There's been a lot of comments here, so our responses have been buried. Want to let you all know that we are still looking into this, and are committed to making it better again. The information I gave before is just for context, so please don't take that as a sign that this is what we want for Arenas.
If this is not what you want for Arenas ,then why did you brought these changes live ? The AI changes are fantastic and would help Arenagrinders a lot .But the rest is not helpful and you guys should have known that.
I love arena and I grind every single round (maybe I missed a few over the years). It was the only mode where you can relax and play with no stress or too much concentration. With the new changes, I might stop doing it. I'm sick of fighting R3 Havoks, Things, Ironman IWs, Dooms, Nick Furys, etc. Not that it's hard, but it's much longer than before. I don't care if it was bug or not, but arena shouldn't have hard and long fights. I don't need someone to challenge me in a mode where TIME is already a challenge. We have other modes for that. Player's time is the most important thing here, nothing else. And because of that, I run suicides all the time, just for arena.
You should motivate people to do arena, not the other way around. And in my opinion, the only change in arena should've been: AI below round 15 to throw specials. Nothing more.
Since you guys are reading these posts, I wanted to give you some feedback. Take it for what it’s worth.
I don’t grind. The reason why is because you have to work the system (for lack of a better phrase) in order to get an “infinite streak.”
I understand that this was an unintentional byproduct of a code change, but if I could just jump in and grind without having to do a a setup and get the multiplier and not “lose my streak” I would start grinding and I would probably do it a lot.
Let’s be real - Grinding isn’t about winning fights or seeing how high you can make your streak. It’s about battle chips and featured 5* champs. Gold, units and new characters for the roster.
If you want more people to do it, make it more accessible - keep the cool downs, but remove the multiplier and remove death matches completely. Make it so anyone can jump in and burn a couple hours grinding through their roster without having to think about the additional BS.
I’m sure the serious grinders will hate what I’m saying, but that’s how I feel about it. I’d definitely grind more if it wasn’t such a hassle. Don’t just get in the pool - make the pool more accessible.
Cheers!
I am a serious grinder and I completely agree with you. I like straight forward grinding versus the bizarre process we currently have in that the first five matches you have to fight with champs who have long hair and then next five only champs that were born outside of the US, and etc.
There's been a lot of comments here, so our responses have been buried. Want to let you all know that we are still looking into this, and are committed to making it better again. The information I gave before is just for context, so please don't take that as a sign that this is what we want for Arenas.
If this wasn’t what you wanted in the arenas why bring about such sweeping change with ZERO input from the community before doing it. If you told us what we were about to face we would have explained why what you were going to do was a bad idea, as we have since it’s gone into effect.
The adjustment to the AI was great less having to bait out specials or hoping that the AI won’t launch their SP3 the instant they get it, this change was perfect.
Then you decided to solve the edge case problem of teams of low level champions (in a game mode that incentivizes the player to strengthen their teams by giving stronger teams more points) facing teams MUCH stronger then they were and instead of solving just this problem you decided to alter the whole system to fix the edge case and punish everyone has many mid ranked champs. This was an absolutely horrible idea and needs to be reverted before you put thought into how to solve the low rank teams facing death matches issue.
There's been a lot of comments here, so our responses have been buried. Want to let you all know that we are still looking into this, and are committed to making it better again. The information I gave before is just for context, so please don't take that as a sign that this is what we want for Arenas.
If this is not what you want for Arenas ,then why did you brought these changes live ? The AI changes are fantastic and would help Arenagrinders a lot .But the rest is not helpful and you guys should have known that.
What players are seeing is an unintended consequence of the change they made to the arenas. The actual change was a reasonable one. The arena "looks for" higher and higher teams for you to go up against. That's why so-called deathmatches happen. They can be as high as four times your team's rating or higher. The devs added a cap that makes the max team it looks for lower, something closer to two times. That would act to eliminate deathmatches and only present "hard" matches at worst. This would make it so that no matter what kind of team the player brought into the arena, they wouldn't have to worry about suddenly triggering a gigantic PI deathmatch, so players could use more of their champs.
However - and this is a bit of an oversimplification based on the facts as we know them now - the problem is that apparently deathmatches were not an actual intended feature of the arena, but actually a bugged failsafe. If the arena tries to look for a team and can't find one, it has some tricks it can play with things like the Kang and Thanos teams, assembling them from other teams. But if it *really* can't find anything, it defaults to a default "profile" which is actually much lower. In effect, what we players were calling "infinite streak" was actually "arena broken, can't find team, defaulting to stooges."
