The SoT Dev Update and On Stealing All Our Doubloons

Alright so I’m gonna start this article off by saying that you should watch the SoT Developer update video so you know what I’m talking about first. You can do so here:

Anyway, yeah, they’re just going to reset people’s currencies.

Doubloons are the third currency in the Sea of Thieves. They aren’t easy to come by, they’re mostly rewarded by doing Reaper-y things, season pass things or commendations, and there’s not really much you can buy with them. New players struggle to get them, but old players probably have a bunch lying around. Alternatively, the stuff you can buy for Doubloons, none of it is that interesting (it’s mostly recolours), so folks just haven’t spent it. Right now, apart from the Lucky Hand, Ferryman and maybe the Wild Rose stuff, there’s very little worth buying. So some people have a lot of it. Some people also have a lot of gold.

Now, the really, really easy way to fix this “problem” of some people having a lot of Doubloons is to add a ton of things for people to buy. People buy the new things, the amount of Doubloons people have goes down. Simple, right? Instead, Rare have decided to just… delete everyone’s Doubloons.

Sure, they haven’t done that yet, but they’re going to, next season. Why? “Some people have too many Doubloons and we want to get the Doubloon economy under control.”

(Honestly, I think they’re doing this because they don’t know how to code a new currency into the game and want to rework Doubloons into the Hourglass currency rather than the rare-and-commendation-based currency, but that’s because I’m pretty sure the current devs can’t code.)

We haven’t been given a date yet, but we’ve been told that there “will be time-limited things to buy”. Except… no one wants to lose all their Doubloons, and there’s never been a Doubloon economy, because there’s so little to buy. If we had things to spend Doubloons on, we wouldn’t need to reset Doubloons. Just stick things in the shops and people will spend them. And at the same time, why is this not a problem with the Gold economy? I have, what, 12k Doubloons but I have nearly 60 million gold. I could buy most items in the game if I wanted to, and I’m not even THAT big a player.

All resetting Doubloons does is erase the time people spent earning those Doubloons. NO ONE likes things being blatantly taken away from you for no reason, and that’s exactly what this reset is doing.

As for the rest of the video, I’ll be honest, it ain’t great. They mention server populations and claim that it’s a “problem with how servers are populated from diving” but fail to address how things like diving, server stability and hourglass massively affect server populations and some ways to try and remove cheaters from Hourglass.

In all honesty, I don’t think making players do the maiden voyage and the onboarding voyages for the main factions will do much to deter cheaters. The maiden voyage takes like 5 minutes, the intro voyages are also very short. Apparently, you’ll also need to be a certain rank in certain factions, but the first 30 levels are pretty easy to obtain, especially if you’re, well, cheating. A much, much easier way to slow down cheaters would be to make it so you have to be Pirate Legend to do Hourglass. It makes sense, after all, since Hourglass is literally Reapers VS the faction you unlock after you reach Pirate Legend. But that’d make too much sense, I guess.

Then they announced a 6 sloop battle that… is time-limited. I have a lot to say about this as well, but that’s going to be a whole separate article, because I… I don’t think it’s a good idea.

Either way, I don’t know what Rare are smoking, but I don’t want any of it. Resetting a currency does nothing but piss people off. And when people are already pissed off, why are you pissing them off further?