[Mega Thread] The Arena Feedback

  • @x-shady-mouse-x So, back on topic "Arena Feedback" I love it so far and think RARE has gone above and beyond in expectations in the release. Even at rep 50/ 240+ wins my crews and I are finding different ways to obtain the win and the versatility between opponents remains somewhat consistent.
    However, I and my crewmates alike all agree on one thing. That is, reward system for sinking other ships. Too often we have found ourselves sinking every ships on the server several times over with nothing to show for it except 2k in hit points, and empty cannon ball barrels only to have some PVE ship avoiding all confrontation and turning in chests.
    I would like this topic and discussion to go further and appreciate all positive and negative feedback on the idea.
    Regards,
    x Shady Mouse x

  • @x-shady-mouse-x Here's an idea:

    Upon successful sinking of an enemy ship a "special chest" worth (x) amount rises to the surface. Said chest is not accessible to the crew being sunk, try if they might chest just does not show an interact. They may even try to guard the chest pistols in hand while floating amongst sharks, but their efforts will be futile against a Galley rolling up on them. If multiple ships are involved in the sinking with multiple cannon hits, then the chest is finders keepers.
    What do we of the community think of this idea?

  • @malfrador If you don't want someone dropping your anchor so easily or for it to take them longer to drop, try putting your chests on top of the anchor. This method is tried and true for my crews. It's hilarious to watch as a boarder runs straight to your anchor while you take your time to walk up and blunder them int the back of the head while their standing there holding a chest.

  • @sprungnickel427 I agree with penalty for leaving game. But dude! 100k, LOL. That's a little steep don't you think. Especially when you only make 4,800 per win. But YEAH I agree with penalty for leaving match.

  • @lifenomadic Why would you report someone for fishing? LOL

  • @matt-ruyter said in [Mega Thread] The Arena Feedback:

    I am so incredibly sick of the spawn points in arena. It straight up sucks to win a fight at an island, to then have the ship you just sank spawn within cannon distance of your own boat. WHAT THE HELL? You barely have time to repair your ship or get chests of the islands before the ship you just sank is already back.

    you HAVE to increase the spawn distance. Or at the very least make it increase with each sink.

    The way it is right now, as soon as crews are at least somewhat decent(which admitedly is quite rare), fights over island just turn into big brawls without any progress. No matter how many times you sink them youre stuck fighting because they just spawn right in your back. All the while some other ship just grinds away chests uncontested.

    I get that you want arena to be exciting and that you dont want too much downtime between action. But spawn the ship I just sank in someone elses back thank you very much. We just won a fight against them and it's insane that you barely get any breathing room. they just get to throw themselves at you over and over and over until youre out of supplies.

    This is just so frustrating, if one ship decides they want to attack you and only you there is nothing you can do because even sinking them does nothing. You just lose because you dont get the time to gather any chests.

    Hit the nail on the head. Having the ship you just sunk spawn right next to you while your still lifting your mast is just ridiculous.

  • @schollisen There is a bit of strategy and tactic RARE has implemented within this mode just as they have with other things.
    For instance, if we have a ship that spawns next to an island with 8 chests vs our meesly 2 chests close to us, we immediately sail to the other ship. This is a risk, if we successfully sink said ship, we reap the rewards, and move on to assessing other threats within the server. Paying close attention to positions of all enemy ships goes a long way in strategy. You have to have a good navigator for this strategizing to go well.

  • @il-yusuke-li Yes random presets are being memorized. This is a tactic that my crews implement sometimes. We'll simply shoot people to islands that will most likely spawn chests while sailing to current map output. This is probably something RARE could work on, but not so much as an exploit.

  • First of all i would like to say that Arena is a cool game mode and it is really fun to play. Having said that it needs to be in a better shape to attract more players:

    • First of all the matches are fun if there are at least 3 ships fighting for victory. Unfortunately that is a rare occurrance as most of the games it is a race between 2 crews with the other leaving the game or being afk. So it is strictly needed to have leavers penalties…. the most obvious one should be gold loss. If you leave a game you lose 1k gold… 2 games in a row (or in the same 24hours frame) you lose 3k gold and so on….

    • You should include more ship types. It would be interesting to see what happens with brigs and sloops. Maybe it can help to alleviate the leavers penalty. Finding one mate for a sloop is a lot more easier and one man sloop is not a useless as one man galleon. So there is a higher chance of having good matches in my opinion.

    • You should consider having "seasons" or temporary objectives to give players one more reason to play arena. Lets say a 3 months season where you need 30 wins to unlock a special cosmetic….

    • I see the necessity of having pre-set colours and ships so that you are able to distinguish better the different crews. It would be nice to have the possibility of designing your own log and crew name and to set ship leaveries before matches. Lets say that you need to create a Home and Away set so that if there is another crew with a "green set" the game automatically switch to your Away set as it happens in every sport.