Changing the arena so that the worst case scenario was x2 instead of x4+ meant that the arena would no longer go looking for those very high PI teams, so players wouldn't face them any more. But it also meant as a side effect that longer arena streaks wouldn't "break" the team selector, as it could now always find the kinds of teams it needed. So instead of getting the very easy post infinite streak matches, players are now getting more difficult ones, because the arena no longer has to kick in the stooge-o-meter.
I'm pretty sure this was not intended, and I know Kabam is looking at ways to reduce the long term difficulty of the arena matches for long streaks. This is probably unfortunately difficult to test, because I believe one of the features of the arena is that it primes itself with the champs we players bring into arena matches. So the arena would not behave normally in something like a beta server setting. You won't know for certain what the match maker will generate except in a live setting, with live players playing real arena rounds.
Can't add to what has been expressed already. Longtime grinder and player of over 4 years. Listen to us. This is a dreadful QOL move. I could use my trash 5*s at 2/35 pretty consistently in arenas. Now they're useless. Constantly fighting 4/55 longshot and doom with agent venom and civil warrior sucks. Taking nearly 100 hits to beat a 5/65 with a mid level 3/45? Sucks. Get it sorted out quickly.
The way I’ve adapted in the 5* arena is to expect to lose my streak around fight 20-24. I restart the streak. There are no more Kant or thanks teams (well maybe one or two if you use max champs). But my score is higher now because I’m using 58 trash to start first 5 fights then get 6* at x3 multiplier. So in effect I’m using more of my 5* champs than I did before.
It’s a longer grind which is tedious, not anything I think kanamycin wants their game to become. But I don’t think scores will be affected by much in the long run.
I Will Stop Playing Arena Until This Was Fix. Thanks Kabaam. I Will Got More Rest Now. This Is Really An Improvement To The Game And To Myself. The Best Changer In The Game EVER. 👍👍
Right there with ya. Normally I’d grind for about 3 hours after getting off work. Instead last night I relaxed, watched a movie, and went to bed. Not going to fight an uphill battle that’s not worth traveling.
What players are seeing is an unintended consequence of the change they made to the arenas. The actual change was a reasonable one. The arena "looks for" higher and higher teams for you to go up against. That's why so-called deathmatches happen. They can be as high as four times your team's rating or higher. The devs added a cap that makes the max team it looks for lower, something closer to two times. That would act to eliminate deathmatches and only present "hard" matches at worst. This would make it so that no matter what kind of team the player brought into the arena, they wouldn't have to worry about suddenly triggering a gigantic PI deathmatch, so players could use more of their champs.
All Kabam really has to do is drop the pool they get their champs from, and just make them all the "bot" teams.
You can see that the ONLY champs that real people make 6* R3s are the best ones available in the game. Nobody is doing 6* R3s that are trash tier champs. This is the pool that Kabam is pulling from, and without knowing all the champs you are going up against, it practically is a death match if you happen to bring in the wrong champs.
They can just generate the "required" PI level for whatever they need for the match, and fully control everything.
Well, i lost my streak thanks to that occurrence of deathmatches. Streak 19-30, i countered 7 deathmatches. Sick. Yes, it is fun because of the challenges. But.... I lost my streak on 30th...
I'm a big arena grinder and it's taking way more time to get through some of these matches. It used to take me about 2 minutes per round. Now some of the harder matches take me 3-4 minutes. You've increased arena match completion times by 50-100% but you only get maybe 10% more points. Doesn't make sense at all.
This arena change is just bad. I played a lot of arena. Over 700k+ pvp. More than I should . They fixed a issue that most people counter may be 2% of the matches that they had, but created a problem that people encounter 95% of the time. The only matches that wasn't affected by the match with team of 5/65 5* or r2 6*. How this help people to advance? I can keep the streak going. Over 160+ currently, but the time that I put in per matches sometimes double or triple depend on the match up. I don't think this is what player want. All they have to do it put one AI(not the overly passive one) for all the matches. Problem solved and no one will have a issue. It may be frustrating not able to use the R2 5* team, but the game is promoting to grow. Just want it to R3. Problem solved. Arena is not a place to test your skill. You can find it else where in game. It took me over 100+ hits to take down a R3 Doom with a pillow hand Dorm for example. This is not what player want.
I grind arena quite a bit (almost 130k wins). I already lost twice my streak in 4* Featured after 24/25 wins. That never happened to me. I'm a bit over 4 million points. A week ago, I'd be at 6-7 million points. I won't even be trying getting more points or even getting the featured champ, because in this state it's impossible for me, because I really don't have time or willingnes to keep resetting the streak. Really bad change.
