What do you mean? We already had months of riots about "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is so OP..."   and how he could 4v1 enemy teams and was a way to force stall quits... and how he definitely needed to be nerfed:

i

And from one of the many Reddit rants:

i

i

It was all over, everywhere

i

Haha, dang, that must've been before my time. 

But see what I'm saying? If an epic in gold arena had people complaining, the Bronze Arena guys are not ready for leggos. 

Good idea

giving a noob a Lego is like handing a baby a shotgun.

perhaps rather than basing it on arena rank, because not everyone who plays focuses on arena rank, make it that you have to be level 40+ to qualify.

Reinbeast was the "Popular to Rage About" champ early in the game, yeah. :)

In my experience, people don't adapt well to new champions that change the meta, or even ones that need to be countered in any way. Sometimes it seems it is easier for them to vent their frustration and complain about their losses rather than improving their teams, farming gear, utilizing counters, etc... Basically way easier to complain and not admit they didn't know... than to get advice, learn, and then win. 

I think your progress and example is a counterpoint. While you have been a spender, you have also been willing to source advice from these forums (and likely elsewhere), and you have made tremendous progress. Your total FW clear that quickly was very impressive, spender or not. You can see my join date here is Feb 2019.... and while I didn't play seriously for a decent while... my final FW clear was in November of 2021. I worked on it for a long, long time, and that was so long that I thought I would never get her, since I didn't spend. 

But like you, I took advice from people who had done it before, and finally got her. I take a lot of arena advice too. When people in G4 Tag or in top Plat arena make a suggestion about my teams, I listen. No ego driven complaining from me, cause I'm just trying to get better. :)

I wish it was easier to get through to people that we are trying to help them, that there are counters to literal every champion in Raid, and that we've all been there, that we've all pushed through the same levels, the same kind of champs, the same meta. That when champs like Rotos and Tormin were fusions, that we had to learn to deal with them too. That the old arena used to require 300+ speed High Khatun to sneak into Gold for the Arbiter missions, and that it took months of farming Dragon to even start to compete in Silver. Now it is just "build your nuker properly" or "snag a Destroy set" and people may not know it, but they would infinitely prefer to be here than back in the 300+ speed meta for G1.

Anyways, we get these rant threads with every new arena meta fusion or free champ really. I just thought it was funny you mentioned Rudolph and the rage over him was even more off the charts than for UDK. lol

Nothing wrong with us noobs getting legend monsters - because we won't have the runes to do much with them anyway. :)

Collecting different monsters and seeing different possibilities is one of the exciting parts of starting a game like this. It's what holds our interest enough to grind for artifacts to make them feel useful to us. Which is never going to be enough to catch up to established players any time soon. :) 

That's what people don't get: strategies, builds, team comps, and synergies are so much more valuable to this game than champions themselves. Gear takes time, getting champions takes time (or money).....learning to play is free.....and these people throw it away.

I don't care how game-changing a champion is....working strategies in this game are far more valuable. People just take it for granted because it's available to everyone. 

People don't want to learn anything or use strategy. Most just want to open shards... 😆 

 I have to agree,

Look at the tons of post here and on other sites complaining about the UNBEATABLE UDK (since that was the last free to everyone login Lego). 

I haven't been around long but I'm sure this has been the case every time a Lego is "given" away. 

There were still a ton of UDK tears even after veterans of the game wrote post after post on how to build a team and harleQuinn put together an amazing article showing that on a low level FTP account, using one of the starter champions (not even Kael), using just the free login and campaign gear, that it was indeed possible to go from Bronze 1 to Silver 4 (I believe) in the land of the Ultimate Death Knights... 

If Plarium wants to give away Champions (don't get me wrong, I'd love a new Legendary 😁) then base it on Player Level:

Player Lvl 1 to 20 - Rare Champion. 

Player Lvl 21 to 40 - Epic Champion. 

Player Lvl 41 and up - Legendary Champion. 

