I hope everyone is healthy, safe, and enjoying their time on the Seas during these times of staying at home.
I'll start this post by providing a little background into my experience with Sea of Thieves and Arena specifically. I've been playing since Beta and play nearly every day. I'm an Achievement and Commendation chaser (e.g. "Completionist") and love the challenge of chasing the checkmarks. I thoroughly enjoy this game and love all the experiences it provide both myself and my crew. We have created countless number of stories and love reminiscing about them. In Arena, my crew has all achieved Legendary Sea Dog, obtained all the weapons and ship components, and loved playing Arena in general regardless if we were chasing a commendation. Our Arena Captain has 900+ wins under her belt, and the rest of our crew have individually 500+ wins per crew member. Suffice to say, we love playing this game. I don't say any of this to brag, but to give some background into our experience level so any criticisms I have around Arena 2.0 come from a place of vast experience with OG Arena (or Arena 1.0).
With that being said, my crew recently completed the new Competition of Courage, obtaining all the new cosmetics associated with the event. (As a quick aside, I love these little mini events that Rare has recently released first with the Fishing event and now with the Arena event, it brings back that feeling of time-limited events from days of old) This Competition of Courage was my crews first experience with Arena 2.0. We hadn't watched any streams or read any previous forum posts prior to starting the event.
Arena 1.0 required a true COMPLETE crew to be successful. The whole crew needed to be competent PvP pirates, but not necessarily professionals including pirate on pirate or ship on ship. The whole crew needed to be quite aware and mind the ship including sails, repairs, watch ladders for boarders, put out fires, etc. Members of the crew needed to be quite proficient at reading maps quickly and locating dig locations on the fly. Members of the crew needed to be able to accurately shoot off the ship and board others to catch their anchor. The crew needed to be able to develop a solid strategy based on the available maps and try to execute on the strategy. Arena 1.0 felt like a true TEAM competition. It felt like a condensed, exciting Sea of Thieves experience. Every member of our crew had their own job for which they excelled and we were able to leverage those strengths for wins.
Overall, my crew was quite disappointed with Arena 2.0. No longer does this mode feel like much Sea of Thieves skill is needed. It feels like a glorified game of dodge-ball or bumper cars. After only a few games, we discovered the meta of the mode is now locate the ship which is the slowest to get underway sail over to that ship, send someone off to anchor and lock the ship down, and cannon away until a win is achieved. The BLUE glowing chest is quite meaningless at this point as a crew can achieve the same amount of points with 25 cannonballs, which 3 cannons firing on a stationary ship doesn't take long to achieve. No longer does this mode require any sort of strategy. It felt like complete chaos and, for my crew at least, took away any enjoyment of the mode. I was also made aware that in the recent streams of Arena lately, many crews have taken the initial action of grabbing a pocketful of supplies, and immediately scuttling their ship to ensure more supplies. While it may be an effective way to get more initial supplies, it seems to take away from the spirit of the competition by sinking your own ship.
Arena 1.0 wasn't without it's faults. 1) Lobby wait times were astronomical which seemed to be caused by open crews. In the handful of Arena 2.0 matches, it doesn't seem like the Open Crew issue has been fixed as in a number of lobbies, a single player would hold up an otherwise entirely full lobby for 10-20 minutes. 2) Spawn locations could sometimes screw a crew if the maps were generated in unfavorable locations to their initial spawn location. This could have been alleviated with an idea of a single, centralized map to start the event, followed by more randomly generated maps throughout the match. 3) Jackpot islands, or multiple maps generating concurrently on single island could cause a runaway leader issue. Limiting the number of a chests on a single island, and a mechanism to prevent an immediate repeat map may have been a solution to these issues as well. 4) The duration of each match was quite long (~24 minutes) and for those that are chasing the Legendary Sea Dog commendation, this is a significant time commitment. The 15 minute time limit in Arena 2.0 seems to have fixed that to an extent, but with the original mode removed from the game, there is no way to determine how the shorter time limit would have affected Arena 1.0 gameplay.
As I noted, Arena 1.0 is no longer, and Arena 2.0 just doesn't feel fun anymore to my crew. In fact, there is a strong feeling of loathing for this new mode. So much so, that we have no desire to play Arena now that we've completed the Competition of Courage. There are many who may really enjoy this new Arena, and more power to you. I'm glad the developers were able to create a new mode that you enjoy, but that condensed Sea of Thieves competition and experience just isn't there anymore for my crew. RIP Arena 1.0. We'll miss you.