Shake up Arena with new achievements and big rewards!

Aero

So I've been thinking. Right now a lot of frustration in this game stems from Arena and a lot of it is because the only thing to do in Arena is finish as highly as possible and get as many crystals as you can to build up your roster faster. However, what if there was something else to go for in Arena?

I propose an achievement for each faction with at least 5 characters be made. The achievement will be to WIN matches with that faction, and the reward will be a new character for that faction.

Win 50 matches with [insert faction]: 80 shards (unlock character at 4 stars)

Win 100 matches with [insert faction]: 65 shards

Win 150 matches with [insert faction]: 85 shards

Win 200 matches with [insert faction]: 100 shards, 10 Vader shards

Now originally I was going to suggest big name characters as rewards, but seeing as CG probably wants to save those I'll try to suggest more mild rewards.

Jedi: Ki-Addi-Mundi
Sith: Darth Bane
Empire: Shadow Trooper
Scoundrel: Hondo Ohnaka
Nightsister: Mother Talzin
Rebel: Nien Nunb
First Order: General Hux
Resistance: Ello Asty
Droid: Droideka

Obviously then Clone, Jawa, Tusken, Ewok, and Geonosian are all missing a 5th member and would need to get that sorted out first.

Anticipating thoughts
Wouldn't people will just use their faction and then swap out a defense team? They could, but that's one less match for the achievement and remember you need to win the matches.

Why would they force me to do worse in Arena? Doing well in Arena nets you tokens and crystals to unlock characters faster. This would just be a slightly different way too unlock a character. Same end goal. It would also highlight any issues with team synergies that need to be addressed.

Why are you discouraging me from mix and match teams? We're not, those are still fun and will likely net you higher rewards. Tune fit decision making! Want that specific character or resources to get other characters faster?

Can't this just be it's own separate mode? I'm down for that too!

Anyways, I hope I don't get too much backlash for this. Just an idea I thought would be fun!

Scorn

I really like this idea. It's a great way to put emphasis on synergy teams, and an even better way to encourage diversity in arena, or another game mode if that is the case. Right now, arena is rather boring fighting the same teams over and over. This would shake things up a bit and make it exciting again. I support this idea wholeheartedly!

Darth_Balls

I love love LOVE this idea Aero!

I honestly think the counter-points you addressed are valid, but I am not sure how this could possibly be a bad thing. Arena needs a shake-up to promote diversity!

BradGoodyear

Best Idea I have seen on these forums yet.

10/10

DarthBarron

Agree with all the above! Love the idea and a great way to encourage movement away from the meta. Ben, Rey, Dooku, GS, QGJ teams are boring and overused. Look RNG was good, I won. Look, they dodged my first 5 attacks... stupid RNG.

@EA_Jesse , you should consider something like this. Great synergy with all of the team specific events that are being introduced and a reason to plan out your own game progression instead of everyone has Dooku, so I need him too.

Aero

So we had a discussion about this in the general discussion and I'm going to attempt to carry a few thoughts over to here as well.

1) You wouldn't need to max out the characters, only have 5 unlocked and put then in Arena. Your team will quickly fall to the appropriate bracket where you can get wins.

2) Money can still be made as whales may want one of the characters but don't want to drop arena rank so they spend big money to quickly get them up to shape. People would also buy arena refreshes more to get the character faster

3) The characters still can't out right be bought and free to play can get them fairly.

RAYRAY

I could get behind this. I like it. It adds a more interesting take on arena to the game. It would need to be a different game mode to work I think. Some balance would need to happen for this to work or you would have complaints that "my empire team gets destroyed by Jedi, Rebels, Droids, well everyone!"

Aero

RAYRAY wrote: »

I could get behind this. I like it. It adds a more interesting take on arena to the game. It would need to be a different game mode to work I think. Some balance would need to happen for this to work or you would have complaints that "my empire team gets destroyed by Jedi, Rebels, Droids, well everyone!"

Not too sure it needs to be a separate mode, especially if the idea is to shake up Arena meta. Plus imagine how different arena will look, I imagine quite a few would jump in this, and others would take advantage of the easy pickings. Though I'm not opposed to a separate mode.

And exposing imbalance is great in my opinion!

medetec

I'll just move this here

While I like the idea, especially adding new achievements to the rapidly dwindling achievement pool, I don't think it will have any significant effect on the arena meta. If you want to shake things up without nerfing the "best" characters into oblivion, which I am strongly opposed to... you have to give a real, power based incentive to cohesive squad building.

