Board Game Arena

Arena has been in draft mode for three seasons, and I think it's time for a change.
Personally I think team building is an important part of the game, and random pool draft nearly prevents most of it.
Yes, I can see that random gives more chances for weaker champions to shine and encourages improvisation, but sometimes the character combination made the game so one-sided that it's borderline impossible to bring back. Plus competitive mode gives player somewhat chances to counter pick characters and probably improve the meta. If you are concerned about competitive player just spamming "good" characters, just make a ban list, maybe based on community votes since from what I know people tend to agree on what should be banned or what characters are good. Or if you still want to keep random draft as the main arena game mode, I suggest that having more characters(more than 6) or even just simply changing character selecting order(for example a player having the 1st, 4th and 5th pick, the other one have the 2nd, 3rd, 6th pick) could balance the game back more in the first players favor(obviously in random draft since in competitive the first player is the one that have the advantage).
As a conclusion, as a fellow player I would like to have competitive back for the arena game mode, or at least have it alter between both random and competitive. Also as another solution, some rule changes or bans could be applied to make random more balanced and enjoyable.
Hope someone in charge of the rules could read this and just maybe make a little change to make the game more fun!

Maybe an extended pool of 8 or 9 champions could solve this problem. This keeps a random pool (and prevent players to pick everytime the same team) while allowing a better team building than only a pool of 6. When I play with my community, we use a pool of 8 champions and it is a game changer.

Yep, we need random draft with extended champions pool. Eight champions seems to be very fair.

I think that changing the order of the draft is the best option. Having the second player immediately be able to select 2 champions after the first pick will make it much more balanced.

CarbonFixer wrote: ↑14 September 2023, 16:48 I think that changing the order of the draft is the best option. Having the second player immediately be able to select 2 champions after the first pick will make it much more balanced.

That's what I proposed on BGG"variants" for the physical game in 2021. But it seem the designers didn't read it yet

glad I am notthe only one to think the random draft is not balanced.
I was not sure because I played only 2 times but both time it went the same way.
I got 2nd pick, and I saw there was 1 hero that would be horrible and knew I would be stuck with it since my last choice would be whatever is left .
Indeed a pool of 8 or a snake draft would help with that.
At least I can implement it IRL !