Sea of Thieves

Sea of Thieves Dev Tracker




14 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by Wiz4rdFr0g

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.


13 Nov

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Ah, October, the month when the veil between the Sea of Thieves and Sea of the Damned grows thin. It was a month filled with spooky happenings and delights, as well as a peppering of definitely-not-spooky but still very exciting updates. That means there’s a lot to get through, so let’s get right into the highlights, shall we?

Content Update The big news of October hardly needs an introduction, but we’ll give it one anyway just in case you somehow missed it: {LINK REMOVED}Season Ten has begun! This much-anticipated shake-up of the Sea of Thieves formula began by introducing Guilds, allowing players to team up with pirates beyond their standard crew and work together to unlock new rewards. The update also included a number of quality-of-life upgrades... Read more
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    /u/ on Steam - Thread - Direct
A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

09 Nov

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Pirates! If there’s one thing you know we take seriously, it’s celebrating how brilliant you, our players, all are. So it should come as no surprise to you that we’re very serious – and also very excited – about Season Ten’s upcoming Community Weekend, which has officially been scheduled to start on Saturday, December 2nd at 11am UTC. Lasting 48 hours, this latest Event promises to celebrate our wonderful players and spoil sailors with a plethora of goodies and Pop-Up Plunder offerings.

You can see the announcement in our very latest episode of Sea of Thieves News below. We know what you’re thinking – and yes, it does sound wonderful, and of course we’ll tell you more! So let’s get into it…


Stream of the Crop To raise the Community Emissary Grade, players will once again be tasked with tuning in to Twitch to... Read more
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    /u/ on Steam - Thread - Direct
A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.
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    76561199490297387 on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
Another fun-packed weekend of bonuses and boosts, Pop-Up Plunder and Skulls of Siren Song will be upon us less than a month from now! Get all the info on Season Ten Community Weekend, running from December 2nd-4th, in the full announcement article: https://aka.ms/SoTS10CommWknd

At-a-glance:
@ Saturday, 2 December 2023 11:00 UTC - Monday, 4 December 2023 11:00 UTC
- Emissary Multiplier
- Twitch Drops
* Eastern Winds Ruby Pristine Jacket
* Eastern Winds Ruby Wrap Dress
* Gilded Phoenix Blunderbuss
* Gilded Phoenix Pistol
* Bonus Twitch Drop if we hit the top 10 gaming categories on Twitch - Obsidian Captain's Drapes
- Popup Plunder (Now includes Fish)
- Time Limited Title "Vi... Read more

08 Nov

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    76561199208411297 on Steam Forums - Thread - Direct
We are aware of players currently running into issues viewing their correct currency balance (this is a visual issue only) and accessing the Pirate Emporium, Pirate Log and Guilds. We are investigating these and will provide an update as soon as we know more.

07 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by _ROOTLESS_

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!

🤜

Comment

Originally posted by _ROOTLESS_

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...

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Comment

Originally posted by AlexRogansBeta

That'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...

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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...


06 Nov

Comment

Originally posted by AlexRogansBeta

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.

Comment

Originally posted by Silvercat18

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.

Comment

Originally posted by DapperDlnosaur

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.

🤜

Comment

Originally posted by _ROOTLESS_

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!

🤜

Comment

Originally posted by tapczan100

I've been told by support to not make tickets as issue will be fixed for everyone.

Well now I'm getting in trouble 😐

Comment

Originally posted by DapperDlnosaur

Well, 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...

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We're certainly aware, a topic were discussing at length at our Leadership level 👍

Comment

Originally posted by Robloxpro69420

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 🍻

Comment

Originally posted by t_moneyzz

Interesting. And we'll see the effects of this in November update I hope?

Yup - that's the plan

Comment

Originally posted by DapperDlnosaur

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!

Comment

Originally posted by shadowa1ien

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.