Indeed you do choose your team, just as someone at Plarium chooses what champions to put in a dungeon stage. That does not mean that doing the dungeon is you doing PvP against said Plarium employee. You build your defense team and that's where your interaction for that ends. You don't build it against a specific opponent, you build it based on pure statistics to minimize the number of enemies that will be inclined to pick a fight against you. You build your offense team and pick a team to fight against when attacking, and that's pretty much the only point of interaction you have for that, which is not really any different from picking a team to clear a dungeon though in this case a dungeon with a random, pre-determined composition of opponents in them. You may technically be fighting against a player-made team, but saying that one is PvE and the other is PvP is a distinction without a difference. You're doing that everywhere in the game. You're not interacting with another person, you're interacting with a scripted sequence of events strictly one-way. Of course, it doesn't make much of a difference either way. In many matches, you won't even get an opportunity to do anything before it's over, and even in the ones you do there's not really that much viable variance possible.

In the end, it's not really about what you call it, but the fact that it's functionally identical. Personally, I'd never call anything PvP unless it has direct interaction between two players, where both have an opportunity to influence the outcome in a meaningful way. In Raid where this only happens when one player picks another team to fight, it is not sufficient. Whether it could still be PvP or not with an AI sophisticated enough to be indistinguishable from a human player is an interesting philosophical debate however.

You know why it's should NOT be a problem having a lvl 50 as your max champion BRONZE 2?

It's called PROGRESSION, any good game have a steady and consistent progression on it!

Look at WHERE they placed Bronze arena mission on the progression mission? ALL BETWEEN NORMAL CAMPAIGN MODE! That is why IT IS STUPID to suggest that people need speed tuning, all maxed out champions, with correct full masteries for people who just got into bronze! These people are new players who just learn the basics! It's like telling a toddler who just learned to ride a bike that they're useless because they need to qualify for Tour de France!

You can justify the broken design of arena you want, the fact is simple, what people experience in arena 2 years ago is EASIER thn the arena I experience 1 year ago, and my arena experience 1 year ago is EASIER than arena today. That is another bad design, when people get different difficulty setting just because they joined the game at different time. And don't blame people who thinks arena as a PAYWALL because arena has become a massive paywall. And they're rightfull to complain about it being a paywall.

I have to agree 100% very true !!

As a player who joined 182 days ago (normally, I don't remember what specific day I started a game, but here I can see from it daily log-in reward), in Gold Arena and spending exactly 3.49 €, I say the arena-paywall is 100% very untrue.

In no way I defend the way the actual arena is, I wrote that the matchmaking algorithm is horrible recently, bad mechanics like account power having influence on your arena matchmaking. Instead they should use the time in game (bound to daily log-ins) as newbie-protection and after some months, just let the matchmaking be randomly inside the same tier. Good teams will rise and therefore leave Bronze.

But the game is like it is, and as I'm no manager of Plarium, I can't change it. If you want to rise in the arena as it is, you have to get a good arena team. The progress mission may be at a wrong space, much to early in game, but you can't change that (Plarium could, you can't). Either you get a good team (like I did), or you stay in Bronze forever.

The problem now though is even with a good arena team it's still a click the button lottery more than half the time if you're going to win or not for many, unless you want to waste gems continuously to carefully pick fights. You can't see shields in advance, the power rating is bizarre, you're still in the dark as to opponents speed until you click and most teams have a speed lead so that's a gamble. And most people don't know all  the little intricacies of what skills rarely seen opponent charcters have.

Plarium saying  'as the attacker you have all the advantages'  as I've seen before is basically nonsense. 

I see something else that is really strange. When there is a tournament I basically always get in the top 10. For Arena even top 3 all the time. Iam steady bronze IV. But now with this tournament (iam level 53 and playing 45 days) I get totally shafted. Iam position 46! and all other competitors have so much more points. The top 10 has 450 to 950! points. In like one day. How am I in a league with similar power level. I got 131 points (not complaining) but the difference is immense. And you cannot see the profiles from those players (again very lazy programming imo). But something tells me that are not bronze III and IV players.....

And that is why I say Arena is a mess. The position of the arena mission WAS correct 2 years ago, a little bit off 1 year ago, and totally messed up today. All the while the mission position itself never changed.

And yes we don't have the authority to change the system, but we have the power to push for Plarium to change it, that is why I voiced this concern instead of defending the system by perpetually saying "git gud".

Veteran forumites that keep perpetuating these "git gud" comments are defending a flawed system that pushes new players away that will eventually hurt the game itself. For god sakes, there's only less than 800k of accounts that are level 60+ after 2 years! That's a horrendous player retention! We can push for a better system rather than parroting "you need speed speed speed"

So it's up to you and other veteran forumites, because ultimately... I'm already done, I already gave my account away.

In the end, I cannot in my good conscience say Raid is a game worth playing... Because it's not, in its current form anyway.

