On a side note, getting people to stop playing arena (for units) might be the actual motive behind the changes.
Not playing arena out of protest does nothing. If you want an improvement, you have to threaten the company wallet. That means not buying anything with real money, and being a squeaky wheel on the forums and social media.
#########
Anyways, I've just been sticking to 1 arena, the featured, for testing purposes. All of them are ****, but it's probably better to stick to the smaller arena unless you have enough 6*s to make a decent dent in one of the 6* arenas.
I think we are lucky they give so many units in arena and we should be grateful.
I do agree that maybe they should add another arena for below TB players only.. with 5* champ.
For all TB player these arenas are fine
Just shows that you're skipping 90% of the posts and just going on the same idea. TB isn't only endgame players with 90+ 6*. TB is a ton of players with wide range of 6*. There are so many people who are F2P with all content done who only have 60 odd 6*. Even for them, these arenas are an annoyance.
The sole purpose of arena is not farming units, which is where your missing the concept..
It’s a by-product that we should be glad exists.
The main purpose is to get new champs/shards.. which have now been increased
False. The purpose of arena was twofold: 1) For hardcore grinders to go for champs that they wanted and couldn't get from crystals. 2) For casual players to get battleships and units. Especially for F2P players to get units since you know, we don't buy them.
Actually, the *intended* purpose of the arena is to give players somewhere to grind for rewards when they aren't doing other things, like completing content, or waiting for energy to refresh. It is an engagement tool to keep eyeballs on the game when the player runs into other bottlenecks.
When the devs revamped the arenas post 12.0, they added a ton of units as milestones. I don't think they expected (many) players to actually go for all of them. They wanted those units to be a nice reward to get while grinding away as a past time while waiting for energy to refill or something. And in fact most people didn't grind those: I know because I've been on a three+ year mission to convince people to grind for those, because they add up. But I can tell you that when I first started doing that, I got piles and piles of disagrees from people saying those rewards were trivial and not worth going after. And extremely few willing to defend the idea publicly. The shift in attitude for arena milestones has been building over time.
The game mode itself is intended to be a past time. But as nothing serves only one purpose, the arenas also have a competitive element - the rank rewards including the featured and basic champs. And the past time rewards have increasingly become a major focus of the arenas. Far more, I think, than the devs anticipated or even wanted. If you're grinding away in the arena, you're not doing monthly EQ, you're not doing the Variants, you're not doing the side quest, and those are the places the devs focus their attention with regard to progress and progressional rewards. Some of us do all that stuff and then the arena besides, but I presume many focus on the arena first, which is fine by me but probably not terribly desired by the devs.
The arena changes are probably being driven by two things. First, the devs want to rethink what kind of rewards are in there, given how players are actually playing the game mode rather than how it was originally envisioned. That's why, for example, they've upped the shards in those arenas. They decided to add a 6* rank reward, because players have been asking for that for a while. But they didn't add a new arena for it, which is an indication that second, they also want to streamline the arenas. There's lots of potential reasons for that, but the logical one given everything else going on right now is that workload on the devs has risen subtantially since the first set of dev diaries came out, and they are doing a lot more content work than in the past. That is putting more time pressure on them, so anything that simplifies game modes will give them more time to spend on other things.
There's a lot of goofy ideas about the why and the motivation for the arena updates. I can say from first hand knowledge they're all wrong. The purpose for arenas was never to be a focal game mode, but the devs are aware that it has evolved to be treated like one by a substantial number of the players over time. These changes are a reflection of the fact that how the arenas were designed and how they are being used has diverged, and the devs want to redesign them to reflect a better compromise between the players usage and the game mode's purpose.
And sometimes, Kabam is genuinely not sure how passionate the players are about any one particular element of the game until they touch it. Two years ago if they had made these changes, I can guarantee the complaints would have been squibs compared to today. Today, arena grinders are a much more wide spread, and much more vocal, part of the community. And honestly, even I'm a little surprised by how much things have swung this way.
No matter the initial reason, over time, the purpose of arena changed. And arena became the source for F2P players to even try to advance at a fast pace. Cutting down on the units obtained will cut down on the ability for many F2P to progress well in the game.
The sole purpose of arena is not farming units, which is where your missing the concept..
It’s a by-product that we should be glad exists.
