Well what team(s) do you use for offense and defense?

That's irrelevant. I am using the same team now that I was using when I was easily staying in Gold 3. That same team has trouble keeping me in Silver 3 now. Did something change?

Of course it is relevant. You can't expect to keep competing in Gold 4 with a randomly assembled team of half-built champions while everyone in the same tier keeps improving their synergies and gear. 

I haven't noticed any change by the way, I still encounter a lot of the so-called 'bot' pages.

you probably were only beating the easy bots, I think the bots were easy at all arena levels and they have started to increase the difficulty in gold.  This is just conjecture on my part, but it seems the closer I get to plat the bots are tougher.  I think I can still distinguish them from real accounts though.

Arena got way too hard, then way too easy... I'm guessing they are trying to find the appropriate balance.

Post your team, as it is relevant 

Did Ancient shard cool down Change ?? Thoufgh it was 24 hours,, 

BUT ,, Mine started at 7 DAYS 

and they added 2 rare heros to Bazaar , both look kinda Mediocre too .........

and they did other little changes too ...

Those rares are for fusions that can't be got other than with void shards - was in the news.

• Ancient shards never had a 24-hour cooldown, it's always been 7 days. 
• The rare champ fragments were just added to help people with the Broadmaw fusion.

Yes there been obvious changes to arena. Few weeks ago winning was way easier than it is now.

No offense Lxzy but a number of people are posting about a sudden increase in arena difficulty - as the Op here says, something changed suddenly a week or two back that means I'm now a tier or 2 lower than i was and can't get back there - and I've improved my speed, upgraded artifacts etc.  The whole community can't have suddenly ramped up its arena teams so saying nothing's changed doesn't make sense.

Same here. It discourages me. 

It's simple, they added the bots to arena to ease progression, so all this time the people who have been in some ways "fed" by the system have been slowly catching up. It's just the natural progression of things. By now they should just completely remove bots in arena and just remove arena from missions so all the entitled players who think they "deserve" gold iv have nothing to whine about anymore.

Everytime someone complains about gold iv it's almost a guarantee that they'd be afraid of showing their champions and artifacts. They know theyre not supposed to be there in the first place~ 

I'm curious about this because personally I don't feel a difference. Understandably, Gold 4 is easy for my main but even my alt that I barely manage to consistently do dailies on is still comfortable in Gold 4. This is why I ask about someone's arena team and stats when they say they're slipping in arena ranks. 

I'll ask about this, I assure you guys. I'm just saying that the deviations or bots that make arena easy are still there and if anyone needs help with their teams, I'd be happy to give some insight and advice. 

Even in gold IV, it's becoming increasingly rare to get a full screen of 10 'bots' with guaranteed wins. I still get tons of such guaranteed wins, probably more than I get serious opponents, but usually not the entire page - can't just hit attack on everything with your eyes closed anymore, as sometimes you'll find some serious opponent inbetween. And some (surely not all?) of those near-guaranteed wins for me may actually be new-ish players who got to gold IV thanks to the bot wins themselves. So it makes sense that they would now be finding it much harder to stay up there. 

I've been playing for a bit over 3 weeks now. I can tell you there's a huge difference in my matchups when I started and now. I don't know if they changed the matchmaking, or if they base matchmaking on some inane metric like account level or player power level, of which the former says nothing about anything except how much energy I've spent, and the latter says nothing about the sort of team I can put together (most of my "power" was tied up in practically useless heroes in my vault, until I unequipped all of them and got rid of most of them, and they still make up a pretty large portion of my total power). Either way, it's sucking all the fun out of the arena when I'm stuck facing people I have no hope of ever defeating even at the lowest tier, forcing me to rely on freebies from people trying to derank, or the occasional poor guy stuck in the same situation I am.

All i believe is that they should remove arena from missions.  Im fighting harder opponents in bronze 2 on my ftp acc then i am in some of my gold 4 battles on my main acc.  100k groups in bronze 2 to impossible to get past early on.  I can farm brutal 12/3 and 3 stared most of brutal but am so far behind on missions cuz i cant get to silver arena.

I totally agree, now I have to lose in the arena because I have to get energy through the missions..