To all the active players in the Arena.

[Ghaladh]

Sorry for the negative comment at the end of my post, that was unnecessary and caused the main points of my post to be ignored, so let's try again:

As others have already mentioned, if you use creative, original decks, they will most likely lose a few times quickly and will be out of the top 500 in just 3 losses. Why is that ? There are a few reasons:

1. The most efficient strategies are already well known, so they do not count as creative, thus creative decks tend to be less efficient
2. The AI is not very smart and has no long-term strategic thinking ability, it makes on-the-spot decisions whether to play each card individually, thus unable to execute any smart creative strategy, e.g. it cannot play OTK decks, cannot hold back cards strategically. This severely limits the type of strategies and creativity you can put into an arena deck.
3. An unusual combo / synergy is completely unknown for the AI, therefore it cannot play it, so you better refrain from building decks on it.

I am sure that there are strategies that works better than others. One of the defects of this game is that only a few cards are truly powerful while the others are average or weak so I suppose it's normal that people tend to make decks around the most powerful cards (shards in general) and their most effective combinations or uses. As you wrote, the AI is not so smart, hence many strategies can only be used by the human player and that, indeed, reduces the variety of choices we can make.

All considered, till someone will be able to add new cards to the game, I suppose we are stuck in this situation. Luckily this community is very active and the occasions to play some good PvP are many.

I wonder only one thing: are those top farming deck being used because they are able to win against most of the strategies used in Platinum, or are those defensive Platinum decks being used because they are able to win against most of the top farming decks? I wonder if, by adding variety to the strategies used by the defensive decks, the farming decks would be as successful as they are now.

[treebeard xiii]

I am sure that there are strategies that works better than others. One of the defects of this game is that only a few cards are truly powerful while the others are average or weak so I suppose it's normal that people tend to make decks around the most powerful cards (shards in general) and their most effective combinations or uses. As you wrote, the AI is not so smart, hence many strategies can only be used by the human player and that, indeed, reduces the variety of choices we can make.

All considered, till someone will be able to add new cards to the game, I suppose we are stuck in this situation. Luckily this community is very active and the occasions to play some good PvP are many.

I wonder only one thing: are those top farming deck being used because they are able to win against most of the strategies used in Platinum, or are those defensive Platinum decks being used because they are able to win against most of the top farming decks? I wonder if, by adding variety to the strategies used by the defensive decks, the farming decks would be as successful as they are now.

It is a combination of both the cycle started with the ai being terrible with most of the 'original' strategies so people built decks that the ai can use, the farming decks were then built to counter these farming decks, then the new farming decks were built to counter that and so on and so forth the honest fact is at the current time it is impossible for both sides of the meta to be changed. New cards or smarter ai may change this but until the all powerful zanzarino returns to his game we are stuck with what we got and we as a community are trying to make the most of it.

[yee]

Yesterday I got Aflatoxin as my Oracle card and made arena deck around it. It was a mono and I thougt that Swallow and other SoP decks would easily own it. So I was realy suprised that with 1 day it went 9-0 and it didn't even have any SoSacs.

So this happens if you use strategy that isn't commonly used.

[farscape]

Yesterday I got Aflatoxin as my Oracle card and made arena deck around it. It was a mono and I thougt that Swallow and other SoP decks would easily own it. So I was realy suprised that with 1 day it went 9-0 and it didn't even have any SoSacs.

So this happens if you use strategy that isn't commonly used.

I am not sure I understand your point. IMHO, mono decks are pretty easy for the AI to play as they do not require any synergies or card holding back to work., hence they are fairly common in arena and mostly non-creative. Are you saying you built a very unusual type of mono-death deck which worked well ?

