Have you ever player DotA? Tower Defense? Bunker Wars? Direct Strike? Team Fortress? Counter Strike? Auto Chess? These games were created by the community surrounding their respective "platform games", be that StarCraft, WarCraft, Quake or Half Life, and they could only be born through the developers allowing a little bit of the playerbase's creativity to shine through the game which is why I am suggesting Custom Game Lobbies for Arena.
Firstly, I don't expect a full open source map editor to come bundled with the next update to the Arena, Rare isn't really known for doing these sort of tools, however on a very basic level I am expecting the very least that could be done to grant the community the opportunity to use the Arena to create and host their own created content.
THE BASIC
Private Lobby Creator: Allow for players to create their own Arena lobby and leave it open or closed for any player to join it. Up to 20 players in the lobby, allow the host to have a few basic controls like being able to kick players and edit crews during tavern wait times and also set the maximum duration of each round to be more or less than the standard Arena. No reputation or gold gain can be obtained in these lobbies to avoid afk farming, the purpose of these lobbies is to allow for the players to design their Arena experience with multiple crews with ease.
This is the perfect place for gamemodes that are constantly in dire need of dev support like skullball and spy games to work easily and practicaly without having to spend hours bribing players in adventure mode to give away their vessels.
Lobby Browser: With player created lobbies comes the need for players to find them, they can be open or closed for invite only with password. This could affect matchmaking, but as long as rep/gold stays in standard arena we should be fine.
THE ADVANCED
Custom Arena Settings: Although the basic is serviceable for most, I do believe Rare can take a step further to improve the appeal of custom games by allowing settings of the arena to be changed which can be:
- Choose the arena area
- Choose the size of the arena
- Choose what resources are in each ship (including cursed cannonballs and cooked items)
- Choose what weapons are allowed in the armory
- Change damage values
- Change health values
- Change silver rewards for objectives
There are other things that can be added to settings but these are more or less the core, so long as players can fiddle around with the game they can for sure create their own unique Arena experiences, like a full on melee deathmatch or a game where you only have snake curse cannonball, it's up to the players.
THE DREAM
Advanced Arena Customization: To some this may already sound like it's a carbon copy of Overwatch custom games, but I'm not going to pretend that it isn't what I want, especially the recent Workshop update. What I mean by this feature is to allow more in depth script coding to the Custom Arena Lobbies, creating some interesting mechanics out of the engine's (UE4) capabilities. Now it's already a stretch to expect the basic suggestions here, but do keep in mind that this is the ultimate haven for user created freedom. As I mentioned before, a lot of games you may have played were born from other games, through the sheer creative power of the community, all I'm asking is for Rare to grant us the chanse to prove we can make something special with their game.
