Blood arena

Everywhere else two players can fight, something is at stake. The Wilderness takes your inventory, the Duel Arena needs a challenge accepted, a tournament runs on the hour off a preset, and the gambling yard is not a fight at all. The blood arena is the one place you can simply walk in with the gear you own and fight whoever is standing there.

::arena takes you to it, or use the Blood Arena row on the teleport window. It is a walled compound at home, west of the blood quarry, with one gate.

The two rooms

The compound is cut in half by a strip of blood-red floor.

South of the line is the lobby. Nobody can be attacked here. The bank, the item spawner, shops and your presets all work exactly as they do anywhere else at home. This is where you gear up and where you come back to when you have run out of food.

North of the line is the pit. Everyone in the pit can attack everyone else in the pit. None of those four work past the line, so restocking means walking back out of the fight. Nothing stops you crossing in either direction at any moment - walking out is always available, and it always costs you the fight you were in.

Somebody standing in the pit cannot hit somebody standing in the lobby, and the other way round.

What a death costs

Nothing. You drop nothing, you break nothing, and you do not respawn at home: you stand up on the lobby pad at full health, with a full special bar and full run energy, and you can walk straight back in. Leaving the compound restores you the same way, so a free scrap never costs you a bank trip afterwards.

What a win is worth

A number, and only a number. The arena pays no blood money, no coins, no emblems, no points and no task progress. It keeps four things for you, and ::arena reads them back:

• wins
• losses
• your live win streak
• the best streak you have ever held

Every fifth win on a live streak is announced to the world. The best streak is the one that stays with the account.

That is deliberate, and it is the whole design. A safe kill costs the loser nothing, which means it is free to manufacture - so anything the arena paid out would be paid to whoever was willing to kill their own second account all evening. Pride cannot be farmed into an economy.

The rules that hold it up

• A win only counts against a real stranger: a different account, on a different connection, who you have not already beaten in the last twenty minutes. A kill that fails that test moves nothing - not your wins, and not their losses or streak either, so nobody can grind your record down with an alt.
• Staff tools are switched off inside the whole compound, lobby included, for every rank. The score is the only thing the arena pays, so it is the only thing worth cheating.
• Arena wins and losses are counted separately from your Wilderness record, and a death here never touches a Bounty Hunter killstreak.