[seulintse]

-.- most farming decks are either this http://elementscommunity.org/forum/trio-quartet/poison-dials-sosac-(fg)(arena)/ or this http://elementscommunity.org/forum/duo-decks/swallow-(patient-otyugh)(pulled-sofo)(platinum)/ or
this http://elementscommunity.org/forum/duo-decks/my-rolhope-(mostly)-unupped/... given that these are pretty typical decks, people will try to counter these the most (mainly pdials). Given that both, the arena deck designers, and the players, don't know who they're fighting, a mono-death with aflotoxin as the main card is pretty much nigh-unheard of, in platinum. Its not out of the ordinary because its unique from what you find in PVP, but because its a PvP (at best) deck in... platnum.

[yee]

Yesterday I got Aflatoxin as my Oracle card and made arena deck around it. It was a mono and I thougt that Swallow and other SoP decks would easily own it. So I was realy suprised that with 1 day it went 9-0 and it didn't even have any SoSacs.

So this happens if you use strategy that isn't commonly used.

I am not sure I understand your point. IMHO, mono decks are pretty easy for the AI to play as they do not require any synergies or card holding back to work., hence they are fairly common in arena and mostly non-creative. Are you saying you built a very unusual type of mono-death deck which worked well ?

It is the normal "Fill the opponents field with Malignant Cells ańd hide behind Skull Shield" strategy, but it is uncommon in Platium (well at least I haven't seen one in ages). Maybe it is so good because it can use Aflatoxin on second turn and the deck also has some Gray Nymphs.

On second day it is at 17-0 and on rank 34

[CrockettRocket]

Yesterday I got Aflatoxin as my Oracle card and made arena deck around it. It was a mono and I thougt that Swallow and other SoP decks would easily own it. So I was realy suprised that with 1 day it went 9-0 and it didn't even have any SoSacs.

So this happens if you use strategy that isn't commonly used.

I am not sure I understand your point. IMHO, mono decks are pretty easy for the AI to play as they do not require any synergies or card holding back to work., hence they are fairly common in arena and mostly non-creative. Are you saying you built a very unusual type of mono-death deck which worked well ?

It is the normal "Fill the opponents field with Malignant Cells ańd hide behind Skull Shield" strategy, but it is uncommon in Platium (well at least I haven't seen one in ages). Maybe it is so good because it can use Aflatoxin on second turn and the deck also has some Gray Nymphs.

On second day it is at 17-0 and on rank 34

All the way! Hes going all the wway!

[ElementalDearWatson]

Bit of thread almost-necromancy, here.

FWIW, I agree with the OP (although I agree that nothing will change by people saying it).  I actually force myself to think outside the box - when I get the Oracle card I use a RNG to get a number between 1 and 12 and then have to use that element along with the Oracle card.  Sometimes it's easy to come up with something the AI can play, and sometimes it's difficult, but the challenge is good.  And my decks often make the top 100 (I'm currently ranked 71 with a deck), and I've been number 1, too.  So it's certainly not impossible to step outside your comfort zone and still make money in the arena.

Truth be told, though, the money you make in the arena is tiny.  Your deck will play about 4 games a day on average.  If it wins all of them that's 92:electrum.  Or, to put it another way, 3 wins in Bronze, 2 wins in Silver, 1 win in Gold, and half a win in Platinum.  Anybody who has enough in the way of cards and experience to put up a Platinum deck should be able to farm 92:electrum in 1-2 minutes, so I don't buy that people don't have enough time to farm and therefore putting up standard decks is the only way they have of making any at all.  It'd literally be quicker to ignore the Oracle card completely and simply use an upped rush deck on Silver twice.

[Lastmerlin]

I hope its acceptable to revive this once more.

First thing I want to mention: Gold is far worse than Platinum concerning annoying standard decks. Gold is really 70% Dimshield, Shard of Freedom, Mono fire and Pests. Even most of the rest are annoying standard concepts (ghostmare, life rush etc). I pressed dislike for about 90% of the decks there. In Platinum this is down to about 50%. Perhaps Gold has lowered my standards sufficiently, because I even accept monos of the less-used elements. But I think you can notice that lots of Platinum players are annoyed of the standard decks as well and try to do something different.

