Arena was soooo much better than season 8.

@wolfmanbush the arena needed competent match making and it would have been a success.

@jdge439 Didn't have the playerbase to support it.

Hourglass PvP has a larger playerbase and folks are still having trouble finding skill-based matches.

Best hope for Hourglass at this point is cross-stamp matchmaking. As you'd find more skill-based fights on other stamps, if none are available on your own.

I also think Rare really should take some ideas I've seen in the forum into consideration. Daily deeds, "win of the day" (1 level), boosted allegiance/XP for a win while defending, cosmetic rewards for levels 1-100 - all that might help draw in more casual players.

@theblackbellamy it wasnt the playerbase at all. It was the ridiculous way the game threw you into a crew before it would start a game.

As you can see in the images, the game wouldnt start and would endlessly be stuck waiting here. These were open crews. they should have been assemvled into a crew before being thrown into a lobby and make everyone else wait.

@jdge439 Oh yeah that lol.

They should have fixed the way open crews were assigned. I remember making suggestions for the game to move vacant open crews back to the crew ledger menu while looking for crewmates. That way only full open crews & closed crews would be left in the lobby, allowing it to start quicker.

But also, idk if that would've helped at all haha. The servers were so bad. I've had lobbies that were full of closed crews and still wouldn't start.

I misunderstood your original comment. Thought you meant Arena needed SBMM. Which I think would've been nice... if it had more than 3% of the games total activity.

@jdge439 said in Arena was soooo much better than season 8.:

@wolfmanbush the arena needed competent match making and it would have been a success.

Meh...Arena was fun when everyone was trying to win.

Towards the latter part of its life, people were just farming commendations most of the time and you only had one or 2 ships actually going for wins.

The Arena commendations were comically grindy so it's no wonder people just wanted to farm it...if only Rare would realize that making things ultra grindy is the reason people cheese so much stuff in this game.

@wolfmanbush said in Arena was soooo much better than season 8.:

@sweetsandman said in Arena was soooo much better than season 8.:

@jdge439 said in Arena was soooo much better than season 8.:

@wolfmanbush the arena needed competent match making and it would have been a success.

Meh...Arena was fun when everyone was trying to win.

So fun. When everyone was fighting and crashing around the turn in, the chest getting tossed around like a fumbling football as time was running out
ships battling, players battling, full on chaos

That was peak pvp in this game imo

What was always fun was that some random inexperienced pirate could get one over on everyone if they lucked out or played it well. The chaos broke up some of the predictability that piratical plagues SoT combat.

Exactly! I agree 100%. Those are the exact reasons why I loved arena. I miss the chaos of having an all out brawl on the deck of a galleon. Some of my favorite memories from this game were from fighting off more than one crew on another ship. It reminded me of an old pirate movie where everyone is sword fighting everywhere. I wish we still had the opportunity for huge ship battles like that. It's a rare occurrence when you come across a bunch of galleons on the same server willing to fight.

We had instant ship respawns with fair supplies and 5/6 ships in a battle.

You also had groups of players making there own games inside a Mode, and if you werent with them you were bullied or worse. How is that fair?
and instant ship respawns? Depending on the players machine. So what I just got here is a long drawn out battle against other ships, but in S8 if a battle drags out too long say 30min....it too long...

@alienmagi

Two percent

@alienmagi no we didn't it was a cess pit of toxic tdmers and towards the end was mainly boosters. Rose tinted glasses much? 😅

Even with Xbox load times, I had more fun playing Arena 1.0 than S8. It will die once every who can be bothered to grind gets their curses. It has no substance in its current form; half the people I play with don't want to even try it, and the other half gave it a go and stopped within the first month. You could write a book on why it's not a balanced and engaging PvP mode. The need for same faction battles and cross-stamp matchmaking proves the population is already low.

