totally agree. Arena is serious wrong. 

I'm 6 months low spender. I reached Gold I once and then gradually get beat down to Silver I now. So hard to play. I pretty much give up Arena now. My Arbiter mission is impossible.

You are competing against people who have been grinding for years and have been pushed out of gold four where they used to be.

It is very easy to drop multiple tiers in one or two weeks due to the way all excess points are removed at reset.

Don't hold your breath. Either they are fully aware of what they are doing and are fine with it, probably because they've done the math and concluded this is what makes them the most money, or they are too stupid to realize that what they want (or claim to want) is not possible. They can harp about how gold is supposed to be "competitive" all they want, fact of the matter is that a game set up like this can't have a healthy competitive environment to begin with, period.

Personally I accept the competitive side and I will accept to go back to bronze level if I don't deserve better but the problem is that it blocks our progression missions and leaves us no chance to catch up by depriving us of the possibility to get precious resources including Arbiter, of course. 

I was level 58 with 241 days of play. I went back to the Silver 4 arena while I was quietly maintaining Gold 4 before. More than two months I'm stuck on the progress mission "reach Arena Gold 3"...

Since plarium thinks it's normal and doesn't act, my only answer to this is : don't spend any more money for this game and stop playing it. I sadly invite any other players to do the same.

As long as Plarium doesn't decide to take this problem into consideration, they won't see me again.

They're forcing players into a brick wall with this method and making them leave.

People on these forums will defend the arena all day long, but a large portion of people aren't having fun with this one portion of the game they're forced to play and are quitting the game.

People are having ZERO fun in the arena.  For a game, that needs to be fixed.

I peaked @ G2 post arena bot removal. Last week before reset I was G1 with 2160 points, when I logged in at 5:30 am est, after the reset point loss and being attacked who knows how many times I was @1850 points S4. I fought my way back into gold just to be knocked back to S4 the next morning, rinse and repeat until I gave up finally Friday. Now this reset I found myself back to S3, used my battles and went back to S4 but I'm not going to bother maintaining any kind of rank this week, I will just be using my tokens when they refresh over time and doing my 5 battles.

The teams that free farmed G4 for months are all dropping and pushing me back more and more each reset, and even down in S3 now the teams are worse than G1 was last week. My 276 sheet speed HK is getting out speed and my follow up 219 speed dps is getting cut in on. I'm being attacked constantly by better teams, arbiter teams are incredibly common.

Arena is so fucked and not even fun at this point, I really don't want to bother with it period at this point but plarium was nice enough to make your arena raiting effect the rest of the game, as well as great hall.

To all the get good guys, some of us missed the free great hall rush, have done our homework, and geared to the best of our ability atm, but there is no winning right now for people like me that have been in the game for under six months. 

I went to bed on 2080 points, in gold 1... i didnt login before reset as i had to work

I lost enough points to drop into s4 - to around 1990 points while i was asleep and of course lost 190 excess points at reset, i have just had a peek and yup down into s3.

In previous weeks i have sat all day refreshing for fights and climbing back into g1, but its just not worth the extreme effort and god forbid i work in the moments leading to reset.

And yes i have grinded a lot of dragon, ive grinded a lot of spider and i have a 290 speed apoth and my nuker has lots of crit damage etc... and i know how the game works- but i dont have any turn meter better than HK/apoth and no that is not down to not being able to 'git gud' its down to luck or whaling out.

The system is designed to cause frustration and push people with a life who dont whale down in the hope they will whale out.

I whaled out on voids this weekend, my takeaway after pulling maybe 90 shards and not getting man eater, or any relevant void epic is that I will never buy shards again from this game.

Ouch that is painful, its a casino at the end of the day, and success depends on luck in that casino (although grinding for hour after hour is even more important). Sorry that didnt work out for you.

I used to buy the monthly gem pack and use the gems to buy shards when 2x came up, but i havent renewed it this time as i am fully ftp now. The thing with this game isnt just that its pay 2 win, its that the amount of money required to actually make a significant difference to the account is ludicrous, they rate a single sacred shard as being worth 20 dollars for example....

If you are a new player that missed the easy farming days you either get lucky and pull a game changing deacon or lyssandra or hedgemon etc... or spend a lot, or quit in frustration. I suspect plarium are happy with that as they probably arent interested in keeping any ftp players at all. Their business model is based on massive advertisiing and incredibly low retention rates with very little money put into development and qa compared to marketing..

Some games want to be fun for players that start ftp and try to convince them to buy stuff as a reward for the entertainment the player has playing the game. Other games want to be as bad as possible for ftp and try to get money from panic-and-frustration-whaling as the players see they can't get anywhere without money. 

100 people spending 100 bucks to a game that uses the first way of generating money can't compete to one whale spending 20k bucks. Sadly the second way of making money out of games has won.

Yup, i voluntarily bought cosmetic items that gave zero 'in game' advantage in Guild wars 2 as i had gotten hundreds and hundreds of hours of enjoyment out of the game for £50 and wanted to support the game.

I agree with everything else you say. Clearly the second option is more lucrative.

I have also the "pleasure" to fight Arbiter teams in Silver IV.  Even though I descending in arean tiers I still face constantly the same teams as in Gold. 

I understand that my arena team as not strong enough but how can it be that so many strong teams with Arbiter, Lyssandra or even Skullcrown speed leads are in the silver tiers? They might be not perfectly speed tune as I am sometimes able to beat them, but I still wonder why they are not at least in Gold tier I.

Well it seems to be that I am going to focus more on dungeons and other areas of the game instead of arena. It seems to be that it will take a lot of time before I will have a serious chance to climb again the ranks.

7:30am local time Tuesday 11th May. Silver IV still dominated by Arbiter led speed teams. Here's 5 in a row: 

i

Please fix this, Plarium. 

There is something weird going on with the matches on defense. If I put my best team on defense (No Arb), I'm gold IV in two days by doing nothing. But then I get my a** handed to me on offense 9 out of 10 times. So I have to put in a joke team to be able to complete events.

Who  is your best team? So your defense log is filled with victories but you can't win when attacking? I can't imagine too many people are having that problem

Gorgorab, Seeker, Stag and Foli. I think many pick them because they think they are an easy win (Gorg is even just rank 4 and just for speed aura and bait). But they are fast. And Foli is a beast. But on offense at Gold I - IV I very often get out speeded by Arb-teams or mangled by Krisks/Tormins.

1. Good strategy

2. Curious how fast you are and if you notice slight differences or no differences in speed of opponent in G1-G4?

3. I agree. Foli is Beast.

4. Don't fight Krisk/Tormin with that team lol

My seeker is att 278, Stag at 233 and then Foli at 206

Very little difference between Gold I and IV regarding speed. If opponent has an Arb lead I loose the speed race say 80% of the times. I think the main difference between Gold I and IV is that the teams are more well tuned higher up. At silver 4 and gold 1 I feel I can cut off the opponent more often. At Gold 4 it's more like watching a movie when you loose the speed race. 

301 Arbiter seems to be too slow 60-70% of time in G4, maybe more.  I am able to cut in half the time and win though 

Seems right. Faster than my Seeker and slightly better aura than Gorgo.

I've just leveled up my Arbiter but I don't know if I'll put her on defense. I like my Gorgo/underdog team. And it works thanks to plariums weird matching algorithms.