@viperishemu2992 Well you aren't right though.
Since people with gamepass have never bought the game.
Therefore your example of "purchasing" the game as a product kind of fall flat.

I will agree that the updates came with no extra fees.
The question is whether they were part of the financial plan or not.

Let's take as an example "early access".
When you purchase the early access, you buy an unfinished product, or an ongoing service.

When they add stuff to the "early access" you don't hear people saying: "IT'S FREE".
Instead people say: "Well at least they are still working on the game, and trying to give me my money's worth".

This game is a service. And the closest model with have for it is "early access".

I think keeping an open mind and recognising that we are not quite sure what we bought is best. Since reading the Terms of Sale is not very helpfull as to determining what we got.

@wilbymagicbear

Here's how I feel.

I personally have harped and begged for Bilge Rat Adventures to make a comeback. I've made post after post, comment after comment, expressing my disdain of the constant Mercenary Voyages. High value loot flowing through the seas has desensitized me to the little spark I used to get when my shovel uncovered a captain's chest. It's sad.

But Rare have subtly responded to the Mercenary Voyage criticism by saying "we don't have time to make these every month, it wouldn't be sustainable" so I'm trusting that they have carefully evaluated their time and resources available here.

Rather than being upset about the lack of Bilge Rat Adventures (which I would still desperately rather see instead of Mercenary Voyages) I've decided to make the most of what we're getting. Blackpowder Stashes was fun for a week. Dark Relics is a step in a better direction in the sense that it gave these voyages a "collect them all" dynamic along with adding the Reaper Chest.

So yes, I have enjoyed this one thus far, but there are still many, many improvements that need to be made to the Mercenary Voyage if this is how they intend to update the game on a regular basis.

So what really bothers me?

• Nerfs for the mindless and impatient

I hate hate hate how the game keeps getting made easier for every sailor who cries that they don't have time to gather loot and XP or who can't be bothered to use their brains for a meager 5 seconds and attempt to figure out a challenge. Dumbing things down to accommodate these people is not good at all

• The Most Engaged Players are being Neglected

An objective way to identify the most engaged players by who is a Pirate Legend, and Pirate Legend is still in beta as far as I'm concerned. Content for Legends was shoved off to the side in the beginning in an effort to get more ground level content in the game, which is fine.

But we haven't heard any news about Pirate Legends or if the whole thing has just been abandoned altogether. They're not even being bothered to drop in a few Legend cosmetics for us to earn while we wait for a proper Legend update. The Ghost cosmetic set has not been updated in over a year. What the hell are they doing with Legends? Just tell us something is coming, please.

Apart from the bugs that are affecting combat at the moment, these are my biggest issues with the game right now. If they have to use Mercenary Voyages to hold us over while they figure out solutions to these things, then be my guest.

Microsoft and Rare constantly skew, spin, and cherry pick the numbers and data they want to show. Even the data they have ended up putting together on a pretty snapshot shows a not so pretty picture. It echoes what the rest of us keep saying. It is what it is and no matter how you adjust that rose colored spy glass of yours will the spin change the reality of the state of the game, what Rare is not doing, and what keeps coming.

@x-crowheart-x said in Update feels lazy:

Sorry but we are definitely not looking at the same horizon. By the things you constantly say your spy glass definitely has rose colored lenses.

It is more than a slump and you should know that. We are getting way more downs and it all will continue to slide down faster and faster. Unless they listen. Each update, each “filler”, as you call it, gets worse and worse and they have been told so each month all across the forums.

The posts are growing and getting louder and louder. Rare is not listening. They have not month after month. They keep telling us it is great and the majority tell us it is not. Then comes the little dev updates that try to sell the update like a used car salesman trying to unload lemons.

The horizon the majority of us see looks mindlessly repetitive, grindy, and increasingly empty.

You throw the word majority around carelessly. Majority to what exactly? Forum users? The wider community?

You do realize that bad news travels faster right? If people are upset, they are more likely to make their complaints heard. However, if people are happy, they're not as likely to sing their praise. Just because the complaints are more vocal doesn't necessarily make them the majority. Only Rare and Microsoft know their numbers, and they can easily use that data to indicate happy vs. unhappy players (by aggregating complaints vs. total players). If the number is small enough, and they're still profiting, then it's safe to assume that players are still mostly happy, or at least content. Could they do better? Probably, but then again, that could be said of just about anybody.