And then work on whatever it is that they intended to do?
At this point this is going to really be the final straw for many.
Since this is most likely either a code change or an engine mechanics change, I suspect they are unlikely to change it in the middle of an arena event. I wouldn't expect to see a change to the behavior until either the Sunday arenas or the Monday arenas at the earliest, assuming changes are possible on that kind of timeline.
The time it takes for an Arena match is much much more than in the past. It is no longer fun. The extra taps are talking a toll on my hands. My thumbs used to be fine for 48 hours or so. Now my hands hurt after the first 24 hours. The Arena grind was bearable, now it feels like a job. I don't want a job!
The "Infinite Streak" is not a feature of the game, but rather the result of the requirements/calculations for finding matches. It is always changing and will continue to do so as more and more players have access to higher ranked Champions.
This change is not made only for those that are "in the know" about the Infinite Streak. We promised to lower the number of deathmatches, and we've done just that. This is a major improvement for all players, especially those that are new to the Arena.
Major improvement making the 6 star arena fights harder than they used too? Everything else seems fine but even when im in a high streak and I use my 6 star champs I face harder opponents than before and matches take longer
Alright now that I’ve cooled down a bit @Kabam Miike I’ve been able to go through arenas more often. The changes aren’t all bad however when using r4 5*, r1 6*, r3 5* and r5 4* we get punished with tough matches that shouldn’t be so bad. Like I posted in a previous post sometimes a single mistake is enough to lose our streak and it’s a pain to get back to x3 multiplier, the champs we are up against when using the ranks I mentioned are the top champs in the game since no one ranks up low tier champs, fights against void, ebony maw, warlock, Hyperion even with the more aggressive AI if a mistake is made it’s a 5 combo KO as well as it takes forever now to grind properly (almost twice as long per fight) so it gets annoying I think that is our main issue here, so my proposal is as follows, reduce the difficulty of the matchups from 2x the difficulty to 1.2-1.5 times PI tops and maybe x2 in an option of matchup for the players that want to make more points, this way fights take less time and we aren’t punished for not playing perfectly all the time like in AQ which is a justified time to concentrate, arena is supposed to be fun and to pass the time. It’s a fair change don’t you think? Taking 2 hrs to do what we used to do in an hour is too much, please reconsider.
Alright now that I’ve cooled down a bit @Kabam Miike I’ve been able to go through arenas more often. The changes aren’t all bad however when using r4 5*, r1 6*, r3 5* and r5 4* we get punished with tough matches that shouldn’t be so bad. Like I posted in a previous post sometimes a single mistake is enough to lose our streak and it’s a pain to get back to x3 multiplier, the champs we are up against when using the ranks I mentioned are the top champs in the game since no one ranks up low tier champs, fights against void, ebony maw, warlock, Hyperion even with the more aggressive AI if a mistake is made it’s a 5 combo KO as well as it takes forever now to grind properly (almost twice as long per fight) so it gets annoying I think that is our main issue here, so my proposal is as follows, reduce the difficulty of the matchups from 2x the difficulty to 1.2-1.5 times PI tops and maybe x2 in an option of matchup for the players that want to make more points, this way fights take less time and we aren’t punished for not playing perfectly all the time like in AQ which is a justified time to concentrate, arena is supposed to be fun and to pass the time. It’s a fair change don’t you think? Taking 2 hrs to do what we used to do in an hour is too much, please reconsider.
One issue is there are still relatively few players that can sport a roster of 3 R3 6*s. So, we consistently get matched against the same death squads all running suicides
Arenas are a complete mess after the "update." Huge death matches appear MUCH more frequently. Trying to "buy it down" only results in a loss of units; not better match ups. Kabam - if "buying down" is not going to work - remove the option. This is not fun at all. Bottom line: please put arenas back to before the update. Shame on you Kabam.
