It is a controversial thing, but Rare shouldn’t be stopped to add some Death Penalty in Sea of Thieves. However, for now, the idea is pretty much gone. After the proposal have been followed up by bad feedback from the players, Rare and Sea of Thieves are giving up on adding any sort of Death Penalty.
Firstly, it was an idea of deducting a bit of captain’s gold for each death. A reason to embrace players to have a serious approach to various of battles.
However, the death penalty avoidance has been confirmed on Joe Neate’s Twitter:
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. https://t.co/83pYg5HPbq
— Joe Neate (@JoeNeate1) March 26, 2018
Therefore, players shouldn’t be scared of this feature coming to Sea of Thieves. We likely sit on the same page with the whole community and the thought of “the game should’ve added more content to play” before it fully releases. It is true, and we have mentioned that before.
Now, the idea behind having a Death Penalty may add up a bit to the game. Sadly, the feedback results were overwhelmingly negative. Having a taxes in a game like Sea of Thieves or sort of kill fee is inappropriate, because some of the PVE content is kind of hard to do, especially for lower skilled players. For instance, the Skull Fort event will surely kill your teammates many times.
Therefore, we can conclude the idea behind this was terrible since the beginning, even though the developers could add some Death Penalty – Gold Gain for killing a PVP player. While it may sound a bit tricky, it should embrace the PVP content over PVE. Otherwise, we do not have any gains from doing PVP, except stealing other players’ loot. But this indeed leads to another question. What if they do not have any loot?
And it all goes in a circle once again.