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Arenas - Why are you frustrated by them and what would you like to change?
harshraj2000
Posts: 43 ★
Well, the title say it all.
Now, I know there already has been a lot of threads on the forums regarding arenas and I do know Moderators like @Kabam Miike and @Kabam Vydious among many others have already responded to this and they will bring it to the game team. The question is why do you think Arenas are frustrating?
Me personally - I think it is because it is because the challenges that this game mode presents aren't really interesting and it hasn't innovated in recent times. Let me expand on this -
We have around 5 different game modes (as of now) - Which are Quests, AQ, AW, Dungeons and Arenas. While Quests,AQ,AW and dungeons require a combination of your roster variety, skills and communication, Arenas just requires you to have a good set of ranked up champions,get into infinite streaks and just smash through rest of the fights as fast as possible. Arenas dictates a player to spend a good amount of time continuously smashing out fights to hit the bracket to get the champion which ranges from something like around 4 hours to a whole day or two. This is not challenging enough to spend enough time doing these fights on repeat.
Don't get me wrong though, Arenas get a ton of attention from the hardcore players and it is generating a ton of revenue for the game developers. It is by any measure a successful business what it is, is a poor gaming experience.
Now, I know there already has been a lot of threads on the forums regarding arenas and I do know Moderators like @Kabam Miike and @Kabam Vydious among many others have already responded to this and they will bring it to the game team. The question is why do you think Arenas are frustrating?
Me personally - I think it is because it is because the challenges that this game mode presents aren't really interesting and it hasn't innovated in recent times. Let me expand on this -
We have around 5 different game modes (as of now) - Which are Quests, AQ, AW, Dungeons and Arenas. While Quests,AQ,AW and dungeons require a combination of your roster variety, skills and communication, Arenas just requires you to have a good set of ranked up champions,get into infinite streaks and just smash through rest of the fights as fast as possible. Arenas dictates a player to spend a good amount of time continuously smashing out fights to hit the bracket to get the champion which ranges from something like around 4 hours to a whole day or two. This is not challenging enough to spend enough time doing these fights on repeat.
Don't get me wrong though, Arenas get a ton of attention from the hardcore players and it is generating a ton of revenue for the game developers. It is by any measure a successful business what it is, is a poor gaming experience.
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If anything, I feel that arenas should be more rewarding, i.e., more guaranteed gold and more battle chips, for the time and effort spent.
However, I do agree with the person above me when he says arenas should be more rewarding. If you are really grinding an arena, you will quite possibly spend most of your free time getting points on both days, but the milestones are weak and stop too early.
They should give more battlechips, units and gold, and quite possibly be extended to 15 milestones total, instead of 10.
To get a 4* Basic from the arenas, for example, you need to score above 2.5 million sometimes, and yet the milestones end somewhere before 2 million. That’s more than 20% of grinding with no substantial rewards whatsoever
For every player that thinks the arena is a poor gaming experience, there are players that think alliance war is a poor gaming experience, there are players that think the variants are a poor gaming experience, or think that Uncollected difficulty is a poor gaming experience. What you call "challenging" a lot of players call "cash grab."
The arenas are probably the most casual friendly part of the game. Whether you spend ten minutes or ten hours on them, you can earn units - arguably the most valuable in-game currency. You can jump in and out at will, and play completely at your own pace. If you want to grind your fingers off you can, but most players don't do that.
If you want challenge, there are places to get challenge. If you want competition, there are places to get competition. But if you insist on every game mode catering to your need for challenge, you're in effect saying the game should only cater to one kind of player, and only one kind of desire from that kind of player. And that's bad for the game overall.
The arenas aren't perfect, but removing the casual grind nature of them is the last thing you should do. That would be like trying to improve alliance wars by removing the competition from them because you don't like hard core competition.
