash exploitations.
I have never interacted with a dev team member. So, forgive me the potential overstep, but I have a question that I have always wondered about.
As it stands, the sloop is the fastest ship sailing into a headwind. This makes sense, and should be the case. If only to give solo sloopers a hope of escaping thirsty crews on larger boats.
What doesn't make sense, and never has, is that this is true with the sails set perpendicular to the headwind. Why is that faster than with the sails parallel to the headwind? It is not intuitive, and I've seen it damage new players' experience with the game. For example, when a new player on a sloop is being chased by a larger ship they sail into a headwind (which they should do), and they do what any rational human would do: they set their sails in the position that would logically create the least amount of drag. However, this is actually slow...
It's an issue we are well aware of but the challenge is that the combination of systems that control the speed of the ships is incredibly complex and would likely need some rework in order to resolve this specific issue - it's been in the list for a long time but the broader impact of reworking such a fundamental system has often deprioritised it.
It's another scenario though that we know isn't intuitive and does need fixing at some point...
I hope you can differentiate between guild members who cheesed and those who didnt. I don't mind my guild getting nerfed because people in it cheesed. But you've alluded to other penalties (maybe bans?). I hope my account doesn't become guilty by association. If I get penalized in some way (like a ban) because some asshat in my guild was cheesing to help ppl get curses even though I told em to stop ... I'd be upset.
We'll protect from that, no one who hasn't been actively participating in the exploit will be affected here except for the guild they are in having actions taken against it.
If this was the case, then lowering the quantity of players would have fixed the issue - and it hasnt. Similarly, lowering the number of servers each machine is hosting hasnt fixed the problem.
What then actually is the problem then if not the game itself at this point?
I've never said the problem is not the game, there is definateley something we are now doing on the server that is eating significantly more processing power than in previous updates - we just have to find out what.
Simply put, servers with larger player counts were significantly more affected. Lowering the player count was our approach to reducing the impact on the experience in order to buy us time to find the real issue (which generally takes much longer to sleuth). Nowhere have I shared that reducing the Player count would 'fix' the issue as it is only a temporary mitigation to the worst cases.
That's good to hear, thank you. I hope I didn't come off as too hostile, I'm just trying to make the best use of your attention as I can while I have it.
🤜
Chiming in and saying that while I share the frustration of many players, especially in terms of weapon-feel clunkiness, I greatly appreciate your communication with the community through these comments. It can't be easy but rest assured that your efforts are appreciated!
🤜
I've been told by support to not make tickets as issue will be fixed for everyone.
Well now I'm getting in trouble 😐
Read moreWell, while we're talking about focus and priorities, I hope you guys are aware of how much of the playerbase really, really, and I mean REALLY want to see you guys put more focus on better game features and especially bug fixes and not Tall Tales. The amount of work that goes into one-and-done experiences that many people (myself included) don't even care to do the one time is grossly disproportionate to the payoff, and Tall Tales have sucked far too much attention away from, in many if not most players' eyes, drastically more important stuff for an exceptionally long time.
There's a vocal minority calling out for a conclusion/advancement of the Flameheart saga, but from what I've seen, it's quite stacked on the opposite side of people that just want better/more replayable stuff like world events and bug fixes to be the priority. A long time ago when all of the Adventures stuff was spinning up, the Rare rep in the video said that it would not be taking away resources fro...
We're certainly aware, a topic were discussing at length at our Leadership level 👍
Thanks for the update on the hg glitch situation.
How are you able to differentiate between legit and glitched guilds? Im in one of the highest guilds rn (top 10 or top 20) and we are at distinction 5 or 6 at this point. Can you somehow see if theyve done it legit or are you just gonna look at the guild level/emmissary value? I dont even want to know how, i just want to know if my guild is gonna be safe or not😅
If you havent used the exploit your guild will be safe 🍻
Interesting. And we'll see the effects of this in November update I hope?
