00:00Hi there, my name is Joe Neat, and I'm the Exec Producer on Sea of Thieves.
00:03And I want to share with you some of the learnings from our recent closed beta,
00:07and also how that's influencing our plans moving forward,
00:10in terms of how we want to test things and get ourselves really for the launch of the game on
00:14March 20th.
00:15So one of the key goals for the closed beta was to test our capability at scale,
00:19so getting loads of players in, seeing that all of our services and our features were working with the amount
00:26of players that we had.
00:27So some of the things that we learned throughout the beta, we could kind of fix on the fly.
00:30So we had our services engineers monitoring messages that were going backwards and forwards,
00:34where we were seeing issues as we were hitting the top scale, the top amount of people's playing.
00:39Some of those we already knew about, and we could kind of go,
00:42cool, that's on our list already, we know we have to address that before launch.
00:45And some of those things were new, so those are things that we add to our list of work,
00:48and make sure that we kind of prioritise in the right order leading up to launch.
00:52There's some work going on right now with our services team in terms of acting on some of the lessons
00:58that we took from the closed beta itself.
01:00And the first test that we're going to be running is a scale test, and that's going to be starting
01:06on February the 16th.
01:08And the purpose of this is to test our scale and to get as many people playing the game at
01:14the same time as possible
01:15so we can test some of the work that we've done, see improvements we've made,
01:19and to see if there are more lessons and more things that we can find out.
01:23Everyone that was invited to the closed beta will also have access to this.
01:26But, you know, we're not really as interested in learning about the features themselves or the gameplay and stuff from
01:33the beta here.
01:34And so purposefully we're kind of keeping a very similar feature set.
01:37So it'll still be the one trading company in terms of the gold hoarders.
01:40And because the purpose of this test is really a testing scale, we are expecting players to see problems.
01:46And, like, for us, maybe not for you, but that will be a good thing.
01:50Which means that, you know, you could see an inability to access the game at some points during that weekend.
01:57Maybe an inability to cash in your rewards as you're kind of getting back to outposts,
02:00because that's where we're really hammering our kind of services and the messages that are getting fired backwards and forwards.
02:05But, you know, there might be points at times where we stop new players coming in,
02:08because we're seeing kind of warnings, we're seeing errors that we don't want to kind of exacerbate and get worse.
02:14And there might be times that we actually take down the beta during that weekend,
02:18so we can work on something and then bring it back up.
02:20And, you know, we'll communicate that out as efficiently and as effectively as we can.
02:25So I'd advise everybody to keep an eye on the seaofthieves.com,
02:28which is where we have a banner which has all of the latest news, kind of what's going on live.
02:33And also at Sea of Thieves on Twitter, where we'll be sharing the latest updates and the latest news.
02:38And finally, thank you to everyone for their help so far,
02:41whether that's from the start of the Insider Programme, through all of the alphas that we've had,
02:45through to the closed beta, where we saw so many players and we saw so many great stories and videos
02:49and moments.
02:50And for those that, you know, had issues during the closed beta itself,
02:53we apologise for that, but it has helped us get into a better position as we move forward to this
02:59scale test
03:00and ultimately to the launch of the game, where we expect to see the most players
03:04and we want to be in the best position possible.
03:06So, yeah, thanks again.
03:08Honestly, this has been an amazing journey and we're nearly there
03:11and we're so excited about, you know, the road to launch and beyond.
03:15So, yeah, I hope to see as many of you as possible out there on the seas.
03:18and until then, cheers!
03:27Pre-order now to receive the Black Dog Pack when the game launches.
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