I can't remember if the Robot Wars arena uses the hazards module or creates its own emitters so I'll just give a high level explaination of how arena flames work. Unlike flamethrower components, arena flames don't do any damage. For this reason, there is usually a call to plus.damage whenever a bot is supposed to get hurt. The flames class found in Hazards does 25 damage per tick (which usually amounts to 100 HP per second). If the RW Arena uses the hazards module, you'll either need to change the damage delivered for all arenas that use it or tweak the Arena.py so that it doesn't use the same class.