Hello. My name is awk, and grappling with Arena mode has sort of become my hobby in TF2.
I worked with Arena for a bit back in 2015ish when I made Arena: Respawn, a gamemode born more out of frustration with Arena servers than any actual attempt at making something interesting. I've recently returned to working with Arena and trying to develop something new out of it. Along the way I've done a fair amount of playtesting and chatting with Arena fans so I thought I'd infodump what I've learned so far and how I view Arena in relation to other TF2 gamemodes.
When I talk about my observations in how gamemodes play out, I should specify I mean pub/Casual levels of play. Stuff happens differently in matches where everyone is communicating. Ultimately, however, I'm interested in how pubs play because I'm trying to build a pub gamemode.
The way I think about Arena's place among TF2's other gamemodes is in terms of how "volatile" it is. Certain gamemodes play more consistently than others. For example, Payload and KOTH are more consistent in gameplay than the gamemodes they originate from, Attack/Defend and 5cp.
In A/D or 5cp, bad positioning or defensive coverage can cost a round very quickly. "Sneaky" or "cheap" tactics can be employed like spycapping or backcapping. When I say "cheap," I don't mean "invalid" - these kinds of strategies are perfectly valid and are technically punishing the opposing team for bad defense. But if a round is won while most of the fighting is happening elsewhere, I think it's fair to say it's a less satisfying end than a final climactic push into last.
Contrast this with Payload or KOTH, where you can completely wipe the opposing team but you still can't win the round until you Push Kart to the end or hold onto that point for the next 3 minutes. There's still plenty more fighting to be done, plenty of opportunity for a comeback from the other side, and plenty of opportunity for the balance of power to shift wildly between RED and BLU without the danger of a sudden unsatisfying ending. Matches have to go on for a good amount of time before the game finishes. For this reason, Payload and KOTH play more consistently in pubs. While cheap final caps are possible, they are a lot more rare because the final objective is almost always smack in the middle of the action.
(Incidentally, I think CTF is a mix of both - when no one has the flag, the game is a very consistent stalemate with both sides having time to build up nigh-impenetrable defenses. Then, the moment someone gets the flag, their journey to capture it is extremely volatile - every step the flag carrier makes toward friendly territory is a step towards an easier capture. Letting the flag carrier slip early in their journey makes them that much more likely to successfully cap. In CTF, minutes go by in which nothing counts, then someone gets a flag and suddenly every second counts. This is, at the very least, a contributing factor to why CTF pacing is so atrocious.)
Then we get to Arena, the most volatile gamemode in the entire game. No gamemode punishes teams or individual players so brutally for their mistakes as Arena does. Play poorly and your team won't even last a full minute. If you perform one useless rocket jump, mess up one headshot, or fail to protect the Medic or Dispenser keeping your team alive, you won't get a second chance. In the words of the eponymous Navy Seal, "You're dead, kiddo."
Arena can and does work, but only ever in the context of community servers. Arena communities come up with rules and etiquette that act as patches to cover up the inherent inconsistency in how Arena plays out. Over time, you learn when it is appropriate to go for the midpoint and end the round and when you should give the remaining players a fighting chance; you learn that when the last man standing pulls out his melee weapon it is considered dishonorable to use anything besides melee against them (to make the final fight less of a stomp); you learn which strategies are universally frowned upon (Cloak and Dagger, hiding behind a Level 3 Sentry); you learn, above all, how to play Arena not just well but in a way that keeps the game interesting for everybody.
When people talk fondly of Arena, they almost always talk fondly about it in the context of one of these communities. There have been attempts to codify these kinds of rules with server plugins or by making rule violations a kickable offense, but really, they only work on the honor system. The rules themselves aren't what's really important. What's important is the community banding together to keep the game playing consistently, because it won't do it by itself.
This is why Arena doesn't stand up to as much punishment as any of the other gamemodes in TF2. If everyone were playing optimally, or were just ignorant of server culture, Arena would be a lot more boring. Of course the 1v3 fight is going to end poorly for the single player without a healing source if everyone is really playing to win. There would be a lot more playing around the midpoint as well instead of treating it as a last-resort "round end" button. In other words, Arena is the only gamemode I can think of where it only works if you don't play by the game's actual rules.
If I were tasked with fixing vanilla Arena mode, the only thing I could think to do is to port the timer system from Respawn. In Respawn, it works like this: after the first kill, the round timer starts ticking down the time until the team with the numbers advantage wins. Each kill against the winning team adds time to the clock. If the other team gets the numbers advantage, the timer now represents the time until they win, and any kills against their team add time to the clock. Ties are handled by a "most recent advantage" type system - if RED has 8 players up and BLU has 7 players, BLU won't be considered the winning team until they have at least one more player up than RED (e.g. if, later in the game, RED has 5 players up and BLU has 6).
Of course, Respawn has the advantage of representing the winning team by making the central control point owned by that team at all times. If the winning team changes, the point owner changes, so it's always obvious who is going to win when the timer hits 0. (In fact, behind the scenes, all that's really happening is that I'm telling the team_control_point_master to consider both teams valid winners instead of neither of them.)
I'm not sure how well that would work in vanilla Arena. It could make a certain amount of sense since that means a mid capture can only be performed by the losing team, which seems fair enough as it gives them a potential second avenue to victory. The winning team just has to wait it out for a short amount of time if someone is turtling, and people fresh to the gamemode will quickly learn that turtling is ineffective since there is an ever-present element of time pressure. Getting kills and keeping the game exciting, however, alleviates that time pressure and encourages risk-taking in desperate situations.
Beyond that, though, I don't think there's much more that can be done for the mode. In a gamemode where a handful of fast kills can decide victory, it's difficult to keep the game stable without resorting to "house rules". I've been tinkering with adding my own game mechanics on top of Arena, but I think my additions take it outside of the realm of Arena. If anyone is interested in that, I'd be happy to make another thread on what I've done so far and why.
