British game studio Rare has taken the gaming world by storm (pun intended) with its latest game Sea of Thieves. The co-op or single player pirating adventure has proven to be a hit with many would-be swashbucklers across the world. Due to its cross platform structure (it can be played via PC and XBox One), many gamers have fallen in love with the sailing, looting, and rich visuals. However, in spite of Sea of Thieves’ popularity, the game has not escaped its fair share of criticism, and it does have some glaring flaws. Without further ado, here is The Madisonian’s top ten things wrong with Sea of Thieves.

1. Lack Of Content
Sea of Thieves is a strong core game worth hours of fun, but the problem is its core gameplay is only a couple of hours. Rare studios boasted that they planned on having Sea of Thieves as their ten year lite MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online). Lite MMOs are supposed to be grind light, drop-in drop-out online games. Sea of Thieves is a bit too light for most players however.

2. Griefing
Sea of Thieves is a pirate game at the base, but that encourages “griefing.” When a requirement for satisfaction is ensuring another player does not have an enjoyable play through, it discourages long term play and new players joining the community.

3. Shotgun Meta
The combat is lackluster at best, unfortunately. The guns may have very different roles, but they tend to be thrown out because of the shotgun’s ability to one-shot on a body shot, the sniper’s sensitivity is annoyingly low when scoped in, and the pistol, while faster, has low damage that leaves the user running for cover. The saber is not much better. While it has relatively high damage output, the player is reduced to three swings before seemingly running out of stamina to prevent a Minecraft-esque sword fight.

4. Crippled Creation

Character creation is heavily limited to only randomized characters. Thieves’ apologists contend that you may save characters that you like while refreshing all others, but this is not a comparable replacement to today’s standard of complete customization.

5. Lack of Any Noticeable Progression

The game lacks any noticeable form of progression. The system currently in place allows for jobs that pay more after hours of grinding, but there are no noticeable differences in player strengths.

6. Team Play
Sloops have little hope of successfully defeating a galleon, which is okay when considering the sloop is supposed to be low-powered but much more agile. This, however, does not play out in the game. An enemy team is much more likely to fire players at you and/or drop them like mines in an attempt to drop the anchor on your own vessel.

7. Respawns
There are two types of respawns that are noticeable right off the bat. The first is when a player is killed and they return to their ship’s hold after waiting on a ghost ship for a short amount of time. This would be an interesting feature, but it gives ship combat little weight. It inevitably devolves into a form of spawn camping where they wait with blunderbusses for you to reappear. Second, are respawns that occur once your ship sinks. These spawns return you to a nearby island with a fresh ship full of resources. This allows sunken ships to return to the site of the battle within minutes, leading to several hours of cannon fire with no real consequence.

8.Broken Questing System

The questing systems require far too much effort for far too little gain. The play in retrospect could be considered similar to JRPG grinding. The quest rewards are also very inconsistent; The Gold Hoarders can sometimes send the player on voyages that could take an hour or more for only about a hundred gold. While several players have realized that it is possible to earn gold much faster when doing merchant guild quests. This was noticed because the merchants guild sends the player to retrieve animals and the value ranges for each can be learned. These are the only quests where value can be determined beforehand. So a player may cycle through them to maximize earnings.

9. Server Instability
The servers for the first few days were in turmoil. The devs actually locked new players out for several hours to allow their engineers to try to fix the problem while still allowing online players to avoid disconnection. Even after the server stress issues were fixed, disconnections ran rampant for days and infuriating players in the process.

10. Toxic Community

The game is cross platform play for Windows 10 and Xbox One. The community based on Xbox Live is notorious for their toxic players and unfortunately it shows and fuels number the “griefing” weakness highlighted in #2 . Arguably, the PC community might not be much better.