We’ve been closely analyzing system performance and player progression after the changes made to Tournaments. Your feedback has highlighted matchmaking as a key issue and a significant source of frustration for many of you.
In our upcoming update, we'll introduce foundational adjustments to the Tournament system, specifically to how you progress through the lower Ranks. We’ll also be balancing the rewards available. To explain what is changing, why it’s happening, and how we’re hoping to address your feedback, we have prepared a deep dive.
Check out the breakdown below, and please continue sharing your thoughts with us.
Before we talk about the future, we want to take a step back and look at where we started. When we launched the reworked Tournament system, our goal was to address some major systemic issues with the old format.
In the past, veteran players could leverage the matchmaking system by adjusting their Squad Power (SP) to get easy, unfair wins against beginners. Additionally, the old 20-player brackets heavily rewarded extended playtime, meaning someone could easily pull ahead in the standings simply by being able to play more often or being in a favorable time zone.
By introducing the 8-Battle limit and the new Tournament Ranking Points (TRP) system, we addressed those core pain points. However, as with any system overhaul, new challenges emerged. While Season 1 succeeded in shifting the focus to match quality, it also revealed that our current progression pacing and reward balance were off.
While we saw a lot of appreciation for the inaugural season of the new system, your feedback has helped us see that the new matchmaking algorithm needs more work. Here is what we found, and how we are fixing it.
Currently, early-Rank Battles are too forgiving. While winning easily feels great initially, it creates a massive "slingshot" effect. Players are earning immense amounts of TRP and rocketing straight into the Master or Grandmaster Ranks before their Hangars are truly ready.
The result is exactly what many of you have reported: you arrive in the higher Ranks with an underdeveloped Hangar (e.g., 6k SP) and suddenly hit a wall. You are matched against 20k SP veterans who have the same TRP as you, resulting in Battles that feel impossible.
To fix the "slingshot" effect, we are making a direct gameplay adjustment:
Smarter bots will act as a genuine test, requiring you to think critically, manage cooldowns, and improve your tactical approach. This will stop the inflated win rates, ensuring you progress at a natural pace based on your skills and aren't boosted into Ranks before you’re ready for the challenge.
Alongside the matchmaking adjustments, we also need to address Tournament rewards.
Let’s be completely blunt: when we launched the new Tournament system, we made a miscalculation regarding the reward payouts. Season 1 saw a massive increase in A-Coin income compared to the old tournaments.
While we love rewarding our players, keeping rewards at our inaugural peak isn't sustainable for the long-term health and balance of Mech Arena. To correct this, we’re making an adjustment:
❗Please note: to ensure fairness across all modes, A-Coin rewards in Free-For-All will be awarded to the Top 5 players. While only the Top 3 are traditionally considered winners, this adjustment ensures reward consistency with team-based modes.
We know that seeing reductions isn't fun, but we want to highlight a crucial point: Even with these changes, you will still earn several times more A-Coins than the old Tournament system. So the new system remains more rewarding than the old one; we are simply bringing it down from an inaugural spike to a healthy baseline.
We want to be completely upfront about what these two changes mean for you. Early progression will slow down, and your early rank A-Coin earnings will be lower than they were in Season 1 (though, again, still much higher than the old system).
These are two distinct but necessary changes: the smarter bots will improve the matchmaking experience and stop the frustrating Grandmaster "wall," while the A-Coin rebalance corrects a miscalculation to ensure the game economy remains balanced.
This was the very first season of the Tournament update, and a brand-new system does not become perfect overnight; it needs a few more seasons to gather data, let the Ranks settle, and sort everyone into their ideal SP ranges.
We are treating these adjustments as the next step in tuning the system, not the final destination. We are committed to continuous improvements. We will actively monitor player progression, the algorithm's performance, and the economy in the coming seasons to ensure they function properly.
We'll have a dedicated feedback channel in our Official Discord once the update goes live. Let us know how the pacing feels, how the bots are behaving, and where the challenges are.
Thank you for your passion, your honesty, and for helping us shape the future of the Arena.
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I've never sp dropped, my 3 hangers are all 20k to 22k, I just played a lot and it was easy to get top in the old style tournaments because I scored high, specially in free for all, I was scoring 3k points per match, you can't do that by sp dropping, 5 vs 5 was abit harder but you just have to play more
show off
Now I can't, buy Panther sigh, this game's economy is overbalanced, ur literally pushing us to improve by buying mechs with real money. I do not actually have a prob with it someones gotta earn money, it ain't charity, poor free to play players, good luck but i am kinda excited for the tournament
idk how difficult life must be with such thinking.. i was here 3+ months and I dont have issues with my hangar.. there is always tons of stuff available, every 3 days a new chest to win something.. if I was to spend real money it would be for fun.. to try new mech or skin or who knows what.. but not because i am "pushed to improve" something.. any stupid 5 mechs can do the job, shotguns and longarms can do the job... I don't know why you need legendary mechs and weapons to feel like this is gamechanger.. try to complete missions on your mechs idk.. or if things are so terrible just play farm simulators..
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iIdk maybe people never seen these missions and a-coins rewards? Maybe never used promo codes? Well at least you figured out how to come here and complain!
On saying that, I need you all who moan here, otherwise I will be killing bots and not real people. And game will not be fun.
