Saying Goodbye to The Arena

@grumpyw01f

but you do agree that giving player at least few more days would be more fair, right?
I mean, if you set deadline ahead, players can decide if they can reach their goals or not. You give them a choice.
By telling players we are going to take it away just because you completed everything esle first is simply unfair.

I honestly enjoy arenas but wanted to complete all the fractions (except hunter of the shrouded ghost) first before diving in the pure pvp. However, I was looking forward for looong time Arenas.

I got your point but still hope you can relate to me & others here at 45+ levels.

@meroviel ha detto in Saying Goodbye to The Arena:

We've heard and discussed your feedback on the awarding of The Good Boy ship cosmetics to players who had already reached rank 50 with the Sea Dogs, but the thinking behind this gift remains unchanged and it is not a decision we will be reversing.

All players who spent enough time in The Arena to reach rank 5 during its lifespan will receive five sets of themed ship cosmetics for free to show our thanks for taking part.

This bonus gift is in recognition of those truly dedicated players who spent significant time in The Arena during its almost three-year lifespan, something we feel is worth an additional thank you; it should not be seen as a time-limited reward that players were recently encouraged to grind for and then unfairly prevented from acquiring, hence the date being capped when we announced it.

I'm super close to 50 and I actually feel scammed. So a level 49 is not a dedicated arena player for you? For 1 level, really? It's so mean to cut out all the players that are at 99% of the final goal. This is not fair, you simply should give us few days (a weekend maybe, would be enough) so everyone who is 45+ can reach 50. So we can "prove" that we are "dedicated" arena players too with our last effort.

Your decision makes me to not want to play the game anymore, not a fan of this way of thinking and won't support it, specially because you can do similar things in future and I don't want to feel scammed again. You should make your players happy, not angry, sad or disappointed.

Please give us a weekend to finish our Arena run. It means a lot for many of us, specially to who cares about getting all cosmetics in the game (cosmetics are the only thing that differentiate a veteran player from a new player in this game, the only thing you can own, collect and show to others).

Level 45+ arena players deserve their last chance, we are dedicated players too, please don't cut us off.

@beernymph

Yes to this 100%...should be getting my 100 third place achievement tonight, but I want to know if there's any point in carrying on to level 50 (currently 39) if the achievements won't stick around!

I wouldn't mind if they lost their gamer score value, but they are a part of our pirate story so should still be viewable in achievements as some sort of legacy achievement for those that completed!

@musicmee said in Saying Goodbye to The Arena:

@funkysvk

it should not be seen as a time-limited reward that players were recently encouraged to grind for and then unfairly prevented from acquiring, hence the date being capped when we announced it.

But it is a time-limited reward that no one knew about. Not looking at it that way doesn’t make it untrue. They done the same with the overachiever sails and received backlash to warrant a change.

Edit: the concern I have is about when will this happen again? They said it wouldn’t, yet here we are. As a cosmetic collector imagine I woke up to find that retroactively, everyone who played the game on “insert random day here” gets an exclusive cosmetic. They done it with the grogmanay tankard notches too. With no warning or no heads up. It’s something I am vehemently against.

@musicmee said in Saying Goodbye to The Arena:

@satanicnemesis

This bonus gift is in recognition of those truly dedicated players who spent significant time in The Arena during its almost three-year lifespan, something we feel is worth an additional thank you; it should not be seen as a time-limited reward that players were recently encouraged to grind for and then unfairly prevented from acquiring, hence the date being capped when we announced it.

But it is a time-limited reward that no one knew about. Not looking at it that way doesn’t make it untrue. They done the same with the overachiever sails and received backlash to warrant a change.

@satanicnemesis

exactly! thank you very much for saying that, completely agree with you.
In fact, what they did is purest time-limited reward as one can be.

@poerised said in Saying Goodbye to The Arena:

LETTER TO RARE:

I started in the Arena. That is where I met all my friends that I sail with today. I loved the few minutes of downtime to shop and check my stats. I loved ticking the boxes of accomplishments. It was a fun place to have an intense battle, learn to shoot and board. The race to the chest. It was a place to observe other players and meet true lords of the sea. It was a place that didn't require hours of commitment to get some gold and commendations. It was awesome. That said:

Rare, you did a dirty thing to your players. You stopped working on it, so it fell into disrepair. We stopped playing because it became literally unplayable, matchmaking was off-line or wonky, we got kicked out regularly. So now you blaming the players for its demise is disgraceful saying we didn't play. Add to that, it required less play time in the first place, so comparing it to Adventure mode that takes hours is dumb and insults our intelligence. You also added insult to injury by cutting it off without notice, especially those of us SO close to finishing. A head's up 6 months ago would have been the right thing to do. AND announcing this during the upswing and new season excitement? What were you thinking?

Let me offer a warning. Have you heard of a company called Zinga? They had one of the most profitable and popular games on Facebook. They had unprecedented growth, built new headquarters, hired new folks... Then some dingalings decided to add features, change the UI, essentially making it into a new game with new mechanics, and wizzbangers. The result? They lost everything. Their loyal players, their revenue and their arrogance because they did not listen to their players. We are not numbers on a spreadsheet. You don't get to say we had input when the "hard decision" you had to make did not include the folks who actually play the game.

ALL OF THIS IS SO WELL PUT AND SAID!

@musicmee

The devs said they will never do it again because it was setting a terrible precedent.

I know they won’t reverse it, however I am still going to throw in my opinion that this was a terrible decision and one that has just caused a split in the SOT community. One that could have easily been avoided.

