Arena improvement ideas
Dead horse beating alert! Yes, we all know Arena is incredibly frustrating and it's even more frustrating that Plarium's attempts to fix it are half-witted and shortsighted. For one, shoving fake accts in with easy defense teams for a month or two and then removing them shows that they have no good plans for fixing Arena progression and are applying band-aids to temporarily slow the negative reviews on the play store and other areas. The idea of using total player power to matchup players is poorly thought out as well, but I'll get into that in detail later.
Whenever Arena problems are brought up in dicussion the answer is always "SPEED SPEED SPEED", which is the correct answer, but not knowing your opponents speed makes life really difficult. For this reason, speed should be a major factor in calculating the power of a champion, which then leads to the team being higher in power so you can see that in the matchup lists and furthermore, it'll make their player power higher especially if they have a lot of really good champions geared up heavy on speed. I don't know how much speed is factored in power currently, if at all, but it should be and from the benefits it brings, it should be a heavy factor in power.
This brings us to matchups. Whatever method they're using for matching up players in arena is not working. For bronze and silver, matching up players by total player power simply makes it extra difficult for people to progress since everyone on both sides is stuck where they are trying to pick away at a few matches, winning some and losing some. The matchups on all levels should be completely random for all players within that tier so that a person progressing can find matchups they can win and move forward until naturally they hit the wall where they can go no further until they upgrade or work on new methods instead of synthetically being thrown against players that are all in the same boat. At the very least, any range of power that's used to match players should be broadened heavily, but I still argue it doesn't need synthetic controls.
Lastly, I think something that's long overdue is to make more tiers per medal, 1 or 2 at the least. On top of that, add some more room in Platinum or another tier of Platinum so that those endgame players aren't spilling into lower levels and making life frustrating for newbies and midgamers. The extra tiers could get more medals per win helping us work on that medal level of the great hall and progressing further to get into higher tiers, rinse, and repeat.
That being said, whoever came up with the medals required per level is either bad at math or a sadistic freak. Going from level 3 needing 300 bronze to level 4 needing 400 SILVER is an elegant looking progression, but if you do the conversion, that makes it essentially go from 300 bronze to 800 bronze, or obviously in silver since it requires silver, 150 silver to 400 silver. This is all possible, but it gets so much worse when you go from 600 silvers to 700 golds. That comes out to 300 gold jumping to 700 gold. Multiply all that by 24 nodes in the hall and you've obviously got a lot of work on your hands. Giving people a better/less frustrating way to grind for that great hall will hopefully make this less of an act of torture.
tl;dr: speed should calculate into power and heavily. matchups should be naturally, completely random per tier. 1 or 2 more tiers per medal level for better medal farming to benefit great hall progression and player progresison overall.