Grand Arena Megathread

Replies


  • If it stays as is I'll probably just ignore it. That's another thing: how would I even opt out of this event if I didn't want to participate?

    When the next one starts, resist hitting that join button. That'll do it.
  • FolsomTony wrote: »

    If it stays as is I'll probably just ignore it. That's another thing: how would I even opt out of this event if I didn't want to participate?

    When the next one starts, resist hitting that join button. That'll do it.

    Nice. I guess I forgot that I had to take action to join it.
  • Ok then, thanks for the rundown (genuinely), and back to substance:
    According to many posts here (not attributing this to you specifically), the ideal format for the matching would take into account every factor that differentiates one player’s roster from another and match them as closely as possible across all of these different metrics. As I see it, the closer you get to that “ideal,” the less incentive you have to improve your roster for GA, because any improvement you make will just result in a harder opponent, and you will just be treading water.

    You are 100% correct on this point. People who want the matchmaking to take all this into account don’t realize how much they’re asking for, or that it would require rebalancing the algorithm essentially every time a new toon or ship is added. It would also create incentives that the devs would want to avoid, just like you say. That’s why I’ve been advocating an Elo rating system for GA. I think it preserves the incentive to gear up your PVP roster, and ensures that incremental on your roster will generally be rewarded with incremental success.
    I did, however, respond to your question of what the point is of improving your roster when the mismatches are egregious by arguing that you can still improve your chances of having a favorable matchup even if the matchups are rarely even.

    I made a point earlier in this connection, and you didn’t respond, but I would like to know what you think about it: In anticipation of GA, I was wondering whether I needed to privilege my PVP roster more, and from what I’ve seen, it would be unreasonable to change my farming habits. The small improvement I could make to my GA squads every week is going to very likely to be swamped by the uncertainty introduced by the bad matchmaking. Over the very long run, statistically, yes, I would het higher rewards by making that small weekly investment in more PVP teams. But I really do believe that the long run we’d be talking about in order to realize those gains is longer than the life expectancy of the game. That calculation is very different if I can count on seeing similarly situated opponents every outing.

    I want to also say that although I’m not super-into PVP, I was very excited for this mode when it was announced. I was optimistic about the devs’ ability to match the roster strengths of individual players, because this mode isn’t confounded by the guild-level dynamics that make it complicated to create pairings in TW. I’m really disappointed, because this seemed like a fun mode, but the fun has been **** out by the bad pairings.

    Depends how small your weekly changes are. If you put one gear 8 piece a week on a pvp toon and then go back to collecting and spreading the gear, then you're right it won't make a difference. But if you focus you can improve a pvp team by 20-30k in a few weeks. That makes a difference rather quickly. It also adds to your gp but not enough to significantly affect match making.

    I should be clear that what I mean is that I’m always going to be investing something in PVP squads—even Ewoks have their uses in TW, and probably in GA as well. But there’s a certain amount of discretionary resources that I could either use for more PVE squads (raid squads, working on top tiers of mythics, assault battles, etc.) or for GA squads. So what I’m really talking about is the marginal utility of diverting those discretionary resources from PVE toons to PVP toons. I just don’t see that the ROI from making that change justifies it, so I’m not changing anything. If the goal of GA was to incentivize the investment of resources in PVP toon, it hasn’t worked for me.

    But most good raid squads are also good in ga. Ns, jtr, bastilla, and bh are 4 squads I use for hstr. I use all 4 for ga and tw too. The other squad for hstr I use is cjex with chewie and almost all of the characters in that one are good in ga squads.

    The haat squad i use is abc with hoda instead of thrawn. Almost every toon in that squad is good in ga. Pit I use zader empire with cls for an easy solo. I use an empire team in ga so no waste there.

    So I just don't see where you have to choose between raids and pvp. I get top 5 in my guild in hstr and haat and pit is just a solofest at this point. And I already have a competitive roster for ga mostly because I developed good teams for hstr.
  • That said that I enjoyed it, here are my suggestions:

    1) Show us a log of how many points were scored against each team.

    2) Only count the GP of the top X toons. Whatever number you think is adequate. My suggestions is 3x the number of characters you can set on defense

    3) Add ships, and add more capital ships so we can field more squads. They don’t even have to be good ships.

    4) Cut down on the time. The preview phase is unnecessary. Auto join anyone who has logged in within 24 hours. Cut the time for setting defense to 12 hours. Cut the attack phase to 18 hours. This would turn a 7 day event into just under 4 days. A 7 day event to attack 21 squads is kind of silly. Too much downtime.