It is important this stuff is pointed out, devs saying one thing then going back on their word means a lot to a community and can be very damaging.

Edit: Your comparison to animation cancelling doesn’t fit here. One is devs content delivery the other is mechanics exploiting to gain an advantage.

The biggest unfairness here is the notice period versus time already invested.

I've played somewhere between 250-300 games, over 100 hours in arena, working towards my TSD title.

College kids and streamers probably don't get that 5-10 hours each week is actually a pretty darn dedicated amount of play on a single game. That's 20 weeks worth of effort to get 70% of the way there... and you've given us about 5 weeks of notice.

I get that you want to keep the rewards for the 'true sea dogs' and not leave enough time for the Johnny-come-lately's to grind it out from zero, but it doesn't feel like you did any math on your stats for average RL time to unlock, so a lot of people are going to lose out on months of effort unless they book some vacation time before March.

@musicmee it does, but again that was before they admitted that wasn’t a good way to handle rewards going forward. They admitted this much later and strove to do better by giving clearer information upfront. Which in this case, they did not do.

SonicBob on the overachiever sails:

“We've heard your feedback that players were frustrated that we didn't communicate our plans for this upfront and allow them to push on and complete the achievements prior to the rebalance. With that in mind we've decided to loosen the criteria for who is eligible for these Overachiever sails and give players a small window now to earn them.”

“We feel this is the right step to inform players of our plans and give you the opportunity to unlock these unique sails.”

————

@musicmee i have a lot of respect for you and I don’t wanna get into a silly back and forth over this. You’re a good mod 😊

While I can understand what you are saying, I just wanted to voice my feedback on this messy situation. Again, I already meet the requirements, I just don’t like the precedence it sets going forward.

@arena-loot

Their reasoning is that with each update to the core game, comes needed maintenance to arena that isn't necessarily seen or felt by people playing, but takes up valuable work hours they'd rather dedicate to adventure. Don't get me wrong, I'll miss arena as well, but they have at least expressed interest in working with the major PvP communities going forward, so perhaps we'll see some solution down the road?

I only got a chance to post a small snippet yesterday but I feel that I need to take a minute to jot this down, The whole Arena removal has been handled very poorly, the cut off happened even before the announcement took place .

There has been a lot of back and forth here and I really need to say, to anyone who is level 50, well done to you, however there is a lot of disembogues comments about those who were “Working towards the sea dogs in their own time” all I can see is those who have them acting more entitled because they just main arena.

I have played the game since day 1, i even have the day 1 eye-patch, I have a combined playtime of 3 thousand hours on steam and xbox before it came to steam, I even have a lot of physical sera of thieves merchandise, I love the game and I support it wholeheartedly.

The decision to close the arena I can get behind don’t get me wrong, however the way in which the shutdown has been initiated is in very poor communication, non one seemed to have knowledge of this, not even as an insider.

If this was the plan then an earlier timed announcement would have sufficed, instead of having to grind for 40 days for all the items I want, don’t forget the sea dogs level is easy relatively but then you need to do 100 kills with x weapon, 100 with that one, dig up 100 chests etc etc.

Now some would say there has been time to get them sure, however I myself have only just completed all the tall tales in order to get the gold curse, I spent 8 hours one day just to repeat the same tale over and over, it will be the same with Athena and Arena they are their own individual grinds, and yes they are grinds.

Let’s not forget everyone also have other commitments and play styles, jumping in an arena every now and then to level up and get straight into some PVP instead of 24/7 is how some approached it, I know me and my friends did as well as some other content creators whole were planning to do arena for pirates day.

It is my belief that any player should be allowed to achieve the commendations and cosmetics in their own way and time as opposed to some on here who seem to contradict that way of thinking without any prior thought put into it.

As to the 2 percent players in arena, sure it doesn't sound a lot, their voices should be heard however as they also enjoy and play the game, a lot of the negative feedback is coming from the other 98 percent who were more casual let’s say at arena or were grinding other items, quests etc in what free time they have, that 2 percent also has to go somewhere, I know some will stop playing and some will just full on attack in adventure now.

The mode itself I feel could have just been left there, all the assets are in the game, just limit the amount of servers and job done, despite the odd issue it’s fully playable as a mode.

There are a good percentage of players that feel this way, having a ball just fly out of left field, all other commitments and games now have to take second place to put into grinding to get as many cosmetics and commendations possible before time runs out, yes we want and have been working towards these things but each in our own way the player should be the one to decide when, how and where they will work towards and obtain items.

If a part of a service is to shutdown then and here's a key-word, an > “Achievable” time frame < should be given so that everyone knows exactly allowing those a good enough chance to obtain what they want.

That is all I have to say really, I respect the team at rare and the mods here, as a passionate player I feel I do feel a need to voice out this opinion especially going forward.

@gromerus who is Arene and why do they need saving?

@musicmee пишет в Saying Goodbye to The Arena:

Players back then had the opportunity to show how loved Arena was... and they didn't, they voted with their feet and moved to Adventure or onto different games, sadly.

This is incredibly mean to me, the person who LOVED the Arena in it's original state.
Devs decided to completely change it, broke it in the process, then stopped trying to fix or maintain it in playable state. Even decided to take the communications between teams (important part of competitive-driven games) with no regards to what actual community thinks, while constantly saying how much the community and its opinion matters.
And somehow its our fault that we don't want to play broken, bug-ridden, poorly balanced game mode? Sir, this is a bad take.
When it was supported, the Arena was great - constant galleon fights, almost every crew is full, little to no waiting times between every session. It was a blast!