Twitch Drops are far and away my least favorite thing about Sea of Thieves. Don't get me wrong, it's great getting free exclusives or pirate emporium emotes without paying, but it's executed so poorly it's just baffling sometimes.
To start, we SHOULD NOT have to consume/follow outside media to get access to in-game items. This is just garbage.
It might be acceptable if Rare was still regularly adding normal-priced cosmetics to the in-game stores, but they completely given up on that front. The last few years it's been all over-priced recolors of past sets, costumes (making our pirates all look exactly the same -- so much for the randomly generated character selection to create a sense of uniqueness ), and the best new sets go directly to the premium real-money pirate emporium. No interesting new cosmetics are ever added to the in-game stores anymore. Maybe Rare is just lazy about testing new cosmetics for conflicts with past cosmetics but everything they add seems to require continuous grinding or spending money at the emporium.
It would be another thing if Rare, ever, anywhere in the game itself, announce that Twitch Drops were coming up or currently happening, but they don't. It would be so easy to just put the twitch drop information right on the main page in the What's New section in-game, but they don't. Thing is, Twitch Drops are essentially a racket just to boost their streaming numbers and make the game seem more popular (guess it's working as Sea of Thieves seems way more popular now than it was at the start, though I'm judging mostly on LFG posts recently vs early days), it's kind of dumb that they don't announce Twitch Drops in-game at the home screen or what's new section.
As it stands we're expected to regularly check Sea of Thieves social media channels to see whether there's drops available, and when they are the window is incredibly short considering Twitch Drops items disappear for years at a time and we have no way to complete sets if we missed a day due to work, or sickness, or taking care of family. Life happens, etc. and most people prioritize what they have to to get by. Video game cosmetics don't mean anything in the long run, yada yada. That doesn't make the 24 hour window any less frustrating though. The time windows for twitch drops should be at least 3-5 days.
It's not like there's daily twitch drops anyways, there's maybe 5 announced items in 5 days and then a gap of time till the next batch. Why not just spread out so there's constantly a twitch drop item that updates every few days. Hell, if Rare actually cared, they could show a roadmap of all the upcoming twitch drop items in a set (not just 5 or so) and what date ranges each item would be available for.
Most importantly, all Twitch Drop cosmetics should always be added to the in-game stores after an exclusivity window. This is the most important change. Rare needs to stop punishing their player base for not obsessively following Sea of Thieve's Social Media. Yes, most gamers like having something exclusives that other's don't, but when the achievement or accomplishment is just logging to a completely separate website and clicking a link it's just idiotic to make it exclusive. Getting 240 wins in am insufferably broken Arena mode is an accomplishment I will never waste my time on, but the players that grinded that out deserve the exclusive Pirate Legends weapons; Clicking a link and watching 20 minutes of video doesn't deserve an award that cannot be acquired anywhere in game for an undetermined/infinite amount of time.
All Rare needs to do is add the Twitch Drops items to the stores 6 months later or so. Give the players who watched the stream the item immediately and for free. Give them a 6 month window where players might ask them where they got that item and they can feel superior about their exclusives. Then add the items and make them purchasable in the stores, so you're not excluding the majority of players from quality cosmetics that are randomly and arbitrary released in no discernible order. Twitch drops are not an accomplishment. They are not an achievement. Until they are announced somewhere on the in-game home screen, they are not deserving of the exclusivity (get it now or else we probably won't offer it again for 2 years) they currently have.
Twitch Drops need to be fixed so the majority of payers might actually have a chance at earning interesting cosmetics, since Rare has clearly shown they aren't interested in adding in anything quality to the base game except expensive recolors or over-priced emporium sets.