    5) Double the attack timer. We aren’t locking anyone out of attempting battles like arena. So of these teams we aren’t used to using and it would be nice to have more time to think about moves. These timeout teams really push the limit if you aren’t familiar with the battles.
  • Liath
    5140 posts Member
    Ok then, thanks for the rundown (genuinely), and back to substance:
    According to many posts here (not attributing this to you specifically), the ideal format for the matching would take into account every factor that differentiates one player’s roster from another and match them as closely as possible across all of these different metrics. As I see it, the closer you get to that “ideal,” the less incentive you have to improve your roster for GA, because any improvement you make will just result in a harder opponent, and you will just be treading water.

    You are 100% correct on this point. People who want the matchmaking to take all this into account don’t realize how much they’re asking for, or that it would require rebalancing the algorithm essentially every time a new toon or ship is added. It would also create incentives that the devs would want to avoid, just like you say. That’s why I’ve been advocating an Elo rating system for GA. I think it preserves the incentive to gear up your PVP roster, and ensures that incremental on your roster will generally be rewarded with incremental success.
    I did, however, respond to your question of what the point is of improving your roster when the mismatches are egregious by arguing that you can still improve your chances of having a favorable matchup even if the matchups are rarely even.

    I made a point earlier in this connection, and you didn’t respond, but I would like to know what you think about it: In anticipation of GA, I was wondering whether I needed to privilege my PVP roster more, and from what I’ve seen, it would be unreasonable to change my farming habits. The small improvement I could make to my GA squads every week is going to very likely to be swamped by the uncertainty introduced by the bad matchmaking. Over the very long run, statistically, yes, I would het higher rewards by making that small weekly investment in more PVP teams. But I really do believe that the long run we’d be talking about in order to realize those gains is longer than the life expectancy of the game. That calculation is very different if I can count on seeing similarly situated opponents every outing.

    I want to also say that although I’m not super-into PVP, I was very excited for this mode when it was announced. I was optimistic about the devs’ ability to match the roster strengths of individual players, because this mode isn’t confounded by the guild-level dynamics that make it complicated to create pairings in TW. I’m really disappointed, because this seemed like a fun mode, but the fun has been **** out by the bad pairings.

    It probably depends on what type of improvements you are considering. In general, I think it would be worthwhile as long as you prioritize roster improvements that are valuable in multiple areas of the game. I’m not sure there’s such a big disconnect there.

    Anything that helps in GA is also likely to help in TW. The best GA teams often have multiple uses. Jedi, whether Revan or Bastila lead, are great at everything except ships. Sith are still strong in arena and great for TB. JTRey is great for the Sith Raid and TB. NS are great for the Sith Raid. CLS Rebels are great for TB, and to some extent raids. BH are needed for TB and Chewie and have great ships. FO are great for TB and decent in the Sith Raid and have good ships. Phoenix and Rogue One are a bit lower in tier for PvP but they have dedicated missions in TB and good ships. Whatever the next arena meta turns out to be will be good in GA as well. Improving mods helps everywhere.

    I don’t know your roster or where you are in the game, but I rather doubt that you really need to change anything unless you’ve been playing very poorly, which seems unlikely since you sound like an intelligent person. There are some people that do play poorly, though, and would need to change their strategies if they want to be more competitive. A lot of the feedback I’ve seen from my guild is that our opponents don’t seem to understand (or haven’t bothered to farm) mods, for example. Another issue would be people that could get into HSTR guilds but are choosing not to for whatever reason - those people will be even more hampered in this game mode than they were before.
  • That said that I enjoyed it, here are my suggestions:

    1) Show us a log of how many points were scored against each team.

    2) Only count the GP of the top X toons. Whatever number you think is adequate. My suggestions is 3x the number of characters you can set on defense

    3) Add ships, and add more capital ships so we can field more squads. They don’t even have to be good ships.

    4) Cut down on the time. The preview phase is unnecessary. Auto join anyone who has logged in within 24 hours. Cut the time for setting defense to 12 hours. Cut the attack phase to 18 hours. This would turn a 7 day event into just under 4 days. A 7 day event to attack 21 squads is kind of silly. Too much downtime.

    5) Double the attack timer. We aren’t locking anyone out of attempting battles like arena. So of these teams we aren’t used to using and it would be nice to have more time to think about moves. These timeout teams really push the limit if you aren’t familiar with the battles.

