Sea of Thieves: 2025 Edition

THIS GAME SHOULD MORE LIKE BE CALLED SEA OF CHEATS

Pardon me for the rage up here, but yes , after I joined into this game to play it with a friend of mine and on my own sometimes, registering almost 480 hours in total on this game , starting from what was at the time already the 5th season probably , I can't hold my frustration to call gamers that wants to approach the game and hopefully the Devs themselves too from what the situation always been for me.

Not gonna lie , I must praise Rare as Devs that added and improved mechanically , especially in recent times, what the pirates where asking for long and surely they delivered it finally after long wait , but I found all these improvements sinking the moment that you face the sad truth about this game , specifically from on EU servers, on how hellish full of cheaters this game is , even after the implementation of an anticheat system after YEARS AFTER RELEASE FOR A MAINLY MULTIPLAYER-BASED GAME the devs fixed that , but sadly the run against a cheater based community is far more efficient on find new ways to jump over the defenses , leading to what my experience was in the 75 % of the PvP and casual free sailing voyages , seeing people hitting the masts from km aways with no problems, or having freeze like cheats to make you essentially an easy lemon to squeeze for them , in order to shoot you down and take all the hard earned rewards from a raid that may took you hours to complete

Just to add a stab on the back, ironically last time I joined one game I was almost , randomly, hold by the anticheat system accusing me to have some , then on the same game fighting against Russians little pirates with more cheats than soul in their own bodies , able to bend my and my friend network too at their own will

Sadly until the Devs takes the cheaters probelm seriously , I don't think I will sail again on this beautiful game , that is ruined from people who doesn't want to play like men , and from Devs that seems to have forgot a basic system to put on a game that revolves around multiplayer , even with the support of a giant publisher as Microsoft on the back

Stay safe and wish you a safe sail on calm seas ,

Yours NobleWolfa

Bought this game at the end of 2021, didn't play for like two year as it was not beginner friendly. Started playing on 2023 under pressure as few of my friends bought it. Worked my way to be a Pirate Legend with a friend on sloop. But I quickly realized that this so-called "milestone" didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things. The online community still saw me as a noob, and honestly, they weren’t entirely wrong. Tried Athena stuff but it was boring AF. Then i started grinding the Hour Glass. This lost me a friend as got bored and the sloop was empty. Then for the first time i tried play with Randoms. NGL it was fun. Made a lot of friends on the way. I made few friends on the way who wanted to grind HG with me. So the hustle began. It took us around a month to get the CURSE in a Brig. It was fun. But after the curse everything is boring again. IDK what to do now. But there are loads of content in the game, but everything come down to reading the Journals and getting the Commendations which makes it not fun.

Sea of Thieves has epic battles, chaotic friendships, and unforgettable voyages. But it also has long stretches of grind and emptiness once you've ticked off the big goals.
Would I recommend it? Yes—but only if you’re ready to make your own fun, or you’ve got a crew who’s down for the ride.

One of the best games i have every played BUTTTT if you are new dont start on high seas start on safer seas until you think you are good enough for high seas.

PS:high seas is a shared server with other peoples ships
safer seas is a server with only you

I've played this game 2k+ hours between the various platforms, while I have a lot of love for it, it is the most unreliable game you will ever play. If you are someone who has a couple of hours a week to play - don't count on it. Between constant server maintenance, in game bugs, or there not being an IN GAME way to join a crew withy our friends, you will almost never have a play session go as intended. Half the battle to play the game, is getting to play the game.

This game does not respect your time. From being forced to complete quests in the entirety (so if you have limited time, good luck ever getting anything done), to other players taking your treasure after two hours of questing, resulting in you losing all progress... after nearly ten hours I feel as though I've made zero progress and accomplished nothing, even if that isn't technically true. It's been one of the worst and most frustrating experiences I've had in a long time.

Nostalgia

I've been playing this game on and off for five years, and it's honestly sad to see that almost nothing has changed — not the community, not the anti-cheat, and definitely not the attitude towards cheaters. Same old bugs, same lack of care. The game is only enjoyable when you're chilling with friends. Yes, there are some good players out there, but that's rare.

I especially miss Arena mode — that was the only real PvP mode that kept the game alive for many of us. And what did the devs do? They removed it. No proper explanation, no replacement. Half of the player base left because of this, many of them competitive PvP players. Sure, a few have come back now and then, but it's not the same. Arena was the backbone of the experience.

Fast forward to today — I ran into cheaters in the new Hourglass mode. Obvious AIM-botters ruining the match. So I try to report them, attach a 20MB video (site limit is 50MB), and guess what? The site says the file exceeds 50MB. Completely broken.

