believe it or not, this was my go to team for a while until I got better champs...but these guys (on the left) got me to Gold 4......

i

The issue being as im trying to highlight without derailing it into something else is, I have a decent enough team to be able to hit first tier of silver, I need to hit first tier of silver to be able to advance in my mission progress. I cant honestly get into silver, I was in silver some weeks ago and got instantly pushed back. As of now I cant upgrade my level 3 to 4 because I cant get into silver and earn silver medals. This means I cant get Arbiter as it is now. Why should I continue to play? Hope to pull Arbiter from a shard? 

Is this okay? Im not asking for pewpew ezpz wins or free gold/platinum medals. All im asking for is that Plarium should as a owning company take actions against this as its broken. This issue can easily be fixed, if you arent active each reset you get kicked out of arena. This would make it so that all the old endgame accounts arent stuck in bronze tier making bronze being as hard as gold was some time ago.

that is not a gold4 team... not even a silver team... sorry

I made it to silver 1, maybe silver 2 (don't really remember when I switched champions) with Spirit Host, Shaman, Athel and Courtier, all but Athel being 50 and wearing mostly 3* gear between +12 and +16 (Athel wearing the free lifesteal set which is mostly 4*). I was using Warpriest before Shaman, but I don't remember how far I got with her. So you can go on and on about what is and isn't a good team all you want. In the end the team is largely irrelevant compared to exploiting the matchmaking, unless you happen to be so far beyond what the mission progression tells you that you should be that you might be able to power through.

I agree that Plarium needs to fix the arena, was just giving you some background on how things were in the past and why a lot of people haven't been taking the complaints too seriously yet. But gold IV is definitely toughening up as well now, so I figure some people who have been ignoring the problem will have to stop doing so... 

Also, remember that many of us older players were in basically exactly the same situation as you six months or so ago, it's not as if we haven't been there. So what did we do... the only thing we could, progress in dungeons to improve our gear and hopefully get new champions down the line that could help also in arena. And even if the issues with arena weren't there, the Arbiter reward at the end of the progress mission wouldn't be something for early game players - you only get her after you can perform at an endgame level in arena, CB and dungeons. Basically, you only get her after you prove that you don't truly need her anymore. 

So until Plarium gets off their asses and fixes things, hopefully in a more sustainable way than their 'bot' solution last time, you may be blocked on progress missions, perhaps for a number of months just like we were, but that doesn't mean you are blocked on progressing in the game. 

Obviously some of the people here / in other threads just don't have good enough teams yet, even if they could farm easy medals in gold IV as long as there were bots around. But there are also people whose teams are perfectly decent yet they still can't break out of bronze - there is definitely a problem, from the looks of it it's just as bad as it was last time. 

Agreed L9753 - that's my approach currently (after a bit of help from Trips too)  - just do what arena missions I have to to get dailies and sort of ignore it until I've upped things. It's frustrating but there's no fix coming anytime soon by the looks of it.

Are bots gone? I can't imagine they are only in gold4?

Havent  seen  what  used  to  be  the  bot  accounts  in  gold  iv  for  a  little  while  now...  there  may  still  he  bots  buts  they  are  not  the  warmaiden,  spirithost,  kael  bots  that  i  used  to  see  pages  of.

This response from Plarium doesnt help really. Instead of solving the problem you arfe saying: play the game for 12 months, get and level all those champs, then you recieve your arbiter (probably third by that time? lol). 

Moderator: lazy response! Fix the matching logic instead. New players should fight new players. Dont pretend problem doesnt exist, it will only become louder on all social media and reviews. 

The bot solution is not necessarily a bad one, assuming you're okay with having the arena as being part of a PvE/PvP hybrid feature. Personally, I'm fine with leaving platinum as the whale playground where they can compete over who can give Plarium the most money all they want, as long as any tiers required for progression is more forgiving and more of a fun experience trying to fight different team configurations with your own. For that particular purpose, bot teams are probably better than player teams, as it will help to mix up a stale meta. If you insist on making a feature part of your overall progression though, then you should also ensure that everyone can get there with a reasonable amount of effort.

