Why did Arena not succeed?

@schardonlp For me, it lacked the incentive. I don't PVP for the fight, I pvp for the loot. Arena was just a condensed adventure without the loot so there was no point. Instead of what it should have been was a last ship standing. A BR with ships.

@schardonlp That sounds like a completely different game. Putting such a mode into the current game would just dilute the actual adventure for PvPvE players.

It has already been touched on but I think it failed because they did nothing with it. The base for arena kept getting smaller and smaller as more and more problems arose. The long wait timers to get into a match were atrocious, the bug showing where the chest was, shutting off being able to talk with other players, adding nothing to it whatsoever. I think after a while they wanted it to fail. There were a lot of suggestions on how to change and fix it but that isn't what happened.

@faceyourdemon this is actually just like what happened in another game:Hitman 2.

Not many people know this but the game actually had a multiplayer mode called ghost mode, a competitive two player Hitman game mode where you had to eliminate your target and just like arena, it was a cool concept. Problem was that, once again, just like arena, it was BARELY worked on. It was basically just…there. Both arena and ghost mode had rewards but not many people cared and the people who did were a minority…
This probably got even WORSE over time as some people playing were probably just in it for the rewards and left. Only the TRULY dedicated stayed and the numbers of people who played these SIDE game modes dwindled

Eventually, both ghost mode and arena were removed, because there was really no reason for them to exist anymore
They were both fun while they lasted…but they never really got the attention they deserved, from both the players and the devs.

I wasn't around from the start so can't comment on the entire history of it, but by the time I joined it was already doomed to fail. Comms had been removed due to toxicity, the community had stagnated and was being gatekeeped by the players.

There was so many unwritten rules that the players had decided that weren't obvious to new players it almost guaranteed a bad experience and likely to drive off the majority of players attempting it. I stuck around for the naval practice and became more versed in the 'etiquette' but I saw it from both sides as a new player myself and as an experienced player that got newer players as crewmates.

How is anyone supposed to know spamming I'm on the island means tdm, parked ships at forts are doing tdm and will hard spawncamp people who attack their ships. There was a glitch to force solo queue but I had so many people do normal open crew yet demand I do tdm and actively sabotage my ship the entire time if I refused to join in (I did some from time to time but I was more there for naval).

As someone there for naval and wins my average game would have maybe 1 other crew interested in it so sometimes end up idle farming chests.

I don't know if it was the hard grind nature of the weapon kill commendations or if that was the natural path but that seemed to twist arena

The reason i didnt play arena much was because matchmaking was just too painful.
I usually play solo and the fact there wasnt a solo sloop match also made choose adventure mode over it.

It was pretty cool when you got into a match where people didnt leave to.

I believe it was made to be too complex from a points system. If people are able to farm/cheese stuff, they will...and in what was supposed to be a condensed adventure mode, they incentivized the wrong stuff.

There should have been ONE metric that went into scoring points...turning in the Sea Dogs Chest. That's it.

They should have stuck with Arena 1.0 style system and got rid of all of the other point adders. 1 point for turning in a Sea Dog Chest...3 points for turning in a stolen Sea Dog Chest. Simple and doesn't incentivize farming cannons and spawn camping.

There's other things that go into it why it didn't succeed...like no skills based matchmaking. A ranking system similar to Mario Kart 8 online would have been great...easy and tries to match you with people of similar ranking. Then, you gain/lose points depending on where you finish and the ranks of your competition.

Then, your ranking could have factored into what got you all the various LSD/TSD cosmetics.

I miss Arena because it was quick...but as a competitive game mode, it was a miss.

Imo the standard Arena experience was lacking. But it had the framework to be really fun.

The sloop arena was boring since most of the time 3-4 ships were actually doing a TdM and you were stuck playing 1v1 in the best case scenario.

The Galleon arena was hit or miss. Running a Galleon efficiently can be challenging for some and the absence of SBMM made it so you could have a great match then the lobby breaks... And 3 out of the 5 galleons pretty much sink by themselves. A very inconsistent experience.

But when playing in an organized manner (there were a lot of discord holding leagues or tournaments) it was a blast.

That being said, even then, Adventure mode is just more satisfying overall. So I will go with @wolfmanbush stance : ultimately Adventure was the superior product and I don't think that Arena could've succeeded much better.

@wolfmanbush said:

I don't view arena as not succeeding or failing overall... I view it as adventure succeeding so much that it didn't leave room for active contrived scenarios.

It shut down because this is a product and a business and decisions need to be made sometimes but Arena was a solid mode, it just could never compete, ever... Put a turtle sandbox next to a lake, is it the fault of the sandbox or the designer that it couldn't compete with activity in that scenario?

