Rare, This is getting ridiculous

While i like drew and his talking head videos he is part of the leadership team seeing as he is the production director, i am afraid that his hands are not completely clean in all of the bureaucratic decisions being made in the company.

We will likely never know whom the detrimental decisions are really coming from however its likely more then one person and coming from more then one position

They get a lot of praise for the times they are "transparent" like in this recent update from Drew. Yet the failings have been the same every time. Not listening to the community. They know the feedback about this up coming pointless doubloon removal has mostly been negative. They have not at all been transparent about what is being changed to fix the "problem" other than stating reaper chests and stuff will still reward doubloons but also there will be special FOMO events to boost doubloon income.. Or are doubloon items ONLY available during those weekends? Either way this is another fail on their part and ignoring the community as per usual.

The reason for acts was obvious. Maybe even pressure from Microsoft to boost monthly active users for the sake of a graph. It could have worked but as per usual they failed to manage correctly. The whole update should have been in the works just like older seasons. Just released in parts. Instead they apparently put the whole team on each act so the following acts weren't having work done on them at all until the release of each part. So we had more hands on deck for smaller updates and they still came out flawed? If not what was the other half of the team doing? Perhaps they had layoffs we don't know about so their team has actually gotten smaller. We don't know the behind the scenes at Rare other than Everwilds was canceled and presumably all those developers were let go. Joe Neate hasn't been heard from or seen in like 2+ years? He was the face of SoT. Though I put a lot of the blame of early failings on him since he was "Executive Producer" it may not have been completely fair.

Would it have hurt to show the FOMO doubloon cosmetics coming as faux compensation for doubloon deletion? If they haven't already been designed then what they will be giving us would certainly be rushed and laughable.

Like you said this situation mirrors a lot of the past mistakes. I don't think most people realized how flawed Adventures were and how hugely negative their impact was on the game. In a similar vein to year 1s bilge rat adventures they were sinking valuable resources into developing temporary content in a game that was sorely lacking in content. I made the argument in year 1 that if they kept all that content when players who quit early on came back they would see how much stuff there was to do in the game now!! Instead if someone quit in the first month due to lack of content came back 10 months later the game would have the exact same level of lack of content. It took them a while but eventually they did re-add most of this stuff.

But then they circled back to Adventures, same year 1 mistake. This time adventures were tall tales but FOMO. If you were on insiders you know exactly what happened this entire year... Adventures were a disaster. Some were fun but where are they now? In the dumpster. Rare has had this flawed concept from the start of players sitting in a tavern together sharing tales of the old days. Things long gone which can't be experienced again. "Man you should have been there it was so cool"

Captaincy was a major addition to the game. A lot of moving parts for something technically so simple. It's something I wanted to test out on insiders more than anything else. But they would only test small parts at a time because they had to keep taking down the captaincy update to put out a test build for the upcoming adventures. Captaincy was probably one of the first bigger delays we had seen for seasons. And when the update finally did come out half the stuff didn't work because we had to keep testing adventures instead of captaincy. And the adventures also always came out broken and being FOMO caused panic as they weren't working for the 1st week out of their 2 week limited run. I recall insider builds being "Test out if the flag on the top of your ship is saved between sessions" "test if trinkets can be placed" basically more testing on the cosmetic saving... which also didn't work for MONTHS after release. I remember wanting to test out captaincy voyages more than anything to insure they actually would count toward commendation completion. They only had maybe 1 week where captaincy voyages were even available and there was some bug preventing us from even starting them and this was 1 week before the update went live. So much for testing that the work!

I don't recall which season it was but if I'm not mistaken they actually went and swapped a whole season with a future season because the season that was supposed to be next just couldn't be done in time and was more complex to work out than they expected. Though there was also the addition of guilds which made us skip a whole season as it cause significant delays and honestly the worst guild system I have seen in any game. But at least it allows guild mates to share captaincy status and easy joining off the main menu without having to click 10 times to set sail. Though that's only ever been a problem for the person forming the crew. We've always been able to just lazily (and smartly?) join off the friends list. But while captaincy seemingly only delayed an update by like 3 months people should keep in mind it was under development for probably a year. If i recall they had been testing it out in bits for over 8 months on insiders.

