As a 40-something software engineer who also likes to play Sea of Thieves, this is what I heard while listening to podcast #5 - https://youtu.be/OuyScbzVeSE
Server Issues: Sorry guys, we're just SO successful we can't keep our servers running! Actually it's because we keep chasing new features and ideas but never pay off technical debt and now it's catching up to us. But don't worry, our solution is to hire more people specifically to pay off the technical debt, even though this will almost certainly frustrate and burn out everyone on that team with an impossible task, but that way everyone else can still keep chasing new shiny stuff instead of doing boring things like fixing bugs they created.
Hit Registration: Did you know how hard it is to calculate the physics for moving projectiles between freely floating objects? Fluid dynamics is hard! Oh, also our game generally has a fundamental hit registration problem besides that. Somehow our hit registration accuracy is intrinsically tied to server performance, so to fix this we're going to take the easy way out and implement hitscan instead. We'll then talk about how we're going to test this hitscan system for feedback, while simultaneously not talking about how we're removing the Arenas which would be the best place to test changes to new combat mechanics. This is because despite what we just said we are really only concerned with overall server performance and not the PVP combat experience with this decision, as we already know that competitive players generally hate hitscan because it makes it easier for players to cheat.
Players Numbers per Session: The game was designed around a six ship population, but we've been running at five instead since server performance is so terrible because we don't manage technical debt properly while constantly adding new features. We even had a 16 player cap that made it completely possible for players to do the basic math and game the server mechanics in such a way where a galleon crew could go around bullying everyone else on the server because they knew everyone else was in smaller ships than them. Woops, sorry about that. Anyways we'll utter one sentence about upcoming architecture changes that are probably actually very important to this subject then move on.
Cheating: All games have cheating, cheating sucks, but we don't really have much of a cheating problem in Sea of Thieves right now, even though we do take every report of cheating very seriously. Also woops most of our current reports of cheating are actually related to poor server performance. We'll openly admit that we hate dealing with the problem of cheaters in the first place because we'd rather be working on cool new stuff that creates bugs in our legacy code which we'll ignore until later. We won't even pause for a moment here to be forward thinking in any way and consider the potential impact of changing weapons to use hitscan and how this will likely make cheating an even larger issue in the future.
The Future of Combat: We realize our player to player combat is currently pretty lousy. We'll ramble on for a few minutes here about how hard it is to get first person melee combat right, even though there are several other melee slashers we won't mention that were created by much smaller studios and have been out for years now doing this quite successfully. Then we'll allude to how we're basically outsourcing the creation of an updated combat system to a new team that doesn't even exist yet, which may or may not produce something in a couple of years or so. Will this line up with Skull & Bones eventually coming out? Stay tuned!
Solo Slooping: As eternal optimists who have this rose colored lens through which we observe our community, we can't recognize that open crew matchmaking is so awful that many players would rather just solo sloop than deal with the often worse than useless crewmates they get matched with, or how after that person sets the ship on fire then leaves ten minutes later it could be an hour or more before someone else is matched back into that crew. We'll talk about creating a task force or feature team or discuss even creating an entire season of content to improve the solo sloop experience, instead of focusing on improvements that could be made to open crew matchmaking that would more beneficially improve the game overall, because that's a boring thing to think about working on.
Spawn Camping: We start by misunderstanding the purpose of spawn camping, by assuming this generally happens to prevent a crew from repairing a ship to ensure that it sinks, rather than acknowledging how spawn campers will often bail your ship for you just to keep it afloat long enough to kill you again. Then we'll lament a bit about how the game seems to lack a referee to step in and address these spawn camping issues, despite us at every other time espousing a "tools not rules" approach to the game's design. We'll then vaguely tease that we're thinking about some big ideas internally to address this in the future before revealing nothing further meaningful and ending the podcast.
