Sea of Thieves’ First ‘Pirate Legend’ Player Defends His Style of Play, Despite Criticism

So, Sea of Thieves has been out for almost a couple of weeks now, and the game has drawn its fair share of players, as well as a heaping dose of criticism from some of those said players. But now a new controversy has risen, as a player has managed to reach "Pirate Legend" – leaving some of its community irked as a result.

Robert "Prod1gyX" Paz, who streams regularly on his Twitch channel, spent hours at a time playing through Sea of Thieves, and managed to attain the "Pirate Legend" label after several sessions. But some folks think he took the "easy way out," as it were, with a lack of skills and unfair advantages.

Prod1gyX recently had a chance to talk to Polygon about the controversy, and about the "haters" that are striking back against him. "Every game, there's always going to be the positive and the negative," he explained. "Sea of Thieves definitely has it. (But) on my side, we keep it positive 100 percent. We don't bash the game. We don't talk shit about other streamers."

The streamer has built quite the positive community over the past few months, with sessions of Fortnite, Gears of War 4 and other games, before diving head first into Sea of Thieves when its beta launched a while back.

He noted that social media makes it too easy for folks to complain about his feat, in which he reached level 50 across all three game factions with his hours' worth of streaming. "They started criticizing my gameplay when they heard something about the boosting," he noted, pointing out that angry Redditors flooded his stream within his final hour of play. "They just heard 'boosting,' and everyone started twisting my words. 'He boosted all the way,' and people tweeted at me, 'Cheater, cheater, not my legend, not my legend.'

"I was like, 'I don't understand the hate,'" he added. "'Do you guys even realize what happened?'"

While Prod1gyX did get some boosting assistance (with help from other crews), he said that others allowed him to hop in and join in the treasure collecting, since they were all part of the same Twitch community.

"People honestly thought that from [reputation level] one to 50, I just got free loot," he said. "I was AFK, and they were judging just off that. That's where people took that and made it bigger, way bigger than expected.

"I can tell a lot of people didn't watch from the beginning, which is understandable. But you can't say that I wasn't playing it right from the very beginning of the game."

And while there were competitive communities for Sea of Thieves out there – including one for someone else that achieved "Pirate Legend" status by the name of SniperNamedG – Prod1gyX insists that everything was done in terms of his community. "Sniper has more viewers than me and possible a stronger audience, but with my community as well, they make me feel like I'm their Pirate Legend," he noted. "In the beginning, it was strange that people talked that way ... [but] my whole plan was to be a Legend and do something awesome with the community."

And so he has. Prod1gyX continues to stream regularly, and contribute to the community that he's still very much a part of, even helping folks with getting through legendary quests within the game, pirate style and all.

Sea of Thieves is available now for Xbox One and Windows 10.

(Again, hat tip to Polygon for the details!)