They haven't listened to player feed back in a long time. And the few times they finally have listened usually comes a bit too late. I mean heck we are finally getting shrinking hourglass circles. I can almost guarantee you the person who brought up this idea at Rare got praise for their solution to the hourglass problem. They got all the credit for coming up with this idea when my understanding is that is how fortnite and pubg work? (Haven't played either). But the shrinking circles was a suggestion the day hourglass was released. So hourglass added in November 22, 2022 might as well just call it December at that point (fun fact the whole company took December off that year for the holidays! Nice perk, while it's a personal choice working for the family business I have only had 1 week off in 8 years, working 365 days a year outside of that) So for shrinking circles to finally be making it into the game over 3 years later? Hourglass getting very few updates since it's release when the whole reason it exists is because they neglected to update arena as well so no one played it any more. "Hmmm must be because they don't like arena" or cause you never added new cosmetics to earn.

Those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them... Yet here we are. Looping through the same failed design decisions over and over, not listening to the people who are playing. Pushing away some of the more dedicated of the player base who are just tired of being ignored. Making god awful decisions to try and compensate for not listening to peoples prior complains or requests for clarifications. We begged for years to know if there were plans for doubloons. Should we just convert it all to gold in a time consuming tedious process. They decide to finally add back old seasonal cosmetics for those who missed them but then not all of them because some people cried about losing their hard earned seasonal rewards for being there in the moment. As our friend Burnbacon always says "earned passively" while he's talking about doubloons that applies to every season reward, ancient coins, gold, cosmetics. Heck everything in this game is earned passively. If were deleting doubloons, delete ancient coins and gold as well! Lets go full scorched earth instead of partial scorched earth. The doubloon situation is a problem of their own making and their solution is literally to punish the players. Just like the burning blade. They should have put a cap on how high you could level the thing. They didn't. They also didn't have a method of even knowing how high a level the burning blade was when turning it in. So all they could do to determine who was exploiting was to look at the emissary leader board and draw a line between the casual players and the no lifers and assume everyone above that line was a cheater. I am sure I am not the only one who got falsely punished for this. I know there were guilds out there that had been maxed level prior to the burning blade update and those guilds actually lost levels. All because no one at Rare ever looked at how the leader boards always have some no lifers (like myself) who play for 30+ hours to accomplish a goal to be able to get it out of the way. All I did was level the burning blade to 8, 10 times. That put me over this imaginary line they had drawn for too much emissary ledger. I was probably on the low end too. But you have those on PvE servers stacking loot for a day or 2 before the month rolls over who smash those leader boards the second the new month starts. They have never looked to notice this ridiculousness. The leader boards are such a joke there's literally no reason they shouldn't be allowed on safer seas too. Was a meaningless attempt at some form of competition which just gets ruined by PvE servers.

@realstyli said in Rare, This is getting ridiculous:

Instead they keep working on implementing features and content that never evolves, or takes years to be even revisited (see Hourglass). They're like a building company that only knows how to build foundations... okay, nice foundations, when are we getting the houses built?

I want to be fair on Rare. For a long time, I was an apologist. I have a lot of respect for the hard working developers, the designers, artists, and all the ones doing actual work. I don't think the problem is there, I think it's in decision making. I reiterate what I said elsewhere: this feels like a failure of management. I get the sense this is a company that has a lot of meetings that lead nowhere and plenty of "we'll circle back to that" moments.

This has always been the problem.

The content coming out with each update has ranged from great, like the Anniversary Update, to what I would call "thin" where you get things like Stools. There are bugs and problems, but that is going to happen with any live service game. The difference is their lack of focus on old content, old bugs and QoL.

Assignment of priority and work has always been their weakness. They don't target easy wins, as you said, instead opting to spend time on new content constantly. Teams are constantly working on the next thing, and old things frequently get forgotten. Commodities, Hourglass, Arena, Quest Board are all examples of things that get released and then never touched again. A lot of these things could be improved or better integrated into what the game has evolved into but instead they just left to wither a die.

