SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE SEA OF THIEVES

SUGGESTIONS TO IMPROVE SEA OF THIEVES

This is going to be a long post, so before I get rained down with negativity and how I'm wrong to even have these thoughts, I will say that I love playing Sea of Thieves and it has been one of my main games little over a year now. At points I will be negative towards Rare (and I think deservedly so), but even if they won't make a single improvement from this personal list of mine (which is likely the case), I'll still be a sucker that sticks around like most of you, since unfortunately there really isn't any other games to substitute what SoT manages to do so well.

Also worth noting, I'm very much a completionist in nature, having put a ton of hours into this game (can't tell how much for sure, but my guess would be around 1.5-2k hours since March 2020). I got on these seas day 1 and dipped my sailor toes back for both Y1 and Y2 anniversaries, but only ever started my journey at the start of Y3 and since then earned almost all cosmetics and 'hard to get titles' to add bit more validity to what I'm about to say.

All of these are ideas me and the other 'title hunters' that I play with have pondered "what if Rare did this" and "why don't they do it like that" on our long voyages, and I'm sure a lot of it has been suggested times and times before. At the end of the day we're all just players, not developers with creative rights for this game, so even though I might think a lot could be made much better with little effort, there might be a very good reason why they decide not to. Anyway, here are suggestions from highest priority to lowest in my own personal list (with a following explanation for them):