Here’s some changes I’d like to see made to arenas
Replace the phc shards and crystals in the featured 5* arena with gmc shards
Replace the featured 4* arena with a basic 5* arena. Move the featured 4* champ to a 15 million milestone in the featured 5* arena. Add a fully formed or equivalent gmc as a 6 million milestone in the basic 5* arena
Add a ultimate crystal as the last milestone in the basic 4* arena
Add a featured 2* champ as the last milestone in the featured 3* arena
Increase gold rewards in all arenas by 50%
I also don’t buy into these changes affecting crystal sales as theRe will always be players who would rather spend on crystals than grind arenas. And since my suggested changes doesn’t lessen the arena grind just makes them more rewarding there shouldn’t be a massive effect on crystal sales. I actually see this as a win win. Kabam gets increased participation and traffic for their app and players get changes they’ve long sought
A whole lot you disagree that arenas need to be more "challenging". I would like to make my position a bit clearer regarding my stance on why the "fundamentals" of arena needs to be changed. That just changes how long or how short the "goal post" to get the champion from the arenas is going to be. It doesn't change the fact that the fights feel pretty much the same once one hits an "infinite streak" and play with a cycle of ranked up champions. Players are still going to spend spend tons of resources to get recharges done quickly and use boosts to get the fights done. There is a high repetitiveness in these fights and almost all of them feel the same (Something which, in a design perspective one needs to avoid as a good game designer strives to make each game element unique and interesting). Personally, one can all gold, battlechips and units just by grinding arenas anyways. Adding another arena specifically for gold might seem promising at first, but it the excitement it generates will die down soon for the people who already do grind arenas. Well, that doesn't stop each fight feeling one and the same, now does it? You have just changed the rewards and progression path while doing so. However, once power creep starts to settle in, you would need to bump the rewards even higher.
Also, adding in more milestone rewards would just mean that the scores for the ranked rewards are going to be even higher.
Also, I don't think Kabam would ever add a basic champion as a milestone reward in a featured arena (For example - A 5* AEgon as a basic champion in the 5* featured arena (featuring, let's say - Morningstar)). This hurts their business as it lowers the engagement people get in the arenas as they might just grind in for the for the much more "hyped" basic champion and may not go for the featured champion (if the content creators like Seatin didn't generate enough hype for it), lowering their sales as people don't refresh their champions to grind more.
As @Aria_Lerendeair said on another discusson regarding this topic on another discussion thread - "The only reason I didn't strongly advocate for a rewards update was because - 1. Any time you talk about adding resources, game economics comes into it, which is a huge/massive discussion and there's no one "right" answer that is going to be easy. And 2. It wasn't the change I actually wanted. As nice as a rewards update would be, what I really want to see is arena scores drop to something more consistently feasible, and have more champions in the hands of people without needing to buy dozens of crystals to do it." and "My conclusion was that unless you spent approximately 2-3 Odins or had a sizable unit stash on hand, you were risking your physical health for the 72 hour arena because of the time you'd need to invest to put up a score like 70 million in 5* featured arenas" - I will be doing a separate analysis and discussion on game economics and monetization soon (but this is not the place for it) but it seems pretty clear that some form of change is needed at the mechanics level for arenas as these statistics are alarming. Agreed with most of the points you state here. Players have their own personal preferences on what they call "poor gaming experiences". Personally, I am not a huge fan of Alliance Wars, but I do get the appeal others who do like AW and can understand why they like them. However, most people that I have encountered with seem to say that the arenas are the "most boring pieces of content they have ever played". Well, one could argue that it is the player's choice for how "long" one wants to grind arena. As arenas are indeed the the most causal part of the game and one gets valuable resources (Battlechips and gold) while doing so, but that doesn't excuse for the fact all the fights with a well ranked up roster for that set arena seems to blend into one. Again, I believe you might have mis-interpreted my use of "challenge" in the original post. What I meant by "challenge" was to "stimulate" more responses from the player rather than using it as a term for making arenas more difficult. This is probably only piece of content which has largely remained the same since launch (mechanics wise). All the rest of the pieces of content has seen some changes or the other (new AQ maps, New combinations of nodes in AW, etc). I would like to keep the same casual aspect of Arenas while at the same time having a sense of "unique-ness" (But not too difficult) between fight-to-fight so as to keep it fresh.
So, @DNA3000 you don't feel the need that arenas need any changes?
