The new arenas are a bit of a mixed bag: some better opportunities in there, some enhanced rank rewards, but probably the most noteworthy and controversial change has been to unit grinding. As I've been promoting for quite some time now, the arenas are a good place to grind units, especially for F2P players. But are they still a good place to grind for units?
It is impossible to look at every kind of player with different rosters and time availability. The arena changes will impact different people in different ways. But I thought it would be useful as a benchmark to look at a couple of standard cases to see how the arenas change things. For reference, I'm going to be using the numbers I measured in my original arena grind analysis:
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/187556/a-case-study-and-analysis-of-arena-grind-rewards/p1. This is just to have a relative point of comparison: different people will grind at different speeds, and points will vary a little depending on certain factors (i.e. masteries) but the relative change should be similar.
Let's start with the obvious: it took a certain number of rounds to collect all of the milestones from each of the original arenas. If a player were to devote the exact same amount of effort with the same champions in the new arenas, how much units would they expect to get. These are the total milestone rewards from each of those arenas:
5* featured: 135 units, 19500 BC, 38000 gold, 9 PHC, 1500 PHC frag
4* featured: 135 units, 16750 BC 30750 gold, 17400 PHC frag
4* basic: 135 units, 13500 BC, 23000 gold, 14800 PHC frag
3* featured: 65 units, 9000 BC, 17500 gold, 9000 PHC frag
Summoner trials: 65 units, 6600 BC, 10600 gold, 4500 PHC frag
The amount of points it takes in each arena is 12m, 4m, 1.5m, 640k, and 250k points respectively. For each such arena, if we simply do the same thing in the new arenas, what do we get now?
For someone who was doing the original Summoner trials, doing the same effort in the New Trials would get you between milestone 5 and 6. Let's assume milestone 6 for now. That would be a total of 42 units, 4k BC, 30k gold, and 2500 PHC shards. That is substantially less units. In fact it is substantially less everything except gold. In terms of very low roster players grinding this arena, their results will be substantially less in most respects, or it will take a lot more effort to replicate the same results. Hopefully, no one was relying on this arena alone for very long, but it is there.
A similar comparison for the original 3* featured, generating 640k points in the new trials arena would reach milestone 9 and generate 63 units, 6250 BC, 30k gold, and 4250 PHC shards. That is almost identical for units, more for gold, and less for everything else. If your focus was unit grinding here, the new arenas don't hurt your unit grinding much, and you do have the ability to stretch slightly higher if you want.
The 4* basic comparison is not quite as bad as the original summoner trials, but I suspect a lot more people were grinding this one because the return per unit time was pretty good for units. Here, 1.5 million gets you to milestone 16 (about) which is a total of 112 units, 11750 BC, 30k gold, and 10k PHC. Units are down 17% for this arena, which is not a huge amount but it is a substantial reduction from the earning rate from the original arena.
The 4* featured arena comparison is pretty catastrophic, for the simple reason that there's no actual arena that is in close comparison. The prior three compare at least nominally to the new Trials arena, but the only place you can use 5* champs is in the new 4/5/6 Basic and Featured arenas, and their milestones are clearly calibrated towards 6* champion point generation. You can use 5* champs in them, and you can earn some rewards, but nowhere near the original 4* featured arena. Basically, the 4m milestone in the new 6* arenas collectively generate 55 units, 9k BC, 75k gold, and 2750 GMC shards. The GMC shards are great, but in terms of units this is less than half of the 4* featured arena.
The last of these is the 5* featured. 12m gets you to milestone 12, which generates a total of 140 units, 19.5k BC, 75k gold, and 7k GMC shards. This is actually slightly higher than the original 5* featured arena generated in terms of unit, battlechips., and gold. If you were doing this, then at least in terms of this part of your effort, this translates okay.
So the very bottom - at least, the 3* featured - and the very top - 5* featured - roughly translate to comparable unit earnings in terms of migrating the effort from the old to the new arenas. The middle arenas - 4* basic, 4* featured - not so much. Also, if you were extremely casual with grinding, only picking off the bottom milestone or two from just a few arenas, things have probably not changed too dramatically. But if you were someone grinding deep into the arena milestones, your effort to grind units probably went up by some amount. The closer you were to being a player with a substantial 4* roster but relatively small to moderate 5* roster, the harder the changes will hit you. The current configuration of the arenas does not account for the kind of effort you were likely putting into the arenas. And I believe this is very problematic, as it is these very players we want to encourage to participate and progress the most: the ones actually putting in the effort, but still growing.
I should also point out that real world grinding is not this simple. People didn't only use 4* champs in the 4* basic, or only 5* champs in the 4* featured. There was a lot of overlap in rarities in different arenas. So the actual impact is more complex and more "diluted" across all the arena grinders. This comparison is meant to simplify and highlight the core earning differences in the arena structure itself, not attempt to emulate any one particular player's grind. There are ways in which I think the 4* basic grinders may have been hit even harder than the 4* featured grinders in spite of the raw numbers for example, but that's a separate discussion and this is getting pretty long already.
There are a lot of ideas flying around right now on how to remedy a variety of perceived problems with the arenas, some valid and some I think not so valid. But I believe the most critical thing to address are the middle grinders that were grinding a large percentage of the milestones in the middle arenas. They are the ones suffering the largest unit grinding opportunity losses and the least amount of compensating benefits in other parts of the arenas. Given that, I would recommend two changes to the current arenas, both primarily targeted at this middle ground area.
The first one is a change to either scoring or milestones or both, such that the amount of effort previously required to acquire all of the 4* basic and 4* featured milestones translates roughly to a similar amount of units in the new arenas, either by shifting more units into the trials and adjusting milestones to make them achievable with 4* effort, or with modifications to the 4/5/6 basic arena that frontloads the units for players who can only use 4* and smaller 5* rosters in that arena. There's a lot of mathy ways to do that, and the details aren't important at this stage.
The second suggestion is unrelated directly to unit grinding, but I think is necessary to address what I perceive to be a gap in the structure of the arenas. The jump from Trials to Basic/Featured is huge, as you really need 5* champs to be competitive or farm milestones effectively, and yet there's basically no way to earn 5* champs in the trials arena. To address this, I would suggest replacing PHC shards for GMC shards in the highest two to four milestones of the new trials arena, and add moderate amounts of 5* shards to the rank rewards for 25% and higher. The idea being to give players who grind that arena some chance to start adding 5* champions to their rosters, so they can "graduate" to eventually doing the higher ones to at least some degree.
My conclusion from analyzing the numbers is that if you are a large roster grinder, things may have gotten temporarily worse for you if you were a heavy unit grinder, but you're going to be fine in the long run. If you were a moderate grinder with an intermediate roster, you were probably hit very hard by the arena changes, and there's no real compensation in terms of other rewards in the arenas, at least not in the short or intermediate term. It could be years before you catch up, which is far too long for an update that should not be hitting anyone that hard. Kabam Miike implied that these impacts were unintentional (cf:
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/comment/1783711/#Comment_1783711) so hopefully Kabam will take note of the problems with unit grinding in the updated arenas and find ways to return unit grinding in the arenas to something similar to what it used to be for the more moderate middle of the road players, who probably represent a higher percentage of arena grinders, and the ones that need the most help in the first place to progress in the game. I do not wish to see top tier arena grinders (and for these purposes I would consider myself one of those) to gain higher tier rewards in the arena on the backs of the progressing players. That's not the way the arenas should function.