• 'Season of Health' to fix up code and squash those bugs (This game is honestly as buggy as everybody's favorite Fallout. Jokingly, I would rather have fixes to all of the common bugs on the next seasons rewards track, than some reskinned cosmetics and a bunch of nothing. Maybe when reaching lvl 100 in the next season, we could finally have the infamous 'Ranged and Melee Weapon Hit Detection' fixed. In all seriousness though, how about using the Insider build for player feedback, before broken and unbalanced content gets pushed on the mainline. Still there are so many old bugs like dissappearing player cosmetics, not seeing wind, multiple soundbugs, light glitches, not being able to interact with the ship or loot, stuck world events, constant crashes, the list goes on and on.. like how the fuck do I even get a hitmarker from sniping a keg and it doesn't blow up, let alone land 4-5 hits on someone in Arena with my buddy and they don't die?!)
• Improve server stability (Think that is another one of your 'always in patch notes' mentions, but I don't get what that really means when you say that. Me and pretty much everybody I've played with has had odd disconnects and weird delays with commendations and gold payouts since beginning of time it seems. Personally going into Reputation menu to check stuff always loads up very sluggish for me, and sometimes talking with faction NPCs to get voyages takes good 10 seconds before it opens up. "I'm having some trouble preparing my inventory. Ask me again shortly." Is this game trying to mine Bitcoins when in menus or what? If possible make the menus more snappy and also faster feedback, when turning in loot, would be greatly appreciated.)
• Adventure pre-choices (A set of optional selections before queueing up for a ship with randoms such as 'exploration'; 'voyages'; 'pvp'; 'GH/OoS/…', so even players that don't have many friends to play this game with could easily find likeminded people when setting sail. Would also lessen the load of people who constantly serverhop and maybe fill up those empty servers more?)
• More Tutorials (Maiden Voyage is decent for explaining only the very basic things and the rest is an absolute mystery to a new player. There should at least be a written tutorial for all the world events and game mechanics, so fresh Sailors could get themselves up to speed better, without spending hours on wiki or only learning through trial and error.)
• True fullscreen mode (Not borderless fullscreen or whatever that crap is right now. I'm playing on Windows Xbox and been in that 'one second late' situation countless of times because my mouse got stuck in the heat of the moment using radial menu for selection, and I was unable to make the shot because of it. Using Win+G also messes it up for me, so if anyone knows a workaround please let me know, cause this is the only video setting this game seems to be missing.)
• Better statistics (From profile overview on SoT website there is only a few pretty meaningless statistics, like times vomited and Megs encountered. How about being able to see in-game how many hours I've played, how much I've earned, how many skeletons killed, Megalodons or bosses defeated, since counter for those stop after maxing out the arbitrary number on their respective commendation. I truly hope those statistics are somewhere and we're just shown a couple dumb ones from a system which never got properly implemented. Also there should exist a leaderboard that showcases pirates with the most titles earned and gold earned/spent, since that is the endgame afterall.)
• Bring back time-limited cosmetics and stop it with exclusivities and FOMO (This hurts the most and it is so damn dumb when developers decide to Bungie their game. Yes, I wasn't here for year one and two, but I've given this game more than most people who were. It is really great when you give out free stuff, but that should also be earnable later on in some way. "I guess you missed out" is some elitist bullshit that shouldn't be encouraged. Also to hell with Twitch drops, such a stupid way to boost your numbers with 'influencers' who are mostly just landlubbers not worthy of my time. Instead you can just let me put in some actual weekly hours to get those drops, you know the game you want us to play and be invested in, right?)
• Simple menu design (I don't know why but you keep cramming menus into menus into menus. Right now to check what I have to do during this event I have to 'button-click-click-click-click-click-click' all the while there's some mini-loadings happening. Why not just put the 'Season' and 'Events' right there at the top and save us a few clicks? Also crew management, scuttle option, etc. should be better presented than some tiny little arrows deep within. And whats up with all the different times in the menus - UTC / PDT / no timezone. Countdown in-game would fare the best I feel. Since Gold Rush happens twice a day, why not have our UI surrounded with a golden border or some little stamp on the screen indicating of it. Same goes for the double gold weekends that happen once in a blue moon.)
• Sensitivity options (It feels very sluggish to ADS with the Eye of Reach or to swim, so I've been using a DPI Shift for both. Not an option for everybody or for gamepad users, so there should be a slider to change those.)
• Extra character option (Give us just one more character to customize like GTA Online. Most online games with emphasis for character customization let you swap your gender and appearance, or at least have multple account systems. Player Appearance Potion is an insidious invention that should not be in a game like SoT. What are you a fucking mobile game? On a side note, I had a bug that cleared all my character cosmetics including 5 carefully selected emote wheels happen multiple times at the end of last year, and when I complained and explained what happened to your support, then that dumbo forced a PAP on my account, so now whenever I start or try to join a game I constantly get buggered about changing my character appearance, which I'm not looking to do nor asked for.)
• Outfit/ship customization presets (How is it still not a thing? No seriously, literally every cosmetic game does it these days except for SoT that still can't figure it out. A few presets would be a decent start already. I have bought all I can in this game for gold and trying to flip through pages to put on some old favorite items suck and take too much away from my actual time for making progress or chilling top-deck with my crew. Heck, Fortnite has a hundred presets each allowing different main emote selections and weapon skin choices. Just add a 'save' button to our selected clothes/vanity that will create a selectable preset, just as the game remembers your clothes/vanity from session to session right now. Shipwright should have an option for doing a few presets as well. Also why doesn’t the game remember our selected ship cosmetics from the last session? And why can't we put on the flag from the ship customization box still?)
• Ledger for earned gold/doubloons (Since that is the main thing to do in SoT, it would be nice to see how much I earned in the current session, what did I sell for how much, taking emissary and gold rush bonuses into account, and maybe even total gold earned/spent in total, if that statistic is even a thing apart from all the other useless ones collected for players.)
• PvP Weapon Balancing (This is personal thought and maybe not that smart, but I take pride more in winning ship-to-ship combat than someone's skill to get a single shot kill when they manage to board. So I think sword and blunderbuss should be retweaked for PvP only, and kept the same for PvE. Full shot from Blunderbuss 90% instead of 100 so there's a chance of survival, not get one-tapped, and sword could be upped for 30% instead of 25%, but lose the stun/magnetism and increase the angle to block attacks. Also blocking with a sword could halve the damage from an incoming thrust attack? I'm definitely not smart about any of this, but I feel there should be more survivability from player weapons and have this game be more about ships than weapon skills.)
