Why did they remove arenas?

[Doc Shawski]

I know they did this a year or so back, but when they removed the PVP arena mode... which was INCREDIBLY fun, and how i scouted to find actual crews who knew how to fight!!!! WHY DID THEY REMOVE THIS!!! WHY! i legit couldnt play anymore after they got rid of the best game mode, and the best way to recruit actual battle ready sailors for adventure right after. Super dumb move. If they ever bring Arenas BACK, ill put hundreds more hrs in. until then, not one.

[Raft]

Originally posted by Doc Shawski:

Why did they remove arenas?

It wasn't worth it. See their website:

Originally posted by SoT website:

As we’ve shared before, only 2% of our players’ time is spent in The Arena on a consistent basis, and this has never really changed. We recognise that some criticism we might receive here is that we didn’t invest enough in The Arena to give it the best chance of success alongside the continued growth of Adventure. The reality is that as a new platform, The Arena regretfully never became popular enough to justify focusing our creative efforts there, beyond our initial efforts to refine the experience to appeal to a broader audience.

Source: https://www.seaofthieves.com/news/goodbye-to-the-arena

After this, I'm guessing they decided to make everything integrated with Adventure/High Seas.

They have introduced Hourglass for players who want PvP on demand. You'd have to recruit on SoT Discord for suitable crew.

They have also introduced Briggsy's quest / Skull of Siren Song (see the note on your mast) as a competitive voyage. Ships doing this quest are visible on the map and should be battle ready.

[Keyrala]

From what i heard from people that been there, they keep using that mode to harass streamers or to go all friendly every ship on an island and do friendly TDM.

Then a group of people started abusing of certain mechanics to deny score and other petty crap, until people got bored of it and stopped playing that mode.

[Cid]

I'm not a developer myself and don't recall all the specific details, but iirc, Rare also had a "it breaks every time we touch other parts of the game" problem with arena. And that led to discussion about whether or not fixing it every time that happened was worth development time/resources, considering the whole "only 2% of players" thing.

I regret that I didn't do arena more. I'll admit that I didn't have much interest and didn't play my first one until after Rare announced they were closing it (just because I wanted to see what it was like at least once before they shut it down), and it turned out to be more fun than I was expecting.

[mopwielder]

https://www.seaofthieves.com/community/forums/topic/145614/closing-the-arena/1