Fleet Arena Mafias

CG would LOVE to remove crystals from fleet arena because it would be hundreds of thousands of crystals they wouldn't give us everyday.  Adding more to GAC would be another mistake because GAC is already lame, stale, broken, old, annoying, and tiresome.  They haven't updated GAC or TW in years.  

What some of us did in both the old squad arena with crystals and the fleet arena is, I asked and when they put me on hold, after getting pushed back too many times, I just burned crystals to refresh and push through to get to the top. I was dealing with 7 people hitting me trying to push me back, I'd climb, refresh, climb, refresh, climb, refresh and push through.   After I did that, they reached out to ME and said, "hey what's up?" and we got it worked out.  It'll cost you some crystals at one point, but if you become a nuisance, they'll connect with you because it costs them crystals too.  (And you'll earn more in the long run) Find out who's hitting you and hit them during their PO climb if you have to.  swgoh.gg shows everyone's payout times if you look them up there.  

If they don't want to let you in, kick the door in and have a seat.  

You are better served by contacting Meathead on this issue

Thanks pal, looks I’m on my way to the dark side of the force with the fleet arena. Need crystals so much lol. 

First of all, let's stop using the term "Mafia's".  It is inaccurate and a huge exaggeration.  Grand Arena is beyond broken and grossly unfair.  Moving the rewards would create an ever greater disparity between meta chasing spenders and light spenders and FTP.  When we have a dozen accounts sitting at the top of Kyber 1 that have no business being anywhere but Carbonite or Bronzium, we have a huge problem.

As far as knowing peoples payouts, that info is readily available using RotBot or going to swgoh.gg.  That info is easy to find.

Hint.  Sign up for discord.  Find your fleet arena discord and join it.  Cooperate with your fleet arena shard mates and life gets great.  I have run multiple accounts and every fleet arena discord I have seen is nothing but cooperative.  People in general want to help each other in this game.  Fleet Arena is definitely not the problem some people make it out to be.

You provide a good point, but at the same time, might not realize there are fleet arenas that don't cooperate, don't let people in, and don't want to be nice about it.  You might've had a good experience, but there are hundreds of fleet shards and enough of them that are very unhappy about anyone "new" climbing the ranks into their little control group at the top.  

I recall at one point hearing about a couple that were so full they only "allowed" non-approved players into the top 50, but not the top 20.  

I think you may be confusing Arena shards with fleet shards but I will take your word for it.  I actually run the discord for my main account.  I inherited it due to retirements..  In both of my shards, we have about 35-40 active accounts in the top 50.  There are so many retirements that there is plenty of room for moving up.  The biggest problem is when someone retires with a 7* Leviathan and leaves it there.  It then takes a long time to move them down the list.  I think people get lazy and hit easier targets rather than cycling down the retired but harder accounts.

This sounds exactly what my fleet shard is like. I stopped fighting for even top 10 becaue I was spending more crystals on refreshes than I could make back by placing higher. I'd get hit back multiple times during the cooldown between battles.

Ended up figuring out I could stay "out of trouble" by relegating myself to top 50. Anytime I stray into the top 20 I get "punished".

I still invest resources into fleets for GAC but FA has been lost to the mafia for a long time.

One of the difficulties about forum discussions concerning Fleet Shards is that the majority of players find it hard to perceive of a Fleet Shard that’s different from their own,DarkHelmetBnB​ 

Sure, there are Fleet Shards where there is a welcoming ethos, where someone who asks to join a coordination server on Discord will be allowed to join with open arms. But there are other shards where this is absolutely not the case and new members will not be admitted. 

You describe a Fleet Shard where there are inactive accounts in your top 50, and I know of guild mates who have even more desolate Fleet Shards than that, but there are a handful of outliers where there are hundreds of active accounts. On a recent camping trip, where I had pretty much no access to cellular data, I fell below 150 in my Fleet Shard and all I could see on my return to the upper ranks was 7* Leviathans everywhere, all with very active owners. 

I have sympathy for people who are wilfully excluded from claiming top payouts by the actions of others. But the suggestions made by the OP will make Fleet Arena vastly worse for the player-base as a whole.