Sea of Thieves’ Proposed Death Tax Cancelled, Rare Aware of Griefing

Rare’s Sea of Thieves is your average, disappointing triple A release – which has its positives, don’t get us wrong. But one way it wasn’t going to be improved was by taking Gold from players if they died. The developer proposed a death tax of sorts for the future that would have achieved this. Thanks to feedback from players, however, the death tax idea has been shelved.

“One piece of additional feedback we’ve seen is around a proposed change listed in our release notes last week, and we’ve heard the sentiment there, so I can confirm that Death Cost is, well, dead. Thanks for the feedback here. We’re listening,” said the developer in an update.

Of course, one reason the idea soured on so many players was the issue of griefing and respawns. It’s not difficult to kill a player and see them respawn in the same location, thus allowing you to spawn kill them for hours. That’s still an issue in Sea of Thieves and Rare is aware of it.

“We are tracking sentiment and the top feedback issues on the game experience itself, and we are very aware of the topic of persistent player griefing (repeatedly being attacked by the same ships or players). We are discussing what short-term fixes we can make, and what slightly more involved fixes we will prioritise. We will share an update on this and the other top feedback points and our thoughts on them later this week.”

Some players have asked for cooldown timers on how often players can scuttle their ships and respawn at the closest port. Differing spawn locations also wouldn’t be so bad. Granted, this is on a long list of things that need to be fixed with the game in addition to content being required but Rare is listening.

What are your thoughts on Sea of Thieves thus far? Let us know in the comments.