Arena has annoyingly turned into Battlegrounds-lite
altavista
Member Posts: 1,578 ★★★★
This might just be part of my bias of thinking that BGs is warping the rest of the game despite ostensibly being its own game mode that can be ignored, but Arena has gotten more annoying (I'm keeping my Infinite Streak alive in my quest to get Wong, but my oh my is the life being sucked out of me).
I'm not exactly sure how Arena creates the team of 3 opponents for you to face, but since (1) It is likely cobbled from among the top champions in a Player's roster and (2) There are enough players who choose to rank up BG defenders to be their top champions and (3) BG Meta defenders tend to have high Prestige, it now feels like Arena is being forced to cosplay as BGs.
Three matches, win at least two of the matches or else you lose the round? Check.
High chance of losing the match, if not the round, if you didn't "draft" the right counter? Check
Have a chance at 'banning' a defender (since you can select one of three player matchups you want), but then be at the mercy of how the "draft" goes (the other two defenders that aren't shown)? Check
Have to face 3 straight tough defenders? Check.
Its getting pretty annoying especially because you don't have any real control, unlike in BGs. Doing an arena grind and just taking in random 7-stars to keep your streak going? You better hope there isn't a Serpent hidden in one of the matchups when you don't have a mystic champion. Even defenders that might not need a specific counter since health and match time is unimportant, like Bullseye or Onslaught or Photon, your chances of winning are less and the fight takes a lot more time.
And unlike BGs, if your high powered team comes up against a weak 3 arena opponents, its not like the arena will forefeit and just save you time for the win.
In essence, with the large mass of BG focused rosters, your chances of winning in Arena is less, you waste more time in a game mode that is already a grind, and you don't earn anything more for facing more difficult matchups. It doesn't help that if you lose a match/round, you lose a lot more time due to the cooldown timer and/or having to build the 3x point multiplier back up.
I'm not exactly sure how Arena creates the team of 3 opponents for you to face, but since (1) It is likely cobbled from among the top champions in a Player's roster and (2) There are enough players who choose to rank up BG defenders to be their top champions and (3) BG Meta defenders tend to have high Prestige, it now feels like Arena is being forced to cosplay as BGs.
Three matches, win at least two of the matches or else you lose the round? Check.
High chance of losing the match, if not the round, if you didn't "draft" the right counter? Check
Have a chance at 'banning' a defender (since you can select one of three player matchups you want), but then be at the mercy of how the "draft" goes (the other two defenders that aren't shown)? Check
Have to face 3 straight tough defenders? Check.
Its getting pretty annoying especially because you don't have any real control, unlike in BGs. Doing an arena grind and just taking in random 7-stars to keep your streak going? You better hope there isn't a Serpent hidden in one of the matchups when you don't have a mystic champion. Even defenders that might not need a specific counter since health and match time is unimportant, like Bullseye or Onslaught or Photon, your chances of winning are less and the fight takes a lot more time.
And unlike BGs, if your high powered team comes up against a weak 3 arena opponents, its not like the arena will forefeit and just save you time for the win.
In essence, with the large mass of BG focused rosters, your chances of winning in Arena is less, you waste more time in a game mode that is already a grind, and you don't earn anything more for facing more difficult matchups. It doesn't help that if you lose a match/round, you lose a lot more time due to the cooldown timer and/or having to build the 3x point multiplier back up.
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I am complaining about matches taking longer (because Onslaught plays keepaway a lot more than even Korg does, or Serpent's second life adding on a minimum of 5 seconds to the fight without a specific counter), more Defenders requiring a specific counter or you have a larger chance of losing the fight.
I am saying that since the type of defenders that exist now because of BGs, and how players choose their rank ups based on BGs, is what is making things annoying. Pre-BGs, the top ranked champions in most players decks were primarily Offensively focused or player's favorite champions. Post-BGs, now that there is a competitive element, the top ranked champions are focused on being Competitive.
And to the other point, I don't want to pay for Sigil (which I guess is Kabam's point to trying to irritate enough players to pay them money). And if I am mindless grinding the arena, I don't want to have to utilize the poor user interface to make sure I have a bleed immune, a non-metal, and a wither champion for every 130 rounds of Arena I am doing.
You take in 3 different classes - that's about as much of the 'poor user interface' you need to use.
I'm on a win streak of 213 in the Wong arena - using 7* R3, all the way down to 6* R1 (stopping when individual champ PI drops below 16k).
Faced my fair share of the champs you mentioned, very rarely die to one. And I cant remember the last time I lost a streak.
You're turning your nose up at possibly one of the best opportunities to learn in game - having to use a non-meta attacker against a meta defender.
I think the only real answer here is the cringeworthy "get gud".
But to clarify an earlier ask, that the game always takes people's TOP teams, nope (well, sort of No).
If you play 4* Arena, and start out with 3* lower champs (or even lower 4* teams), it's not that you will only get much lower rated opponents as potentials. (those that are new, don’t have very high ranked 4* in their roster, etc).
You may get matched against equally high ranking players, that also just happened to use those low 3* or 4* champs at certain times during their own advancing to infinite streak, etc.
