I swear at this point this is the only reason this could make any sense at all. The moment someone posts the slightest criticism about Arena, some "gitgud" post appears next.

I am not even sure those are human beings. The answers seem generic and completely free of any "soul". Its basically "Arena is fine, you are not gud enuff, get better" ergo if you pay you win!

If they are not bots or paid agents then at the least they are "useful idiots" that keep valid criticism away from Plarium and give Players the wrong impression that this is somehow "their fault". 

Its not, Arena is busted and needs fixing....dont let them tell you otherwise!

Yeah, the sheer number of Arena posts every day proves, that it needs fixing and it needs it alot!

You farmed bot pages to get gold and now you're surprised you're tanking when they removed the bot pages?

Why?

You don't belong in Gold. Why do you think you do? 

ah ...Airmaxx our resident troll.

Hey "Airmaxx"! Care to explain who put you in charge to define who deserves what? 

Let me help you out here: the way I see it, to be able to post in this Forum you need the following things:

A:) human decency

or

B:) general common sense

What mental gymnastics do you use to justify being here when you dont meet these two criteria while EVERYONE else does?

I DO understand though (you need to validate your addiction and needless spending somehow)

And dont tell me its "bEcAuSE I wAnT a GoOd gaME"

You are not entitled telling players what they deserve or not. You are just one player and it is up to Plarium and their CUSTOMERS to find common grounds. They dont need you as an ARBITER in between!

Spare us your twisted cheap "elitism" and go troll elsewhere!

Oh I can, I just don't think you have anything worthy to say. 

Another effect is that players pushed out of gold then squeeze silver players who end up in bronze and make bronze players lives impossible.

I win 80% of the fights i start as i am fussy about who i fight and can generally read now if i am likely to win, but- staying in place in arena is a chore not fun. Games are supposed to be fun not another job.

I can understand why people want competititve pvp and it should be competitive. I havent started a 'fix arena thread' for this reason (and because if i am honest there are enough of them)

But it seems to me that pvp should be seperated from pve (great hall and bonus stats), that way competitive pvp'ers can duke it out for fab rewards but it becomes optional

I suspect this wont happen because if arena was optional 90% of the playerbase would not touch it. The vast majority will be doing it because the game forces them to do arena to progress. That is bad game design, the activity should be fun for the majority of people not something they are forced to do..

As for all the threads, in all honesty? there are enough threads on it now surely. However being rude and dismissing the genuine frustration of players is not helpful.

Dear participants of the discussion! We appreciate expressing your concerns about the Arena and are looking for ways to make better this part of the game experience. I would like to encourage you to confine such discussion to a lesser number of threads. Please, consider continuing an existing discussion on the Forum instead of creating an additional one if it mainly corresponds to the matter you would like to discuss.

In this manner, it would be easier for us to process your feedback more thoroughly. Of course, you are still free to create a new thread, but it makes collecting your feedback slightly less effective and the discussion becomes less focused in this case

Also, please abstain from the usage of offensive language. Even if you had some disagreement with a person before, please do not bring up your previous disagreement if it is not directly related to the current discussion.

Even when the community manager missed the oportunity to repeat it here right now, Plarium said (in response to a Hell Hades video) they never had bots in the arena. The lvl 1 Warboy defensive teams where just players sandbagging into lower tiers in order to collect arena tokens with their offensive teams.

The bot teams weren't the ones with 1 level 1 champ on defense, they were the level 35 or 40 teams with 60k power, appearing out of nowhere in the gold tiers, entire pages full of them, when there was zero chance any such team actually could have made it into gold with the arena being as difficult as it was before the 'bot period' started, never mind so many of them. Nor would they have stayed up in gold, considering how many people farmed them, if they had been real accounts.  

It is as simple at this:

Nobody was talking about UNM...UNM are also not the first steps in the game or an area of the game like Bronze arena. Comparatively we would be speaking about Easy Clanboss...

And talking about influences...how much does the nifty 20% bonus from Great Hall influence your performance in Dungeons? Arena? Faction Wars? ClanBoss?Campaign?

UNM is not the most influencing factor...it just drives up your chances to get good champs and ressources....but it will not give you the boni to all areas of the game.

I think you are delibarately mixing up topics here...

See, this is where you lose me man. 

You talk about BRONZE, but you also talk about 20% bonus from Great Hall, wtf?

I think you're just confused man. Just think about it again. 20% bonus is literally nothing. My CB damage goes +/- 1m when in between Platinum and Gold 4 and that's a 5% bonus. 

UNM is definitely the most influencing part of the game, with biggest rewards and one players should focus on ASAP. I demand players be able to clear it from DAY 1 , because every day spent not doing UNM is a day spent in a massive disadvantage! HURR DURR

EDIT: I also love how you ignored the part where I show my 1 month old alt clearing entire page on auto in the bronze 4 while you claim it's impossible for new players to progress LOL facts and evidence are too much eh? 

# When can we expect an update on how the problems with Arena preventing player progression will be fixed?

# When are you going to take action regarding the rather obvious trio of trolls belittling the problems that new players are running into with this game?

See the absolute bashful ignorance and arrogance of new players?

The sheer audacity on this guy ... Hahaha

If anything arena should be harder, every team on defense should get a bonus increase to their stats (except speed) to counter the fact that you're playing against an AI and have the knowledge of the team you're facing beforehand. That's an insane amount of unfair advantage for every offensive team!

Actually, I'm becoming more and more convinced that what they need is to decouple progression and most of the significant advantages from the arena entirely, at least if they insist on limiting entry by population ratio. The arena isn't an aspect of the game you can just ignore. It's not just the Arbiter or general mission progression, but some very significant advantages in the great hall and the arena tier itself. Comparing the gold 4 tier bonus + fully upgraded great hall to not doing anything in the arena at all is comparable to playing the game without putting equipment on your champions. It's a big deal, and that's not even taking into account your access to the forge, tournament rewards, quests etc. Progression in the arena is central to your progression in general, the same way doing dungeons for equipment is.