Yup - that's the plan
So in so many words, you basically are saying "yeah, the coding teams are pretty overwhelmed". It makes sense, and thank you for responding.
No I wouldn't use overwhelmed, as our role as Producers is to give the teams clear areas of focus and let them do their best work. Instead I think it's worth considering that any live service title out there has a staggering amount of work that the team could choose to tackle with live game health and future facing investments to name just two.
Even the largest teams still have to ultimately prioritise where to invest their teams time and that means there is always areas that are missed or simply receive less investment. There's always too much work, irrelevant of the size of the team - our job is to try and help teams prioritise the right stuff. We won't always get this right, there isn't a formula - but we will continue to adapt and learn!
I think thats his point, he's basically saying "cut last gen support" to lower the playercount, even though there are still plenty of last gen players, and just cutting them off would be unfair, as not everyone can afford a new xbox or playstation, or even a PC.
Given that our server migration tech optimises for busier servers it would make no difference 'lowering the player count' as we'd still be actively migrating players together to fill servers.
We still have a large amount of players on older generation consoles and lower spec PC, we have no plans to remove that right now.
Follow up question: given the continued server instability and hit reg issues, will the Skull of Sirens Song be delayed? Or is it still anticipated to launch this month as a premier High Seas PVP event with diminished player/ship caps and ongoing issues specifically surrounding PVP?
We are continuing with our previously shared plans for The Skull of Siren Song to come later in November. We're clearly working on further improvements alongside that however will be keeping the reduced cap's until we have performance back into a stable state.
So less players per server didnt solve the issue and less servers per machine hasnt solved it either.
Can we not just abandon the compatibility with out of date consoles at this point? As it is, the game is essentially "full" and now it is apparently collapsing under its own weight, presumably because it is forced to abide by archaic limits and code to enable those old consoles.
I don't know how many times I have to say it, but older generation Consoles and Lower Spec PC have no impact on Server Performance! The servers don't really care what the spec of clients are connected, only the quantity of them.
To be fair, the server issues that were experienced at the start of season 10 weren't unique to it. There were a lot of server issues and problems at the tail end of season 9 (the last couple of months), and I think the major factor that exacerbated season 10's start was the normal influx of players who were starting the new season returning en masse and making the normal problems much worse.
While it's true there is no way to test that with something like Insiders, I think it's something that could have been predicted given the fact that a lot of people felt like the game had serious issues with server performance even prior to season 10, so proactive steps like reducing ship and player limits to ensure a more stable launch may have been prudent.
☝️This☝️ Some of these perf regressions started appearing in September but only caught fire once we hit scale with Season Ten launch, this is all general build health and has no ties to Guilds as a feature set here.
Read moreIf you're unsure of how to make sure you are made aware of issues when people find them, the answer is to actually read your dang forums. If someone makes a post on the insider forums outlining a clear bug or issue and a single Rare employee reads that, it should be pinned or logged or linked to whoever needs to start fixing it. It really is that simple. And if not a single Rare employee is reading them, then there is no point in having them. There is no excuse for a big bug to be mentioned in the Insider forums and then make it to the live game, other than "we didn't have time to fix it, but we know about it and are working on it", but we don't even get that. Even the barest minimum of communication in-house should be preventing that from happening, like I said, if a single Rare employee is actually reading anything on the Insider forums and doing the minimal work of forwarding it to somebody.
Speaking of that, what exactly is causing issues to remain in the game for mon...
The best way to get critical bugs to the Dev team is to submit bug reports, while we have teams who try and skim the threads as part of our usual process there is a chance they will be missed in the discussion.
RE prioritisation, running a Live Service game takes a lot of triage and prioritisation to ensure we are focused in the right spaces. We have multiple game teams focused on long-term feature commitments (some 12 months out, others 3-6 months out etc).
We are always assessing the issues reported from various channels but ultimately we have to make a priority call on how much we invest in bug fixing alongside feature work - I won't claim that we always get that right, but it's a constant effort for us to juggle the various things we feel are important!