Greetings, Raiders!
Happy Friday and here is our regular portion of the Raid Digest!
Let’s take a short break between numerous raids and battles and revise our positions. Hence, without further ado, let’s get straight to it.
Right from the beginning of this year, we have been seeing a lot of comments about the changes in the Classic Arena overall and the matchmaking algorithms in particular. That’s why we want to shed some light on the current state of things in this area.
As you may remember, in October 2020, the new matchmaking system was introduced in the Classic Arena. It constituted the creation of a list of opponents with roughly similar account levels and player power. The new matchmaking system, among other things, calculates the difference in the players' power when forming the list. While it may not be perfect yet, it allows to create a fair competition in the Bronze and Silver Tiers and to prevent pairing players with vastly different experience at early stages of the Arena. This matchmaking system also maintains the difficulty curve of the feature. The power difference between accounts plays a huge part in forming opponents' lists in the Bronze and Silver Tiers. However, the Gold Tier is the most competitive one, so it doesn’t filter opponents by their account power, but uses the current Arena placement as the main criteria. That's why, upon entering the Gold Tier, you might experience a greater difficulty in further progression as you encounter a much broader list of opponents.
Basically, Gold is the Tier where the strongest players go, while having more or less perfected champions’ Skills, gear and choice of allies. This Tier should be challenging, and the ones who manage to reach Gold should be ready to keep fighting strong opponents to remain competitive and stay in the Tier.
Last fall, all of you witnessed low-level accounts appearing in the Gold Tier of the Classic Arena, and it helped a lot of players reach Gold relatively easily in a short period of time. The reason why those accounts appeared in the game was that we added more segments to the server, so that the load would distribute more evenly and the server would feel better during the activity peaks. As the result of it, low-level accounts started occasionally appearing in all Tiers (since the algorithms started to take these new segments into account while defining opponents in all Tiers). Still, this was a temporary phenomenon, it couldn’t last forever. We realized back then that those accounts would disappear from Gold, eventually. That was rather a deviation than a new order of things. As time passed, weaker accounts were gradually demoted to lower Tiers, and now the Gold Tier has become as competitive as intended.
The recent trend of steadily increasing difficulty in the Gold Tier of the Classic Arena is an aftereffect of the mechanics mentioned above, and the gradual demotion of the low-level accounts added to the game in October. Since fewer and fewer low-level accounts were popping up in the Gold Tiers, the overall league's competitiveness had increased. Therefore, many players who quickly passed through Tiers and propelled themselves to Gold 3 and Gold 4 by their attack power alone, have now started losing their footing due to possible breaches in defense strategies and stronger players having an edge in these Tiers.
Let's sum it up: because of the higher level of competitiveness in the Gold Tiers, it is becoming yet harder to compensate losses in defense battles with victories in attacking battles only. That requires revision of def teams and searching for more effective combinations.
Another important question that we want to talk about is Arbiter Missions, since the Classic Arena is closely related to these, as well as to many other in-game activities. Looking back, let’s recollect what Arbiter Missions were all about. Arbiter is not a regular Champion - she is a top Legendary who has been considered the ultimate game reward for a long time. Thus, the Missions should not be too easy to complete. Nevertheless, we truly believe that none of these Missions should block your progression to Arbiter. That's why we closely monitor the situation by checking the analytics and data at our disposal to make sure that it is not a “mission impossible” thing.
It is also worth mentioning that the Arbiter Missions help reveal your weaknesses in the game and motivate you to improve these areas.
We want to thank you all for your constant feedback about the Arena that we receive from various social media. Rest assured that we are continuing to closely monitor statistics in the Arena and all Arena-related features to spot any possible anomalies. The current Arena situation is the result of a natural progression of this feature. We will keep you informed about any changes in the matchmaking system.
One more thing that we want to mention is the newly added moderation tool in the Global Chatroom. At the moment we have a complete team of moderators for the in-game chat so we are not hiring new ones for now. The in-game moderation feature is in the development, and we will inform you before a next expansion of the moderators’ team.
Last but not least, we are putting final tweaks on the rebalance of several Champions and this rebalance will be released in one of the nearest updates. Additionally, we are working on AI improvements, and if all goes as planned, they will also be included in the next patch.
So that’s it for today’s Raid Digest! Stay tuned for future updates in our official channels and take care!
