Ongoing Issues in Sea of Thieves - Urgent Need for Matchmaking Improvements and Technical Fixes

[Ekiro]

1. Matchmaking and Unequal Opponents:
An ongoing issue is the matchmaking system, where either servers are empty or players face highly experienced players or streamers, making a fair and enjoyable game almost impossible. A ranking system for crew matchmaking is urgently needed, especially for those looking to play in open crews. Such a system could help ensure that players are matched based on experience and play style, leading to more balanced encounters.

2. Technical Issues and Connection Drops:
Technical errors, like the well-known “Beard” error messages, frequently disrupt gameplay by dropping players from sessions, often while making in-game progress. Additionally, ping spikes, especially during Hourglass matches, are unpredictable and can frequently range between 120 and 200. This instability disrupts the game’s flow and makes smooth gameplay nearly impossible.

3. Problems with Settings and Game Performance:
Since the last update, my settings are no longer saved. Additionally, overall game performance seems to be declining, and I have repeatedly had to reinstall the game just to continue playing. It feels as though each update fixes one issue only to introduce several more.

4. Lack of Focus on Community Feedback:
It seems that with each update, decisions are made that overlook the needs of the community. The Sea of Thieves community is passionate and engaged, with many players offering constructive ideas to significantly improve the game. Unfortunately, this feedback is often addressed too slowly or not at all.

Conclusion:
Sea of Thieves undoubtedly has great potential, but the game appears to be moving in the wrong direction. It’s essential to focus on resolving technical issues, improving matchmaking fairness, and incorporating more community feedback to bring back the joy and excitement that Sea of Thieves once provided.

[mpcgannon]

Under technical issues:
I can access shops, logs, and guild promotions for the first five minutes of play ( or, ya know, not at all ) and then I get the eternal loading of frustration. Tech support was very polite but after performing the suggested actions, the issues have not been resolved.

[Fail]

Matchmaking in a PvPvE sandbox game makes no sense.
It'd also just encourage players to make smurf accounts to go back to robbing newbies.

[Eshman]

Hey OP this thread is great and all but it'd probably get far better traction and positive response on the official SoT website forums which are conveniently located here: https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/categories. You can locate them for yourself through their main site here: https://www.seaofthieves.com/. Oddly enough all this info is pinned above the main discussion thread for the game here on Steam but funnily enough many folks appear to not be able to comprehend or navigate to it.

Back to your topic(s)
1. Matchmaking should only apply when a crew/ship dives to go into combat against another crew/ship otherwise it serves no purpose or method in real/open-world combat. Also, what methodology would be applied to gauge the skill levels of the crew members aboard the particular ship anyway other than commendations earned or achievements completed (if that's even an accurate measurement?).

2. The vast majority of these issues are dependent on multiple factors beyond the scope of game development itself. For example, each user connected to a server most likely has different hardware at this point (consider the various platforms available for the game--I'm not going to list them all here that'd be silly). The mere fact that there is cross-platform compatibility is great but then each of those connected users most likely has different Internet service providers as well that probably aren't even the same provider as SoT. Providing connectivity across all of those telecom services and platforms is no simple feat and while some improvements can be made it's something that will occur over time and requires lengthy processes and if not mistaken they address this issue in some form in almost every update.

3. Settings on your device are completely independent of the SoT servers and your account settings that get saved there on them. You may need to contact support regarding this particular issue. However, it sounds to me like a permissions issue that your settings simply aren't being saved to the files and that causes them to revert to the default installed ones.

4. Totally agreed that listening to constructive feedback in any business should always be considered valuable whether it's positive or negative. Even though the SoT community tends to lean a bit toxic at times it still grows valuable pearls through all the brine and it's my sincere hope that it will continue to do so. It's also a hope that the SoT devs will never forsake that genuine and unique value from this eclectic community.

*Obligatory, but apologies for wall.

[Raft]

Originally posted by Ekiro:

1. Matchmaking and Unequal Opponents:
An ongoing issue is the matchmaking system, where either servers are empty or players face highly experienced players or streamers, making a fair and enjoyable game almost impossible. A ranking system for crew matchmaking is urgently needed, especially for those looking to play in open crews. Such a system could help ensure that players are matched based on experience and play style, leading to more balanced encounters.

1. I don't think the size of the player base is large enough to accommodate skill/experience-based matchmaking. Chances are, the game just matches you with people whose location is close enough (i.e. latency/ping is good enough) for the match to be viable.

Originally posted by Eshman:

Hey OP this thread is great and all but it'd probably get far better traction and positive response on the official SoT website forums which are conveniently located here: https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/categories. You can locate them for yourself through their main site here: https://www.seaofthieves.com/. Oddly enough all this info is pinned above the main discussion thread for the game here on Steam but funnily enough many folks appear to not be able to comprehend or navigate to it.

Sometimes, I don't want to log in to individual game websites just to express feedback. I like to see Steam as a one-stop-platform for gaming issues on all my games.

[Eshman]

Originally posted by Raft:

Sometimes, I don't want to log in to individual game websites just to express feedback. I like to see Steam as a one-stop-platform for gaming issues on all my games.

Bruh you do realize Steam only operates mostly as a [middleman sales] hosting service & forum not an actual game developer, right? Most developers don't bother responding to anything on Steam with a few exceptions. So if you really want to contact or hear any actual communication from a game's developers you gotta go to the sites they actually create and customize specifically for their games. Whodathunk, right? Yeah I get it's just a big ole hassle that a company would actually have a marketing budget just to inconvenience you into creating an account on a site they made to go along with the theme of their game but there ya go. There's no such thing as a one-stop-platform btw unless you're literally talking about a monopoly which would end up literally being the worst thing imaginable for every gamer in the world.

[storm179TTV]

the holy grail of SoT is the most random of random encounters you can get. add matchmaking, then you destroy the game