So yeah... Git gud or whatever...

Arena mission should be X number of victories

Yeah, things have gotten downright ridiculous in the arena. Over the past two weeks I've dropped from Gold IV down to Silver IV and it's nearly impossible to progress. I made it to the top before with a basic team of Epic and Rare champs. Now I have teams of maxed out Legendaries (including Underpriest Brogni) and I regularly lose to teams with lower team power composed of lesser champions. Worst thing is, I've actually spent good money on this stupid game but it's gotten me nowhere fast. I'm stuck at the gold III arena objective. Thanks Plarium  raining on my parade! At this rate I won't be playing very much longer.

buy a raid card save shards pop on the events u will get there lol )

maybe not matching someone in bronze 1 with a roster of legendary teams.... that'd be a good start.  whoever thought tying overall player power into the arena matchmaking is an idiot.  plain and simple.  i can beat spider 18 with my roster, but i can't get out of bronze for the progress missions.  i'm working my way through nightmare campaign, still stuck in bronze 1.   i though there was more to this game than the arena, but apparently arena trumps everything else.  not really very smart down there at plarium, i might have spent more money, but i see how badly buying shards has fucked me over already

I disagree with you saying that highest level champ only at 50 is not a problem is not true. Technically, you can farm minotaur and get masteries to tier four. Because ai is broken, arena is easier than expected. Farming=full ascensions too. So, a lv.50 full ascended team with tier four mastereis and speed artifacts should be fine to silver.

By every metric aside from arena you are mid to late game, i am guessing you have dragon 20 and golem 20 on farm if doing spider 18?

The problem is that 1) Plarium dont care, their analytics probably show them that ftp players are quitting and the whales are whaling harder buying the speed packs etc. They have had lots of 1 star reviews as a result, but can easily afford to buy positive reviews to counter that.

2) Veterans who have already got to G4 and benefitted from the easier periods dont care either, they prefer to perpetuate the 'git gud' argument, without recognising the issue with matchmaking.  

I think the answer is either download something else (i do login to do my cb keys and chat to clanmates about various crap but i have gone back to playing guild wars) or just accept arena changes are not going to happen and get what fun you can out of it. Plarium certainly do not want to retain new non-whales so have no incentive to improve things

We are not used to difficult missions, the consoles have accustomed us badly.
The arena is chaos, people get angry but there are a lot of players and I always play it myself.
Perhaps this is precisely the success of the game, having really difficult goals to achieve. 

how boring must a game be if you have every champion and have completed everything in the game to do. :) im actually thankful i still have lots to achieve

Make a pic of your lvl 50 arena team that doesn't use buffs when you reached silver.

Hi, guys! I'm here to say that we are indeed concerned about the difficulties that many of you experience in the Arena.

That's why we are developing some tweaks for the matchmaking mechanism, which we will release in one of the upcoming patches. After the changes are introduced into the game, progression through Bronze and Silver Tiers will become a bit easier. We cannot provide you with more detailed information for now, but we will inform you later, near the release of the patch

spider is the highest i can get.  i got lucky with a Khoronar about a month ago.  dude is stupid overpowered on spider even without Minaya.  golem and dragon are 17-18 also.   honestly don't care one bit about arena, and would not even do it, even for the daily reward, but that damn great hall is tied to it.  it's too bad great hall bonuses are so monumental.  like, literally gamebreaking if you can't progress.  thinkin about just quitting.  i have zero interest in arena.  way too many unknowns with arena.  why waste another hour on arena?  i already spend 5+ hours trying to get the rest of the daily crap done.  starting to think plarium doesn't think i have a job, or life, or anything better to do with 1/3 of my day besides grinding on their game.

you sure you're not too busy making power creeped champions to sell to the whales?  cuz it kinda looks that way....

I hear ya, i was stuck on spider 19, it was MM that took me to auto 20, although i have dropped multiple arena tiers since i went inactive so i have no idea if i can still do it now that i have lost the arena bonus, this has to be the only game where you can grind for months, but actually go backwards in progression lol.

Yup, they make arena essential because they know participation would be very low if they didnt force you to do it.

Its quite funny really, i have a 280+ speed lead and speed tuned debuffer/ nuker in good gear (savage gear, 4.5k attack, 200 crit damage etc) and now that i have gone inactive and fallen into silver i am totally being hammered in defence and my high player power is giving crazy matchups from a quick peek at my logs.....i think i might go all the way from gold into bronze within 1 week at this rate lol. But i am at the point where i literally log on and chat about stuff to clanmates then log off so fortunately i dont care

Yes its a massive timesink, to be honest when active i never watched the fights, i think most people use mouseclickers and leave their laptops running them come back to them.  Most games have an auto complete option once you have proven you can consistently do the level. 

Its hard to quit for many because of the  sunk cost fallacy - where you continue because of the investment already made and the feeling you will lose that investment of time or money. But it is a fallacy.