Also, Nice to see some more interactions on this topic and not being thrown down the road as some a banner occupying one's screen's real estate
The arenas are actually a very large source of rewards overall, and across a wide range of players. So in many ways changing the way arena works would have a much bigger impact on the game than changing, say, Act 6 rewards. And most of the things people cite as problems are side effects of other things that have major consequences if you change them.
Unintended consequences are everywhere in the arena. If you remove the money from the arena, you may decrease cutoff scores, but you'll also impact players who just want to recharge their top champs a couple times to reach that last milestone. If you increase arena rewards globally, you'll increase the gap between arena grinders and those players who don't participate in the arena, which they will perceive as a penalty. If we simply limit the amount of time or rounds or whatever players can grind period, you'll give a huge advantage to players with larger higher ranked rosters. If you make the individual fights more complex or difficult you hit the Netflix and grind people very hard without affecting the people who focus all their attention on the arena when they grind, which is effectively a penalty on casual grinders.
Perhaps because I've done this before, I look at suggestions differently than most players. Most players ask "who does this help?" I always first ask "who does this hurt?" And all suggestions hurt someone. For a suggestion to be a good one, the trade has to be unambiguously worth it in my opinion. And honestly most arena suggestions I've read don't pass that test.
Aggressive AI
Sunday arena would be gold arena
More milestone rewards in between for featured 5*
A 5* basic arena, even if it’s just top 5%. This would probably still settle at 15-20m, but guaranteed champion rather than the top 150 boys and poor Lagacy.
More gold
1) Arenas are really built for only hardcore players that can sit and grind non stop for three days. Look at the numbers that are put up. There is no way for a common player to obtain a champion from the arena unless it’s a 3* or 4* basic.
2) So time consuming - as stated above several hours of arena can get you to milestones and that’s about it. On top of the other content quests, AQ, AW the game requires a high demand of people’s time to an unhealthy amount.
3) Rewards are decent at best for milestones. The amount of gold required to rank champions in current meta is massive! It takes hours, days, and weeks to grind arenas for gold and a few units to help with questing potions and revives. Effort vs reward
Arenas are ok and one mode you can do and chill. The repetition gets tiring after so many hours though. Arenas would be much better if milestones meant champions. People would be more inclined to grind for a milestone if it meant a good champion to add into your roster.
Lots of people take off work for three days to try and put up as many points as they can and then miss out. That’s a terrible design concept.
I would certainly do a lot more arenas if I could actually build 5* champions and add them to my roster. I will never put up 30-40-50 million or more arena points though.
There are also people who say the same thing about alliance quest, and even the monthly quests. There are players who believe that no free to play player can reach uncollected or cavalier status and those difficulties only exist to be cash grabs. If you believe all of these players are wrong about all parts of the game *except* for the arena, I'm probably unlikely to convince you otherwise, because that's a wildly dogmatic position.
The arena is a great equalizer, and one of the best opportunities to get ahead in the game without spending cash through just your own gameplay. Without it, the primary avenue to progress in the game, beyond playing the same content as everyone else, would be to join higher tier alliances. The idea of alliance-hopping to "progress" in the game is wholly unpalatable.
Alliance war used to be a relatively casual past time. Seasons made it entirely unpalatable to me: I now only do it on a very casual level, and not because I personally couldn't handle the difficulty. I acknowledge that alliance war is something appealing to many players, but the logistics of running a competitive alliance is simply not something I want to do in a game. But I don't begrudge those that do.
In some ways, alliance war is "better" than it was before. It is more interesting, combat-wise, and it is more rewarding. And yet, I suspect fewer players actually enjoy doing it. You can end up making arena more rewarding and more interesting, and still make it completely unpalatable for many of the people who are currently participating in it. In the case of alliance war, that was done at the expense of the players who were not really into it, and for (at least the theoretical) benefit of those that were much more hard core into it. That's fine. But making arena more palatable for the people who don't actually want to grind in the arena is wrong in my opinion. You *might* make it better. But unless you really know what you're doing, you're more likely to make it worse, regardless of intentions.
And if you think you can't make it worse because you see no redeeming value in it and can't imagine any people exist that actually like the game mode, then in my opinion you shouldn't be tampering with it in any way.