Cheating in Sea of Thieves

If you have a multiplayer game, then you’ll stumble across cheaters. And, it turns out, Sea of Thieves has pretty much no anti-cheat system what so ever. Sure, Rare have said that they’re developing an anti-cheat system, but they’ve been saying that for a while. In the mean time, all you can really do is record other players that you suspect of cheating, then send videos to Rare for them to inspect. While having no anti-cheat in a sandbox game wouldn’t be too bad, there’s a whole PvP game mode (hourglass battles), PvP is encouraged in general, and there’s also a very heavily PvP-orientated faction (the Reaper’s Bones) that rewards killing other player emissaries and stealing their flags. Most of the time, you don’t see much cheating and, frankly, most people tend to keep to themselves. But sometimes you do see cheaters and there’s an odd amount of variation to them.

The first kind of cheater is the more obvious cheater. Not obvious to look at, but obvious when it comes to gameplay. Aimbots appear in every single game that has aiming in it, pretty much. Sea of Thieves is no different. Thankfully though, the only one-hit-kill requires you to be in melee range, and the eye of reach and the pistol both have slow reload times, so there IS a chance to fight back. At the same time, aimbots with guns can’t do much against a cannon ball to the face, and naval combat is as important as close quarters combat in Sea of Thieves.

While you do have aimbotters, you also have aimbotters with cannons. These can be harder to spot, because some people just have really, really good aim. But there’s a limit to cannon balls. They have a maximum range they can travel. Chainshot is even worse, it has a completely different arc, but I’ve seen chainshot being fired in the same way a normal cannon ball has been fired, and going way further than it’s supposed to. Thing is, the AI in Sea of Thieves also kinda uses aimbot (I mean, technically it has to) and there’s some funny videos of skeleton ships shooting cannon balls that curve in order to hit you, but malicious players definitely use something similar. There are hacks that assist in aiming, showing the required angles to hit a ship, but other cannon aimbots just follow players around, which makes repairing impossible because you constantly get jostled.

I’ve also seen people who just don’t seem to take any damage. Normally, a person takes one direct hit blunderbuss, two rifle shots or four pistol shots to kill. But I once ran into someone who tanked 3 shots fired by me, PLUS shots fired by both my crew. Sure, you can claim hit-reg (hit registration has always been a problem in Sea of Thieves) but these days, we have server-based hit markers that prove that an enemy has been hit and shows a cross symbol when you hit someone. One other thing I’ve seen are teleporting players, but for some of them, it might just be really laggy internet. The start of season 11 was particularly bad with servers having massive ping spikes for no reason. Then again, some players do seem to teleport.

While I’ve seen a few things, I haven’t seen as much crazy shit as other members of the Stormcloud. Both Bacxaber and Fox have done a LOT of Hourglass PvP, and have seen everything from cannon balls phasing through ships, to cannon balls just… randomly being deflected. Another thing that all of us have experienced is the infinite and impossible spawning of kegs on the middle of your ship. Sure, using a keg is definitely a tactic, but there is a very obvious limitation when it comes to using one: you need to actually be near a ship first, you can only carry one per player and they need to be manually detonated. So having 5 go off right in front of your mast with no one around is clearly fucked up.

Maybe one day Rare will finish their anti-cheat system. But until then, all you can do is leave and deny cheaters of any fun (and try and record them and send the videos to Rare, but that can be tricky, especially when people can hide their usernames). And, thankfully, with the Scuttle And Change Server option and season 11’s new Diving feature, simply leaving is easier than ever.