    • Match lenght should be 5 minutes longer… it is hard to have a come back if you start the game badly as things are now. Having 5 more minutes it is a good compromise to help crews that are behind to come back and not make the game too long.

    • There should be a stats page or tab to see how many games you played, kills you made and win %. It is included in the reputation tab but it should be more clear. Also Ladders and ranks could be a cool thing to add.

    I hope some of this things are constructive and useful. I love this game and this mode and i would like it to improve.

  • Need sloop & brig arena. It would be nice to have the objective be combat and have game modes oriented around sinking ships or being last ship standing. Most people in the game want to flank, so having a 4 crew sloop mode should be a priority

  • Arena Sailing Races

    Personally I really enjoy the sailing aspect of SoT. Having sailing races as part of a sub-section inside the Arena would be a welcome addition.

    • I'm sure you could come up with algorithms that can work out the approximate best time to complete the course if you need to keep the time limit to 24 minutes.

    • Cannons and may need to be adjusted to having cursed cannon balls only at the start of a race (two of each type in the barrels on a freshly spawned ship), but true cannon balls could be scavenged from barrels on islands and at sea.

    • Ships sunk could spawn at the nearest island behind their sinking position so that they can still be in with a chance of catching up to the pack.

    My point here is that there can be so much more to Arena which could really appeal to a more varied pirate than just 'shoot and loot' types. With very little effort or changes this simple scenario could be achieved.

    Does an SoT 'America's Cup' sound like the sort of race you would want to compete in?

  • @lifenomadic I find it worrying that you posted about storms 2 months ago and they're still in Arena mode!

    Two questions were posted in today's live Q+A regarding storms, no replies.

    I had wondered whether the devs couldn't remove them. I'm pretty much convinced of it now.

    It's unfortunate.

  • Pvp only mode. Only points for kills/sinks. Give the murderlords something to do besides grief TT players lol. 🧜‍♀️

  • Anyone else had problems with defending with the cutlass? Because
    me and my friends did and its VERY frustrating.

  • @kerszi If the opponent is jumping up and down while slashing you it breaks the block. - That's what i do when i see someone that blocks :P (same goes with skeletons)

  • Feels more like a chest race than an actual arena

  • my crew and I will not play the arena mode any more to crossplay is either removed becomes or eligible.
    as a xbox player it is simply to be had to play garbage against pc players.

    With Crossplay the Game ist killt for XBox Gamer.

  • I have played my fair share of arena now and I have to say, without the optional crossplay it is almost unplayable but still an overall enjoyable experience. Though the main issues I am coming to face now is getting a game started. I'm either being thrown into a game that's currently in progress on a ship in last place or a ship that has 1 other player on who is idling (unfortunately i don't have a crew). It feels that since they implemented the switch of players each game, the matchmaking has become incredibly slow. I don't mind playing the same team again, it makes it interesting and more competitive knowing i have to beat them and knowing I'm on a game where there are active ships battling it out, instead, it chooses to swap out a lobby into a fresh one where everyone is idle other than one ship. I hope the implemented change wasn't to just please streamers as they are such a minor part of the community and stream sniping can't really be a thing with arena, as everyone has the same maps and can see everybody on the map, they know when they dig a chest and sell, so stream sniping doesn't really apply and the non- streaming community are bigger, but that is just my speculation, there may be greater reasons. I just hope there's a better resolution down the line, maybe keeping the same lobbys so you get fuller games and ships, and if you see a crew with 2 and another with 2, instead of starting the game with separate ships, merge the 2 crews together. Fuller ships = more action and more competitive.

  • I’m a Pirate Legend and have never dug up a treasure chest or transported a chicken. I “Pirated” my way there.

    I will not even play Arena because it requires digging up
    Treasure and I ain’t doing that.

    If it was just PVP I would
    Probably play it exclusively. But it’s not. So I don’t play it at all.

  • @x-shady-mouse-x said in [Mega Thread] The Arena Feedback:

    @x-shady-mouse-x Here's an idea:

    Upon successful sinking of an enemy ship a "special chest" worth (x) amount rises to the surface. Said chest is not accessible to the crew being sunk, try if they might chest just does not show an interact. They may even try to guard the chest pistols in hand while floating amongst sharks, but their efforts will be futile against a Galley rolling up on them. If multiple ships are involved in the sinking with multiple cannon hits, then the chest is finders keepers.
    What do we of the community think of this idea?

    I like this idea a lot!

