The development team are looking to steady the ship, following a rocky release earlier this month.
Sea of Thieves servers are down today as Microsoft and Rare prepare for some major maintenance.
Having seen the game’s launch plagued by issues concerning failed connections and DLC loot not turning up, the tech giant are moving to act.
This will include five hours of scheduled maintenance today to try and solve Sea of Thieves’ biggest issues.
Sea of Thieves server downtime will begin at around 9am GMT, or 2 AM PT / 5 AM ET if you live in the United States.
As the timing shows, Microsoft are looking to get ready for a big surge tonight, when the most amount of gamers will be online.
“During peak times (9pm–2am GMT/5pm–10pm EDT/2pm–7pm PDT) we are seeing a very high volume of players, which is leading to strain on our server matchmaking services,” Microsoft explains.
“Try matchmaking into a crew that is already out on an adventure, as you will join an in-progress session rather than going through the server matchmaking flow.”
This means that the Sea of Thieves server status will be running red until around 2pm GMT, or 7 AM PT / 10 AM ET in the United States.
The latest scheduled maintenance will likely end in a new update for the MMO.
While Microsoft haven’t confirmed this yet, they have revealed what are their main priorities to fix.
The top issue is players having difficulty getting into the game at peak times.
Here’s the latest on the subject from Microsoft, who confirm: “Ongoing work to improve. On Wednesday night we again reached a higher CCU than we have seen so far, thanks to some improvements made in our services.
“Work continues to prepare for peak time Thursday, and then through to Friday and the weekend when we expect the highest player numbers yet. As the numbers continue to grow, we will work to maintain the experience for everyone.
“There might be cases where we need to temporarily halt incoming players to maintain the quality of the experience for people already in and playing. If we need to do this, we will message out on our social channels.
“We ask that everyone bears with us whilst we work with the extremely high player numbers we are seeing.”
For those missing the pre-order DLC for the black dogs pack, Microsoft say it should be arriving early next week.
“Due to the huge number of players redeeming their entitlements we saw some instability occurring in the title.
“We have temporarily disabled this and a fix is in place for the first patch update, likely to arrive early next week.”
Other issues include player rewards being delayed, which is again due to the volume of players, leaving major delays.
“Players should expect to see these rewards eventually come through, as they are queued up in our message service,” Microsoft adds.
More on the new downtime could be announced later today, following its end on Xbox One and PC.