    Facts. Especially #4.
  • TVF
    36526 posts Member
    A 24 hour preview period does not do anything to the time. You press one button.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • I think the devs have this somewhat backwards. Grand Arena should be established as follows

    0. There should be no Preview Phase. This slows down everything just for the sake of mismatched inclusion.
    1. Defense Phase (just have the one arena - there's no need to split into two subarenas just for the lack of an endzone that has no value)
    2. Matchmaking Phase (algorithm matches defense GPs; those who don't participate in defense either have squads setup for them or cannot participate)
    3. Attack Phase
    4. (for later) Allow for 3000 GP squads to participate (to allow autodefense to happen). And for Xenu's sake, DO NOT make Grand Arena a daily requirement. Just... yeuch.

    The timer for phases 1 & 3 should be dependent on player activation rather than a set schedule (this is how Trivia Crack does its matchups). This way, whales can grind on whales ("Phrasing!" intended), matches will be even (within a 100-300 GP variance), time frames will be determined by player activity, and everybody's happy (theoretically). Of course, this may require an overhaul of the entire arena... I can wait (and while they're at it, try to incorporate guild member pvp if you want to guarantee FAR MORE use of Grand Arena). In time, this could be much greater than Squad Arena ever could, thus living up to the name "Grand Arena".

    PS: While you're redesigning, try to situate the buff/debuff symbols so they don't crowd out other buffs/debuffs/turn meters/health bars/protection bars/actual friggin characters/etc.
  • NicWester
    8928 posts Member
    edited December 2018
    Drim wrote: »
    Not only did my opponent not set defense but he gets to attack me and do his quests....that’s sounds fair

    He also gets an extra 100k currency for each won battle. You don't.

    Oh, dip, you mean I’m missing out on a little over 10% of a Credit Heist?

    Well that’s just brutal! Instead of 25.6m, I’ll only have 25m.......
    Ceterum censeo Patientia esse meliat.
  • That said that I enjoyed it, here are my suggestions:

    1) Show us a log of how many points were scored against each team.

    2) Only count the GP of the top X toons. Whatever number you think is adequate. My suggestions is 3x the number of characters you can set on defense

    3) Add ships, and add more capital ships so we can field more squads. They don’t even have to be good ships.

    4) Cut down on the time. The preview phase is unnecessary. Auto join anyone who has logged in within 24 hours. Cut the time for setting defense to 12 hours. Cut the attack phase to 18 hours. This would turn a 7 day event into just under 4 days. A 7 day event to attack 21 squads is kind of silly. Too much downtime.

    5) Double the attack timer. We aren’t locking anyone out of attempting battles like arena. So of these teams we aren’t used to using and it would be nice to have more time to think about moves. These timeout teams really push the limit if you aren’t familiar with the battles.

    Facts. Especially #4.

    I'm loving #5. There are times when I could eventually whoop a squad of Nightsisters/Ewoks/Rebels if I didn't have travel through spacetime to do so. Dragging out the timer is only an effective strategy to beat Revan/Traya/Ugnaught*.


    *seriously, no love for the Ugnaught, devs?
  • 3pourr2 wrote: »
    flux_rono wrote: »
    First this will probably get merged... oh well

    But what if when we sign up for GA we choose which legendary/raid/hero character you use/fight against. (every other character would be considered fair game)

    So basically if you have all of those characters you can choose to use/fight them if you want or deselect them and you cant use them at all. BUT the key is that the person you match with also would have that same selection and similar GP so its a fair fight. Furthermore lets say you really hate fighting a Gen Kenobi defense for some reason, you can deselect him and you don't have to worry about that potential problem anymore; but of course that means if you have Gen. Kenobi you cant use him either.

    Going against a Revan or Traya or someone else (of those categories) that you don't have is a bit unfair, even if there are counters to them it can be a disadvantage to the person without said character. Further onto this if you don't have the character they should/would already be crossed out (deselected) since you don't own them yet; and if you choose you could enable them if you wanted to fight someone with them as a challenge while still not having the character yourself.

    Also I would say, that if you deselect a character you own it should also lower your current GP as well since they wouldn't be used.

    And if I deselect everything except a well developed Revan team?

    then you only have revan as your legendary/hero/raid character. raid han, gen kenobi, traya, r2, palp, bb8, chewie, thrawn, GM Yoda, C-3PO, CLS, and RJT will be locked out. and you should fight someone who also has all of those characters locked besides revan.