This isn't even the first time. We had a problem before with not receiving currency after selling items. Uploaded proof. Sent two reports. First one? “Sorry, not enough evidence,” despite the video. Second time? We didn’t get an achievement we clearly earned. Their answer? “Yeah, looks like you don’t have it. Play again and maybe you'll get it.” No apology, no compensation. Nothing.

The support is a joke. Instead of fixing core issues like cheaters, bugs, or missing rewards, they just keep adding useless cosmetic junk. Meanwhile, legit players suffer. It feels like cheaters are treated better than real fans.

Final rating: 1/10. That one point is only because it’s still fun with friends. But the game, as a product and as a community, is a total failure.

i rly like how immersive it is u feel like an actual person sailing the sea of theives, not just a person at a desk. also the art style is gorgeous

i love the game, its just soo good to sail across the seas alone or wit ur buddies and the monsters are fun even tho i only saw sum variants of the megalodon but still a great game, really recomend!!!!!

I've owned the game since release day. Hacking has become a major issue in this game and it's clear the devs aren't doing anything to solve it. The same hacks are being used for the last three years and are publicly available for free. Additional hacks for $15 a week available and people are paying it. The game devs do ban hacking accounts if they get reported and suspected caught however they just buy another account and continue. Theres no real remedies being done by the dev team to fix a very game breaking experience. They are however happy to take in money via new game sells and the cosmetic shop along with battlepasses but no money being spent on cybersecurity. Before you buy this game know you've been warned and watch a youtube video about it. You'll be sick. If there is a hacker on your server and you have loot, its their loot now.

It's really too bad, every other aspect of this game is a great experience it and I would highly recommend it, however save your money unless you don't mind a hacker now and then. High percentage of players are encountering hackers now at a very frequent rate in game especially with the public release of free hacks that sea of thieves dev team specifically have not been able to fix for over a year or more. Let alone the paid hacks.

Here's an example video of the current state of the game video is called "Sea Of Thieves Is Unplayable In 2025":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utRMkUItjC8

This new season is probably the worst season every made : People are literally camping the Reaper's Island and waiting for people to come with the loot. It is unbearable and the fact that there is only ONE island in the game where you can sell reaper stuff is just freaking dumb. I am staying away from this game until the next season.

As a mostly solo player, they desperately need a solo queue world option. Having to almost always 1v2, 1v3, or 1v4 is just not fun. I don't mind having sloops, galleons, and brigs on the same server, but I do feel solo players should have an option for a solo experience. Unless you sink hundreds of hours into the game to get good, you basically stand no chance in a fight as a solo. So, basically, you can play casually as a solo and I think that's a big reason the player count is the way it is. Safer Seas is an option, but for a pirate game it just feels wrong. I think there should always be a risk that someone could steal your loot, but often times it just feels like if you run into someone as a solo you don't stand a chance. On the flip side, though, if you have a group of friends that play this game, it is almost unparalleled in terms of fun. PvE and PvP with a crew just feels special.


Don't let my hour count fool you. I have well over a thousand hours in this game.

I really tried to enjoy this game but ultimately found a love hate relationship that did more to cause a great deal of undue stress for very little return.

The developers at rare seem to advertise this game as being a social and whimsical pirate adventure and it certainly can be however, those charming moments are seldom at best. You will spend nearly 100% of your time on the sea completely and unshakably paranoid. This is because after playing for long enough you will eventually encounter an event so traumatising it will live in the back of your head playing out on loop while you scan the horizon for any sign of player activity jumping at shadows when you mistake watch towers and rocks with ships and sails.

The game has all the toxicity of a competitive online game but with none of the polish to make it feel like dedicating any amount of time practising to improve your skills and game sense to be worth while because ultimately some slur spewing unsupervised clan of pre-teens with all the free time in the world and all the knowledge of the exploits to get the upper hand will inevitably roll up on you and mercilessly undo the last hours worth of work you spent in the game. And the worst thing is Rare seems to make decisions that indicate that they are afraid that the game wouldn't be fun without this sort of player interaction.

This is a game that is far more fun to watch than actually play yourself. That is why their are so many emotes in the store for streamers and content creators to use to turn their pirate into their very own rantsona to present their whimsical adventures. It lulls you into a false sense of security into thinking "hey, that looks like fun, I want to do that too!" only to find that these are curated snip-its of hours of game play.

Most of the time you will spend sailing from point A to point B bored out of your brain if it wasn't for the paranoia and avoiding other players. The worst of these encounters involving some of the most pathologically entitled bullies who think it is their divine right to torment you because you should have known what you were signing up for when you opened this game when all you want to do is catch fish or dig up treasure. Some of the content creators and players who copy them genuinely spend their whole time tormenting other people in this game truly relishing in the humiliation of fellow gamer who just wanted to have a good couple hours gaming in the afternoon after a long day.