Making arena ranks exclusive, saying that gold is not something everyone should be able to reach, is not sustainable. Bronze and silver are all kinds of screwed up with the current matchmaking, which makes its function as a ranking system fundamentally broken since your success has more to do with everything except the arena, but at least everyone has a theoretical chance to advance in it, provided that they follow the arbitrary rules of player power management (and even then, it relies on the assumption that not everyone will so that you can take advantage of it). Gold, however, will only get more and more saturated. Let's just assume the game survives for 5 years. What are the chances of a new player to ever reach gold when it's filled with accounts that have had 5 years to consolidate their power? Skill? Please. Skill may be a factor, but it's insignificant next to luck, with time and money being your primary way to influence how many opportunities to get lucky you have. There is simply no scenario in which a player of any amount of skill will ever be able to reach the top without a significant amounts of luck/time/money involved. This isn't the case in any proper competitive game. If you've got the hand-eye coordination and reaction times of a god, you will be good at CS:GO whether you've played it for 10 days or 10 years. Here, you'll forever be playing catchup.

I'm starting to think bot teams is the only way to go, or at least some other form of arena point inflation that will push players upwards (e.g. points for being too strong for others to pick a fight with you). I don't know if there ever were bots, I've certainly never seen any I could identify as such with any degree of certainty. Let's be real here, the experience would be pretty much the same whether you were fighting against bots or players, since the arena isn't really PvP in any meaningful sense to begin with. Note that this doesn't have to mean it will be easy to reach gold, you could theoretcally put in much scarier teams than what a real player can manage, just that there's nothing gatekeeping you from doing so provided that your skill/luck/whatever is sufficient. Even if I can't do dragon 20 for example, I know that if I get the right champions and equipment, I will be able to eventually. There's nothing saying that sorry, we've hit the limit for number of players allowed to beat dragon 20 at the moment, guess you have to wait for one of them to quit or hope you randomly pull that one god tier champion that'll let you push out someone else.

As for platinum tiers, well, I don't know. I still think the idea of a game like this even having PvP is stupid to begin with for the aforementioned reasons, but at long as it's not important to overall progression I don't really care.

1. Arena is "broken" without the bots

2. Arena is "broken" with bots

I am closer to Airmaxx, able to maintain gold4 but recognize neither 1 or 2 above is the solution.  Problem is 99% of complainers will struggle if it is fixed in a good way regardless.  Everyone crying Wolf with sh!tty arena teams masks the real problem.  Arena missions and progress have always been the most dificult and and should remain that way.  But accounts less than 6 months should not be competing with 18+ month accounts.  We did not have to do that when we started, because they did not exist.  

They need 2 separate arena servers, pre-arbiter and post-arbiter.  If you are on pre-arbiter, you don't fight anyone that has completed the arbiter missions.  A somewhat arbitrary line, and another variable could be used to make the distinction.  There may be a better line in the sand to draw.

But in addition, those that have not completed arbiter will also be restricted as follows:

1. No Faction Wars

2. No Doom Tower

These will be unlocked upon arbiter completion.  This should prevent sandbagging in lower level, and also prevent idiots from building FW teams before other priorities.

We don't even know if it was a 'LEGITIMATE glitch' as you call it - if so, it was an awfully convenient one and one that Plarium chose to keep in the game for a long time because it was serving a useful purpose. Basically, let's call it what it was: a temporary fix, however they arrived at it. It was a poor fix, we both agree on that, but it was still better than how things were before. 

So now the fix is gone and arena is back to the mess it was before. That's not 'normalized'. We've gone from a broken arena to one that had the problems papered over with a temporary fix, and now we're back to broken. A properly working arena would have a reasonable increase in difficulty as you move up in tiers - and a reasonable way for newer players to develop their Great Hall without finding their path blocked by older players. 

The Arbiter missions aren't really the point, the Great Hall and the PVE boosts granted by higher arena tiers are. If it's actually Plarium's desire that arena keeps getting tougher and tougher for new players because older players get further and further ahead in terms of champs and gear, then that doesn't fit with the Great Hall and arena bonus systems which basically require players to stay in Gold IV once they've reached a certain point of PVE progress. It's not only the progress missions that would have to be fixed, it's much broader than that. Though it's probably easier to leave all of that untouched and instead rework the arena to add multiple Platinum tiers and manage the tiers until you reach the right level of difficulty for gold IV, with the more serious PVP competition limited to the Plat tiers. 

As for the people complaining on the forums (in which I don't include myself because I'm not really affected, I got Arbiter months ago and I still manage to stay in gold IV despite the huge increase in difficulty), there are some who have strong cases to complain and others not so much, because their teams suck or their expectations are absurd. But using the second kind to dismiss everyone and pretend like there's no problem, like you and some others are doing, is disingenuous and you know it. 

I spent 2 years building my arena team. 

That's the effort I'm talking about.

Damn right I should gate keep you. Have fun catching up. 

Your argument is you deserve to be in the same place as me for simply "participating in the game" , don't make me laugh

What effort starting earlier and now gate keeping for everybody else so you can feel good about beating up AI teams? 

You literally don't have basic reading comprehension, do you?

I said I am still winning 99% of my fights on auto, in gold 4, because I took the effort to build my teams.

The absence of bot teams doesn't affect me.

Arena is still easy for me as if almost nothing has changed. 

I understand that I am a minority, on here, but at players like me should be rewarded for their effort vs 90% of the players being stacked in Gold 4