S4 to G1 is ridiculous. There is a HUGE backlog of abnormally powerful accounts (hrmmm...whales) that are stuck in S4 and can't move up because Plarium somehow decided that the entire Gold tier bracket should only be open to less than 1% of the player base with that ridiculously low static number.
I've been stuck in S4 for months and I can't get over the hump for G1. I have some, but not enough, of the arena meta champs and primo gear to pull it off. Even if I'm safely in green on Sunday afternoon, you can bet I'll get beat down hard in the final hours before reset. It also doesn't help when the game freezes on loading into a match and you get an automatic loss. How hard would it be to change the code so that it only counts a loss if a champion takes a turn first? That is beyond frustrating. People aren't killing the game on loading screen to get out of matches. I don't see how that could be exploited. Just make it so if no one takes a turn, the match never happened.
Of course this backlog rolls downhill, which is why newer accounts complain that they can't even move up in Bronze due to the strength of teams even at the bottom.
They don't have to ruin the competitive structure of TTA with wonky shenanigans like they did to Classic. They can just boost the brackets up by a healthy margin (preferably as a percentage of active participants) and the problem will be solved. People will have places to advance to and the whales will still be able to dominate, just in a higher tier.