Some ideas:
Give rating more power. Currently, the up/and downvotes have a minimal impact, I dont know if they even influence the rank. A Standard Ghostmare or BlackHole/Discords that everyone hates should not be able to rise to rank 1, even if it wins all games. The influence of votes should be finetuned such that a rank 1 decks needs to win the majority of matches while still collecting a good number of upvotes.

Give the opportunity to rate decks you have beaten. Sometimes I would like to give an upvote for a deck that I killed in a thrilling and tight fight. And some decks deserve downvotes as addition to a beating. Its psychologically really detrimental that voting decks is connected to the negative event of losing the game. Requesting for feedback in the moment of negative emotion is really stupid if you want some fair and objective results. No surprise, that 80% (my guess) of the votes are downvotes. Always rating a deck would get rid of that negative connection and make rating a more positive habit. Furthermore, together with the first point this allows less successful, but nice decks to survive longer. Of course, this should be finetuned such that decks that dont win anything drop out no matter what.

Finally: Show the deck makers the votes directly. Currently (as I understand it) you have to compute it via some sort of reverse engineering. Increasing the visibility of feedback already provides an incentive to create decks that get some upvotes.

Bottom line: Make player feedback more frequent and more important. Currently its just about winning, no matter how annoying and uncreative your deck is.

[Sera]

I agree that rating should have a more significant effect, but I disagree on rating decks you've won against. You can rate up easy-to-beat decks to keep them up longer.

IMO, finding a way to reduce the effect of the common grinders in arena is just as important. As someone who likes (or actually, used to like) posting decks in Arena, the number of people that use PDials/Swallow/etc is just as annoying as the number of Dims and Monodarks in Arena. And this seems really hard to fix. Maybe the players could have a hidden rating on them which adjusts their effect on the ratings of arena decks, such that losing against someone who's using PDials all day won't hit your arena deck's rating too much, and winning against him will give better rating.

[Lastmerlin]

There will be always players who downvote just because they lost and would upvote if they easily win. I dont see why the first is no problem, but the latter is. Just ensure, that decks that loose everything still drop out quickly.

However for decks that just do 50:50 (which is clearly subpar in Platinum): These are the decks that should be able to survive for at least a while. The top decks in Plat are something like 40-0 or 60-1. Congratulations - if the whole league consisted of such decks it would be completely pointless and utterly frustrating. In the subforum for platinum decks you can learn that even 70% winrate is considered rather mediocre. If the league had only decks with 70% to 100% winrate, the average rate would be 85%, or 15% for the player. This is surely below the frustration threshold for any player (which I estimate at 30% mininium, perhaps rather 40%). Conclusion: The beatable decks are those who keep the league attractive.

The monoculture from player side is difficult to break because the few named decks are the ones which lift the player winrate above the named limit which I called frustration threshold. It depends on your personality of course, if you are satisfied with 20% wins you can do a lot, but if you want 40% there are hardly any options. I tried a bit with my rainbow deck could not find a variation that even came close to that.

Essentially the situation seems to arise from the fact, that everyone want to be successful:
1. Players want at least 30-40% winrate
2. Deck builders want 80% winrate

This contradiction leads to the ruthless optimization from both sides. You can't do a lot about the first point. First, only winning gives positive feedback in form of cards and coins. Second, the threshold is psychological one - hardly anyone likes to loose the vast majority of games, even if 20% would still gain money. Hence, the second one is the point to change: What deck builders consider as success. Currently, there is only one benchmark criterion displayed (and really relevant): Ratio of wins and losses. Of course deck makers will look at this criterion and try to be the best in this regard, which means in Platinum aiming at close to 100% winrate. So the solution is: Offer a different measurement of success that incorporate other qualities. The variety in player decks will follow, if the pressure on the 30-40% threshold is relieved a bit, because using always the same gets really boring.

[bripod]

What people fail to realize is that the AI can only play a certain group of decks well... Most of the "really cool" deck ideas that people put in the Arena fail miserably because the AI has NO IDEA as to that 6 card combo that your deck is based around. Until the AI is upgraded, this conversation is mostly pointless...