I understand the comments about the changes back last year with Classic Arena. What I am having difficulty with is my lower powered clan memebers being pitted against high powered teams when they referesh their Classic Arena opponents in Bronze and Silver. I do need to get them to post what they are seeing but this information should be in the data. I had one Clan Member approach me on discord this morning saying they are in Bronze I and every time they refresh all they come up against is high level Legnedary Teams. When I said that can happen at the top of the tier they stated they were still at the bottom of the tier. I can give you the clan member name privately. Thank you, BoomMaker49
Traduction en français du raid Digest :
https://www.alucare.fr/changement-sur-larene-dans-rsl-raid-digest/
(For non-French speakers, this is a link to a French translation because many do not understand English)
Not sure where you come up with your matchmaking ideas but why dont you make a new account and try and make it to bronze 3 for the arbiter mission. Guild hall wont help you when your first starting out and the crap gear dont help either. Your saying that everything being equal and its NOT you should be in bronze and ready to quit in no time flat. Great job sir as always. Refresh the page over and over and see how long it takes you to get out of ........ Bronze. Seems balanced to me.
The moment you're considering purchasing some void shards but then see this post and realize that no one at this company obviously plays this game based off the pr save thats being attempted in those comments. Ill hold onto my money until you people start caring. I hope others will do the same since it appears thats the only way any kind of change will happen, once it starts affecting your bottom line. Bravo friends, bravo. 👏
Consider my sub canceled.
es normal que las arenas esten dificiles, las personas de 2 meses quieren superar a personas que tienen 1 o 2 años eso es muy dificil sin gastar, resolver el problema es muy sencillo sin retocar algoritmos, este problema ya se vivio en clash of clans, lo unico que tienen que implementar y lo unico viable sin poner bots, es extender lo niveles de arena, en ves de que el limite sea platino, se deben de crear nuevas ligas para que los mejores jugadores asciendan, una liga de leyendas o cual quier nombre que le quieran poner entre platino y oro 4 es la solucion, y demas esta decir que platino con solo 300 jugadores por mas de 1 año tambien se esta quedando corto una ampliacion a 1000 jugadores estaria demaciado bien, todo lo demas que implementen es algo irreal competitivamente hablando y se puede manipular, las arenas entre competidores se enfrentan por posiciones en las arenas, el nivel de equipo o de cuenta no tiene nada que ver si el jugador se gano el derecho de subir.
This totally misses the points we are raising. We can watch older youtube clips from prior to your arena update back when players were last saying it was broken. The teams they faced back in the previous "broken" period are infinitely easier than the teams which are being filtered down to Silver and Bronze now. If gold is more competitive in the ways you want... great! It should be competitive at the top levels! But if the teams which are being pushed down are making the early and mid-game absolutely impossible, it isn't good. I'm on day 66. My account level is 56 and my player power is 604k. Many of those who I match up against are able to field significantly more powerful teams than I can (high bronze - low silver) despite not being that far off from my account level or account power. Why? Because you have allowed us access to a lot of ways to increase our account level and you have expanded the character vaults which allows us to increase our account power without actually making any teams we can field be any more powerful. Older accounts which took longer to level and which had smaller roster sizes look comparable to mine but absolutely are not comparable by any reasonable system of measurement if you look at individual teams we can put out there.
As for the missions... I would be completing progress missions regardless of what the final reward was. If you gave us 2 sacred shards I would still be completing progress missions because progress missions are designed by game designers to be the steps you take. When one mission is upgrade 2 great hall bonuses to level 4 and it is ludicrously more difficult than every other part of the game and then the VERY NEXT MISSION is "Earn 3 Stars on Stage 7 of Godfrey’s Crossing on Hard difficulty", that is an indication that you guys have no idea what the comparable levels of difficulty are. I 3 starred hard in the first week. I 3 starred brutal early in the second week. I have 1/3 of nightmare 3 starred and could probably go on but have been too busy leveling characters. Competing in low silver arena is WAY harder than 3 starring early nightmare stages and yet your progress missions think HARD difficulty is comparable to low silver. No, just absolutely no. Create an account and try it out. The game design doesn't match the current game.
Well, I think this might be my first post, and whee it's gonna be a doozy.
I'm going to preface this with I get how gatcha games work so I'm not going to hyperbolically threaten to quit or change my admittedly very low amount of spending on this game but the following needs to be said clearly and concisely.
That is, even if true, pure and utter garbage.
Why on God's green earth was there nearly no mention of any of the details about the matchmaking changes and what they would do back when it was implemented? Or better yet before? Transparency on these sorts of things has reached a state of can't hurt could only help. Plarium is in such an amazing state of day late and dollar short at community management you're lucky the parts of the game that work do work as well as they do.
