The sorry state of the Arena

[nolf]

Sorry for the attention grabbing title and certainly I do not wish to offend anybody by what I'm going to complain about now.

The unoriginality of the decks in gold and platinum is just mindnumbing. About 50% of the decks I have faced over the last months are so worn out. Especially the usual supects, Mono-Aether, Mono-Darkness, Mono-Gravity, Mono-Air, Ghostmare. I don't expect everybody to - admittedly - waste time creating arena decks like I do. I cannot remember the last time I put up a mono deck and because like everybody else I hate it, I have never ever put up a Ghostmare deck.

I'm certainly not claiming I come up with great original ideas for my decks. I applaud the people who come up and share with us amazing deck ideas like The Bone Cellector or Voodoo Bravery or Swallow or the old Instosis. I look up the card the oracle gave me when I want/need to put up a new deck, I usually check the Wiki first for recommendations, sometimes I browse through the forum for 10 minutes. I play against my own deck a few times to make sure it's fairly balanced. As I said, I admit, it takes way too much time for what it's worth. Currently at level 65, I'm in platinum and sometimes only a few people get to play and beat my deck and it drops out of the top 500 in no time. And I hardly ever get a thumbs up for my effort. In part I guess it is a design problem of the way the Arena works in general. There's not much electrum to be made, especially not if you aim for something out of the ordinary rather than the most difficult deck to beat. And it's hard to give a thumbs up to a deck you lost to, especially if it is right before a special spin. Though I've personally grown used to now giving a thumbs up to anything which isn't mono-something - still, probably less than half the time.

So what to do about it? To Zanz I'd suggest to let us vote on all decks we play, including those we beat, and have that actually make a difference,  penalise decks which get voted down by dropping them in the table and push up decks people enjoy. Or, if he feels people would exploit that (by pushing up weak, badly designed decks which are easy to beat), add a new league, maybe JFF (just for fun), totally without financial incentives where decks are collected which get lots of thumbs up and offer a lot of variety.

It took me long enough to be able to collect and buy enough upgraded cards to try out some "serious" grinders for the two upper leagues. And I expected I'd see a lot more variety than in silver and bronze. After all, we're getting to half-blood or even false god status, while the player is still stuck with the usual 100 HP, single draw and single mark. Ok, we're smarter than the AI, it needs some advantage to provide us with a decent challenge. But still, with these powers available it's disappointing to see how unoriginal most decks really are. It's entirely possible to face three nearly identical decks in a row - even playing the False Gods feel more varied and there's only 29 of them.

Discuss, please.

[treebeard xiii]

The fact f the matter it's not actually about electrum its about making number 1 in the respective arena most people you will find in plat have more electrum than they need or want and if they do need it they can easily grind it. Yes far too man of the decks are unoriginal and dull but the psychological boost it gives people when they make number 1 is the real incentive thre are some people who have accounts at multiple arena levels to get the amazing clean sweep, number 1 in all arenas at the same time or as many as they can. I don't understand it myself but i must admit I may not build specifically to reach number 1 it feels good when a deck I built starts closing in on number 1.

Financial gain has always been negligible it is more the bragging rights when you reach number one and unfortunately the decks most likely to reach number 1 are your boring meta decks.

[Submachine]

Agreed. I'm also starting with unoriginal decks because my goal was exactly reaching Plat 1 and perfecting the way to there. This quest is still going on as yesterday I was Plat 1 for the second time with monodarkness, an admittedly unoriginal deck.

On the ironic side, I also get your feeling when I try to grind Plat. The thing is, that shards make most of the decks nearly invulnerable. For example, not many decks can defeat a SoSac+poison, a monoaether SoW, a monoair SoFree or a monodark SoV deck. Even SoB, SoI, SoG and SoD decks can be a pain in the A. Without sharded decks, I doubt that there would be much complaint.

[andretimpa]

There's also the problem that original decks spend so little time in the arena that no one sees them. 2 days ago I posted a trio deck mixing staffs, scorpions, adrenaline, AW and SoV (staff was the card and I picked mark of darkness). It went 1-3 and got 1 thumb up but was out in less than a day. Yesterday I got RT and made a ghostmare. Last I checked it was 3-0 with no thumbs.

The root of the problem is not the people sending decks but a combination of things:
- People play arena to win, so they'll use a strong deck.
- In the higher leagues this creates a competition that is not well balanced by the thumb system.
- Players in their majority just thumb down, no matter what.

If you put these together, just a few people trying to get number 1 is enough to define the meta.
To solve this there would need to be a handicap that not only kept original decks longer by making them gain a higher rating, but somehow making them more powerful. The problem is how to recognize what is an original deck since thumbs are not being well used.

[iDaire]

I remember I put a very specially designed grab bow into arena. A day later I checked and it was inactive rank 8467. A better system needs to be established where not only the content and strategy of a deck are rated "by a simple thumbs" but also where the originality of the deck is also considered and given credit. Also, a rematch button without rewards would be appreciated for playing decks that we liked to play and also to better understand the original decks in arena.
Me, I farm bronze because my deck calls for it. But I have to admit, the originality of decks from bronze to platinum gets massive weaker. I can't play three straight games in SILVER without running into some mono darkness or some light stall. I rarely see a grabbow or a RoL OTK, fun decks to try and counter.
In short, we need more original decks and a better way to credit them.

