**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.
Comparing New and Original arenas: Unit farming
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.
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.
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Comments
with this, I can get maybe 170 if I’m lucky enough to not get a deathmatch
You’d be better off doing clears of the lower eq difficulties than this
My 6 star roster get can get me 6 million to the milestone 8 in the new arena.
Add in the 4 million I used to get with my 5 star roster (135 units previously) can get me roughly to 10.5 million or milestone 11 in the new arena. Only adding 45 more units.
So that’s 90 units I am losing from my 5 star roster. The amount of time and effort my 5 star roster gets me in the new arena is fractions of what I got in the old format.
-Gotta put in more time and effort for basically the same milestone rewards.
-Upper Rank rewards will require even more points than before.
-Even sizeable rosters are negatively affected (I have 90+ 6* champs and still need to put in more rounds (~15% more) than before).
I'll also post a comparison from my actual experience once I've completed all the milestones.
Featured 5: 22M for 135 units and 5k/200 shards
Featured 4: 4M for 135 units
Basic 4: 1.5M for 135 units
Total units 405
Plan for new arenas
Featured 6: 22-24M for 200 units and hoping for 5k/1k shards
Basic 6: 5M for 65 units
Trials: 2.2M for 140 units
Total units 405
Hoping this doesn't add too much time over what I usually spend. It just sucks having 2 arenas that can use 6*s and with the refresh time is difficult to use in both.
As this is where a big chunk of arena grinders that grind for units lives, this is a problem. If the intent was to deliberately trade making units far harder to earn in exchange for shards being easier to earn, that would be one thing, but Kabam's statements about the arena suggest that was not their intent. As it was not their expressed intent, it is something they should try to fix, by using those data points to tweak either the amount of points you earn or the value of the unit milestones in the three arenas.
Even as a large roster grinder, these changes have hugely impacted my grind. I said it in the main thread, but it’s going to take roughly double the time, spread over a much longer period, for me to equal what I was earning before.
And I think that sums up the overarching issue with these new arena systems. In terms of units, because let’s be honest, that’s what 90% of players grinding arena are grinding for, the new arena system makes them work much, much harder, for the same or less rewards than they were earning before
By definition it is impossible (without huge unit spend) to grind both arenas at the same time.
We will only know this is few weeks once arena settles and we see impact of 2 arena when one is not the featured new champ
This is based on the fact that 21-22M is the usual cut-off for 1-5% rewards. I have been unfortunate several times to stop at 20-20.5M and receive the 6-10% rewards, and an example of that are the two most recent arenas.
Now, also considering the fact that there should be much more players grinding for the top 100 reward, this cut-off will also go much higher. Even moreso with Shang Chi and Falcon being highly sought after champions.
I do hope I'm wrong and that the cut-offs for top 500 and 100 will be much lower than people expect. Noone can have an idea on how to reliably predict the results yet. But that's something you shouldn't have assumed I didn't already know.
I only used to play those arenas because of the effort vs reward ratio.
If I had too busy a week, I could do 3 rounds of 4-stars and one of boosted 3-stars for 25 units total (14 units now) or 7 rounds of 4-stars and one of 3-stars for 40 units (28 now).
Also I used to grind 3/4* this way:
1) 5 winstreak w lowest 4*s
2) 10 winstreak w my highest 4*
3) repeat point 2)
This way I used to get slightly under 300k points per round, which allowed for pretty solid unit burst anytime I needed ( 1)+2) gave me 45 units for about 45 mins of playing every fourth day).
I don't hate that they simplified the number of arenas that are out, but it does seem like the milestone rewards are a bit rough. I have also always wished the ranked rewards would increase, since ranking 31% in the featured arena gets you a measly 500 5* shards and two greater arena boost crystals. Just kind seems like there isn't much point caring about rank rewards unless you are pushing for the champ, which isn't even conceivable for a normal TB player like me.
That's what happened with the 5* featureds in the previous arena iteration, and it was driven by arena psychology. No one wants to do way more work for no gain. And since the cutoffs have huge jumps in between them, scores tend to cluster around those cutoffs.
Since the 1-5% reward is much higher, you'd expect people to be willing to push harder for it, so I would expect there to be pressure for the 1-5% cutoff to rise in the new arenas. But that's counterbalanced by the fact that there are now two of them, and there aren't really a lot of people with both the means and the will to grind that high. So it is difficult to say if enough people come out of the woodwork to drive that a lot higher. Should be interesting to see how it shakes out over the next couple months (it took a while for scores to settle down when the 5* featured was first introduced).
I should point out that the 6* and 5* featured and basic champs, and even to a large extent the very top rank reward brackets, are competitions and have always been competitions. I'm less concerned about the competitive side of the arenas and more concerned with the milestone and low rank rewards that are more of the "bread and butter" rewards that are accessible to most players (that enter the arena). If you're entering a competition, you should expect to compete. But milestone rewards were put there specifically for players to earn outside of the competitive parts of the arena. They are the ones we need to be more careful about moderating.
The arenas are not designed to compel players to spend units. If you were grinding for units in the first place, you wouldn't do that no matter what the arenas looked like. It is simply a lot less efficient at earning units in many situations, and I think the focus should be on the problems that exist, and not on problems that don't exist.
I always buy health potions when this balance is interrupted in order to restore it.
This new 7 unit arena is going to interrupt this a lot.
I can see myself collecting a huge stock of health potions if I start playing it consistently, so I’m going to stay away for now 😂
In the old arenas, I used to max out everything besides the 2* arena (didn't touch it at all). For that kind of grind:
3* arena: ~35 rounds, 75 units
4* basic: 38 rounds, 135 units
4* featured: 45 rounds, 135 units
5* featured: 67 rounds, 135 units
Total: 185 rounds, 480 units
In the new arenas, I hit all the milestones and the results were:
Summoner trials: 62 rounds, 140 units
6* basic: 101 rounds, 200 units
6* featured: 101 rounds, 200 units
Total: 264 rounds, 540 units
So that's an extra 60 units farmed at the cost of 79 additional rounds. For units earned per time investment, assuming each round lasts for an average of 2 mins, the reward ratios are:
Old: 5.12 units/min
New: 4.09 units/min
The new 6* arenas offer better crystal shards than the old ones, but I'm not so sure if they are worth the 20% loss in efficiency. 5* champions steadily lose value as time passes and regain some value only when rarity-specific content is released.
I should have checked the required number of rounds to get 480 units in the new arenas, since that can give a more straightforward comparison, but I doubt that the reward ratio will be significantly better than 4.09 units/min.
So, as a general conclusion for unit-farming, given a roster with a similar size as mine, OLD ARENAS >> NEW ARENAS.
*also posted this in one of the megathreads
I understand it's going to be very difficult to get a good estimate on this but how far out of the realms of possibilty is it that you get roughly the same units in the end?