Arena rewards

Feature Requests and Game feedback
1

I like arena. Sue me. I know many here dislike it but it is a relaxing game mode that isn’t over in 20 seconds.

But.

Devs, can the rewards be improved? As is, there isn’t much reason to do them. Although some people do farm trophies I would bet they are the minority as trophies do nothing in this game. Here are some ideas:

More gold.
I timed some runs and I can make about 4 times the gold in PvP in the same amount of time. That’s including the free first fight due to VIP level. In my opinion, arena gold should be about the same.

Increase pet gnome rate.
I don’t know the rates for the pet gnome in arena vs PvP, but if they were more common in arena that would provide an incentive.

Leaderboards
Leaderboards are fun, plus the top people get extra rewards like an orb and some gems.

Put a timer on the offers.
I don’t like the game mode where you need to farm (arena) to buy something (offers), but, since it’s clearly here to stay, make the offer valid for five minutes. Anytime I see an offer for a troop or pet, if that will increase my kingdom power right then, I will buy it. But, the game doesn’t let me check. So, I don’t buy the offers from arena. Another idea here is to have the offer specify how many of that pet/troop you already have, like how in the Soulforge it tells you.

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2

Absolutely agree. I love Arena too, but poor rewards are why I only do 3 runs a day for the daily offers. The “old” Arena rewards weren’t that great either, why they got nerfed further is beyond me.

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3

Precisely why I don’t fight Arena battles. Rewards for effort are just not adequate.
:slightly_frowning_face:

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4

The rewards aren’t even good enough on the Valor weekends.

Honestly, I think the Arena could have really been positively served by dropping a token or two per run. Similar number of battles to Explore, similar time (if anything, it takes longer than fast E12 teams), so :man_shrugging:

Or — man — a new currency (don’t kill me!) called Medal Fragments that, once collected, could be Soulforged into medals of one’s choice. Make the crafting recipes as costly as you want — people would still love a pathway to Nyshas that weren’t so entirely dependent upon time, luck, or money. And, heck, this proposal would, no doubt, still cost a crap ton of time, given the exchange rate I know would have to exist to justify “costing” the bottom line by having people not buy Nyshas at $50 a pop as much as (I guess? I’d never spend that — I’d rather get a new AAA title or something) some do now :joy:

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5

Didnt think about tokens but that would also work! I consider tokens as fragments already, but I wouldn’t argue against a craftable option.

As for Valor weekend, I agree the rewards still aren’t good enough. If after getting an orb, it didnt take even more fights for the second round of rewards, it’d be ok. But otherwise, eh. If I do arena, that’s a lot of gold I am missing out now that I would vastly prefer.

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6

I’ve taken the advice that the more you play it, the better you’ll get at it. So now I’m invested.
To try to keep the ‘make it better’ train that @Snooj & @Magnusimus started here (& others in other threads) going:

Offer me a Reroll of each offer. If you’d like (to keep our skin in the RNG game), attach a small gem cost to it.

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7

They definitely got lazy with the rewards for arena event. A lot ways they could be improved upon imo. A few examples:

  • Scaling rewards based on the number of cycles completed. Getting the exact same rewards for a second (or more) cycle while having to do exponentially more fights is probably the biggest turn off to doing the event currently, particularly when the rewards are mediocre. If the rewards scaled for each cycle, it might encourage people to play more.

  • Offer different rewards each cycle, while also considering amount of time invested. Maybe include some VIP keys, diamonds, random deeds, major orb of chaos, etc. Something worth the time needed to complete multiple cycles.

  • Create a token of valor shop where players can actually choose which rewards they can get with their points. As someone who only really cares about the shards/writs rewards, being able to use my valor on just those and not the keys/minor orb of chaos would make me more inclined to participate.

Of course, these are just rough ideas which could be modified, but I fully agree that some kind of change is necessary to the current rewards of this event

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8

I like that idea.

I rarely do Arena Battles. Last campaign, I used an arena run for a four battle bronze task, then another four battle bronze task, and then the final silver task. (Which probably means “Rng” will never allow that to happen again).

I did fight an Arena just now, and got a pet offer I need. Most times I just click out without paying attention. I would agree with @Snooj’s recommendation that we be allowed a five minute timer to double check. I typically buy all pet offers, as worst-case scenario, I use them for food.

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9

This is a good thread about the arena, but I wonder if any of the arguments here are going to fall flat when viewed from the devs’ perspective on these reward incentives.

The problem here is that the reward structure for Arena is purely based on RNG as a limiting factor to keep players from obtaining too many valuable rewards too quickly. So, on one hand, the devs want player to play the Arena daily, but on the other hand do not want them to obtain rare resources from the Arena via offers quicker then they would want.

Remember the original incarnation of Daily Dungeons, where earning diamonds from each boss match was determined by a dice roll to see if any were earned at all? Think of the arena situation as going back to that system, and then the devs doubling or tripling down on it as a core account progression method. The devs set their desired rare resource player acquisition rates through the rarity of each type offer appearing as a arena reward. To that extent, the devs very seriously believe that the chances for a purchasing opportunity for a resource to appear to advance an account’s progression are the actual reward and incentive for playing the Arena. There is very little chance to move the devs away from that position in any meaningful way.