[ARTHANASIOS]

^
Just a single correction; Grabbows are neither fun nor original and OTKs can't be played by AIs (their playstyle is just too complicated for any kind of artificial intelligence).

[andretimpa]

Rank 8467

wat

[Higurashi]

Agreed. I'm also starting with unoriginal decks because my goal was exactly reaching Plat 1 and perfecting the way to there. This quest is still going on as yesterday I was Plat 1 for the second time with monodarkness, an admittedly unoriginal deck.

On the ironic side, I also get your feeling when I try to grind Plat. The thing is, that shards make most of the decks nearly invulnerable. For example, not many decks can defeat a SoSac+poison, a monoaether SoW, a monoair SoFree or a monodark SoV deck. Even SoB, SoI, SoG and SoD decks can be a pain in the A. Without sharded decks, I doubt that there would be much complaint.

I'll refer to this post of mine as it lists some relevant examples: http://elementscommunity.org/forum/nerf-this-card!/nerf-shards-in-the-arena/msg1127742/#msg1127742

Restricting Shards would do nothing. Removing Shards would cut down on the number of cheese decks that can get to first with little effort, but the majority would still remain. Ultimately it wouldn't create any more variety in Arena since there are more than enough cheese decks to fill up top 10 (and 25 too). That means people will continue to try to emulate the top tier decks. It's unavoidable in a competition scene that people try to win; the only way to reliably make originality more common is to reward it sufficiently where it ends up on par with the best decks in terms of lucrativeness.

Two big problems with that approach: what is original changes with what's common; if people can make odd decks that are rewarded as much as good decks, those odd decks will become unoriginal and eventually we'll, of course, come full circle and continue the circle. The plus is that while this is a predictable cycle, it IS organic, if that's a desirable thing.

Secondly, rewarding sub-optimal decks rewards a worse ability to distinguish the strongest cards and synergies in the meta. Far from all original decks are original on purpose.

[dragonsdemesne]

One change I think would help somewhat would be to divide the arena into five leagues instead of four.  I don't know fi they should be even divisions like how it is 20 levels/league now, but just as a theoretical proposal, suppose we divided it into five leagues of 16 levels each.  That would mean there were slightly less people in each league, and it would therefore mean that a higher percentage of players would have their decks active in the arena at any given time.  I'm not sure how the special spins would be done for this, though.  I wouldn't want to see a 'diamond' league at the end that only needed 1 win to get a special spin, but I also am not sure that a 'paper' league that was even easier than bronze should deserve a special spin.  I guess it could require six wins in a row, one more than the current bronze.

As for the actual decks themselves, I try to make interesting decks that, while they don't usually get really high ranked, do occasionally last a week in the arena, even if it was somewhere in the middle of the pack the whole time.  I also don't care about electrum anymore and I don't care about any kind of prestige from getting a #1 deck, since I figure nobody will remenber it, anyway.  (I've had one #1 plat deck ever, and I'm sure nobody else remembers or cares what it was)  Even then, though, I've still had a few more original decks make it into the top ten, so it can be done, but certainly not with the kind of reliability you can get from spamming monodeath poison SoSa or whatever.

[iDaire]

I know it will take possibly forever to make but hear me out,
There should be a tracker that tracks what cards are used most in the arenas and what card combinations that are also used most in the arena along with what combos that the CPU uses. With all three of these, we can eventually have a way to maintain what decks can be put into a league at once because let's admit it: Platinum is FLOODED with at least ten poison decks. Though this isn't that much of a great idea, we can at least remove cards such as Shard of Sacrifice from leagues. I also believe we should just remove the standalone poison card that can't be reflected, because not all of us run purify: and have pity on those who feel that they have to when they try to grind platinum. Shard of Void should be removed as well since besides stone skin and shard of divinity, there is no efficient way to recover MHP. Remove Shards of Sacrifice and Void & Remove Standalone Poison.

[bripod]

I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the REAL reason that the Arena Meta is the way it is... The AI is only so smart...

If you come up with the greatest counter to PDials and Swallow etc and pop it into Arena, odds are that the AI will NOT know how to play the combo/strategy that you have thought up. That's why Monos and logical Duo's do very well in Arena. Any deck that is a "play it if you draw it" type deck does well too.

The simpler the deck, the better the odds of the AI being able to execute it. So many times I've seen the AI totally ruin a good idea that someone put up... Many times I would have liked to give that person a thumbs up even tho I totally destroyed the deck because the AI couldn't play it...

If the AI were developed further or there was some way to "tell the AI" how to play your deck then the Meta might get more interesting. Until then, your best bet is to create a grinder that can deal with the current Meta and profit. Believe me, there are plenty of choices to use in the current Meta and make nice sums of electrum.

Yes, Mono Air sux, yes Mono Dark with SoV sux, yes {insert your most hated deck here} sux but get over it... Build a counter and have fun...

 We can't even get a small update to this game right now let alone a whole new arena. So until we see from the almighty Zanz, just stop playing your fav deck and build something that can compete with what decks those who know how the AI plays, are giving it...

[Naesala]

That would mean there were slightly less people in each league, and it would therefore mean that a higher percentage of players would have their decks active in the arena at any given time.

Excepting, of course, people who intentionally make several accounts and get right to the edge of a league so they can have the best stats for that league and try to take the number one position. Not that I think that's unfair to regular players especially in Bronze or anything >.>