I will pass on your feedback.

Also, Arena is TOUGH right now. I am getting the crap kicked out of me trying to float in G5. I agree it is tough, as do the posts that crop up here each week. 

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The addition of G5 some how made G4 harder, tbh I expected the opposite effect. I have cheater champions like that damn cat to stay in upper G4 at least.

I expected the opposite as well.

After 3 years, there has been an immense power creep in arena. In older videos on youtube, the content creators said something about 230 speed to stay in gold 4. Now 330 speed are'nt enough anymore.

I feel like this is the case. G5 is like Diet Platinum, G4 is somehow getting tougher. Is it cause G5 brought some people back? Is the algorithm still settling out? I don't know, but I will be asking.

Any other thoughts on why it could be this way? You would think for sure it should take some of the pressure off from Plat teams pushing downwards onto the Gold teams below.

There  used  to  be  a  fair  amount  of  single-character  teams   in  the  past,  so  spending  gems  to  refresh  the  arena  a  few  times  was  a  viable  strategy  . Were  these  bot  teams?  Dunno  . But  now,  it  takes  a  dozen  refresh to  get  a  single  beatable  team--  not  worth  it.

I have my arbiter at 346 speed and it isnt really fast enough for confidence. I win just over half the races.

I am in G4 still but my defense record shows constant pressure and everyone seems to have tormin/hedgemon/candraphon etc.

I am contemplating building a resist team around lydia for defence, but i am not sure that i have the gear,  i cant keep up the number of battles required to stay in G4 with a speed nuke defence.

On attack i can deal with leorius fine, i just use uugo.

On defence though, if i use uugo in defence it leaves me vulnerable to something else, which i guess is how it should be but the number of hits i get in defence is insane right now. I am sitting at around 3.3k (the middle of g4) and struggling to stay there...and while i am admittedly FTP i have been playing over a year now.

I have a suspicion that it is neither. My theory is that the real culprit is Stoneskin Cardinal. That is an arena team that requires a lot of end-game stuff, and thus isn't available to many of the newer players. It also absolutely crushes a ton of "normal" teams.

My guess is that G4 and above became much more competitive because of that addition. It just so happened to be at the same-ish time that G5 was added. The meta still hasn't really adjusted to this new team - I still see tons of very easily beatable arena defense teams that, in the past, may have been challenging - teams like Arb + Duchess + Deacon + Trunda. By far the biggest culprit though, are the blender teams - they are 100% countered by Stoneskin Cardinal.

I think we'll need to see the meta shake out a bit, and wait for the dust to settle, before we really get an indication of whether G5 will matter.

The other big problem, though, is there is almost no incentive to actually get into G5. I wouldn't be surprised if the pool of players in G5 is much, much smaller than anticipated.

I'm  freefalling  at  about  50  points/hour.  At  that  rate,  I guess  I'll  be  gone  from  the  game  tomorrow  morning  . Faster  than  I thought,  but  now  I'm  half-looking  forward  to  it  . Time  to  try  something  else...

I dont understand stoneskin cardinal, can someone explain it?

I have fought lots of teams with a stoneskin cardinal, i love them- i just use a block revive champ for my nuker, i dont think i have lost to that sort of team yet 

What am i misunderstanding?

Card resses with a full TM, so your team dies card resses and you kill other team.

I love SS Card teams as my team is a CC single nuker team, and I have 2 buff strppers.

I either strip SS and kill card and rest, or CC others wait the 1 round for SS to fall and kill team.

So SS cardinal is all about the revive and turn meter, i dont think it is game breaking to be honest or difficult to deal with 

I dont think it explains why arena is so insanely difficult right now. 

The team is garbage on defense, which is why you have no trouble beating them. But it is great on offense. You get almost a guaranteed win against many of the common meta teams. Looking at my battle log, 7/9 of my last wins were using the Stoneskin Cardinal build.

I agree and do not know why Arena is such a mess, other than it always has been and they just fix it by putting bots in for easy wins.

That's  right,  but  that  was  an  acceptable  strategy  since  it  got  people  to  spend  gems  . Not  anymore,  though  . The  cost  just  isn't  worth  it.

I'm surprised the normal suggestion of farming dragon 20 hasn't been brought up in this thread yet.

Last week I spent around 7k or 8k energy during the 2x speed event myself, no luck getting a upgrade unfortunately.

Wondering op what comp(s) are you running and what kind of speeds/stats do you have.

I think the arena became so difficult completely organically, as part of natural progression of the game. And, sadly, as time passes it is likely to become even more difficult. Here's how I think it works:

A lot of Platinum players are OG, they have been playing for 2+ years, some even since the game was released. As such, they had a lot more time to farm god-tier gear, spent more on getting the meta champs, fine-tune the teams, etc. Once they reach certain level, they don't quit the game, but prefer to stay there.

As a result, the top of arena gets filled, saturated, so to speak. As newer players arrive, they occupy slightly lesser positions, but are still competitive for top postions.

Then come even newer players, with less than 2 years worth of playing. As Arena if filled from top down, those players are at a huge disadvantage, because there simply wasn't enough time and gameplay to progress their accounts enough to catch up with the rest. One way, if not the only way, is to spend far more than OG. This is why it becomes more and more difficult and more and more is required to spend money to stay competitive.

The addition of G5 was a great idea - but only on paper. Instead of staying in G5 or pushing for plat, those ''plat dropouts'' as i call them, drop down more or less on purpose, some want to farm more easiliy, others with maxxed or near-maxxed GH simply don't care. They're not in any rush. So they keep dropping to G4, G3, or even further, and are in the way of others who are struggling to reach higher tiers.

The problem is that the arena is saturated from top down, and as time passes, it will completely saturate G5 and eventually G4. SO you will end up with players trying to get to G4 to get Arbiter, and G4 will be filled with people who have been playing several years. And this is what they'll be up against.

One solution to this disaster-in-the-making is to EXPAND. EXPAND EVERYTHING! Plat, G5, even G4. This is absolutely paramount. Otherwise, arena will become completely unplayable for any new player that comes into fray within a matter of months. I'm referring to G4 in particular. It will become impossible to reach, even for high spenders. And when I say ''expand'' I don't mean by 100 or 200 places - but rather 1000 or several thousand.

The other solution is to un-tie game progression (get Arbiter, get Ramantu, get MyLateGrandma...) from reaching G4.

I am pretty sure even the brass and the developers at Plarium are aware of this looming problemm which is only going to get worse with time. The last thing any company, any business needs is to demoralize their potential customers. That's the best way to lose them. For evidence, i present the OP.

I hope i made sense. I would write some more, but i ran out of ink.😁

I think everything you said makes sense, but from Plarium's perspective it's a difficult pill to swallow, I'd imagine. In the short term, possibly even in the medium term, having the system as-is encourages spending. If they made the arena system "easier", especially to reach the few rewards that are worth getting (Arb, Ramantu, etc), people would spend less. Conversely, making it as hard as possible makes people spend more to reach that level.

They burn their player bank in the process, but that's the nature of the game. The fact this game even exists after 3+ years is probably well beyond their expectation, and I'm sure there are quite a few people over at Plarium that are simply saying "well, let's milk this game for all we can before people move on to other things". By making it easier to get those rewards, they are quite probably going to just lower their overall earnings from the game.

Welcome at the Arbi G1 World.

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