I made it to S2 before I had High Khatun as well. Most of the way there I used Athel, Courtier, Warpriest and Spirithost. I don't know if Athel was 6* at the time or not, but the rest were definitely not on account of them still not being 6*. At some point I switched Warpriest for Shaman (also still 5*). Apart from Athel who had some 4* rare/epic stuff (lifesteal from the new player rewards), they were mostly equipped in 2-3* gear from the campaign. The team was without a doubt considerably worse than anything posted above. I think I was in S1 when I switched out Courtier for Madame Serris that I was lucky enough to get. I think my player power was around 200k or thereabout at the time.

So yes, you absolutely can get to silver as a new player, but in my case it was for the single reason that I didn't open any shards because I had been told to wait until 2x events (I opened 4 or 5, don't remember, void shards during the first 2x event I was in, which is when I got the aforementioned Serris). It wasn't until the 2x ancient shard event that my player power jumped up to about 300k and I could no longer maintain my arena position. It took about 10 minutes, or however long I spent opening shards, for the arena to go from reasonable to impossible. There are some posts when I documented this while trying to figure out the matchmaking system, and evidently I was correct.

This is not an argument that the arena is fine. It's in fact the complete opposite. Whether your position is that a team like I used shouldn't be able to get to S2, or that it should, it just serves as further evidence that the matchmaking is completely absurd. Either I shouldn't have been able to get as high as I did to begin with, or I should arguably be able to do so now when my team is considerably better. Neither is the case, and instead the game arbitrarily punishes the player... for playing the game. I'm not sure what possibility I find more concerning; that no one realized what this would do before they added it, or that they did and added it anyway. I have some theories on why they might've, but let's just say they are not very flattering.

The difference would be his player power - as trevor pointed out above, it was already obvious from Frost's description of his experiences, losing his account and starting over with a strong focus on arena and a small team of champions, that he would profit strongly from the matchmaking system. Presumably you have a significantly higher player power than his 233k because you have a wider roster, so you get far harder opponents. 

So what he says makes sense as far as it goes, but he's leaving out the part where his approach only works if you are super focused on arena from day one - which actual new players are unlikely to do, as they'd generally want to try all parts of the game. 

@L9753 

It is true that I focused on arena this time around but I don't think I really limited myself to other parts of the game. I'm able to solo brutal campaign. I'm near enough on most dungeons to always run a 5* artifact stage. I run faction wars high elven crypt high enough now to at least get a chance at 3* glyphs. I don't do CB yet because I haven't the complete team to run it affectively. I have pulled some ok champs during the 2x events (see below), which some I am beginning to develop but I want a specific team for CB and am content to wait for the right champs to drop.

We all know now that player power is a key factor in match making in the bronze & silver levels. At some point I will hit a wall in arena but as long as I can stay within bronze IV and silver II then I'll earn enough medals to continue working on the great hall. I can't argue with those that feel the match making system is horrible and perhaps discouraging, and my posts weren't meant in any way to belittle those players. I just wanted to show an example that has worked for me to handle arena and progress in the game without spending real currency. I enjoy arena. I like having enemy teams that I have to think and plan how to beat. Yes I have to play within the confines of Plarium's game design and maybe things could be easier but I as a player would most likely lose interest in the game.

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I  dont  know  if  people  are  spending  way   More  gems  on  resfreses  than  my  kid  but  i  can  tell  you  the  run  wm/hi/sh/starter  has  only  gotten  him  so far.    Almost  every  team  he  sees  on  refresh  is  a  speed  team  running epics  and  legos.    Often  60,  mostly  fully  ascended.      So  i  think  it  is  unfair  to  say  follow  the  meta  and  you  will  be  fine.    He  cant  win  the  favorable  matchups  fast  enough  to  tread  water  in  b2.  He  is  running  HK  with  190  speed  and  against  spped  teams  his  level  its  still  50/50  he  goes  first

his  pp  is  330.    Yes  he  has  pulled  to  many  shards  and  sits  on  a  bank  of  blues  that  he  may  never  use.    But  Not  being  able  to  work  his  way  out  of  b2  seems  a  bit  silly.