So with that said, now for the Doom and Gloom (I ought to trademark this) portion of the post, my personal thoughts on the viability of the various proposals out there:

  • Increase pet gnome rate: Not against the idea, but skeptical it would happen. I can see Salty saying that the primary incentive for playing PvP is to obtain pet gnomes and not want to disincentivize playing PvP by making Arena the ideal place to farm pet gnomes. The possibility of rare offers are the reward, not pet gnomes.

  • Leaderboards: The arena isn’t meant to be a competitive event, so I’m not sure that a leaderboard would be appropriate. Leaderboards are there to incentivize players to spend more gems to play an event, and the arena does not require gems to play.

– Offer timers: Would also like this personally, but it would go against the FOMO psychological trigger that is the exact reason why an arena offer that is presented is an instant now-or-never purchasing opportunity. So, probably not a realistic chance of this happening.

– Medal Fragments: Possible, but if it happened, it would have to function similarly to the green orb → minor/major treasure functionality that was recently implemented at best. Keep in mind that Epic and Legendary medals are VIP 6 locked purchases. As such, the devs are not going to allow farming of components to construct these medals for free of these rarities during Valor events. The devs want you to buy medals through the Daily Deal shop and farm Explore to grind them out the hard way. Workarounds to that are going to frowned upon. Orpheus medals, at best, if it ever happens.

Yes, they would. And it’s 100 million billion trillion quadrillion percent absolutely never going to happen, at least not until something comes out (if ever) that trivializes the value of Nysha medals. The devs absolutely want players to give up on the very long and frustrating grind for Nysha medals and resort to purchasing them for real money. Nothing is going move them in the slightest from this stance.

All that pessimism aside,

I agree. For an event that is only comes around once every six weeks, the “wow” factor / carrot is simply not there. On the other hand, part of the reason why the current reward is lackluster is because they do not cost gems to obtain, as is normal for most weekly/ weekend events. The devs may not want to offer better rewards because there is no gem cost to obtain them, but it doesn’t help the event to be more appealing in general.

Well… humm.

On one hand, rerolls would be functionally equivalent to additional daily offer attempts. Would the devs want to allow players to have more than 6 attempts per day at offers, given that the rarity of these offers are meant to be a time-gate for slowing down the rate at which rare resources are obtained? And if so, how much would a re-roll attempt for resources at their low offer rates be worth in gems? 20 gems? 50 gems? And how many rerolls per offer would even be allowed? It’s an interesting question to ponder. So, maybe someday, this might have a chance of becoming reality in some form perhaps as some future implementation of power creep? Maybe it might be possible as a future VIP 7 perk? Rerolls, seem very powerful to me and might warrant such a very significant cost to unlock for them to be implemented.

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10

You can’t buy Valor with $$ or Gems, so you’re not gonna get good rewards from it. Sorry. “Fun” doesn’t enter into the equation anymore in GoW, unfortunately.

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While I agree with most of your Doom and Gloom arguments, I believe there’s a middle ground that’s still skewed toward to devs (and for those nitpickers, I state again that when I say devs, I mean anyone that has any impact on what happens in the game).

I forget where I got this number but let’s assume that the gnome rate is 3%. By definition, pet gnome rate is <3%. I’ll be generous and say that there’s a 33% that if a gnome shows up in PvP/arena, that it’ll be a pet gnome, meaning 1% chance of pet gnome, so on average one pet gnome every 100 battles. Now, I don’t know how fast people can play PvP or arena but I’ll assume that it takes 30s for a PvP match and 90s for an arena match, probably close to 120s (2 mins). That means that if the rates are the same, it would take you 4x as long to find a pet gnome in arena simply because it takes longer to do each battle. If it’s coded that ONLY pet gnomes spawn in arena, so 3% chance per battle, it would still take longer to find it in arena. In short, the rate can be easily doubled in arena without impacting PvP’s attraction (and I’m not even touching on the rewards yet).

Leaderboards: Nothing to add here.

Agreed. It would be nice if the question mark showed additional bit of info though. You can already see the current rarity of that pet/troop but not the number of copies. So while adding the number of copies would be a nice QoL improvement, I don’t think anything that extends the duration of the offer will be done.

When everything is tallied up, there’s about a 2% chance to get 1 token of Nysha at the end of an Explore 12 run. For ease of math, I’m going to use 3 minutes for a full explore run, compared to 9 minutes for a fast arena run (feel free to use your own numbers). At 3 minutes per run, needing ~50 runs per token, ~150 per badge and ~450 per medal, that’s 22.5h. Even at 1 minute per run (I don’t think it’s possibly but I’m also not that far into end-game), that’s still 7.5h per medal.