She did in fact make it to Gold 1. :)

As for level gating: I would not be a fan of this change, regardless of the saltiness we see from time to time. I would rather see more legendary log-in champs given out rather than less, or none at all to brand new accounts.

Whatever negatives free legendaries might present at the beginning of their release as it pertains to brand new accounts is far, far outweighed by the long term net positives. Those champs help new players leap frog through content, provided they utilize those champions well. 

Level gating is also a pretty good way to make newer players feel slighted if not pushing them away from the game. I don't think it's a great approach to punish players or prevent them from getting ahold of impactful champions. Especially wouldn't want to do it because of making some new(er) players angry because they can't see the forest for the trees.

That's kinda how some of tha tournaments are.  Players of certain level got Royal Guard, higher level players got KRISK wahahaha

i think there was another between them as well.

but those were not give always, you had to work.  

I could see alot more people quiting if this plan was implemented. The shiney is what alot of people like. I pulled alot of shards early. I got the champions to build my teams that way though. Then I settled down and started watching video's and asking questions to build those champs. With alot of help from those on this forum. 

I love cracking 3,000 greenies for a fusion champ.  lol

Not sure how many times we have to go over this... sigh.

First of all, essentially no-one complained about deliana or aleksander in arena when they were new and in 80% of defense teams. There is a real difference with UDK, who requires advanced game knowledge and optimal builds to beat, because of how defensively oriented he is. Not unbeatable, but that doesn't matter.

Anyway, the attitude of a lot of people here seems to be that it's important to prevent noobs from having an easier time than earlier players, or heaven forbid receive a tool they don't know how to use (yet).

Just because arena has been even worse in the past than now, doesn't mean that the current experience is in any way good.

Do you guys even understand that onboarding of new players is a thing? 

Edited by your friendly Mod team to comply with Forum rules.

  This started off short but turned into a long post.... sorry. 😁 

Urlibu, 

First of all I'm a "Noob" myself. As of right now I have exactly 68 days experience in Raid. I feel that this gives me a really good view on what the "New Player" Experience is.

Please don't assume that because I'm new to Raid that I am also ignorant when discussing games, game mechanics, game design ect. I was playing RPGs when they were text based. I have a good understanding of game mechanics, gearing, etc. as in those 68 days I've been able to accomplish the following: 

• Clear through 12-5 Nightmare Campaign (That last boss is a pain in the...) 
• 2 key Nightmare CB daily and looking to push into Ultra-Nightmare soon. 
• Hit Platinum Arena (my stay was short but long enough to get a screenshot 😁).  
• All the lvl 20 potion keeps on auto farm. 
• Dragon 25 on auto (although very slow). 
• Clear Spider, Ice Golem, & Fire Knight lvl 20s on auto. 
• 3 key the lowest Normal Hydra Chest. 
• Clear Normal Doom Tower. 

All of this was due to finding a supportive clan, TAKING ADVISE from veterans such as dthorne04, harleQuinn and others here on the forums (no one seems to want to do this anymore) and watching YouTubers such as Hellhades, Deadwoodjedi etc.  

So here we go:

I think giving new players OP Champions / Gear / Resources ect. hurts any game in the long run. Although it will draw in new players, the long-term consequences actually hurts player retention and sets these new players up for frustration and failure in the near future.  

*Disclaimer: I'm going to use UDK as an example since being relatively new to the Raid community this is the "free" legendary I have the most experience with and am most familiar with the issues involving him. 

100%... a Legendary given to new players does give them the ability to blast through content and makes the lower-level content much easier, in fact, it makes it trivial. The issue is...  that lower-level content was designed and tuned in a way that was supposed to assist players with progressing in not only Player Power but Player Skill and UNDERSTANDING of the Game and its mechanics.  

When new players get a Lego, such as UDK, who can solo steam roll through most, if not all, of that lower-level content (the content that was designed to teach them about things such as team composition, gearing, synergy, etc.) then those players don't gain the knowledge and experience needed to progress later in the game. 

