Fixing Squad Arena

"Mageduckey;c-1207955" wrote:
I'd like to counter with this: why should the daily investment of time and participation in events, raids, and the daily grind for gear be discarded? You're the one who chose to take a break from the game. Just because you want to be top 20 again doesn't trump the 4 months of time and effort invested by the other players. If you want to catch up, you'll have to spend money - the two are directly linked (not just in this game but in much of life). You didn't invest the time that others did, so if you want to catch up you have to invest money that they didn't. That's the model this entire part of the gaming industry is built on.

Don't get me wrong, sometimes people need to take a break for legitimate reasons, and that's totally okay. But to come back and expect equality of roster strength and arena competitiveness without matching others' time investment with some kind of new investment of your own is wrong. Why should the work of others be invalidated to accommodate you (or anyone else that takes a break)?

This involves a lot of misconceptions to me. Let's take your opening two paragraphs, and counter them with a comparison. If somebody plays the game for six months, then quits for six months, then comes back, they will find it a nightmare to try to get back to being competitive in squad arena. However, if somebody never started playing for that year of time, then starts playing when our old player returns, they will be in a much newer shard and will find it much easier to get to the top. Therefore, the player who has invested six months more of his time has a disadvantage versus the player who invested none of his time until that point.

"Mageduckey;c-1207955" wrote:
As for switching arena shards - this is a terrible idea. There's a reason "free to play players being disenfranchised by whales dominating the top spots in their arena shard". They paid for that advantage. To change up their shard so that they only face other whales would completely invalidate their financial investment in the game and would signal to every single player that spending money will only make your life harder in the future. That's not exactly a good way to keep the game running.

This was a valid position to take in the past, but these days it's simply not true. For a start, with more competitive shards, it would also be fair to upscale rewards for lower rankings. Perhaps, even rewards could scale with the level the shard is at - very high level players then always get better rewards. Much fairer. However, you forget that these days whales and high level players aren't in any need of character shards, they need gear. The primary source of high level gear these days is raids. Whales would still get a huge advantage in raid performance.

"Mageduckey;c-1207955" wrote:
You speak of old players taking a long break coming back to an unfair shard, but in actuality it's perfectly fair as-is. It is fair to the investment of others for you to come back from a long break with setbacks and struggles. It is fair that the advantage some paid for with money (in addition to time) should stay with them, at least until F2P catch up and whales have to spend again. You are confusing fairness with respect to investment and equality irrespective of investment. While I don't think there is anything wrong with taking a break, I know there is something wrong with taking a 4 month break and coming back expecting everything to be easy.

Again, this is debunked by my response to your first two paragraphs.