With the January update for Sea of Thieves, Rare made it so that all servers would support six crews at a time with a limit of 16 players. However, Rare has now decided to dial things back a bit, reducing the number of ships in Sea of Thieves servers from six to five. Sea of Thieves servers will still have a cap of 16 players, but there will be fewer ships sailing the open seas. Rare hopes that this change will result in more Sea of Thieves ship size variety and will improve the game’s matchmaking performance.
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The reaction to this change has been mixed. Some members of the Sea of Thieves community are welcoming the change as it means there’s less of a chance they’ll get attacked by enemy players. Others are asking Rare to actually increase the number of ships present in Sea of Thieves as they enjoy the PvP element of the game and find getting into fights with other pirate crews to be exciting.
With Sea of Thieves being a live-service game, it’s always possible that there will be even more changes to the number of ships and players for each server. However, it seems unlikely that Rare will ever increase the number of ships or players in a server by too much. After all, Sea of Thieves is an Xbox One game just as much as it’s a PC and Xbox Series X game, meaning that its potential player count is likely being held back at least somewhat by older hardware.
Regardless, fans should still be able to expect plenty of Sea of Thieves updates in the months ahead, as the game remains quite popular. Some of these may even be rather substantial ones, like the Sea of Thieves Pirates of the Caribbean update that added story content based on Disney’s pirate-themed movie franchise, but most of it will be smaller in scale.
Sea of Thieves support may continue for even longer than one would have guessed, as Rare’s next game, Everwild for Xbox Series X, is reportedly running into some development headaches.
Sea of Thieves is out now for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X.
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