Yes arena is a grind, it used to be much harder than at present however. When i went for my arbiter i spent a lot of time struggling. Its free kills nowadays.

UDK is easy to deal with after playing for a while. He might be used a lot in lower arena levels but really isnt meta in defence.

The counter for UDK, Ronda, who can block his passive, was given for free to everybody.

it wasnt that easy for newer players especially.  Sure in same gear it probably is, but again the smurfing is a widespread problem in Raid in general, ( caused by the grind incentive over rating incentive aforementioned), but compounded by UDK and his force affinity.

older playres and plarium have to understand that what is being asked of newer players is to fight the same annoying guy about 99% of the time for possibly months to who knows how long.   And you WILL LOSE almost every battle against UDK until you meet a threshold.  There will be no variety for what seems an eternity.  

I could not beat most UDKs with Rhonda.  It's a tall order when most players with UDK have been around longer, and have much better gear.  Rhonda's skills are definitely good against UDK, but she's still magic vs force affinity.  Those two factors means a long grind to even get on par.   For those that even missed the Rhonda event, no option there either.

The only thing that gave me a chance was Elhain's blessings.  

I just want to reemphasize, and question again is anything going to be done about the smurfing?  

There is a great amount of variance in the leagues from people farming in lower leagues instead of playing against equally powerful accounts.   And tag team arena is just way worse.  

Smurfing? Lol.

There is zero reason not to just stay in G5. Just farm one-man defense teams. Nobody will intentionally lower their arena rating anymore.

The only way to lower your arena tier without wasting tokens is putting up a crappy defense....where is the issue? If it's UDK traps for miles, that doesn't sound like people dropping on purpose....it looks more like they are desperate to stay where they are. 

I tend to put in a one man defence to keep myself mid G5 rather than the top of G5 or plat, but yes i agree. 

What the heck.  Lol.  You're saying to stay in gold 5 when that's an upper echelon. Of course if you've made it you'd stay there.  Look, the smurfing is widespread.  There's very wide variance in power, with disparities up to 200%.    And ya there's quite a few rollover defense teams too 

The UDK issue does become better in the higher gold tiers. There, seeing a team made up of free champs (UDK, ronda, Deliana, Ninja, Aleksander, Scyl, High Khatun) is a clear sign that the team will be easy to defeat, as it's likely to be an underdeveloped account.

As noted several issues: 

1) totally stale gameplay.   Look I've played a fair share of competitive games. Was even pro for a short while for warcraft and wow.  Good game designers are always trying to get variety in meta.  Great designers get variety at multiple levels of play.  This UDK prevalence is a very bad sign for low to mid tier.  This is one of the worse I've seen.  The only grace i concede is this is not a pvp oriented game, which is why I'm asking what is Plariums actual vision for arena 

2).  My guess is people probably go back and forth, turning on a real defense and no defense to hover at a farmable League.  Again this is the problem with grindable currency. You're not going for your best but for what's easy.  This means the pvp isn't pair matching, it's more eating the weaker.   That would be stale pvp.  Again, asking what is Plariums vision.   

3) maybe the second point isn't true.  Regardless, the power variance of teams is extreme.  I'm at 72k right now and theres plenty of 140k teams, and some 60k.   Is this working as intended?   These mass disparities sure seem like smurfing 

I believe you but if Plarium is asking people to build for years before they can start enjoying arena then they're asking for too much 

I'm really struggling not to just respond "git gud".

Most people in G5 literally just put 1-man defense teams. They don't care about arena defense at all. There is no advantage whatsoever to lowering your arena ranking. And getting into G5 is simply a matter of spending some time with refreshes to reach it - because once you're in G5, staying there is effortless. And yes - I'm saying even for "new players".

Your claim of "wide variance in power" is really quite indicative of not really understanding how arena works at all.

Not years, a few months, and knowing how to build champs.

Well that is definitely much more comforting.  But that's still kind ridiculous.   People should be matching with their appropriate competition at all levels.  

Just to be clear I am doing pretty well for my time played (about 50 logins).  Made it to gold 2 at one point.  However there was no incentive as the league reward was pitiful and the medals were to be found at much lower leagues.  It just irks me the matchmaking system doesn't seem right. 

Gosh, don't try to rank in arena at that level, just farm it: put up a single weak champ defence and farm the bronze and silver tiers for points. Weak defence gives you easy opponents. Heck, been playing around 80 days now and touched gold for the first time ever today, and even then by accident - I lost track and thought I was headed to silver IV. Spent rest of my tokens purposefully losing battles on auto to drop my ranking, so I'll be ready for the next arena tournament.

Yes indeed!  I think most of us agree on this but as you can see so many are not aware or even denying this phenomenon.   

 I'm really confused by this. "However there was no incentive as the league reward was pitiful and the medals were to be found at much lower leagues. 

How is there more incentive to be in the lower leagues?  

If you are talking about farming medals... You do realize that 2 Bronze Medals = 1 Silver Medal & 2 Silver Medals = 1 Gold Medal right?  

