Tyrant Tommy said:

Solution: Allow all medals to be used for all upgrade tiers (not stopping at 5 or w/e the cap is) and increase medals by 2x for bronze and silver. Gold would still be the highest value then for every 2 silver it counts as 1 gold and 4 bronze for 1 gold. This will allow weaker players to grind arena at the right level for them and still make progress.

This would actually make arena worse for lower tier like bronze, because I would bet you, a lot of higher level players would sandbag themselves and go down tiers to get easier match up.

People have even already doing this right now, they don't want to use silver medals for bronze level upgrade making them throwing themselves down to bronze to finish their upgrade in Bronze before going back up. A couple of YouTubers even advocate for this tactic.

What we need if anything is to double gold medals so people would want to go up, as of right now, the incentive to go up is not much, why would anyone want to go to silver 1 when the reward at Bronze 3 and 4 is equivalent in value? 

Good point! Keeping incentive to stay in Gold, I guess part of my issue is that a lot of folks in Bronze and Silver are already facing against 3-6month old Plat teams (I know my alt can't even hit bronze 2 due to this) The whole thing is really screwed up. Maybe they need to revise the game so you can't just suicide arena matches to drop your rank and the only way to drop rank is to lose defense (which is good since we might promote more flimsy defenses). 

Did the ranking used to be based on player offense team score vs player defense team score within a bracket? That seems to make a lot more sense, I read that it is based on total player power now, which I think is why I am fucked. I have a solid 3 key UNM team and auto stage 20 on the dungeons and never really put time into arena so my arena team doesn't have my best gear and i don't have amazing units built for it. 

I think reducing the points you lose on defense by half would help. I am 126-42 (75%) since reset and I haven't made it to silver3 yet. Lol

The fix ? you don't even see the root cause of the problem, how can you fix it ? 

What is called Root cause ? Imagine an alien tree grow up and break your house, to rescue the house you cut its branches, because you never know the Root cause of the problem. Solution: it only take 1 day to cut the root, instead of spending 1 life to cut the branches. 

https://plarium.com/forum/en/raid-shadow-legends/674_game-discussion/200406_what-is-happening-with-the-arena-/