  • Ok then, thanks for the rundown (genuinely), and back to substance:
    According to many posts here (not attributing this to you specifically), the ideal format for the matching would take into account every factor that differentiates one player’s roster from another and match them as closely as possible across all of these different metrics. As I see it, the closer you get to that “ideal,” the less incentive you have to improve your roster for GA, because any improvement you make will just result in a harder opponent, and you will just be treading water.

    You are 100% correct on this point. People who want the matchmaking to take all this into account don’t realize how much they’re asking for, or that it would require rebalancing the algorithm essentially every time a new toon or ship is added. It would also create incentives that the devs would want to avoid, just like you say. That’s why I’ve been advocating an Elo rating system for GA. I think it preserves the incentive to gear up your PVP roster, and ensures that incremental on your roster will generally be rewarded with incremental success.
    I did, however, respond to your question of what the point is of improving your roster when the mismatches are egregious by arguing that you can still improve your chances of having a favorable matchup even if the matchups are rarely even.

    I made a point earlier in this connection, and you didn’t respond, but I would like to know what you think about it: In anticipation of GA, I was wondering whether I needed to privilege my PVP roster more, and from what I’ve seen, it would be unreasonable to change my farming habits. The small improvement I could make to my GA squads every week is going to very likely to be swamped by the uncertainty introduced by the bad matchmaking. Over the very long run, statistically, yes, I would het higher rewards by making that small weekly investment in more PVP teams. But I really do believe that the long run we’d be talking about in order to realize those gains is longer than the life expectancy of the game. That calculation is very different if I can count on seeing similarly situated opponents every outing.

    I want to also say that although I’m not super-into PVP, I was very excited for this mode when it was announced. I was optimistic about the devs’ ability to match the roster strengths of individual players, because this mode isn’t confounded by the guild-level dynamics that make it complicated to create pairings in TW. I’m really disappointed, because this seemed like a fun mode, but the fun has been **** out by the bad pairings.

    Depends how small your weekly changes are. If you put one gear 8 piece a week on a pvp toon and then go back to collecting and spreading the gear, then you're right it won't make a difference. But if you focus you can improve a pvp team by 20-30k in a few weeks. That makes a difference rather quickly. It also adds to your gp but not enough to significantly affect match making.

    I should be clear that what I mean is that I’m always going to be investing something in PVP squads—even Ewoks have their uses in TW, and probably in GA as well. But there’s a certain amount of discretionary resources that I could either use for more PVE squads (raid squads, working on top tiers of mythics, assault battles, etc.) or for GA squads. So what I’m really talking about is the marginal utility of diverting those discretionary resources from PVE toons to PVP toons. I just don’t see that the ROI from making that change justifies it, so I’m not changing anything. If the goal of GA was to incentivize the investment of resources in PVP toon, it hasn’t worked for me.

    But most good raid squads are also good in ga. Ns, jtr, bastilla, and bh are 4 squads I use for hstr. I use all 4 for ga and tw too. The other squad for hstr I use is cjex with chewie and almost all of the characters in that are good in ga squads.

    The haat squad i use is abc with hoda instead of thrawn. Almost every toon in that squad is good in ga. Pit I use zader empire with cls for an easy solo. I use an empire team in ga so no waste there.

    So I just don't see where you have to choose between raids and pvp. I get top 5 in my guild in hstr and haat and pit is just a solofest at this point. And I already have a competitive roster for ga mostly because I developed good teams for hstr.

    Probably the best example of a purely PVE squad that I’ve considered working on is First Order. I haven’t touched them since I unlocked BB-8. Under KRU, they’re tough on defense, but they’re not arena-worthy, and other than running up the score a bit in the kitchen sink phase of HSTR p4, they’re not good for much PVE content. That’s the sort of team I could be persuaded to invest in if the incentives were right in GA. As it stands, I post them on defense at G7-G9 and cross my fingers.
    I demand Grand Arena Elo ratings.
  • *purely PVP squad

    Typo.
    I demand Grand Arena Elo ratings.
  • TVF
    36526 posts Member
    *purely PVP squad

    Typo.

    You can edit your post.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • TVF wrote: »
    *purely PVP squad

    Typo.

    You can edit your post.

    Didn’t want to lose another one to the mod ether.
    I demand Grand Arena Elo ratings.
  • TVF
    36526 posts Member
    TVF wrote: »
    *purely PVP squad

    Typo.

