---Post-Hotfix Update---
Hey Everyone - A further update, it's been an eventful day!
After rolling out today's hotfix we began to see signs of game instability and after investigation it's been identified that the new Voyage cooldowns we put in place are the root cause. As a result we've now temporarily disabled them to protect the game experience while we work on a resolution.
As these Voyage cooldowns were part of our Hunter's Call exploit mitigation, we'll continue to monitor folks using this route to progress The Hunter's Call much faster than intended, and they will all be wrapped up into our progression rollback action. As we've said before, genuine Voyage play is not being flagged here but excessive use of Voyage cancelling to force specific island locations will put players under investigation - you've been warned!
We'll get to work addressing these issues and share more on our plans here when we have it!
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
---Original Post---
Hey Everyone,
With Season 15 having launched just under a week ago, we're incredibly pleased with how our latest release has landed! From dramatic Megalodon encounters, kicking back on relaxing fishing trips, through to sneaky heists now focused on stealing extra large fish, we're loving the new stories emerging from our latest update.
Our second phase of Game Performance improvements has clearly had a positive impact on your experiences on the waves too, with the suite of improvements building on top of phase 1 and providing a step-change improvement across Client, Server and Networking. It's energising to see the feedback here so far - and knowing we still have further phases in progress behind the scenes, we know we are on the right track!
We've been closely monitoring the launch of Season 15 and triaging the feedback and bug reports across the experience that have been coming into the team. As a result, we're releasing a hotfix on Thursday, 27th February to address some of the commonly reported issues.
Hunter's Call Progression
Following the expansion of The Hunter's Call above Rank 50, we've seen plenty of feedback about the speed of progression and how The Hunter's Call feels much slower to progress when compared to other Companies - even with Emissary multipliers. The team have investigated, and have identified that while the intended reputation was being rewarded across the new and existing experiences, the amount of reputation required for each rank was incorrect for all ranks above ~40.
---Update---
During our maintenance period checks we've identified that players having made significant progress through the Hunter's Call since the launch of Season 15 will not be accelerated through the ranks as we intended. This does unfortunately conflict with the message initially shared in this State of Play update.
Now, these players will find themselves automatically pushed to the next rank, however any further progression earned to future ranks will not be applied.
We will investigate this though, as moving forwards we feel players' time should be respected and reputation earned should be reflected when broader progression changes are made as part of live game balancing.
---End Update---
In addition to progression speed, we've seen confusion on where crews should hand in their Hunter's Call loot, due to the Hunter's Call Representatives seemingly over-paying compared to the Sovereigns. This was clearly unintentional and didn't align to our broader approach to how Sovereigns work alongside the other Trading Companies. Today's hotfix will address this and ensure that crews are rewarded equally across the Sovereigns and Hunter's Call Representatives at Outposts and Seaposts.
While the team have addressed targeted reputation fixes as part of this hotfix, we'll continue to monitor progression more broadly across the expanded Hunter's Call Company to ensure players are progressing through the ranks as intended.
Hunter's Call Exploits
Sticking with progression: thanks to everyone who reported the various methods folks were using to progress through this Trading Company expansion much faster than intended. Today's hotfix will address both the 'Last Fish' duplication and the Voyage cheese where players were forcing the same target island on-demand for fish farming.
For the Fishing Voyage cheese, we've used our recently detailed Voyage cooldown capabilities to apply a restriction to this particular Voyage, should crews attempt to start/cancel this repeatedly to game the location of the fish. This cooldown has been balanced to not affect genuine play, but will capture crews trying to force a location. The change means these crews will now have to wait before starting the Voyage again, slowing their progress.
As these two exploits allowed some players to capitalise on the increased reputation gains, we'll be taking the same approach we did with Season 13 and identifying those players who have abused this exploit - knocking them all back down to 50. This follow up action won't be in sync with the hotfix and will be done behind the scenes ahead of our next update.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that this so far has only been a few hundred people, so my previous updates on how players should approach exploits may have deterred the behaviour at scale.
Voyage Cooldowns
As I mentioned above with how we are mitigating the Fishing Voyage issue, we now have the capability to deploy cooldown restrictions to target Voyages that are being used to accelerate their reputation or currency gains faster than intended.
As part of today's hotfix we will also be applying cooldowns to Voyages commonly used to power level much faster than intended. These Voyages are; Medley of Gold Hoarders, Executive’s Lost Shipment, Ashen Executive’s Lost Shipment, Ashen Captain's Treasure Vault, Bounty for a Skeleton Lord and Legendary Search for Cursed Treasure. These cool-downs have been balanced to ensure they do not affect genuine play but instead focus solely on crews repeatedly starting and cancelling in quick succession.
Other Fixes
This hotfix also brings in fixes to a number of other issues:
- Fixes to cursed faces when equipping certain mask and costume combinations
- Ensured equipped scars show correctly on all pirates
- Rediscovered the mysteriously lost Crates of Rare Fish Scales
- Removed the invisible hits causing throwables to explode in areas around the ship
Unfortunately, due to the last issue, we have rolled back a prior fix to how throwables interacted with the rear hull of the Galleon. The team are back investigating a cleaner route to addressing this original issue for a future update.
While this hotfix won't address everything that players have been reporting, it should address the most common pain points and allow us to stabilise the experience. We're still investigating areas like contribution for Ancient Megalodon Commendations and toning down the ship-flipping as part of future updates.
Thanks again for all your patience and support as we've rolled out our latest Season - we're loving the stories being shared of all your antics so far!
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
Sea Of Thieves - Redmaw Flipping A Sloop Into Space (Almost!)