Arena was not updated or maintained. Adventure was. It ultimately comes down to that. Stop adding content to Adventure, leave all the bugs & any matchmaking problems in, and tell me what % of the playerbase sticks around long-term. The folks who played Arena the most were the ones who saw the silver lining in it: quick, opt-in PvP. Otherwise, it was a pretty broken mode.

Rather than a turtle sandbox next to a lake, it was more like your local gym installing a hot tub next to their indoor pool. Both offer different experiences, but they can be enjoyed by anyone in their swimsuit. Folks could have their longer pool sessions, and then dip into the hot tub as they pleased.

The problem is Rare never maintained their hot tub. They left it filthy; not allocating any staff or resources to clean it. Eventually, only a small portion of pool-goers were willing to sit in the debris, just to appreciate the warmth.

Long story short: Arena was neglected by the developers because it turned out to be more work than they expected to maintain. That neglect caused an increasingly dwindling playerbase, which then allowed Rare to say that it's not worth keeping Arena going because so few players play it. Which of course is what happens when the developers neglect a game mode.

The longer version:

Step 1: After 1 big update to Arena Rare abandoned support for Arena because it was not deemed important enough to spend further development time on. Bugs started mounting which shrank the playerbase to only the hardcore PvP interest groups.

Step 2: Assert the self fulfilling prophecy that not enough people are playing it to warrant further supporting it.

Step 3: Rare excluded Arena from the new Season Pass renown progression system. Meaning you couldn't grind renown progression for the new Season pass the same way you could in Adventure. Which contributed in killing off what little interest casual players had in Arena.

Step 4: During the big Disney PotC crossover update Rare decided to remove the Arena tab from the main menu and relegated it to a tiny box placed in a secondary menu to help hide it from the newer players joining.

Step 5: Rare completed the journey of the self fulfilling prophecy by announcing that Arena waa being closed down because not enough players are playing it and it doesn't warrant further investment.

Step 6: Kill DeMarco, the lore character who ran Arena with his sister. Don't add PvP milestones in the Captaincy update. Bask in Gigachad moment.

Competitive Speed Adventure was not what I wanted to play.

Arena should have been a pvp haven not Fight Club hiding at a Fort...

And the other problems everyone else listed.

@schardonlp Arena didnt fail, Rare did. They refused to make changes to a stale gamemode. Players didn't want to complete X marks the spot voyages whilst 4 other ships were nearby shooting at them.
So many gamemodes were asked for; a simple TDM, last ship standing free for all etc etc but rare refused to make changes and moved on to the next half finished update and never went back.

The long of it is that it had few incentives to keep playing, had no reason to come back regularly outside of grinding levels and commendations, matchmaking was non-existant, and the points system was laughably unbalanced meaning that spawncamping was a legitimate strategy and just made the game mode feel unfun.

The short of it is that it wasn't popular because Rare never supported it. It got one major update and then was never touched again outside of very scant gamebreaking bug fixes.

It's no surprise no one played it when the mode had been on life support for nearly 2 years.

@schardonlp said in [Why did Arena not succeed?]

The Community:
To be honest, we also have this in Adventure mode, don't we? I'm constantly encountering people who swearing and being racist, telling me to do certain things with a certain guy in Russia, etc. But then again, which online PvP game does not have this? I don't know any... Pretty much every game has a quite big amount of tryharding, toxic and salty people.

Yeah it’s true toxic people existed before arena
But it’s wayyyyy easier to encounter toxic people in an enclosed pvp environment.
Heck judging from the results in the hunters cry, just an enclosed space is enough to encounter toxicity
Because the toxic people are drawn to these spaces
Because enclosed spaces are harder to sail away in and most of the time it’s way easier to find a “victim” in them.
And the thing is, the more toxic people there are, the more people leave because of toxicity
So eventually toxicity will take over
Yes this happens in other games like COD
But COD is MA15+ and is a multi-million dollar franchise with a dedicated fan base that will keep playing their games.
Arena is a side mode with a small fan base in a game that some players quit in the first 5 minutes. Plus it wasn’t really making any money.
So it was shut down

My current theory is that it just didnt get enough attention. Hardly anyone brought it up, and the few friends who didnt touch it, often didnt know what it was about or understand it and thats why they didnt play it, or why they only touched it once.

So i think it just wasnt in the spotlight enough to give people an understanding about it, before i played it, when i first watched videos on it, i couldnt tell if it was all about getting the 1 chest, or if it was only about fighting, because i only saw those 2 sides separate and nothing about how it actually played as a whole.