Hi all, firstly, thanks to everyone who turned up to play during the Sea of Thieves Closed Beta. We learned an invaluable amount of information, which has fed back into the game’s development. We wanted to give an update on our plans leading to launch.

Closed Beta learnings

One of our key goals was learning about what would happen when we hit a high number of players. We wanted to find out if there were any bottlenecks and if any of our messaging services had challenges processing the amount of data.

The response to the Closed Beta was humbling, where we saw increasing numbers of players every single day and saw more players log in than we’ve ever seen before.

Due to the amount of people who turned up to play, we learned so much about our services and capabilities. Some of these we could address on the fly, some of them we could attribute to plans we already had to do before launch, and some identified completely new areas to work on, so these have been added to our list to address for launch. If there were times where you couldn’t start the game, or sell items at outposts, this was where the biggest bottleneck of data was seen, and it’s where our areas of focus are now.

Third Scale Test *

After last week’s Scale Test, our Services Team have done even more work to help manage the traffic of player counts when playing the game.

We are now running a third Scale Test, beginning on Friday March 2nd at 10am GMT (2am PST) and ending on Sunday March 4th at 10am GMT (2am PST).

The goal of this is to test the latest services work we have done, and try and hit the highest number of concurrent players yet!

What to expect

With this added scale we expect – and plan – to see issues, that we can learn from and address. Not only are we looking to hit scale, we will also purposefully be stressing our services by throttling performance at certain times, testing the game in different data centres around the world, and simulating deliberate outages.

Some examples of the issues we expect to see are:

· Sessions being interrupted

· An inability to join the game at certain times during the weekend

· Issues when using shops in-game