Sea of Thieves in my opinion lost part of its magic, since the end of the dev weekly updates Rare's communication went downhill, the disconnect only felt stronger and the long list of bad choices just made it worse.
So what do we have, (and i probably missed some) Emporium shop that really got well received in the beginning and praised for being fair started to make bad experiments, lore based cosmetics time after time, the first more personal items that got added were instruments i think and we knew that its only gonna get worse.
Costumes were mainly hated and defeated the whole idea for creating something new to fit your style, some compromises turned down.
Shoving politic views down our throats and then shutting down the convo, banning many players for doubtful reason, and simping some ahem.. streamers who had some mental power trip and got supported by Rare.
Seasons were introduced in a cheap way, got announced only as seasons and they did not bothered to include in the Plunder pass, Rare did it to introduce it in baby step and while it was speculated in the comments "some" people told us that if they will do that it will be completely different then other games but was not confirmed.
Low and behold day or two after Rare told us about Plunder pass, there is no innocent reason to why it was not mentioned, simple way to play games with us.
And Seasons for me were a huge mistake, efforts going to an unoriginal feature that everyone and their sisters have already used it in their games.
Artifical progression that the only things i can praise about it is that at least if we must do the same thing AGAIN at least this time we didnt needed to go out of our way to progress in it, fair plunder pass system that dont lock items behind it, the Season 1 got really cool cosmetics.
But i would scratch so much of this boring content from this year and get something more decent.
I feel like the Adventure element was left out, the one thing that actually was creative got the least attention by far and its a damn shame man.....
I love Sea of Thieves and the devs are good people and weve got a great community, i had so many memorable moments to treasure and awesome people to meet.
Story time, sailed with someone from the forum and with her met someone random on the seas and even though she wanted to kill him, ive convicned her not to and now they live together hahaha so it happenes.
I feel like the game was going through a rough road and i dont know if Rare is really putting effort into what was actually unique in Sea of Thieves but i really want to be wrong.