It disrupts the way the game was designed in regards to champion gearing and leveling as well. I'm sure (as with most game design) that these levels were built to require a certain level of "team power" to complete and these levels give a set amount of XP and gear needed prepare that team for the next level. RPG games are not designed to run through every level on the first attempt (at least none of the ones I've played have been). You run a level, you die, you go to the previous levels and gain some XP / get better gear, then try the level you failed again. This cycle repeats as you progress and is really the heart of an RPG. It builds and devlops your champions. The thing is when you're playing these levels with the champions and gear the devloper had in mind when they designed the game and you fail a level, normally a few runs of previous levels is all you need to increase your champion's power through XP or gear enough to succeed. 

When a new player receives something OP for the stage of the game they are in and allows them to run through this leveling content in one shot, they don't get the XP and gear needed for the other Champions on their team. Since they ran through the campaign so fast, in order to progress their other champions they are forced to go back and basically "grind" to bring them to a sufficent power / gear level before they can progress. Grinding XP in Raid with a 10 sec campaign farmer on 12-3 brutal is boring enough. Now imagine you're 2 weeks into the game and realize that you need to run Hard campaign levels over and over @ 2 minuites per run before you are able to progress.

When players don't learn and understand the mechanics of the game, they will eventually hit a wall no matter what champions you hand them. If you don't believe that knowledge of game mechanics is greater than the champions you have on an account just go watch one of the 100 Hell Hades "Account Takeover" videos. Watch him take an account that is struggling to clear a lvl 20 Dungeon, tweak it with nothing but the gear and champions that player already had in their inventory, and proceed to put the same Dungeon on auto farm @ level 25. Watch him take an Arena team that is struggling in Gold 2 or 3, regear and SPEED tune it, then proceed to win 10 arena matches in a row. 

Another negative thing a Legendary like UDK does to new players is give them a false sense of their perceived power.  

They can't understand why they were dust rolling everyone through Bronze 4 on auto with their 5* UDK in free Lifesteal Gear and 3 level 30s but now that they've hit Silver 1 and encountered older accounts with actual gear, some semblance of team composition, speed tuning, etc. they can't win a single match. (I will say that Silver Arena is broken... it took me longer to get through Silver 4 than it did to go from Gold 1 to Platinum).  

They can't understand why they blasted through the Normal and Hard Campaigns and cleared through the first 10 Dungeon levels on auto but all the sudden their Lego isn't OP anymore and now they can't progress.  

At this point they either: 

Like the game enough that they go back and work on grinding gear and leveling the Rare / Epic Champions they've neglected up to this point (because they weren’t needed to progress until now). For a lot of new players this makes them feel like they are going backwards, they get bored, and they quit. 

OR  

Since everything so far has been "easy mode" then the reason they've hit this progression wall is because "the game is broken", "the game is designed to be unfair", "the game is designed to be PTW", etc. Since they've never had to do anything up to this point other than press "Start" in order to progress now they don't have a clue how to counter the new intermediate content. They become frustrated and they quit.  

I know everyone won't agree but as a new player to Raid but with a good bit of gaming experience in general this is what I see.   

Actually we don't prevent noobs from having an easier time, we help them to have an easier time.

If experienced players tell noobs that they need heal reduction or decrease of enemy max hp to beat UDK, if we tell noobs to do 12-3 campaign to get their champs at lvl 60 and if we tell noobs to farm Dragon 20 to get better gear, we help them - and get ranted for doing so by people like you. Undank ist der Welten Lohn (literally: Ungratefulness is the reward of the world). 

@Kankle69 

That's good progress on the early game! I am 270 days in, and my first 3 months were roughly similar (except for never getting into plat). But lately I've been playing through 6 free accounts, for no particular reason ;), so I have a lot of fresh early game experience to base my opinions on.

