Is it against the terms of service

@Waqui

I see no justification for having free rank 1 rewards handed to you without having to fight for them. That's not much of an arena to me. And I doubt it will stop people coordinating in shard chats.

But you do fight for them. You just fight for them every 3 days instead of every day.

And people can coordinate in shard chats, but they could do that anyway. You can't stop them. What you can do is give the bullies motivation to drop out for a couple days by taking #1. Not every shard has a shard mafia, but if you do have one on your shard, losing a couple of the bullies makes it really hard for them to keep you out of the top spots by poaching you. Can't do any poaching if you finished #1, after all, and what would they rather do? Finish #1 or stay out of the top spot just to have more opportunities to sabotage other players?

On my SA shard think we only have 6 different #1 finishers per day. If 1-2 of those time zones the 2nd place finisher can't beat the new #1 (just like they couldn't beat the #1 in their own time zone before they were phantom zoned for 2 days), then you get 10 first place finishers in 2 days. Hard to say what happens next, but all those people who finish 11-20 now have a shot at #1, but not everyone will accomplish it. So some number, just call it 6 again to be easy, get 1st place on that day, but the moment they take first they get phantom zone'd and someone else comes back. So only 10 or so people are in the phantom zone at any one time in a shard where people are funneled into 6 time zones.

Of course, people can change their payout times, but they still have to be good enough to knock someone out of first place if they're going to take first themselves. People that normally finish #20 are probably not good enough to take out a #1 squad. So once the rotation becomes steady over a couple cycles, when the great squads pop back in from the phantom zone, they can't get removed from #1 except by someone worthy.

So there's still a minimum level of bad@55ery that a person has to accomplish to take #1. If you're on a thread absolutely crowded with great teams you benefit more form this, because the people hovering around #50 are good enough to take #1 if they could just fight their way close enough - which they can't do with mafias and probably can't do without paying for a couple refreshes.

The beauty of the system is that it naturally benefits the shards that need the benefit the most: shards with even quality from #1 all the way down to #50, and shards with teams of bullies.

Does it change things? Yep. Does the reward for #1 "increase"? Well, sure if you count not having to fight for position for 2 days an extra reward. Does it change things enough to destroy the crystal economy? Not really. Very few people are going to get more than 25 more crystals than they would otherwise.

But the whole point of this thread is imagining ways that we could change things to help those 2 groups without completely messing up Arena. Since most people don't finish #1 and couldn't finish #1 even with the new system, the vast majority of players wouldn't notice anything different at all, while people in Legendary shards with players worthy of #1 but stuck at #50 could benefit quite a lot.

It probably doesn't matter because CG probably isn't even trying to "fix" these problems. They probably just accept them as the inevitable situation that develops in a game like this. But whatever you think of it, it is a system that focuses the benefits on the people who need it most, hurts only the bullies who get their pleasure from sabotaging others rather than from their own success, and would be completely unnoticed by the vast majority. In that sense, it's the best "fix" that I think has been proposed.