I don't do more than the minimum in PVP because I'm not much of a fan in general and it's even worse with raid It's already one of the most mathematically awful ladder systems I've ever had to deal with. It hemorrhages a mind-boggling number points into nothingness every time it resets and loses are so much more relevant than wins that you can lose a good deal of rank breaking even on wins and loses, it's been exploited off and on for months any time they could be with little to no compensation with every new fix... So now a bunch of people with teams that by your current ideals shouldn't be blowing through and getting Arbiter by virtue of being lucky enough to play to take advantage of a glitch in the system and the stupid missions *still* force you to repeat an idiotic amount of content that you've done a billion times already because they chose to or were forced to due to champion and gear selection focus on other areas of the game instead until they could catch up where they lagged behind.
I've lurked and read on these forums for somewhere around two years now. My play and the time I can spend on this game are limited enough that I'm not really all that concerned about my current levels of progress, I spend more gems than I should on shards because I can't devote the literal hours upon hours it takes to build up food or farm gear past my 30 auto missions. This is kind of annoying but ultimately fine. I knew the deal when I signed up for the game. I can beat every level 20 but spider on auto with no problems and spider I could probably do if I could get to it but I need to 60 and book up the champs to get it done. I can two key nightmare with my clan boss team and have never been in a clan that had ultra unlocked so I'm not exactly sure how I'd do there. I'm about as casual as it gets when it comes to this game. I've played similar games in the past and been much further along by this point because until recently Raid's Daily quest and login reward system was... Lacking. It's better now so I know things can get fixed. Sure I'd like an arbiter but I'm not all that bothered by not having one. Patronizingly explaining how things work after the fact people are upset by it clearly isn't bad business because you guys are raking in cash hand over fist but I'm sure I'm not the only one who's more than a little sick and tired of it.
Its like I wrote this thread myself because I always knew this to be the truth and took as much advantage of it as I could to better myself in GreatHall as long as it lasted
You only confirmed my thinking with this Thread
It all makes sence to me and reasonable in every aspect, even if the FTP do not get it :/
I'm fine with Gold, particulary upper, being hard. That isn't the bigger concern - it is bronze and silver being mismatched which isn't addressed in this letter. Matching teams by total player power is too flawed. I have about 200 champions for a 90 day account full of rares and epics. I could fully level up every champ I have and I would not compete against an Arbiter and Tundra, etc., team which I see at lower arena levels. That is the problem with using total team power. Players with Arena OP champs don't correlate with player power comparisons. A great example of this was a recent Ash video. He took four epics that were partially ascended with no gear and he fused them into Rhazin, took him to 60, fully ascended him and put OP gear on him. His team power DROPPPED 200k! How could his account be worth less? That max Rhazin would kill all four of those epics and everyone in my account. I've read players saying they used half their champs for food to lower their rating and arena got easier. That can't be the behaviour you should be encouraging.
There has to be a better way. For example, rate each champion for arena off and def (you already have in game and CC ratings to reference) and then match us against each other based upon best arena comp possible. That would be more accurate then allowing a pile of arena garbage champs to drive the matchups but it would solve the concern with just using the champs that are being fielded now in arena if the player isn't developing the right champs they have (e.g. Tundra in vault). In this manner, I wouldn't see those crazy arena teams from someone who has 120 champs but a crazy arena def team and my 200 champs make the computer think we are a good matchup. This certainly can be improved with more complex ratings systems or there are better ways, but total team power is just too flawed and drives the frustration you are seeing.
I think this would be powerful when coupled with another suggesstion out there which is to reset the arena def at some interval. I think at each arena tier reset is too painful for someone who just misses the reset for a couple days, but you could do it if they have no arena battles in a month. I hear it is done now if no logins for 30 days but someone who just logs in or just does CB doesn't address the arena issue so if people know they will reset arena def in 30 days if they don't fight one battle is pretty easy to avoid but woud provide additional relief to the arena challenge as they would be removed from arena without a defense.
If you want arena's meta to be really hard it ok... but you need to balance all the content related... any mid or early player need to be able to fight a fair fight in arena... a lot of the game progesion depends on it... Any player can tell, if you succed on a brick wall arena mision... the next 20 are a cake walk... unitl you are stucke on another arena progress mision.
Bronze and silver al completly fucked... you can find teams with 150k full legg... so dont tell us, the arena sistem is fine... only need to adjust gold tier...
How can a mid or early player, try to fight for a fusion, dedicating time and resources when it will be imposible to get fragments or resources needef from the arena (40 arena fight daily... 400-500 point to earn... fighting in pages where 9 or 10 acc are insane OP).
The arena system block all content... needs tu be balanced and fixed... ans is killing low/mid player mainly, unless you are looking for all of us to quit the game...
