Hey Everyone,
While our Mid-Season update to Season 15 will be arriving later this week, I want to take you on a little journey behind the scenes and share an update on the particularly spicy topic (when is it ever not...) of Game Exploits.
The timing on this one might feel a tad reactive given the hot-topic discussions some of you may have seen recently, but with the team having made a bit of a breakthrough I wanted to share an update.
I've shared updates regularly in our videos on the efforts of our dedicated Game Health team. This team started off small and grew in size over the last year, with their initial focus being very much behind the scenes to begin hardening our game security from common third-party exploits with various protections for common issues.
Most recently this team has been the one spearheading our recent Performance Bash, delivering Client and Server performance improvements across our recent updates, which we're already seeing improve the game experience for everyone.
While Game Performance and Game Security will continue to be long-running workstreams, this team has now begun to look at other areas of the experience and where improvements need to be made. One clear pain point that has been on our hit list for way too long has been a commonly used movement exploit often called Ladder Launching/Funny Launch (Basically any scenario that resulted in players becoming stuck inside a physics object and then being ejected from it) . I called out this issue all the way back in November 23's SoT News and this continues to be a sizeable movement exploit that was well and truly breaking our game design and high on our hit list, and while that's honestly an uncomfortably long time ago since I called it out - this is the first area the team began to dig into.
Now, let's take you all behind the scenes a little. In a game like Sea of Thieves, the use of Unreal's PhysX engine is fairly significant from the intricate buoyancy profiles of our various ships, to keeping players stable on networked floating platforms with other players - our game physics is always being pushed hard. In the past, we've classed any physics-related movement exploits as incredibly high risk as small changes can often have wide-reaching side effects and come with unwanted performance impacts that are hard to diagnose.
This cluster of 'launching' issues were parked waiting for some specialist experience and a few weeks ago the team began exploring this in earnest, looking for ways for us to address this without a wider physics impact to the experience. After a few weeks of tinkering and internal testing we feel confident we have a solution here that safely isolates the issue and mitigates the velocity players are ejected when colliding with areas of the ship which is where the root of the issue was.
As we prepared to enter Insiders for initial testing this week, we saw the discussion of 'launches' become a hot-topic over our recent community weekend with a heated debate on whether this was indeed an exploit/cheat/unfair tactics. While I've stated frequently that game exploits are not considered bannable offences, these various 'launches' allowed players to gain a significant movement advantage on their opponents well outside of the designed game mechanics of the world - there should have been no doubt that this was a game exploit.
With this fix heading into Insiders this week and the recent hot-topic nature of this discussion, I wanted to lift the lid on this and share our plans for addressing this issue. We'll spend some time now testing with Insiders and ensure we can safely control this change and if we gain confidence in the implementation will schedule this for the next available game update.
As always, you can get involved with testing in Insiders by heading to seaofthieves.com/insider, we'd appreciate your support in helping us build confidence in nailing this issue! Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully this shares some context on why this has been such a challenging space for us to tackle, we're excited to continue working in this space though and our Game Health team is eager to begin hitting some of these long-standing issues within the core experience.
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens
