Arena is a ghost town

[Lakki]

Throughout the years, players come and go in nod. While TC sales may be good, the amount of teams queued has dwindled over the years, 1-2 hour queues for top teams queuing because of the matchmaking preventing you from fighting duplicate teams more than twice in a row, and avoiding greys...

There were people who had a lot of alts, that queued them, but even people who have lots of alts don't care to queue them much for tokens or bonus, like the old days. We also have a huge lack of new players coming into the arena because of how discouraging it is to constantly get lose.

On top of that, Iirc there was a change that made it so that teams could only fight within 1500 rating or so, Correct? This is good and all, to encourage the weaker teams to queue more, but nonetheless, it also does slow down the queue for higher rated teams.

I did mention in a previous thread, that changing the way arena bonus works, and making it real-time based , instead of match based, may be a better option, due to the way arena works now because of the fact that less teams are in queue, and we can only fight teams within a certain range now.

Years ago, when arena was booming. Horde's of alts from Ghosttamer, Dennisthemenace, Mircibeast, Jade/Pearl, Liten, Stormwizard, Thorin, and others i can't remember, queued their toons.

If i had to make a guess, I'd say we are down 25 teams or so, than prior premade seasons.

Not really sure about what can be done, to encourage queues, or if this will probably be overlooked. but just my thoughts and a bit of a rant.

Anyone else have any thoughts?



Reference threads :

http://forums.nodiatis.com/forums/sh...ad.php_t=21138

http://forums.nodiatis.com/forums/sh...ad.php_t=21099

[Darklords]

stop dodging better teams problem solved

[Glitchless]

You can't expect 3v3 queues to be anywhere near as fast as the other seasons, especially when you get into top 5 territory due to the 1500 rating gap you mentioned.

Reference:
https://nd1.nodiatis.com/halloffame/arenahalloffame.htm

In less than 1 month, your team has 1200+ arena fights. There's not a single 3v3 premade season in the history of Nodiatis (that I can see) that has had a team in the top 10 with so many fights per month.

Furthermore, the system was tweaked on purpose to make it more difficult to farm the same teams repeatedly during off hours. This was a dodger strategy (I'm not suggesting you're dodging) used in previous seasons that required a nerf - not a buff that rewards sitting in queue during off hours. Play prime time against prime teams. Don't whine when you can't get fast queues in the middle of the night.

[Lakki]

Originally Posted by Glitchless

You can't expect 3v3 queues to be anywhere near as fast as the other seasons, especially when you get into top 5 territory due to the 1500 rating gap you mentioned.

Reference:
https://nd1.nodiatis.com/halloffame/arenahalloffame.htm

In less than 1 month, your team has 1200+ arena fights. There's not a single 3v3 premade season in the history of Nodiatis (that I can see) that has had a team in the top 10 with so many fights per month.

Furthermore, the system was tweaked on purpose to make it more difficult to farm the same teams repeatedly during off hours. This was a dodger strategy (I'm not suggesting you're dodging) used in previous seasons that required a nerf - not a buff that rewards sitting in queue during off hours. Play prime time against prime teams. Don't whine when you can't get fast queues in the middle of the night.

That makes sense I suppose , we queue like crazy for the bonus, and tokens. A particular motivator was that you said it would be a short season, so we wanted to get as many tokens as possible, ASAP.

As far as "dodging" goes, we queue several hours throughout the day and feed hundreds of rating to Freaky, and sometimes brooke's team if we are awake that early. Although we mostly queue mid-day to evening, and when evening hits, the queues get slower closer to reboot. So if we are dodging, then we are doing a pretty bad job at it

I think the point i was trying to make was that I think people aren't queuing as much as they used to, regardless of the fact that we have most matches, in the shortest time-frame. but, then again, maybe we just queue........ A lot

1200 matches in a month isn't bad though, right?

thanks for quick response on that, that clears my head. we just no life the hell out of it, that's the problem O.O

[Boog]

I'm in Q with 2 different teams for the last hour and can't get a match...

[flipynifty]

what about an NPC team in q, gives a max of 1 rating but quells peoples anxieties

[Underkid]

I think it really depends on the time and your rating. Last time I queued I had a match nearly everytime I exited combat on an alt. Around 1500 rating the queue is quite fast during peak hours imo.

[Khettry]

@flip A NPC team that scales to the team being fought would def work to keep matches going for everyone.