In terms of game design in general, I agree with everything you're saying. However, in raid we don't exactly have a finely tuned early game anyways, so adding a free leggo can hardly make things worse.

1) GEAR

The starting gear you're given is way too powerful. Something on the level of your initial 4-5* pieces of lifesteal can't easily be farmed until about 2 weeks into the game. On top of this you get a couple of 5* speed pieces. Any reasonably played account will use only these initial pieces, getting them to 16 asap, even though the game interface is literally discouraging you from doing this (by blocking the "upgrade to 12" and 16 options, and not giving you instant upgrade until level 40). All other gear is just temporary filler, to be thrown away at the first opportunity.

Gear rating goes from 1-6*, but from day 1, literally day 1 of your account, anything under 4* is crap not worth investing into. After 1-2 weeks, 4* is obsolete too (except for the pieces you've already rolled to 12+ of course). But the game through its quests and challenges literally pushes you towards farming 2* atk% boots on normal campaign. That's just a bad joke.

Arena and CB rewards are just completely out of whack. The gear is shit until you're around gold IV and brutal clan boss. Lower levels of clan boss are barely worth doing, and I've never used a 5* uncommon divine offense item other than as FW filler gear.

2) CHAMPIONS

There are hundreds of champions. But you learn really fast to ignore commons and uncommons. Guess what, you should also ignore 95% of rares. And about half of all the epics. I was really struck when playing through my 6 extra accounts how bad most champions are. Like, you're better off investing more into the 2-3 good champs you have, rather than building a shitty one just for their heal reduction or other supposed "specialist" role. What hurt my 1st account the most was naively thinking that champions lived on a relatively flat power curve, like in more traditional games such as MTG. I took way too many champs to 50 "because they might be useful at some point".

For things like clan boss, you're not looking for generic, strong champions. Rather, you're looking for very specific sets of buffs and debuffs (while ignoring all other effects). Most damage comes from poisons and warmaster, and appyling any sort of common sense while building a team will actually lead you astray.

So, the problem is hardly that players get a free UDK. Rather, initial progression is extremely slow, and small mistakes get punished and amplified. All the while you're bombarded with terrible options that you're supposed to know to ignore.

A solid (but not top tier) legendary champ just gets you faster to the actually interesting part of the game, where you have a basic team established and can gear new champions decently when you get them. I can attest to this as there is a huge difference between my older accounts where I got free champs compared to the newer ones where I didn't. On my best account I pulled one great leggo (Brogni), together with Deliana, UDK, and some other ok epics / leggos. It feels like playing a "real" account ~45 days in. The worst account is just sad in comparison. Pulled literally nothing worth building in the first 10 days, so it feels like wading through muck.

I've said before that raid sort of stumbled into having a really varied and engaging mid and late game. But on any objective scale of game design, it is an utterly terrible game. I just throw my hands up in the air every time I see other games (dyslite, EE) blindly copy some of their worst design choices, like flat stats on gear. LOL.

Anyways, thanks for engaging thoughtfully!

In this very thread people are saying that n00bs shouldn't get good champs that "they don't know how to handle". If I dare to critizise the current state of arena, people tell me all about the 300 speed high khatuns they needed to get into gold. Whether or not the current arena experience is actually good in an absolute sense doesn't seem to matter to them. Spouting true facts that answer the entirely wrong questions.

You're also misrepresenting what I've said. I've never ranted at people for helping others. I've ranted at people for being willfully blind towards the real problems with this game. Stuff like @harleQuinn's experiment with arena was really cool to see. Trying to find empirical answers, showing how the problem of UDK can be surmounted. But I can't fail to notice the sort of sneering tone that goes along with it, the pretending that strategic knowledge accumulated over months of playing is obvious, not caring that people who engage with the game at a lower intensity should maybe also have fun.

Anyway, just a bad look for a community that I've otherwise found wonderful and very helpful.