You can use Gold Medals to level up your Great Hall Bonuses even though the chart on the side shows bronze for levels 1 - 3 and sliver for levels 4 - 6.  

To level a 0/10 bonus cost either 50 Bronze Medals, 25 Silver Medals, or 13 Gold Medals. So at G5 you only need 4 wins to level a bonus from 0/10 to 1/10. That same boost would take 9 wins in Silver 4 and 25 wins in Bronze 4. In a single day (20 wins) @ G5 will give you enough medals to level 6 different GH bonuses from 0/10 to 1/10. 

On top of that, you receive stat bonuses for every arena rank just by being in that tier. Currently @ G5 I get +22% to Health, Attack, & Defense just for being in G5. The bonus in S4 is only 12%.  This bonus applies to the entire game, not just arena.

If you are referring to the difficulty of the matches... G5 is far and away the easiest bracket to stay in once you get there. I win my 20 arena matches every day fighting nothing but 1 man defenses. Honestly, my biggest issue is making sure I don't get so far above 3200 arena points that I can't get the easy wins.

I'm chiming in here as a new player, around 40 days of excessive gameplay, and with more spending than I like to admit. I am completely fed up with UDK in arena. He is so broken at the level he is at, and as mentioned above he seems to be in a very high % of enemy team comps. For whatever reason, going from 5* to 6* is like an exponential jump in his survivability, and I don't even like to think about the hours of my life wasted trying to take down a 60 UDK after the rest of his team is long-gone. 

Many times I have just forfeited the win because he just doesn't die. You can get him down to nothing in health and he can just hover there, seemingly invincible forever. 50 UDK seem to die within a round once down to nothing. But the 60's live on forever taunting you with the smug constant lines of 'too awesome to die' and 'everyone get comfy'. I personally think Plarium created the guy to troll the player base as hard as possible with all his mechanics and his absurd run. 

My team that has done the best so far vs UDK teams is 60 Pythion, 60 Ronda with brimstone, 60 Fellhound, and 50 Magnarr. The Ronda and Fellhound have full masteries. Fellhound is fully booked and in 6 pieces of legendary instinct gear and his A1 aoe is one of the few reliable things that I find I can use freely when Ronda doesn't have her A2 blocks on UDK. And yet even when his bar is empty I have yet to see a brimstone proc actually kill him. The games sometimes show UDK with stats in the millions for damage done, damage taken, and healing done. If I didn't have Ronda, I don't know what I would do. I have fought tons of UDKs now and sometimes they die and sometimes they don't, though they almost always get their bar to empty whether it takes a short effort or a long one to get there. So why do they suddenly get so invincible when they are empty bar?

In terms of arena matchups. it seems that in Silver 2, where I have basically been sitting since day 1 in the arena, that most of the available matchups are significantly higher power level than me. Does this mean that I am playing above my level? It seems that at least 2 50s on the enemy team means I will be able to do well vs them. Unless they happen to all be legendaries, which I find happens way too much. Or if one is a 60 UDK. This sure seems like the majority of all of my available matchups. Occasionally I will get a decent refresh where half the games are winnable. But this is the exception rather than the rule. And tag-team is a whole other level of imbalanced. In there I am Bronze 2, and pretty much 80% of my matchup options have 2-4 60s on every team, and it's hard for me to find matchups in either arena version where the enemy team has a power level that isn't significantly higher than mine.

I don't mind the grind, or the learning curve and yet UDK is a massive hindrance to fun and is IMO bad design balance.

Everyone says use ronda to beat death knight. My ronda can barely hurt him. I looked online at gear and set up what heroes i have with the gear that is recommended. If ultimate death knight is the only guy on the other team left my entire team cannot stop him even when ronda disables his moves. the 2 turns is not enough and he often just tanks the whole team, heals all the way up, then slowly kills my whole team. if i try to kill him first then the entire enemy team is able to beat my guys before we are able to take out death knight. what I am seeing here is I have to just deal with this for months or maybe years before i get passed this? other suggestion is to use specific heroes I have no way of getting outside of pure luck with shards that i cant get? 

This has got to be the worse pvp system i have seen in any video game. if this is what this game is about i am out. if you guys enjoy it then cool good for you but for me this is absolutely horrible and im not sure how this game is so popular. 

I found it best to make Ronda 6* and ensure she's got fast boots on - then for her first attack, use her A2 into UDK to kill his passive heal. 

However, the higher you rise up in arena the more challenging those UDK's can get - BUT if you're early game at the very least you want to maintain a low arena ranking to farm for arena points, and make for easy arena tournament wins (along with all the prizes you get from those). 

That means putting up a single weak 1* champion defence, so that you're easily beaten, keeping your arena ranking low.

When you do that, the UDK you meet in Bronze tiers tends to be less of a problem all round, you get your wins and points and prizes and by the time your team improves enough to want to challenge silver, then gold - in order to satsfy the in game challenges - your team will be strong enough to deal with most of the UDK's you meet on the way up.

The mistake most people make is thinking that they're supposed to rank well in arena from the start - and those stat bonuses on offer are tiny and not going to make any real difference to your champs at low levels.

2c.