@kiddo We hit 1800 rating and it def slowed down a lot. I doubt we're good enough to get "dodged" but it seemed to grind to almost a halt. We now average 10 min between fights during the really active parts of the day, now

[Glitchless]

The fact that it becomes very slow to get arena matches when your team reaches high rating is an issue because a lot of those players want their farming bonus as much as their arena rating. An NPC match that wouldn't give rating but gave bonus (if won) would be an interesting compromise.

[flipynifty]

i agree

[Tsutsu]

Originally Posted by Glitchless

The fact that it becomes very slow to get arena matches when your team reaches high rating is an issue because a lot of those players want their farming bonus as much as their arena rating. An NPC match that wouldn't give rating but gave bonus (if won) would be an interesting compromise.

That would be nice, because since we queue in more "off-hours" we tend to get like... no matches at all anymore. Several of the teams we were fighting pretty consistently have just outright stopped queueing in general. the last 2 nights we've had like... 20 matches while queued for hours and hours and hours.

Or perhaps just increment bonus if you've been in queue for X minutes without a fight?

[NoRemorse]

one of the main reasons i do not do arena is that the rewards versus investment does not match up at all , every season to be competitive and do your best you need to invest between 500-750M gold, the rewards 10 tcs and perhaps some lg does not warrant it , not even with the arenabonus at 20%




that is me being competitive and going all out for a top 3 spot , each season you need to change your build to be suited for pvp means you farm slower pve , i know it is all about choices and what one likes best , for me i like pve best on any game.


just my 2 cents

[paulodjohn]

The aim should be to make arena more competitive. Personally I think the long drawn out seasons and the necessity to queue for hours each day to have a chance at winning has many people avoiding competing. This season has been particularly slow. 4-5 hours could go by without a decent match (for a top team).

Solutions:
1. Shorter seasons, By short I mean 1-2 months. Nobody wants to devote 4 months of their life to hardcore queue for a chance at winning. Maybe 1-2 months would be more doable for lots of people.

2. A tournament/league style at the end of the season, where x amount of teams qualify and then each team meets each other x amount of times. Gaining fixed points for winning and nothing for losing. The points gathered will place teams from 1-x. This could go on for a week or two after normal season ends to finalize the top of the leader board.

Personally I think a combination of both would be great for this game. I would much rather this and have no bonus during off seasons (if there needs to be off seasons for 1-2 months) than to keep arena the way it currently is. This would be for 3v3 only as the problem doesn't arise in other solo 3v3 and solo seasons.

[Freakymagic]

Honestly. Arena as it currently is is a bore fest.

As multiple people have said here they have no real incentive to arena. Majority of top teams can farm the end result in a few days. They arena because they find enjoyment in arena. Teams who dont make as much gold dont enjoy being beaten over the head repeatedly by the top teams. If they are in que with the limited teams in que they fight the same team over and over and over till they get fed up and leave que. Who could blame em. They dont enjoy being beaten by the same team over and over. Neither does the other team enjoy sitting in que for hour + wait times to get a 20 second match.

Honestly I dont know what can be done to fix this. Cant increase bonus. People make too much gold as is. If you increase the high rewards people complain the rich get richer. If you dont increase the top rewards and only the lower rewards the top pvpers just que for bonus and get more for no work. Increase all the rewards and i doubt its changed to incentives people to dish out hundreds of millions of gold and hours upon hours sitting in que. Tournament helps determine strongest teams at the end of arena. It does not help the ghost town and bore of sitting in que for months. Shorter arena wont change anything either. Just rewards handed out more often.

As is you have more incentive to me a mediocre team (currently top teams are 3-3.1kish rating) around 2-2.5kish rating. Larger range of teams to fight, faster fights, more bonus, more tokens.

Honestly the only way i can see it changing is a new game mechanic. Some new reward for arena to go along with whatever new mechanic is.

For example for something like siegecraft maybe you get a bonus/extra's/etc depending on your arena finish.

Maybe you get a token from arena that when farming with arena group gives a big bonus to gold/resource/trophies if farmed in some new mode (call it mythic mode for example) and mobs are ultra hard and can only be fought with said token from arena. Depending on placement depends on bonus vs strength of said mythic mode?

Just a few ideas but something needs to change otherwise arena will just continue its slow decline.

[xaivia]

Run two formats simultaneously, allow queuing for both.

TOP tier players will be going for the double requiring a whole bunch of new, upper-mid tier players will have to specialise. Fun for all the family.

People like me are just happy to be here.

[Atropos]

My heart is a ghost town. . .