“Once Safer Seas comes out, will you ever play High Seas again?”

Sometimes, asking questions is a good thing. Forums and sites like Reddit and Discord can give you all sorts of information if you ask a good question. The other day, I had a question of my own. After reading a post in r/seaofthieves with the announcement of Safer Seas, I was curious on how many people would remain in Safer Seas and whether they’d return to High Seas once they’d reached their goals. So I basically just went ahead and asked the question. “Once Safer Seas comes out, will you ever play High Seas again?”

I got a LOT of answers to that thread, which completely blew up my inbox and made my karma increase from 8400 for the first time in years. I don’t really post on Reddit much so that was a tad surprising to me. What’s more surprising though is that I can kinda group people into categories, based on what they said. There’s people who won’t touch Safer Seas with a barge pole, there’s people who will only play Safer Seas with less experienced friends, then you have people who will switch between based on their free time, and finally you have people who won’t sail on anything but Safer Seas.

A lot of the answers I got were pretty simple. People just want to be able to fish or do tall tales on their own. Once they’ve done those things, they’ll probably play a little High Seas, but don’t guarantee that they’ll leave Safer Seas behind. I can understand why people would answer like this. Tall Tales are long and arduous and require a lot, despite lacking decent rewards. Doing each Tall Tale 5 times to get the Gold Curse can be tedious, but in Safer Seas, it will be a lot easier since you’ll be completely on your own. Fishing was one of the major reasons why people wanted to play Safer Seas, for getting commendations.

Plenty of people also said they’d play Safer Seas with less experienced friends or family. That’s understandable. Safer Seas would make for a great tutorial area. After all, you don’t want your first experience to be shot down by someone way better than you.

However, I find it odd that quite a few people would perpetually play on Safer Seas, especially since it has a lot of downsides, even after you’ve reached the level 40 cap. When I asked one player whether they thought there was enough content to keep Safer Seas interesting, they said yes, despite missing out on things like Pirate Legend, Athena’s Fortune and the Legendary Hideout and getting more gold via Emissaries.

What surprised me the most though were all the people who were playing with their kids. Their kids that are not teenagers. Sea of Thieves is a Teen-rated game, it’s not really something you should have your 5 year old daughter playing. And the Teens0only rating doesn’t include multiplayer ratings. Sea of Thieves isn’t meant for young children, and frankly I think it’s a pretty silly idea to let your young kids play. Sure, there isn’t any blood, but we’re still shooting and killing things and you can’t control what other players do. Although I guess Safer Seas completely eliminates the online problem.

Personally, I don’t see much point in Safer Seas, as I love the player interactions (when they happen) and I love making tons of gold. There is a lot you can’t do in Safer Seas, which puts me off from playing it. And I’m not alone in this opinion. But it really does seem that a lot of people really hate anything PvP-related, to the point that they’d rather suffer through the large downsides than have to deal with any other players at all…