Developer Rare's new open-world pirate RPG Sea of Thieves has been awash with criticism since its launch, but the developer may be about to make a significant change for the better.

In a recent developer update, Rare laid out plans to alter the way that Sea of Thieves' multiplayer operates, while also explaining how the studio planned to deal with cheating in the game before briefly touching upon the topic of post-launch content.

The first, significant change that Rare plans to introduce will allow players the option of choosing whether their ship is "invite-only," rather than open to any matchmade players. This change would allow groups of less than four players, for example, to crew a ship without having another player assigned automatically to their crew. Rare apparently hopes that this change will discourage players from misusing the brig system to lock up automatically-assigned players.

It would also enable a smaller group to crew a galleon, or even bring a larger crew aboard a sloop, though it will not lift the four-player cap. According to Rare, this change is one of the most requested by players.

Rare Hopes to Stop Players From Misusing the Brig

The multiplayer changes planned by Rare also including a matchmaking system that filters by microphone status and language, allowing players to prioritize matchmaking with other players who have the same microphone status as themselves, and who are speaking the same language.

The other key issue addressed in Rare's developer update is cheating in Sea of Thieves. Despite only releasing a few weeks ago, the game reportedly already has a hacking problem, and Rare states that the studio considers dealing with this issue a top priority. The studio reiterated its banning policy, stating that any players caught cheating in the game would be banned straight away.

Sea of Thieves Giving Players the Option of Private Crews

A recent patch to Sea of Thieves already extended the game's ship respawn distance, preventing players from respawning their ship within sight of the ship that sunk them, but Rare states in the developer update that the studio has plans to improve that aspect of the game even further. Rare also wishes to address other problems with spawn-killing by adding in-game reminders to players of the "Scuttle" option, and possibly even moving ships to other world instances to avoid prolonged cases of spawn-killing.

Finally, Rare briefly addressed the studio's plans for Sea of Thieves' post-launch content. Although the studio has chosen not to release any DLC roadmaps for the game's future development, the blog update states that the studio plans to release a video next week that outlines plans to improve and add content to the game in the coming months.

Sea of Thieves is available on Xbox One and PC.