Sea of Thieves

What officially changed

Since Sea of Thieves launched, we’ve taken thousands of enforcement actions against those who’ve acted against our Pirate Code when sailing the seas. When our enforcement system was first designed, we had a lot less experience in the live service arena – and while we were as informed as we could’ve been back then, we didn’t necessarily understand what the impact of this would be years down the line. Over the last six months or so, we’ve been taking the time to review and analyse our enforcement strategies with a view to evolving how we move forward. While we’ve shared our plans for this in a previous Developer Update (from 7:15 in the video below), today our new policy goes live – so we wanted to take this opportunity to talk a little more about the how and why. From today, we will be giving players more information on why we’re taking action against their accounts and an opportunity to change their ways. While, unfortunately, there are a few bad eggs in this world who do want to cause harm and distress to others, we’re conscious that some folks might just be having a bad day and immediately regret their actions – and we want to give these players room to learn from their mistakes. Our Previous System Our previous enforcement system was a three-strikes-and-out policy – which has worked for us, but has also had some limitations and made it hard to take nuanced action. For example, if a player had received their third strike for a relatively minor offence, under the old system they would have received a lifetime ban – which, after a long and lengthy review on our side, felt perhaps a little too inflexible. For someone on the end of this enforcement action, under our old policy they would have simply received a Redbeard error message upon their next attempted login, rather