“All I can say is that the plans and ideas for the game were bigger than what was released but there were never any solid plans on extra game mechanics. The main pirate ship was constantly being worked on the whole time I was there. That’s 2 years for 1 asset. It became a bit of a joke among us.” - Artist Rob Beddall, former Rare employee.
This is an article written by a fellow forum user that is no longer among us @WilliamHerschel. He writes on many aspects of the game's developmental cycle based on our 9 month journey through SoT feedback.
My personal obervations first and foremost is that we are no longer having good forum traction on long form and well thought out Suggestions, rather just having too much low effort, complain based and repetitive Feedback. I personally have lost any and all hope to get any form of discussion going on my own suggestion threads, although I don't consider them to be the best this site ever had (my ego has indeed limits), I do pride myself in having most of the time been correct in adressing key parts of the game that require additions or changes, but more importantly there were forum posts here in this forum that far surpassed mine in so many ways and got the traction they needed, but most of the features advocated in such threads are still missing from being shown in any roadmap. For example this thread which has been around from the get go unanimously showed that the top two things people wanted were ships and quests, however the very firsst content update we got was the megalodon, followed by bilge rat adventures (which aren't the quests we actually wanted) and then we finally got the new ship.
The above linked article exposes this issue in a few ways.
"Rare decided to address [the lack of content] with a broad brush by building the late-game around commendation grinding and time based-events. While this perhaps temporarily created the illusion that the game now had “more things to do.” They were quickly faced with criticism about how building events around commendation farming detracts from the overall freedom of the sandbox. Instead of giving people tools and letting them explore and interact with other users in unpredictable ways. The game now dictates users to perform specific behaviors in order to check item x,y,z off of an ever growing grocery list of tasks."
To bring it back to the point I made about suggestions losing traction in favour of "Feedback + Complaints", I have not seen many more attempts at big content suggestions for the game. I am mostly seeing people constantly and repeatedly bash current features, and I get why, it's frustrating to have a new feature have some small detail that doesn't conform to every single idealization some of you had in mind when you saw the content roadmap, however I must state that this is completely irrelevant and detracts from the central focal issue of Sea of Thieves, we do 3 repetitive quests for 200+ hours until we hit legend to do the same quests for more 100+ hours. The very few that adress this issue get their voices silenced by the ever growing moans of the entitled (I hate this word) community that needs the game to remain unchallenging and acessible over being good, nuanced and with a deeper gameplay loop. All players suffer from this, not just the PvP people or just the PvE people, literally everyone: streamers, casuals, hardcore, flavour of the month people, guilds, children... whatever type of player archetype you may have suffers from this lack of focus on the feedback. The biggest issue of SoT isn't how you have to do your athena's 10 journey again, it's that the athena's journey isn't fun to begin with, that is why you hate doing it again. It isn't that you died to a volcano, it's that you died to a volcano doing a fetch quest. It isn't that you lost your progress to griefers, it's that you mindlessly did a task over and over again and it sucks that you have to do that repetitive task once more. The biggest issue of SoT is that it's still a beta, a disguised early access title with no full game release date.