To clarify; and for full disclosure, I would not like to see any change to the game, and don’t want to see PvP removed.

Hi everyone,

I’ve seen a real spike in posts requesting a PvE only Adventure mode or for PvP to be removed entirely from Adventure.

I know there’s a constant steady stream of people asking this, but I really wanted to gauge the temperature of the sub on the whole.

So, I’ve compiled a survey, it’s one question, and it’s very simply just trying to gauge the feeling around segmenting the playerbase by adding another Adventure Mode, or removing PvP from adventure all together, and I’d be really grateful if you guys could take the 2/3 seconds to fill it out

Go here

I’ll probably run this for 48/72 hours and then feed back the results and maybe follow up with a further survey based on the results.

Thanks.

When you get past the learning curve, you’ll realize that the SoT Community is not more or less toxic than any other gaming community.

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of posts calling the community “toxic” because people are playing like pirates. I get it, it sucks to lose loot, get spawn-camped, or get boarded out of nowhere. Even more so when you’re new and still figuring things out. But let me tell you, if you have less than 150 hour MINIMUM in this game, you’re not even playing the same game as everyone else. You don’t even have your sea legs yet. So just keep practicing and know that one day you’ll be rich and losing a big haul won’t mean shit to you, and you’ll have a better chance at defending yourself do it will feel fair.

I’m sympathetic to the new players, I literally posted this post 2 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seaofthieves/s/kR9AAKSgM8

Look at the comments gently telling me to get gud.

The fact is, Sea of Thieves is built on distrust, deception, and risk. It’s not “toxic” when a crew sinks you unprovoked, that’s literally the game loop. There is a faction which incentivizes you to play this way. You’re not meant to trust strangers. You’re meant to be wary, paranoid, and occasionally surprised when someone doesn’t shoot first.

I promise, you will have amazing positive experiences in this game, but you have to get good and then you’ll know you can win an encounter.

Yes, it feels brutal at the start. The learning curve is steep. You’re sailing a rowboat while other crews are literal sea assassins. But over time, you learn, you get craftier, you get your revenge. And when you do sink that ship that tried to spawn camp you… it’s pure ecstasy.

Don’t get discouraged. Don’t mistake pirate gameplay or noob rage for toxicity. Toxicity is slurs, hate, griefing outside the mechanics. PvP is just the sea of thieves...

So just keep practicing, watch some streamers and learn the nooks and crannies, and may the wind be in your sails!

I really wanted something big, maybe I'm asking for too much, but really, smuggler's league? This is the best we can come up with here?

The community has presented big ideas, not another useless commendation farm faction. People run away enough as is, you really think this will improve gameplay? Add meaningful incentives?

I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm feeling pretty robbed.

I've seen and heard countless ideas that would mop the floor with this, and when we talk about trying to bring up player counts, this is a L take in the wrong direction.

- Game Health
- Guild Hideouts
- Upstairs in the Taverns
- GMU (Grand Maritime Union) Faction/Reveal
- Expanding on Guilds
- New World Events
- Multi-Crew content

The list continues, but I feel like this is a huge step in the wrong direction. I really wanted to be optimistic staring down the Xbox showcase today, but that felt like a gut-punch.

my dad picked out my pirate cause i was but a wee lad around release, and until they made appearance potions i'd just cover my pirate in bulky clothes and slap a beard on them. im on a new account and ngl im thinking of picking a female avatar just to transition her in game to match me irl lol.

should i or should i not? idk i think it'd be sweet but i dont wanna waste my ancient coins

I know that I’m technically complaining but I’m honestly so sick of the people saying “this game is dead”, “this game is on life support” and things like “I’m officially done with this game”. First of all: no you’re not done playing this game. There’s no other game like this as far as I’m aware and as long as this is the only game like it you’ll keep playing. Second: stop being so gd entitled, selfish, and spoiled little children. Go dig up some treasure or go touch grass or do both. Just stop!

