Role experience in Arena mode, and how to make it better

[kuzestanx]

If you were questioning my comment about 4p being the least popular there are actually tons of 4p games played. I didn't do a count of all games to compare but I know when I suggested 4p in arena it was extremely shot down and a lot of my friends thinks it sucks also

Sure, 4-players mode is the most balanced. Also sure, a lot of players will say it is boring or not funny or sucks xD
But I also want to add this mode will kill Sam, Rose and Paul, who are already weak, but still playable, and they will turn into no-features characters

[ChiefPointThief]

If you were questioning my comment about 4p being the least popular there are actually tons of 4p games played. I didn't do a count of all games to compare but I know when I suggested 4p in arena it was extremely shot down and a lot of my friends thinks it sucks also

Sure, 4-players mode is the most balanced. Also sure, a lot of players will say it is boring or not funny or sucks xD
But I also want to add this mode will kill Sam, Rose and Paul, who are already weak, but still playable, and they will turn into no-features characters

Most people play with manually for character select so there is a second option. Also I find Paul more playable in 4p. I choose Paul over some bad characters as sheriff & maybe in a RARE scenario I choose Paul in higher player counts but for the most part he stinks I have him ranked worst of all characters.

[AVTactics]

Me and a friend had this convo about the renegade last year so I manually checked my last 100 games to get an estimate of my %. But I think better statistics would come from sitewide so I just collected data from the site of the last 100 4p games. This was my findings.

Outlaws won 49%, Sheriff 34%, Renegade 17%. [...] Also you will see outlaws are even @ 4p with the sheriff being slightly over due to stealing wins from the renegade which makes sense.

In March 2025, I played 100 games in casual mode, 4-player + chosen hero format. I used the same principle of collecting data I used before.



Thoughts:
a) Does 4-player format look like a more balanced format? Yes, seems so.
b) Can I really rely on casual mode when think about Arena mode? No, I can't because of my subjective impressions/feelings that says people play differently in these modes, also it seems players have less skill in casual games (not proven).
c) Is 100 games enough to really catch the situation? No, I think that 100 games is better than nothing so it is more about touching the surface than catching real thing.

My motivation was to get a quick look at other formats than 5p and 6p. Once I wrote the original post I understood that my main option here, what I can do, is to vote for another format. The question sounded like "is it worth it?", "will it work out?" - this got me in this little additional research.

I don't have a delusion - I can't say anything real about 4-player or 7-player formats related to Arena mode, and speaking about Arena I cannot really rely on 100 games in casual mode. However, this little additional research (combined with the original research) is enough to make me vote for something not 5-player and not 6-player formats for the next Arena season, for example, what Pheonix03 proposes (4-player + new expansion).

[ChiefPointThief]

Yeah. 100 games is a small sample size but it is something. Even though gathering info for 4p games is the easiest it was still time consuming (took over 20min). In addition when I gathered my personally data previously I didn’t note the winner of each game. Only my win % for each role. & I was 61% outlaw, 56% sheriff, %17 renegade in 4p over those 100 games.