As many people sais before... make a new f2p accc.. and try ti climd on progress and also reach silver 2 o 3...
Please consider a few of these suggestions:
|||Take a look at some champion passives that have cooldowns and reduce or remove them. Ironclad, specifically, has an interesting passive but can't make use of it since there are not enough big single target heals.
Also champs like Souldrinker having a 5 turn cooldown between death bombs is too long, it could be 3 turns and not be OP.
|||Skills that cooldown random abilities are able to misfire which severely hurts their usefulness. Golden reaper for example. Her a1 reduces a single cooldown of a single champ. This effect could trigger and hit an ability that has '1' turn left of cooldown, meaning that it will be available the next turn anyway, so the effect is wasted.
||| Rotos needs a bit of a buff after his nerf last year. His a3 should be able to block revive if he has ANY +max health. So he would still have to hit at least once on an unshielded opponent with his a2 before blocking revive. This would make it doable, instead of never ever happening.
||| This isn't champion balance related but how about allowing glyphs to be used on main stat? Taking boots as an example, the max speed is 45 for main stat but for a substat it is 38. For atk/def/hp the mainstat max is 60 and the substat is 43.
This might seem insignificant since speed is weighted higher however there is only an 18% difference between speed main and sub stats while there is a 40% difference for atk/def/hp.
If glyphs were usable then the difference would be much closer together power wise since 8 spd is more desirable than 8% atk/def/hp.
|||We NEED a legendary dog, add to orcs?
|||Counter attack(CA): Since the advent of unkillable teams centered around team attack, or a single DPS, CA has fallen out of favor. I think it's about time to increase teamwide CA options from the 3 available now. An older epic would be a great target for CA. Warden, for instance, could have counter attack and reflect damage and be very interesting as a spirit defender.
|||Rebalance all champs that have situationally triggered abilities like Cillian a1 tm steal versus the clan boss. How it might work is that Cillian gains the turn meter but the clan boss doesn't lose any, this would also effect champions like maneater but with the new ai customizer it will allow him to be used in UK cb teams still.
||| Consider giving more small support abilities to fringe dps champs. Someone like Baron, who can be a huge damage character but that relies on a % being met. His usefulness would go up significantly if his a3 had the effect of duplicating (2) buffs on him and placing them on allies.
Someone like Abbess, who was rebalanced last time but still is lacking, could have her a1 changed to also remove the same debuff from all allies. Or add a true 'holy' support ability which would preempt fatal hits, place unkillable on herself, and swap health with the ally that would have died.
Basing Arena matchmaking on player power is so ridiculous it's hard to fathom why it's done that way. I've reduced my player power by 100 and am now one whole bronze tier higher than i was yesterday - woo - my arena team hasn't changed, my player power has. It seems to really be that shallow and stupid.
It is also worth mentioning that the Arbiter Missions help reveal your
weaknesses in the game and motivate you to improve these areas.
My 'weakness' seems to have been using shards and getting a bigger pool of characters. Pretty stupid punishing someone for doing that in a game based on collecting and levelling characters. I think you'll find this sort of response will 'motivate' people to do a lot of things including in many cases spend less or stop playing.
Cortavius says:
"There has to be a better way. For example, rate each champion for arena off and def (you already have in game and CC ratings to reference) and then match us against each other based upon best arena comp possible. That would be more accurate then allowing a pile of arena garbage champs to drive the matchups but it would solve the concern with just using the champs that are being fielded now in arena if the player isn't developing the right champs they have (e.g. Tundra in vault). In this manner, I wouldn't see those crazy arena teams from someone who has 120 champs but a crazy arena def team and my 200 champs make the computer think we are a good matchup."
Agree. As a newb (4 months, just reached player level 40), I'd like to see some documentation of how arena matchups actually are calculated. Until seeing this I had no idea I'm being matched based on all my champs, in the active set and the vault. And since I'm fielding what I think is my strongest 4 for defense and offense, it's baffling to see my four level 40 champs getting matched against teams with multiple 50's and some 60's. I'm at the bottom of Bronze I, some refreshes don't give me a single winnable battle, others throw some wimpy one-champ teams into the list, and I have no idea what needs to be done to climb out of the basement.
Throwing what appears to be random chaos at new players isn't the way to retain them. There has to be some sense of order, a rulebook from which a strategy could be discerned. Where is it? The Arena guide describes mechanics, but explains nothing about the rules:
"Arena Points determine a player’s Arena Ranking and Tier." Well, doh. But a player matched against completely overwhelming teams has no way to gain arena points.