And as mentioned, players that had used “mismatched” teams along the way to their own Infinite Streak, you may see them against you on occasion (where 2 champs are much higher rated than their 3rd champ on that team is).
As to “people Rankup great BG Defenders, so those are always appearing in Arena Teams now”..
Most people's top ranked up champs are either gonna be their best/favorite Attackers or Defenders.
And since those champs are thus high up on their rosters, when they do their own Arena of course they are gonna chose them for their own Arena Teams, because you just keep picking the next 3 champs in line (by rating) generally, so those tough attackers are gonna be high up on potential Arena Matches you face,
But it is not new to BG (ranking up Defenders). People have been doing that for AW Defense forever.
Fights just take longer by default even with perfect play - all of Serpent's power gains mean you have to wait and bait, and if you don't have any champion's that can remove the Death Immortality buff, that is a default 5 seconds additional to the fight. If you're facing 10 Serpents in a row, thats 50 seconds more time wasted. Doesn't sound like a lot, but you're already spending a lot of time.
And you can play perfectly, have the AI turtle up / ignore your inputs, and then you just lose. That is another waste of time. When the Defenders are more punishing, these bugs have greater impact. I agree. As I mentioned, enough players are prioritizing ranking up Defenders that we've reached a critical mass of Arena fights having more BG Defenders show up.
So don't be surprised when next year you'll have to face R4s in Arena.
At the end of the day, there are no nodes here, so all the fights should be easy with a basic understanding of who the opponents are and what they do.
You can't really focus on anything else if these defenders come up. I don't think there is anything kabam can do about this though.
I’ve opened 2m battlechips worth of arena crystals so far this year, so I like to consider myself abit of an arena connoisseur… never seen 3 serpents in a row, let alone 10!
1. The arena keeps track of what teams the players use, and stores that somewhere.
2. When a player is in the arena, they have an invisible difficulty multiplier that scales with the length of their win streak. This multiplier starts at 0.8, and increases steadily until it caps out around 3.9 at about win streak 19 or 20, and then stays there for all higher streak lengths.
3. When a player forms a team and enters the arena, the game calculates something sometimes referred to as "naked PI." This is the PI of your team without boosts, masteries, or sig levels. It then multiplies this by your current difficulty multiplier to get a match target. So if your (naked) PI of your total team is 10,000 and your current streak difficulty multipler is 2.0, your match target is 20,000 PI.
4. Every player is assigned a subset list of all arena participants. How the game does this is not known, but it is known it is fairly random but probably tends to pick players roughly near the player's strength and is reset every time the arenas themselves reset. Because these lists start empty, players who jump into the arenas immediately right as they start can sometimes see weird match results, as these tables are not yet full.
5. From this subset, the game looks at every team used by all the players in the set, looking for a reasonably close match to your target match in (naked) PI. The matching system always finds three matches, a match slightly lower, more or less on the dot, and somewhat higher. These margins are also, to the best of my knowledge, not perfectly known, but we all see them.
6. If the game cannot find reasonable matches, there are two possibilities. For reasons probably are most likely due to an implementation bug, if your current streak length is of a certain size (somewhere around 8-15) and the nearest match falls outside the reasonable range but within certain limits, you will get Kang or Thanos teams that are constructed by the arena system. Outside of these ranges, the game resorts to default teams that are at or near default matches (i.e. with the initial difficulty multipler of 0.8).
Because the game chooses matches from the teams players use, which teams players use ultimately determines the difficulty of the arena. This is by design, as the intent was to make the arena get harder as the players grow stronger automatically. And since matches come not from all of the hundreds of thousands of players who play arena but just a subset of them (probably for efficiency reasons) it is possible to see the same people over and over again in any one particular run. But this can then shift when the arenas reset and players' rosters change.
What players call 'Infinite streak" is possibly the longest surviving bug in the game. If the absolute strongest possible team that can ever enter the arena as a PI of, say, 90,000 (naked PI), then anyone who assembles a team of about 24,000 or more can never find a match, ever, at high streak. Because the game will never find a match for such teams, it is forced to default to low difficulty teams as a last resort. As long as you keep your teams above that critical limit, the arena stays "broken" and never sends actual difficulty-scaled matches. That's infinite streak in a nutshell, and that's why there's no set formula for it. The minimum team required changes based on the highest team the game has ever seen within each players' opponent match basket. There are R4s in the game right now, but if those players are not in your subset opponent basket in this arena, you will never see those teams and the infinite streak requirement for you personally is lower than it might be for the unlucky shmuck that happens to get those guys in their match basket. But even ignoring them, since everyone's match basket is different, and changes with new arenas, and those players rosters also change over time, everyone's infinite streak minimum fluctuates slightly over time, and slowly drifts upward in the long run.
The more serious threat is when an R4 changes the infinite streak cap in your match bucket, and suddenly that team you thought was safe draws a deathmatch. That's when the R4 becomes a real threat, because the first time you see that R4 you might be using R1s.
But that's just the arena working as intended. It is infinite streak itself that was never intended; the devs just decided to let us keep it rather than rewrite the arena to fix it.
Arena is a snore fest and I like it that way. Don't ever change.
I average about 75k battlechips a day