Season Ten - State of Play Update

  • Hey everyone,

    Following the launch of Season Ten on October 19th, I wanted to share a quick update on the current state of play and what we are doing to improve the player experience right now.

    Server Performance
    Following the October update we've seen the wave of reports from players who have been impacted in some way by poor server performance. We can also see from player data a significant spike in servers underperforming since the recent update, with servers of over 15 players being the most affected.

    As the server is the focal point for most systems, an underperforming server has a significant impact to those connected. Some players are reporting a further regression to hit registration, extended ping spikes, rubberbanding while moving and a general desync across the experience. I appreciate that Season Ten was communicated (by me no less!) to include a suite of improvements to player combat, and it's incredibly disappointing for us that the initial experience has felt like these either haven't been delivered or have regressed. While we can't rule out any bugs that may have surfaced when live, we are not going to focus on investigating or balancing these individual areas until we have performance back under control and can assess the state of play with player combat in clearer, more stable conditions.

    The team are investigating the server performance issues and working on resolutions to return us to an acceptable level. However, while these fixes may take time, we recognise the need to prioritise the player experience right now. With this in mind we are going to stabilise the experience for everyone by temporarily limiting the maximum player count on all servers to 14, along with a temporary limit of five ships per server. This change will take effect on servers at the same time this post is shared.

    The team are working hard to implement improvements to server performance and we will return to the intended six ship limit as soon as we have performance back under control.

    Guilds
    Following a successful launch of the many complex systems behind Guilds, the experience for most players is being incredibly well received.
    The team are however working to resolve issues that have been raised over the weekend, with fixes to issues with the 42 Ship Limit and Guild ships being locked after Hourglass play being the key focus for the team.

    Firing from Cannons
    While not an issue strictly introduced in Season Ten, Octobers update did not bring a resolution to this frequently experienced issue where players fired from cannons would collide with the ship and flop into water. While this continues to affect players, the team are prioritising a fix for this issue.

    Fortune's Favour and Reaper's Riches Commendation Progress
    Players having made progress in these Commendations prior to Season Ten's launch will have found their progress appeared to have been wiped alongside the introduction of the new grade. However, no player progress has actually been lost here - and the team are working to restore players' progress.

    We appreciate all of the bug reports and feedback provided over the last few days and understand that it's disappointing that many of our players are experiencing issues right now. The team are working hard to hit these priority areas alongside others to improve the experience for everyone as we continue through Season Ten, thank you all for your patience!

    Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens

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  • Thank you for the response. This needs to be made public too instead of just limited to the forums, as Social Media, and especially SoT Partners, are allowing the narrative right now that things are terrible and the end of the game is near etc. the usual doomerism. Please consider making these announcements public to quell the unrest. Thanks.

  • @tesiccl We'll be communicating these changes wider very shortly - we'll be linking to this Forum post in multiple areas. :)

  • @mcgrath-of-wrath amazing, thank you!

  • Thanks for the update! I‘m glad for that fast and open update, this kind of transparency is highly appreciated.

    Could you clarify if itMs intended to lose access to the guild emissary after hitting a distinction and we have to unlock them every time by playing until level 15?

  • Much love to all the staff that work on SoT to bring us the very best to a world we treasure dearly.

  • 14 players per server and only 5 ships is crazy not gonna lie. I hope this can be resolved quick.

    Though the insane amount of time that needs to be spent to level up guilds seems to not be addressed here, is the incredibly slow progression really intentional? I understand that they are guilds, not parties, so a guild of 2-5 players of course should not speed through levels but in my opinion doing 2-3 world events, selling, and seeing the bar progress for like a quarter is incredibly unsatisfying and only very dedicated players with hours of free time on their hands can really progress and actually unlock things right now. Also, knowing that there are commendations for many distinctions, only very low percentage of players will be able to unlock those with how the xp gain works right now. Personally, I just don't think that's right. Having big goals is good but not when all it takes to progress through them is constant grind of the same things over and over (also considering that no new PvE activity has been added since Season 6, hourglass does exist, but it is already a year old with barely any updates to it besides small adjustments).

    I guess I will also mention that it is weird that once you reach a distinction, your Guild flag gets taken away until you reach level 15 again, even though you will be technically level 115.

  • @destmor https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/topic/162229/guild-progression-faq/21

    Here :)

  • Thank you to everyone involved.

    I've still enjoyed playing and appreciate all of your effort.

  • I first just want to say a heartful thank you, for all of the continued work behind the scenes. I appreciate the open-ness, and these updates, and I hope that other folks who are less pleased, will be understanding.