• Fix Rowboats (Press 'R' to row. That's it! Every time I try to pick up treasure from the storage side my character decides to take a little break to sit down and it is making me SO mad. Just one button for you to to change! While I have you at button changes, stationary ammo chest could also be swapped to 'R' for reloads, so it has the same prompt as the ammo crate.)
• Fix Mermaids (Not that they're fully broken and need replacing, but who hasn't had their Mermaid appear just a little too late or too far for comfort, especially in critical moments. I think a better system for it would be a player-initiated one, which would also be more fair, where one could take out the pocket watch and hold 'R' for respawning back in the next 10 seconds when in the water. Its all voodoo-magic anyway, so I don't see why not. Something is also broken with the current system, when after sinking a boat there would sometimes be a mermaid that stays around for a very long time, which is not ours or theirs, since noone backspawned and we are all back on our boat.)
• Voyage Completion 'slimline' (I swear I've seen Davy Jones' locker dozens of times because my healthbar gets blocked when gasping for air in Lost Shipments, or digging up the final treasure for a voyage, while skellies decide to have the last word.)
• Underwater breathbar (Can be an option to toggle. Searching shipwrecks for rare fish or doing Lost Shipments has me submerged quite a lot, so it would be a welcome add-on. Games with lesser emphasis on diving have it, so should SoT.)
• Female voices (More than 3 years now this game has only had male grunts and drowning sounds. You don't need a higly paid actress for doing this, just take any lady from the office to record few types of sounds our characters can make and have that be a selection for us, if your game doesn't distinguish between male/female.)
• More shanties (There's 2 more spots at the second selection page and I feel most of us would want 'Wellerman' being one of them when delivering our "sugar and tea and rum" from outpost to outpost. Game doesn't need more instruments as the 4 take up corner slots of the radial and have set uses for other purposes in the game already).
• Make boats recognizable from distance (Whether player or skeleton, I would like the render distance for sails be better. Looking with the spyglass I would like to be able to tell the emissary back flag shape better and whether a ship has an alliance offer flag up, since recent months I'm pretty sure that is a bug of seeing multiple trialngle shaped flags at the top when they're not really there.)
• Journal collection (Would be very nice to access every once interacted journal from the menu, perfect bit-sized reading for trips back and forth on the seas. Personally I've only half-read them all, since there's constantly either some skeletons nearby punching me in the back or a threat from PvP. I'm not a lore buff, but would find it interesting to have that option while I'm sailing from A to B.)
• PvP Arena in Adventure Mode (A place on the map where people can practice weapon skills with their teammates or settle differences with other crews 'weapons only', should they choose to. Arena Outpost in the middle of the map is the perfect spot already where the actual Arena lobby could be used to arrange weapon fights. On death inside the PvP Arena people could spawn just outside of it in a very small PvP free zone that can have a selection of minigames to cool down or even challenge fellow pirates for some Liar's dice or smth. Would also be awesome to just initiate PvP anywhere with a teammate, if both agree on it. Getting revived should then be optional.)
• Better emote wheel (There are a lot of emotes in the game to express yourself and a lot more being added. Default emotes are fine but there doesn't need to be 4 empty pages. How about everybody just starts out with 1 page of default emotes and there would be an ability to add up to 9 more pages ourselves? You already have a bunch of cool packs that include 8 which take up a whole page so recently its been really sad for me to juggle out some cool emotes that I would do every now and then to make room for more currently fitting ones. Personally I love cool emotes in games, and SoT is perfect for them, but the implementation could be way better for choice.)
• Emoting with instruments (I just want to see my character in 3rd person playing on those expensive instrument skins. Maybe a different button to start playing from the shantie selection screen to start playing a shantie in a locked spot emote mode? Make this available without MTX purchase please!)
• Remove or add emotes from/to all outfits (Full body outfits should either have their emote removed to be usable normally, or every outfit should get an emote for consistency sake, not just select paid emporium ones. Also its very sheepish that you guys removed the emote from Lunar Festival Outfit. If religious fanatics can say what is appropriate in your game, then my Banana Religion disagrees showing our object of worship in decorative wrappings, so why don't you go ahead and remove that free emote from everybodys inventory as well why don't you! In any case I wasn't happy with that, and you guys should do better than that.)
• Pet emotes (Most sessions I take out one of my many pets, only to see them dissappear and finally finding them somewhere lower deck under the table or sleeping on top of a barrel somewhere. How about 1 default emote for every different animal type in the game that we can trigger with an option when we pick them up? Would surely make pet purchases more lucrative too. Wink-wink-nudge-nudge)
• Past and current patchnotes in-game (Release Notes, as your website has them, should be readable from in-game, just like most evolving games have them these days. Surely it would be helpful for returning people with reading abilities to see what is new in the game. Also I'm kind of curious how many times you've had the word "should" mentioned in your supposed fixes and how long back did the 'Ranged and Melee Weapon Hit Detection' become a "key priority to the team".)
• Ability to see server activity (How many players or boats are on the server. Not what they are doing, nor their names or ship types, but just to see that we aren't alone with the only other person on our server fishing splashtails at the furthest corner of the map somewhere when we're sailing around to form alliances or do pirate-y things to others.)
• More funtion for the brig (No, not Brigantine, but the prison square in each ship. My favorite idea for it would be taking the ghost crew from the PL hideout and making them a purchaseable addition to your ship in every session. Maybe reaching Athena 20, one could recruit them for certain amount of gold from the hideout? They would idle until you start playing shanties and join in to fill up all the missing instruments just by one person playing deck-side, having the freedom for other crewmates to manage ship in the full sound of these wonderful shanties! You already have the assets to make it happen, and we all know how you like repurposing old content for new. This would actually be amazing! But hey, I guess having people abuse it to trap players and puke on them is the next best thing, smh.)
• Catch ladders mid-flight (Whether from a jumping sword lunge attack or fired from cannon, the ability to grab a ladder or interact with items would be very fun.)