I can say with complete confidence that this game has given me a collection of unpleasant memories so bad that I can say that they are easily the most upsetting, humiliating, and traumatic experiences I have ever had in gaming. The negative interaction's I have had in competitive matchmaking in competitive games have nothing on this game. I really should have quit sooner but I kept fooling myself into thinking maybe I could have the adventure I was promised and that with time I could overcome the challenges I faced but it was never worth it.

Some might say I need a thicker skin. To that I'd say I did have a thick skin. Now it's worn thin. If anyone tries to pin the fault on you for not wanting to be repeatedly exposed to abuse then they are an abuser and they are using the "pirate game" as an excuse to continue their abuse.

If you are the type of person to get invested in their gaming worlds and want to feel like you have carved out a niche for yourself and an in game identity then this isn't the game for you despite what they advertise it to be. If you care about this game at all you will get burned. The only way to enjoy it is to have no investment, no long term goals, and to not care at all.

Play the game at your own peril. Ye have been warned ye damned fool. The pirates life is not for me.

Very fun game to play. Lots of different things you can do and you dont have to be super good to have fun. The only downside for some is that its more of a game you play for several hours at a time.

This game is riddled with pointless microtransactions, a toxic playerbase that will kill you for having the gall to want to have fun (all while calling you slurs), and truly some of the most horribly optimized and buggy physics I've ever seen. Rare clearly have put a lot of passion and care into this game, as they always do, and Microsoft did their best to make sure they can monetize every single feature in it as much as they want. Want a cute little pet dog or a parrot to really complete your pirate look? Good luck grinding for 80 hours, or just spend your real life money on it! This game has SO much potential to be amazing, but like any Microsoft-published game, they've trampled all over the charm and fun to turn it into live service garbage. Call me when someone makes an online pirate game that's published by a company who actually cares about video games as art.

This game surprised me with an incredible wealth and depth of things to do as well as a stunningly beautiful game world. This game is much better than it looks at first glance

game is beautiful, story is great, the hackers are prevalent.

It's difficult to fully capture how I feel about this game, but after spending a little bit of time again on it recently, it is simply put: an avenue of wasted potential. Sea of Thieves is a good idea on paper, but executed terribly in practice. You can get some initial enjoyment out of the game, doing quests and experiencing everything the sandbox has to offer.. but at some point it falls flat. I've spent a whole lot of time in this game. Items, encounters, commendations, while they should have different rarity factors, something like the Shrouded Ghost should not be something people almost never see in their entire lifetime on the game. Targeting sucks. After a while things get repetitive as fuck. The Meta stinks. Latency is such a massive factor, if your ping sucks, you can never fight anyone, ever. The Monkey Island Tall Tale singlehandedly bored the living soul out of everyone nobody touches them anymore, and if that wasn't enough, they add more PvP things that sweats will glitch through walls and make you lose kills, every time. Why do small baby ships even keep up with Galleons? Seriously. Alliances and separate boats should have been a thing ages ago. I don't care anymore. I've gotten Pirate Legend and I seriously cannot be bothered to touch this game anymore. Rare has all but abandoned it and the numbers reflect that reality. Don't let anyone gaslight you otherwise. Unless you play on the dumbed down version, Safer Seas, this game isn't worth it and I don't recommend any new players spend money on something the company behind it itself does not give a single shit about anymore. You have been warned.

It's a fun game but playing with random people in this game is a bad experience, mostly because you have no way of kicking people from your crew once they join.
80% of the people are simply not fun to play with. They either do not talk with you at all, are afk the entire time, sabotage you, are racist or do other things that makes playing with them simply not fun. This would all not be a problem if you simply could kick them from your crew but this game does not offer that option.
So if you and a freind want to play on one of bigger ships, you either need other friends available for it as well, you have to go on discord to look for people or you have to keep reseting the game session until you find people that you enjoy playing with.
The game is really fun once you find people that you actually vibe with but the fact that there is no option to kick people from your crew kills the enjoyment for me and my friend.

Full of adventure and content, mostly fun with friends, but pretty cool for solo too!

A particular Caribbean partnership ruined this game by attracting an increasingly juvenile, racist and toxic community.

Shipmates are often saboteurs, instakill hackers are rampant and safer seas prevents you from working on anything above level 25.

Rare shivered the timbers of ardent fans by putting shareholder profit over player enjoyment.

Great game. Love the tall tale storylines, the factions, weather, and the world events. Especially love fishing with the scenic views, be it on an island or the open sea.

I just fell in love with Sea of Thieves.

I played at launch for a month and fell off hard. but 7 years of updates, and they are still doing seasons / new content. I'm playing with people on the discord, and i haven't done that in years. I also solo a lot, it can be punishing (but there are private servers available).