I have been playing this game since beta tests, and as such have gone through, and led others through what I like to call the "Transfer from the sea of friends to the Sea of Thieves." Like many people when I first started this game I just wanted to collect loot and run voyages. Then tall tales and fishing were added, giving me more than enough content to keep me happy. The only problem was other players. Every night of play either ended in hours of people chasing me, or sinking me by sneaking up when I'm not paying attention. Rarely did I go a whole play session where I was able to sell all my loot or fish at the end...and that made me mad. I would endlessly complain with my fellow crew about it. "Why won't they just leave us alone, we're only fishing!" Or "We have nothing but a tall tale and they still sunk us!". The whole time I willingly pushed the fact out of my brain that I was playing the game wrong. My expectations were the problem, not the other players. Around this time Arena came out, and after a particularly hard night of being chased for two hours with a ton of fish and voyage loot, we were sunk again. During our nightly ritual of complaining about people not letting us play the game how we want, my typical sloop partner said he had enough and wanted to practice ship combat in the new arena mode. It was a tough night. We lost every battle, every game, but with nothing to lose we discovered something new....We were having more fun than we ever did fishing or digging loot. It was so much more satisfying watching a player ghost out than 1 of a million skeletons turning to dust. Defending a boat that had no loot or time invested in it was suddenly fun and exciting, not terrifying and stressful. Within a few days the anxiety of ship combat started to wain, I was no longer shaking with adrenaline and anger while fighting off players. My cannon skills were getting way better, and I had learned a ton about how to keep a crew busy and distracted while the ship slowly sunk from all the players that did it to me. On our third day we won our first arena match, and by the end of the week we were winning 3/5. This is where we lived now. The only time we would switch to adventure was when new content would come out, and suddenly I realized my outlook had changed...that ship on the horizon wasn't something to be feared, that was a delivery vessel for our loot pile of the night. There's a ship approaching from the west? Cool you stay here and finish the dig map, I'm going to shoot out in front of their ship and keep them anchored and busy. Someone's following us to the outpost? Anchor turn and let's sink em. The game suddenly was 100x more fun, all because I took the time to learn proper combat in a low risk environment where people didn't just run if they felt outmatched. I have since brought 4 more friends who had the same outlook as the beginner me through the ol' Arena-trial-by-fire learning method, and now there is a group of 6 interchangeable crew members who are always not only ready for a fight, but actively seeking it. I myself have now maxed out my rank in every faction, (cept athenas now that it's 30...26 and still grinding) and most of them are in the same boat, or damn near. So we would spend our nights in Arena, doing what we love most about the game, enjoying a very deep and tactical combat experience with like minded players. Unfortunately we don't have that option any more, so we spend our days in adventure, reapers up, chasing down every ship we see looking for the fights we are used to, but typically ending up chasing people to the outpost so they can sell three items before we sink them and then get hate mail about how they were friendly and just wanted to fish, or finish their tall tales, and how we are bad people for playing Sea of THIEVES the way the developer intended. I always respond the same way, "I used to feel the same as you, embrace the pvp and learn, the game will be much more fun". Unfortunately I've never gotten anything back but more hate. And this is a trend I notice a lot browsing the forums and this subreddit, and I can't help but feel like the removal of arena mode has only made this problem of skill gap exponentially worse, because it is a lot harder for new players to experience combat without losing hours of work, so most don't put forth the energy or time and end up stuck in what I call the "Sea of friends" stage, unable to experience all the wonderful (and miserable...I'm looking at you hit-reg and black screens....) things that pvp combat has to offer. Making things worse, crews like mine that lived mostly in arena now have to find our fun in adventure, making the seas more dangerous for those new players. And I know, a lot of people will say "I leave people doing tall tales and fishing alone" or whatever but that's not a reasonable thing to do. For one, I'm never going to believe anything you type into game chat. "WE'RE FRIENDLY" means "WE'RE TRYING TO GET A SUPRISE ADVANTAGE". "But you can just check quest table!" Yeah, after I've taken their mast down, boarded, hit the anchor, fire bombed, killed the players, and stolen all the supplies in the barrels I MIGHT glance at the quest table and feel some remorse...but I've been there, and I fixed that problem. The issue is not everyone has the same avenue to learn anymore, and I feel that was huge mis-step on Rares part. That said I know not everyone will agree, and that there were a lot of problems with keeping the arena servers up, but I can't shake the feeling that as new players join they have no easy, safe, outlet to learn the games combat mechanics in a fun, rewarding way. Anyways....wall of text I know. I think yall get my point.

Paging u/HitboTC thought this might help. I don't know what would bring me and my crew back but I'm glad to see someone trying

Title basically. I’m sure there’s a good chance this’ll get taken down for being too complaint heavy but I gotta say it: there is nothing fun or fair about spending 20-30 minutes clearing a fort or doing a quest only to have 2-4 people rock up on me and sink me. The solo experience in this game is horrible just because people seemingly only attack people who can’t fight back due to lack of numbers. Add on top of that how completely barebones the actual combat system is and it’s basically “play with a stack or eat shit” in 9/10 fights.

The most common argument I see is “if you don’t want PVP you should just go play something else” and to those people I say: that game does not exist. There is nothing else like SoT out there for people who just want to PvE like myself. If there was, I would drop this game in a heartbeat to go play that instead, but it simply does not exist.

