First impressions arena mode owns quote this if you're down

/!\ WALL OF TEXT /!\

Impressions on arena:
Nice to see new environments, personally I feel that Lumbercamp and Ravine are the best, while the remakes are a little less entertaining. The only problem with arena so far is a common problem in sudden death: Many people play too conservatively, which rarely helps in this game mode because there are no real safe zones to retreat into. The passive team will just get steamrolled. Scouts and engineers are a gamble in this mode, but still actually do pay off if they take advantage of circumstances. However,  I've seen very few engineers ever in lumbercamp; there is usually one engineer per team on ravine. Crits really should be off on arena. If the emphasis is supposed to be on the individual team and their strategy, there shouldn't be random bullshit that can tip the scales like in normal play.

Impressions of Badwater Basin:
Awesome. This is how goldrush should have been. There are some weird cart bugs and Blu seems to win more this time around, but it is really better than goldrush in every way. It's very large, open, and gives the player multiple attack paths throughout the entire map.

Thoughts on Steel:
It's nice to see steel has finally been made standard, but since most people haven't actually played it, coordination is difficult. A lot of people go out the B gate even if A isn't capped, and the reality is that only scouts, soldiers, and demomen hoping to rush E should be headed that way. It's a really fun map to play once you get the layout down, and Fishbus did an excellent job at making steel so professional that many people mistake it for an official Valve map.

Heavy Weapons:
Natasha is actually very useful for hunting down medics and scouts, along with weaker units like engineers. They have a very difficult time escaping if you keep a constant stream of bullets on the target, however against anything else it can be rather dangerous. Obviously, Sasha heavies will own your shit. Sandvich is okay, seems like a decent idea and is really helpful on arena maps. KGB is kind of a gimmick item.

Man, why is this game so slow the first time you enter a game? I swear, I'm waiting like 5 minutes for the map to load, but instead the game decides to crash on me and make me restart.
I'm down for a few rounds once I get this thing running.

I haven't had speed problems, but there is a very common memory allocation error that happens randomly to anybody when playing on the arena modes. Some servers can't even load the game type at all and crash shortly after an arena map begins.

ps we really need to get sunday, sunday, sundays goin' again, if only timezones werent a bitch