What Is Wrong With Arena
And no, I'm not talking about collusion or shard chats or any of that.
There are 10 major things wrong with arena:
1) Payout time. Asking me to sacrifice family dinner to play a mobile game in order to get my best rankings
2) Ranking movement. You can drop from #1 to #20 in under a half hour, while the guys at #2 - #4 and #6 - #8 and #10 - #13 and #15 - #19 all stay the same. The mechanics of not only the potential speed of drop but also how everyone else can stay the same is just asinine.
3) Recent reworks. I understand people wanting to play with their favorite toons in arena, but the recent pushes to make all teams arena viable is leading to an environment where everyone in the top 50 is able to make the top 5 if they play enough. People are praising "diversity" at the same time as this increases the annoyance of trying to play in the arena, as now with so much activity and possibility, I can just as easily make top 5 as I can do 5 battles and not move more than a few spots from where I started.
4) No Practice Area. They've created an environment, both with arena and territory wars, where we need to try out our theories to see if things would work, if a certain team setup would work in arena or be a good defense in territory wars, etc. However, we have no way to practice. GW was made super easy, so not even that is a candidate anymore, imperfect as it was previously. I can use arena to practice, if the right opponents are in shooting distance, but this leaves me open to getting bumped, and bumped hard and fast!, if the team I chose isn't very good for arena. And then I either have to pay 50 crystals to refresh to switch back to my defense team or wait 10 minutes to try again.
5) Mod management. Going along with #4, I can't easily practice a different team with my arena mods. They are so tough to move around and hard to track.
6-10) All of the above again, but more annoying the second time I think about it.
There are plenty of easy ways to fix this, but I doubt it will ever happen.
Simplest to start is mod management. Allow us to assign mods to a combined "set". I can place this "set" of 6 mods on any character and it will pull them from wherever I have them (paying the defined cost) and place them on the character.
Create a practice area. This could be an inner guild thing, perhaps, where we can set up defenses for others in our guild to try to attack. No rewards required. No cost, or a minor ally point cost, perhaps. You can move your mods around here to whatever characters and it won't affect your raids, TB, TW, or arena setups.
Fixes to the arena would be more difficult, but one idea I like:
Change the arena so that you have 10 attacks and you are given a random choice of about 10 other players to attack. If you win all 10 battles, you get 500 crystals and highest arena tokens. If you win 9 battles, 450 crystals, and so on. Each day your opponents are updated, being made more difficult by being placed with others that won all 10 or some other algorithm to increase difficulty. Yes, yes, at first most would be getting 450 or 500 crystals a day, but it would begin to average out. On average, players would be making about 250 crystals a day, being placed in an area where they can beat only half their opponents. The players at the top end would have enough depth of roster to be able to beat all or most teams and continue to get 450 to 500 crystals a day.
There are multiple advantages to a system like the above: Payout time no longer needs to be a thing. It's a mobile game and people can play when they have time to play. You can use different teams to beat different opponents without having to sacrifice your standings or getting a heart attack that you're going to drop 20 ranks simply because 5 people climbing can reach you as the farthest rank they can attack.. Perhaps you can place the team that you want to show up as a defensive team for other players.
This last idea for the arena, though, is something I doubt they'd ever provide. I don't know why they want to provide their players the pain and constant annoyance of a set time for payout that coincides with typical family time (or for people that moves timezones, ends up being at 2am; it's happened), but they've never even acknowledged that they think it is a problem, so I don't know what to say about it.
There are 10 major things wrong with arena:
1) Payout time. Asking me to sacrifice family dinner to play a mobile game in order to get my best rankings
2) Ranking movement. You can drop from #1 to #20 in under a half hour, while the guys at #2 - #4 and #6 - #8 and #10 - #13 and #15 - #19 all stay the same. The mechanics of not only the potential speed of drop but also how everyone else can stay the same is just asinine.
3) Recent reworks. I understand people wanting to play with their favorite toons in arena, but the recent pushes to make all teams arena viable is leading to an environment where everyone in the top 50 is able to make the top 5 if they play enough. People are praising "diversity" at the same time as this increases the annoyance of trying to play in the arena, as now with so much activity and possibility, I can just as easily make top 5 as I can do 5 battles and not move more than a few spots from where I started.
4) No Practice Area. They've created an environment, both with arena and territory wars, where we need to try out our theories to see if things would work, if a certain team setup would work in arena or be a good defense in territory wars, etc. However, we have no way to practice. GW was made super easy, so not even that is a candidate anymore, imperfect as it was previously. I can use arena to practice, if the right opponents are in shooting distance, but this leaves me open to getting bumped, and bumped hard and fast!, if the team I chose isn't very good for arena. And then I either have to pay 50 crystals to refresh to switch back to my defense team or wait 10 minutes to try again.
5) Mod management. Going along with #4, I can't easily practice a different team with my arena mods. They are so tough to move around and hard to track.
6-10) All of the above again, but more annoying the second time I think about it.
There are plenty of easy ways to fix this, but I doubt it will ever happen.
Simplest to start is mod management. Allow us to assign mods to a combined "set". I can place this "set" of 6 mods on any character and it will pull them from wherever I have them (paying the defined cost) and place them on the character.
Create a practice area. This could be an inner guild thing, perhaps, where we can set up defenses for others in our guild to try to attack. No rewards required. No cost, or a minor ally point cost, perhaps. You can move your mods around here to whatever characters and it won't affect your raids, TB, TW, or arena setups.