It can be as sweaty, or chill as you want (private servers) or full on pvp. Just fish all day, you're working towards goals! doing anything in this game works towards something. It can be a very steep learning curve, but the whole point is that you take it at your own speed. I've gotten over the need to grind hard for the best loot/min, but just jumping on with another chill person, and doing some quests avoiding pvp, melts the hours away.

Its crazy but the most common compliment about this game is the water. they simulated sailing and the sea with just the right amount of gamification. its so pretty and relaxing. If you have a nice monitor, this game is Beautiful!

I haven't had a game get its hooks in me (no pun intended) this much in decades! Honestly feel like a kid again. I've had it a week, and I've already sunk 40 hours (had some time off). I know its a hard sell, but I finally found my 'Stardew Valley' game.

Kudos Rare. A passion project, with nothing else out there quite like it.

In 2025, years after release I didn't expect to spend nearly 2 hours deleting corrupted game files, installing new ones, reinstalling multiple times and still unable to get past the start screen without a hard crash / error message. P02, P05 & PVS were the ones I was getting and after countless YouTube videos, support forums - I urge anyone with the same error messages just to refund the game. This ship is well and truly sunk.

Amazing game! Thrilling quests and treasure dives, atmospheric sound design and fun gameplay. It's not too difficult to get into, but you are more often than not (especially if there are loot and treasures on board) vulnerable to not just other players' attacks but also to sudden sea monster fights. That of course is the appeal of it. Great pirate journey!

- When it’s good it’s really good but when it’s bad it goes to pieces. Sea of Thieves is one of the deceptively *strangest* game designs I have ever played.

- SOT’s design insists that its gameplay value hinges on player interaction - slightly in the friendly sense, but predominantly, and I say again INSISTENTLY, in the conflict sense. SOT genuinely believes, fears, that without the restless paranoia of another player deleting your play time, that their game will not be fun. This has so many weird implications for its open-world, casual-cozy aesthetic, and crucially, its economy.

- SOT, for some bizarre reason, does not advertise itself as what it wants to be - certainly not as what it is. And I do believe SOT is what it wants to be - it’s had what, 8 years to change its mind? Let me pull up the Steam page description real quick: “Sea of Thieves is a smash-hit pirate adventure game, offering the quintessential pirate experience of plundering lost treasures, intense battles, vanquishing sea monsters and more.” “Intense battles” is as close to “ruthless, time-deleting, spontaneous aggression at any moment” as it’s willing to get.

- Let me be clear: when I say SOT deletes your time, I mean it. When you “lose” in SOT, you lose everything: every piece of treasure on your ship; the ship itself; travel time to wherever you were. I have never seen a partial exchange, where you lose only a bit of treasure, or only your ship, or only your character. If a player eliminates any 1 of these things, they’re going to eliminate them all, because that’s the correct strategy: if you lose your treasure, it’s 99% because it fell off your broken ship; if you lose your ship, good luck transporting 1 goblet at a time to Bumfuck Landing by way of breaststroke, and there goes your ability to teleport back on respawn as well; and if you die, your treasure will almost certainly be taken, most likely because your ship’s been sunk to prevent you from teleporting back. Fully back to zero

- SOT is not gentle in the time department, even without pvp. Sailing voyages can be long, and so can treasure extraction missions. Any substantial haul of loot will take, at minimum, 2 hours uninterrupted round trip. But do you know how long it takes to sink a ship? I’ve had it, or near enough, happen to me inside of about 30 seconds. So my 2 hours’ labour translates to 0 gains for me, and pays for about 30 seconds labour of my slayer - give or take a few minutes of stalking me. This attack can occur anywhere during the voyage. It can happen before you’ve even acquired any treasure; it can happen while you’re land-bound, giving you no ship to bring the treasure back and so no way for the treasure to pay off; it can happen just as you’re leaving the extraction site, and it can happen DURING THE SALE OF THE TREASURE. Nowhere does there exist a single moment of safety - it’s insane.

- Complaints about this lack of instancing, or framing of PVP - even PVE in some cases - are common on SOT forums. The most common response is, of course, “get good”. The second-most common response is, “Gold doesn’t matter.” This is such inside-out logic that it makes my brain want to bleed. According to the game, gold is basically the sole motivating macguffin of the game. It sure takes enough time and effort to find, gather, transport, and then fence the gold to feel like it matters. Fun, convenient, and even useful things end up costing you gold. But what these try-hards mean when they say, “Gold doesn’t matter,” is that gold “only” buys cosmetics. So? Cosmetics are the only currency, the only meaningful progression track, in the entire game. The entire design revolves around gold. Put it this way - if gold doesn’t matter, then why kill other players for it? Why do anything at all in SOT, if gold is so “meaningless”? If gold’s meaningless, then there’s no reason to play, because all that happens is that I might gain, or lose, some meaningless thing. It’s the prisoners’ dilemma - if every player “got good” in the most literal sense, no player would ever go on missions to dig up treasure, because that is the tactically correct choice around a resource that “doesn’t matter”. I’m spilling an awful lot of tearful ink on this silly gamepass game, but it genuinely baffles me, this jenga tower of contradictions that seem fundamental to the designers’ intended vision of the game.

