Sailing the 7,000 seas.
It’s never been quite clear how many players will be able to fit in a Sea of Thieves server, and it turns out there’s a very good reason for that – Rare’s approach to servers is very different to most online games, meaning there’s no definitive answer.
The developer’s focus is on keeping player encounters regular, but not too frequent – the magic number is apparently to see another ship, on average, every fifteen minutes to half an hour, making every encounter different, as well as giving non-violent players the chance to escape.
But in a map as large and spread out as Sea of Thieves’, a high number of players might still be too spread out, or a small group too bunched together, to keep that magic number in check. The solution for Rare is to focus on the distance between players in a server, not just how many players are on that server.
“We step in to ensure that you do have that frequency of encounter,” explains lead designer Mike Chapman to IGN. “So when we detect that there’s fewer people near you, we migrate you to preserve that ratio, so we kind of move you seamlessly across servers.”
That seamlessness is the key. All servers are synchronised, meaning that day-night cycles and even weather remain consistent for every player playing at one time. When you’re migrated, the idea is that players will feel interested rather than interrupted – meaning you won’t be kicked out of the game to join a new server.
Instead, your boat will continue sailing as normal, but the screen will react to show you something strange is happening: “When you see it happen,” says Chapman, “you see a cryptic riddle on screen and hear the music, it kind of refers to the fact that the world is changing.”
The upshot is that, practically, there’s no hard-and-fast maximum or minimum number of players in one Sea of Thieves server as long as everyone’s still hitting that magic number, and it should never really feel like you’re being placed and replaced into new versions of the world.
For more tidbits about Sea of Thieves, we’ve got you covered – from how the game will handle microtransactions, to why the maximum party size is 4, to how everything kicks off, and what it is you’re aiming to achieve.
Joe Skrebels is IGN’s UK News Editor, and thinks it would be very cool if that server migration riddle led to treasure. Follow him on Twitter.