You can also just attack the teams with one lone scrub and never worry about it?

The irony of this comment is that arena enjoyability is essentially an inverse-U shaped curve. Newer players find it a slog because they just don't understand arena mechanics, get hung up on things like team power, champion rarity, etc, and fail at arena because they simply have bad teams. Mid-tier players simply don't care about arena, because they just farm easy teams and leave 1-man defenses so that they don't need to compete against actual teams. And endgame players find arena a slog because actually decent arena teams are now so defensive-oriented that you end up with matches that take too much time and effort actually warrant the investment.

OP is in the former category. I'm in the latter category. And, ironically, we both have the same end conclusion - arena would be far more interesting if we just put artificial constraints on it. That, however, is the end of our agreement. Artificial time constraints would be silly, and would either give way more power to arena defense teams, or would take away their ability to win entirely.

A better constraint would be to limit the *number* of fights per day. Rather than having arena tokens generate at one per hour, alongside the fifteen extra ones you get from quests, have arena tokens be fixed, like with keys for twins, with no ability to actually get new ones. Remove the hourly generation of tokens entirely, remove the ability to buy tokens with any resources. Give players five classic tokens per day for free, and allow them to earn an additional five through a daily quest. Give players three tag tokens per day for free, with an additional three through an advanced quest.

Do that, and you can keep arena actually interesting, because the time commitment no longer becomes a slog to compete against others who have more time than you.

In the arena, as the attacker, your goal is to defeat the defender. The defender's goal is to keep you from defeating their team. If you cannot defeat the defender, then you did not accomplish your goal and you shouldn't get any reward. 

The issue with the "tie breaker" you suggested is that arena then becomes extremely unfair to the defender. 

The defense team is a preset that the attacker can see prior to starting the match. This lets the attacker choose champions that can counter the defending team. In addition, the defending team can only react in a very predictive way since it utilizes the AI. 

For example, your suggestion would allow an attacker to build a "glass cannon" and 3 tank champions who can neutralize the defender’s damage. They could then front load a ton of damage letting their nuker die, and just "turtle" for the next 10 minutes on auto to win the match.

In closing... if you haven't won an arena match in the first 5 minutes, just take the loss, you are most likely not going to win.  

 Please God no... 

I realize that from your perspective this would "fix" the issue but implementing "10 Arena matches per
day" would mean that advancing the great hall would take FOREVER. 

Currently it cost around 4,300 gold medals to level one bonus from 0 to 10. 

There are 24 bonuses. That's 103,200 gold medals.  

At Gold 5 (4 gold medals per win) it takes 25,800 arena wins to max out your great hall.  

With a limit of 10 matches per day it will take a new player 2,580 days (7 YEARS) to max their Great Hall. Keep in mind that these numbers are assuming the player is getting Gold Medals at the rate received at GOLD 5. 

Yeah okay - fair point.

But this just lends itself towards another idea I'd had percolating in my mind. Change the quest system to be gated based on your progression through the game. The easy way to do this would be to just have the quests change based on your progress mission milestones. Have my suggested changes only kick in after you finish the last milestone, for example.

 I agree that Arena needs a revamp. As you said, it is essentially an inverse-U shaped curve. 

I'm in the middle you described. I only fight the numerous "1 man" defense teams that are in Gold 5 unless I'm in a hurry and just want to complete my 5 matches for the daily quest. In that case, I just pick the lowest level player and take 5 "exit battle" losses in a row to get it done (figure I'll help someone who may be trying to actually progress) as long as it won't drop me out of G5. When I complete my Great Hall (still a LONG way off) the only reason left to stay there is the 22% stat bonuses. 

I Tag arena is in an even worse place. I run a 1-man defense and do the 5 matches every day to complete the Advanced Quest and get the 6 extra Faction War keys.  

The Tag Arena Bazaar needs a serious update. Once you have Drex there's really nothing left in the Bronze Bazaar worth worrying about.

 1 Ancient shard - 1200 gold bars / 27 wins

 300 energy -  1000 gold bars / 22 wins

1 rare skill tome - 1000 gold bars / 22 wins  

3 brews - 300 bars / 7 wins

50K silver (that's less than a Spider 20 run that I can do in 14 seconds Plarium) - 200 gold bars / 5 wins

And last but not least... 10 fragments for Rare Champions that I've pulled 50 times from shards and used as food... they aren't even GOOD RARES - 150 gold bars per 10 fragments / 4 wins x 10 WEEKS (FOR A RARE) 1500 gold bars total / 40 wins.

All this is PER WEEK. Now if it was say per DAY, or 5 of each of those per week... sure, I might care about Tag Arena. 

Silver & Gold rewards aren't much better considering where an account needs to be to even get into and stay at that level since those levels are capped by number of players allowed per week.  

"Silver & Gold rewards aren't much better considering where an account needs to be to even get into and stay at that level since those levels are capped by number of players allowed per week."

Completely disagree here. There's a lot of value in the Refresh accessories, rarity and rank charms and that's before you get to the shards.

That said, I think Bazaar getting freshened up a bit and removing tier locks on rewards would be nice.

I hope the skip battle button never gets removed.

If they reduce the number of arena battles (what they absolutely should do!), of course that should come with an increase of the rewards, like arena medals and magi steal, per battle.

I'm one of those who likes arena. :)

What appeals is the problem-solving element - trying to come up with counter-strategies that might work. I just evolved Miscreated Monster to 6* specifically to help make it easier to defeat cleave defeances in Gold V.

