I'm genuinely curious as there seems to be a hardline disconnect between what what's really happening with actual active players and the "round table talks" we get as updated info, from the podcast or Ytube videos etc from the Figurehead Folks (not a disparaging term, your literally the Firgureheads of RARE we hear from) never outside of a planned, sponsored, invested "streamer heavy" session has ANYONE I've ever sailed with, irl I'm talking 6-700 different players, conservatively, since the beginning of Season 2, from U.S, Australia and European Servers. Across Xbox, windows and Steam, (yes I have Xbox sot and bought steam sot too for my steam collection, silly maybe but...I play both either way) Never ever have any of them seen RARE sails, or deckhand sails, employee sails or the banana sails that don't even play anymore. Or any employee ship or pirate? Are moderators and "deckhands" etc allowed to play? Do they? Outside of custom setups and the like I mean. Do y'all ever sail the steam servers? Do you sail around sinking folks or gifting a Chest of Legends to a random solo newbie?
I know and understand a lot of staff are busy and can't play, not really impactfully, so It would amazing if you would maybe hire, non financially and semioffically, and only in-game, a swath of pirates that would be like The Crew of Random Blessings. Monitor their accounts for bad behavior , let them send logs in to a moderator, etc to keep it friendly....ish. lol. They could sail around with special sails and gift to those pirates they see fit, a special hat, or hull, or Chest of Blessing (50,000 gold idk). Players would be less likely to burn everything they see on sight in the hopes it was a Gold Crew come to say hi. Something, ya know? Why not really? Id log on for hours just to seek out those soloing a vault or doing tall tale and escort them for one completion or gift them a "thank you from RARE for being here, chest of awesome stuff" lol. It would be so cool to be able to gift a new player I find a chest I can put my own gold in, capped obviously at X amount and 1 gift a 24 hr period, from my pirate to them as a welcome to the Seas. Or grant them a Golden Spyglass for seeing us coming and holding fire. Something, anything close to this would do a lot I think for veteran players mostly. Require 2-3 years minimum at Sea for consideration, treat it in a way like the Partner program, just don't force the streaming aspect. Silent giving is so much better and would be cooler then everyone watching just a handful of streamers on Steam make watchers do tricks for them and sub and earn points etc etc etc to get something. We are people, not animals. When is a gift not a gift? Eh? I already give most of my loot away and let newbies take me down on purpose so they have a sense of pride and confidence. Let's See the Gold Crew become a real thing.
Do any mods, devs or employees here play Sea of Thieves? Not a trash post, please read...
That type of stuff really messes with immersion and the organic experience. See it all the time with streamers on both sides, they interfere with the immersion of others by treating players as content and streamer immersion is weakened by players wanting screenshots in the middle of scenarios, attention on the stream, etc
I have bias towards the organic experience and I've always been transparent about that so I acknowledge that but it really interrupts the flow of a server and the experiences on it.
Randomly here and there has low impact but any sort regular coordinated effort will impact the environment significantly, like streaming does. Content creation in general but the live all day while playing thing really impacts encounters in this game.
@foambreaker every community day mods giveaway 6 packs and capstans if they find crews to interact with and they’ve been nice :)
@r3troraccoon Rare very much do play their own game. If you go on twitter some of them post about their sessions. In fact, some devs like to play with ppl via the SoT discord. Deckhands play a lot also as they are some of the most active players in the community (not trying to put words in your mouths, @Deckhands)
TL;DR Yes, they play the game. You prob just don't see them considering they are a massive minority of the playerbase.
If you wanna boil it down that far yeah, I don't think it would be a bad thing necessarily. It would recreate the "do we fire or see what they have to say" aspect SoT has been missing for so long now. It's 95% fire first and run, no comms, no parley no pirates. I'm just trying to spice thing up without it being a burden on the DEVs and other teams at RARE. Basically a player driven, RARE supported type adventure for veteran players. It doesn't even have to be giving free stuff out all the time. Give them 5 chests of blessing, 5 hats(or whatever) a month to pass out. New players could see a the Gold Crew sails on the horizon and know for a short while they have an ally. Like I said. One completion of a tall tale, one vault, whatever they are up to atm. Then you said off into the sunrise, or they attack you. Either is ok. My thing is that every fires first, nearly zero interaction outside fighting. If someone saw the sails from a distance it may foster a better in-game interaction between folks, the whole screaming obscenities or hyper rude people would be ignored and never receive anything, so they'd have to chill a moment or see the ship disappear. And I love PvP, and rally against PvE only. You could generate a chest with internal codes to the specific gifter and receiver, like chest ownership when stealing, to be given to whoever that would confirm it's wasn't fake coined in. Idk, just putting good vibes out there, as I can be a little harsh and critique-y most times.
@scheneighnay
Not really. They are actually one of the most interactive dev teams. People are just people and we all stray from the mission and forget the plot sometimes. Which is why it's on us to nudge the wheel when we see it going off coarse.@tesiccl and the last how many community days were plagued with login issues and crashed servers? I'm not talking about 5 people in a world of, according to rare, 30 million. It doesn't float. They need players, not even me, but players doing these things. Because it's the players keeping the game afloat, it OUR interactions that are mattering now, not a handful of top brass trying to excite an entire community. They need more of us on "their side" as it were. If that makes sense....
@Scheneighnay Your post has been removed as it goes against the Forum Rules and Pirate Code.