1. I don't care if noobs get a UDK......I get frustrated when they start b**** and moaning because they don't know what to do with other players' UDKs. 

2. The "sneering tone" you are talking about is because of countless threads by people who just started playing, complaining about UDK in arena, and barking back when offered any constructive advice. In the last month, I've heard people call High Khatun a garbage champ, people threatening to quit, and mocking the moderators for giving advice. 

3. People who engage the game at lower intensity (and really, everybody) should work on gear way before they start focusing on Arena. Arena is gear intensive content, period. You don't throw your farmer +3 chickens in there expecting to blast through everybody. 

This community can only handle so much of entitled brats creating accounts to just complain. There has to be a back and forth. I struggled with Faction Wars, I asked for advice....AND I LISTENED. When I meet a challenge, I come here, I ask a question....AND I LISTEN. Good things tend to happen when you ask and listen. 

P.S. We can have a conversation if at least one of them shows their arena team.....we've been asking them to post their roster and their builds since the beginning of this mess. There is one guy who posted it and who reached Gold 1 within week 3 with a 97% CDMG Kael and no defense debuffer. If that is too much to ask, maybe they're not ready for a leggo. 

Sure, people complain mindlessly. I'm not defending assholes who come here asking for everything on a silver platter. But I also think that the advice being thrown around is often only part of the story, thrown at those noobs as if it was "the" correct answer.

"Use heal reduction champs" ... well, do you mean actually build them? Like, take a shit-tier champ like rocktooth and put actual resources into them? that's a terrible idea! At most, you'd want to take him to level 40, throw as much speed and accuracy onto him, and hope to place the debuff before he gets killed. But that part of the advice gets left out. Or the fact that a 4* chicken is extremely valuable until you have at least 3-4 rank 6 champs.

"Just use a destroy set" ... again, same thing. How much stats is it worth giving up for wearing that destroy set? does this mean the champ in question is 100% dedicated to arena? Where do you get the millions of silver needed to make that build, and could that silver be spent elsewhere? Nope, none of that discussion.

About what you say in point 3. I actually agree! Arena is not content meant for month 1 players! But people suggest to throw more and more attention into arena. And the terrible design of the daily rewards makes this worse. From day 2 onwards, plarium is telling you to play arena every day. The climb is fast enough that people inevitably hit defenses they can't beat. Most people aren't interested in arena, but you don't get that energy refill (or eventually that sacred shard) if you don't do it EVERY DAY. And when it takes multiple refreshes to get those 5 one-man defenses, or even worse, conceding 5 battles on purpose, the huge, pointless time waste of it becomes apparent.

I know I'm going against the grain of the forum here, but asking people to "show their arena team" really isn't a productive direction. "Don't worry about arena, just cheese it until you organically end up building at least 75% of a team" is the advice I'd give.

The whole thing infuriates me because you're telling those players to waste a bunch of resources in non-essential areas, when PvE progress is way more important in that crucial early stage of the game. As I've said before: even small mistakes in resource allocation get punished severely by this game. Do you disagree?

Whelp, I see you've tagged me into this, and then immediately called me sneering after, then stated I pretend strategic knowledge is obvious, and that I don't care about people having fun.

I would hope that taking the time to create and build an account, and do the brutal food grind for taking champs to 6 stars, then running a ton of arena matches would be enough to show I obviously care about my community here. No one forced me to spend my time that way. No one forced me to say "I wonder how much of this is real, or how much is just people not understanding how to win in Arena cause their own UDK lets them steamroll everything before." Nor did anyone force me to take that question and then test the complaints about UDK, to see if there were legitimate concerns or if this was the same thing as Reinbeast or Ninja or Tormin. No one forced me to share my screenshots, findings, or builds.

I didn't get anything from that time I spent except being called sneering, a liar, and stupid.

