Sea of Thieves: major downtime planned as maintenance continues on fixing online problems
A lot of folks jumped into Sea of Thieves during its first 24 hours of availability.
Unfortunately, the game is plagued with online problems that are forcing developer Rare to take the game offline for significant maintenance. Three days worth of work is planned from today, over the weekend and into next week.
According to Rare, Sea of Thieves saw 3-4 times more concurrent players than during any of the scale tests or beta sessions, as one million players in total have tried to play since launch.
The massive amount of players has led to scale-related issues which the team is working to resolve, and the game will go offline March 22, 24 and 27, for at least five hours to address stability.
These issues include being unable to access Sea of Thieves during peak times; rewards and achievements being delayed; missing items such as gold; and performance issues on Xbox One X.
While the developer video posted below goes into more depth on current issues, the main issues cropping up are listed below along with current status.
Rare also provided a maintenance schedule for Sea of Thieves. As stated previously, the first occurs today, March 22. It's also worth noting maintenance on Saturday and Tuesday has been extended to five hours rather than three.
Sea of Thieves Maintenance Window
- Thursday March 22: 5-8am EDT, 9am–12pm BST
- Saturday March 24th: 5-10am EDT, 9am–2pm BST
- Tuesday March 27th: 4-9am EDT, 9am–2pm BST
If you're just getting started in Sea of Thieves we've got all the pointers you need. We have a run down of all three factions; the Gold Horders, the Order of Souls and the Merchant Alliance. We're also piecing together the Mysterious Stranger and what that has to do with progression.
Sea of Thieves Issues and Current Status
Players having difficulty getting into the game at peak times
- Issue: During peak times (9am–2pm GMT/5pm–10pm EDT/2pm–7pm PDT) Rare is seeing a very high volume of players, leading to strain on server matchmaking services.
- Status: Ongoing work to improve. Plan to have improvements in place for peak time tonight (March 21). Players should still expect some issues.
- Advice: 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.
Player rewards being delayed
- Issue: Due to the volume of players, 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 the message service.
- Status: Ongoing work to improve. The plan is to have improvements in place for peak time tonight (March 21), but the team is investigating whether this needs a patch to the main game client or can be handled within the services.
- Advice: Don't quit and restart to try to resolve the issue during peak times. If you continue playing, rewards should flow through eventually.
Achievements being delayed
- Issue: Some of players, especially during peak time, could see a delay in achievements being awarded.
- Status: Believed fixed for next game patch (ETA: early next week).
Temporarily missing items
- Issue: Reports of players loading into the game and not having items/weapons.
- Status: Believed fixed for next game patch (ETA: early next week).
Reported performance issues on Xbox One X
- Issue: Some performance issues reported when playing Sea of Thieves on Xbox One X.
- Status: Believed fixed for next game patch (ETA: early next week).
Hopefully, folks running into connection issues will be able to log in soon and start raiding ships and killing chickens.
Sea of Thieves was released March 20, on Windows 10 PC and Xbox One.