Season 17’s Big Listen Survey Results

As we committed to in last year’s inaugural Community Direct, we’re surveying players every Season to find out how you found its features, and where you’d like to see us do more. Season 17 was no exception, so we’re here to share with you the outcomes of our Big Listen survey for The Smugglers’ League.

Before we get into the finer details, we want to say a huge thanks to everyone who’s participated in our recent surveys. We’re finding that these surveys provide really valuable signals for us to go and act upon – we know they’re not short, and we’re grateful to those of you who spend the time and energy to give us such comprehensive reads on where you’re at with Sea of Thieves.

As with our last set of results, we discussed our findings at length on the latest episode of the Sea of Thieves Podcast – you can check that out over on YouTube (or any other reputable streaming service) to get a long-form look at our thoughts and feelings:

However, for the short version – let’s get stuck in. 

Season 17 Headline Learnings

The overall player rating for Season 17 was 5.6 out of 10, vs Season 16’s 6.1 – so unfortunately, players found this Season’s offering 5% less satisfying than Season 16.

This is in line with what we were anticipating; we announced the smuggling theme at the Xbox Summer Showcase to lukewarm reception, and can acknowledge that we struggled to win players over with the concept from there. Given that there were a couple of months between the initial announcement and release of the content, it’s fair to say that this sentiment felt prolonged too.

The smuggling focus did lay some valuable groundwork for future events and features, with the upcoming Bilge Rat Weekender leveraging Smugglers’ Voyages, but we recognise that much of Season 17’s feature set did not resonate with you all.

Season 17 Content Highlights

When it comes to what you enjoyed: Black Powder Barrels and Reaper Fortresses were the most popular features of the Season, scoring 4.1 and 4.2 out of 5 respectively. Improved weapon switching was third most enjoyed of the Season 17 feature set, and this has really highlighted the importance and impact of significant quality-of-life updates to our core community of players.

With some other key quality-of-life improvements on the way – stay tuned to our Developer Update series for news on these – we feel good about revisiting hot topics and making features and tools more enjoyable with tweaks and twists.

Least popular of Season 17 were the Smugglers’ Hideouts and the Smugglers’ Route Run Voyages, scoring 2.9 and 2.6 out of 5 respectively. We hear you, and with the introduction of the Bilge Rats Weekender, our new pirate festival, we really hope to revitalise player satisfaction with how some of these features feel.

Game Health

Game health improved regarding cheating and toxicity by 1% – which is a small improvement, but importantly not a regression. Given some of the in-flight work we’ve got going on at the moment regarding Hourglass and cheating/toxicity prevention measures, we feel confident that future surveys are going to show this needle moving further in the right direction.

As discussed on the podcast, we have a cross-discipline strike force working together to tackle player toxicity all up – and we look forward to sharing some of the insights and changes that come out of this new internal initiative to make our game a kinder, safer place to play.

Live Events

Ghoul & Glory and Season 17 Community Weekend scored highly on our Event schedule portion of the survey, both scoring 3.7/5. We don’t want to rest on our laurels there though, and we have some changes coming to Community Weekend, where we plan to refresh the feature set and make sure it’s feeling as fun and as fresh as it did when we introduced it back in 2022.

However, we’re really buoyed to know that years on, these events are still broadly hitting the mark on providing you with fun and worthwhile reasons to play Sea of Thieves.

Future Content

There hasn’t been any major change to what you’d all like to see from us, with the top requests matching what we shared in Season 16’s Big Listen survey results.

However, if you’re intrigued about what’s on the horizon, we have news! Our next Community Direct will air on March 30th as part of our broader Sea of Thieves eighth anniversary celebrations, and will provide a look at this year’s upcoming plans for Season 20 and beyond.

We’re excited to be able to share this view on Sea of Thieves’ future; we know there’s been a lot of change in the winds lately, but we’re building towards a more meaningful, more sustainable roadmap that ensures we’re delivering content you enjoy, to a quality we’re proud of. More on that in March, when we unveil what’s next on the seas!