Live Arena was added to RAID today so here I share with you my first impressions (both positive and negative) and tips.
I won majority of my Live Arena, winning 7(8) out of 10 battles, which is very impressive considering that in the beginning all kraken players are matched with regular players. As ChoseN said during an interview, normally one should expect 50/50 success rate as a good/decent player, so you should calculate that at least half, over the long term, will be losses.
1) Will take few weeks to stabilize
And that's the first point and a major frustration to thousands of players when they try Live Arena for the first time, some happily, only to be met by kraken accounts who will demolish both their team and their first impression of Live Arena.
This is, as usual, a badly implemented start by Plarium, where they should have anticipated the horrible matching and for the first 10 or so fights matched opponents based on current Tag Arena Tier / power / age to avoid these horrible first impressions and negative posts on social media.
That said, this, I believe, is a temporary issue for a few weeks until everyone is settled to their respective brackets and then the matching will start to be more proper.
2) The Live Area Schedule & 1 thing they should do
The schedule sucks, but there is no good solution for it. They simply cannot have it open the whole day because their tests showed that people will be unable to find opponents. Which actually means that there are a lot less real active players than they advertise, because if they really had 1 million active players this would not be an issue.
There is one thing they can/should do so that players don't fall too much behind - they should give a half or a third of Crests for all unused Live Area tokens to the players at the end of the day. This will help a little bit to all those who were unable to play Live Arena (of which there will be many!).
3) Up to 1 hour or more added to daily RAID time requirements
Adding to the already massive time requirement of RAID, Live Area pushes that even further. It took me over an hour to finish 10 tokens and would be even longer if you buy more tokens.
And I did not even meet a staller today - I saw some reports of stallers pushing a fight to over 20 minutes making the enemy angry and "forcing" them to leave / surrender the fight. If you take into account such fights it would take a massive amount of time.
There is waiting time at every step. Matching, picking champions, banning, choosing leader, the actions during fights are much slower than regular arena, waiting time for anyone to take every action. Then repeating the whole process for as many tokens as you plan to use.
And not forgetting that we are not robots to perfectly execute without losing any minute in between.
When they add something, they should also either remove something incorporating the old rewards into the new feature (such as removing the old Arenas) or significantly reduce time spent in some other areas to compensate (such as opening instant complete in some grinding areas or 3 times reducing tokens while 3 times increasing rewards to save time).
4) Live Area can be more fun
I am not 100% sure if it is just a novelty effect which might get annoying after 1000 battles, but I thought Live Area was fun, especially when compared to Classic Arena or Tag Team Arena or more accurately Classic Arena copy pasted 3 times.
The mind game when picking champions is probably where the fun is and then the battle is already a lot less fun because when you win the mind game the battle is almost always already decided.
The only exception to this is when you are matched with a kraken where no matter what you do you will lose anyways. This is why I said 7 (8) wins in the beginning because in one of my fights I did everything correct and ended up with a winning team but his Warlord without any speed boost or leader bonus went before my Arbiter, which, as you can imagine is pretty amazing given that he also had massive Accuracy.
RAID Live Arena Tips
- It's all about the mind game. The fight, while still important, is secondary.
- Before starting think about 5 champions that you will pick and in which order.
- Prepare in your mind both a speed team with 5 champions and 1 or 2 go-second teams.
- Fight in your mind against yourself - which of your 5 champions would you ban and then ask yourself if the remaining 4 will win?
- Consider 5 champions where you can be both a speed team and a go-second team such as having both an Arbiter and a Cardinal.
- If the enemy shows a powerful champion in the beginning such as Nekhret he is expecting that you will ban him, so he is calculating the rest of his team to win. Surprise him by not banning it and building a team against it and break his strategy.
- Is your enemy trying to nuke you? Ban his Arbiter, put 2 speed leads and 2 nukers and nuke him first.
Is your enemy using traditional Stone Skin champions, such as Mortu, bomb him with multiple bombers. If his plan is to use Mithrala to stop the bombs simply ban her. - Is your enemy trying to bomb you? Ban his Accuracy booster and there is a good chance your Resistance team will handle it.
- Look carefully at the enemy choices. There is often 1 key champion which you can ban, but play the mind game also and do something surprising if he also expects you to ban that one champion.
- In the future I think people will equip champions specifically for Live Arena in unexpected ways such as making Support Champions into Nukers (e.g. Archmage Hellmut can be both support / stun as well as nuker) all with the aim of confusing the enemy and forcing them to make a wrong choice. This, however, will force all RAID players to waste a lot of resources which is probably what Plarium wants.
Update: Significant issues in Live Arena
I paid some Gems to make several more attempts and Live Arena crashed massively.
- First you get disconnected and you are told that you have problems with your internet connection. This is a lie - shameful tactic by Plarium. Probably some problem with the server and you get booted.
- Then you re-login but you are not put back into the battle, you are told that the battle is ongoing without you and you will be told of the result. This means your opponent is fighting you thinking it is Live Arena but you are not even there - he is effectively playing Classic Arena against you.
- When you try to play a new match you cannot. It keeps telling you the battle results are processing, but it never finishes. Hours later it is still processing even after Live Arena has long finished. This also means the tokens you have are lost and you will not get refunded for the gems spent.
If they don't solve these issues, Live Arena is effectively dead. I will try to be optimistic in hoping they will solve them.
Here is a collage of the pictures / problems:
