Sea of Thieves being a sandbox environment make it a powerful juggernaut of an adventure game. Being able to choose what you want to do is the starting ignition of every story on the seas.
Every story can end in many ways, but the most generalized ways of ending a session in Sea of Thieves, is success and failure. For every few moments you managed to sell a large haul of treasure at the outpost, the others end with your vessel meeting it's watery grave with the Ferryman and all of your efforts (if any) resulting in wasted time.
Most people when they respawn from recently sinking make usually 1 of 2 or 3 choices:
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Leave the game (and possibly start a new session)
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Return to where they may have last sank (to retrieve any on-board items they lost or to seek revenge against any pirates that may have successfully stolen their treasure)
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Somehow, against all that's against them, without leaving the game or server merging, do something else.
One issue I have noticed for a lot of people that have the right amount of determination, or too much determination, is that consistently, and constantly going back to the same place in some vein attempt to recover even a morsel of what they lost, or to refuse their enemy to claim full victory. Some try to be respectful and leave game after their second or third sink, while some don't care and would rather no one get anything should they get caught in an unlikely conflict, a.k.a. constantly coming back over and over again, emptying their enemy of supplies that either forces them to run, or take the sink as the constantly returning crew is rewarded, even after going through 3 different refreshes of fresh supplies via sinking and respawning.
It's not often you'll do something else in the same session you sank in unless you're somehow okay with the idea that the same crew of hostile pirates are out there, ready to give you nothing but trouble should they see you again.
The easiest choice when sinking is to leave, ending that session properly, but at the price of experiencing whatever feelings you're bound to have following your failure. We already have several upon metric tons of threads, youtube comments, reddit/twitter/facebook(Meta) posts depicting those various feelings when their sessions end in unsatisfactory ways.
My conflict in these choices is that there isn't a single one where in any scenario, it ends in a net positive for all parties. Being sunk is almost like a game over in this game, the "You died!" of Minecraft and several other games with archaic ways of loss. If you leave the game, you're left with whatever feelings you have to deal with following your failure. If you go back, you risk losing again, as you'll probably have less supplies than before against a relatively mighty foe, with the only benefit of shrinking their supplies assuming they don't steal it from you on your third and up return. Then ignoring the problem and threat that gave you that misery and then just staying on the same server is just more questionable than going back for a third time.
Like with the running thread last week, this has been an issue that I always wanted to see discussion about, since I know of players that have issues with losing crews constantly coming back over and over again, and if every single complaint thread regarding situations in PvP mean anything, it's clear these players have selected "Leave Game" and left in a very unsatisfactory way.
Does Sea of Thieves have great post-sunk choices? Do these common choices seem inaccurate to what normally happens at the end of a session? Maybe I made some strong assumptions about the playerbase? There's a likely chance that the way you end your sessions isn't how others usually end their sessions, so feel free to share your thoughts on this topic!