Fixes to the arena would be more difficult, but one idea I like:
Change the arena so that you have 10 attacks and you are given a random choice of about 10 other players to attack. If you win all 10 battles, you get 500 crystals and highest arena tokens. If you win 9 battles, 450 crystals, and so on. Each day your opponents are updated, being made more difficult by being placed with others that won all 10 or some other algorithm to increase difficulty. Yes, yes, at first most would be getting 450 or 500 crystals a day, but it would begin to average out. On average, players would be making about 250 crystals a day, being placed in an area where they can beat only half their opponents. The players at the top end would have enough depth of roster to be able to beat all or most teams and continue to get 450 to 500 crystals a day.
There are multiple advantages to a system like the above: Payout time no longer needs to be a thing. It's a mobile game and people can play when they have time to play. You can use different teams to beat different opponents without having to sacrifice your standings or getting a heart attack that you're going to drop 20 ranks simply because 5 people climbing can reach you as the farthest rank they can attack.. Perhaps you can place the team that you want to show up as a defensive team for other players.
This last idea for the arena, though, is something I doubt they'd ever provide. I don't know why they want to provide their players the pain and constant annoyance of a set time for payout that coincides with typical family time (or for people that moves timezones, ends up being at 2am; it's happened), but they've never even acknowledged that they think it is a problem, so I don't know what to say about it.
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Replies
EDIT: this is pretty much the same system you are suggesting, but instead of 12 battles in GW you give the example of 10. Same concept though.
This would:
1) Make arena collusion impossible/obsolete
2) Remove the payout times
3) Fix GW being too easy, and would give it good reason to be as difficult as it once was.
4) Remove the hurdle returning players face in their arena shard, encouraging them to actually continue playing rather than creating a new account or giving up.
Very similar, and you're not the only one to make that comparison. My idea was a bit different, as there was a ranking system in there based on how you performed the previous day, but yeah, either way.
It could have been nice, to allow new players to choose their own payout time—zone/pay—out time when they unlock the arena.
2)
Drops differ from day to day and from shard to shard. What you describe is not a general rule.
3)
All teams are viable now? Nonsense! The game will never be balanced like that. It simply conflicts the developer's bussiness model. Power will always creep.
4)
Nice to have but not really needed.
5)
That would be a much welcome QoL improvement — not only for arena.
4 - Agree
5- Agree
6-10 really ?
EDIT i finish between 100-200 every day. i'm not trying to protect my free stuff, find a system that rewards me more than others without putting in the time effort or money they did (mostly what these fix arena posts are)
If anything I can be objective because I don't really care about arena. I do see that there have been multiple multiple suggestions on how to "fix" arena some are great suggestions others are not.
But the one thing you can be sure of in every instance is that the proposed changes will benefit the poster while not benefiting the other people in their shard (mostly there are exceptions like the highest rank of the day thing etc)
Again thanks to DEV's for always improving the game and QOL updates !!!
Actually, my proposed changes should benefit everyone who has enough depth or good enough teams to be able to beat any other teams. Those that have progressed to that point would be able to do all 10 battles a day and get the highest reward. For others, they would be below 50 or 100 in the current setup anyways, and my proposed changes shouldn't hurt them at all. They'd still get on average 250 crystals a day.
I realize some of my statements are shard dependent. I know of one guy in my guild whose shard is virtually dead. He stays at top 5 all day and there isn't much movement. In my shard, I've seen all faces in the top 50 also make it up to the top 10. I'm sure it just depends on how much effort they put in and how much battles they do.
But the currently viable teams: nightsisters, Rey, Rex, Empire Palp lead, Empire Thrawn lead, CLS. I've seen all of those teams in the top 10 if not top 20 at least and my shard is quite old. I've even heard of well-built phoenix, ewok, and first order teams hitting the top 10 on other shards. Maybe you haven't seen it on your shard, but it's completely possible.
That is another good point of what is broken with arena! Depending on your timezone you may either have no competition at all, or be competing against 20 other players.
No, not a general rule. I was pointing out that it's completely possible. That kind of structure is just completely silly in any kind of PvP competition, imo.
See my note above in response to Boba_The_Fetter. Maybe you haven't seen it on your shard, but I've seen it on mine and a couple of my friends. I might be exaggerating when I say ALL teams are viable, but a goodly number are. They did start some power creep when they started to add mechanics like pretaunt and increase the health and attack of characters, but after a year of reworks and character releases, they're bringing it back in line. Not all characters are viable necessarily, but a large number of team compositions are.
Normally, this would be a great thing. Work the team you like and have fun. They way they've structured the arena this means that it is more possible for a larger number of players to be able to beat any team. Sounds great, we've always wanted more diversity, but it has decreased the motivation for not only myself, but several friends I know, to play the game at all.
2. You say that you won't speak about arena cooperation and then you make the point that you drop 20 places while everyone's rank stayed the same. You basically just implied cooperation as one of your complaints. And yes I'm against cooperation too.
3. I agree on payout times, you have to sacrifice family dinners, I have to risk getting fired from work when I sit in the bathroom for 20 minutes trying to finish high. I do think we should be able to pick our payout times or at least make it work differently.
4. I don't think your proposed system of giving everyone 10 battles daily and reward them based on success rate would work. Don't forget that some people don't have the time for 10 battles every day. Also that would greatly benefit those in the very low ranks 200+ over those in the 20+ range. I think we need a different system but not that system.
5. I agree on mod management and practice mode more than anything.
6. Never forget that the devs won't just give out crystals to players. The game is funded by panic farms and crystal spending on gears and refreshes.