There’s a lot here but it took me a while to get my thoughts in order on the subject. This is feedback on the current state of the sandbox, activities, and player interaction.
I think that the voyage rework was overall bad for the game. As are many, but not necessarily all, of the changes designed to reduce the friction in the general gameplay.
I had mixed opinions when the voyage change was first introduced, after a while I quite liked the simplicity and how easy it was to change servers, now I think it was an overall bad change that moved us away from the core of what this game is. Away from the sandbox and the reasons that a lot of us really fell for this game.
The clinical sanitisation of voyages and the on-demand world events has removed much of the variation in gameplay and has made every session feel the same as any other. The texture and atmosphere of the game has been wiped away in the name of balance and accessibility.
The gameplay loop of putting down a voyage and then shenanigans happening is gone. You’ll very rarely encounter the same ship multiple times in a session. The seas feel lifeless as everybody is engaging in what are essentially parallel single player experiences. It also feels as if extra PvE is being shoehorned into everything to try to create a facsimile of variety.
World events are mostly uncontested because they’re on-demand. The only thing that’s regularly contested now is the FoF; and only when the CoF is there. I have several experiences of going to a world event to see the crew that is at it scuttle or dive away; because they can and because it’s “optimal” to just give up.
Voyages are Sisyphean. They’re exactly the same every time, almost never lead to player interaction, and ultimately pointless as gold is inflated to near worthlessness.
Even the heist event was dead in a day due largely (in my opinion) to gold being worthless. I still remember fighting for hours for a fort worth 12.5k to save up for a ship set (and because it was the only decent way to get merchant rep).
The issues run a lot deeper than the reworked voyage system but the end result is that the game feels soulless. It feels like it’s been designed by committee and balanced by spreadsheet. Balanced badly too; the gold values are inflated beyond sense.
The events team needs to chill out too (sorry). I’ve blasted through my “long term progression” distinction rings with the ridiculous 10x gold and rep events. The fishing event didn’t need such inflated rewards and the Athena event really didn’t need double rewards on top of mega stashes. (Side note: I’d really love those fishing shopping lists to just be a staple voyage for HC. They’re fun and involve a bit of executive function.)
We need another rework; or a de-work. To me it’s the difference between a restaurant meal and a McDonalds meal.
A restaurant meal is very rarely exactly what you expect. Every meal, even from the same restaurant, has a fair amount of variation. You’re not always 100% happy with it but it’s overall a good experience. You like the restaurant even if you don’t like everything about every meal you eat there. A McDonalds meal is always exactly the same, exactly as expected, and always distinctly mid.
I think the wider playerbase that the changes have been trying to capture doesn’t exist (or is transient) and I think the casual players don’t really care much either way. Whatever data has been used to inform decisions over the last several years must be wrong. It must be based on assumptions, fallacy, and/or missing important context. Otherwise things would be going well for the game.
There has been talk of moving Sea of Thieves back towards its core. I hope that activity design, the gold economy, and the voyage system are on the list. The sandbox has been replaced by a shallow theme park.
