Sea Of Thieves Is Shutting Down The Arena Mode

thegamer.com:

Sea of Thieves' sixth season starts in March, and it's bringing six new, solo-friendly Sea Forts. But it's also removing the Arena mode.

The new Sea Forts are solo-friendly because they scale with the size of your group. If you're alone, the enemies' difficulty will reflect that, but if you're with a crew of four, they'll take a bit more to knockdown. They've been pulled in from the Sea of the Damned and in each Sea Fort, there are keys to find that let you take on harder enemies, leading to the big treasure haul at the end.

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Then there's the Arena - support is being axed, and it's being removed from the game entirely. "With the scope of Sea of Thieves growing larger and larger, the huge task of maintaining QA and bug fixes for both Adventure and Arena modes has become something we can no longer justify," developer Rare stated. "We're proud of what we achieved with Arena, but ultimately it wasn't as successful as we had hoped, and a bespoke competitive mode with few dedicated players is hard to align with our future vision for Sea of Thieves."

Sea of Thieves' Arena mode was a competitive alternative to the usual seafaring Adventure mode. You're put into a small circle that's closed off by the Devil's Shroud. Then you have 15 minutes to fight other players for silver. But the mode proved unpopular and didn't pick up in the way that Rare envisioned, so it'll be gone by the time season six rolls out.

In fact, only two percent of Sea of Thieves' player base used the Arena mode and so supporting it simply isn't worth the resources. But there is new content coming next season to the Adventure mode in the form of the new maps, a new mystery, a