Commitment to Player Safety - State of Play

Thank you for finally addressing it. Locking HG behind level is a great idea, let's hope it's a high enough level that it makes a difference. My only concern is that it will shift cheater's focus from HG to general adventure. Let's hope that won't be the case.

Many use cheating to level up faster in PvP (Hourglass), the game itself encourages people to use cheating, since most people don't have the patience or enthusiasm to level up in PvP because it takes years (Playing Legit).

• Take away the time-consuming difficulty of climbing in PvP, and you'll see that many people will climb to achieve their goals and then move on to PvE.

HE MAIN GOAL OF CHEATING IN THE GAME IS TO QUICKLY UPGRADE THE HOURGLASS. Rare is also to blame for encouraging this.

This post while good, also has bo mention of the tracking abilities which are plaguing streamers and other players on the 'list'. While I understand bot wanting to discuss specific cheats, this issue is nearly as major as the yellow beard one, as it prevents targeted players from playing sea of thieves at all.

I have to say all likelihood is that a level req won't really help. Making it so cheaters have to play to level 20 or something is just going to boost online alt account selling businesses. Also just going to increase the interest in loot exploits/cheats. And it's going to negatively impact the new players that come to the game exclusively to play PvP. This level req might discourage a few cheaters but ultimately at a base level you should be trying to shut down exploitive communities and ban the cheaters through cheat detection. This is a solution that may stall them for a day, but it won't stop them for a week.

Thank you so much for addressing these issues. Big win on the hourglass lock and improved chat filtering. I look forward to the implementation of these solutions and appreciate the teams work on the issues.

Good stuff.

Alongside our game security, we are aware of the impact that ban evasion has within the experience and how frustrating it is to see malicious actors circumventing permanent account bans. We are exploring ways to mitigate against this at both a game and platform level.

Why can't you ban the steam accounts that the cheaters use as well as their Xbox accounts? All it takes is 10 minutes to make a new Microsoft account, link it to steam in-game and then cheaters and other ban evaders can get back to playing. If you banned or hardware banned the associated Steam accounts (as all or most cheaters play from steam) cheaters would be forced to either quit or purchase the game.

This would certainly put a majority of cheaters off of SOT if they were continuously being forced to buy the game repeatedly to keep playing. It is too easy to ban-evade if you own the game on Steam.

One thing i would like to suggest to help community sentiment is I’d say we should also maybe introduce a program where people can sign up to be mods of sort. Make it so us chosen experienced players can report people and have a guaranteed line to developers who will pay attention when we report someone. Theres nothing worse than coming across people who are clearly cheating , reporting said issues and hearing nothing back in return. It feels like screaming into the void. Even a simple No what happened was fine/ yes there was a breach of conduct , here is what we did about it. I understand there is only so much you can do about people making a new account and being awful , but there have been multiple times I have come across golden Athena curses / skeletons in hourglass and they are the rudest mf's I have come across.People who are toxic right out of the gate for no reason should have no right talking / messaging other players and should have the option to be muted from typing / talking. Maybe a 3 confirmed strikes and your out?.

@mogetius-ita The vast majority of games and online community based platforms do NOT use humans to review every report. It's extremely common to use an automated system as a first line of review.

@mamasnoot I know it and I think it's unfair that we adopt a system where a machine without critical thinking can decide whether to disrupt a person's gaming experience or even be used as a weapon against those who advertise the product instead.

Thank you for your ongoing work to address these issues!

I'm so happy that the rare team is finally coming to grips with this issue.
Whether it works or not, I want to minimize the chances of encountering cheaters. Thank you guys.

I know it's hard to eliminate, and I'm glad there was an official statement. I just hope we see some follow through

@goofycs-811 just to clarify they can change their own game files so whatever they want appears on their own desktop, but that is not visible to other players. That is likely an alt with access to high level guilds, if alts are active accounts can and will be switched out.

Will we ever get the PS5-style voice chat indicators on PC and Xbox? This would really help for reporting with evidence. As would better compatibility with Shadowplay and Game Bar clips.

For example, on PC I have to either get very close to someone to hopefully see their Gamertag or enable the speech to text override myself (and still hope for the best because it doesn't catch everything).

Meanwhile on PS5, from what I've seen, their Gamertag is just presented to you by default if you can hear them at all.