@x-crowheart-x said in Update feels lazy:

Sorry but we are definitely not looking at the same horizon. By the things you constantly say your soy glass definitely has rose colored lenses.

It is more than a slump and you should know that. We are getting way more downs and it all will continue to slide down faster and faster. Unless they listen. Each update, each “filler”, as you call it, gets worse and worse and they have been told so each month all across the forums.

The posts are growing and getting louder and louder. Rare is not listening. They have not month after month. They keep telling us it is great and the majority tell us it is not. Then comes the little dev updates that try to sell the update like a used car salesman trying to unload lemons.

The horizon the majority of us see looks mindlessly repetitive, grindy, and increasingly empty.

I am starting to see your point. I am not as excited to get on these days like I used to be.

Sorry but we are definitely not looking at the same horizon. By the things you constantly say your spy glass definitely has rose colored lenses.

It is more than a slump and you should know that. We are getting way more downs and it all will continue to slide down faster and faster. Unless they listen. Each update, each “filler”, as you call it, gets worse and worse and they have been told so each month all across the forums.

The posts are growing and getting louder and louder. Rare is not listening. They have not month after month. They keep telling us it is great and the majority tell us it is not. Then comes the little dev updates that try to sell the update like a used car salesman trying to unload lemons.

The horizon the majority of us see looks mindlessly repetitive, grindy, and increasingly empty.

It's not that Rare is not listening. It's that they're working. Yes, it's filler - Rare has gone on record saying pretty much that, but it's not bad filler. Better things are on the horizon, and as an Insider, you should know that.

Every game has slumps or slow periods of the year; at least Rare is doing something about it.

@galactic-geek said in Update feels lazy:

@x-crowheart-x said in Update feels lazy:

@letslipthedogs said in Update feels lazy:

Trust me on this! It's a lot worst when you hate it and pay for it too!

Very true! Does not change how bad all this constant recycled content really is. Or how it is drastically hurting the game and wider community.

Is it really though? I don't think it is - the game is doing fine for the most part, and I think the wider community could really care less because they're just playing the game and enjoying it.

Disagree totally with this. Since all these mercenary themed voyages that recycle the same content that came out within the first year, the game has become extremely stale and empty. Each month it has gotten progressively worse.

The reaper chest spark excitement reminiscent of the high times sailing the Sea of Thieves in the past. It only lasted two days. The sea went back to an empty sea with the trend of just sloops, mostly solo players. You occasionally see a Pirate Legend on one of these sloops. Mostly it is new players.

My spouse and I have been using looking for group. Use to find experienced players that sailed since launch. Pirates who loved the Sea of Thieves when it has been at it’s worse and best. Now it is new players who joined in the past few months. We get the occasional Summit brought me to the game. Most though do not have a reason they just play it once and a while. Most cannot find anyone to play with. So many players from launch have left Sea of Thieves behind.

All the mercenary voyages just as the OP said are lazy recycled voyages, some with very minor tweaks. Now it looks like with the Dark Relics Rare is turning these voyages into more of a grind. They all have been to inspire PvP. They all fizzle faster and faster with each update. No content to inspire other ways to play and other type of player interactions. No content for the bigger part of the community.

Tall Tales showed us there was potential for more creative voyages. In some ways intentional or not it created PvP opportunities that lead to a lot of camping and griefing. With improvements this aspect of the game has so much potential to grow and expand the game. Too bad Rare cannot drop in at least a chapter like part of a continuing story.

If you read the forums instead of criticizing, demeaning, and attacking posters, you would see the majority want way more than the mercenary voyages and what Rare keeps pushing out in monthly updates. They want more truly new content that grows and expand what we have done so far. They want more content that inspires other player behavior than PvP. Behavior like what the best of the Bildge Rats Adventures did. So many Pirate Legends sitting at Athena 10 want that real adventure Rare told us was the true beginning of the game and is not there.

Rare will not show us a road map. They say over and over they are not ready to talk about it for months now. Over a half a year. They say they are transparent and they are not. They say the opposite of way things are and do the opposite of what all the players want.