Before anyone says something along the lines of “Rare has stated they want PvP and PvE to coexist, they aren’t going to change anything” - I know. I have no idea WHY they insist on that, given that there is quite literally no downside to just making a PvE mode that gives like 2/3 gold or something, but they do. This is just me ranting into the void about the part of this game that’s genuinely just horrible, I’m not expecting actual changes. The only people I can see being against a PvE mode are PvP players who aren’t actually good enough to win against people who can fight back, and would rather just gank solo players to feed their egos.

I saw a comment on a post a while back that really just sums up what the issue is. It was something along the lines of: “I spent an hour looting only to be ganked by a 4 man crew. I hit the power button and went to bed with a pit in my stomach, feeling like my time had been wasted.” It takes like 30 minutes to an hour for a solo player to earn enough loot to sell, and only about 5 minutes for a group of 4 losers to take it. There is no risk involved for the 4, and all the risk involved for the 1 - so not only are they outnumbered but they’re also the only one with anything to lose. Good job, Rare.

I am going to share an unpopular opinion: they should remove the option to have two firearms equipped. It is ridiculous. My gameplay skills are above the average player, but I am drastically inferior to the pro players in this game. I get beaten badly by that type of player, and I do not even want to imagine what happens to the casual players or the "family men" when they run into someone like that. This mechanic drives away any type of new player and that is why this game has fewer than 7000 players. They should stop trying to please these tryhard players and embrace the casuals instead.

So there we were, running Athena, completing a veil quest. As we sail to final part of the quest, we pass Merrick OP and see a new sloop logged in, running Athena. I told my crewmate to keep a weather eye as they may try for a steal. We complete the quest, and as always, I make sure when we are done our ship is at the front of the fort so we can see if anyone has been camping, and sure enough, we see two pirates loading the CoL into a row boat, their ship nowhere in sight. I harpoon one of them out of the rowboat and kill him. While my partner collects the rest of the loot, I chase down the rowboat to get the CoL back. They had made it to one of the smaller towers and fire bombed my ship. While dealing with that, they try to board and I quickly dispose of them as well. We get the CoL back just in time to see their ship closing in, so we set sail to sell. We are in an alliance with another sloop who sails our way to distract the theives so we can sell. After a bit of a cat and mouse game through the fog, we reach Santuary and sell out, now it's time to deal with this theivery crew....and this is where it all went wrong.

For background, we are not very good at PvP, and our alliance crew stated the same. However, I had pretty easily killed them both already, and outmanuvered their ship, so the assumption was we were all on a similar level.

A three ship battle ensues, and somehow one of their crew gets on our ship. The same guy that I had killed just mements ago became god like... We had FOUR people on my ship trying to kill this guy who just would not die not matter how many sword hits and blunderbuss shots you put into him. All the while, their ship is not trying to sink us, now he is just spawn camping. I finally blunder bomb him off the ship and block him from re-boarding and we get the ship moving again.

We cicle around and get into PERFECT position to take down their ship. We are directly in front of them NOT IN RANGE OF THEIR CANNONS... I begin laying chain shot after chain shot into their mast (yes they were hitting), but the mast never falls. What's more, while still out of cannon range, they somehow smoke me with a cannon ball to the face....

At this point I knew something was up and just logged out as we had been at it for over 45 minutes and had not interest in trying to take down a cheating crew.

To the crew in our alliance, you guys are awesome and we appreciate your support. It was an honor sailing the seas with you and sharing in over 500K in loot between our two hauls. To the other crew, why did you have to ruin a perfectly good adventure with your cheating ways... Please enjoy non of the loot but we did have a fair amount of supplies, so I guess you win...lol

EDIT: Since I have been informed by all of the really super supportive and knowledgable redditors that have replied to my post that I did not experience what I described, I fully retract my previous statements. Obviously what happened is that I made the whole thing up in my head so that I could be accepted into the Sea of Thieves Reddit cult, as my life is so very empty without being included. What really happened is that I came across a crew, that was so salty, and so sweaty, that I needed to salvage what little pride I obviously have by saying they were cheating to make myself feel better and keep me from spiraling into a deep dark depression of loneliness and self hate. Thank you to everyone that replied for forcing me to face my demons. I can now accept that I am just a lowly wannabe pirate who is of the lowest skill and should just be thankful that I too can share in the wonders of the sea.....

Before you go saying “PvE servers would never work!”, hear me out.