If something gets revisited, it's years too late (like Hourglass). Things that impact the game negatively stay in the game way too long. The impact of diving on the game and server ecosystem needs to be reevaluated. All of the map trackers and visibility systems need to be revisited and a lot of them removed. Servers feel empty because of the huge increase in inter-server movement brought on by these elements; the matchmaking issues they are investigating are a symptom and not a cause.

There does need to be a certain amount of effort devoted to 'new' things to keep a live service game fresh, but a lot of the stuff that they seem to be focused on isn't all that exciting or inspired. The problem is that if you constantly need 'new' stuff every update, you're going to be releasing some uninspired stuff every other month just to meet that target. No one is going to miss the scrapped S19 stuff if we want to be honest about it. Focus on less new things - package them into bigger drops that happen once or twice a year. We need faster response to issues hurting the game and QoL features that remove pain points that affect day-to-day play.

@tintintheboy said in Rare, This is getting ridiculous:

@d3adst1ck said in Rare, This is getting ridiculous:

@realstyli said in Rare, This is getting ridiculous:
the matchmaking issues they are investigating are a symptom and not a cause.

I agree, but why on earth does someone at rare not be putting two and two together. It's obvious the direct cause is diving, yet they think it's something with the matchmaking system. Why?

I imagine it is being talked about internally, but they are looking for other things to try first. I don't think these adjustments to matchmaking are going to change much, and might create new problems (messing with the range that players can appear around you, for one) but it does point back to management assigning development time to the wrong areas.

@tintintheboy A new engine would take several years to migrate to and likely add a bunch of new bugs. Unreal 5 optimization also isn't great.

@karminiumsot said in Rare, This is getting ridiculous:

So you have a new engine, to place a terrible code in?

could be wrong but i think the code is bad because of the engine. they could upgrade the engine and organize the code, but i have a feeling they'd just copy paste
[mod edit]

That is not how engines work, also to get sea of thieves working with the water physics and stuff the had to do ALOT of customisation to the Unreal engine, this is also why during development they had to choose to stop updating it every time a new update to the engine came in and it is highly likely this same limitation that is preventing them from upgrading to UE5 in the first place.

A new engine is not a magical fix all bugs button.

The engine is also not the main issue sea of thieves is running into imho, the game is bloated with alot of features, but they all lack any sort of long term vision.

The idea for the game are endless (Flameheart, GMU, smugglers etc f.i.) however then they finally bring in flameheart and it seems like nobody internally has even asked, ok we bring him back in, this big badguy and we put him in this rickety hideout with a cool cave beneath…. “Then what?”

And now we have a static NPC that coexists within the same realm as his arch nemesis another static npc…. Where is the promised war, where is the drama etc etc…. Nah nah, lets add a skull fort and this time we give the cloud a funny hat….. ok but what are we going to do next season ? I know it, we add another skull fort, but this time we reuse the old red skull cloud from years ago….

Ok do these forts do anything interesting, yes the funny hat fort has a big chance of mega stashes during its introduction, this way after that period nobody cares about it anymore because 9/10 times it has trash loot otherwise…. Okay mega stashes cool, what about the mechanics of the red cloud fort…. Ooh, ooh i know lets dump all the games bullet sponge bosses in there and add a new loot item, the orb of the banished, ooh cool is that really new… nope its the same orb from the skelly camps with nothing special apart from a color swap

But we gonna use that orb next season for a new mechanic in which it gaines value by doing activities, this mechanic is done, the voyage has been trough insiders and just needs some polish…. Yeah no we f’d up all this development is now cancelled, as is development on the new kraken encounter. Because we thought it would be genius to add sea forts 2.0 with extra walls around it and no special mechanics just a new name “Garrisons” completely new content we can now ignore again for years to come.

It seems like they have a contractual obligation to make it the originally promised 10 years,
Mike chapman: “We have plans for at least 10 years”
However no such plans really existed