[p]As pledged in this year’s Community Direct, as part of our ongoing commitment to better dialogue and transparency, we conducted one of our largest ever player surveys with Season 16’s Big Listen. In the spirit of this concerted effort towards improving transparency, we wanted to share with you how the results of this survey shook out and how we’re thinking about some of the signals we received.[/p][p]Before we get into the nitty gritty, we want to say thank you to everyone who took the time to give us their feedback. We’ve found the results genuinely illuminating (as well as confirming a few assumptions and hunches), and it’s given us a clear set of priorities to think about. Of course, game development is hard and change doesn’t happen overnight – but we are listening and focusing our efforts on the things that matter most to you, our players.[/p][p]We discussed these results at length on the latest episode of the Sea of Thieves podcast, so for those of you with 45 minutes to spare, tune in below to hear Creative Director Mike Chapman and Production Director Drew Stevens talking about what this means for Sea of Thieves’ future. However, if you’re after the key headlines, please read on – we have them all right here![/p][p][dynamiclink href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqrGKEbGsZc"][/dynamiclink]Season 16 Headline Learnings[/p][p]First up: one of the big learnings from this survey was that among the thousands of folks we asked, we saw a significantly stronger affinity with Athena’s Fortune than The Reaper’s Bones – 64% to 36%, which was a surprisingly large margin to us given the closely fought battles of Adventures gone by.[/p][p]So, going into a Reaper-themed Season with Season 16, we’ve been able to recognise retrospectively that the majority of players might not have vibed with the overall theming. While this will perhaps have coloured some of the survey perspectives, there are still all kinds of great insights we want to share with you all.[/p][p]The overall player rating for Season 16 was 6.1 from our active players which, while not phenomenal, was a good result. Over a quarter of active players rated the Season as an 8/10 or higher, and less than 6% rated the Season as 1/10 or 2/10 – so there’s some recognition that, broadly, it was a solid experience. We’re always going to want to see that score go much higher, but given the transitionary nature of Season 16, it’s been heartening to see that players reliably took some enjoyment from its offering.

[img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/37295600/036242bff31f9b21cbbae093421f1c222cfc2952.jpg"][/img][/p][p]Season 16 Content Highlights[/p][p]Those helpful Mercenary Skeletons of the Order of Bone and Blade were the highest-rated feature by far in Season 16 – their user rating came out on top, followed by the unsealable Reaper’s Chests and new cosmetics. The new Voyages introduced during Season 16 were broadly rated as fine, but players did not express a particularly keen desire to play them again – so we can recognise that there perhaps wasn’t the intended replayability appeal there.[/p][p]We’ve heard this feedback, and for those who are interested, Creative Director Mike Chapman provided some good context behind the decision to introduce these Voyages on our latest podcast. In the same way that we fleshed out The Hunter’s Call at the beginning of the year, we wanted to expand the offering for The Reaper’s Bones – and these Season 16 Voyages are a solid entry-level introduction to Reaper play, as PvE experiences that bring a little more PvP threat.[/p][p]We were more surprised by how little awareness and understanding players felt in general around the new Season 16 content. The Voyages ranked more highly for comprehension, which makes sense given they’re very much aligned with the Voyage structure our pirates are used to. However, around the new tools like the Cannon of Rage and Mercenary Skeletons, there was a sense that many players weren’t fully aware of them or didn’t feel well-informed about how they worked.[/p][p]This is a sign we’ve already begun taking cues from, levelling up the UI Seasonal Tabs and Deeds to promote better discoverability of the content we’ve been introducing in every Act. A version of this went live with Season 17, and Season 18 will bring further refinements – so we hope to see these data points change more positively over time.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/37295600/705839c51fd5d381e000cbdabcf2d4f49cef19c7.jpg"][/img][/p][p]Game Health[/p][p]Overall game health was rated 3/5 by our active users, with quality and stability being the key areas of technical performance we struggled with most. However, one of the biggest signals we got from this survey was that it’s the player-driven health metrics impacting the experience most of all.[/p][p]Cheating and toxic behaviour from other players were rated 2.6/5 by all respondents. From our community sentiment, customer support contacts and game telemetry, we’ve always had an awareness of this problem – but to see it so concisely summarised in a low score was a stark reminder that we still have much to do in this area.