- SOT is absolutely fantastic at furnishing a solid 2-3 hours of hanging out with a friend or two, jumping on some opportunities, and hauling home 10 or 20k gold. Naval warfare with skeleton fleets, vanquishing endless waves of the undead, plundering ancient tombs and unsealing hidden vaults and diving to the coral coliseum at the bottom of the sea - all of that is 100% satisfying to me. Nothing about that experience “asks for” pvp conflict. But SOT is anxious, desperate, to dump conflict onto you, even in the private servers. It’s virtually guaranteed on a private server that, once you’ve been on an island for long enough, or gathered enough treasure, the game will spawn 2 aggressive NPC events directly on top of you the moment you leave the shore. You cannot outpace AND outmaneuver both of them, not with just 1 or 2 players. Even on “easy mode,” I’d say SOT is downright desperate to sink you - to control and deflate the gold economy - this economy of a currency which “doesn’t matter”. It sure matters to the devs a whole lot!

- SOT is incredibly fun and lighthearted when it’s being a game. But when it’s being a trapdoor-spider blood sport (which it constantly threatens on “normal mode,” with other humans around), there is literally nothing tangible to extract from the experience for at least half the participants. When I die in Valheim or a Souls game, I get a “last shot” to recover my stuff. This does not exist in SOT. When you lose, you lose everything that you had, you unwind time completely. This reads as downright inhumane when you look at the heavy time requirements to get loot. The game proactively disincentivizes you from its core loop. Sure, you “get to have the experience” of deleting 2 hours of gameplay from the ledger - but I “get to have experiences” every moment of every game I play. “Having an experience” is not a selling point when it costs me wasting my evening for some asshole’s gain.

- I have tried repeatedly to have fun in SOT every way I can, because the core loop is simplistic fun. Jumping in solo, whether in easy mode or PVP, has had a 1/4 hit rate for me - a 25% chance to have a satisfying basic session where, after 2.5ish hours, I successfully collected (any) treasure, brought it back to base, and sold it. In any other design, even if I got sunk, I’d have XP at least, or character upgrades, or questline advancements - there is nothing to hang your hat on in SOT. There’s guild rep which just gives you more ways of spending time and money.

- SOT is some of the most fun I can have with friends online - I guess the weird thing is that this might have more to do with hanging out with friends online, and less to do with SOT. This is a game I do like - rather, there is a game inside of SOT which I like, but in spite of the thing as a whole. With some private server slider settings, or some kind of safe zone or opt-in PVP indicators, I would recommend Sea of Thieves in a heartbeat. As it stands, it’s a volatile tangle of cross-purpose design goals.

If you want to get angry at a game, play this one. You'll spend hours doing quests, only to be killed by some no-life player with 5,000 hours in the game who steals everything. Honestly, the missions are so bland and repetitive that it feels like a job, and then someone sets all your work on fire. I can't recommend this game. You’re not getting paid; in fact, you’re paying to suffer.

I used to love this game, but I recommend you to not buy this game untill they put a TRUE anti cheat + stable servers

i went on an adventure to capture a pet pig then i killed it accidentally this happened at 2023 and im still depressed about it great game tho

I love this game, i truly do. Its a fun experience, truly nothing like it... However... the developers are either the laziest people on the planet, or downright incompetent. They continue xbox one support despite admitting themselves that its holding the entire game back. Bigger map? nope sorry xbox one. More ships per server? nope sorry xbox one. Boarding a galleon in this game is laggy and has always been laggy, there was a one week long period of time where on the burning blade, a ship bigger than a galleon, actually didnt lag, i was surprised i figured they finally figured it out, NOPE, next weeks patch to *fix issues* thus made the burning blade laggy, like the galleon. This game has an "insiders" build, where you can test unannounced future features of the game, under an NDA of course. So guess what, any bugs found within that beta test are ignored 99 time out of 100. Oh and what happened with Summit the streamer. Plays some sea of thieves after a long break, and somebody attacks him by using a ladder launch glitch, sends you very far. So he decides to rant on stream about it. Well lo and behold almost INSTANTLY rare says they are working on fixing it and the next major update removed it (mind you the glitch has been in the game and KNOWN SINCE LAUNCH). The only thing that gets Rare off their LAZY ASSES is a big streamer, the community had been complaining and it was even acknowledged by rare LONG AGO. And take a big fat guess at what fixing it did. Well it broke other things, because of course it did, because whenever they launch updates its right before the weekend, so theres actually nobody around to fix the issues, game just has to suffer until the next week, and even then theres no guarantee they fix anything, everything they fix breaks something else.