    I haven't personally ran into too many issues, just some of the normal reg-issues, and gunplay feeling a tad off, but that's just me needing to get used to the new changes. Here's hoping you all can identify the server issues!

    Thank you again for all your hard work, I appreciate you immensely! Guilds have been a treat, and being able to form our own smaller communities has been a delight!

    --- Valor Omega, Yonko of the Strawhat Grand Fleet Guild

  • Thank you so much for the response. Transparency and quick communication is the key for a constructive relation between players and devs. Let's hope you will find a solution for all these problems. Bless you.

  • thank you for the transparency on this as i have found myself being in a tough spot with the game. i hope that when player to player combat is looked at quickswap could return which yes i know is unlikely but one can hope as using quickswap for me was more than trying to shoot guns faster it was for movement to dodge a shot close distance after a shot. as for lowered server numbers i have no issues with that and hope it means that servers preform better myself. that's all from me

  • @destmor Damn you guys already over 100? Tell me how you go so fast?!

  • Thanks for the update and addressing these issues so quickly! I'm loving the guild stuff so far and the quality of life changes are incredible.

  • @destmor it makes no sense your guild flag is taken away after getting a distinction i hope that get's fixed soon for everyones sake

  • @erico360 said in Season Ten - State of Play Update:

    @destmor Damn you guys already over 100? Tell me how you go so fast?!

    The only way I can think of is a lot of members and/or lots of hourglass, which seems to give an over-proportional amount of rep.

  • could you possibly add a way to cancel guild invites? or increase how many we can send out? kind of annoying not being able to invite anyone to my guild because i've reached the max number of invites

  • Thanks for your response!

  • Thank you for this update. We truly appreciate the transparency and it's what we need right now!

  • Yeah, I need to lay off the Twitter since people continue to say "Rare doesn't listen!" I'm pretty sure they're getting confused with Activision/Blizzard for the billionth time.

  • is the clunky combat performance many people have been talking about, due to the quick swapping removal, which also unfortunately failed to work properly going to be addressed as well? not only are people still able to do it, but fighting overall with guns specifically is the worst its been in years, with videos of people shooting with pistols until their entire amount count is depleted, and yet no damage to another player has been taken, people using several sword swipes to kill a chicken or pig when it usually takes 2-3.

  • Dear lord, you need to fix the combat. Having a delay between 2 shots that makes you rubberbanding when trying to scope is beyond bad. I really hope Rare isn't done looking at combat, its WAY more exploitable & bugged than before!

    Hitregistration also is worse in Season 10 - I thought this would be 'fixed' with 9/10 shots actually doing damage?

  • I assume no hamsters will be harmed in the server improvement effort?

  • @foambreaker no, they will be using guinea pigs.

  • @super87ghost guinea pigs also have rights!!

  • Sometimes things can really go wrong and, from a dev to other devs, I feel you, I know what you are into but I know that you will make it, you are a great staff indeed!

    Thank you for the update and transparency, I hope to see everyone happy within the next releases and I know they will.

  • Thanks for the update!

    Is the Skull of Destiny Voyage meant to be 300 doubloons? It was 100 last season before it was removed.

  • @jackgrimm6899 Could be they deliberately made it more expensive now the FotD has the CoF?

  • @tesiccl This isn't just sot partners allowing a narrative. This is how a great portion of the community feels. It's not some conspiracy that the game is in one of the worst states it has ever been. People are complaining because they aren't happy with the state of the game. Sounds like you would rather bury your head in the sand.

  • @d3adst1ck I was originally worried about this very thing. I do hope rep is reward proportionally based on amount of members. My guild is only and will only be 3 people. 1 has only been able to play once since release and the other 2 of us have really grinded with what time we can and only reached 4 1/4 in rep. If we average 1 level per day and thats a huge if then it will take 3 years to hit D10. Realistically it will be more like 4 or 5 years. Thats way too long. Rare themselves said the life expectancy of the game was 10 years. So D10 for guilds with small amounts of players puts them at EOL timeframe or never getting there.

    On a sidenote I do appreciate the transparency. Things happen and stuff messes up. Owning up to it and saying we are working on it and this is the priorities make the community much happier and feel less ignored. Cannon problems were admitted in this post to be known before S10. Its a big problem. Those type problems need to be acknowledged.

  • Has there been any discussion or plans to address the Quick Swap community who are finding ways to work around the changes implemented in Season 10?

  • Thank you for addressing this publicly. Transparency goes a long way in helping your customers feel confident in your work and valued.

  • @sonicbob Skull of Destiny voyages that captained ships bought from shipwright cancel out when voted on.

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