Hard to answer actually. A couple of weeks ago, suddenly people started occasionally getting free wins - sometimes after a refresh, you'd suddenly see a full slate of 10 weak teams (like, player level 30 with a mostly rare/epic and really badly designed teams). And thanks to that, everybody who had reached at least a certain level in arena was suddenly able to push into higher tiers - which also made things easier for others, because they could now fight their fellow fast climbers who were much more beatable than the overpowered teams that had been there before. And then as people got back to the tiers they wanted to be in, you also started to see more deliberately weak defenses again, which had almost disappeared while arena was so hard. 

So now I guess things have mostly stabilized again, but with many people still in a far higher tier than they were a month ago. I climbed from silver III to gold IV and am now able to stay there without any trouble. Not sure if the free wins are still around - personally I haven't seen any for a number of days now. 

The real question is how sustainable all this is - even if there are still free wins now, they announced that they would disappear eventually, question is then how long it would take until people like you and me start getting squeezed out of gold again...  

Every non-bot page looks like this in my refreshes. No way I'm beating any of them. I know I'll be out of gold-4 in no time if bots disappear.

Sometimes teams are led be Skullcrown or Gorgorab instead of Arbiter. Sometimes there is a lone Arbiter from a real player for 1 win.

Still get free wins every day, but have to refresh a lot. Sometimes bot teams are even higher in power than my team.

Also, we would like to shed some light on the subject of those low-level accounts that a lot of you have already witnessed on the Arena with some refreshes. The reason they appeared there is that, after the technical problems that 2.20 release brought, we added more segments to the server so that the load would distribute more evenly and the server felt better during activity peaks. This led to the opponents distribution algorithms getting skewed a little - low-level accounts started occasionally appearing in all Tiers. This deviation will disappear eventually.

SunnyRay said:

Also, we would like to shed some light on the subject of those low-level accounts that a lot of you have already witnessed on the Arena with some refreshes. The reason they appeared there is that, after the technical problems that 2.20 release brought, we added more segments to the server so that the load would distribute more evenly and the server felt better during activity peaks. This led to the opponents distribution algorithms getting skewed a little - low-level accounts started occasionally appearing in all Tiers. This deviation will disappear eventually.

We can take this statement for what it is but IMO most people are having a positive experience in arena right now and things seem to be looking up. However the current state of arena shouldn't be a reason to stop with working on your arena comps/strategies. :)

ok, so help me understand: I believed that the improvement seen in the arena was due to a rebalancing of the entire system by the developers, finally thinking of playing a well-balanced game, and instead it is solely due to a matchmaking bug that is it destined to disappear in a few weeks? Or was this somehow intentional? Will they take into consideration the idea that things are okay or are you telling me that I will go back to reeling in silver 3 against defenses with 4 legendary voids at 60?

Lxzy said:

We can take this statement for what it is but IMO most people are having a positive experience in arena right now and things seem to be looking up. However the current state of arena shouldn't be a reason to stop with working on your arena comps/strategies. :)

Of course we are having a positive experience :)

Every non-bot page looks like this in my refreshes. No way I'm beating any of them. I know I'll be out of gold-4 in no time if bots disappear.

Sometimes teams are led be Skullcrown or Gorgorab instead of Arbiter. Sometimes there is a lone Arbiter from a real player for 1 win.

Still get free wins every day, but have to refresh a lot. Sometimes bot teams are even higher in power than my team.

ok, so help me understand: I believed that the improvement seen in the arena was due to a rebalancing of the entire system by the developers, finally thinking of playing a well-balanced game, and instead it is solely due to a matchmaking bug that is it destined to disappear in a few weeks? Or was this somehow intentional? Will they take into consideration the idea that things are okay or are you telling me that I will go back to reeling in silver 3 against defenses with 4 legendary voids at 60?

My main account has been in gold4 since this started and is still getting bot pages a couple times a day. They are still in all levels.  

L9753 said:

Can I ask how high in gold IV you are? Like I said, personally I haven't had bot pages in a while, yet I'm still comfortably winning battles - anywhere between 1 and 5 each refresh. That could mean a few things - maybe my team is a bit better than yours, maybe I'm more lucky, but another possibility is that due to your hunting for free wins and getting a big rating boost each time you find a bot page, you've gotten up too high in gold IV. But of course, if that works for you and you get more medals that way, enjoy it while it lasts! 

