A few details about T500

[dracomageat]

Notice how there is a sword icon next to the "pick a League to challenge" area and a shield icon next to the "Change your Arena deck" area? You attack with your normal deck, and defend with your Arena deck.

So in other words I'm building a deck I can't use?
.

[wavedash]

One other thing that maybe should be fixes is it seems like the Oracle is giving the same card to a lot of people each day.  Today I got dissipation shield and from chat, it sounds like a lot of others did as well and even more people got other types of shields in the last 2 days(I also got Hope the day before).  If the idea of the oracle card is to force a variety of different decks, then it would be good to make sure the card selection is more random(and yes, I know several people I talked to getting the same or similar cards COULD happen even if it is truly random, but seems at least somewhat unlikely for that).  If the oracle card is truly supposed to be completely random, than given this and the complaints about decks selection and some other issues, might need to look at how "random" the game RNG actually is

Confirmation bias.

[Hodari]

Oh, and I have one question. Are winning streaks reset overnight? I thought I had streaks going in bronze and silver (I might be remembering wrong), and this morning none of the continuous victory circles are lit up.

Most likely, they are reset any time you logout or close your browser window.

[Hodari]

Another patch:
- Fixed the bug that didn't allow adding upped cards to the regular deck
- Added a button to test your own Arena deck
- When the AI is drawing 2 cards per turn it will refrain from chaining more than two of the following:
Silence
Nightmare
Earthquake
Black Hole

This is a definite improvement and fixes the issues with Nightmare, Silence, and BH quite nicely I think but..not nearly as effective in dealing with Earthquake nor would it work for explosion or steal as well.  With those the problem is not the chaining so much as just the sheer number of them that the AI has.  At best a player can PA 6 of their permanents(including pillars) while the AI can explode or steal 24 of them(not even counting pulverizer, butterfly effect etc. which are designed to be reusable but take longer to set up).  EQ is especially devastating in that you can drop 2-3 towers from your opening hand, have those blown up right away, be unable to do anything until a few turns later when you draw another one..which gets destroyed right away etc.

[xdude]

Platinum is not supposed to be farmed with an 80% win rate. It's supposed to be a challenge for you to keep adapting to keep a 30-40% win rate if you have all the cards to work with.

[wavedash]

It's supposed to be a challenge for you

There's challenging, like beating a Mario game without collecting any coins.
And then there's stupidly hard, like beating a Mario game without powerups and using only one hand.

to keep adapting

Adapt to the, what, 200 decks out there? If you could change your deck after seeing who you're up against, adaptation would play a role. But with so many god damn decks, you can't adapt because a change in one person's deck has virtually no impact on your win rate, and every change is accompanied by another change in the opposite direction, thanks to probability.

to keep a 30-40% win rate

Not only is 30-40% pretty generous, I doubt that figure will increase in the future. Sure, we'll develop new timebows, speedbows, time stalls. But every deck published on the forums is public knowledge, and Platinum decks will adapt to farmers. And this isn't even accounting for how much better we'll be at building False God decks by the time 1.28 is live.

[Hodari]

Platinum is not supposed to be farmed with an 80% win rate. It's supposed to be a challenge for you to keep adapting to keep a 30-40% win rate if you have all the cards to work with.

  I'll certainly agree there, however I think we also don't want to have a situation where if you don't have both an adequate amoint of quanta sources AND a PA in your opening hand, you might as well instantly quit against any deck with fire, earth, or dark in it.  At the very least, I think the outcome of a match should be in doubt for a while, not having it be over as soon as you see which 2 decks are matched up.
 
  My last game is a perfect example of the kind of thing we should avoid.  My opponent's oracle card was unstable gas.  My opening hand had 3 quanta towers, supernova, LS, AM, Mirror shield.  Looking pretty good so far right?  I play the towers and end turn.  AI plays 3 explosions right away, along with a couple creatures.  ok, at least I can use the supernova now and drop the shield which should help somewhat.  A couple turns later, I draw another tower and play it..instantly blown up again.  I play a couple scorpions..instantly firebolted.  AI plays fahrenheit..ok, I don't have a PA yet but he has a lot of fire quanta so I need to do something.  I play both an hourgalss and pulverizer, hoping he's burned off all his pc and knowing the hourglass will be targetted first..hopefully can at least get one use out of the pulverizer.  Nope, 2 more explosions.

  You could say it was an unlucky draw, but I've seen quite a few games go like this using a variety of different decks.  I don't expect to win every game or even the majority of them but I do want to be able to at least PLAY against these decks, not have everything be instantly wiped out.  Also worth noting that the false gods which most people seemed to have the hardest times with were Rainbow and Hermes, again in both cases because of their extremely high levels of permanent control. 

  Simply put, they have too many ways of destroying or stealing permanents and there are not enough ways to protect them.  A similar situation exists for poison which is another type of deck that I see being fairly dominant right now.   Again, there is only one card which directly counters it.  At least here things aren't as bad though since poison takes a while to kill you and gives you some time to either heal yourself or just outrush it.   At most, I would say making upgraded purify be free to play again or cost 1 of any quanta rather than water would adequately fix poison, if indeed it needs to be fixed at all.  Permanent control will be a far more difficult one to balance but I do think something needs to be done there.

  And lastly, hope it doesn't sound like I;m complaining too much on this as I do think Arena overall is a very big improvement to the game and a lot of fun.  I knew as soon as I saw the idea for it that balancing it would also be very difficult.  I also know that the only way it WILL get fixed is if we point out where we feel the issues are which is why this is in a beta like this in the first place.

[kirchj33]

I like kev's idea of decay occurring at 24 hours or upon Oracle spin.  I really don't see the downside and it does a lot to promote interest in the arena, increase competition, and keep the entire community involved.

[Calindu]

Platinum is like FG proposals,FG's made by players but you don't know what you will face.
It's nice to play,enjoyable.But so...hard.

[zanzarino]

The current win ratio for platinum is very close to 33%
Sounds like a perfect number to me, again, the fact that if feels frustrating to the most does not mean that it needs to be removed from the game because it is too challenging, it is the equivalent of the "level7" that a few players have been asking for.

Rewards will be adjusted accordingly when the arena will go live.

[Jocko]

Seems right to me, if you consider the upped rare spin and the increased rewards.
Offtopic: Why does Zanz get 3 slices of cake?

[Marvaddin]

33% because we have just a few decks, including some "NPCs" and crap decks with skeletons. When its alive and we have a lot of decks submitted every day, weak ones being quickly eliminated, I bet it will be much worse.

Every one knows PC is the worst part of FGs. FGs with no or little FGs are much more beatable. And of course a lot of players know this, and will pack decks with 12 Explosions and / or Steals. Because of this, I still think the main thing would be ban Shards and QT. Wants heavy PC? At least you cant do it in a rainbow, with a lot of creatures, hourglasses, etc.

Another good option: adding some more PA like cards.

About ranking interfering in how many games a deck will get, I agree, this COMPLETELLY SUCKS. Whats the point in having 500 decks if decks under 100 (for example) get near 0 games? Random, please.