March Update - State of Play

@deathkiller1286 I agree!! I would much rather them REMOVE stuff to make the game buttery smooth. Nobody wants to play a slow paced game where the once in a blue moon intense fighting moments are inconsistent and stuttery, teleporting, etc. It’s nothing personal to Rare obviously I love this game or I wouldn’t be giving feedback in the forums, I just am a diehard fan who has sunk hours into this game and I couldn’t tell you the amount of tumes my hitreg or choppy gameplay has ruined excellent moments for me & my crews.

There’s enough to do, I bet our newer playerbase would appreciate the overall performance update!

If the game was buttery smooth new players might have a fighting chance. I’ve been lagging so badly & experiencing traversal stutters and such that I was called a cheater by someone who didn’t understand lol.

I'm also having issues with the radial and FPS drops (all intel and Nvidia hardware though), it's soo sticky and it's an issue when running Hourglass. Super disappointed with this and I don't think it makes sense for me to play until fixed.

I've come to the conclusion that (at least from my testing) the drops have to do with loading islands rather than other ships or trinkets.

I sailed for 4 hours today with all my trinket spots empty and the big drops I saw where when approaching islands, particularly big or dense ones. I would see my framerate tank from a usual steady 120fps to less than 30fps on some islands (Mermaid's Hideaway was particularly bad).

Getting close to other ships barely had any impact, in my case.

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Specs and info again: Ryzen 7 7700x, RTX 3070ti, 32GB DDR5 RAM, Steam version, Windows 10 22H2, Direct3D 12 enabled, 1440p 120fps capped with VRR

I play on Steam intel i7 2080 RTX, first time it's happened, after update the game crashed with red x ( I don't remember the exact error). 15 seconds later I got BSOD/ kernel level error, pc crashed. Deleted - re-installed game and it's working again - however I am seeing frame drops to roughly 30 fps for 3-5 seconds at a time, but weirdly this only started today and not several days ago.

Also, just enter a TT portal and game tab vanished, no warning or crash error.

Preformance after this update is worse for me.
I have AMD cpu. (Ryzen 7 3700x) ,but nvidia card (rtx 2070)

@sonicbob

I am also experiencing massive frame drops and stuttering (down to 20 30 fps for long time) during pvp games after a while. I am on AMD hardware: CPU Ryzen 7 5700x3d, GPU Radeon RX 7800XT.

Something has happened this patch with the performance. AMD 7900x with 7900XTX GPU and fps just drops to 30-50 fps from stable 120fps(locked). I can't find the pattern when it happens, if I'm close to something or not. It was running very smooth last week before patch. It's like stuttering and dropping in a way that something in game is extremely unoptimized or there's a million things loading in, then it stops, goes back to good fps and then it comes again.

@realstyli said in March Update - State of Play:

I've come to the conclusion that (at least from my testing) the drops have to do with loading islands rather than other ships or trinkets.

I sailed for 4 hours today with all my trinket spots empty and the big drops I saw where when approaching islands, particularly big or dense ones. I would see my framerate tank from a usual steady 120fps to less than 30fps on some islands (Mermaid's Hideaway was particularly bad).

Getting close to other ships barely had any impact, in my case.

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Specs and info again: Ryzen 7 7700x, RTX 3070ti, 32GB DDR5 RAM, Steam version, Windows 10 22H2, Direct3D 12 enabled, 1440p 120fps capped with VRR

I did some more testing on Safer Seas. I visited some of the same islands I did on High Seas yesterday, and some new ones (to rule out shader complilation). I even went to Plunder Valley, which I would say is one of the most demanding islands in the game.

I did not see any of the same frame drops as I did on High Seas. I still had short drops when looking in barrel or rowboat inventories and the odd hitch at sea but, otherwise, the fps was consistently high.

So, it could be related to having multiple ships on a server, not necessarily in close vicinity or it could be related to sailing on a Captained Ship, regardless of trinkets.

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Update:

I went on High Seas with a chartered ship, to rule out Captaincy being the issue. I visited some of the same islands again and, while it was initially promising, I began to see big drops after about an hour (from 120fps down to 70fps or so).

I even went back to the first island I had visited in the session (Plunder Valley) at the end, and what was initially an almost locked 120fps a couple of hours earlier, now was showing a lot of dropped frames.

Given that my session on Sunday (quoted above) was over 4 hours and I really started to have major drops towards the end, I would bet this gets progressively worse with time.

Is any effort being put into fixing the merchants and then giving us supplies or supply crates getting stuck? It's super annoying the amount of gold I've lost not receiving items I purchased.
Storage crates, food, cannon, wood, and now spears are getting stuck.
I'll buy food through captaincy and plenty of times it doesn't show up in my ship.