Aside from droids, there is no reward for synergy over just frankensteining the best components into a brute force solution. Synergy lead bonuses either need to be significantly stronger than what general purpose leads provide, or general purpose leads need to be removed entirely in favor or all faction based leads. There are also per character tweaks that could be made in addition to fixing leads that have bonuses not necessarily related to faction. Master-Padawan bonuses, canon team bonuses (ie. Darth Maul and Savage Opress, Lando and Lobot) and the like.

As long as there's no alternate avenue to reaching the power of a Frankenstein team then even if people switch up briefly to go for achievements or other incentives it goes right back to square one unless synergy has some effective staying power.

1AmYourFath3r

Agree with both @Aero and @medetec. Arena needs something - it's stale.

Jedi2407

+1. Great idea to incentivize building a diverse collection of characters. Please consider this Devs!

Gank_Killer

Arena does need something, it needs to be fixed. No more 75% dodge rates, no more 10 back to back Phasma assists.

1. Put the % effects back the way they're supposed to be. Develop a defense interface where you can assign priorities to each character (ie RG to "never attack stunned target") or something similar.
(would be a large undertaking, but better than current state)

2. Make arena "hands off", meaning it's AI vs AI. (don't like this one)

3. Make synergies actuallly SYNERGIZE. Having 1 character that gives "+30% offense (half for non-synergies), +20% crit damage(half for non-synergies), if evaded grant Advantage", and then having another character that does "+30% offense EMPIRE ONLY" is ignorant and clearly had no thought put into it, it was just **** out for a deadline.

Anything else is putting bubblegum on the hole in the dam.

Allenb60

This idea is better than most in my opinion, and can be described as hitting two birds with one stone. It nails the problems of arena and even if it wasn't added to arena would be one of the better game modes. It really reminds of the Grand Master Yoda event and I honestly wish Yoda was unlocked this way instead of requiring so much investment in stars.
My only problem is the amount of characters, adding that many would take a lot of work so maybe they could be available seasonally, and introduced two at a time by having opposite factions battle, for example rebels vs empire, Sith vs Jedi, whichever two fight together.
Also this is a less significant problem but I don't know if Darth Bane would be so easily added since the canon version of him isn't exactly a real person, but it is an interesting choice and I guess the options are limited, I have seen some really cool and unique suggestions for his character too so I think he would be my first goal.

Aero

Allenb60 wrote: »

This idea is better than most in my opinion, and can be described as hitting two birds with one stone. It nails the problems of arena and even if it wasn't added to arena would be one of the better game modes. It really reminds of the Grand Master Yoda event and I honestly wish Yoda was unlocked this way instead of requiring so much investment in stars.
My only problem is the amount of characters, adding that many would take a lot of work so maybe they could be available seasonally, and introduced two at a time by having opposite factions battle, for example rebels vs empire, Sith vs Jedi, whichever two fight together.
Also this is a less significant problem but I don't know if Darth Bane would be so easily added since the canon version of him isn't exactly a real person, but it is an interesting choice and I guess the options are limited, I have seen some really cool and unique suggestions for his character too so I think he would be my first goal.

I was originally going with Darth Plagueis but he deserves something a bit more. Darth Bane is the only other canon sith I can think of at the moment.

And I'd rather they just wait until they develop the characters and then drop it all together. I'd hate for arena to just be 2 factions and then meta.

Maybe have placeholder shards? Like say you still get the shards for Shadow Trooper but you the character will be locked until he's ready. Maybe not the best approach, but it is a lot of characters you are right.

Alexone

It's an interesting idea, i could get behind it. I don't think the wins in arena should be the staple, but the losses too. A scoring system like you said, where one win gets you 3 points and 1 loss gets you one point. Could work and could be fun, but some serious thought needs to be put into this.

medetec

It could be a decent way to introduce and guide people towards faction team building after factions are fixed. Actually, that's pretty good.

Aero

Ok, regarding the character proposal, maybe use existing PVE characters as rewards. Can anyonehelp remind me who those are? I'm omitting Jedi Luke, Starkiller Rey, and the Emperor for obvious reasons.

Empire: Scout Trooper, Sand Trooper Stormtrooper Commander, Imperial Agent, TIE Pilot

Rebels: Endor Rebel Scout/Soldier/Officer

Jedi: Jedi Sentinel

Sith: ?

Nightsister: ?

Scoundrel: Cartel Brute, various Pirates

Droid: Various B1 Battle droids, Commando Diplomat droid.

First Order: ?

Resistance: ?

Could cut down on some of the work. Any bonus character would be good in my opinion at least.

medetec

I don't believe there are any PvE additional Sith, Nightsister, First Order or Resistance characters.

You can look here for existing (and datamined) PvE encounters. https://swgoh.gg/characters/pve/

Grraauuggh

@Aero Plus a million on the faction arena achievements idea. My only question is, why would it be a good thing for someone to not level their characters?

Example: Someone is a top-100 player with their meta squad, and they have an all-Empire team unlocked, but not really leveled-up much or maxed-out. They also have a few other factions unlocked, but are similarly unleveled. So, they put in a squad of nothing but scrubs so that they can drop themselves as low as they can get until they can compete with others using their Empire team. Then they simply keep playing as Empire, or Nightsister, or whatever without actually leveling their toons until they unlock whatever rewards they get for the achievements. Thus, they earn the achievements without actually leveling their characters.

I get that there are probably a lot of people who would like to do this without leveling their characters, and I could even see doing this with some low-level achievements. However, I don't see EA getting behind an enhancement to their game that encourages people to have lots of characters that don't ever get leveled. My guess would be that they would want to add something to this that would incentivize people to level-up their non-meta toons, which would make them even more money, and would also shake-up the composition of the teams at the top of the ladder as well as the bottom.

My recommendation would be to do something like what you recommended, but maybe add an additional requirement that the wins have to be at a minimum arena-ranking or character-level so that in order to get the achievement, the characters have to actually be leveled.

For example:
Win 50, 100, 150, etc. arena matches using 5 Empire players at a ranking higher than 200.
Win 50, 100, 150, etc. arena matches using 5 Nightsister players at a ranking higher than 200.
Etc.

Or

Win 50, 100, 150, etc. arena matches using 5 Empire players at character-level 80 and 7-stars.
Etc.

Also, you could do a sort-of combination of the two strategies. For example, you could have the lower-level achievements be free of the ranking/character-level/stars/whatever requirements, but at the higher-end you could reset the number of wins but also require the player to have the characters leveled to an appropriate point prior to their wins. Nothing ridiculous mind you, but something higher than just level 50 gear 4 5-star characters, or whatever the minimum would be to win at the bottom of the ladder.

Thoughts?

Allenb60

Aero wrote: »

Allenb60 wrote: »

This idea is better than most in my opinion, and can be described as hitting two birds with one stone. It nails the problems of arena and even if it wasn't added to arena would be one of the better game modes. It really reminds of the Grand Master Yoda event and I honestly wish Yoda was unlocked this way instead of requiring so much investment in stars.
My only problem is the amount of characters, adding that many would take a lot of work so maybe they could be available seasonally, and introduced two at a time by having opposite factions battle, for example rebels vs empire, Sith vs Jedi, whichever two fight together.
Also this is a less significant problem but I don't know if Darth Bane would be so easily added since the canon version of him isn't exactly a real person, but it is an interesting choice and I guess the options are limited, I have seen some really cool and unique suggestions for his character too so I think he would be my first goal.

I was originally going with Darth Plagueis but he deserves something a bit more. Darth Bane is the only other canon sith I can think of at the moment.

And I'd rather they just wait until they develop the characters and then drop it all together. I'd hate for arena to just be 2 factions and then meta.

Maybe have placeholder shards? Like say you still get the shards for Shadow Trooper but you the character will be locked until he's ready. Maybe not the best approach, but it is a lot of characters you are right.

Ya, I don't think people would mind just waiting for the new characters, I wasn't trying to hijack your idea I just thought it might be easier if they were released a few at a time until they were all available

BradGoodyear

Grraauuggh wrote: »

Example: Someone is a top-100 player with their meta squad, and they have an all-Empire team unlocked, but not really leveled-up much or maxed-out. They also have a few other factions unlocked, but are similarly unleveled. So, they put in a squad of nothing but scrubs so that they can drop themselves as low as they can get until they can compete with others using their Empire team. Then they simply keep playing as Empire, or Nightsister, or whatever without actually leveling their toons until they unlock whatever rewards they get for the achievements. Thus, they earn the achievements without actually leveling their characters.

Thoughts?

I don't think this will occur. It would take a lot of wins to unlock a character. Also you would be forfeiting any Arena awards for that time.

I think it's more likely that you put in your lvl 50 or 60 empire team, and keep building it. I mean you are going to be leving someone all the time, just focus on the current team, You slowly climb back up the ladder and start getting rewards again.

I pesonally probably wouldn't bother until I was at least gear 7 on all toons before switching teams, this can be done in a few days.