Rare killed Arena 1.0 by leaving it to stagnate. Worst of all, they left the lobby system totally broken for literally months. Lobbies could get into a state where they just wouldn't start, even when enough crews were full. I don't think they ever figured out the bug, and instead solved it with work arounds. If they'd made everyone sit on the crew ledger page before being matched to immediately start a game (like pretty much every other PvP game in the world) it would still be thriving. And as a separate mode they could have made it free to play. Arena 2.0 solved some game mode issues, but introduced new ones (AFK farming simulator anyone?) and kept the game-killing lobby system.

But no, it's our fault Arena got decommissioned because we didn't play it enough.

And the worst thing about S8? It left adventure mode as dead as the Mary Celeste. My crew is taking a break right now because of it. Lower server limit, PvP ships loading in then diving, people getting burnt out from the game completely having tried the new mode and lost too often to bugs, exploits, and cheaters. There might be a few PvE players breathing a sigh of relief that the seas are quieter, but overall I bet the numbers show that less people are playing adventure right now.

This is a matter of opinion that many seem to disagree with based on stats. The big issue with arena was that galleon mode was nothing but respawn platforms that people would fire from, and you would be hard pressed to find more than 2 ships that were active, while sloop arena, though fun, it still had issue of afk ships, and still took forever to find enough people to fill crews.

The big issue with both was they were neglected once stats showed no one cared for them, so they both stayed in a buggier state than even adventure mode.

@goldsmen Agreed that was a problem later with Arena 2.0, for two reasons: low popuplation partly due to the lobby system putting people off playing and/or leaving before the match started, and the points/commendation system discouraging people from playing the objective.

Lol always entertaining reading through an Arena thread comment section. You can see who took some of the PvP maybe a little too personally.

I loved TDM. I loved 5-boat-naval. I loved that Arena offered the opportunity to practice all kinds of PvP, even if you weren't going for wins. I'd goof around tuck at the turn-in spot, or camp the chest sometimes, or solo gally naval just for fun.

@WolfManbush used the term "full on chaos" in reference to when everyone was scrambling to win. I just embraced Arena's full on chaos, in general.

I enjoyed 2.0, though I did feel badly for the 1.0 fans, as much as I felt for the dedicated TDMers. I would have preferred a sort of "Arena 3.0" with multiple modes, all with clear objectives, more (and seasonal) cosmetic rewards, better maintainance, with better matchmaking. Could have even used a 1v1 mode where we sail on our captained ships.

Hourglass, imo, almost feels like a pre-Arena. A prototype. Something they thought of before they realized all the potential it has in its own dedicated mode. I appreciate all the changes the devs have made, to make it a smoother experience. I'm just not sure what the long term effects will be on the organic experience.

Agreed, imo if Arena had this much freedom of ship customisation, care, attention from Devs,rewards, different game mod options (1v1, 3v3), did i mention rewards like curses? It definitely would still be here...but oh well, it's what it is.

@alienmagi said in Arena was soooo much better than season 8.:

What we have now is just frustrating, 5-10 min before next battle and it's only 1v1 every time. Meh.

IF you even can get a match. Every time I've tried the HG, I'm underwater for a session waiting to get a game .....

I like it more, and I was an old arena tdm head, so you know that I'm either unbiased or biased towards arena. The new mode is better integrated into the story and the actual game mode that people play, the rewards are arguably better, and, although yeah supps can be annoying, the q times are a LOT better than some arena lobbies that would bug and be annoying. I miss arena too, but the new mode is way better for what SOT wants and needed.

Plus I like 1v1s more :)

@wolfmanbush said in Arena was soooo much better than season 8.:

maybe put in something for tdm specifically.

This is something we all hoped would happen. Would've saved arena from a lot of the toxicity cause people would just go to tdm servers, but realistically this wouldn't have worked. Not enough people outside of tdmers played it for the gamemodes to be split up and still make sense to keep around. Ofc we all wish it was made that way, but I do like this new update. I think they made the best out of a bad situation with it, and have had a lot of fun with it recently.