• More discoverable hidden places on the map (I was just recently shown how to open up the back door in Flamehearts hideout, which I stumbled upon some half a year ago myself and never figured out how to proceed further. Without ever expanding the map, there's a lot of potential to add many more places like these to the map to spice things up.)
• Reskin PL hideout entrances (So out of 7 outposts only Galleon's Grave has a unique entrance and all the other share the same. Kind of tells me that they had the idea to do that and then gave up? Would be nice if 5 of them got reskinned.)
• Remember inventory on disconnects (Alabaster yet again, and there goes all the meat / chainshots / curseballs that I gathered just before the fight we got in. Connection problem is just with the game, where direct calls and everything else stays fine. Doesn't happen often, but it happens. Would be nice to be in that fighting chance immediately on reconnect.)
• Dark Adventure glow (With the shipset alone costing 40M and all the items totaling close to 80M, there should be an option to make the 'red parts' glow, even if its just a personal thing for us to see. My gut feeling says it might have been a deliberate option not to make it stand out too much, since then it would give people reason to use it over the fancier PE sets, which people with time wouldn't feel the urge to buy.)
• Repair ship hull in session and add sails damage model (Could be just an option talking with the Shipwright to 'fix up visual damage' for a small sum of gold. I know people can say that it shows character, but it just looks bad imo and the damage model only applies to hull as of now. I would love if the sails got tattered too and ability to fix'er up when going to an outpost for a small sum. If someone has set their minds to attack us, then they aren't going to pull away once they get in range to see our 'now brown, but previously coal black hull' that has lasted without sinking for 10+ hrs straight.
• Color attached rowboat same as ship hull (Another option that the Shipwright could have for a very small gold sum to personalize attached rowboat just same color as the ships hull. Not asking anything complicated like giving it a personalized name here.)
• Option to enable 'sound/text/visibility range' shown on map (This is a weird one and probably immersion braking, but would be nice to know how far does player voice travel normally and using a trumpet, range of text being visible to others, and range of visibility to see island formations and other player ships from the map. There might be info on that which I haven't seeked up yet, and I doubt most sailors ever will, but if I remember from my own personal testings I think text and voice travel only half a square, trumpet throws voice 1 square, ship visibility is 6 squares proved by seeing fresh spawns at Ancient Spire from Morrows, and islands can be seen 5 squares away on a clear weather. My implementation would be with the relation of your ship on map screen having a half transparent circle of somekind drawn around it for any of these selected from a menu option. I don't think it would be too far-fetched either, since we can see reapers and alliance ships like they have a GPS tracker that our iMapTable is able to track.)
• Loot priority on pickup (I don't quite get how it works right now, but its possible to stack a bunch of loot into each other and I don't know if there's an order for picking up things from that singular pile. What if there was a priority for last placed/first placed/most expensive? Personally I would love this game to have a physical space requirement for each piece of loot, but that would require rethinking the entire loot economy. Anyway, could be a menu option that defaults to 'most expensive items frist' I think.)
• Swapping weapon positions (Now that we have weapon emotes, and perhaps also nice feature in general would be, when interacting with the weapon cabinet to hit 'R' to switch places between Weapon 1 and Weapon 2, instead of changing W1 to W3, then W2 to W1 then W3 to W2.. how about that?)
• Prompt to equip all the same set cosmetics (When I choose to put on the 'Bilge rat shirt' or equip 'Killer Whale Cannons' then it would be super convenient to have a button that equips all of the same ilk to other changeable slots.)
• Set titles directly from their respective commendations (I would prefer both Titles and Emotes separated from Vanity section and swappable anywhere.)
• Make merchant commodities more clear (Apart from that 17 page manifest, how about just showing the weekly 'surplus' and 'sought-after' goods with pictures next to the Merchant NPC. Also add a bit color to those reskinned wood crates, so it doesn't all look the same. Sad that you nerfed that payout, but I can see how noone must have told you from the Insider build how ridiculously easy way to earn gold it was. Still nothing beats this way to earn gold now, especially running it in alliance convoys, and only turning profit during gold rush.)
• Make merchant animal quests less of a bore (Walking with a cage in hand to search for that last required animal can take ages, so how about being able to catch animals by hand, so they squirm themselves free from our grip after a few seconds, so we can run freely and get them more quickly back to our boats with fun gamefulness, and cages would be only required to take them on board and get delivered.)
• Ability to run across harpoon lines (Again, we have players shooting out cannons and skidding on the surface of the sea, so I don't think it would be too far-fetched idea to shoot a harpoon right up to a cliff side or next to a vault door and run back and forth on those with loot in hands. Shouldn't be able to block other entities like ships or players, so I'm thinking that vaulting on them could only happen from the tip or the base.)
• Personal Quarters (Taverns in outposts have a 2nd floor.. just saying. Could be just a little room with some memorabilias from feats completed by our commendations. Kind of like Vermintide does it, but with gold to spend on visuals, which could eventually become the gold dump further down the line. Place to put your own personal Chest of a thousand Groggs after delivering 100 of them to Gold Hoarders, if you catch my drift.)
• Solar Eclipse (So there is an actual eclipse which I think is rare in the game, and the game servers are all on the same time and day, but most people will never notice it since it ain't all that special with the tiny moon blocking the big sun. What if the eclipse would blot out the sky for a brief moment like lets say 12 seconds every 12 hours, wouldn't that be pretty special and noticeable, just like the mysterious sound that happens each day around 3am.)
• Give pets purpose (For this everyone should receive 1 free pet of each type, which would of course kill your pet selling business, and also hard to make it happen development-wise I suppose, but what if… parrots delivered parchment messages across the map to alliance ships making old-timey Twitter happen; monkeys helped you carry 1 piece of treasure back to boat or outpost, like a skull or a gem; dogs would help on finding hidden treasures and bark when close to riddle locations; cats would be fucking useless as usual, nah I'm kidding, they can do player-detection and be anti-tuck lol. Barrel begone!
• Ice Expansion (Seeing "The Terror" lately and absolutely loving ice environments in games, if all the monies from those '20 Million Players' could somehow support bigger more meaningful updates for the game, then it would absolutely "Shiver me timbers" if you made a small co-op adventure like a few Tall Tales long for a separate map. Could be just a few bigger and smaller landmasses, in seas that get frozen over, new enemy types and map size of that little chunk in the bottom left of the main map with a single outpost. Wouldn't be any gold to earn, but just very VERY hard PvE adventure to tackle with randoms or friends for cosmetic unlocks, and hey.. maybe Shrouded Ghost is there too, you know.)