This has been happening for well over a year now and no end in sight. PLEASE FIX IT

@hiradc said in March Update - State of Play:

Honestly, if trinkets are causing an issue in performance, remove them or limit the number. Certainly don't need the mechanic where they get tilted and need correcting.

It'd be better to have an option to disable them clientside like ship rats

The FPS drops are my main issue alongside server instability. I am rooting for our developers to full-force focus on the choppy inconsistent gameplay and try to smoothen everything out before adding anything else to make the experience worse performance wise.

I recommend removing completely the trinker wiggle mechanics, neat but not nearly necessary and probably for the best:

I’m a die hard Pirate who has struggled enjoying the game at times due to it’s terrible performance and I have a 7800X3D, 4070ti SUPER and 64GB of RAM, 2Tb SSD. I expected my Rig to blaze thru frames smoothly and was sadly surprised when I kept trying to optimize my system & nothing was working.

I swear once our servers can manage the players smoothly everyone who left will come back and everyone who isn’t good will get better and Pirates will see how awesome this game is and spend hella money improving their cosmetic vibe.

I want to drop anchor here in the Sea of Thieves as a committed Pirate, I just know that I and many other gamers refuse to play an inconsistent game especially a slower paced one where those once in a blue moon split second moments matter like SoT.

BUGS I DIDNT MENTION ABOVE: I have a bug where it displays me having 0, 0, 0 currency completely wiped also cannot see promotions at merchant nor buy supply crates, food cannon balls etc.

I also have noticed that when I’m trying to quick-move items from inventory - barrel it sometimes will not recognize what item I’m hovering over and will store/take the wrong item. Not terrible.

Another thing is the electric eel ladies. They are so clunky and goofy, the electrical attack is cool how it disabled you but their movement and attacks are lowkey robotic. I like their dash but maybe its a lil weird seeming.

Also the hunting spear seems like it needs a second or so extra when removing it from the hull of a ship. It comes out relatively the same pace as a small repair no?

I absolutely love the Ancient Megs fighting both of them is so much fun even with an inexperienced open crew it was a total blast. I would love to see more bosses like these 2! I expect to see a Kraken in the future, like a super Kraken 20 tentacles. It could peek out here n there and headshots are critical hits. Tentacle mechanics are already S+ but I’m sure your creative genius could consider new tentacle types. Rock throwing tentacle, Ship tossing, ink spray to blind pirates, etc.

Love you Rare and hope we continue scratching eachothers backs for years to come! >

@boneyardx0 said in March Update - State of Play:

The FPS drops are my main issue alongside server instability. I am rooting for our developers to full-force focus on the choppy inconsistent gameplay and try to smoothen everything out before adding anything else to make the experience worse performance wise.

I recommend removing completely the trinker wiggle mechanics, neat but not nearly necessary and probably for the best:

I’m a die hard Pirate who has struggled enjoying the game at times due to it’s terrible performance and I have a 7800X3D, 4070ti SUPER and 64GB of RAM, 2Tb SSD. I expected my Rig to blaze thru frames smoothly and was sadly surprised when I kept trying to optimize my system & nothing was working.

I swear once our servers can manage the players smoothly everyone who left will come back and everyone who isn’t good will get better and Pirates will see how awesome this game is and spend hella money improving their cosmetic vibe.

I want to drop anchor here in the Sea of Thieves as a committed Pirate, I just know that I and many other gamers refuse to play an inconsistent game especially a slower paced one where those once in a blue moon split second moments matter like SoT.

BUGS I DIDNT MENTION ABOVE: I have a bug where it displays me having 0, 0, 0 currency completely wiped also cannot see promotions at merchant nor buy supply crates, food cannon balls etc.

I also have noticed that when I’m trying to quick-move items from inventory - barrel it sometimes will not recognize what item I’m hovering over and will store/take the wrong item. Not terrible.

Another thing is the electric eel ladies. They are so clunky and goofy, the electrical attack is cool how it disabled you but their movement and attacks are lowkey robotic. I like their dash but maybe its a lil weird seeming.

Also the hunting spear seems like it needs a second or so extra when removing it from the hull of a ship. It comes out relatively the same pace as a small repair no?

I absolutely love the Ancient Megs fighting both of them is so much fun even with an inexperienced open crew it was a total blast. I would love to see more bosses like these 2! I expect to see a Kraken in the future, like a super Kraken 20 tentacles. It could peek out here n there and headshots are critical hits. Tentacle mechanics are already S+ but I’m sure your creative genius could consider new tentacle types. Rock throwing tentacle, Ship tossing, ink spray to blind pirates, etc.

Love you Rare and hope we continue scratching eachothers backs for years to come! >

I'm in favour of this only if the Kraken's loot pool is drastically improved