  • Idea for Balanced, Fun, and Simple implementation of Sloops into the arena

    So I know other ships were play tested and I'll admit I'm not sure what the implementation was. My idea is this:

    Give players joining the arena the option to choose either Sloop or Galleon, open or closed. Each match will still have 5 teams, but players who choose to join in a sloop will be teamed up with a 2nd sloop in the lobby. Therefore a lobby will consist of 5 teams of either one Galleon or two sloops. (potential 10 sloop lobbies with alliances of two sounds hella fun to me) The sloops fly the same colors, contribute points to the same score, and deduct only 500 pts from their team upon sinking.

    In my opinion this addresses most of the major pros and cons of adding smaller ships. The biggest reason people want them is so that players with fewer friends can participate in arena without having to put up with managing afk/incompetent/children/no mic crewmates trying to sail a galleon.

    PRO:Now you and a friend can que into arena together in a sloop.
    CON mitigated: and not be at an immediate crushing disadvantage by being alone against galleons.
    PRO:This adds a lot more variety and strategy to the gameplay. Mixed composition of lobbies. Do you and your alliance sloop stay together and try to swarm a galleon, or divide and conquer?
    CON mitigated: You may still have afk/incompetent/no mic teammates on the 2nd sloop, but at least they won't ruin your specific game-play experience as much as trying to two man sail a galleon does. Each sloop could have it's own separate score (though the alliance total is cumulative) so that an afk or braindead alliance sloop can't drop below 0 points and therefore can't detract more points than it's added to the alliance total.
    CON mitigated: this method maintains 5 teams and the same 5 ship colors, no commendation or reward balancing necessary, and it won't split the playerbase so there shouldn't be a significant que time increase like a sloop only lobby would create.
    CON mitigated: A potential issue is that skilled players will prefer the two sloop alliance to a galleon, and you'll see galleons disappear from gameplay, this is easily mitigated by simply not allowing four players to set sail together in two sloops, the options are either up to 4 in a galleon or up to 2 in a sloop. Your sloop partner is always randomly assigned, so tryhard crews getting 4 skilled players together in Discord to dominate lobbies will still always have to sail in a galleon.

    So what do people think? are there pros or cons I missed? How do you think two sloops against a single galleon balances in a straight up fight?

  • How about some server selection options! Those of us living in Australia cannot even play arena due to always being grouped into EU or NA lobbies with 300 ping being the norm!! Third and final time I've tried to play arena but have given up on it now.

  • It is absolutely uncalled for that Arena would even start without a crew. What does one person on a galleon do in Arena other than die die die die die die.

  • @glannigan said in [Mega Thread] The Arena Feedback:

    I’m a Pirate Legend and have never dug up a treasure chest or transported a chicken. I “Pirated” my way there.

    I will not even play Arena because it requires digging up
    Treasure and I ain’t doing that.

    If it was just PVP I would
    Probably play it exclusively. But it’s not. So I don’t play it at all.

    There's not enough players to play Arena anyway@ I could make a video on just sitting here alone on a ship with any random video Clips I take between 9 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. EST. The only way to get a crew is to Outsource it from other websites so you're probably better off not even attempted this anyway.

  • @darknessalone I have been begging for any response on this situation for a long time from rare and it is avoided 100%.

  • Will we ever get a response? Nobody I talk to will play arena due to latency :(

  • @quitpenguin1113
    Sure, I will respond too you.

  • Nerf the blunderbuss [mod edit]

  • @icebreaker3004 One of your posts has been removed as it was a duplicate and the other has been edited as it was inappropriate.

  • So the Anniversary Update is out now for a significant amount of time by now.

    I would say it's huge for the digital world.

    I'm really wondering when we will finally see things getting changed?

    • And by that I don't mean nerfing stuff out of the world but when will we have a split between Xbox and PC players?
    • When do we get a rotation in ships maybe so people don't always have half filled Galleons?
    • When do we see events (barrels/skeletons/Cursed balls/etc.)
    • When do we get a proper tutorial so everyone knows where the points are coming from (not pop by the way)

    Announcing that there is an extra studio working on the Arena feels pointless to me when there isn't stuff changing or added!

    Or are we just waiting for "The Huge Arena Update" coming six months after it's release and then another six months for "The Next Huge Arena Update"?

  • I've got back to this game like 3 days ago, and been playing almost only Arena.
    It's really fun, and I haven't lost even once so far, but... 1000 pts for turning in a chest? That's insane.
    Especially if sinking a ship will only cost them 1000 pts, as well, and hitting a ship with a cannonball is only 25 pts.

    It's supposed to be a PvP mode, right?

    Honestly, I think if you sink, you should be back down to 0.

    Could even cut down on the ragequit I observed too, from crews who are too far behind the team that's first losing hope and just logging off.

  • Separate servers/lobbies for closed and open crews please. That is the biggest difference maker.

  • Can we having something like Dota 2 matchmaking? I know Rare is working on new features and ranked system, but it would be awesome to have it sooner rather than later.
    I love this game so much, I just want it to have a smoother matchmaking system, and I'd be beyond happy!

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