Good Day all Arena pirates,
Jason Cross, Producer of Arena here with an update to Matchmaking in the Arena.
Firstly I want to say a thank you for your patience and reporting of this issue. We have been investigating it each week in an effort to solve the issue as fast as possible.
The Issue:
We saw several Taverns not starting when they should have been, this meant players were sitting in a tavern for an extended time with no progress. During this time the Tavern would also struggle to accept new crews who were attempting to join giving the illusion of low player numbers. After further investigation we found this issue occurred more when Arena showed higher player numbers.
We found the servers could get into this state due to two reasons, players in open crews leaving and the server believing they were still active and some servers changing region without the correct region settings.
The Solution:
We have now put in 2 temporary fixes which will lower the Tavern loading times. This will allow crews to start after everyone has loaded in even with phantom crews. A match will look to start with 5 crews and the relevant amount of players however, it will never start with less than 3 crews present. But this doesn't stop crews from leaving as a match starts meaning in a rare scenario you could be left in a 1v1 match.
We are getting a more permanent fix out for you in the next patches. We are also releasing a new feature which will look to see if you have waited a more than 4 minutes in a tavern, if you have it will merge your tavern with one in another state.
Thank you for your patience and understanding whilst we investigated this issue.
I enjoyed getting sunk by you all the last few months, from last minute loses to complete pirate ship sandwiches. My pirate is very bruised but looking forward to some more matches.
Thanks,
'Cast Away Cross'
Jason Cross