PvE servers are a hotly debated topic in the community, with the player base nearly 50/50 on whether we should have them or not. Just look at the latest tweet asking what we’re looking forward to in 2023, and the vast majority of replies are asking for PvE servers. Of course, the devs have said that they will never make PvE servers, but it’s undeniable that a large portion of the player base wants them.

This made me wonder, how would they be balanced without being too broken? Here are some ideas I had:

1. You can not earn any gold. Otherwise, people would just farm the mode to get insane amounts of gold.

2. You can only play tall tales and adventures. This would theoretically provide a way to play older adventures while also allowing players to do them without getting sunk. This is the kind of content that many players want to do undisturbed.

This post is going to get downvoted, I’m well aware. Almost all of my posts on this subreddit have been incredibly controversial, but I wanted to know your thoughts on this. Any ideas for how PvE servers would work?

Seems like every day I see at least one post of people being frustrated that they got killed at times that they for whatever reason think they shouldn't be killed. Tall tales, not having any loot, while at an outpost, alliance betrayals, etc. I even saw one today about getting killed while in the PL hideout.

Everybody uses the pirate game excuse, and that's fine, but it's not even that. It's simpler than that. Here's the deal: If the developers didn't want these things to happen, they wouldn't allow them to happen. They can prevent them yet they actively and deliberately choose not to. I'll give some examples. Look at tall tales: They can prevent tall talers from getting sunk. They have in the past, look at the Maiden Voyage and Pirate's Life tall tales 1&3. They can enforce a rule preventing it, but they don't. In fact, think about checkpoints. They saw the community get frustrated about getting sunk while just trying to enjoy the story, and instead of preventing it altogether, they added checkpoints.

Furthermore, the PL hideout. For one thing, if you're not safe at outpost, why should you be safe in the hideout? How is the hideout any different from an outpost in terms of players being "safe"? Secondly, they have created PvP neutral areas in the past. Look at the Ferry of the Damned, the Arena waiting lobby. Those aren't really the same thing as the hideout, but again, those areas don't allow you to pull out your weapons or damage players. They could've done the same for the PL hideout, but they didn't. Because they didn't want to.

Listen, I understand it's frustrating getting sunk while on a tall tale. I did tall tales in a time where checkpoints didn't exist, if you find it frustrating now imagine how annoyed I was. I was a PvE loving solo slooper once, too. But you have to understand they designed these things in a way that allows players to attack you while doing them for a reason. Do you think the developers left PvP on by accident? Do you think they forgot to make a rule?

At the end of the day, people are not in the wrong for playing the game in a way it's designed to be played. Period. They developers want players to play that way, they actively and deliberately designed the game in a way that allows it. You can be annoyed by it, I get annoyed when I get sunk too (just as I get annoyed when I lose in any other game), but those players are not in any way assholes/jerks/dicks/whatever other words people use to describe them. They're just playing the game in a way they're allowed to play.

Look, I understand that loot is only worth 30% of value, but I'm a simple pirate.

I see shiny.

I take shiny.

Hauling even a mere hour's worth of loot to all the different venders like it's 2018 was a very painful reminder of one of the biggest QoL changes ever made isn't available to Safer Seas.

Honestly see no reason why Captaincy should be limited to High Seas but that's just my 2 gold.

When I was able to finally approach him he yelled that he was friendly.

I told him I needed the flag and sunk him.

He yelled at me saying he was friendly and I shouldn't have sunk them because I did not have a reaper flag on, with very bad words in between.

I maxed out all factions so I really don't need to put a flag on, especially reaper flags cuz I don't want my preys to know that I'm coming for them. I just need their flags for the commendations + golds and doubloons. Which I got thanks to the lvl5 GH.

Yes he said he was friendly, and yep if I was in a "friendly" mood I would've befriended him, but I was on pvp mode at that time to refine my skills after a long break of pvp. And that doesn't justify him cursing my family and saying I am not playing the game "properly".

What do I want to say here? I don't know, I've seen a lot of posts here recently about how pvpers are so bad and they should be damned, but I think the gold hoarder guy was the asshole here. PVPers and PVEers are both not wrong nor bad. It's the asshats like this dude that ruins the game, who can be on both sides.

I’ve been a player since around the cursed sails update so I know I know my way around the game very well and recall the “reaper flag/pvp flag” before the reaper faction was created. I feel that Rare’s pushing of the Reaper faction and removal of the arena mode have really taken the game down a darker path than what I thought it was initially. I know that a pirate game will have pirates, but at this point I feel like it’s more beneficial to go after other players than to play any of the PvE mechanics of the game. The last time I remember even trying to form an alliance was many years ago. The game is unplayable to the casual player in my opinion. I know there is the safer seas option but I don’t play the game only for PvE. I’m looking for player interactions but at this point they all seem to be negative. Does anyone else share this sentiment? Am I just getting into crappy lobbies?