But do you know what rare can do for you. Every couple weeks.
More paid cosmetics
In the game where the only things you can unlock in this game are, cosmetics...
Rare, i love your game. Do better. Please. Dont slowly kill this as a cash grab.
Remove Xbox One support
Bring back arena (at least for a month or two out of the year)
Add more hourglass incentives.
Please

DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME!!
Everytime my friend and i played this game, we got CHASED by many ships with sweats (literally sweaty players) FOR HOURS. and if we got lucky and got out of the trouble, a kraken attacked us. One session we got attacked by a kraken 5 times in 2 Hours and then we were food för other players and got spawn killed. Even if you have no loot on your ship and not even putting an emissary up. Sweats will still chase you around the whole map for hours. They keeping your ship alive to a certain level, so they can kill you over and over again, because it is "fun".
I do not recommend this game, it is a reason that it has a discount. too many sweats competiting in this game and bullying others. Even that they have an own modus for sweaty players, they still going after you!
whoever read this, play another game with your friends, this is a waste of time.
Have a nice day!

don't let my total hours fool you - I have thousands of hours poured into this game, when I could've been doing something productive

This game has been out for over several years and the developers are yet to solve the main issues, like hit registration, desync, and game stutters and performance like Port Meric. Sometimes when I launch the game, I wonder, what error will I encounter now?

That said, you might ask why I continue playing despite my negative reception of the game. Simply, the game is one of a kind. It's a multiplayer game where you interact with other pirates like you and it's sort of a sandbox game, because you can do pretty much everything you want, limited to the game and yourself of course. There's a lot to explore and for once, the devs actually add content to the game, rather than abandoning it completely.

But that's the problem, the devs add new content, instead of fixing problems, and it seems like with every new update a new issue arrives.

That said, if you're focused more on the PvE side of the game, go for it. Once you get bored and start focusing on PvP even minimally, you'll see that the game has a lot of issues.

In the end, I would only recommend if you focus on PvE solely, which isn't common but happens. But until the main issues aren't solved, I wouldn't recommend this hunk of junk.

The game only has bugs like the game has not been completed. The gameplay system sucks. Overall is the dregs.

The game may look "cartoony", but trust me the visuals definitely create a really organic aesthetically pleasing experience. Plus overall Gameplay/FunFactor are pretty high up there. Enjoy!

Could have been a good game if it hadn't been ruined by RARE. In the pursuit of money they keep breaking the game! About optimization, it has already been said a lot RARE do not know how to cure the game! Feeding promises. The game is full of problems. Not working game mechanics. Poor balance of weapons food . Every new season, makes the game more stupid and boring. AI bots, very bad! The legend of the game is broken. There is no difference who you play as. It doesn't affect anything. A table of endless quests, so uninterestingly complex and confusing that you don't even want to touch this part of the game.
The world, empty !!! You have nothing to do in the port . The game does not enthuse you with mini games where you could have fun with other players.
Spanish forts - what are they for? There is no interaction with them ! Capturing, holding - there is no such thing ! The arena is broken!
People endlessly jumping around the servers looking for the only interesting activity! The game doesn't push players together, making it more interesting. The game has turned into the usual dull PVE . Where you have to close achieves, and buy rags!
Good mechanics have been broken. Harpoon ship, as an example! RAre went down the path of simplifying the game. turning it into garbage.
The game is broken right at the beginning. You can't save button customization, constantly getting knocked off settings.
After every purchase, you have to press CONTINUE CONTINUE CONTINUE !!!! How many times?
There is nowhere to put gold in the game. It means nothing there, except for your personal achievement. Why can't I buy with GOLD everything I need on my journey? Empty chests, boats, rum? Why can't I buy more than one item at a time?
Ships. They're no different from each other! Except for the controls.
Galleon: Why do they draw water in buckets? There should be a water pump!
Why are there no lockers to hide valuable loot and the captain's key!
Why isn't there a safe area for carrying explosive barrels?
Remove the cage! You still haven't implemented these mechanics! Make a safe zone for cargo, lockers for small valuable loot, keys.
Redesign the health replenishment mechanic! Rom should add buffs and debuffs.
Redesign the weapon balance.
Remove from the game some of the tasks that are on the table. They should be part of the game world! Not like yours. Until you choose!
KABANES! That's just awful! The player has to pick one! No one is interested!
Burning Blade - ruined the idea! Sink the ship, take the blade, return it to the captain! You play as Bones, you do the same thing. This is about as stupid as it gets!
Floating around the islands collecting orbs! Doing the same thing - Fail!
And no matter what faction you play for, you'll be doing the same thing!
And the whole game is made up of this kind of Failure Failure Failure Failure Failure!
It's a shame that RARE, do not understand what players want and continue to move in the wrong direction.
The game is dying, and RARE continue to milk it like a half-dead cow!