The middle ground would be to make it take at least the same amount of time, i.e. 22.5h. At 9m a run (again these are fast runs which are not sustainable due to RNG and troop picking), it would take 150+ arena runs to get enough “Medal Fragments” to get a medal of Nysha. However, this would be a guaranteed medal of your choice, based on cost for each medal/badge. Since the incentive would be for people to play arena outside of arena weekends (assuming daily offers aren’t the main attraction), then it would be a grind like explore is. 22.5h for a guaranteed medal of Nysha would probably lead to problems with the bottom line (even if 22.5h is for 150+ optimal 9-minute runs). Would 300 runs (45h) suffice? 450?

Two things to remember here:

  • Epic tasks were created to slow down resource gain
  • Skeleton key (we assume) was nerfed to slow down gold farming

So if no other resource changes, we’ll be getting much less gold than if we farmed in explore. However, we would be able to get guaranteed medals. Is there an equivalency between gold, time and medals that the devs would be inclined to set? Unlikely. But the more time someone spends in the game, the less they spend on competitors and the more likely they are to spend more money in the game since grinding 450 arena runs is not something many will want to do.

So while it does provide a goal, as ridiculous as it is, would this be enough of a long-term that most people still prefer to spend the $50? No idea since, I agree with @Lyrian , it’ll probably never happen.
(Will address other issues after grocery run)

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12

Many people already slog through their 3 arena runs for their daily offer rerolls. Even if you low-ball it and assume 4 runs per day becomes the new norm for the top 15% most active players, that’s still almost 1500 runs per year. Or 3 1/3 Nysha medals, assuming the 450 runs/Nysha figure. That’s probably way more than what they’re willing to let us have for free, even at 1000 runs/Nysha.

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13

Your logic is sound, but you are overlooking an important point. There already is a guarantee in place for obtaining a Nysha medal. It is cold, hard cash. The devs are absolutely not going to undermine a cash guarantee offer in any way.

The value proposition for Nysha medals currently are, from various perspectives:

  • It takes 22.5h of farming to obtain one (using your numbers for illustration purposes).
  • Buying a medal saves 22.5 hours of farming.

When it comes to monetization, the devs are not in the business of compromising with players’ perspectives. Their goal is to get players to decide that paying cash for rare resources is the optimum method for obtaining those resources.

  • There will always be a small percentage of players that have the time, stamina, and fortitude to grind out a Nysha medal.

  • There will be a larger portion of players who will realize how much farming is required to obtain a Nysha medal and actively choose to buy the medal outright.

  • There will be an even larger portion of players who will attempt the grind, eventually give up, and then buy the medal in frustration.

Many of the game’s mechanics in the monetization era are designed around getting players to give up on grinds because of time or difficulty (ex: last weeks of Campaigns) to induce purchases. To that extent, the devs will very likely never compromise to shorten the steepness of a cliff that results in players buying things out of frustration, because in their eyes that compromise translates to lost sales.

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14

That’s exactly the point that I was trying to make, although maybe not so eloquently.

Yes, there will always be people who will grind until their fingers should’ve fallen off or their retinas permanently burned with the board, to the point where they are matching in the little sleep they get. There’s nothing the devs can do about that other than not have a way to obtain it. In that we’re agreed.

But if it is obtainable, just very obnoxiously so, there’s still a profit. Ex: Zuul & Enraged Kurandara. The only ways to obtain orbs are:

  • Arena weekend (one chaos orb every increasing loop) (grind)
  • Leaderboards (which usually requires gems/$$ spending) (grind)
  • Shrines ($$)
  • Weekly events (time)
  • Vault keys (grind)

Which is why shrines are there for anyone wanting to spam money into the system until they get enough orbs for both troops. Yes, you could save for 1 year like I did and craft Zuul. But you could speed up that year to hours by spamming the shrines.

Going back to medals, only way to obtain them is through:

  • Offers (gems/$$)
  • Explore (grind)
  • Tasks (only up to orpheus)

So what if we removed Nysha from the obtainable? I.e. only Anu and below? Would that be intriguing enough? What if it was another shrine-like lootbox where every X medal fragments would give you a “chest” pull that gave you one of the tokens?

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You left out one of the easiest, albeit random, ways to get orbs: Vault Keys

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16

I play exactly 1 round and take the 3 gem keys, then move on. That’s where it stops being worthwhile to me.

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17

This has been debated many times.
I’m still enjoying my source of 6 guaranteed deeds and 179 flexible use writs. Joining the game late, these are still very useful.
The pet food stream guaranteed I never waited to upgrade pets.
And I haven’t maxed all factions yet, so still making some use out of the chaos shards.

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18

Fair. I was parrotting what I saw on the forum and that obviously has to be taken with mountains of salt sets tinfoil hat aside

That being said, main point stands that if the goal is to get us to play more, particularly play arena more, it would be amazing to have a reachable longterm goal, like Zuul and power orbs. Some resource that you can either squander early, or hoard until it turns into something shiny.

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19

Rewards need a rework everywhere; they are currently only trickle nonsense rewards right through the game. Can’t see an overhaul, oh hum.

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As far as I know they offer only those troops and pets which you miss. I play arena a lot and I’ve never got an offer I don’t need.

I agree with the rest of the post: arena is a good alternative to boring pvp, but the rewards are too poor, especially regarding the fact, that we can’t train hero classes there.