**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.
ARENA Q: Do 6 and 5 star champs reward equal points but 6 star still take longer to revive?
Magonus
Posts: 521 ★★★
Just trying to understand what is going on here... is it intentional to make 6 stars "worth" the same as 5 stars but at the same time make them less usable / useful and thereby 6 stars are actually worth less that 5 stars in Arenas?
Apologies if I am way off here just an observation which prompted a question. Thanks for listening.
Apologies if I am way off here just an observation which prompted a question. Thanks for listening.
5
Comments
Might have been a better idea to remove 6* from basics completely, but there are dis/advantages to both.
And neither myself or others ever said the milestones didn't have to be fixed. I've *always* said that they did. Just not by nerfing people's rosters.
The baseline is the original five arena system. The devs have a pretty good idea (at least in theory) of how much effort it took to achieve how much stuff in those arenas. The specific intent of the revamp was to simplify the arenas from five to three, maintain roughly the same opportunities to grind rewards for the widest set of players, and update and improve some of the shard and champion rank rewards in them.
The first attempt was a failure, because it radically increased the effort to grind milestones for a very wide range of players. In particular, there were a few opportunities that were lost completely or reduced substantially. One of them was the 4* featured arena. This arena allowed players to grind for milestone rewards in an arena optimized and balanced around 5* scoring. 5* champs were the highest rarity allowed, and the milestones reflected a moderate amount of effort with those champions to clear all of the milestones. That opportunity vanished in the new iteration. 5* champs were unusable in the Trials arena, and meanwhile the new Basic and Featured arenas were balanced around 6* scoring.
So while the original five arena system had one arena balanced around 2* scoring, one balanced around 3* scoring, one around 4* scoring, one around 5* scoring, and one around 6* scoring, the new arenas had one arena balanced around 4* scoring and two balanced around 6* scoring. There was no arena optimized for 5* grinding (or any rarity lower than 4* grinding).
Losing an arena optimized around 2* scoring is no big loss, but losing the opportunity to grind optimally with 5*, when that is a central rarity in the current progression ladder of the game, is a lot less palatable, so it was worth attempting to put that back in. There's a couple ways to put that opportunity back into the arenas. We could allow 5* champs in the Trials, but then that would have to be optimized around 5* scoring, which eliminates the low end opportunity entirely. The alternative is to take one of the two 6* arenas and balance the milestones around 5* scoring.
But that then creates the problem of balancing the milestones around 5* scoring while allowing 6* champions to blast through those milestones at least twice as fast. That's simply not an option. The alternative is to reduce or eliminate the scoring gap between 5* and 6* champs, so that the milestones can be safely balanced around 5* scoring. Which is basically what was done.
We could also just completely eliminate 6* champs from being used in the Basic arena. In effect, reduce their scoring to zero. But that takes a player option away for no reason other than to satisfy the psychological needs of the scoring purists. There's no game design reason that higher rarity champs must always have that advantage. There have been arenas in which there is no such scoring advantage, when we simply don't want that advantage to exist. So long as there is a reasonable reason why we wouldn't want it to exist here either, it doesn't have to be here.
The notion that the game "took something away" from the players is frankly untenable. We originally had one arena where 6* champs could have been used for scoring advantage: the 5* featured arena. We now still have one arena where we can use those champs for scoring advantage: the current Featured arena. But that arena generates far more rewards than the old 5* featured arena did. Anyone who possessed a strong 6* roster is undeniably better off now than originally, and has a greater opportunity to leverage that 6* roster into more rewards. Structuring the Basic arena identically to the Featured arena doubled that opportunity, but that was a mistake: it added that opportunity at the expense of taking away completely the original opportunity that existed to leverage 5* champions in an arena optimized for them. Saying players should be allowed to keep that opportunity and the devs should just magic a new one to replace the one that was lost might be understandable, but it is also completely unreasonable.
I understand, and completely agree with everything you said about the need for an arena to be balanced around 5 star. Sincerely. It's mostly that... what's happened IMO, is that it's been done in a weird way. It's been done to an arena that is unique in that it's the first arena in history to award a 6 star basic champion. Under the logic that the Featured arena has a greater value to veteran players than the Basic does. The problem is that many of us will disagree on that. It's just one of the side effects of condensing the arena system. That's the core issue, to me. That this theory that 6* champs can still be used without handicap in the arena with "the highest value" doesn't take into account anyone who disagrees or believes that the Basic can at times be the arena with the highest value. Folks keep comparing this to the 4* Featured... It's markedly different. As you can earn a 6 star champ...instead of a 4 star as previously. You can't just ignore this fact when comparing them. Why is it ok for an arena with a 6 star champion as it's top prize be balanced around using 5 star? It's moving backwards. And forcing anyone who wants to compete for the highest available rarity champ in the game to use their past champions and not their present (let alone future) isn't a great move IMO.
All is to say, I'm still not convinced a 3 arena system will ultimately work for everyone. Which is why myself and others have suggested the possibility of Summoners having 3 arenas available to *them*. Rather than 3 available to everyone. This way the arenas could be tuned more individually for each level of roster?
Second, there's a lot more stuff going on now that before when those arenas were created. Part of the fall out of the situation that prompted the dev diaries and the expanded development directions is that time and resources are a lot more constrained. Five arenas takes longer to maintain than three, and I believe collapsing the arenas was in part a resource-saving strategy. They want to reduce the time spent maintaining the arenas, so that they could reclaim that time and put it towards all of the new stuff on their development plate.
The easiest thing to do would have been to just tweak the existing arenas. The fact they spend the time and effort to refactor them tells me they think there's a long term return on that investment, and it is probably the long term time savings in having to manage fewer arenas. It is possible that in a sense the enhanced rewards we're getting in the arenas was "paid for" by the time savings Kabam will realize over time with the simplified arena structure. Not exactly, but the justification for touching them at all was the development simplification, and once any change was justified, it opened the door to reviewing the rewards in them.
In general, more is better when it comes to making content appropriate to different players. More progress tiers, more content tiers, more reward tiers, more gate tiers. But more is also more costly in time and resources, and the more tiers we have, the less interesting each of them can be given limited resources. We see direct signs of that: we gain Cavalier, we lose Beginner. We gain Thronebreaker, and now Kabam wants to start pushing us quicker out of Proven and Contender. I believe we gain 6* arenas, but we have to lose 2* and 3* arenas.
At the end of the day, I don't see you making a counter argument to the fact that my progression has been markedly reversed, in the one arena I was most excited about participating in. But rather that it was necessary to do so for the greater good.
Depends when each of those circumstances were, and what rating the matched up opponents were (which has a noticeable affect on how many points you earn.
Was it during opening rounds of arena (against much lower opponents), then score would have been less (no matter whether you used 5* or 6*).
Was it higher in buildup to streak (like around 10) matching up against “real” opponents a couple ranks higher than yours (that's when you probably see highest amount of points).
Was it further on but still before 15, facing Thanos/Kang, which in past without 6* being available would have given little less than at around 10-ish because Max 5* Thanos/Kang is without mastery, thus lower points. But now that 6* are include, Thanos/Kang could be at Max 6*r5 so may actually be giving very high points as well.
Was it post-15, where you are now relatively equal in opponents as your own ? And then again, also depends if you pick the 3rd team matchup (ie, Suicides, higher Rating, higher Points), or the1st team matchup (same Ranking, but less Rating so lower Points).