Translated with DeepL.com (free version)

trash game, infinite blackscreens, high ping issues and continuous bugs every update.

Its fun but can be a very laggy mess with a lot of stutters and rubber banding issues and has a lot of cheaters despite having a powerful anti cheat. But it can be very fun as it has a lot of content and stuff to do but can get boring over time

Day started off great: my buddy and I raiding skeletons, taking down a Skeleton Lord. High-fives all around. We haul the shiny loot to our ship, dreams of riches filling our pirate brains.

Then... BOOM.
Our ship hits an explosive barrel while I’m still transferring the loot. Ship sinks, treasures start despawning faster than my faith in humanity. Fine, annoying but manageable. My friend heroically respawns with a fresh ship.

BOOM.
Again.
Because apparently if there's an explosive floating in the water and you even look at it wrong, it detonates. Didn't know that before! Good times! Ship #2 gone.

Third time's the charm, right? WRONG.
We manage to scrape together a handful of the now heavily-thinned treasures and limp away, traumatized but alive. Then we thought, hey, let's go fight a Ghost Fleet. Easy money, right? Well, during the Ghost Fleet fight, a Megalodon shows up because why not, everyone loves a third-party. We fight it off somehow, running low on supplies but spirits slightly restored.

And THEN.
A Kraken spawns.
MID-GHOST-FLEET.
Because Sea of Thieves thought "hmm, you seem like you're having fun, let's fix that."

AND THEN.
An enemy player ship rolls up, like the final boss of a clown fiesta. They clean up what's left of us like janitors after a festival. We lose everything. Hours of work, sunk into the salty sea.

Sea of Thieves is not a pirate simulator.
It's a suffering simulator.
11/10 would cry again.

So Sea of Thieves is cracking down on voice comms, with a risk of players getting permanently banned. Hm, on one hand most people probably agree with combating toxicity, but I just have two questions. First, you know that this is a PVP game about stealing each other's loot? It doesn't take a scholar to realize that the core gameplay is in and of itself toxic. You're stealing from each other in an intense PVP-based pirate simulator.

But more importantly, HOW are they going to know who's being "toxic"? Obviously, they're going to have to monitor voice comms to police them. Do you realize that even decent players who aren't toxic may become worried about bans and just rather avoid using in-game voice and just use third-party VOIP apps?

So then just don't be racist/sexist/misogynistic/ableist/ageist/yaddayadda-istopobic.
The problem with this argument is that some people are just inherently uncomfortable with a Big Brother listening to their comms. It sounds paradoxical when you're putting your voice out their into a video game anyway, but just the faintest possibility of getting arbitrarily punished from the ether can intimidate people into just not using the in-game voice. What if me and my friends like using edgy humor to pass the (sometimes quite lengthy) time sailing back to port, or to a mission location? Will we get punished for just talking to each other? What if some pimply-skinned Reddit moderator takes offense to us and selectively decides we're being one of the seemingly-endless kinds of "toxic", and bans us?

To finally get to the point, do yourselves a favor, dear devs, and just stop policing speech. Yes, this means that people will be able to be legitimately unpleasant at times, but that's the reality of playing online. You can't babyproof a video game, especially a PVP one, without doing more damage than good.

If you find yourself spending a significant portion of your time browsing Reddit and/or Twitter, you'll love this game.

A very fun game, it is suited for a lot of different kind of players. You can fight people in a PvP mode or find players and NPC ghost ships in the open sea and pick a fight with them. You can also relax a bit and explore the islands in PvE, searching for treasures and solving riddles. There are always new events that you can take part in and new friends you can find (I suggest joining their official discord server to stay updated and to find new people that you can set sail with).
If you like a mix of both PvP and PvE you can play the various story modes called Tall Tales or do different kind of missions ranging from treasure maps, vaults, riddles and skeleton hunting to deliveries of animals, plants or other goods across islands.

Upon launching this game, be ready for the best and worst humanity has to offer. Some pirates out there are lovely, kind souls; others are sociopathic sewer vermin that'll sink you with 4 hours of progress just for kicks. All in all, phenomenal graphics, art style, and pve adventures, but man are there some twisted and imbecilic people out there.

