The Game
Sea of Thieves is an online pirate adventure game made by Rare. It mostly involves sailing the seas and finding treasures, but also has stories called “Tall Tales” that act as quest chains all involved in lore of the world. The game also has PVP combat, as pirates are, of course, known for piracy. Risk and reward are very much the core of the gameplay experience. However, to my mind, there is an imbalance between the risks and rewards that harms the feel of the game.
Firstly, I am not driven by cosmetics. So, the main reward of the game doesn’t motivate me, but I will try to treat them as valuable and talk about them having listened to people who do care about cosmetics. I also do not like PVP, especially in Sea of Thieves, but I think it has potential to be more interesting than it is currently.
Rewards
The rewards for Sea of Thieves usually come in the form of gold, or other currencies. You use these currencies to purchase cosmetics. There are a large amount of cosmetics, enough where I think most people can find a set of items they like. This reward, initially, comes quickly and is easy to obtain. Some cosmetics are locked behind achievements which might take some time.
Then there are more intangible rewards. Figuring out a puzzle with your friends, taking the skeleton fort, sailing the boat itself. These are, to me, where the game shines the brightest. The act of being an adventure pirate (as opposed to a piracy pirate I guess) is so much fun, with or without friends. Sailing the sea, hunting treasure, dicking about on deck while you sail in a straight line. These rewards are frequent and satisfying. They tend to lead to currency rewards as well, but you don’t get bonus currency based off how much fun you had.
Punishments
PVE
On the other side of this are punishments. Which are, admittedly, quite rare. You can die and you lose nothing but time. You will spawn right back on your ship. For PVE content this generally doesn’t harm you, but it can in the case of a skeleton ship, or the kraken events. If your ship sinks while you are gone, however, your loot all floats to the surface, your lose your emissary rank, and your boat appears near a random island. Basically if your ship sinks you lose everything. It can be saved if you have a lifeboat or something. You can stack it all on the boat and park it ashore and come back for it. Loot lasts 5 minutes in the water, but will stay for hours on land.
PVP
The other punishment is other players. PVP is far worse than sinking to PVE events. For my 100 or so hours into Sea of Thieves, PVP has been incredibly infrequent overall. It generally falls into 3 categories for me:
Master and Commander: they follow you to the ends of the earth as you try not to engage, but no ship can really outrun the other, so you need to sweep in and around islands, many of which are of no help really, eventually getting overtaken. You may win or lose, but the chase still took over an hour so…really what did anyone win here?
The Surprise: They came out of nowhere and started shooting or dropped your anchor. Or shockingly destroyed your mast first try. You are basically powerless and just lost all of your loot.
Verdun: You both see each other and engage, the battle lasts for what feels like hours as you repair holes, and fire cannons to varying levels of success, drying up all of your resources. Eventually one of you sinks. Neither of you had any loot.
I’ve been on both sides of these sorts of fights, and it has never really been worth it. Like, yeah I just defeated another player, it was kind of exhilarating but what’d I get for it? Typically nothing. Maybe some supply crates. Lost a lot of time though.
Risk Reward Balance
That is what it all comes down to. Time. Nothing in Sea Of Thieves is quick except losing all of your stuff. Voyages can take an hour or multiple hours. If you’re an emissary you’re basically locked into several hours of play to get the reward, even without doing the bonus emissary quest at the end. All of that gets removed in an instant. If you do get caught and eventually sunk, you potentially wasted several hours getting the loot and then more hours getting killed. The balance feels off, as this structure doesn’t reward the “adventure pirate” feel the rest of the game puts on, but directly rewards the “piracy pirate” of reality. Luckily, the loot is not extremely useful or necessary so losing the loot isn’t really that big of a problem. In fact, getting sunk as an emissary by a non-emissary hurts even more as they are only going to get 40% of the rewards for it, but the time investment hurts. No one in the history of video games has ever enjoyed having hours/days of work getting destroyed/taken away from them.
However, I don’t want PVP to go away. I like the tension of the potential encounter more than the encounter itself, but I also frequently feel powerless during PVP. The powerlessness stems from lack of options, especially as a solo player. The issue is trying to come up with solutions that are effective at all levels. The other thing is losing all of your loot/emissary rank in an instant with no way to safeguard the time commitment. But before we discuss possible solutions, I want to take a moment to talk about emissaries as gated rewards.