Thank you for this update. Obviously we hope that the block behind reputation cannot be circumvented by voting using a qualifying account. The block should prevent the activation of the hourglass if an account that does not meet the requirement if is on the ship. And if it enters a match that has already started, the ineligible account must be blocked at the ferry of the damned or even be blocked at entry via bearderror.

All in all, a good response. I know a lot of people had been against level restrictions but, realistically, it is probably the best approach to deal with the situation.

We also plan to introduce a system that will monitor the content of chat messages more closely and provide moderation behind the scenes.

This is good and I'm surprised it hasn't been a thing already. I hope that any actions follow a manual review. My only real concern here is that speech to text can often be unreliable with thick accents such as my Irish one, and it's incorrectly suggested I've said some stuff I haven't in the past. So, yeah, good idea in theory as long as the tools are used correctly. Typically, these bad actors tend to spam their messages, so maybe that's another flag to look for.

In any case, thank you, Drew and team, for taking the time to address the current issues.

As a security researcher and player, knowing previously that some CSM reps had their accounts compromised, I can only assume that's how they managed to even find the tools in order to target.

I hope the increased text chat focus means that you'll be able to flag players who are advertising cheat clients, in order to get EAC to scan and fingerprint the processes running on their computers to find common threads.

I also hope this means that you have tooling in place to verify Gamertags of people interacted with, so that people stop getting banned with I and L substitutions and other typo's, because just because someone has video, doesn't mean that it wasn't faked with a Gamertag replacement filter to make it appear like a player was being toxic.

Glad you mentioned platform changes, because as a Microsoft Studio, surely this is a cross-game problem, and that tricks learnt with say, Halo Infinite should be applicable to Sea of Thieves, and given that MS make both Xbox and Windows, I've always thought that there should be a MS solution to anti-cheat or process protection akin to Google's Android app attestation, to prevent modifications to files or processes, especially on windows 11 with TPM modules, I foresee a future where there could be a "secure environment" matchmaking option which only allows windows 11 in some form of gaming sandbox mode, akin to xboxes OS. Granted it wouldn't be as strong as Xbox's hardware, but it should be able to get reasonably close.

Altho I respect the Transparency... NOW.
You could've done this way sooner..

Most of these implementations I see, I have no problems with.
I will be worried for a Surge in Cheating Activity in Adventure tho (Because of the soon to be Restrictions upon HG which they usually reside on.).

That said:

We also plan to introduce a system that will monitor the content of chat messages more closely and provide moderation behind the scenes.

If you do, please make sure that the Speech- to- Text Interpretation isn't included/ or improved upon: Often Speech to text gets interpreted to **** or profanity.
Keep that in mind.

If you go monitoring Live Text prompts/ whether written or Interpreted these might contain untruthful generations.

EDIT: Also, regarding this topic. How will you filter out accidental Music/ TV/ Background (Family, Friends)- hotmics that the system inteprets the Vocals of (If they do contain profanity or any words that might "Violate" or "Get caught" by that new- and what I assume to be automated system)

• As part of coming updates, we’ll be placing restrictions on certain parts of the experience that will require play time in order to access, such as locking Hourglass play behind a reputation lock. While these were not part of the feature’s initial design, we want to add friction for cheat developers by placing barriers on cheaters to stop them impacting your play experience.

This this literally changing nothing. People have and will always buy accounts. Now it's just going to be even worse. How about you straight up learned how to hardware ban people, or even go as far as to have their xbox account completely terminated? This is a really poor solution for the problem to be honest.

Locking hourglass behind playtime or reputation is a horrible change.

It can take a while to find matches and even then, the game mode is just full of try hards so it’s hard to enjoy the game mode. Preventing a chunk of player base from entering the game mode just further worsens the hourglass experience since it will take even longer to find games and the game mode will just be full of no life try hards that all have the exact same strategy so the game mode becomes even more boring.

Before some PvP sweats come complaining that I need to git gud or something, I’m level 368 Servant and 202 Guardian with a positive win rate.

So yeah Rare, fix the game by improving your cheat detection software instead of slapping a bandaid. I mean literally, this hourglass change just slows down cheaters instead of actually removing them. How hard is it to detect cheaters that teleport? You guys should contact Riot for their Vanguard software.

What will you do to solve the fishing rod glitch? That allow players control the fly easily and get a deck shot easily? It's a real problem