It's still hard to do too much at that level as a relatively new player, with a limited champion box and limited artifacts - but all the more reason to think strategically. :)

For those who don't like arena - are you in this game just for the hit of rewards, rather than the problem-solving element? Just curious. :)

I do 10-15 G5 wins per day.  Your math made me realize I may not live long enough to complete it.   lol

My issue with arena (mostly tag) is it takes too long.

I flit between G3 and G4  (tag) and the matches can take forever. You can take an hour just doing 5 matches for almost no reward.

The only alternative is to deliberately drop to s4 or whatever where the fights are easy.

The problem is the number of fights. Hence my suggestion to reduce that. 

 If they reduce the number of arena battles (what they absolutely should do!), of course that should come with an increase of the rewards, like arena medals and magi steal, per battle. 

I support this 100%. I'm all for a reduction in the number of available Arena battles per day as long as they increase the rewards to compensate. I was just pointing out that prior to requesting / making changes to a system you need to look at all of the possible repercussions. 

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate arena. For me it's no different than running a dungeon or Campaign quest. That said, I don't really have any time constraints on how often I can log in and do an arena battle either. It's not really an issue for me to refresh every 15 minutes until I get the match-up I want. I also realize that some people have a finite amount or specific time window every day that they can / will play so refreshing every 15 minutes isn't possible. I'm not sure a reduction in the number of battles / day would help with the time issue but I think the increase in rewards would. 

On a "side note", I feel like people give Game Designers a hard time without understanding how difficult it actually is. While it may seem easy to "balance" a game from the outside, looking at something from every angle and trying to predict every possible outcome is extremely challenging. Throw in some "out of the box" thinking players and a seemingly small change can get out of control rather quickly. 

My issue with arena (mostly tag) is it takes too long. 

I flit between G3 and G4  (tag) and the matches can take forever. You can take an hour just doing 5 matches for almost no reward. 

This was more my point on Tag Arena. I've only been as high as Bronze 4. For me personally, the current rewards are not worth the time and resource investment needed to progress / maintain those higher brackets. 

For those who don't like arena - are you in this game just for the hit of rewards, rather than the problem-solving element? Just curious.

As I said above, I don't hate arena. I think I may actually enjoy live arena since at least then there will be some strategy to picking your team and ability use. 

As far as the "problem-solving element" in Classic Arena, that fades quick. The defending team is running on AI making it extremely predictable. Go on YouTube and watch some of the content creators run Plat Arena matches. They will give you a "play-by-play" of the defenders next move before they even take a turn. I watched a video testing a UDK Stoneskin build the other day. The content creator practically laid out every move of the match before he took his first turn.   

While there are over 600 champions in Raid, there are only a handful you're going to see in Gold & even less in Plat. Most players in Gold Arena & above will look at a team comp / player level and know if they can win before the match even starts.  

Lol you are obviously new.. there are not even that many champions in this game and i have easily memorised all of them.. any average person should be able to.. i just happen to know their speeds, attack and crit points etc due to actually having a drug and booze free memory unlike most people it seems.. 

there are not even that many champions in this game and i have easily memorised all of them..  

Bannerlords 67, High Elves 41, Sacred Order 75, Barbarian 61 (244)

Ogryn 48, Lizardmen 41, Skinwalker 39, Orcs 52 (180)

Demonspawn 52, Undead 60, Dark Elves 57, Knight Revenant 55 (224)

Dwarves 52, Shadowkin 45, Sylvan 16 (113)

Makes atotal of 761 champions in the game, obviously more than the mentioned 600. 

i just happen to know their speeds, attack and crit points etc due to
actually having a drug and booze free memory unlike most people it
seems..  

🙀

 "While there are over 600 champions in Raid " 

Sorry, pulled the 600 number off the top of my head as I didn't take the time to google or count them.  

Just to put things in prespective... out of those 761, 294 of them are either Rare, Uncommon, or Common. Very rarely will you ever see more than a couple of these in Higher level Arena. 

Since I've been in Gold 5 - Plat... the number of arena champions I have actually encounter on serious defense teams is less than 100. 

You can pretty much narrow that list down further to the champions below:

Siphi, Kymar, Ronda, Warlord, Hegemon, Arbiter, Duchess, Candraphon, Tormin, Trunda, Scyl, UDK, Krisk, Seeker, Genbo (thanks Amazon), Lydia, Pythion, and Rotos.

Hm, I might be about to eat my own words about enjoying arena - it occurs to me in the fragment event there'll be at least one arena event, and I'm not sure I'll get enough points just attacking single champ defences and weak cleaves in gold V to get the fragment. 

Am seriously considering an epic fall back to silver by making sure I lose as many fights as possible - but the first arena event could be Friday, so I may be better sticking where I am for now, just in case. 

Literally just got enough gold points to upgrade a Great Hall stat to Level 8 as well, to advance my Arbiter missions.

So, just to elaborate on my previous point - the problem with arena isn't that the fights themselves aren't enjoyable. In fact, it's quite the opposite - arena is pretty much the *only* enjoyable part of playing the game itself. The rest of the enjoyment in this game is actually derived from the metagame - IE, figuring out team comps, etc.

Rather - the problem is that if you want to remain competitive, you need to grind it out. For classic, that means playing all 39 free matches per day, along with buying refills to get even more wins. For tag, that means playing a minimum of the five matches per day, along with most likely even more than just that.

The lower end of classic is just autobattles, but when you get closer to the plat level and stop seeing the free wins, you need to actually play the fights out. And every fight that needs to be played out is five minutes minimum, sometimes closer to 10. The time commitment ramps up very sharply.

Don't do that... the arena events are by far the easiest. I think u need like 30 wins over 3 days in g5