Hi all. My favorite part of Elements is deckbuilding for the arena, but I have two major issues with it:
1. Decks don't get that many plays, so we can't test out variants on a single deck / getting plays is fun
2. If we have a good deck, in order to reach high ranks we're obligated to leave it up for at least 5 days, meaning I can't try a new deck in the meantime
3. It's pretty random how many plays you get. There is probably an equalizing system in place, where decks with fewer plays per day are more likely to get selected, but it's not effective over short time periods. If there isn't, that's a really good and easy to implement suggestion.
I have two solutions (I prefer the first one).
1. Take the standard arena, and make the decks fight each other. Basically, whenever you have a deck in the top 500, it periodically (once per day? once per hour? 10 times when first submitted? there are options) fights another arena deck (AI vs. AI) in its league, leading to a win for one and a loss for the other. These win/loss rates would be simply added on to the human-based ones (they could be separated somehow, and weighted differently in points, but I don't see why facing a human deck needs to be more important than facing another arena deck). This even fits thematically into the "arena" theme better- you are making a deck, and putting it into an arena to fight other arena decks (plus humans). We could even augment the win/loss system (still visible, but not the method of ranking) with a points system based on ELO- decks get more ELO for beating decks with higher ELO.
2. Every time you play an arena match, the game automatically plays some number of times (1? 5? 10? 50?) AI vs. AI using your deck versus the arena deck. This would be a valid idea, if it weren't for the fact that human-based decks will rarely be played properly by AI, leading to artificial inflation in winrates/inaccurate results. Arena decks are more suited to be played by an AI because they're designed to be played by an AI. But this would work if Zanz wanted arena decks to only play arena farming decks for some reason.
There could be a system in place to watch replays of AI matches against your deck, which would be nice, but that'd be complicated/unnecessary/memory intensive.
Since there would be more fights, we would have more immediate feedback/scoring which is fun. You could decrease the amount of time it takes for a deck to time out/become obsolete, making it so that people can make a new deck every day (or other day, or w/e).
The current arena system is nice, but it's hampered by the low amount of players on Elements and the fact that it takes up to 7 days per deck. Thoughts on my improvement?
Downsides I can think of:
Requiring too much computing power
Taking time to implement
Making your level too important (level 39 would become much more valuable than level 40, moreso than today)