So I calmed down after my lengthy venting post and decided to play the arenas again to see if I unfairly judged the changes.. Nope, I sure didn't. In fact, I have two more points to make. Again, I am sure others have made these points but I need the therapeutic benefit of getting them off my chest. First, I find it interesting that when you go against a Deathmatch they are almost always the same players. I went against the same players champions 5 times in a row. Funny (cough) how it was always 6R3 Domino, Green Goblin and Wasp all great defense champs. Personally, it would be very far into the future before I took my 6 star Green Goblin up to rank 3. I marveled (another cough) at the coincidence that Domino and Doom always seemed to be in the mix. However, if the game is truly picking players that have multiple 6r3's wouldn't you see a Symbiote Supreme, Sunspot, Ghost or a strong offense but not defense champ in the mix? I preferred it when you fought Kang's or Thanos's team. At least then you knew it was the game throwing what it wants against you and not using a players champs to act like it is a random occurrence. So if you are going to throw these 6r3 champs at us, give us a fighting chance. I am sure Kabam is going to make changes to this new iteration of arenas because of the overwhelming poor feedback but I want to add my last point. So lastly, (I really want this to be the end), arenas is the part of the game us poor schlubs that get crappy champs can actually benefit from them. So when I got a 6 star Superior Iron Man or duped Civil Warrior I thought well at least that's 60,000 extra points in arenas. I've actually grown to really like some of the champs I initially wrote off due to playing them in arenas (Man-Thing, Terrax). I am now going to take a nap and dream of the arenas of old, from two days ago.
There was a change to the 5* Featured Arena matchmaking algorithm a while back that made 5r2 champs unviable as you would get a deathmatch. Now they have made a change that makes 5r3 unviable. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Kabam just wants you to rank up rubbish champs in order to compete in Arena. F2P summoners won’t do that and they don’t matter to Kabam. Simple as that.
That wasn't a change. That was the result of more of the highest-Ranked Champs being in the game. When the ceiling rises, the Total PI required increases. Not greatly. It always levels off.
Yeah i heard people argue that previously but the difference was clearly noticeable immediately after an update. I didn’t buy that argument then either. I don’t think it garnered quite so much attention as this change as taking a champ to 5r2 takes very little rare resources compared to taking a champ to 5r3. You don’t take a meme champ beyond 5r2 unless they might be useful/have a synergy that might create another good Arena team.
Now we have jumped from making any 5r2 useless in Arena even as part of a synergy team, to making any 5r3 a total liability even if teamed with two 5r4. That’s a big shift.
From my experience, the first 20 fights are definitely easier, but after that i’m just getting deathmatched with mostly everyone other than r5 5 stars. Yeah, the deathmatches aren’t as bad as before, however the fact that arena has gotten harder and more time consuming is completely the opposite of what the intended goal was for making arena easier. This change is definitely worse than how it was before.
I noticed this in the t1a arena and forgot they said arena changes were happening today. During what I considered infinite streak territory (20+ rounds) I started getting deathmatched with 5r5s once I switched to my 5r3s.
There was a change to the 5* Featured Arena matchmaking algorithm a while back that made 5r2 champs unviable as you would get a deathmatch. Now they have made a change that makes 5r3 unviable. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Kabam just wants you to rank up rubbish champs in order to compete in Arena. F2P summoners won’t do that and they don’t matter to Kabam. Simple as that.
That wasn't a change. That was the result of more of the highest-Ranked Champs being in the game. When the ceiling rises, the Total PI required increases. Not greatly. It always levels off.
Yeah i heard people argue that previously but the difference was clearly noticeable immediately after an update. I didn’t buy that argument then either. I don’t think it garnered quite so much attention as this change as taking a champ to 5r2 takes very little rare resources compared to taking a champ to 5r3. You don’t take a meme champ beyond 5r2 unless they might be useful/have a synergy that might create another good Arena team.
Now we have jumped from making any 5r2 useless in Arena even as part of a synergy team, to making any 5r3 a total liability even if teamed with two 5r4. That’s a big shift.
To be precise, this is a result of the new changes. The shift back then was because the ceiling rose. They're also examining it at the moment. I agree that it's a problem. I'm just pointing out that the latter wasn't any kind of intentional change. It was from the pool increasing.
The way I’ve adapted in the 5* arena is to expect to lose my streak around fight 20-24. I restart the streak. There are no more Kant or thanks teams (well maybe one or two if you use max champs). But my score is higher now because I’m using 58 trash to start first 5 fights then get 6* at x3 multiplier. So in effect I’m using more of my 5* champs than I did before.
It’s a longer grind which is tedious, not anything I think kanamycin wants their game to become. But I don’t think scores will be affected by much in the long run.
Comments
The AI changes are fantastic and would help Arenagrinders a lot .But the rest is not helpful and you guys should have known that.
You should motivate people to do arena, not the other way around. And in my opinion, the only change in arena should've been: AI below round 15 to throw specials. Nothing more.
