So I keep seeing a couple of words floating around that I simply don’t understand, mostly “payouts” and “shard chats.” I understand the shard in shard chat is probably referring to arena shard, but what chat? And what is a payout? I’m assuming it’s not just the rewards the game gives you, and that it’s some kind of outside form of rewards? But I have no idea, and would love somebody to tell me what this all means.
(Edit) Probably not the best place to post this, but would love answers anyway
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A shard chat is typically a group of the top players on your arena shard that use a third party messaging app like discord to coordinate who gets what arena rank during their payout time. Shard chats usually have the intention of helping everyone get the best rewards possible, but sometimes have a reputation of being full of players who don’t care about and will purposefully target other players on their shard.
It's not a reputation unfortunately - plenty do run a closed shop that targets anyone not in their little club. Not all do this, but each has the potential to do so.
Basically, it's about the most contentious topic in these forums.
Since there are many players on each shard and thus probably a lot sharing a payout time, it's fairly common for a group of players in the shard to collaborate outside the game via a third party chat app like Discord or LINE. This way they can organize who hits who and try to maximize everyone's payouts, rather than everyone just having a free-for-all where the guy with the best mods wins.
Shard chats are obviously beneficial to the people in them, but since they will target non-members over members when possible, it creates the impression to those outside the chat that they are being "targeted." In fairness, sometimes this is actually true, because people are buttholes and will sometimes actually beat one person down to "teach them a lesson." This leads to non-shardchat players referring to them as "unfair collusion" or "shard mafias" or what-have-you.
They're kind of a stupid practice, but they're just a symptom of the real problem, which is a PVP system that actually encourages this kind of behavior.
Ok sure, but if my shard made a shard chat, and I wasn’t invited, and they decided I was “being a blight on the shard”, and targeted me without even telling me they thought I was doing something wrong, then what? Am I resigned to just sit there confused as my rank drops like 80 spots a day?
And another question I’ve had for a while is, how do these things even get started? As far as I’m aware there’s no way to just message somebody in your shard, so how do people find out about these things?
Ok, thank you!
Please!?
In Squad and Fleet Arenas, you are in groups, and your shard is your group