What I had hoped, instead of that. was to learn if he was unbeatable, and how one might would beat him, then share my experience doing so. And how did I beat him? And what did I share being necessary? Well, it ended up being the thing you accuse the forum of not doing for people.... PvE progress, campaign farming, recommending that they rank their champs to 60. I say it over and over in my thread. Rank your champs to 60!

What I didn't do was take my years of "strategic knowledge" from playing, or even from two years of advising people on how to build arena teams, and hand waive it away as obvious. Instead of building my Tayrel to go in front of Athel, and my TM boosting Kinagashi to go before them all, my AoE Dec Def had to sit 60 speed below my nuker and be basically a wasted slot the whole time. Building a speed nuke team is easy for me, and it really only takes farming Palace of Aravia for a week for gear to set up the basics. But I didn't do that, I wanted a fair shake....to test the bottom limits of how you can make Silver, then went ahead and pushed on to Gold cause we were still steamrolling. By doing so, I hoped to clearly demonstrate the grind was a bit less terrible than many people across many platforms were making it out to be. Going 134-3 and making Gold 1, hitting every team on every page until Silver 4, then being a little more selective after.... it took ranking two champs to rank 6, and using a mostly upgraded starter lifesteal set, and the 4 piece Regen given to you in the first few of the daily logins.

You would hope that this is a hopeful message. "He CAN be beaten and you don't even need a Heal Reduction champ or Destroy set! Just go rank up food to get your team and nuker to the stronger 6 star version!" This seems to be exactly the advice you are accusing people of not giving.

As far as "spouting true facts to the entirely wrong questions", perhaps you can cool that down a bit. Many of us giving advice, or building accounts just to test our own advice, see Arena as easier than it has ever been. We are attempting to share with people trying to beat UDK that the solutions are incredibly linear right now. UDK can be answered in a lot of ways, and learning to counter specific champs (and following from that, bosses) is a huge and necessary step to truly progressing into the more difficult and deeper areas of the game. Learning to counter a champ like UDK by 1) Ranking your champs  2) Learning to regear your DPS  3) Learning to bring in a specific countering debuff 4) Learning to bring in a specific countering set... all of that is great advice that will help players throughout the game, and it certainly isn't a bridge too far. Before the only real advice involved months of farming AFTER ranking your champs before you could even play outside of Bronze. "Dragon 20 for 90 days" was the only real advice you could give people, and that was a real problem.

On the good side of this, I am super glad to see @Kankle69's post above yours, which shows the time spent on that UDK Arena test account, nor on this forum in general, that time is not a total loss. I hope the post, and my posts in general, continue to be helpful to people, showing them that a rage echo chamber isn't the way to progress, nor is a total unwillingness to hear ways to improve. Cause you see, UDK is not going to be nerfed, Arena will not be changed to remove leggos from Bronze, nor any of those style things. Neither will the Login Legendaries, so I would think you take suggestions as like "Don't provide Leggos to new players" with a grain of salt too.

Hopefully with the advice here people can, instead of focusing in on the single champ they are struggling with, focus in on the two weeks of farming food that can help them make the progress they'd like to see in Arena, and in the game as a whole.

Just a side note, I see you talking about people should just ignore Arena early. Perhaps that is how you are doing it that way on your referral accounts. It is, however, not the way I would recommend anyone do it on their real accounts. The goal there is not just to "Get an account to Level 50" then quit, like you will be doing. Instead, those people need to make real progress on their accounts they will be playing for a long time. They can't just leave their account in the trash. This means they need to start seriously pushing up the dungeons and clan boss. Great Hall bonuses and even more so, Arena Tier bonuses, make a huge difference for whether people can complete Dragon 20, or Spider 13 or when they move into Nightmare CB. Takeover after takeover, a regearing that moves someone up in Arena also significantly improves their teams and performance in the PvE side of content.

Lastly, even if this whole exercise of making an account to test a player problem, or sharing how I dealt with that problem is not really your speed, I do wish my working with Plarium during my free time, or my 4424 posts here would indicate I care about the experience players have in the game.