The adjustment to the AI was great less having to bait out specials or hoping that the AI won’t launch their SP3 the instant they get it, this change was perfect.
Then you decided to solve the edge case problem of teams of low level champions (in a game mode that incentivizes the player to strengthen their teams by giving stronger teams more points) facing teams MUCH stronger then they were and instead of solving just this problem you decided to alter the whole system to fix the edge case and punish everyone has many mid ranked champs. This was an absolutely horrible idea and needs to be reverted before you put thought into how to solve the low rank teams facing death matches issue.
However - and this is a bit of an oversimplification based on the facts as we know them now - the problem is that apparently deathmatches were not an actual intended feature of the arena, but actually a bugged failsafe. If the arena tries to look for a team and can't find one, it has some tricks it can play with things like the Kang and Thanos teams, assembling them from other teams. But if it *really* can't find anything, it defaults to a default "profile" which is actually much lower. In effect, what we players were calling "infinite streak" was actually "arena broken, can't find team, defaulting to stooges."
Changing the arena so that the worst case scenario was x2 instead of x4+ meant that the arena would no longer go looking for those very high PI teams, so players wouldn't face them any more. But it also meant as a side effect that longer arena streaks wouldn't "break" the team selector, as it could now always find the kinds of teams it needed. So instead of getting the very easy post infinite streak matches, players are now getting more difficult ones, because the arena no longer has to kick in the stooge-o-meter.
I'm pretty sure this was not intended, and I know Kabam is looking at ways to reduce the long term difficulty of the arena matches for long streaks. This is probably unfortunately difficult to test, because I believe one of the features of the arena is that it primes itself with the champs we players bring into arena matches. So the arena would not behave normally in something like a beta server setting. You won't know for certain what the match maker will generate except in a live setting, with live players playing real arena rounds.
It’s a longer grind which is tedious, not anything I think kanamycin wants their game to become. But I don’t think scores will be affected by much in the long run.
So in the 5* Feature arena, you have to get your PI over 30,000 as death squads start around 58k/59k
That means you need a team of one R5 5* and 2 R1 6*s to NOT pull a death squad right now... which is redicilous
You can see that the ONLY champs that real people make 6* R3s are the best ones available in the game. Nobody is doing 6* R3s that are trash tier champs. This is the pool that Kabam is pulling from, and without knowing all the champs you are going up against, it practically is a death match if you happen to bring in the wrong champs.
They can just generate the "required" PI level for whatever they need for the match, and fully control everything.
Well, i lost my streak thanks to that occurrence of deathmatches. Streak 19-30, i countered 7 deathmatches. Sick. Yes, it is fun because of the challenges. But.... I lost my streak on 30th...
Here I’m going for featured champ thinking cutoff will go down 🤨🤣
I’m targeting 30 Million
One issue is there are still relatively few players that can sport a roster of 3 R3 6*s. So, we consistently get matched against the same death squads all running suicides
Nope, I sure didn't.
In fact, I have two more points to make. Again, I am sure others have made these points but I need the therapeutic benefit of getting them off my chest.
First, I find it interesting that when you go against a Deathmatch they are almost always the same players. I went against the same players champions 5 times in a row. Funny (cough) how it was always 6R3 Domino, Green Goblin and Wasp all great defense champs. Personally, it would be very far into the future before I took my 6 star Green Goblin up to rank 3. I marveled (another cough) at the coincidence that Domino and Doom always seemed to be in the mix. However, if the game is truly picking players that have multiple 6r3's wouldn't you see a Symbiote Supreme, Sunspot, Ghost or a strong offense but not defense champ in the mix? I preferred it when you fought Kang's or Thanos's team. At least then you knew it was the game throwing what it wants against you and not using a players champs to act like it is a random occurrence. So if you are going to throw these 6r3 champs at us, give us a fighting chance.
I am sure Kabam is going to make changes to this new iteration of arenas because of the overwhelming poor feedback but I want to add my last point. So lastly, (I really want this to be the end), arenas is the part of the game us poor schlubs that get crappy champs can actually benefit from them. So when I got a 6 star Superior Iron Man or duped Civil Warrior I thought well at least that's 60,000 extra points in arenas. I've actually grown to really like some of the champs I initially wrote off due to playing them in arenas (Man-Thing, Terrax).
I am now going to take a nap and dream of the arenas of old, from two days ago.
Now we have jumped from making any 5r2 useless in Arena even as part of a synergy team, to making any 5r3 a total liability even if teamed with two 5r4. That’s a big shift.
Not working as intended I think!