The pirate's life just got a little easier. Sea Of Thieves developer Rare just released an update to the game today that fixes a lot of bugs, and also scraps a feature before it was even implemented. The game was meant to have a "Death Cost" that would penalize players for meeting their end at sea or to the game's many hostile entities. However, due to a large amount of player outrage over the feature, Rare has decided to get rid of it.

The current version of Sea Of Thieves only makes players wait a bit of time before respawning. However, Rare announced in its forums last week that it was planning on adding a "death tax" to the game. The tax would be quite literal, forcing players to lose gold every time they died. Even worse, the gold cost would go up if the death was easily avoidable. So a player who lost their life just messing around would stand to lose a sizable chunk of their savings. Needless to say, players did not respond positively to the announcement.

The forum was lit up with comments from players, both constructive criticism and sour sarcasm. Many were concerned that the tax would encourage trolls to stalk players, repeatedly killing them just to drain them of gold. Others pointed out that the appeal of Sea Of Thieves is anarchy, living like a pirate with all the freedom in the world. They felt that imposing a penalty for experimentation would fly in the face of that. Then there were those who simply pointed out the game's lacking content, and wondered aloud at whether adding more features would be a better use of Rare's time than the Death Cost.

Rare's response was swift, thanking players for the "passionate feedback" and declaring that there would be no Death Cost. The announcement also comes with a huge game update "as opposed to just a patch." The reason for the sizable update was that Rare wanted to fix a lot of visual bugs, particularly some that affected the game's 4K performance on Xbox One X.

In this age where companies keep pushing the idea of games-as-a-service, they keep finding that being a service means constantly listening to the consumers. The infamous loot crate controversy with Star Wars Battlefront II showed the power of player feedback on a huge scale. While the reversal of Sea Of Thieves Death Cost is not as big of an issue, it still shows the necessity for player-developer communication. Gamers do have a voice, and they're using it.

NEXT: WHAT KIND OF COMPUTER DO I NEED TO PLAY SEA OF THIEVES?