Sea of Thieves hit 1M players in 24 hours, Rare talks issues and maintenance windows
A lot of folks jumped into Sea of Thieves during its first 24 hours of availability.
One million is quite a lot of players to be jumping into a new, online game like Sea of Thieves. It's no wonder the servers have been on fire ever since.
According to Rare, Sea of Thieves saw 3-4 times more concurrent players than during any of the scale tests or beta sessions.
The massive amount of players has led to scale-related issues which the team is working to resolve, and the game will go offline tomorrow, March 22, for at least three 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.
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).
Rare also provided a maintenance schedule for Sea of Thieves. As stated previously, the first occurs tomorrow, March 22.
Sea of Thieves Maintenance Window
- Thursday March 22: 5-8am EDT, 9am–12pm BT
- Saturday March 24th: 5-8am EDT, 9am–12pm BT
- Tuesday March 27th: 4-7am EDT, 9am–12pm BST
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 yesterday, March 20, on Windows 10 PC and Xbox One.
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