Sea Of Thieves Just Revealed How It'll Prevent Griefing

With the hype surrounding Sea of Thieves' launch beginning to die down a bit (and the game's server stabilizing as a result), Rare can begin focusing more on improving the game through post-launch content and updates. Rare has been collecting player feedback about the game, and in upcoming patches will look to fix some of the problem areas Sea of Thieves fans have been reporting. If you've been a victim of brig abuse, then take heart, because figuring out a solution seems to be pretty high up on Rare's to-do list.

In a post over to the Sea of Thieves blog, Rare covers a few topics players have been bringing up and discusses what it's going to do about them. Some of these issues, such as ships respawning nearby after you and your crew have sunk them, have already been fixed (with more improvements on the way), while fixes for other issues are still incoming. One such fix concerns stopping brig abuse, which has been an issue running rampant since launch.

Rare notes that players are misusing the brig for multiple reasons, but says that the most common reason it happens is so groups of players can "hold a slot," on their crew. In some cases, they may want to sail as a private crew, while in others, they may be waiting to get matched with a player who is using or a mic or speaking the same language. Regardless of the reason, this workaround to Sea of Thieves' matchmaking problems results in someone getting tossed in the brig and having their game experience ruined.

To fix this issue, Rare says it will soon roll out new matchmaking options, perhaps the most important of which being the ability to set matchmaking for your crew to invite-only. Not only will this prevent random people from joining your crew, but it will also allow you to sail on a galleon with less than four players or on a sloop with more than two.

Beyond this, Rare also has plans to implement a new matchmaking system that prioritizes players based on their microphone status, with the potential to roll out language-based options as well. The company says that it has also been investigating reports of cheating, and plans to take "direct action" against players who have been compromising the game to gain an advantage.

Finally, while the blog post doesn't talk about any new content coming to the game specifically, Rare does say that it will share a new video that outlines "how we plan to evolve Sea of Thieves moving forward." Just as well, we don't have a timeline for the release of the fixes Rare lists, but the expectation is that they'll be coming around the bend shortly. We'll see that content update video land sometime next week, so stay tuned.