Five years, eh? We’ve come a long way since launch, and while plenty has changed for those of you who sail our seas, one thing never falters for us: this amazing community makes Sea of Thieves what it is.
Following previous Seasons’ celebratory Community Days, the event for Season Nine took the form of a fifth anniversary special, running a full 24 hours longer than usual. Of course, we still started by asking you all to take part in the usual hashtag hijinks – but this time we tracked the new #SoTAnniversaryPromo tag on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube, and it all helped to increase the in-game Community Emissary multiplier! Through a combination of that freedom and the lure of a boost to Ancient Skeletons appearing at Grade Five, you smashed our cumulative cacophony ceiling within five hours and 15 minutes. Outstanding!
Of course, even if you never heard the pulse-racing jingle of an Ancient Skelly, simply logging in during Community Weekend was enough to earn you the Gilded Flag of Fellowship, Baker’s Barrel Disguise Emote (used 186,611 times over the weekend!) and a Skull of Destiny Voyage, while a quick visit to the Pirate Emporium sale yielded a free Down the Hatch Emote too.
But as we announced would happen ahead of the day, reaching the maximum Community Emissary Grade enabled us to use magic (some nifty engineering) to encourage more frequent emergences of those Ancient blue-boned keepers of cash. As per the plan, a total of 50 million Ancient Coins were claimed by lucky pirates during the weekend surge, with Ancient Skeleton appearances returning to their normal rarity after a little over 17 hours of action. To those who were lucky enough to claim a slice of the prize pot, congratulations – we hope those Ancient Coins have gone towards something nice in the Emporium.
Pirates who got lucky and pirates who didn’t were seen coming together throughout the weekend at New Golden Sands Outpost, where the fifth anniversary picture wall built for the occasion was enjoying its final days on display following its appearance on March 20th. The perfectly posed pictures you shared from that special spot throughout the weekend truly warmed our hearts. Thank you.
We’re worryingly close to getting sentimental now, so before our tear ducts try anything wet, let’s talk numbers. Facts! Facts won’t make us weep. Starting with the most important insight, bananas are still a pirate’s top choice of nourishment with 9,177,967 cronched over the weekend, although coconuts were a close second as we saw pirates smash a total of 9,027,677 into their faces. Some of you have more curious dietary habits though, given that 1,788 burnt leeches were also consumed. Perhaps they taste like chicken?
Despite the friendly wrapping of a Community Weekend, however, combat is inevitable when you throw pirate crews into a treasure-filled sandbox, so colour us unsurprised that 50,741,900 cannonballs were launched during the window, likely contributing to the 46,147,284 skellies smashed, 67,431 Megs dispatched and 24,030 Krakens dismissed. Not sure the 3,850,326 player pirates fired from cannons were as effective, nor the 68,860 dogs for that matter.
All this carnage led to loot, with a grand total of 19,749,926 individual items handed in, so congratulations if some of that was yours and commiserations if it used to be. Clocking up a bar tab of 2,592,392 grogs and showing off your moves with the standard Dance Emote 629,307 times does show us that you all just enjoy a good time in the end.
We also love to see how you’re celebrating – so much so that we crowned yet more deserving ne’er-do-wells with their very own Hats of Unfeasibly Glorious Fame as part of our neverending celebration of the #BeMorePirate mantra. From the cosplay props of neonautic_art on Instagram to the cinematic flair of Twitter’s Capt_Angelica, variety was, as it often is, the watchword of the day. ArcalenithSoT’s logo-inspired Trinket, JRedler_Art’s Gold Hoarder and swdrawings_nl’s striking sketch all earned the honours of fancy headwear too.
Outstanding creativity isn’t the only thing we reward, however. Servant of the Flame stan MutinousMel finally saw her presence in the community acknowledged by way of the Hat, while other long-standing MVPs (most valuable pirates) were also suitably honoured, including Fleeni, KroTukk, BriittyBear and TheD’sBack. Oh, and The Longest Johns, who we probably meant to give Hats to a while back but kept getting distracted by their tunes. This isn’t a complete list, but congratulations to all who were lucky enough to receive one this time around.
We served up plenty of fun social content for you to join in with during the weekend too: showing us your pirate and ship customisation screenshots were a key part of it, and a quick glance at the #SoTAnniversaryPromo tag on any social media channel will show just that! Silliness naturally took hold as the weekend went on, however, with memes and quote misremembering taking over throughout day two. You even got us trending on Twitter, so cheers for that!
Phew, got a little breakneck at the end there so take a minute if you need to breathe. Right, with all of that out the way the only thing left is to say our thanks, and probably cause some of those emotions we were trying to avoid. We started this article saying that the community makes Sea of Thieves what it is, and every time we run an event like this it only proves it even more.
Thank you for bringing your creativity, fun and energy to the full Community Weekend and, above all else, thank you for continuing to enjoy our silly pirate game in a myriad different ways. These events will continue, so keep your spyglass trained on our social media channels to learn about the next Season’s celebration closer to the time.
Five years, eh? Here’s to five more!