Sea of Thieves is a uniquely co-operative multiplayer experience1 set in a shared world that combines the thrill of adventuring together with friends with the unpredictability of emergent play and unexpected threats – both from other players and the world itself.

Be the pirates you want to be, share adventures with friends and set your own rules, roles and goals in a world where every sail on the horizon is another crew of players with unknown intent.

Explore, fight and live the pirate life together in this uniquely fresh and fun multiplayer game. Choose your voyage and decide how you’ll approach adventures in a world where every sail on the horizon is another crew of players with unknown intent.

Sea of Thieves also supports cross-play across the Xbox One family of devices and Windows 10 PCs so that everyone can play regardless of their preferred platform.

Hi, we wanted to share an update with all our players about the top issues that we've been seeing since we launched Sea of Thieves.

Over the weekend we broadly managed to get everyone who turned up into the game. There were a few hiccups on Friday evening, but we got through those and it ran pretty smoothly through the weekend.

We are still tracking and working against a series of player-facing issues. Work is ongoing to address these, and the list below is in revised priority order.

We are also releasing a new game client to all players on Tuesday March 27th which contains a wide array of fixes across our services, stability and game experience. This is a full game update as opposed to just a patch. If we'd wanted it to be a smaller client update we would have had to delay by a number of days, and felt the priority here was releasing the improvements to our player base. This will be available to download during our maintenance window tomorrow morning. For our next client update, we plan to be a much smaller patch size.

Beyond our key issues affecting players below, internally we are tracking sentiment and the top feedback issues on the game experience itself, and we are very aware of the topic of persistent player griefing (repeatedly being attacked by the same ships or players). We are discussing what short-term fixes we can make, and what slightly more involved fixes we will prioritise. We will share an update on this and the other top feedback points and our thoughts on them later this week.

One piece of additional feedback we've seen is around a proposed change listed in our release notes last week, and we've heard the sentiment there, so I can confirm that Death Cost is, well, dead. Thanks for the feedback here. We're listening.

Below are the main issues we're seeing along with their current status.

Last updated: March 26th, 4pm GMT

Live issues:

1.    Player rewards being delayed

• Due to the volume of players, our services that award players gold and reputation when cashing in rewards can be delayed. Players should expect to see these rewards eventually come through, as they are queued up in our message service.

  Status: Ongoing work to improve. We have made improvements in the two maintenance windows so far, and we also have identified some client-side fixes that require a game patch to update, which is due Tuesday March 27th. Right now this is our key priority from an in-game experience perspective, and all efforts across the team are focused on addressing this ASAP. It is a direct result of the scale we are seeing, so please bear with us. We are also investigating reports of some players still not receiving rewards, even after a delay. Investigations are still underway on this as a high priority.

  Advice: Don't quit and restart to try to resolve the issue during peak times. If you continue playing, rewards should flow through eventually.

  2.    Achievements being delayed

• We have had to temporarily disable achievements being awarded to allow our services to cope with the scale of the messages flowing through them, and this has lasted longer than anticipated. We are storing all awarded achievements, and are working to deliver these for all affected players. There is some groundwork in the patch arriving tomorrow that enables us to then deliver the delayed achievements via a service-side change, but ETA on this is a little loose whilst we work on the plan. We are hoping to enable this by the end of the week, and will share more information soon.

  Status: Plan in place, hoping to deliver delayed achievements (and turn achievements back on) by end of this week.

  3.    Players having difficulty getting into the game at peak times

• During peak times (9pm–2am GMT/5pm–10pm EDT/2pm–7pm PDT) we have been seeing a very high volume of players, which has been leading to strain on our server matchmaking services.

  Status: Broadly we feel we are on top of this now. We have made a series of fixes and tweaks in our services, and our join and play rates are now manageable. If we start to see unexpected behaviours, such as a high influx of new or returning players, there might be cases where we need to temporarily halt incoming players to maintain the quality of the experience for people already in and playing. If we need to do this we will message out on our social channels, but we hope to avoid it.

  Advice: If you experience this, try matchmaking into a crew that is already out on an adventure, as you will join an in-progress session rather than going through the server matchmaking flow.

  4.    Characters losing details such as hair colour/scars

• We have seen isolated instances of this being reported since launch.

  Status: We have made a client-side fix which is in tomorrow's game update to prevent this happening in the future, but if this happened to you during launch week please contact our support team and we will investigate your individual case as we hope we can resolve it.

  Advice: Contact our support team, provide your details including gamertag and we will investigate.

  Fixed for next client update:

1.    Temporarily missing items

• We have seen reports of players loading into the game and not having items/weapons.

  Status: Believed fixed for next game update (ETA: Tuesday March 27th).

  2.    Reported performance issues on Xbox One X

• We have seen some performance issues reported when playing Sea of Thieves on Xbox One X.

  Status: Believed fixed for next game update (ETA: Tuesday March 27th).

  3.    Players not receiving entitlements such as the Black Dog Pack

• Anyone who has redeemed their code should now see this being available from tomorrow's client update. If you are yet to receive your code, the final batch of these are being sent out this week.

  Status: Believed fixed for next game update (ETA: Tuesday March 27th).

  Upcoming maintenance windows:

• Tuesday March 27th, 9am–2pm GMT

  Thanks,

  – Joe Neate, Executive Producer

Key Features:

• A unique co-op experience that combines the thrill of adventuring together with friends with the unpredictability of a shared landscape and its threats, both from other players and the world itself.
• Designed around players working together with shared goals and rewards, where you’ll go on epic voyages in search of legendary artefacts and buried treasure, but in a world where every sail on the horizon is another crew. What flag are they flying, and what do they want?
• Crew up with your friends and be the pirates you want, choosing your own roles and goals. Explore the world, take on quests, or seek out conflict. It’s your crew against the world, and how you deal with other crews is entirely up to you.
• Invites players into a beautiful world with a distinctive art style, ripe for exploration and with mythical creatures lurking on islands and under the inviting surface of the sea…
• Offers an experience that will evolve over time, landing in players’ hands early and growing thanks to community insights and feedback. New ways to play will be unveiled as the world expands and evolves.

Sea of Thieves launches for Xbox One and Windows 10 PC on March 20th, 2018.