Hello everyone,

Many of you might have experienced sudden crashes without any warning neither error code in Sea of Thieves. It has long been a mystery I wanted to solve. Now, it is done and I don't really know what to think about it.

I've been playing Sea of Thieves since my wife made me discover it back in October and we truly love it. However, when we've got a second capable PC and started playing together, we have noticed casual crashes from her side. They were rare enough to ignore, but some weeks later, a friend joined the party. He didn't have Sea of Thieves, so I suggested he adds my Microsoft account to Microsoft Store and installs the game.

That is totally legit. Microsoft used to allow users to install games on multiple devices. Sharing a Microsoft Account isn't an easy thing, since you have to trust the person you share it with (it would have access to your emails and such). Also, only one of the devices can run games offline (the feature doesn't truly work, you can try on Shadow of War, for instance). DRM has always been a pain and will still be for years to come.

Whatever. The friend installed the game with my account and we have taken a 3-person ship (sorry, I only know the names in French). So the crashes began. Every 10 minutes, one of them (my wife or my friend) would crash unexpectedly, with no error code at all. The game just closes.

We've tried moving the game to an HDD, defragment the HDD (only I had it on an HDD and I was the only one without crashes), tried connecting through a VPN (maybe having 2 instances on 1 IP – me and my wife – was an issue with Xbox Game Services…), tried joining in different orders, tried playing with no skins (-_-)… but nope. Both kept crashing.

So I've paid them a Game Pass for PC. One to start with, and the other had crashes. Then the other, and crashes stopped completely.

Now, I'd like to know if Sea of Thieves' developers are aware of this. Because there are reports on the Web about this kind of crash. And if they are, we'd like to know if they do it on purpose. If so, we would be grateful if they added an error message about it; or publicly acknowledge that they do make people crash because more than one person is playing the game with the same Microsoft Account.

And of course, it would be interesting to know why a « feature » from Microsoft becomes a nightmare for players.

tl;dr

If you have the game installed using the same Microsoft Store account, N-1 of the N players that do so would crash randomly. It's frustrating and shouldn't happen. Is Rare aware of it?