Hey everyone,
Following the launch of our latest update on April 25th, I wanted to share a hot off the press update on the current state of play and what we are doing behind the scenes to improve the player experience - not just right now, but with our plans for next week too.
Open Crew Matchmaking
As shared in our release notes, we identified an issue very late in our release process that would have caused Open Crew sessions to experience a game crash. We made the difficult call to mitigate the impact of this issue by removing the option to start an Open Crew session for launch on April 25th as we worked on preparing a fix with sufficient test time to ensure we were confident we could return this feature safely.
This was a really tough call for the team as our launch into Early Access on PlayStation®5 was a fantastic opportunity to allow our wonderful community to use Open Crew matchmaking to step into cross-play sessions and show these new pirates the ropes. However, we stand by the fact we prioritised the stability of your experience here.
As we approach our Season 12 launch we have a confident fix now in the bag and will be returning the Open Crew option for our update on April 30th. We look forward to reopening this matchmaking option and welcoming both seasoned and new pirates together to build bonds on their journeys ahead!
Guilds
Within a few hours of opening up the servers on Thursday we saw alerting and player reports that large amounts of players were experiencing issues Guilds, being unable to access them on the Front End. While April's update included a fix to a longer-standing issue which caused this menu to fail to load in some scenarios, this issue was affecting large Guilds consistently and was a different root cause.
In an attempt to return players access to Guilds in the interim, we deployed a mitigation which would only return the three most recently used ships when selecting a Guild.
While many Guilds regained access to their Ships, this mitigation did cause further unexpected issues which led to issues sailing Captained Ships and not gaining progress towards their Milestones. Larger Guilds with many pledged ships also still suffered with the same issues with them being unable to access the Guilds menu.
Returning fresh this morning, the team have reassessed our options - and while a full solution is being worked on behind the scenes, have made a further change to Live which has now been rolled out.
When accessing the Guilds menu now, players will be shown their own pledged ships as we have confirmed the root cause of this issue is not located with a player's owned ships. The result of this change is that players should regain access to the Guilds menu, able to sail their own ships on behalf of the Guild earning progress and in-turn be able to sail Captained Ships without the prior progression issues.
While this temporary mitigation has returned Guild play to our players, we recognise that this will affect a player's ability to view active Guild Ship sessions easily, and may require players to use regular game invites to form their crews. Again, a tough call to make, but on assessment we feel returning Guild play in this way over the weekend should return players access to their ships and allow them to continue to contribute to their Guild Reputation.
The question I'm sure you're all asking is 'When is this going to be fixed?'. Now that we have the root cause identified the team are working on a fix, however we'll still need some time to gain confidence in testing the various Guild scenarios before we can commit to a fix date - this will not be arriving on April 30th.
However we do feel this issue is in need of a critical fix, therefore we'll be scheduling a hotfix shortly after Season 12's launch to return full Guild functionality - we'll keep you updated once we have a plan locked in.
Game Health
I shared an update on Game Health in our '24 Preview last month and acknowledged that keeping on top of game quality is an area we haven't been doing a good enough job with recently and an area we just need to improve.
While a new strike team will be deployed directly to this space, we aren't quite there yet and therefore need to review and tighten up our current processes and get it back under control.
While Thursday's update delivered fixes to some long-standing issues like Voice Comms, Xbox Game Stability and Ship Interactions after diving - we quickly saw reports of new issues that hadn't been caught and slipped through to Live.
For transparency, and while it's not an excuse, a large focus for our team has been our recent integration onto PlayStation®5 and with this we're disappointed to see issues slip through at such an important time for us.
The team are preparing fixes for the recently introduced water visual issues, and are jumping back to investigate the longer-standing bugs that seem to be causing us a real headache with shark frequency, passive Megalodons and inconsistent Captaincy Supplies.
We'll be monitoring the launch of Season 12 closely and will triage any issues we see following the introduction of the new items arriving across the seas.
We appreciate all of the bug reports and feedback provided since we brought the update live on Thursday and for myself and the team it's disappointing that so many of our players are experiencing issues right now. We hear your frustrations and will be working hard to both resolve the immediate issues but also tighten up our processes so we can improve the experience for everyone - so thank you all for your patience!
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