Do I enjoy the game, yes, it has some very fun game mechanics. HOWEVER, the way that players are added to servers is random within your region, which also means that complete new players are put in the same server with others who have gold pvp curses and completely shut down the enjoyment that alot of the game has to offer. Is it a skill issue, absolutely, but surely there could be some element of sbmm based off of K/D, playtime, succes rates etc that could be implemented. These are my thoughts tho, I've played for 200 hrs on steam and 500 on xbox, and this still annoy's me to no end. Also is very buggy and the servers have been lagging.

I have well over 1000 hours in this game and the last 5 months of me playing this game i have run into more cheaters than ever. when i go to report them it always tells me that there is not enough evidence to prove. one instance clearly showed the player cheating via teleporting around my ship. another i reported my own teammate because they where useing what they called the ladder glitch and forcing them to launch foward to catch the other persons ship. i used to enjoy this game but the amout of players hacking in the game has made the game non enjoyable.

i would recommend it is fun or at least used to be fun i cannot start the game animore the sound qualty is so bad i onley have it in this game and its just sad couse i relly liked it but its unplayble like this

Loved this game, but it's dead. They took out the fun arena pvp because of "toxicity" but left in the open world pvp and did nothing about the egregious hacking. There's no point to it anymore.

Just wait for Wildgate.

1557 Hours but I'll take a stand now, I hate this game.

Servers in AUS are unstable, cheater plagued in HG, making the love of the grind worthless.
Great game but with fault I feel the creators have forgot, The Pirate XP
Sailing around for fun, PVPVE Ligestyle,

Love the game to death but omg this game is the most broken POS i ever play. I get hit by meg while in boat get knocked THROUGH the boat. SINK. finally in a good PVP fight (with no cheaters) get black screened for 10 mins. SINK. Finally finishing a tall tale. Game crash, not back in time. SINK. like for the love of all that is holy FIX THIS GAME IT HAS BEEN YEARS!

this game has honestly turned into a joke, the public lobbys are riddled with little children cheating because they have no skill, teleporting, rapid shot cannons, full on skeleton crew and aim-botting and the devs somehow are unskilled enough to do anything about it..

fix this or allow people to gain rep and all the cosmetics and stuff in safer seas. way to kill the game.

As far as I can tell the gameplay loop is something like this:
- spawn in
- prepare to sail
- get demolished by a grade 5 reaper galleon named "The poop train" or something similar. The captain WILL cannon himself over at you to make fun of you as this happens. He no-lifes this game and ruining people's day makes him feel good.
- respawn with your ship on a corner of the map.
- try and prep to sail again
- actually make it to sea this time
- move servers to try and find one that doesn't have a reaper in it
- next one has one
- so does the next
- a dozen tries down the line you finally find one that's all clear
- you decide to try doing an event. There's a fort nearby and no one around that you can see.
- you head over to the fort and finish the event, get the key, loot the loot room.
- you get on your ship and check the map cause you know doing anything for any amount of time is risky
- There are 3 reaper emissaries that have spawned into the map. All of them are headed to your location
- there's also a 4th ship that just rounded some nearby rocks. He's not a reaper but he's in cannon range and shooting at you anyway.
- Fucking run, trying hard to get the reapers and the other ship to all fight each other instead of you. In your head you can already hear the whole playerbase saying "skill issue, just 1v4, get gud"
- it's no use, there's too many of them, you have to fight
- the whole mess drags out into a long and unprofitable fight for everyone
- In the end you and 3 other ships have lost or given up
- respawn on a corner of the map
- get your ship sailing again and try to do something safer, like fishing, cause that set looks good and clearly nothing else is gonna work out for you today
- a half hour in one of the reapers from earlier sails by. He's sold the loot by now, you figure he's here to sink your boat again or something.
- you notice a distinct lack of cannon fire
- he stops the boat next to yours and pulls out the megaphone
- he says it's nothing personal, just business, tells you he's got pointers for you next time something like that happens
- realize a reaper is stopping to talk, this never ends well
- he shouts "don't suck, dumbass" shoots what is likely a dozen kegs he picked up god knows where in his hull, catching your ship in the blast and filling it with holes. You assume he's logged off at that point but you don't care, you quit the game as soon as you saw the explosion.
- question why anyone plays this game
- remember that one time you had lots of fun and met some cool guys that legit saw you trying to solo an event and decided they were gonna be your personal bodyguards for fun
- they fought the whole world just to make sure you got back to port
- that was 6 seasons ago
- you've never had a moment that good since but you keep hoping and that hope leads you back to the top of this loop.

Sea of Thieves is a unique and often hilarious pirate adventure. Its not always smooth sailing, but the unpredictable nature of the game and the companionship with your crew make for unforgettable (and often ridiculous) moments. Just be prepared to yell a lot, laugh even more, and maybe lose some treasure that is worth of five hours grinding along the way.