Sea of Thieves Has Disabled Achievements Temporarily to Address These Immediate Issues

Sea of Thieves is here and many pirate hopefuls are diving right into the shared-world adventure! That being said, the launch of the latest Rare ltd title didn't exactly go off without a hitch.

The company was forced to shut down their servers to new players temporarily when they became unstable due to a large amount of participants . Not surprising, this has been a highly anticipated online title for quite some time and many players couldn't wait to hop right in. But man ... it was a sinking ship there for awhile with the developers scrambling to get everything back in working order.

Needless to say, the first week after launch was a rough one but the team over at Rare are determined to get everything in working order. In the development update video above, the team talked about what's going on behind the scenes as far as why they disabled rewards and achievements and to tell players not to panic, they will be live shortly.

This morning, Rare took down their servers to make all of the necessary adjustments mentioned in the above video. They also offer a few tips regarding how players should handle "peak times" and what kind of crews are the best to join up with while the fixes continue to be implemented into the game.

Below is a list of the live issues they are tackling within this latest update:

1. Player rewards being delayed

Due to the volume of players, our services that award players gold and reputation when cashing in rewards can be delayed. Players should expect to see these rewards eventually come through, as they are queued up in our message service.
Status: Ongoing work to improve. We have made improvements in the two maintenance windows so far, and we also have identified some client-side fixes that require a game patch to update, which is due Tuesday March 27th. Right now this is our key priority from an in-game experience perspective, and all efforts across the team are focused on addressing this ASAP. It is a direct result of the scale we are seeing, so please bear with us. We are also investigating reports of some players still not receiving rewards, even after a delay. Investigations are still underway on this as a high priority.

Advice: Don't quit and restart to try to resolve the issue during peak times. If you continue playing, rewards should flow through eventually.

2. Achievements being delayed

We have had to temporarily disable achievements being awarded to allow our services to cope with the scale of the messages flowing through them, and this has lasted longer than anticipated. We are storing all awarded achievements, and are working to deliver these for all affected players. There is some groundwork in the patch arriving tomorrow that enables us to then deliver the delayed achievements via a service-side change, but ETA on this is a little loose whilst we work on the plan. We are hoping to enable this by the end of the week, and will share more information soon.
Status: Plan in place, hoping to deliver delayed achievements (and turn achievements back on) by end of this week.

3. Players having difficulty getting into the game at peak times

During peak times (9pm–2am BST/4pm–9pm EDT/1pm–6pm PDT) we have been seeing a very high volume of players, which has been leading to strain on our server matchmaking services.
Status: Broadly we feel we are on top of this now. We have made a series of fixes and tweaks in our services, and our join and play rates are now manageable. If we start to see unexpected behaviours, such as a high influx of new or returning players, there might be cases where we need to temporarily halt incoming players to maintain the quality of the experience for people already in and playing. If we need to do this we will message out on our social channels, but we hope to avoid it.

Advice: If you experience this, try matchmaking into a crew that is already out on an adventure, as you will join an in-progress session rather than going through the server matchmaking flow.

4. Characters losing details such as hair colour/scars

We have seen isolated instances of this being reported since launch.
Status: We have made a client-side fix which is in tomorrow's game update to prevent this happening in the future, but if this happened to you during launch week please contact our support team and we will investigate your individual case as we hope we can resolve it.