Arena rewards decreased

[Palapapa]

All rewards for reaching upper league have been decreased by 50-70% despite what have been stated below in the general announcement of season 12

"Rules updates

No Arena rules are changing this season. It does not mean we are 100% satisfied with how the Arena is running, but you seem to appreciate the current rules so we want to keep them as they are for now."


My questions are :

-Why this change? Rewards seemed fine as they were. There was no need for change. And it's unfair to newer players that are trying to climb in the general leaderboard.

- Does that mean end-of-the-season rewards will be reduced accordingly also?

-Again, why not let players know what they play for with a general announcement and a reminder on arena page with rewards conditions?

Playing arena is a big time and energy commitment. Players deserve to know the exact rules before commitment. Developping this whole arena thing must have been a lot of work and it's a great addition to bga. Still, the easiest part of the development has not been done after 12 seasons : giving players the rules for rewards and making sure the rewards given are in harmony with those rules.

At the moment there are two issues regarding the latter :
- When a game comes out, the first season gives random rewards and no way to know before the end of the season : sometimes 6k only for first despite a player pool of 500+ or 1000+, sometimes full rewards.
- The other issue is when the player pool for a game goes below or above a new threshold. Then it is not clear if rewards are correlated with last season player pool or current season player pool (the latter should be the rule, no reason to give end of the season rewards according to previous season number of player, only rewards from league should be based on previous season numbers), as there are examples of both cases.

[sprockitz]

They changed it during this season as people to hit Elite early this season got the higher amounts.
XP for reaching Elite has been changed to be based on number of levels (instead of number of players in the prior season). *This is my conclusion based on looking at the results I don't have any inside info.
2 levels - 120
3 levels - 240 i assume
4 levels - 400
5 levels - 600
6 levels - 1200

Why they did this? Who knows, it doesn't make sense as it is exactly as hard to make Elite in a game with 5 versus 6 levels, so differentiating by a factor of 2 is just terrible design. Whoever makes these changes doesn't consider what would be the right or smart thing to do. But this brings us back to how flawed the arena level system is to start...and they have shown absolutely zero interest in improving it. Because people are still playing games they act like they have a great system when that is far from the truth...people are playing despite the flaws in the system.

[Jellby]

What's the point of the XP anyway? The only effect seems to be a number in your profile. Why not just ignore it?

[Palapapa]

They changed it during this season as people to hit Elite early this season got the higher amounts.
XP for reaching Elite has been changed to be based on number of levels (instead of number of players in the prior season). *This is my conclusion based on looking at the results I don't have any inside info.
2 levels - 120
3 levels - 240 i assume
4 levels - 400
5 levels - 600
6 levels - 1200

It somehow follows this pattern but I have several examples that doesn't fit into this like :
Stoneage, 3 leagues : 400xp
Seasons : 6levels : 400xp
It's not about the current number of player for the new season either (that would be meaningless as it is harder to reach elite at the beginning of a season compared to the end of it) nor the player pool of the previous season.
So again, it's quite random.

[Palapapa]

What's the point of the XP anyway? The only effect seems to be a number in your profile. Why not just ignore it?

it's just a number, indeed. Like trophies are only a picture. It's a symbol. Some people don't care about it but some others do as the whole arena thing is about competitivness and rankings. Xp and trophies are the symbols that represents achievments, glory and fame .

Whatever the rewards are, i think it should be explicit.

[frogstar_A]

For most games the rewards are the same

For those that have decreased it's generally based upon how many people played the LAST arena

For example if it drops below 1,000 I think the rewards fall. There are other levels that cause further falls

[Palapapa]

For most games the rewards are the same

For those that have decreased it's generally based upon how many people played the LAST arena

For example if it drops below 1,000 I think the rewards fall. There are other levels that cause further falls

It has changed for every single game I play where the rewards were not already the minimum (120xp for elite), including very popular ones like castles of burgundy, welcome to, seasons, stone age. All player pools for those games stayed where they were (>2000 for the 1st two, >1000 for the other 2. It has nothing to do with the number of player of the previous season going under a new threshold.

My guess at the moment is that the condition have changed from :

0-50 (player pool of previous season) > 120xp
50-200 > 240xp
200-500 > 400xp
500-1000>600xp
1000+ > 1200xp

to

0-500> 120xp
500-1000>240xp
1000-2000>400xp
2000-4000>600xp
4000+ >1200xp as lucky numbers and can't stop stayed at 1200xp


This change makes no sens as it is not harder to reach elite league in a game with 8000 players than it is in a game with 1500.
But reaching elite in a game with 10 players or with 499 is very different. Even more so regarding end of the season rankings.

Moreover, if that means beating 498 players give 6k at the ends of the season and beating 998,12k XP, it is ridiculously low.
The difficulty to reach top rankings follows a logarithmic pattern where the more player there are, the less difference more player in the player pool makes. Beating 10000 player is far from 10 times harder than beating 1000. I would say it's not even twice as hard. But beating 500 is way more than twice harder than beating 50. So rewards should follow logarithmic pattern also or be capped above 1000 like it was before, which was a pretty good solution.
The previous system was well balanced. I've played something like 50 different games in arena with all kind of player pools, reaching elite league in 39 different games and top X trophies in 22 different games. I think i've a pretty good idea of the whole thing.

My suggestion if BGA wants to do something more for the games with 2000+ or 4000+ player pool is to add more rewards at the end of the season. Awarding top 30 for 2000+ player pool and top 40 for 4000 seems fair as rewarding only top 20 for such a big player pool seems a bit tight. But please don't ruin the whole thing to do this. All rewards should stay like in seasons 11 but lower rewards are added for those top 30 and top 40. For example, 2000 XP for top 30, 1500XP for top 40.

Another suggestion is to consult players before making such a big change.

[miklomike]

Why do they never announce these things either? So many game news articles, but never for changes that we have to try to figure out on our own. You think someone took the time to change it that they would also take the time to tell us they changed it.

I'm glad I found this post because I thought I was just going crazy.