Hey everyone,
We have recently seen an increase in player reports and community discussion on harassment and cheating. We wanted to share an update on the current state of play and what we are doing behind the scenes to protect you from malicious actors.
‘Yellowbeard Error’ Reports – 30th August
On Friday 30th August we received reports that a small number of our active streamers and members of the community became disconnected from the game and appeared to receive temporary bans. For some players this also coincided with targeting from malicious actors within the game.
Our Live team quickly discovered a vulnerability in our support toolset that allowed these actions to take place. The Player Support team reinstated access to all players within 10 minutes and the vulnerability was subsequently patched within the hour. This was an isolated issue within the support toolset and didn’t affect the wider game or any player information as a result.
While only vulnerable for a short time, some players experienced unacceptable behaviour that is in breach of our Code of Conduct. This vulnerability has now been resolved.
Update on our Commitment to Player Safety
One of the realities of operating an online game is in the ongoing work to keep our game secure and defend against the ever-present threat of cheat developers. It’s through this route that our community can sometimes meet people with malicious intent, and therefore cheat prevention is an area we are continuously actively working to improve.
In March this year we integrated Easy Anti-Cheat, Epic Game’s industry-leading solution, to help ensure a fairer experience for all players. While this initial integration halted many active cheat engines, we are now starting to see some of them return. We are committed to the ongoing work to harden our security, and alongside this commitment we are performing a full internal review across our game and our processes.
Alongside our game security, we are aware of the impact that ban evasion has within the experience and how frustrating it is to see malicious actors circumventing permanent account bans. We are exploring ways to mitigate against this at both a game and platform level.
As part of coming updates, we’ll be placing restrictions on certain parts of the experience that will require play time in order to access, such as locking Hourglass play behind a reputation lock. While these were not part of the feature’s initial design, we want to add friction for cheat developers by placing barriers on cheaters to stop them impacting your play experience.
Recent reports show that in-game text chat is a common tool used by malicious actors to target players, and with this in mind we are improving our profanity filtering before messages even reach players. We also plan to introduce a system that will monitor the content of chat messages more closely and provide moderation behind the scenes.
We know that creating a safe and fair player experience is an ongoing focus, and by working across multiple areas we can meaningfully disrupt the efforts of cheaters and protect our players. While these improvements are ongoing, I want to also remind players of the tools within the game settings that can be used to protect you online and mitigate the impact of malicious actors today – see this article on In-Game Safety Options at the Sea of Thieves support site.
If you believe that someone has broken our Code of Conduct or the Microsoft T&Cs, please read the article at the link here and create a support ticket – Sea of Thieves: How To Report a Player. This will be reviewed, and the appropriate action taken by our support team. It's important that you report any encounters where you perceive someone to be cheating or abusive – this helps us better investigate the incident itself, but also helps us understand the full context and scale of these issues.
We are committed to improving the experience for our players and will continue to share updates on this topic regularly as we deliver improvements to the game over the coming months.
Drew ‘Sonicbob’ Stevens