    You can edit your post.

    Didn’t want to lose another one to the mod ether.

    Just give it a few seconds. It only does that when you rapid edit.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • Drim wrote: »
    Not only did my opponent not set defense but he gets to attack me and do his quests....that’s sounds fair

    So much for attaining Quest rewards. Great design, devs!
  • Dk_rek
    3299 posts Member
    edited December 2018
    b248nnfa7i7c.png

    Like sending zerglings into a purifier collassus i really thout i could have gotten a pip of chewy tho
  • Liath
    5140 posts Member
    Ok then, thanks for the rundown (genuinely), and back to substance:
    According to many posts here (not attributing this to you specifically), the ideal format for the matching would take into account every factor that differentiates one player’s roster from another and match them as closely as possible across all of these different metrics. As I see it, the closer you get to that “ideal,” the less incentive you have to improve your roster for GA, because any improvement you make will just result in a harder opponent, and you will just be treading water.

    You are 100% correct on this point. People who want the matchmaking to take all this into account don’t realize how much they’re asking for, or that it would require rebalancing the algorithm essentially every time a new toon or ship is added. It would also create incentives that the devs would want to avoid, just like you say. That’s why I’ve been advocating an Elo rating system for GA. I think it preserves the incentive to gear up your PVP roster, and ensures that incremental on your roster will generally be rewarded with incremental success.
    I did, however, respond to your question of what the point is of improving your roster when the mismatches are egregious by arguing that you can still improve your chances of having a favorable matchup even if the matchups are rarely even.

    I made a point earlier in this connection, and you didn’t respond, but I would like to know what you think about it: In anticipation of GA, I was wondering whether I needed to privilege my PVP roster more, and from what I’ve seen, it would be unreasonable to change my farming habits. The small improvement I could make to my GA squads every week is going to very likely to be swamped by the uncertainty introduced by the bad matchmaking. Over the very long run, statistically, yes, I would het higher rewards by making that small weekly investment in more PVP teams. But I really do believe that the long run we’d be talking about in order to realize those gains is longer than the life expectancy of the game. That calculation is very different if I can count on seeing similarly situated opponents every outing.

    I want to also say that although I’m not super-into PVP, I was very excited for this mode when it was announced. I was optimistic about the devs’ ability to match the roster strengths of individual players, because this mode isn’t confounded by the guild-level dynamics that make it complicated to create pairings in TW. I’m really disappointed, because this seemed like a fun mode, but the fun has been **** out by the bad pairings.

    Depends how small your weekly changes are. If you put one gear 8 piece a week on a pvp toon and then go back to collecting and spreading the gear, then you're right it won't make a difference. But if you focus you can improve a pvp team by 20-30k in a few weeks. That makes a difference rather quickly. It also adds to your gp but not enough to significantly affect match making.

    I should be clear that what I mean is that I’m always going to be investing something in PVP squads—even Ewoks have their uses in TW, and probably in GA as well. But there’s a certain amount of discretionary resources that I could either use for more PVE squads (raid squads, working on top tiers of mythics, assault battles, etc.) or for GA squads. So what I’m really talking about is the marginal utility of diverting those discretionary resources from PVE toons to PVP toons. I just don’t see that the ROI from making that change justifies it, so I’m not changing anything. If the goal of GA was to incentivize the investment of resources in PVP toon, it hasn’t worked for me.

    But most good raid squads are also good in ga. Ns, jtr, bastilla, and bh are 4 squads I use for hstr. I use all 4 for ga and tw too. The other squad for hstr I use is cjex with chewie and almost all of the characters in that are good in ga squads.

    The haat squad i use is abc with hoda instead of thrawn. Almost every toon in that squad is good in ga. Pit I use zader empire with cls for an easy solo. I use an empire team in ga so no waste there.

    So I just don't see where you have to choose between raids and pvp. I get top 5 in my guild in hstr and haat and pit is just a solofest at this point. And I already have a competitive roster for ga mostly because I developed good teams for hstr.

    Probably the best example of a purely PVE squad that I’ve considered working on is First Order. I haven’t touched them since I unlocked BB-8. Under KRU, they’re tough on defense, but they’re not arena-worthy, and other than running up the score a bit in the kitchen sink phase of HSTR p4, they’re not good for much PVE content. That’s the sort of team I could be persuaded to invest in if the incentives were right in GA. As it stands, I post them on defense at G7-G9 and cross my fingers.

