After a day of these new sites, I must say it is just frustrating to run them, you almost always get something that counters you, be it Stabbers that go 5km/s or full tanked Moas. There is nothing that reliably works at all. Whatever you bring, you have 0 chance! And looking at the Jita market, it indicates that Caracals are the goto ship. It also feels like 75% of all kills were made by the Caracal(in the old Arenas about 50% of all kills were made by the Iki).
And the rating system needs some kind of rework, it should use an elo based system, not only the raw amount of wins. This gives advantage for people that do the content 24h/7 day a week. If a player with less wins kills a player with more wins, than he should gain more points. Same vice versa. If a player with many wins kills a player with less wins, then he should gain less points. Lets say point range between 5 and 50 points depending on the win/loss ratio. And the player who lost will lose the same amount of points. Abysra has a formula: https://abysra.com/
This gives players with less experience in the arena a realistic chance to catch up to the good players.
Back to old arenas: There used to be a lot of feedback on that back in late 2018/early 2019
Recently, I started playing a mobile game while in train etc… and this has a weekly tournament in the arena. The old arena could have been “saved” with something similar. Lets say that there is a tournament every 2 weeks, where the best 10 players would get some sort of rewards, like isk, skillpoints etc. Then there is actually a “reason” to do it and population would increase massively.
So what about a “old proving ground” filament. This filament would allow any T1 Combat/Attack cruiser, all Navy and Pirate cruisers, Heavy assault cruisers/Interdictors(Including Ikitursa and Vedmak) and the Curse to enter. Dampening modules(Tracking distruptor, Guidance distruptor and sensor dampener) would be limited to 1 per ship of each, so that peopla have to fight rather than fitting a full damp lachesis and kite 35 min around. Instead of the queue, you enter an arena that looks like the old one with a 35 min timer and a 5 min timer on the cache. If no one enters within the 5 minutes, you can take the cache, get 1 elo point and leave. If you get another player, you fight until the death and the winner gets between 5 and 50 elo points(depending of the rank of the players). There would be a tournament every 2 weeks where the best pilots get some sort of rewards. Population of old arena was like 30 people, but if we could increase that to 500 or something…
But anyways, the ranking of the new system needs a look at. The point that matters now is the amount of time spent in doing them rather than the skills of a pilot.