Seems like a good change.
The problem is (was?) that the conflicting rulesets in silver and gold don't allow cross-play between the two tiers. So the krakens have no incentive to move to gold, because they immediately get matched against a tiny pool of top players, and environment in which its practically impossible to climb.
This change will greatly accelerate the playerbase getting spread out, and populating gold. Which should be a virtuous cycle: the better the spread of players, the more incentivized people are to play more, which will make it even better, and so on.
Honestly, the best solution would have been to have a period after launch with simplified rules, then introduce stuff like the current gold tier rules as a second step.
Why isn't live arena avaiable all the time?
Plarium mentioned in their initial announcement there were concerns about long que times if Live Arena was open all the time.
Out of curiosity if Live Arena was open all the time and as a result que times were increased what would you find acceptable for the time frame? 30 seconds, 1 minute?
No length of times changed.
No medal conversions changed.
I guess this will start to inflate the tiers? It doesn't really address the main issue of time.
How do you think the time frames should be changed? Reduce all selection times by 25%, 50% and limit the maximum battle time to 10 or 15 minutes? I'd love to hear how much time other players would be willing to commit to this daily.
Also hopefully inflating tiers will lead to better matchmaking and quicker fights overall.
Sounds like they have doubled down on matchmaking by power level with their talk of 'fair battles'
I know some like it, personally i think anything other than a simple ladder on pvp is a bad idea.
But i am not the target audience, i have played less than 20 matches as it simply takes too long.
I had been trying to avoid being pulled up to a higher rank than necessary in the LIVE ARENA until this update was added. If I was matched with an unfavorable opponent, I immediately surrendered to reduce my points and fought only against evenly matched or favorable opponents. By doing so, I was able to focus my resources only on matches that I thought I could win, rather than spending time and energy on matches that I was likely to lose. In the first place, I don't find LIVE ARENA fun, so I only do it to win medals and advance the Hydra content in my favor.
However, with this shitty update, I've been pulled up to a higher rank no matter how hard I try and have to devote my time and energy to every match. Medals are harder to earn and I have to devote more time and energy to this uninteresting content than before.
That LIVE ARENA is uninteresting is evident from the fact that half of the respondents to Cold brew gaming's community survey said they do not play it.
Quickly do something about this content created for self-satisfaction.
still a majpr headache to deal with the 30 min wait time on an apparant tie. I came up with an alternate activity (play another game) while waiting for the Raid game to finish, but now that is hosed up also.
I keep getting the blue screen of death, which is a plarium message that the game is having issues and I am presented with a choice of continuimg or contacting support. This happens way too often, multiple times in every battle. If I am not watching to press "continue", then I will get booted on the game, they say I left it and dock me point or two. Obviously this is a Plarium trick to keep you engaged even in a dead deal.
Please change the 30 min limit to 12 or so.
I think you guys at Plarium have already done a lot to make the Live Area better. But you guys still haven't addressed the elephant in the room. It's hard enough to beat a whale account but for the life of me, I don't understand why you are giving them an unfair advantage. Letting players use champs that are restricted or no longer available to newer players or without access to them is unknown to me. Champs like Ninja of course and Aleksandr, Rhonda. Tonight out of 10 matches I saw Ninja in 5 of those and Aleksandr just as much as him and Rhonda being the most common of the three. The silver league is like going to ocean world to see the whales row over the waves but here get to watch them row over your ass to the next rank. I hope that maybe you guys at Plarium will address this issue so that you're putting none of your players at a disadvantage.
I don't mind the changes. One one hand, the match-making is actually worse than it was. My 1550 points getting matched with 1800+ players. But, here's what's funny, it's actually a time saver LOL. When i see this, the battle takes 0 minutes, i just leave. And reversely, it happens i fight guys with 1350 points, and they auto-leave on me. So in fact, my 10 runs take less time now than they used to.