It was anything but smooth sailing for yesterday’s global launch of Sea of Thieves, as the game’s servers struggled to keep up with a massive influx of new pirates. Players were plagued by problems connecting to the game, random disconnects and matchmaking errors. At one point, developers had to temporarily suspend new players joining the game.
Sea of Thieves began rolling out late Monday night in New Zealand, adding new regions throughout the day until reaching North America on Tuesday afternoon. Shortly following the North American launch, the official Sea of Thieves Twitter account posted its first message about managing the server load.
Ahoy Pirates for an update! We are seeing join rates on our servers faster than we have ever seen with the US online, people are getting in steadily and our team is working now on it to manage the load… appreciate your patience while we work through this. pic.twitter.com/e4WKFolhPn
— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) March 20, 2018
So things were already looking bad on Tuesday afternoon, as North American players who’d purchased the game ahead of release and pre-loaded it on their PC or Xbox One started coming aboard.
I personally had no issues getting into the game on from around 10PM Tuesday to 7AM Wednesday AEDT, but as school and work began to let out in the US, I started experiencing CinnamonBeard errors, indicating a problem connecting to the game.
We’ve got A LOT of eager pirates playing #SeaOfThieves right now and due to this some of you may experience issues. Our engineers are working hard to investigate and alleviate them. Thanks for your patience! Visit support for more guidance: https://t.co/qtuHXghul5
— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) March 20, 2018
Connection problems were no doubt exacerbated by an influx of players who’d acquired the game through the Xbox Game Pass. Sea of Thieves is the first Microsoft-published game offered for free with the subscription service. Players receiving the game through the Xbox Game Pass were unable to download it until it officially launched, so many of them were unable to play until Wednesday morning. And many of them were unable to play even then.
In order to resolve the issues players are seeing with the servers, we will be temporarily suspending new players joining the game. We’ll get everyone back in and playing as quickly as we can!
— Sea of Thieves (@SeaOfThieves) March 20, 2018
Developer Rare and Microsoft are currently working on updates to “ensure the playing experience will be optimal”, so I’m hopeful the seas will calm in the coming days. Until then, I recommend either calling in sick for school or work or getting a job that involves playing Sea of Thieves during the work day.
Look for more coverage of Sea of Thieves, including a full review, as I continue to play the game during my work day.
Comments
17 responses to “Sea Of Thieves Servers Weren’t Prepared For So Many Players”
~Welcome to our woooooorld~
seems typical for all online services to be honest and from a budget point of view, most companies wouldn’t allocate idle resources so good luck with standby servers
This just shows how little these guys were actually prepared for launch. I have the game pass so I’m going to play around with mates for a few weeks, but from what I’ve heard you run out of things to do pretty damn quickly other than pvp. Rare/Microsoft are going to run out of good will quickly if they don’t start having a road map + quick releases.
Wait, you mean an online mmo style game was not prepared for an influx of players on launch day? Now where have I heard that before… every game since online became a thing!
I was (am) hype for this game, but the beta showed me it’s a $30 game, not a $100. Having to play via the MS store/ Xbox app on PC also killed it for me.
I will play it when:
a)the price comes way down
b) they add $100 of content (a ship between the Sloop and Galleon would be nice).
c) it comes to Steam.
Yargh, $100 bucks be too much booty for this swashbuckler.
Why are you paying 100 bucks when it’s on the Games Pass?
I don’t squander me time on games enough to validate a Games Pass me matey! Yargh!
It won’t come to Steam. All these greedy af publishers like Microsoft, Ubisoft, EA etc all trying to do their stupid own gaming platform is just irking me tbh. When a game is not on steam i have a REALLY hard time even wanting to get it.
Greedy? Because they don’t want to give Valve 30% of every she for nothing?
Greedy because they think their platforms will get as successful as steam. It’s the same now with Netlix, Amazon TV, Foxtel, Stan, the upcoming Disney one… People getting greedy and wanting to try and do the same thing.
Good attempt to convert incompetence into hype.
Or… a typical example of corporate-speak 🙂
Not sure why anyone is still surprised about server overloads on launch day. Game companies know the playerbase will inevitably drop off after the first week or so, regardless of the launch day experience. Quite rightly, the decision is made not to invest in the extra servers, maintenance and personnel required to satisfy fickle gamers during this very short lived time. It’s just not financially beneficial, so they cop the cued outrage on the chin and move on.
Sure, their marketing team will apologise all day long on behalf of the gaming company, feigning ignorance and promising to right the ship, but I would put money on those tweets having been drafted weeks before. You’re blind if you think otherwise.
They ran scale tests almost every weekend for the last month or two to try and gauge how the game would go under load. Calm down people, they tried.
I was able to play when ever I wanted, although I think I was experience plenty of lag. Many times I was stuck on loading screen ‘Checking for fake coins….’ or after trying to take a job stuck on ‘Counting coins’ and couldn’t leave game with out forcing it to crash.
I knew this game was going to be bad when it took me 4 days to get into the game during closed beta. Closed beta servers normally dont experience server load issues. When I played it, the game had literally no content. So you team up with friends and find what ?!? treastre chests for what ?!? Literally no weapons/armor or anything.. bad game riding under MS name.