And terminator probably is the only one who does not sp drop, so he is the only one with 20k hangar, the others sp drop so he kills them all easily and gets 1000 acoins :) Well idk, good if so, i could never get such rewards even theoretically, by doing math in my head.. you start with novice and maximum reward is low, you get +1 it increases, only on grandmaster it was 1000 something and you would need to SP drop to get it, otherwise you would never be able to kill so many people that are equal to you, unless it's calculated by damage, im not sure.. but clearly Im not worst player, I would probably get 5000 points max by playing more than 10 games which is at least 1 hour... and then I see people with 70k points in old tournament in just few hours. There is no way, other than sp drop or magic to get those numbers to win those 1000 acoins. Point.
The problem I have, maybe I'll make a post of my own, is the victory based rewards. Simply because match outcomes might be black-and-white (eg winning or losing), but matches themselves are not. You can have, and will have with ideal matchmaking, very close games, where maybe the winning side was decided by a random bot kill at the last second. Doing poorly and losing are different things. I should get a reward reduction for doing poorly, eg placing last/near last, instead of from losing. And vise versa, getting your team carried by bots should reward you as if you did all the work when you didn't.
Hangar showdown has the same issue - where losing grants you basically zero - and I was so happy to see that the new tournament did not...
If the matchmaking is bad - and let's be honest it can never be perfect - this will massively worsen the problem. When you get a frustrating or unfair battle, the fact that you still get some acoins (50% reduction, which isn't bad when compared to smth like the 80% reduction for pilot XP) really helps lessen that frustration. Because if the battles aren't fun, and you don't get anything worth it for them, people will stop playing - which is EXACTLY the problem HSD has - and it creates a death spiral as the matchmaking gets more and more stretched as there are less and less people to find for matches, causing battles to become even more unfair.
Imo, the acoins rewarded should be more significantly reduced for people who place lower on their team, instead of simply from losing - as a compromise instead. Something like:
Winners: Losers:
100% 60%
80% 40%
60% 20%
40% 0%
20% 0%
Ofc that's outside of FFA, where the fallout would be more similar to the preposed idea.
i would rather make it
Winners: Losers:
100% 60%
80% 40%
60% 20%
40% 10%
20% 5%
if you are really bad, you still should get something for trying. Otherwise why would you play tournament at all if you can instead SP drop and go to normal game mode, why would you go to tournament?
They could also create weekly tasks to play 20 tournaments. Some special tasks like kill 20 mechs in tournament. No need to add things like "kill 5 with longarms or 5 from behind in tournament or apply 25 emp" that would affect gameplay.. even capturing control points task is not a great idea, it may make you change your playstyle to run to control points more and die, maybe you are not good at it, but better at supporting your teammates or defending points. the tasks should be what you would do anyway without changing your playstyle as long as you play tournaments at all
if game economics needs any changes for acoins reduction i would leave losers acoins but i would reduce acoins gained in novice leagues, they dont need that much for new mechs or upgrades, while grandmasters are the opposite, they need a lot more than newbies, not just twice more, they need 6x increases to feel the difference.. but fair enough, cant please everyone, point is if you want reduction in acoins giveaways reduce novice leagues, leave experts and above alone.. keep some minor wins for everyone.
More bots dont attract sales, more bots dont attract more players, more bots make old players lose interest or switch to other games. Keep humans interested.
Nice
I have to say my problem isn't that they reduced the acoins we get my problem is that first when updated the tournament at first we got alot of acoins which I found was an ok amount they if they thought it was ruining the games economy they could have reduced it by 5% but now they are removing acoins from losses which will reduce it by probably 30% seeing you are an average player with a 50% win rate
With the old/new tournament you could only guarantee a special crate every 4 crate rushes so it was pretty balanced in my opinion so I think they keep doing what ever they are doing but change the victory based rewards to you can still get acoins from losses
I agree that the old format had some faults, and the upgraded format had some faults. Of course, how could they not? My view is that it is really, really rare to tell people so openly what the faults were, and how they are being addressed. A fault to one person will be a seen as a benefit to another, and vice versa. So I give my personal thanks to everyone involved in trying to improve this game. I love it. To be clear, my feedback is entirely positive - there will be people that disagree with the old format, the new format, any future format. That is the nature of life. To learn and try and improve is really what matters.
I want the option of being able to choose what type of Tournament battle we want to be in instead of have it be choice or specified by how far we progress. I don't mind the Team VS or Capture Point, but hate the Free For All which I would rather skip. Please re-add the right to choose what type of Tournament run we can select instead of having it chosen for us.
Lo del juego por equipos esta diseñado de manera que siempre va a perjudicar a alguien al ser incluido en un equipo en el que no conoces a nadie, ni esta organizado. Sin embargo, el equipo contrario, que es el equipo que ha solicitado esa partida por equipos, suele ser gente de un mismo clan o gente que suele jugar en equipo habitualmente y si juegan con coordinacion. El resultado es que a ti te meten en un equipo que no has solicitado condenandote a perder sin remision. Por otra parte, me pregunto porque me tienen que incluir en un equipo cuando a mi no me gusta jugar en equipos? Ademas, he observado tambien que el equipo solicitante suele tener muchisimo mas poder que el equipo en el que tu has sido incluido sin solicitarlo.
Quieren jugar en equipo? Por mi perfecto, pero solo si hay otro equipo disponible y si no, que jueguen contra bots como todo el mundo. Basta ya de perjudicar a unos para favorecer a otros.
