5* featured arena death squads
BirdReynolds
Member Posts: 527 ★★★
Guys seriously. Now I’m starting to get death squads, post streak, with all 4/40 or 2/35 teams. It’s manageable, yeah, but seriously? Why does this seem to keep increasing and why have you to my knowledge refused to speak with us on it? A couple weeks ago myself and others started noticing death squads when using teams with one 4/40 and two 3/30, then gradually it increased to two 4/40 and one 3/30. Now it’s with full 4/40 teams. This is making it so skewed towards the biggest accounts. I don’t have the time or resources to rank up every single 4*/5* I get to 5/50 or 3/45 just to avoid death squads in arenas. The one place where people with smaller accounts should be able to go to grind and improve their rosters the most. Please mods, admins, someone. I’ve put in support tickets and got the generic auto response, and forwarded to the suggestion box that probably has t been checked in a decade and is full of spiders and gum. This is all really starting to suck the joy out of the game...
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Comments
If players want to grind with 1/1 champs for the lowest possible points, we should be able to.
Additionally, the cutoffs for death squads should not be based on PI but rather rank/level. I have 3/30 champs with higher PI than a couple of my 4/40 champs. Consequently, those 4/40 champs are treated like 3/30 and will trigger death squads (Round 16 in the Alpha arena triggered a death squad when I tried to use my 3/30 Voodoo who has a higher PI than my 4/40 WW2 and 4/40 Wolvie).
I get having the minimum threshold, I do, especially in the 4* basic arena where it costs nearly nothing to take champs to 3/30. But 5* champs require a lot of resources just to go to r2. And with the amount of time and work that goes into just acquiring one, it is unfortunate and pretty lame we can’t use our full 5* roster in arenas. It is also really just very obnoxious that we have to be so mindful of the teams we choose, it takes the fun out of it. And why else would I play a game, for it to be a chore? I used to enjoy arenas, not nearly as much anymore. And with no more end game content left to explore outside of LoL, arenas are almost all I have left to satisfy that gaming itch.
If the minimum is going to increase like this, it would at least be nice for it to stay put for a while to allow for adjustments and rank ups, instead of what I’ve experienced to be an increase almost monthly. It would also be nice to get some feedback from Kabam on this. At a minimum just say “hey, don’t use teams below 10k pi before synergies, etc”. @Kabam Miike the game is changing, we are all trying to adapt and roll with it, but you’re the ones at the wheel, some communication on this would be great.
I’m going to experiment some and see if I can reproduce your results out of curiosity, but not before I hit my milestones.
@BirdReynolds
@DarthPhal
Kabam has commented on this several times. Kabam has stated that nothing algorithmic has changed in the arenas and that it is the fact that the arenas, in some unspecified way, factor in player roster growth that is causing death matches that used to show up at lower ratings to show up at increasingly higher ones. That is all they are prepared to say about the inner workings of the arena.
My own testing indicates that the arena is more complicated than players have generally assumed. I've determined that matches you fight now can affect the strength of matches you get later, for example, in a mostly predictable way. Which is to say, if I play in a certain way, I never get death matches. If I play in one of a number of different ways, I can practically guarantee them, and this is repeatable. So I know the game is factoring in how I play, but I cannot state in what precise way it is doing that.
As far as Kabam seems to be concerned, this is working as intended.
Nothing stops you from using any team you want in those arenas, it is just that the difficulty tuning you trigger could exceed your skill level. But there are players who claim to deliberately die in the arena to avoid entering infinite streak, because they believe they get more points during the run up before the drop down into infinite streak. I'm not one of them, but it is entirely possible that one of the design decisions embedded in the arena is a way for players to indirectly manipulate PI and point totals in this way. The concurrent design decision is that this manipulation can backfire on the player in ways we characterize as getting a death match.
1/25s are still useable. It is just that no one wants to do anything other than read two year old infinite streak guides.
This isn't a problem when you're dealing with relatively easy to rank champs like 3* and 4* (when the arena meta was created). However, this is entirely thrown out the window when we're dealing with 5* champs that are significantly more challenging/expensive to rank up.
To me, this is a flawed system as it forces players to rank up champs that we have no other intention of using. And it also punishes players with limited rosters. I don't even have 30 different 5* champs and I have to be very selective on how to use the bottom third out of fear of generating a death match. Am I expected to burn through 20 T4b and 50 T1a to gain access to a third of my roster for the sole purpose of Arena grinding? These champs will not be used in any other part of the game.
Oh I know, I still use all my 5* but I know people who have the vast majority of their 5* at 1/25 still and it has to be tricky to pair them all safely.