Rare’s Studio Head Craig Duncan and Sea of Thieves Executive Producer Joe Neate have made a video frankly addressing the issues that have cropped up during the game’s launch, explaining why they have happened and what they’re doing to correct them.
Standing in front of a whiteboard in Craig Duncan’s office, Duncan and Neate have outlined the main technical concerns that people have experienced while trying to play Sea of Thieves since the game launched.
Chief among them are problems people have experienced while trying to log in during the peak period – between 8:00am and 1:00pm AEDT – where playing across multiple regions are trying to get into the game at once.
Despite all of the testing done before launch, the join rate is well in excess of what Rare experienced during the final beta with up to 5,000 people attempting to login per minute.
Part of the problem comes from Sea of Thieves matchmaking which attempts to match a crew together before matching that crew to a world. There are multiple steps involved so it adds a lot of strain to the servers.
Engineers are working to fix this. In the meantime, Duncan and Neate suggest that players having issues connecting try to join galleons already in the world, bypassing one of the match-making steps.
An issue that I’ve personally run into was items not loading into the game. That, along with performance issues on the Xbox One X, will be addressed with patch that is likely to come next week.
There have also been issues with delayed rewards and gold for completed voyages. This is a temporary server-side issue and Rare asks that people be patient as engineers work on it. Attempting to restart the game will only add more strain to the servers.
On the other hand the delayed achievements people experienced was a deliberate choice done in part to help keep people online while the servers were being bombarded. Achievements were still tracked and are being awarded to players.
Launch issues are nothing new for major online games. It’s refreshing to see developers get out in front of the problems.
[Youtube]
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