The main purpose is to get new champs/shards.. which have now been increased
Getting news champs just became way more time consuming too...so they nerfed that purpose along with unit farming. Before, while the targets were undefined and varied depending on how many people made runs at the champs, you could get a basic for 1.5M-2M points and a featured for 2.3M-3M. Now you have to go higher...way higher in the case of the featured. How is this better?
Focus on one arena to maximise shards and build account depth. I remember when I started playing I could not hit all arena milestones, but every week it gets easier as your acquire and rank champs.
Do you think all big accounts started big?
Whale accounts aside, we've all worked hard to get where we are. It's not that people aren't willing to put in the time. It's that Kabam made it twice as hard to get what you used to get for X amount of time spent. And they advertise it as some great thing. That is a giant middle finger to the community.
Focus on one arena to maximise shards and build account depth. I remember when I started playing I could not hit all arena milestones, but every week it gets easier as your acquire and rank champs.
Do you think all big accounts started big?
Whale accounts aside, we've all worked hard to get where we are. It's not that people aren't willing to put in the time. It's that Kabam made it twice as hard to get what you used to get for X amount of time spent. And they advertise it as some great thing. That is a giant middle finger to the community.
I can only comment from My own perspective and yes I’ve always done arena to complete content, as don’t buy units.
For last year or so I have only ever grinded 5* feature and the basic.. I can’t stand using 3/4* champs, so for me I now get far more units doing the exact same grind as before, as well as a few 3/4* champs (which have no real interest in) and more 6* shards at end of arena
@DNA3000 is completely correct about the ACTUAL purpose of arenas. It's to keep us engaged when we are waiting for energy to rebuild in quest-based content. For the employees and executives at Kabam, the biggest KPIs are: number of app downloads, number of active users, time-spent per user, and real-world currency transactions to purchase in-game currencies and rewards. That's what matters to them. So they want us engaged in the game as much as possible. Hence arenas. All the arena rewards - gold, battlechips, shards, units, whatever - are just incentive to get us there and keep us there.
As far as your point about shards and champs being the purpose of arenas...I offer this: While many of us are highly motivated by growing our roster, collecting all the champs, having the best variant possible of our favorites champs (I am very guilty of prioritizing champ crystals over catalysts, even though I know better)...progressing in this game is about the currencies, of which there are many: energy, health, gold, units, catalysts, loyalty, glory, and on. And the end-all be-all of the currencies is....UNITS. That is the base currency in the game. The developers even say that. Units can get you everything else.
And Kabam just nerfed the best source of the primary currency in the game.
Comments
I do agree that maybe they should add another arena for below TB players only.. with 5* champ.
For all TB player these arenas are fine
Not playing arena out of protest does nothing. If you want an improvement, you have to threaten the company wallet. That means not buying anything with real money, and being a squeaky wheel on the forums and social media.
#########
Anyways, I've just been sticking to 1 arena, the featured, for testing purposes. All of them are ****, but it's probably better to stick to the smaller arena unless you have enough 6*s to make a decent dent in one of the 6* arenas.
TB isn't only endgame players with 90+ 6*. TB is a ton of players with wide range of 6*. There are so many people who are F2P with all content done who only have 60 odd 6*. Even for them, these arenas are an annoyance.
For last year or so I have only ever grinded 5* feature and the basic.. I can’t stand using 3/4* champs, so for me I now get far more units doing the exact same grind as before, as well as a few 3/4* champs (which have no real interest in) and more 6* shards at end of arena
@DNA3000 is completely correct about the ACTUAL purpose of arenas. It's to keep us engaged when we are waiting for energy to rebuild in quest-based content. For the employees and executives at Kabam, the biggest KPIs are: number of app downloads, number of active users, time-spent per user, and real-world currency transactions to purchase in-game currencies and rewards. That's what matters to them. So they want us engaged in the game as much as possible. Hence arenas. All the arena rewards - gold, battlechips, shards, units, whatever - are just incentive to get us there and keep us there.
As far as your point about shards and champs being the purpose of arenas...I offer this: While many of us are highly motivated by growing our roster, collecting all the champs, having the best variant possible of our favorites champs (I am very guilty of prioritizing champ crystals over catalysts, even though I know better)...progressing in this game is about the currencies, of which there are many: energy, health, gold, units, catalysts, loyalty, glory, and on. And the end-all be-all of the currencies is....UNITS. That is the base currency in the game. The developers even say that. Units can get you everything else.
And Kabam just nerfed the best source of the primary currency in the game.