Sea of Thieves had a million players in its first 48 hours, Rare talks server issues

‘It’s been 24/7 since we started’

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Despite extensive pre-release testing, Sea of Thieves has had something of a rocky launch this week with players finding themselves unable to connect. The servers have been slammed, and at a certain point Rare opted to temporarily suspend new players from joining the game. Once-amusing error message names like “Lavenderbeard” and “CinnamonBeard” started losing their charm.

Rare spoke about the server issues today in a 10-minute video. In short? Tons of people are playing.

According to the studio, the scale of players at launch is “between three and four times” that of the game’s biggest beta test. “I think at one point our service engineers told me we had 5,000 people coming in per minute,” explained studio head Craig Duncan. “The other thing is just on a general level of scale, we’ve actually seen more than a million unique users in a 48-hour period.”

Rare has implemented server-side fixes and will continue to do so. In the meantime, the developers suggested a few things to help combat problems during peak hours. If you’re a solo player trying to queue up, you might have better luck joining a full crew. And if you’re in a game but your quest rewards or Achievements aren’t popping, just give them time — don’t quit out and rejoin.

“We do appreciate all the patience, we do appreciate the support. Believe me, it is as frustrating for us as it is for anyone that’s experiencing an issue,” Duncan said. “We wanna get to an end state where everyone has a good time all the time every time they play.”


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