I'm gonna completely restart this review. I've played since 2019 and during those times arena was peak. In my older review I stated I was a PvE player and I would run from everyone.

People dont seem to understand that the way you keep your loot and make money is by defending yourself from other pirates. And defending yourself gets you tons of money to buy cool cosmetics and get rare commendations.

After turning into a PvPer and enjoying arena, hourglass (NOT skull of siren song its dry as heck literally nobody does it) I'm getting scolded and blamed for making this game bad for players for simply sinking them (in a pirate game) and saying gg and moving along my way. calling me a bad person for playing a pirate game.

4 solid years of that small community asking for a way to just play with friends, they finally settled and gave them safer seas. Now clearly if you try to please a community its never enough especially in rare's case.

To protect the value and rarity of cosmetics, achievements etc they nerfed safer seas quite a bit. Spoiled brats said it wasn't enough and still rioted and rampaged in discussion forms and the discord server to the point where the community took a dark turn especially the game too.

Rare has been making horrible decisions lately almost completely changing the game too by the way for a small community, I respect them for trying to fix hit registration, etc but they nerfed sail vision (no more cool v cut sails) they nerfed quick swapping (a bug that was in the game since release that allowed you to switch from 1 gun to the other in 1 second) it took major skill to do that and so they patched it, making most players switch to swords.

But others find ways so it just makes pvp more and more annoying as time goes, people literally switch from a gun to a bucket to a gun in less than 1.5 seconds just to kill you.

So it doesnt sound all bad right? No it gets worse.

Servers are absolutely dog water. My ping averages 120-140 (at season 7 and lower my ping was 40-60) they are bringing back all older cosmetics too so if you are a long time player all your distinctive cosmetics are going straight to newer player's hands. (basically saying EVERYONE has them now and it has no value)

They gave away already more than half of the pre-order bonus set cosmetics to where its not even special anymore. Lets also not forget that they arent updating pvp anymore and are taking forever to create an anti-cheat. Right now hackers are on an insane rise you'll see them everywhere. You'll spend 4 hours just to get keg bombed by a teleporting hacker and have your boat flipped and shoved under a rock.
UPDATE: EAC was installed and it literally did nothing to the game. cheaters are still worse than ever. as of 3/14/2025

This game was special, the game is going a dark path where its going now. And the community is at its worst, I would be happy if the community managers got fired its extremely one sided and unfair. I'm not getting too deep into the community thats not the point of this review.

Get it on sale sure, but I dont recommend spending over 1,000 hours for cosmetics that sooner or later people can get in 10 minutes. Complete waste of my life and I wish I could refund all the hours I put into this monstrosity of a game.

TL;DR the game is extremely buggy, full of hackers, EXTREMELY toxic community and brain dead developers. ruined game.

ANYTHING rare says they fix, they dont instead pushing more broken content in a broken game, as my friend said: "rare breaks a vase, then adds a broken vase to replace the broken vase, then realizes its broken, so they buy a new broken vase"
to break it down, they break their game, then add broken content to replace their broken game, to then realize its broken and to try fixing it they break their game even more.