So, my SoT story goes back to before release, i was so hyped for SoT. I was showing my mates hype vids like " Bruh we can be like Luffy!" my mates where like " Bruh you watch to much anime" (totally not wrong though.). Anywho, i didnt end up buying the game on release, i didn't end up buying it until 3 months ago, for my partner non the less.
So my partner got really into this game ( like she dosnt play many games having to take care of kids and all) but this she absolutely slayed and got pirate legend in just under a month. By which time she was already Athena 5.
She talked me into buying game pass and a new xbox just so i could play this game with her, and i gota say guys, you got something special here. We havnt had this much fun playing video games together in years, and im talking halo 3 years here. Every game we play these days one of us is so much better then the other at that we just don't enjoy playing together (LoL (me), CoD(her) etc.) or the games a single player game (witcher, skyrim, etc.). We have spent 5 of the 7 days a week staying up till 2am (missing out on so much sleep) in the last 6 weeks just so we can spend some game time playing together and bonding though this beast of a game.
In this last week and a bit we have played mabey 5 hours or so, its the bugs, and no I'm not talking about your spyglass, (it was funny for like 15 mins tops, and now every day we have another reddit post, we get it and we all seen it) but things like no 2nd chapter (no x marks the spot for Chest of Legends, amounting to a massive waste of ever so valuable time) on athenas, bounty skellies not spawning no matter what work around you try it dosnt help, not being able to feed pigs, and the new one, not being able to use recourse barrels ( the ones on islands for stocking up with, not the ones on your ship) and not being able to interact them until you re-log because no work arounds help.
There has just been so many bugs of late and for every fix there is another game breaking bug. We get its a free to play game with regular free content added into the game, we understand better then most how this effects the development of games, I studied game design and programming at uni myself , but to put it simply, as a player, its unplayable, its just to frustrating and way too time consuming considering the amount of time that goes into doing anything in the game (this is like runescape level of grinding, well not quite but you get it), theres no point in playing if you're going to spend 3 hours on a voyage and 2 trying work arounds because the game isn't working the way it should.
For this, we decided to wait until cursed shores before we play again and see if the game is playable without frustratingly wasting time, which really sucks because we wanted them sweet doubloons from cursed crews, but to us its unplayable at this point. Sorry if that comes of as a rant, but we really hope for the best for the game.
I'm not sure how you test updates and hotfixs but its missing the mark, I believe the best thing to assure the quality of the game is to launch a beta server for atleast pc where these patches can be tested before going live. A beta environment would greatly benefit the community ( reviews/hype of new content) and the general quality of the game.
Anyway thanks to anyone who actually got through this, you're the real MVP cause I couldn't be bothered to a TL:DR for the lazy.
Cheers,
Wewty
