Arena as a PvP focused mode favors PC’s because the machines are faster and load the game faster. Often, it took multiple crew members to cut through the lag that naturally afflicts the slower machines to actually kill a single PC boarder. Blunderbombs were a god send to us for this reason. Firebombs also opened up tactical options to trying to deal with boarders that were indistinguishable from hackers as well.
During the first iteration of Arena, there were victory conditions that involved avoiding particularly belligerent and problematic crews; we often lost the moment a PC player boarded us, so our strategy often involved not allowing boarders by choosing our battles with PC crews very carefully. We shifted the focus from pirate vs pirate combat to ship vs ship combat whenever we had to fight them, and to which they usually were terrible at as they had been relying on pirate vs pirate combat like a debilitating crutch and never bothered to learn how to tactically maneuver their ship. They were objectively bad at the game, and by being good at the game we were able to take a variety of measures like outmaneuver them and sneak a single boarder on to drop their anchor and buy us the time we needed to escape. More importantly though was that the multiple maps with multiple chests opened up a whole new brilliant dimension of tactical choices to make; you actually had to watch what other players were doing. Who was digging how many chests? Do you want to go for a safe bet and dig chests away from the action or is the only victory condition in the melee? The amount of times we swam a chest for the victory from an island a tile away or more was brilliant in of itself. Arena was a brilliant game that stressed skills in digging, maneuvering, and outside of the box thinking with more tactical depth than you will ever reach.
Then the update with the single chest happened. The beacon made all of our skulduggery and swashbuckling nigh but impossible. On sloops, the chest matters because the cannons won’t dominate the points. This is heavily tilted in favor of people that don’t really need any skill in the game because they just need to be able to point and click on the island to maintain dominance over the chest, and retrieve it. The beacon made anything sneaky impossible to do with the chest. This of course focused the game on streamers and other try hards. It was terrible for everyone else. Even worse was that this focused combat in a small area and made the game even more heavily tilted towards pirate vs pirate specialists, and brought a focus there for both galleons and sloops. On galleons, a pc player boarding the enemy could easily lock a ship down so that 3 cannons could constantly rack up more points than the chest ever would give. Heck, our strategy usually consisted of finding a crew that’s short on players or looked easy, lock them down and light them up until another ship flushed us out and that was how most of our victories came. I feel like our win condition was based on not fundamentally playing the game and simply exploiting the points structure and hoping another crew was not better at it or luckier than us. That’s a terrible game design. And we see increasingly people that are objectively bad at the game start to dominate because of either hardware or suspected software advantages; hacking would be way less effective under the older style arena.
Arena is just twitch streamer self pleasing material at this point, exists mostly for the streamers and insulting to a lot of the loyal fan base that was there from the beginning and it’s just not that fun anymore. The pirate vs pirate combat was mediocre to begin with and a game mode that intentionally focuses the game on that aspect is pretty bad. I imagine twitch stream viewers can only watch a streamer click to win so many times with no intelligent thought to maneuvering or display of any other skill. Leave that to the first person shooter genre. My crew has conversations all the time about how to make arena fun again and one solution is to go back to the way arena was, and the other (and this is just to make it bearable in this case) is to buy Xbox series x and only play on Xbox servers. Arena is trash now and you’ve obviously prioritized a minority of elitists over the majority of your customer base. Arena used to actually develop skills and tactical decision making processes.
