Sea Of Thieves Addresses Long Matchmaking Times For Faction-Based Battles

When Season 8 kicked off in Sea of Thieves last month it introduced several faction-based PvP content, including a 1v1 ship fight on the high seas against an opposing faction. Unfortunately, queue times for the battle have been extremely long from the day that it launched, but the good news is that Rare is now on the case.

According to the studio, the long queue times are caused by several different factors such as low population regions, faction imbalance, controller preference, and the way that the matchmaking system separates players into smaller groups called stamps and not by the lack of suitably -skilled opponents.

“To enable Sea of Thieves to support the largest possible number of players, we separate our servers and services into smaller units that are easier to manage,” Rare explained. “These units are called ‘stamps’. This helps us to scale our game and ensure the gameplay experience is great for all players.”

“The downside to arranging our servers in this way is that it can mean our players are separated between different stamps,” the studio added. “Currently, Sea of Thieves does not allow players to migrate between these stamps, which means that even if crews of the opposing Faction are ready to fight you, it may not be possible to actually matchmake you all together. This will in turn result in longer queue times as you wait for an opponent who is also on the same stamp as you.”

As a fix, the developers are looking into adding an option for same-faction battles as a secondary option and allowing cross-stamp matchmaking. There’s currently no solid date for when the fixes will arrive but the devs hope to have it ready for deployment by early 2023.