Sea Of Thieves Death Tax Plans Cancelled, Players Don’t Want To Pay With Every Death

Being a pirate in the Xbox One exclusive, Sea of Thieves is a dangerous position to be in. There are so many ways to die and while it can get annoying, at least there currently aren’t any costs to perishing. The developers of the game were actually planning on changing that by implementing a death tax or “Death Cost”. After the community pushed back, this plan was scrapped.

So, it turns out that gamers don’t want to have to pay every time they die in the pirate simulator. In a recent Tweet, one of the people behind Sea of Thieves announced that the “Death Cost” that was proposed last week would no longer be implemented.

“Letting everyone know we've heard the feedback and the proposed 'Death Cost' in #SeaOfThieves is, well, dead. We messed up with the messaging around this, and it's now gone. Thanks for the honest feedback & discussion on this,” the Tweet reads.

The original plan was revealed in a forum thread the week before, with Rare posting details with regards to the supposed tax. Apparently, this was to ensure that players will avoid dying unnecessarily.

“This new feature has the Captain of the Ferry of the Damned deduct a small gold fee when you die,” the developers wrote. “Rates are dependent on the cause of death, so the more avoidable the death, the less patience the Captain will have when we enable this feature!”

As expected, the players did not think well of this plan, at all. As Kotaku notes, gold is hard enough to come by in the game, what with having to fight skeletons and other pirates for the precious metal. Giving it away just because the player died can be a huge issue. There was also the concern that it could be unfair to new players as well as the risk it posed in increasing player toxicity.