The Sea of Thieves community has been dealing with some heinous levels of harassment and threats recently. As a result, the developers have had to promise a new level of commitment to combating these malicious players and the problems that have surfaced.
In a new developer blog, Sea of Thieves production director Drew “Sonicbob” Stevens has acknowledged that there was “an increase in player reports and community discussion on harassment and cheating.” Not only were hackers ruining gameplay experiences for servers, but streamers were also hit with temporary bans that coincided with targeted badgering from individuals in-game.
“Our live team quickly discovered a vulnerability in our support toolset that allowed these actions to take place,” Sonicbob said. “The Player Support team reinstated access to all players within 10 minutes and the vulnerability was subsequently patched within the hour. This was an isolated issue within the support toolset and didn’t affect the wider game or any player information as a result.”
Additionally, there have been multiple reports of malicious players using in-game text chat as a tool for horrible forms of harassment. To combat this, Rare will improve Sea of Thieves‘ profanity filter to block any type of language that could be deemed harmful.
In addition to fixing the vulnerability that allowed people to get certain players banned, the Rare team has been hard at work to mitigate ban evasions at both a game and platform level. They’ll also be adding restrictions on certain parts of the game that will require specific amounts of play time to unlock so cheaters will have even more roadblocks on the way to affecting legitimate players, old and new.
Many Sea of Thieves players likely hope Rare can iron out a majority of the harassment cases that have surfaced over the last few months. Even though you might be flying the Jolly Roger, you still need to respect your fellow pirate.