Players keep telling Rare over and month after month here across all the forums. Rare is not listening. We are just going to get more and worse of the same until they do. The cash shop is just going to add to all the woes. I know you really care about the game. All us other players are not wrong. We need to get Rare to listen to everyone so the game can become way better for every pirate that sails the Sea of Thieves.

@x-crowheart-x said in Update feels lazy:

@letslipthedogs said in Update feels lazy:

Trust me on this! It's a lot worst when you hate it and pay for it too!

Very true! Does not change how bad all this constant recycled content really is. Or how it is drastically hurting the game and wider community.

Is it really though? I don't think it is - the game is doing fine for the most part, and I think the wider community could really care less because they're just playing the game and enjoying it.

@letslipthedogs said in Update feels lazy:

Trust me on this! It's a lot worst when you hate it and pay for it too!

Very true! Does not change how bad all this constant recycled content really is. Or how it is drastically hurting the game and wider community.

@x-crowheart-x said in Update feels lazy:

Being free does not automatically mean everyone must be happy and not say anything. Silence can be acceptance that nothing is wrong.

Maybe if Rare actually was making much better content they could sell it as DLC. I would pay for good content. Especially content that truly grows and expand the game past all this year and a half old content constantly recycled.

Trust me on this! It's a lot worst when you hate it and pay for it too!

@shut-ur-mouth said in Update feels lazy:

@sweltering-nick said in Update feels lazy:

@wilbymagicbear said in Update feels lazy:

@blazedrake100 The Reaper's Chests are kind of cool, at least in concept, but they just feel so half-a*sed. They couldn't be bothered to so much as make a new texture. It seems like they don't care, or they're just so slow it took them an entire month to make/recycle 7 new textures.

Box of Wondrous Secrets:

Reaper's Chest:

No, it's not a recolour, it's a RETEXTURE... Meaning at least some effort was involved. :P

These things happen QUITE OFTEN in many games... same model, different texture, etc... Re-using assets is part of game design, because if they always try to make something utterly unique, development time and resources would be streched SO thin updates would be even slower to release.

This is literally a mercenary update, like all the others, just taken a step further in quality... if anything, this is far LESS lazy, than what they've cooked up so far with mercenary updates... I don't understand why you are complaining... Did you think this update was a major update or something? ._.

I never noticed that there is blood coming out of the chest of secrets. Hmmm

Reapers looks black to me. More likely tar which is what was used to seal things but why you’d have red leaking out of the Secrets is anybody’s guess.

Edit. In both cases it’s the same colour as the seal so it does look as though it’s just wax. And sadly, exactly the same graphic. I wouldn’t have thought designing a tiny asset like a chest would have been a stretch but there we are.

@bactatankbill said in Update feels lazy:

@shut-ur-mouth I thought it was wax... like ancient tamper-proofing... could be blood though... That has a lot of interestingly sinister implications if so...

Actually, I think you are right. I never seen blood used in this game. I don't think they would add it to the chest. But if it is blood, I wonder was is inside the chest.

@shut-ur-mouth I thought it was wax... like ancient tamper-proofing... could be blood though... That has a lot of interestingly sinister implications if so...

@sweltering-nick said in Update feels lazy:

@wilbymagicbear said in Update feels lazy:

@blazedrake100 The Reaper's Chests are kind of cool, at least in concept, but they just feel so half-a*sed. They couldn't be bothered to so much as make a new texture. It seems like they don't care, or they're just so slow it took them an entire month to make/recycle 7 new textures.

Box of Wondrous Secrets:

Reaper's Chest:

No, it's not a recolour, it's a RETEXTURE... Meaning at least some effort was involved. :P

These things happen QUITE OFTEN in many games... same model, different texture, etc... Re-using assets is part of game design, because if they always try to make something utterly unique, development time and resources would be streched SO thin updates would be even slower to release.

This is literally a mercenary update, like all the others, just taken a step further in quality... if anything, this is far LESS lazy, than what they've cooked up so far with mercenary updates... I don't understand why you are complaining... Did you think this update was a major update or something? ._.

I never noticed that there is blood coming out of the chest of secrets. Hmmm

I mean, you really can't complain about the monthly updates when Rare has come out and said themselves that they're filler until the next big content patch.

