"First Live Arena" since what? Also which Marius missions "require" spending money exactly? If anything, those missions are balanced to the point that you can NOT pay to speedrun a lot of them and they gatekeep all accounts equally at certain ones...

Lastly, how have you not run into this before when you were in Silver? I've seen similar matchups and I'm in Silver. I'm trying to get clarification of what the issue is, is it the roster of their 6516 rating to your 3517? Context please

FWIW i was one of the first people to get Marius, and I did it *mostly* f2p. (I've spent ~$120 total over 3.5 years, an average of about 3 bucks a month, mostly on monthly gem packs, and once on a forge pass)

It's just a matter of time and resource management.

You're absolutely right about there being terrible matchups in Live.

I *think* the matchmaking is only looking at the "season" score and ignoreing gold tiers and all-time score.

And even if that's not the case, it was pretty terrible to start with.

Otoh, they've also added bots to live gold. 3 losses in a row and you'll face a bot.

That matchup doesn't make sense to me. Admittedly I don't really play live arena much, but how exactly does the system determine that it's "fair" to match such different scores? Is it simply because there aren't any other opponents to fight?

​Sorry, I was a little frustrated when I wrote this. So, it was my first match of the night.
I had never faced teams like this in silver and gold until today.  

​As far as my issue, if you can't see it, there is nothing I can say to explain it better. But the other team almost doubled my ratings.  

ok that definitely helps clarify but what were the next matches like? Maybe there's a queue timer and that 6k person had been waiting for like, 30 seconds and at that point it starts looking for players outside the normal parameters so you just got really unlucky?

As far as the Champs themselves, like I said I've run into super whale/kraken teams in Silver and expect I will in gold. It's a more satisfying victory if you do manage to beat them.

I've only been playing for about a 1 and a half and seen them power creep the normal/starting legos to death.

Speeding $3.00 a month today will not win you the Arena matches needed to complete the missions to get Marius.  

My next four matches went like this.

2nd match 5.5 k loss

3rd match 5.7 loss

4th was 3.9k win

5th 6.9k and quit the game at this point.  1-4 

You may be correct about the wait time but that's no excuse for the match-up that I had. They can create a better solution than this.

Thanks for you feed back

from the official Discord server (please don't shoot the messenger)

i

so how long is the season for? Sounds like it will start evening out in 1-2 weeks probably

Thanks for the info, but it does hamper my game. I'm close to getting the last fragment piece I need for Quiatus. So every loss vs a team that doubles my ranking pushes me further away from getting it. 

Another 26 days. I'm hopeful it'll be reasonable next week, but we shall see.

Understandable. Trying to push to G4 finally but I'll probably take this week easier and take fights here & there before trying in earnest Monday or so.

oh damn, that's right. When it said seasonal for some reason I thought 3 months but yeah 30 days makes moe sense for rewards and whatnot

Maybe when next season starts they'll use the previous season's scores for matchmaking at the start

We've fed back alot of this sentiment already and will continue to do so.  The seasonal matchmaking is just not a good metric.

As for progression to Quintus with the point scoring change you'll at least always be moving towards him, but I agree that does little to effect the enjoyment of the game mode.

4 weeks on, 2 weeks off we were told.  Also told that every new season is going to have fresh matchmaking.  I certainly hope they change their mind on this.  No one wants to get crushed by people 2x ( or more ) than their ELO.

The matchmaking is 100% fine.  Most occur in <10 seconds, in order to make the complainers happy (every single battle being "fair") would take FOREVER and still be subjective to their unreasonable criteria.  The first few days will have much higher variance, but I expect it to stabilize over the season duration. My plan is to go 7-3 or 8-7 daily to get the final rewards. 

Yeah, it's fine if you're on the upper side of it.  And keeping complainers happy is more like feedback to make the game better for everyone, not just the top 10% spenders. I understand that those at the top of the ladder are fine with things now, but I think they feel threatened by the thought of someone spending less money to achieve the same goals. Arena in this mega is not about skill or strategy, just how much money is spent.

Wouldn't using just seasonal score be the most "fair" method?

or how much time they've been playing consistently. But I respect the POV of endgame players with arena teams in the top 1% of the game, I wouldn't want to wait minutes for a matchup when I can easily crush lower-strength players to get a nice lead at the start of a 4 week arena season. 

Regardless, my vote is still for the next arena season to use the previous season's rankings. Like most competitive seasonal sports do. 

For now, it might be best to start then quit the 3 battles till bot, beat the bot and then start-quit another 3 over and over. That way it'll match you against really bad players for awhile after that, maybe? Feel free to test and let us know. 

In closing, the only thing I wanted to add was the Top 100 win/loss rate is very interesting and does indicate competitive balance since the more battles it shows they've played (on average) the closer they are to a 60% win rate. Except 1st and 2nd place, Crypto is the biggest kraken account I've ever seen on the World Leaderboards for Champ Chase and Summon Rush

I'm guessing those on the leaderboard are just fighting each other the majority of the time, working as intended...

I mean I could go 7-3 today, but come here and post the 1 whale I got matched with as proof of bad matchmaking. 

I concede that it will be significantly more difficult for newer accounts to progress, but that's no different than any other area of the game.