Gated Rewards
Emissaries work by you raising a flag for a specific faction. While this flag is raised you gain emissary points for doing things for that faction. Each rank multiplies your rewards, with rank 5 maxing out at 2.5 times the reward. The downside is that the flag is a target, especially for the new faction that came with the emissary update, The Reapers. When a reaper ship hits rank 5, they can see all emissary ships on the map. Conversely all ships can see the reaper ship on the map at any rank.
This creates a gate for many players, as to get higher rewards you take on higher risks…in theory. The problem is the risk is guaranteed. If your server does not have a reaper ship, many times one will spawn in. This has happened to me, where it spawned several meters off the bow as we were looking at our map. Pairing that with them knowing exactly where you are, if they give chase you must be creative with how you drop off loot and have it potentially take a lot longer.
The response to this problem is generally “well don’t raise the emissary flag then!” which on the surface is good advice for a player centric view of the game, but it has some flaws from a game design side to me. Namely the flag is not “I want more loot” but “I would like to PVP please” which is not really the idea that comes across when being an emissary. These gated rewards create a gap in the playerbase. Those that can get away with being emissaries for whatever reason, and those that can’t or don’t believe they can.
To be clear, having an emissary flag is a huge benefit. It would be absolutely silly to expect players to not be emissaries. Time investment not withstanding, that’s the value of 2 and a half voyages for the price of one. So one must expect everyone to be an emissary if they have the time. Therefore everyone must be fine with PVP. Thus the gated reward becomes shitty gameplay experiences.
Solutions
The major solutions I would like to propose don’t change PVP at all, though I have some that do.
Firstly, I think each faction should have a wandering version. If not a boat on the sea as a random event, just a rotating merchant on the small outposts with the hunters. Put whatever penalty on it you want, like you get less because they have to ship it to a proper outpost, or whatever. This would help alleviate problems with outpost camping, and give players a way to dump their loot for a single faction and not lose all of it. It respects time and also their comfort with risk still, fitting into the overall risk/reward structure of emissaries.
Second, If you recover your own emissary flag, you can hang it on your new boat, and a way to remove the flag. This should absolutely come with a rank penalty, though gaining rank is quick. The feeling of being able to save your rank would take a bit of the sting out of it when it happens.
For PVP changes, I would like a way to damage ships while being on them that don’t involve fire or gunpowder barrels. I heard in beta there was data in the game for a boarding axe. I am unsure how it was supposed to work but I like the idea, and I would propose we get an axe weapon that can damage ship parts like the mast or capstan. It would make it so if left unattended a single player boarding a ship can do damage, but not enough to sink a ship. Just cripple them. And this scales to the already shitty experience of 1v4, so if 4 people board your ship and hack it to pieces you’re just as powerless as you are with 4 cannonballs blasting your mast away and half of your hull, but it importantly gives the single person more power to fight/get away.
I would also like galleons to sink faster. I know the galleon has more space per player than other ships, but in my testing where I threw a single firebomb into the central point in the bottom of the hull of all three ships (not the most scientific, sure) I got these results:
Sloop – 4:15
Brigantine – 4:54
Galleon – 5:40
This is a percentage increase of about 15% per boat tier. But the absolute difference is that the galleon gets more time over the brig than the brig gets over the sloop, about 7 seconds, but the gap between the galleon and the sloop is a minute and a half. I imagine they tested this, so they have way more precise data and this was a reasonable answer for them. So maybe the increased space per player meets up with some metric where their repairs per minute are the same or something. Coming at this as a player that sails solo or with 1 friend mostly, the sloop will get 4-6 holes in it while the galleon gets 1, and it sinks glacially slow in comparison. I think compressing these times a little more, the galleon should take longer to sink after all, would help the experience a bit. Though maybe making repairs more difficult for galleon crews.
My last change would be to be able to bury loot, or have claimed loot not sparkle in the distance. A lot of times I just want the vault key, or the one important loot from my entire voyage. The rest can go.
Conclusion
I enjoy Sea of Thieves for the sense of adventure it gives me and my friends. The risk/reward balance seems heavily skewed towards risk. The reward is lots of gold and cosmetics and fun and time well spent, the risk is losing it all. Always. No matter what you did the risk is always tacked directly into the extreme. My goal has been to bring that down some to be more in balance with the reward, or at least have varying levels of risk if you can manage it.
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