It's kind of funny, the  week before everything went to hell in arena playdumb sent me a poll asking if i was having fun

Players quitting because they drop down will only make it worse. The way the arena works, and if we for the sake of argument assume that the creation/destruction of arena points is essentially equal at the moment, the player distribution would be somewhat akin to a pyramid. An oddly shaped one to be sure, but roughly and close enough to illustrate the point. In order for it to stand, it needs a wide base, that gets more narrow the further towards the top you get. If players drop to the bottom and quit out of frustration, then picture that as the base of the pyramid shrinking. This will lead to the sides narrowing, meaning more players will be pushed out of the higher tiers down towards the bottom to stabilize the base and support the entire system.

Now, the arena probably isn't zero-sum right now, so it won't quite work out like that in practice. If the net balance of arena points is positive, then players will in general slowly get pushed towards the top. If it's negative, they'll be pushed towards the bottom. If it's neutral, then the arena will be pretty much static (although individual players may trade places occasionally). It gets a little bit complicated because even if the arena is healthy (which I don't think it is at the moment), stronger teams can still get pushed down from inactivity. It's difficult to say exactly, but the fact that we're seeing so many of them at all levels seems to indicate that there's a problem. Of course, that the matchmaking also ensures that even strong active teams will have a hard time climbing up doesn't help the analysis either since it makes it impossible to establish some sort of average for what kind of team each tier requires. Whether that requirement is reasonable or not remains to be seen.

^^^ Interesting analysis except i am firmly convinced it is deliberate.

When a third party developer produced a toolkit that allows gamblers...ooops i mean customers to be informed and educated about their pity status they were able to kill it within a week via an update

So when the profit margin is involved they absoloutely can fix things quickly....as arena has stayed a mess for so long - it shows lack of interest in improving the situation.

It may be deliberate, it may be that they designed it at a time when player growth made the net change of points positive by nature and figured that since it worked then it'll work forever (which should be fairly obvious that it won't, but I digress). I don't know, but I probably wouldn't trust them if they told me. I certainly don't trust them to fix it, whether it's because they don't want to or because they can't. We'll see what this patch does, but my expectations are suitably low based on past communication and actions. Wasn't more than a few weeks ago when the official word was that there was nothing wrong with the arena to begin with, and this feels more like a kneejerk PR move than any genuine intention to improve the game.

I don't necessarily believe that restricting third-parties from accessing your data is worthy of criticism, I'm somewhat surprised the data was exposed to begin with. It does sound like a potential security issue, no matter how benign one particular example might be. That the game doesn't expose it to the players to begin with, is however worthy of criticism.

I dont buy security being the issue, other third party apps are still working and have been for a while, but presumeably dont hit the bottom line.

Speaking of the toolkit, nobody knew where they stood when mercy system was introduced. How does any one know when they get a hit from it?  I used it and am now keeping a tally. At the very least I can prove to myself if it  works.

I wouldn't know, I wasn't aware that there was a third-party tool to show the mercy counter at all. Personally though, I would be very careful about exposing data in a system I developed, and only through APIs that I've explicitly chosen to do so. I don't know the nature of this particular data, maybe it was never supposed to be exposed and it just got caught up in a fix to a bigger potential data leak. If the same way you could access the mercy counter externally could be use to, say, access payment information, that's a problem. Or maybe you're right and there's some nefarious reason for it.

Either way, I think the question shouldn't be "why can't we use a third-party app" but rather "why haven't you implemented these handy features so we wouldn't have to use a third-party app".

Oh i agree it should be in game, i think they dont want people to know, they want people to gamble impulsively and i would guess their analytics showed that people were buying less shard packs.

I used to think they couldn't "fix" it. I was naive.  

1. Arbiter was too easy for F2P in beginning,  Didn't matter, Player acquisition/retention still a priority
2. Arena then gets harder as top just keeps getting stronger, more difficult but doable (Arena is a paywall for some, but not at all) -- This is what Plarium wants 
3. Progressively arena gets too difficult (paywall to big now)
4. Bots introduced (short-term player bliss!, short-term revenue bump from low spend segment)
5. Bots still around (players happy, revenue declining... no more paywall)
6. Bots removed (Goto step 2 lol)

Arena is a paywall for Arbiter by design, moreso now than prior.  Our "fix" to right-size arena to 2019/2020 difficulty helps players (f2p specifically) but not the Plarium bottom line.  

Of course arena is WAY too difficult now, and likely impacting the spenders now.  The point touced on above that I liked was the change from a zero sum (actually deflationary with the reset crap) to a steady increase in the points pool makes sense.  My guess is it will be only marginally helpful though, the tiers are just too small to see an imediate impact.  But they don't want the overkill they introduced with bots.  So expect to be underwhelmed with the upcoming changes, is my unfortunate prediction.

It will get worse as reaction gear filters down as well.

As bad as it is right now for newish players - speed nuke teams are the most accesible, good go second teams seem far more intensive for gear and roster requirements

Once reaction gear becomes common, speed nuke teams are dead. Apparently this is being seen in plat, but it will filter down eventually.

I'd forgotten about that... ugh.  I need to get back to Gold Tag fast while I still have a small chance... Might be impossible for me in another month as I drift into casual mode.

Just the fact that a grand majority of teams are aribiters should tell the devs SOMETHING IS WRONG!

Sure ignore the players, we spout garbage all the time.  But do not ever ignore statistical data.  Monkeys bashing a keyboard to make code and this is what you get, a broken portion of the game.

i