I know the matchmaking is different for someone who ignores most aspects of the game to focus on player power.  What everyone is ignoring and what I pointed out is that his team power (80k) does not seem to come close to matching the stats on the characters he showed us.  His team looks like it should be considered weaker by player power.  Considering I have to check player power on every single match in the arena, teams like his that have 80k power normally can survive a bit better than one would expect for a double-nuke early game comp.  Now perhaps the 93-94 added resistance on Kael makes a lot more difference than I thought it would in terms of player power because with the rest of his stats I would have guessed 60k team power.  If that is the case than I apologize.  

I don't feel he hid the fact that he was playing this account to game Plarium's current matchmaking in the arena as opposed to how the game designers clearly intended the game to be played.  That's certainly his right although I do find it odd that he would use this as an attempt to claim that the arena isn't an issue for new players who try to follow the progress missions that Plarium laid out to guide them in the game.

@Quintinar 

I wish we knew what stats affected player power. Is it how big your roster is or how many champs are leveled up or what type of champs you have and how many (rare vs. epic vs. legendary) or artifact level or masteries level, etc? Or all of it? Logically it should be all of it but I'm guessing it isn't, that certain attributes have more weight. 

Well I was talking about individual champion power which we can test out (at the cost of silver of course) which leads to a difference in team power.  Someone on the forum did test out different level champions added to the roster and leveled although of course I forgot to copy the link and I'm too lazy to test it out myself.  Crit and resistance stats obviously play a big part but the resistance (even low levels which don't do anything really since everyone focuses on speed and accuracy so you'd need a metric ton of resistance to help) apparently is more important than I thought.  My Kael is in my clan boss gear right now (when I originally pushed into arena, I swapped crit damage and attack in for defense but swapped back ever since I plateaued in Silver 2 which now dips into silver 1 overnight a lot of the time after being in mid silver 2 for a month), but his attack is still over 3k with 100% crit and over 100 crit damage and my team power is around 60k:

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Maybe I am gaming the system, I can't say 100% that I'm not. I am able to accomplish the missions and quests, etc. so am I really gaming the system and going around how the developers intended? Or am I instead able to compete all around with the strategy I'm now employing? Figuring out strategy is a part of every game be it digital or not. I still believe that arena is working according to the devs intent, be that good or bad. The mission course may be in need of correction, I can't say because I am not being limited by it. Players who have gone too far using other strategies and now appear locked out of advancing have a point, I was there with my other account and I couldn't advance out of bronze. But now that I've restarted I think that I could have got over that wall by focusing more on grinding for better gear and understanding the team synergy aspects. I can't prove that though because that account is gone or I would go back and see if I could correct my initial mistakes. 

Maybe the game has underlying issues. Maybe players are just too impatient. Maybe Raid's missions are creating this impatience in new players. I've played other games that had similar issues in their versions of arena where if you build characters too fast you are doomed, Injustice Gods Amongst Us was that way. If you maxed out champs all you faced were hacked account teams. The only way to beat them was with certain teams, all maxed out, with maxed out gear and even then you could lose. Maybe Raid should only match make based on purely win/loss figures with no player or team power considered? 

No you are not gaming the system and i was not trying to criticise you, i hope that is not how you read it.

A couple of my clanmates came back after an absense, dropped to the bottom rank- and cant get out of bronze, their player power is several million, yes they know the game (hitting unm cb and were g4 before absense) and they have better teams than the opponents you see in gold.

Luckily they find it funny, but i dont know how the game is managing to find matches so absurd for them to be honest, when i started a new account i hit b3 within 6 days.

@FrostNFire

I would not say you are gaming the system.    I would say that the system definitely has balancing issues.   I think we can all agree that the level of difficulty to get out of the  b2  is  out  of  whack.    Further  I  would  suggest  your  starategy  while  both  creative  and  viable  cant  be  the  strategy  the  devs  built  the  game  assuming   one  would  have  to  utilize  for    basic  arena  progression.

@trevor.wilson

I didn't take your gaming comment negatively, I was taking it more like that I have found a loop hole in the game mechanics which I am able to capitalize on, which if that's what you meant may be correct.

If you have clan team members that are that high and can't get out of the bronze levels, then there is definately something wrong with the matching system.

@dizzydfamily 

Plarium says arena is working according to the metrics they are watching. Either they are outright lying, are in denial or arena is working as they intended. 