The issue is that the arena is not just a PvP ranking system (as bad as it is), it's also a component of your PvE experience and not a small one either. Without the arena, your options in the forge are restricted. Unless you get get to silver, you can't get great hall bonuses above 3, and even that is painfully slow when you need a minimum of 250 bronze 3/4 wins to get a single one to level 3. It prohibits you from participating in tournaments involving the arena, for example I would need to win 186 arena matches just to get in the top 10 of the current one (which unless I'm mistaken would translate to about 83 wins per day). Progress missions are, as mentioned many times before, hilariously out of sync with reality. There are daily quests that depend on arena participation. I'm sometimes struggling with the one to gather 30 materials.

So on one hand, you have the game tell you basically from the start that here is something that you should participate in, practically taunting you and partially blocking progress if you dont, and on the other hand you have the harsh reality pushing back and telling you to go screw yourself. Let's have a look at another similar feature; the tag team arena. If anything, that's even worse than the classic one, but do people complain about it? Well, okay, yes to an extent, but nowhere near the same. Why not? Well, presumably because the only thing you lose out on by skipping tag team is the bazar. I don't think it's that no one cares about the potential rewards from the bazar, I'm certainly interested in them, but rather that without any pressure from the game for you to actually do it, people are more willing to acknowledge that it's not content that they are ready for yet. Likewise the doom tower. I can't get past the scarab boss, but I don't feel any particular need to complain about it because I know I'm not there yet and nothing is telling me that I should be. On the other hand, you saw what happened when they made doom tower participation a requirement for completing the advanced quests; some people were not happy about it, because suddenly there's that external pressure to participate in something they felt they were not ready for.

I'm not sure why this seems to be a surprise to some people. It's not exactly rocket science here. If the game pushes hard to set up expectations that it then can't possibly deliver on, it's not exactly shocking that people get upset about it.

This is spot on, if i didnt need to do arena for pve i would ignore pvp completely until i had a team and gear to play it properly.

As for whales, they are what make the game viable financially and are definitely crucial to plarium

But if ftp and minnows quit then the whales lose people to dominate and i suspect they will lose whale accounts too when they no longer have ftp players to beat up.

When people quit, their teams will stay in the arena, even deleted accounts will keep their teams in the arena.

So we end up with retired whales in silver/bronze?

I thought inactive accounts were removed from arena?

One should be really inactive, like never login into the game for 90 days.  

Even in gold 4, things are finally getting harder. I don't think there are bots anymore, just still some newer players who have been farming bots and managed to stay in gold 4 until now... but they won't manage much longer. And just like in the lower levels, once things start to get harder, it quickly becomes a vicious cycle that pushes the difficulty way up. I'm not sure I'll still be in gold 4 a month from now, if things continue like this. 

Don't believe every rumour you hear. 

I wanted to approach the person to ask how he built his champion. I searched for it in plarium play, and when I tried to send a message there was shown this account is deleted

I managed to claw into silver 2 after getting High Khatun and ascending her to 6 (for the extra speed), but the teams I've seen from Bronze 3- Silver 2 have been more or less the same.  You can go for a page or two with teams there is no reason to even try.  There is something messed up in the game when the progress missions say that I'm supposed to be getting silver medals in the arena and then the next mission says I need to really stretch myself and 3 star a campaign mission on hard!  I'm 1/3 of the way through 3 starring nightmare which is easier than the low silver arena.  It is messed up.

Anyway, I didn't know teams could hit you twice when they beat you the first time.  I found it annoying enough that I lose medals when a team loses to me but then rechallenges me and wins.  I actually gained fewer medals than I lost last time that happened which is really bad game design.  Anyway, the two teams at the top are the same person.  I blurred out the names because they didn't ask to get dragged into a forum discussion but I really don't know why the same person could hit me and beat me twice in a row.

i

The team page for that top player was the same:

i

Ya back in January when you got pages full of free win bot teams. Right now that team would not even get out of bronze 3 lol.