Sea of Thieves will let you set your crew to private
It's a brig issue.
In an upcoming and hugely welcome change, Sea of Thieves will soon let you choose whether your crew is publicly joinable or private.
Currently, there's no way to stop other people being matchmade with you if you have an open space in crew - for example, if you're starting the game in a four-person galleon but only three of your party are currently online.
There's no way of holding a crew space open for a friend who's joining a little later, which is leading to matchmade players who join you getting immediately told to leave - usually, by being voted into your ship's brig.
"We hope this mitigates one of the key reasons for people misusing the brig," Rare wrote in a blog post from Sea of Thieves exec producer Joe Neate published today.
"It also has the added benefit of allowing players to sail the galleon with a smaller crew if they desire, or the sloop with a larger crew. We've had a lot of feedback and requests for this so we'll be very happy to deliver this functionality."
In another change, matchmaking will soon give preference to other players who are detected as using a microphone, in order to aid communication between players on the same ship. Rare is also investigating the possibility of letting you only choose to be matchmade with others who speak the same language.
As for other, bigger changes to Sea of Thieves - there's some good news on the horizon. The studio plans to release an update on the game's future content plans next week. Hopefully this includes some kind of a development roadmap, which the game's community has grown increasingly anxious to see.
"We hear and understand that people are keen to understand what our plans are for updating Sea of Thieves, beyond the top experience fixes," Neate concldued. "We are currently in the midst of adjusting our roadmap based on feedback we have received since launch, with a ton of planning meetings continuing through this week.
"We plan to release a video next week updating everyone on how we plan to evolve Sea of Thieves moving forward. We totally understand that people want to see this ASAP, but the critical thing here is to have the right plan that allows Sea of Thieves to grow in the right way."