Arena 2.0 Thoughts from a seasoned Arena player

  • I hope everyone is healthy, safe, and enjoying their time on the Seas during these times of staying at home.

    I'll start this post by providing a little background into my experience with Sea of Thieves and Arena specifically. I've been playing since Beta and play nearly every day. I'm an Achievement and Commendation chaser (e.g. "Completionist") and love the challenge of chasing the checkmarks. I thoroughly enjoy this game and love all the experiences it provide both myself and my crew. We have created countless number of stories and love reminiscing about them. In Arena, my crew has all achieved Legendary Sea Dog, obtained all the weapons and ship components, and loved playing Arena in general regardless if we were chasing a commendation. Our Arena Captain has 900+ wins under her belt, and the rest of our crew have individually 500+ wins per crew member. Suffice to say, we love playing this game. I don't say any of this to brag, but to give some background into our experience level so any criticisms I have around Arena 2.0 come from a place of vast experience with OG Arena (or Arena 1.0).

    With that being said, my crew recently completed the new Competition of Courage, obtaining all the new cosmetics associated with the event. (As a quick aside, I love these little mini events that Rare has recently released first with the Fishing event and now with the Arena event, it brings back that feeling of time-limited events from days of old) This Competition of Courage was my crews first experience with Arena 2.0. We hadn't watched any streams or read any previous forum posts prior to starting the event.

    Arena 1.0 required a true COMPLETE crew to be successful. The whole crew needed to be competent PvP pirates, but not necessarily professionals including pirate on pirate or ship on ship. The whole crew needed to be quite aware and mind the ship including sails, repairs, watch ladders for boarders, put out fires, etc. Members of the crew needed to be quite proficient at reading maps quickly and locating dig locations on the fly. Members of the crew needed to be able to accurately shoot off the ship and board others to catch their anchor. The crew needed to be able to develop a solid strategy based on the available maps and try to execute on the strategy. Arena 1.0 felt like a true TEAM competition. It felt like a condensed, exciting Sea of Thieves experience. Every member of our crew had their own job for which they excelled and we were able to leverage those strengths for wins.

    Overall, my crew was quite disappointed with Arena 2.0. No longer does this mode feel like much Sea of Thieves skill is needed. It feels like a glorified game of dodge-ball or bumper cars. After only a few games, we discovered the meta of the mode is now locate the ship which is the slowest to get underway sail over to that ship, send someone off to anchor and lock the ship down, and cannon away until a win is achieved. The BLUE glowing chest is quite meaningless at this point as a crew can achieve the same amount of points with 25 cannonballs, which 3 cannons firing on a stationary ship doesn't take long to achieve. No longer does this mode require any sort of strategy. It felt like complete chaos and, for my crew at least, took away any enjoyment of the mode. I was also made aware that in the recent streams of Arena lately, many crews have taken the initial action of grabbing a pocketful of supplies, and immediately scuttling their ship to ensure more supplies. While it may be an effective way to get more initial supplies, it seems to take away from the spirit of the competition by sinking your own ship.

    Arena 1.0 wasn't without it's faults. 1) Lobby wait times were astronomical which seemed to be caused by open crews. In the handful of Arena 2.0 matches, it doesn't seem like the Open Crew issue has been fixed as in a number of lobbies, a single player would hold up an otherwise entirely full lobby for 10-20 minutes. 2) Spawn locations could sometimes screw a crew if the maps were generated in unfavorable locations to their initial spawn location. This could have been alleviated with an idea of a single, centralized map to start the event, followed by more randomly generated maps throughout the match. 3) Jackpot islands, or multiple maps generating concurrently on single island could cause a runaway leader issue. Limiting the number of a chests on a single island, and a mechanism to prevent an immediate repeat map may have been a solution to these issues as well. 4) The duration of each match was quite long (~24 minutes) and for those that are chasing the Legendary Sea Dog commendation, this is a significant time commitment. The 15 minute time limit in Arena 2.0 seems to have fixed that to an extent, but with the original mode removed from the game, there is no way to determine how the shorter time limit would have affected Arena 1.0 gameplay.

    As I noted, Arena 1.0 is no longer, and Arena 2.0 just doesn't feel fun anymore to my crew. In fact, there is a strong feeling of loathing for this new mode. So much so, that we have no desire to play Arena now that we've completed the Competition of Courage. There are many who may really enjoy this new Arena, and more power to you. I'm glad the developers were able to create a new mode that you enjoy, but that condensed Sea of Thieves competition and experience just isn't there anymore for my crew. RIP Arena 1.0. We'll miss you.

  • 14
    Posts
    4.5k
    Views
  • Thanks you for this analysis. I totally agree (and I'm sure my crewmates too) with you on all this points.