I'm 3420/4082 as on the above screenshot. I prefer to be here instead of 3000, because if I drop to G-3 and get 10-bot page, I may not be able to beat them all before the page refreshes because it's G-4 again. Also, it's guaranteed 4 medals per key. 1:1 for gems if more than 2 pages show up in a day. I even spent some gems on refreshes when ranking period started to get to a safe distance from G-3 border.

I'm sure your team is better. Mine is even led by level 50 High Khatun that looks adoringly at 15 speed banner in my storage. But all these Arbiters and Tormins... I doubt you can reliably beat them.

Where are you and what are the teams there?

PS: Got a page with 100k power team led by Gorgorab and another with level 50 High Khatun. Tried them, lost 2 fights. My 251 is too slow.

SunnyRay said:

I'm 3420/4082 as on the above screenshot. I prefer to be here instead of 3000, because if I drop to G-3 and get 10-bot page, I may not be able to beat them all before the page refreshes because it's G-4 again. Also, it's guaranteed 4 medals per key. 1:1 for gems if more than 2 pages show up in a day. I even spent some gems on refreshes when ranking period started to get to a safe distance from G-3 border.

I'm sure your team is better. Mine is even led by level 50 High Khatun that looks adoringly at 15 speed banner in my storage. But all these Arbiters and Tormins... I doubt you can reliably beat them.

Where are you and what are the teams there?

PS: Got a page with 100k power team led by Gorgorab and another with level 50 High Khatun. Tried them, lost 2 fights.

Usually not far above 3200 - not that much lower I guess. I do indeed avoid almost any team led by Arbiter and definitely those led by Duchess. But most non-speed leads are winnable fights for me, including some Tormin teams if the rest of the team isn't too overpowered, and I can generally take weaker speed teams too. And I still get enough of those two categories. Having Mountain King in a shield set means that some rare-epic speed teams may get the jump on me, but they don't put much of a dent in my team. See below for some of the teams I can beat and some of those I can't (still waiting for Plarium to stop the Ma'shalled cheating...).Though really, before all this changed, I might have lost to teams with precisely the same champions even down in Silver III, because they'd have been far more min-maxed than these. 

L9753 said:

Usually not far above 3200 - not that much lower I guess. I do indeed avoid almost any team led by Arbiter and definitely those led by Duchess. But most non-speed leads are winnable fights for me, including some Tormin teams if the rest of the team isn't too overpowered, and I can generally take weaker speed teams too. And I still get enough of those two categories. Having Mountain King in a shield set means that some rare-epic speed teams may get the jump on me, but they don't put much of a dent in my team. See below for some of the teams I can beat and some of those I can't (still waiting for Plarium to stop the Ma'shalled cheating...).Though really, before all this changed, I might have lost to teams with precisely the same champions even down in Silver III, because they'd have been far more min-maxed than these. 

The teams you beat on the screenshot would probably slaughter my team as its only way of winning is nuking first. At least I can't attack them and be sure I'm faster. 50% or even 75% winrate is not good enough when you can refresh for 100%. I have Vrask in shield set, but not sure about using him in arena, wasn't happy with him back in silver 2.

L9753 said:

The real question is how sustainable all this is - even if there are still free wins now, they announced that they would disappear eventually, question is then how long it would take until people like you and me start getting squeezed out of gold again...  

I agree, I'm afraid we are attaced to a jojo which gets us down, then brings us up, but not by skill, just plain bots who make it easier on us When they will in time disappear I wonder where I will be ending up again and whether we will have the same discussions on receiving siver medals instead of golden medals

The only thing we can do is to sit and wati and see how we are (de-)progressing. One thing I think Plarium learned, is that when you boost teams up to a certain level, you just can't let them down just like that. So that is maybe something positive to take away from this experience, since you can also say the opposite ... they took a long time to respond when people were going down from gold to silver and people in bronze, weren't able to reach silver. Buy they started to acknowledge the down side, so wherever we will end up, it won't be like the last few months ... fingers cross though

They are working on balancing the arenas as soon as possible, in theory the fighting will not continue as it is now much longer.

Pipsie said:

They are working on balancing the arenas as soon as possible, in theory the fighting will not continue as it is now much longer.

So it is back to being majorly frustrated by Arena fights, by being stopped by Arena missions and unable to progress ?