I've been away from SoT for months... I come back, buy crates from the merchant, and they cannot be taken from the representative.
How is it that this has never been fixed permanently? This has been a problem with Sea of Thieves for as long as I can remember... small bugs that make the experience harder to enjoy never getting fixed. It cannot be that hard.
@grumpyw01f I don't know the first thing about coding, but it might be harder than we think. These guys just fixed the HG so give them some credit.
Meanwhile there are ways to get back your crates; usually buying something from the HC or using an emissary flag does the trick.
Its only been happening for what a couple of years now. And its right at the start of the game for the whole world to see. There gotta be something wild going on behind closed doors. I think the subject came up in a developer video a long time ago and they basically said it was nobody's job to fix it and that's the last I heard on it.
Edit: I went and looked around after I had posted, I believe the season 14 podcast from nov. 29th, 2024 they mentioned they had assigned an engineer to work on it (somewhere around the 20 minute mark) can find it on youtube. So they know about it, but no telling where it falls in the triage with all the challenges they have happening.
@metal-ravage
All things aside, thanks for the tip. One of the reasons I disliked the quest changes is that it removed my "buying a quest" workaround... glad to see that there are other solutions.
@theblackbellamy said:
They should just spawn the damn things on the ship as soon as they're purchased. Might prevent dupe exploits too?
Should of, would of, could of, that should be RARE's current tagline for the game.
So many broken bugs still present after months/years.
I think I have a somewhat controversial take. But I hope someone in a position to do so makes it happen.
The crate pickup bug has been around ever since Rare tried to patch out dup-supply purchasing (which you can now do again under some circumstances.) There are so many checks it is doing that it glitches. That's pretty obvious considering how many ways people found around the first blocks. Harpoon while buying. Do an emote, then jump, the sacrifice a chicken. People will always find ways around convoluted code.
My take? Simplify the code. It hurts performance. It hurts the legitimate experience. And it does NOT help with "illegitimate" experiences. It only hurts honest players. This isn't just about crates. DGE animation cancelling has made guns clunkier. Bucket animation cancelling has made "bucket reg" a thing. Food reg a thing. Splashback in places that makes no sense. People sink by playing the right way because of these bugs. It is horrendous.
They need to do a wholesale rip out of all the exploit checks. Don't replace it. Don't try to streamline it. Go all the way back to the code that was stable, worked, and is easy to maintain. I wouldn't be surprised if this also significantly improves performance, because right now the game has to do dozens of checks to see if someone did an exploit before deciding to allow an action.
Then. Add simple back-end metrics. Did a ship set sail with extra shipwright supplies? Yellowbeard them for a day. Use Rare's new ban policies. They were happy to ban people for behavior issues (cussing, slurs, etc.) And bans serve two purposes: Change behavior (yellowbeard) and protect the rest of the community (redbeard.) Using exploits is, in the end, just another behavior that is unacceptable and instead of trying to do ever-more convoluted technical blocks, just disincentivize the behavior! Ban them. Make it unacceptable. Make the downside worse than the upside. Checks can be "lazy" instead of needing to be done in real-time. The code is cleaner. The game runs better. The desired effect of preventing exploits is accomplished as players learn they can no longer do certain things.
Rare has historically been reluctant to do this, but I think it has reached a critical-mass thing where the can't ignore the problems anymore.
Issue I see with that it may hurt people who unknown to them are playing with an exploiter as their ship (which they might have joined later) is sailing with too much supplies.
Also, yellowbeard for just a day seems way to lenient.
I think you may be deluding yourself in asking for RARE to fix their code/make it simplified i'm sure they would do it if they had the time and luxury to do so!
To me it just feels like they are chucking things in the wall hopping it sticks and quickly band-aid fixing the issues while others are still present as you mentioned plus other exploits that need addressing after a few years in the game (Blunderbomb Galleon exploit).
@strangeness said
People sink by playing the right way because of these bugs. It is horrendous.
This is hands down why my OG friend group stopped playing the game after 10 hours when hit reg was super bad back then. (Still is but better). Getting a clear kill that doesn't register and having the fight flip on it's head because of it I can't count how many players have quit the game off it over the years I've been mingled into the community. Too much to count, and that's one out of the many...
I considered the collateral damage issue before I posted. I didn't deep dive it. But here is a brief set of thoughts:
Most exploits (animation cancels) are per user and that user gets banned. Supply dupes, ban the users participating. Again, lazy metrics could find this out. When a "new" exploit like harpooning a player while buying comes out, add that metric to find out what two players were doing it, ban them.
Alternatively, if it is a crew thing, Rare's new point system towards bans protects the random player from getting overtly caught up too much. Which is why a 1-day first time offense is fine. If a player is consistently getting caught up, chances are they are participating or joining crews who they now are participating. And each offense escalates the time. So 1-day may seem lenient, but its that warning shot across the bow to start behaving. I'd be fine if it escalated all the way to permanent bans for people who continue to knowingly use exploits. A vast majority of people would stop if their pirate is at risk of being lost. And the code is cleaner, faster, more performant. Win-win.
@strangeness said in How has this not been fixed:
I considered the collateral damage issue before I posted. I didn't deep dive it. But here is a brief set of thoughts:
Most exploits (animation cancels) are per user and that user gets banned. Supply dupes, ban the users participating. Again, lazy metrics could find this out. When a "new" exploit like harpooning a player while buying comes out, add that metric to find out what two players were doing it, ban them.
Alternatively, if it is a crew thing, Rare's new point system towards bans protects the random player from getting overtly caught up too much. Which is why a 1-day first time offense is fine. If a player is consistently getting caught up, chances are they are participating or joining crews who they now are participating. And each offense escalates the time. So 1-day may seem lenient, but its that warning shot across the bow to start behaving. I'd be fine if it escalated all the way to permanent bans for people who continue to knowingly use exploits. A vast majority of people would stop if their pirate is at risk of being lost. And the code is cleaner, faster, more performant. Win-win.
Punishing innocent players - even with a one-day yellowbeard - would become a very undesirable side-effect and a thing that nefarious players might abuse to get innocent players a ban. Didn't Rare Yellowbeard people who sold a large amount of fish that were gotten by an exploit ? So people would give away fish and see other players removed from the server (or was that just a meme ?)
What if, in one month a person joins two or more exploiters, they will get their 12 points rather quickly and either never play open crew again or just play another game.
Regarding the ship supplies exploit though, I doubt they keep tabs on the origins of the supplies of a ship, but if Rare logs purchases this can be solved without punishing the whole crew. There is a crew-wide cooldown, so if two or more members of a crew buy the same thing within a minute from the shipwright (or two or more buy the same crate from the same MA or HC NPC within a minute) - at least one of them is exploiting (depending on the actions that need to be taken, maybe all need to be aware of the exploit); certainly if they do it more than once in a certain time-frame.