ALWAYS:
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Name calling, personal attacks and using derogatory language against Community Members, Rare Employees, Global Moderators or Deckhands is not acceptable. Using such language will result in a warning, then temporary ban from the Forums and a final warning. If the action is persistent or increasingly aggressive, a permanent ban from the Forums will be issued.
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@r3troraccoon the last few have been great.
You may not know this but most mods are volunteers who don’t work for Rare, have been there since the beginning of the game, and even helped shape it before launch. They play the game regularly and know what they’re talking about. Jotoro, Musicmee, Taaaamas, Lizalaroo, and many more are all mods but play the game a lot.
@scheneighnay said in Do any mods, devs or employees here play Sea of Thieves? Not a trash post, please read...:
Rare is in the top 5 of out of touch devs I know of.
You got the shots but what are your principles on environmental maintenance?
This narrative really makes no sense in season 9.
The most connected they have been to the organic environment is right now.
Incredibly tough to make a case for being out of touch in current time when the focus is on qol improvements for those that have been carrying all of the weight in the game for years so that everyone else can have fun and make content out of it.
It's not perfect, not always consistent, sometimes it's a bumpy road, but the best time to be someone without connections in this game is right now and it'll continue at least for monkey island content. That's not out of touch.
I suspect they don't heavily advertise who they are. I follow lead design andy Preston on twitter and he is actively doing the hourglass grind pretty high skelly curse I.e 200+ so fair play to him.
They generally do have tales on podcast of playing and adventures even if the implication is being pretty casual, can't imagine you have time to hard game when working for them.
@musicmee said in Do any mods, devs or employees here play Sea of Thieves? Not a trash post, please read...:
@tesiccl Us mods play a lot, a lot... Like everyone else we are also facing the end of Season lul... but we will all be back to our level-grinding selves again soon!
dang. You guys aren't immune to the end of season burnout? welp. guess mod superpowers don't work for everything lol.
@musicmee said in Do any mods, devs or employees here play Sea of Thieves? Not a trash post, please read...:
@tesiccl Us mods play a lot, a lot... Like everyone else we are also facing the end of Season lul... but we will all be back to our level-grinding selves again soon!
We don't doubt that but you guys have to cross the pond sometimes and give a chance to NA servers :)
Hi!
Yeah, we do play. 3000 hours here; Athena 30, both Season Eight curses, TSD, and I'm slowly grinding away at commendations but I constantly forget to do them as I have no attention span when playing and get distracted. A lot of the team play, but we are a very small percentage of the playerbase. I know folk with 6000 or more hours who have never met a dev on the seas. Not to mention that if you're in the US or Asia/Oceanic you're even less likely to see us as we're UK based.
The dev team would never be highlighted to give stuff out - people associating our sails with free stuff and not people is not a good position to put our team in. Instead, we use our community-facing team - the Quartermasters and Deckhands to give out things on Community Day and you may sometimes see myself and other Rare Community Managers doing the same thing under the Quartermaster sails as part of Community Celebrations.
While it may seem like some of your feedback isn't listened to, please remember that game development is a) not quick, especially with a multi-layered live game as a service like SoT, and b) is a balancing act. We have to follow sentiment, data, and feedback in order to strike a balance and that means some people may feel 'unheard' - it isn't that we haven't heard people - we are ALWAYS listening - it's that we have to balance all the feedback and combine that with the vision we have for our game. Changes that are driven by our playerbase often require more than a few weeks, or even a few months to implement as despite the size of our game we are still a relatively modest-sized studio.
Hope this helps and hopefully, see you on the seas!
@r3troraccoon said in Do any mods, devs or employees here play Sea of Thieves? Not a trash post, please read...:
Never ever have any of them seen RARE sails
I have though. In fact, twice i have had those sails on my ship, because i sailed with a Rare employee (both times the same person).
J0toro even streams her sails. So you could have known they would sail themselves just by that.
@r3troraccoon said in Do any mods, devs or employees here play Sea of Thieves? Not a trash post, please read...:
They could sail around with special sails and gift to those pirates they see fit, a special hat, or hull, or Chest of Blessing (50,000 gold idk).
That sounds like a bad idea to me, since Rare is located in Europe, so you will only be able to get those if you're European or US, since when those Rare employees play solo they will be put on EU-servers and when they play with a partner streamer it will almost always be either a EU-streamer or a US-streamer. Not just because that is where most partner streamers are from, but also because Asia and Australia is in the wrong timezone (their playtime is when those Rare employees are either sleeping or at work).
Although in theory you already have something like this with the partner steamers. They can give away cosmetics and it's up to them how they do it. Most do it by raffles on their stream though, especially for the reason i just mentioned, since otherwise most people would be excluded from winning it. But i have seen some of them gift something to people they met on the seas. So it does happen.
tldr; Rare should have unpaid employees, that give stuff away in game.
arent deckhands unpaid employees? basically vip forum members from the beta who rare granted mod privileges to? maybe i misunderstood the role. they do a lot of work for it to be for free exactly but they dont have the rare employee title implying they arent paid. but yea even if they did give away stuff the odds of running into them is rare. wish there was another way to get an obsidian capstan that whole set was handled poorly. heres 90% of a set from drops but the final piece will be a super rare code
@formlesszulu515 No we aren’t employees. You’re correct we’re trusted forum members who’ve been around since the Alpha with mod privileges who help keep the Sea of Thieves social spaces safe for everyone to enjoy.
We are given cosmetics to hand out during community days and (for me) the Forum ‘capture a code’ competition. :)