Those last few are pretty much wishful thinking, and definitely need more serious development time, something that I doubt Rare is willing to do anymore. Crazy ideas like that are easy though, so here's a few more wild ones, like: Using harpoons to shoot out grappling hooks to climb heights ; Shield as a 5th weapon type that could also double as a glider akin to BotW glider (imagine using it, when shot out of the cannon to float gently onto islands and ships) ; More throwables like axes/knives or smokebombs ; Hunters call emissary, that could also enable the use of net fishing ; small 'detonation-charges' that could be dropped from the back of the boat, that do half keg damage on pursuers ; etc.

All the rest seem to me basic quality of life feature requests, and simple ways to reflip assets for interesting means, that could probably be done in a few months of work, should Rare take that focus, and also give artists something other to do than change colors on already existing skins.

Hey, I get it. Rare made a cool game with some excellent mechanics that is also playable with friends/others, something that they currently have no competition for. Kind of like Rocket League. Well same as Psyonix, they noticed that and started pumping out more and more purchasable cosmetics, when real development took the back seat. So much more could be done with this game, and when they boast how they have constantly growing player count (which I don't doubt at all), then it just dissapoints me how little they care for anything other than making money from us.

Almost everything since Heart of Fire has been some sort of an asset flip it seems (Flameheart, GH vaults, Lost Shipments - all smartly pulled from previously existing mechanics and Tall Tales, but still..), so it really has been just a year to make a big push for Emporium updates only, and nothing else that's actually new. I'd be okay with that too, but.. Rare releases 100 euros worth of cosmetic content EVERY MONTH NOW, and says there are 20 Million people who play their game, so sorry that my expectations are a bit higher, ok! I'm just guessing I have a few thousand hours played for this repetitive (not saying I don't find it enjoyable) content, and Ancient Skeletons have visited me personally 4 times, bringing me less than 10 euros worth of Ancient Coins all together. What the fuck Rare?!

So for final say, suggestions here are my own for Rare, not the community, and I stand by them. Unfortunately I have no idea how to push my suggestions for Rare, without becoming some harassing prick, so I put them here. If you agree with them, good, if not, then you have your own say and I have mine. I know basically nothing about game development, but I strongly disagree when someone says "Rare pushes expensive monthly cosmetics, because they need to recoup the costs of running servers" or some other apologetic nonsense like that. I could have made this post with more careful thought in wording, but I'm not trying to appeal to them as if I don't have any other actual good games to play, so this was mostly just a writing exercise to organize some past thoughts that I've jotted down. This game is decent fun, but also quite disappointing, unless they finally make changes for the better and not just fatten pockets from success.

#RarePleaseMakeSeaOfThievesBetter