**Mastery Loadouts**
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Due to issues related to the release of Mastery Loadouts, the "free swap" period will be extended.
The new end date will be May 1st.
Comments
I am playing 4s featured and its the same since last update
I thought i need to update the game
I will check again
Even spending 100% focus on the arena, which I do not do in general, I could not make the newer system generate more points per hour. I'm not the best player in the world, but the argument that players just needed to get good at the arena to take full advantage of the new match algorithm is unlikely to be helpful to the vast majority of the playerbase who frankly are unlikely to get better than I am at grinding arena in any reasonable amount of time.
I should say, this primarily concerns the 5* featured arena. I was able to outscore my normal effort in the 4* basic arena. It was more difficult to judge in the 4* featured. But again, I'm an experienced veteran player and arena grinder. I doubt if the arena match algorithm change was benefiting everyone, or even a majority of players.
The problem is the odds of getting bad match ups over a large number of rounds is high enough that at 1x fights which are manageable become nightmarish at 2x or higher. I suspect the vast majority of players would lose their streak at least half of the time, if not almost all the time, facing this:
I actually won that one, but I lost streak to matches like that three times during the 5* featured. Typically, I lose streak in the 5* featured maybe once a month due to a mistake or particularly bad match up. So that's a 25x higher failure rate. I could conceivably get good enough over time to reduce that rate substantially, but there's no way that the majority of the playerbase could be expected to face those kinds of matches over and over and over and both sustain a streak and not get burned out from the effort. It was easier running the Cavalier map than trying to sustain streak in the 5* featured with champs below 5/65.
I am an arena grinder 100% free 2 play. New system, old system, didn’t matter to me. I will say though that I knew the old system and could use all my champs in the 5* featured arena without having to sacrifice any of them to sandbagging. No lost fights means more points in less time. It has nothing to do with needing to get good. It has to do with personal preference, some liked the changes, others didn’t. Kabam must have felt that there were more that didn’t like the changes. Thus, the reason they changed it back at least for now.
Also, the Kabaam monkeys, and Kabaam officially, in the forums said that this abrogation they have foisted on the players, mostly likely to extract real dollars from players, since Kabaam is a for profit enterprise, was to be for the most part corrected yesterday ahead of the arenas today. But I don't see it. As soon as I hit fight 12, I'm fighting teams that are 2-3 times my teams pi and it's mostly Dr. Doom dominated teams. This is a complete load of bovine excrement.
I'm a free 2 player and always will be, depending on how much longer I can stand to do arenas the way they are now. I don't have the kind of time that this game is starting to demand to be successful in even a limited way. WHEN ARE ARENAS REALLY GOING TO BE FIXED KABAAM? I don't mind the more aggressive opponents, but I really do want to be able to streak. It's the only way to get any consistent decent awards. And if you're going to take that away from us. You might as well shut down the game, because there will be no fun playing it.
Then Kabam changed solo event rewards. Now they are much better, including the ranked portion. And most solo events can be done via arenas, with a few exceptions.
A month after they made the solo event reward improvements, arenas were changed and became, effectively, massively more difficult. Here's my personal experience, based on my abilities:
BEFORE:
AFTER:
Honestly, it's pretty clear to me the motivation for Kabam was to counter-balance the increased solo event rewards, and the arena grinding that made them profitable. Yes, the arenas are harder. Kabam literally eliminated all "easy" fights (which is disingenuous at the lowest multipliers) and made the AI significantly more aggressive (I had to laugh at the Kabam statement this somehow makes the fight easier. Someone is taking spin lessons from politicians!).
Even though Kabam claimed to have fixed the match-making as of October 11th, I haven't seen it. My arenas are painful and disheartening. And I won't be able to get the units I was trying to grind before the end of today, which means I won't be spending money to increase my units balance. It doesn't work that way, Kabam. You take away are free units and we don't just hand us over all the money.
is back to normal. The PI levels are all comparable to my actual team. I hardly look at the "Easy/Hard" words, because those do not correlate to difficulty directly. I suspect the reason why we might be seeing most or all of the teams show "Hard" is because that's how they added the new AI profile to the arena. The "Hard" profile is the one that aggressively throws specials.
Now, because every player is different, I suspect there are players who think that aggressively throwing specials is bad, because I would assume they have more difficulty dealing with them. But the very long-standing complaint in the arena is passive AI where the AI either doesn't attack or doesn't throw specials. It is the combination of high PI and passive AI that creates the kinds of match ups that frustrate most arena grinders. You can't beat a champ that will insta-kill you with a special three because their PI is three times higher than yours and refuses to throw a special until they reach three bars of power.
(I also suspect there are players who are just seeing the word Hard and complaining about it without actually making any attempt to evaluate if the fights themselves are indeed harder).
If there are players that are keying off of the word "Hard" and not the actual champions themselves, or who do not like to face more aggressive AI, then the problem here is that the word Hard doesn't correlate to the actual strength of the champion, and the more aggressive AI is something they put in after literally years of player requests for that very behavior. In fact, its a long standing request for AQ AI as well.
Can't please everyone, and for years the majority complaint in the arena has been either get rid of deathmatches or get rid of the passive AI. Both changes are responses to long standing player feedback. It does make the arena much easier to deal with and much more enjoyable for the vast majority of players I've ever spoken to. They flubbed the deathmatch change but that change has been reverted. The match I posted above is exactly what others are seeing as being a complete reversion to the old behavior. The "Hard" is, I suspect, connected to the AI change that players have been asking for, and most have had a positive response to.
Your theory that Kabam is trying to offset increased arena rewards has a critical flaw. For *most* players, the AI change is a positive one. And the deathmatch one has been reverted, so it can't be making the arena any harder than it used to be. Kabam is working on figuring out a way to eliminate death matches and high PI match ups, which again would not cause the average player to generate fewer points. That seems to make that theory completely untenable.
So if anyone thinks that the arena showing all "Hard" implies that Kabam is trying to make the arena harder, that's not true. In fact, the opposite is true: the intent is to make the arena opponents more aggressive when throwing specials, which makes them easier to bait and less likely to reach special three, and more predictable overall. Aside from being more aggressive in general, I haven't seen the "Hard" AI in the arenas exhibiting any particular tricks that make them more difficult to fight. They are easier to bait, and easier to counter attack, but otherwise more or less like the previous arena AI in other respects.
Arena matchmaking changes have been effective, at least for my preference. This is at 110x streak and I haven't encountered teams with a total rating that's 1.5x that of mine. Cheers, MCOC team. 🍻
"Arena matchmaking changes have been effective" Yea right