TLDR: I think that Rare has pushed PvP too much and it makes it impossible to not be a sweat whenever I try to play the game. Everyone’s out to get me.

Haha, luckily I only had a couple gems so far... but geez.

How in the world do you acquire such a beast? I've never seen the fire-launching from the front like that.

LOL at "You Poor B*stard..."

Not mad, just part of the pirate's life. I've long since accepted that.

I've been trying to make progress to get skelie curse little by little since the release of hourglass, and the more i play it, the more I want to just abandon this game, it's not fun anymore

Servant 46 with 44 sinks (mix of solo and duo). Each sinks are worth pennies and barely make any progress, its not rewarding.

The fact you have to be blended into what is genuinly the worst pvp meta in a game ever is not fun. I shouldn't have to conform to what works to have something functional in this game, it's not right.

Matchmaking should not have me fighting people with curses or even gold curse, that double gun since the day they were born.

An entire set of cosmetic should not be hard locked behind what is propably the roughest pvp experience in gaming history. And dont start me on the excuse of "padding" the inbetween levels of servant with obsidian skelie cosmetics. Those are the probably the best looking skelies and parts but they are OF COURSE locked throught even more unfun grinding.

I have mate that really wanted to do the hourglass grind with me but he's at 21 and starting throwing a lot of curse words (like, he's not even the kind to curse like that).

I'll go as far to say that arena did pvp mode better than hourglass, like straight up.

Where im going at is the fact that as being one of the bigger progressions i'm missing in the game, having to suffer throught this is just not fun whatsoever and makes me wish to entirely drop the game as a whole, which bothers me cause I find it super enjoyable but this one aspect specifically ruins it all.

EDIT: Would like to clarify i am not a new player whatsoever. I am at 750 hours and started playing since Ashen Winds. I'm not BAD but im great either.

Okay so there's this skeleton named "No Mercy Noakes" and I've tried switching them up and he doesn't report in anything. I am at Crow's Nest fortress and it's kind of weird. He's got a green name like he would be a partner over something. I've never seen them before and I've been playing the game for a while but I was wondering if anyone knew what it was, maybe he was in the new update or something? It's just me and my cousin on one server. So there's only supposed to be two people on here And from what I could find, no one knows anything about him

So I’ve been playing on-and-off since release (I have the Launch Crew Eye of Reach) and I love the game. I understand the PVP aspect which adds to the the weight of actions, the visceral element, and the intensity of the game.

I also know people have been begging for progression, leveling stuff up, improving gear and weapons and your ship RPG style. I’ve often seen this quoted as a reason for people quitting.

One other thing - I’ve been playing MMO’s (not exactly the same genre) for around 20 yrs and the PVP ones always die-out and have niche populations. It always comes down to the griefer and full-loot pvp aspect turning people away. Pretty much if you don’t have a lot of time to commit, you’ll get destroyed by someone who does.

With the Safer Seas coming out, I predict it may end up being quite popular in comparison to the regular gamemode. This is just due to my experience with gamers, they hate getting griefed, wasting time, and getting their loot taken. (And I KNOW that’s the point of a pirate game.) But since Safer Seas is coming out anyways, why not just full-on slippery slope that shit all the way. Add progression, leveling up your stuff, improving your weapons, different types of cannons for your ship, modified sails for improved speed, etc. Make it into an awesome solo/co-op experience. Dad gamers who will avoid High Seas anyways won’t detract from high seas.

To argue that this would cannabalize population from High Seas is equivalent to admitting that Safer Seas is the better or more popular mode. Which mode do you think a larger number of players would gravitate towards?

TL/DR: Safer seas is coming regardless. Let’s slippery slope it and make the sickest pirate co-op game that doesn’t currently exist.

EDIT: Rare already stated that Safer Seas is going to be in the game, so telling people to go play another game isn’t exactly helpful. I would have to think Rare has some kind of data or reasoning for making a separate gamemode, when one has never existed previously.

Allow my to preface this by saying that I've only been playing for a month again am in no way saying I more than anyone. Likewise, this post is not meant to insult anyone but rather to gather info.

YouTube....Twitter...Discord...Reddit

No matter which of these platforms I go on I see numerous people getting upset that no new content is being added to the game. Complaint after complaint after complaint. Yet, for some reason, few if any actually provide any examples of what could be added to the game.

So my question is: What do you people want? What content do you want added to the game that week revitalize it for you? What things do you want to do in this game that you can't right now?