Sea Of Thieves Drops Plans For "Death Tax" After Community Pushback

Now that Sea of Thieves has launched, Rare is looking to improve the game with new features and updates. Right now, Sea of Thieves can feel a little feature-light, with PvP dominating the game because there aren't really any penalties in place for failing. Recently, Rare announced to plans to change that by deducting gold from players who die on the high seas, but after an outcry from players, it seems those plans have changed.

First, a little background for those who are unfamiliar with the way death works in Sea of Thieves. At the moment, dying isn't much of an inconvenience – when you kick the bucket, you're forced to wait on a ghost ship for a small amount of time, after which you're teleported back to your ship (assuming it's still floating) alive and well, ready to continue the fight.

While forcing people to wait a short amount of time before they're revived helps ensure players don't get caught in endless battles where pirates on both sides are constantly reviving, that's really the only penalty for dying that's in place at the moment. This can cause some people to be little bit reckless in how they play the game, attacking anyone they come across instead of playing the game in a more reserved manner.

To combat this, Rare announced plans to implement a death tax over on the game's official forums, essentially charging people gold for dying. Gold is somewhat difficult to come across in Sea of Thieves, so as you can imagine, the community didn't react very well to this plan. Though Rare later updated the forum post to say that it never intended to charge players gold for dying in player-vs-player combat, the reaction to this feature was already in the books as negative.

Now, Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate has taken to Twitter to announce that Rare is dropping plans to implement a death tax. "Letting everyone know we've heard the feedback and the proposed 'Death Cost' in #SeaOfThieves is, well, dead," Neate wrote. "We messed up with the messaging around this, and it's now gone. Thanks for the honest feedback & discussion on this."

So, if you were worried that you were going to start losing gold each time you die, you can take a sigh of relief. A number of players actually used that forum post to present a bunch of interesting ideas – such as penalties for losing your ship – so Rare has a few different directions it could go from here. We'll see where this controversy leads soon enough, so stay tuned.