I think Plarium needs to answer one question. Are inactive teams removed from the arena pool? It seems on the surface that the biggest problem would be the trickle down effect of higher level inactive teams and probably answers why very high powered teams who find themselves back in the lower bronze and silver levels are facing basically terror teams. If I am correct in my assumption, a defense team generates no points when they win and since these teams would have no active wins, they would just fall lower and lower, correct? In theory an inactive Platinum level team could end up in Bronze??? 

Also I assume some players don't always have their strongest champs on defense so that they can stay within a certain tier to easily farm, is that correct? If those players become inactive does their overall player power drop? If it does and Plarium's match making takes only player power into consideration you could also have very high level defense teams (low for the actual player who they belonged to but much higher than the active player's attack team) being paired against live teams. Does this make any sense?

The official answer is that inactive players are removed

But when players quit they dont just stop logging in straight away

They might log in to chat on clan chat, or just do clan keys for a few weeks, or just log on once a week and not bother in arena.

In that case i am not sure they are removed, they just sink down the league.

Defensive victories give points to you, I don't know what you are talking about. 

Their is a mechanic preventing arena manipulation, attacking the same player all the time (and loosing by will) doesn't work, you get points only once (or was it 3 times?) per defensive victory against the same attacker.

@trevor.wilson

Now what would Plarium actually consider inactive I wonder? As you said a player could still be logging in and that might be considered active by their programming, even if they aren't participating in arena or are very very infrequent in arena. Something has to be causing the downwards power creep and inactive arena players would be the most logical reason. The only other explaination, if they are truly watching what goes on and say nothing is broken, is they are doing it on purpose.

@frostnfire

i  call  bs  on  Plarium..if  getting  to  b2  is  supposed  to  be  the  same  degree  of  difficulty  as  getting  the  challenges  before  and  after  the  b2  challenge  it  is  clearly  not  working  as  intended.    

case  in  point...my  son  is  on  day  50,  sitting  in  b2  with  330ish  pp.    ran  into  an  87k  team  with  a  fully  ascended  scyl  of  the  drakes....

My  son  really  wanted  to  6  star  royal  huntsman  next,  but  given  his  struggles  in  arena  i  dont  see  how  he  has  any  choice  but  to  6  warmaiden...

My PP rised from 395k to 425k and those are standard s3 roll for me now :)

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all 50k+ to my 90k team power

we  see  90k  teams  in  b2  quite  often...

I'm almost 100% certain now that there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of inactive teams spiraling downwards affecting match ups for a lot of players.

But in regards to team power, in S1 & S2 I can face anywhere from 56k teams to 130k+ teams. I don't place much weight on those numbers though because I have easily one shot those higher stat teams and been pounded on ocassion by the lower. A champ could have really high stat gear but if the gear isn't tuned to the champ then you have a very ineffective champ with an inflated stat. Take a Spirithost for example. Place her in a bunch of attack/crit gear, that is maxed out and give her all the wrong masteries and her stats will be high but she'd be pretty ineffective because that isn't her roll on a team or playing to her strength. Now expand that to a whole team and you'll get a team with a huge power rating but no substance. Now I'm not saying all those high stat teams are like that but I've run into a lot that are. It works the same for a low power team. Get the right gear for a nuker where they deal tons of attack/crit damage, have an HK, WM and SH with only attention to speed gear so they go first. Keep them at a low level overall and the teams power would be low but their buffs with the speed boost, attack boost, defense debuff would allow their nuker to have two turns before the enemy gets one turn. I never engage a team that looks like that.

For example of an inflated team power. My 81k+ team beat that 130k team below in S1. They are all leggo, maxed, ascended level 60 champs. They only killed my WM but not before she served her purpose of dropping their defense. You'd think by their stats they are an OP team right? I should have never even tried to battle them right? It was a guaranteed loss for me right? But whatever stat advantage they appear to have on the surface was wasted by the player not using them properly, I mean Lord Shazar is not even the leader to give them the speed boost. That was a 32% speed boost to the whole team that was completely ignored by the player. If the team has no synergy or the champs are not used correctly it will not perform no matter how high it's power rating.

I agree that there is a match making issue but not all of these high power teams are legit. 

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Here's an example of the low powered team that just crushed me...lol.

25k and only I champ, she didn't even get the speed boost and didn't need it with her Avenging gear. Every hit on Skullcrown allowed her to counter-attack me....great defense team. 

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