It has its upsides and downsides - a lot of people, myself included, can find it hard to scrounge up the time needed to play a standard-length session of Adventure mode. Meaning some of us will miss out on the time-limited nature of some of these adventures.

On the other hand, I really like the idea of adding more high-risk-high-reward items and tasks to the game, like the Reaper's Chest. I also hope the Dark Artifact items stay in the game in some capacity, either as loot you can find washed ashore or as rewards from special Order of Souls missions.

@viperishemu2992 It's not a gift. They give us content, we give them Microsoft loyalty and future whale entertainment. It's a transaction.

@fearthebeardig said in Update feels lazy:

@viperishemu2992 you're wrong. You think "why, im never wrong!" because the game was a joke when it came out, anniversary update was the state of the game as it should be released. This updates are a part of our payment, it was promissed and thats why the most of us are here. Constant updates and something to do in this sandbox!

Actually I'm right and your wrong. And I suspect that it will always be that way. But thanks for wasting my time with explaining the definition of purchase and free again. (for what feels like the 10th time!)

What did you buy? A game.

For how much? Let's say €60- for the sake of argument.

Did the game work? It worked. Obviously not to your satisfaction ("...it was a joke"). But it worked! Financial transaction done. End of Purchase.

Do you have a contract with Rare to provide any further content? Nope! If so, where does it say what quality and frequency the additions to the SandBox will be made?

Have you paid a single penny for anything that Rare has given you since your purchase? No! It was all FREE.

These are not my opinions. Just facts. Buy a dictionary if words like free, gift, purchase or give-away are difficult for you to understand. Check the Consumer Protection Law in you country/region. Or the Terms of Agreement that you clicked (but obviously didn't read) when you bought the game.

Rare owes you nothing. You have no "entitlement" to any new content or special events. You may well have bought the game with expectations. But that is your own fault. Everything Rare has given you (since you bought the game) has been a free gift. You may not like the gift they gave you, but don't call the gift-giver lazy. Or insult their work ethic. A gift is a gift. Show some grace.

The reason I call the people who defend a lackluster update positive trolls is because they all do the same thing. They come into a thread like this where we are trying to be constructive and they say things like it's free so we can't complain, or that it's really hard to code, or other games or toy manufactures from the 1970s re-used old assets, and basically fight with us and say we can't post these types of threads or have these types of civil conversations. Smh.

@x-crowheart-x said in Update feels lazy:

Being free does not automatically mean everyone must be happy and not say anything. Silence can be acceptance that nothing is wrong.

Maybe if Rare actually was making much better content they could sell it as DLC. I would pay for good content. Especially content that truly grows and expand the game past all this year and a half old content constantly recycled.

Maybe these points should be made while content is still in the developement mode (insider program).

http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/3VzqOXgkZ64hO/giphy.gif

Even though I love to see the passion and engagement in this topic, I think agreeing to disagree is not a bad thing.

(Also YAY 100th post)

@wilbymagicbear said in Update feels lazy:

A friend and I took a break from Arena today to check out the new update. I have to say, it's honostly the most uninspired, low effort thing I've seen in a while. This update feels like what I did on my high-school homework: the minimum effort possible just to check a box to say I did it.

Reaper's Chest: Rare must be going green, cause this whole thing is recycled assets. The box itself is just a recolored box of wondrous secrets. The insignia on the front is just the logo colored red. The concept itself is just a recycled reaper's flag, and it just spawns in Shipwrecks. As far as I can tell, the only new things are the particle effect to show its there, and the little mark on the map. That said, at least it's a new cursed chest.

Dark Relic Voyages: It's just an OoS/Gold Hoarder voyage with a few retextured skulls. Sure, there are some petty differences, but at the end of the day, it's just the same tired story we've been doing for years. Heck (we don't name the Devil's domain on these Christian forums, please and thank you), all the mercenary voyages ate like this. Every update after Anniversary has just felt so lazy, I'm getting sick of it.

then go back and play arena then sir

Being free does not automatically mean everyone must be happy and not say anything. Silence can be acceptance that nothing is wrong.

Maybe if Rare actually was making much better content they could sell it as DLC. I would pay for good content. Especially content that truly grows and expand the game past all this year and a half old content constantly recycled.

How much did you guys pay for all these updates and new content? Destiny and COD was charging us for every DLC! You really can't complain about Rare here.