    I built FO for PVE. They aren’t the best raid team available but they were a decent one (about a million points) I could work on after I had the biggest ones done, and that would also be good for DS TB, where at the time I was lacking a consistent winning team for all phases. Also I was annoyed by having to do the first phase of the BB8 mythic every time because I couldn’t 3* it. They’re pretty fun.

    The real question is if you didn’t work on FO, what would you do instead?
  • urtil
    73 posts Member
    edited December 2018
    I will try to keep it short:

    This is a game.

    A game is supposed to be fun.

    I don`t care about whether the pairing is fair or not. I care whether I have fun when I spend time on this game.

    Steamrolling or being steamrolled by an opponent is no fun. It is just yet another click to collect resources of which we already have too much.

    Close matches with people of similar competitiveness that make you think how to maximize banners is fun (at least for me).

    Matching solely based on GP is probably leading to many match-ups that are no fun and therefore fails to deliver the main purpose of a game.

    Which is why I think the match making needs improvement.

    That all said the idea behind GA is great and I feel it has massive potential to be a lot of fun :)

    *got a bit longer than I thought - off the soapbox now*
  • In all seriousness, because we love Star Wars and are addicted, and there are no other good Star Wars games to turn to.

    Force Arena is the only realtime pvp game out there (though there is mismatching and severe lag), while Commander is a decent tower defense (even though Luke and Vader can't saber duel, and the utter lack of unit choice). So much for Rise To Power and Rivals.

  • TVF
    36526 posts Member
    edited December 2018
    Dk_rek wrote: »
    b248nnfa7i7c.png

    Like sending zerglings into a purifier collassus i really thout i could have gotten a pip of chewy tho

    Nobody has 84 teams. I call shenanigans.
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • TVF wrote: »
    Dk_rek wrote: »
    b248nnfa7i7c.png

    Like sending zerglings into a purifier collassus i really thout i could have gotten a pip of chewy tho

    Nobody has 84 teams. I call shenanigans.

    LOL, has to be single toon attacks
  • TVF wrote: »
    Dk_rek wrote: »
    b248nnfa7i7c.png

    Like sending zerglings into a purifier collassus i really thout i could have gotten a pip of chewy tho

    Nobody has 84 teams. I call shenanigans.

    I just caught that. Shenanigans seconded.
  • TVF
    36526 posts Member
    TVF wrote: »
    Dk_rek wrote: »
    b248nnfa7i7c.png

    Like sending zerglings into a purifier collassus i really thout i could have gotten a pip of chewy tho

    Nobody has 84 teams. I call shenanigans.

    LOL, has to be single toon attacks

    It's either a TW (notice how it's cropped) or a photoshop. Why would someone waste the time to do 84 single toon attacks?
    I need a new message here. https://discord.gg/AmStGTH
  • The only problem with matching based on gp is what that gp consists of. Somebody with less characters geared really high can have the same gp as someone with every character unlocked with a majority of them geared low. Naturally the one with higher geared characters is gonna stomp since lower geared characters are so much weaker in comparison.
  • Liath wrote: »
    Ok then, thanks for the rundown (genuinely), and back to substance:
    According to many posts here (not attributing this to you specifically), the ideal format for the matching would take into account every factor that differentiates one player’s roster from another and match them as closely as possible across all of these different metrics. As I see it, the closer you get to that “ideal,” the less incentive you have to improve your roster for GA, because any improvement you make will just result in a harder opponent, and you will just be treading water.

    You are 100% correct on this point. People who want the matchmaking to take all this into account don’t realize how much they’re asking for, or that it would require rebalancing the algorithm essentially every time a new toon or ship is added. It would also create incentives that the devs would want to avoid, just like you say. That’s why I’ve been advocating an Elo rating system for GA. I think it preserves the incentive to gear up your PVP roster, and ensures that incremental on your roster will generally be rewarded with incremental success.
    I did, however, respond to your question of what the point is of improving your roster when the mismatches are egregious by arguing that you can still improve your chances of having a favorable matchup even if the matchups are rarely even.

    I made a point earlier in this connection, and you didn’t respond, but I would like to know what you think about it: In anticipation of GA, I was wondering whether I needed to privilege my PVP roster more, and from what I’ve seen, it would be unreasonable to change my farming habits. The small improvement I could make to my GA squads every week is going to very likely to be swamped by the uncertainty introduced by the bad matchmaking. Over the very long run, statistically, yes, I would het higher rewards by making that small weekly investment in more PVP teams. But I really do believe that the long run we’d be talking about in order to realize those gains is longer than the life expectancy of the game. That calculation is very different if I can count on seeing similarly situated opponents every outing.