    • Arena 2.0 rewards too much for cannoning and chasing the chest is now useless. You have a lot more points for cannoning AFK ship.
    • Too many AFK ships = easy target. You don't need to play the objective if there is AFK ship : because, see the first point.
    • Too many time between games : We can wait from 5 to 45 minutes if we don't switch lobby because that ONE GUY in an open crew ship just waits for mates.

    The idea of this new arena 2.0 is good, but it sacrifice too much to be enjoyable.

    So, It's cool and all to say what's wrong, heh ? But wait, there is more !
    Some clues to maybe resolve this sticky situation :

    No more AFK ships in Arena :

    • Maybe add a button to click when the games start to check if everybody is here, if not ? Launch without the afk ship.
    • Split open crews and pre-made crews. It's hard to get a crew yes, but when you have one, you don't want to wait 40 minutes to play.

    Get the objective (CHEST) right :

    • The chest must be THE reward of this arena 2.0 : Make it worthy :
      You can : Nerf the cannoning to 5 points, just like killing a pirate.
      OR
      You can make the Arena's Chest worth 2000 or 3000 points, maybe more : You will see every Pirate fighting for it !

    Notes : Its really better in sloop arena because you can play faster, get faster lobby experience etc... But it's the same issue with AFK (but they're few)

    Pardon my English !

  • Actually I remember the first time I played new arena it seemed cool idea. But then you start to realise how dumb it became. Before you had to deal with strategy and have in mind lots of islands, locations of ships, how fast you can dig, how fast you can pick up the stuff, what amount of chests you can carry.
    Now its dumb as it is, 1 chest few ships and not much strategy. Btw we played sloop arena
    If there was an option to Choose between 2 types, arena 1.0 is definetely more intense and deserves itstitle. May be they can make it possible to choose mode at least?

  • also I have to admit, that its a good idea to upvote this topic and attract as much attention to it as possible

  • @bloody-vico Agreed. You had some good points. If Arena 2.0 is to be the new mode, suggestions to make it better are always good.

    The long wait times in lobbies due to Open Crews could possibly be fixed by re-queuing or merging other open crews from other servers. Server merges seem to merge other crews into the servers, but not necessarily address the Open Crew issue.

    The Chest mechanism definitely needs some attention. As I noted in my original post, the 1000 you get from turning it in is inconsequential. It needs to be worthwhile. I like your idea of 2000-3000 silver. As many games I participated in, the winning team averaged 3000-5000 per match. A Chest worth 2000-3000 would definitely bring attention to that mechanism again and make for some interesting interaction.

  • @promotordj not sure, it applies for galies, but with sloops 2-3k for chest is way too much. You simply cant cover this amount with fight
    Now its mostly balanced for sloops. Galies yep, 25 hits is easy and mostly nobody is dealing with chests

  • @sheetsack Good feedback! For clarification, my only experience has been with Galleon Arena. Any of my above thoughts should be taken with that mindset. Sloop Arena could very well have a different feeling or meta.

  • @promotordj vise versa, my experience is mostly sloop. Glad my remark wasuseful.
    I believe that more chests on island is a better solution for galies. It encourages more pvp and makes it possible to outrun score with combined points for battle and chests. Even 3 would be enough I guess

  • sailing a mile into the wind to get 1 chest lol half the match is over.

  • We should definitely call our friends to upvote and post here about Arena 2.0 to make our voices heard by Rare.

    We, fellow Pirates from that awesome PvPvE game, shall unite !

  • I did my best to attract attention)

  • Great feedback, I agree with all the points you put forward and have discussed with people I regularly play with. Feel Arena 1.0, although definitely far from perfect, was much funner than 2.0 mostly down to the meta. I too was a seasoned veteran on 1.0 but honestly I'm not sure I'd grind out 240 wins on the new mode if I hadn't done it already, each game just feels the same; find the slowest/afk boat, farm till you win. 2.0 is definitely savable, just needs a bit of a re-work, especially with the scoring.

  • @promotordj I feel the only thing to change is raising the silver granted for killing enemy pirates. Of course spawnkilling would be more common, but this would also raise the attention pirates give to watching ladders.

  • As this thread was 8 months old and revived today, it will now be locked.

    A general reminder to all, please avoid reviving threads aged past 30 days, as it is considered a necro, and is against our Forum Rules.

    Bumping Threads
    Bumping threads with content that is not providing additional information to the original post is not permitted. Resurrecting very old threads is also not permitted. A warning will be issued and the thread locked. Ignoring the warning will result in a temporary ban from the Forums and a final warning. If the action continues, a permanent ban from the Forums will be issued.

14
Posts
4.5k
Views
1 out of 14