[/p][p]We do have some key improvements coming to Hourglass Battles to address some of the encounter-based toxicity, which Production Director Drew Stevens talks about in the latest Developer Update. But, more critically, we need to take a step back and look at how we influence players and gameplay at a fundamental level, to make encounters with other crews feel fairer and more fun.[/p][p]Toxic behaviour is a huge topic to tackle and it encompasses so many parts of the experience, but we’re committed to finding a path through to change those numbers. More on this as it comes, but we’re teeing up a second, more in-depth survey to dig into the heart of this issue so that we can prioritise related areas for work moving forward.[/p][p][/p][p][dynamiclink href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjPFeayVfSo"][/dynamiclink][/p][p]Community Relations[/p][p]As part of this survey, we also wanted to know what you thought of how we were communicating, and if you felt we were listening to your feedback. These are perhaps some bold questions to ask, but again, as we said in the Community Direct, we’re serious about improving community relations and bringing players’ perspectives to the forefront of our decision-making.[/p][p]So: first, we asked if you thought we were listening to the community. You scored us 3/5 on this, with 43% of all active users rating us a 4 or 5. However, nearly one in five players (19%) scored us a 1/5, believing that we do not listen to our players at all – so it’s clear that while some feel there’s a foundation to build on, we need to do some work here to win back your trust and prove we’re listening.[/p][p]Since the Season 16 Big Listen survey went out, we’ve made some advancements here based on your feedback: we’ve introduced 110 FOV, made the incoming spatial audio experience more player-friendly, worked on weapon switching, adjusted Season 17’s Reaper Fortress loot pools, and we have plenty of other feedback-inspired irons in the fire. We’re hoping to see this effort reflected in Season 17’s scores too, and we’ll keep putting the work in to ensure we’re addressing your key pain points.[/p][p]Just on this: it would be remiss of us not to address the sentiment that some of these updates have skewed towards a certain player type, rather than all players. However, we want to assure players that there are ton of discussions ongoing where we’re looking at what would be impactful quality-of-life changes for everyone. We hope to have more to share here in the coming months, so please stay tuned for fresh information (and register as an Insider to test these upcoming changes, if you’re not already one of the crew)![/p][p]Also on the topic of communication, we asked if you thought our communication was regular and transparent enough, and you scored us 3.5/5 on this – with almost 60% of all active users rating us at a 4 or 5. We’ve been working on this lately, and we’re pleased to see it reflected in the scores. Again, we could still be better here and intend to drag that average up. However, it’s another solid foundation to build upon, so thank you for recognising our efforts with the return of the Dev Updates, the Community Direct commitments and everything else we’re doing – like the survey itself – to ensure a better dialogue with you all.[/p][p][img src="https://clan.akamai.steamstatic.com/images/37295600/284bed9fb8a5f36f6e2d78b8c760c1850330422b.jpg"][/img]

The Future[/p][p]While we’re still working out what this really means for our development roadmap, as these results are still contextually very fresh, we have some clear signals about what players want to see the most. We can’t yet comment with any specificity on what we’re doing in these particular areas, but we wanted to be honest about what our players have asked from us – so, the top five most popular areas for future content updates amongst our active users include:[/p][p](1) New world regions and locations
(2) More narrative content
(3) New ship types
(4) New World Events
(5) New sandbox tools and mechanics[/p][p]The Community Direct in early 2026 will be the next opportunity for us to unveil some of our content plans for the year ahead, so look forward to that![/p][p]And the Survey Said…[/p][p]This was an incredibly useful first set of results for us. We’ve surveyed our players before, but not on this scale – so the sheer volume and breadth of the feedback has been invaluable. We’ll continue with our Seasonal surveys and track some of those key health metrics from Season to Season, with the hope of seeing the needles move in the right ways. And we’ll continue to share those results too, as part of our ongoing commitment to sharing in what we’re up to and why we’re making some of the decisions we do.[/p][p]The survey for Season 17 will be arriving soon, so if you’d like to participate and have your say, sign up to the Insider Programme and ensure your email preferences are on to receive the invite – you can do this by logging in to the Sea of Thieves website and checking your Account page. Thanks to all of you for taking part![/p]