Since Sea of Thieves launched, we’ve taken thousands of enforcement actions against those who’ve acted against our Pirate Code when sailing the seas. When our enforcement system was first designed, we had a lot less experience in the live service arena – and while we were as informed as we could’ve been back then, we didn’t necessarily understand what the impact of this would be years down the line.

Over the last six months or so, we’ve been taking the time to review and analyse our enforcement strategies with a view to evolving how we move forward. While we’ve shared our plans for this in a previous Developer Update (from 7:15 in the video below), today our new policy goes live – so we wanted to take this opportunity to talk a little more about the how and why.

From today, we will be giving players more information on why we’re taking action against their accounts and an opportunity to change their ways. While, unfortunately, there are a few bad eggs in this world who do want to cause harm and distress to others, we’re conscious that some folks might just be having a bad day and immediately regret their actions – and we want to give these players room to learn from their mistakes.

Our previous enforcement system was a three-strikes-and-out policy – which has worked for us, but has also had some limitations and made it hard to take nuanced action. For example, if a player had received their third strike for a relatively minor offence, under the old system they would have received a lifetime ban – which, after a long and lengthy review on our side, felt perhaps a little too inflexible.

For someone on the end of this enforcement action, under our old policy they would have simply received a Redbeard error message upon their next attempted login, rather than any specific information on what happened and why, resulting in a lack of clarity around our decision-making. In this scenario, a user may have ended up banned without necessarily understanding why, or perhaps even thinking that we’d overreacted to a report about a smaller infraction.

With that in mind, we’ve been developing a new enforcement system that allows us to more accurately capture the nuance of offences committed, and enables us to communicate exactly why action has been taken against someone’s account. Our system is an evolution of the Xbox points system, and we’ve spent a lot of time collaborating and consulting to ensure that the new system addresses our concerns with our previous enforcement policy, while also making sure that punishment of more serious offences carries the right weight.

Under our recently introduced policy, every new player begins their journey on the Sea of Thieves with zero points, and can accrue a total of 12 points before receiving a permanent ban on their account. If a report is submitted against them, points will be administered to their account – with clear communication to the offending player(s) as to why. Varying points will be accrued for certain types of offence; the below classifications aren’t an exhaustive list, but we wanted to provide some clear examples.

• Toxic communication over text/voice chat that isn’t of a discriminatory nature (i.e. doesn’t use racist, homophobic, misogynistic or ableist terms) will – depending on the strength of the offence – earn a player from 1-3 points and a corresponding suspension of 1-3 days for each instance of this behaviour.
  
• Discriminatory toxic communication that uses slurs/prejudiced language over text or voice chat will earn players 7 points and a seven-day suspension. This means that previously, under our three-strike system, players had to offend three times to be banned – whereas with these types of offence, it’s now reduced to just two (within a given time period).
  
• Cheaters will receive 12 points immediately, plus a permanent ban.

The important thing with these offences is that the offending player is told that why they’ve received a suspension and points on their account. They won’t just log in to find a Yellowbeard or Redbeard with minimal context, but will be contacted directly with the reasoning behind the action taken.

Another thing we’re introducing with this policy is that, if a player with points has a ‘good’ month – i.e. they do not receive any more reports of poor behaviour – their total points tally will decay by 1. This means that if you receive 2 points for toxic communication, but behave yourself over the following couple of months, you’ll go back down to a total tally of 0. Our hope and intention is to communicate with these players why they received their initial enforcement action, and give them space to reflect and improve upon their conduct.

If that sounds like something it might be hard to keep track of, don’t worry – we’re bringing players’ enforcement status to their https://www.seaofthieves.com/account, so everyone knows exactly where they stand. This will also include when their access to Sea of Thieves will be restored, if they’re currently serving a temporary suspension for an offence.

For players who have recently offended and received enforcement action on any scale: we’ve had our points system up and running in the background for a little while now, so when this change comes into effect, you’ll see your score reflected when you log in to the website. We’re not wiping the slate clean on previous poor behaviour, but there will be a net benefit in that our approach to further offences will have a better-suited and more nuanced outcome.

For players who’ve experienced poor behaviour, the reporting process will remain largely the same. However, we’ll continue to work on improving the ways you can get reports and information over to us for review. To submit a report about something you’ve encountered on the seas, please head to https://support.seaofthieves.com/ to provide evidence and a summary of what you’ve experienced – or initiate a report via the in-game menu.

Although we’ve been monitoring recent enforcement activity in the background through this new lens, we’ll continue to keep an eye on scores and behavioural changes as it comes into effect. We know that there are still a few things we’ll have to refine or work on to ensure fairness across the board, but change has to start somewhere – so we hope you’ll understand and appreciate our move to a much more transparent and flexible system that looks to forgive players who can recognise they’ve made mistakes, while punishing folks who want to undermine the integrity of the Sea of Thieves experience.

While we can appreciate this is quite a significant change in how we approach enforcement, the ultimate goal is to provide transparency on why we take action, and allow players to grow with that feedback instead of rebel against it. We hope – and believe – that this will lead to a better player experience for all pirates.