    I want to also say that although I’m not super-into PVP, I was very excited for this mode when it was announced. I was optimistic about the devs’ ability to match the roster strengths of individual players, because this mode isn’t confounded by the guild-level dynamics that make it complicated to create pairings in TW. I’m really disappointed, because this seemed like a fun mode, but the fun has been **** out by the bad pairings.

    Depends how small your weekly changes are. If you put one gear 8 piece a week on a pvp toon and then go back to collecting and spreading the gear, then you're right it won't make a difference. But if you focus you can improve a pvp team by 20-30k in a few weeks. That makes a difference rather quickly. It also adds to your gp but not enough to significantly affect match making.

    I should be clear that what I mean is that I’m always going to be investing something in PVP squads—even Ewoks have their uses in TW, and probably in GA as well. But there’s a certain amount of discretionary resources that I could either use for more PVE squads (raid squads, working on top tiers of mythics, assault battles, etc.) or for GA squads. So what I’m really talking about is the marginal utility of diverting those discretionary resources from PVE toons to PVP toons. I just don’t see that the ROI from making that change justifies it, so I’m not changing anything. If the goal of GA was to incentivize the investment of resources in PVP toon, it hasn’t worked for me.

    But most good raid squads are also good in ga. Ns, jtr, bastilla, and bh are 4 squads I use for hstr. I use all 4 for ga and tw too. The other squad for hstr I use is cjex with chewie and almost all of the characters in that are good in ga squads.

    The haat squad i use is abc with hoda instead of thrawn. Almost every toon in that squad is good in ga. Pit I use zader empire with cls for an easy solo. I use an empire team in ga so no waste there.

    So I just don't see where you have to choose between raids and pvp. I get top 5 in my guild in hstr and haat and pit is just a solofest at this point. And I already have a competitive roster for ga mostly because I developed good teams for hstr.

    Probably the best example of a purely PVE squad that I’ve considered working on is First Order. I haven’t touched them since I unlocked BB-8. Under KRU, they’re tough on defense, but they’re not arena-worthy, and other than running up the score a bit in the kitchen sink phase of HSTR p4, they’re not good for much PVE content. That’s the sort of team I could be persuaded to invest in if the incentives were right in GA. As it stands, I post them on defense at G7-G9 and cross my fingers.

    I built FO for PVE. They aren’t the best raid team available but they were a decent one (about a million points) I could work on after I had the biggest ones done, and that would also be good for DS TB, where at the time I was lacking a consistent winning team for all phases. Also I was annoyed by having to do the first phase of the BB8 mythic every time because I couldn’t 3* it. They’re pretty fun.

    The real question is if you didn’t work on FO, what would you do instead?

    At the moment, my priorities, in order, are Ewoks (for Threepio), Smugglers (for the highest tier of Smuggler’s Run), and cargo pilots for the highest tier of Contraband Cargo. There’s quite a bit of new PVE content that I haven’t quite finished. The ROI for those seems better than putting together a solidly second-tier defense GA squad.
    I demand Grand Arena Elo ratings.
  • NicWester wrote: »

    Whether the setup window is 12 hours or 24 hours isn't going to give us more or fewer Grand Arena events, so just use all the time to make things convenient and stress-free for everyone.
    It could, yes. That is exactly what people are asking for. Reduce the down time to 12 hours so the calendar can be adjusted to include a couple extra per month.
    It will be even worse when these are a week long and there are only 3 days of the week you actually fight. The current schedule is ridiculously slow.

    Wait 2 days fight a few battles. Wait 1 more day, fight a few battles wait 1 more day again, fight a few battles...who thought that schedule was fun?


  • At the very least remove the 24 hour join period. When you set D you join. That would also solve the issue of people joining and not setting D.
  • Ugnaught wrote: »
    At the very least remove the 24 hour join period. When you set D you join. That would also solve the issue of people joining and not setting D.

    I agree with removing the join period, but setting defense triggering the join won’t work. I set my defense based on my opponents roster. I want to know who I’m facing before I set squads. You don’t want everyone to join, because you don’t want inactive accounts as opponents. That’s why I suggested everyone who logged in within 24 hours is automatically joined and we go right away.
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