Please fix the grand arena matchmaking

"BeralCator;c-1857526" wrote:
I think people are conflating the terms "fair" and "competitive" when they are not equivalent terms.

There are some mild elements on "unfairness" (the aforementioned roster bloat from the period between TB introduction and TW introduction, general power creep that more heavily hits older players, lack of capital ships), but there isn't really a more "fair" method than matching GPs. We all know the GP calculation, and we can all make decisions that will give us an advantage or disadvantage in Grand Arena.

There are some ways to make the matches more competitive though:
1) Readjusting the GP calculation to give more points to G11/12 gear and 6E mods and less points to * level would help, as the current formula is pretty arbitrary and not terribly reflective of utility. This would probably be very unpopular with P2P players though, as they'd all end up facing each other after the adjustment.

2) Having more tiers with diversified rewards would also help significantly, as there would be less motivation to artificially suppress GP. It sounds like this is part of the long term plan for Grand Arena, as mentioned in the last Road Ahead post.

3) Reworking more characters would help, as it would mitigate the penalty for having fluff toons. The reworks to OG Ahsoka and Anakin are a step in the right direction, and additional reworks to Geonosians, Nute, Mace, Dooku, Clones, etc. would go a long way to making deep rosters more viable.

4) The ships portion of GA needs to go away until there are more capital ships. While you can at least use every character on your roster (in theory), you can only use 28 ships because of the dearth of capital ships. Having two more capital ship options and placing two fleets on D would help a bunch (people with lots of goods ships would actually, y'know, have an advantage). Currently it's just Han's Falcon mirror matches and not very interesting, and the GAs with ships are actually *more* unfair to people with good ships than the one's without. Ships are 40% of my GP, but account for 20% (or less?) of the available points; if I get matched with someone who has same GP, but better characters/worse ships, I'm suddenly at a massive disadvantage.

For people complaining about CG not doing anything - items 2 & 3 are happening, and 4 is highly likely to occur eventually. Matches should become more competitive over time. You can also take steps to become more competitive by only gearing and zetaing useful characters. However it's going to be a gradual process.

I do think it's important to strike a balance between competitive and fair though, as there's not much interest or fun in non-competitive matchups (even if they are fair). That said, there are a lot of whiners in the forums; I have a massively bloated roster and I can usually win 1-2 rounds in GA anyway through thoughtful strategy.

While I agree with most of your statement, I think the reason you see so many complainers about GA is because takes so long to fix such obvious problems. For example, I along with many others pointed out from during the trial GA that matchmaking was bad because it accounted for ship GP when ships aren’t available to use. It took 4 months for CG to make that adjustment...4 months. Why 4 months???

Almost everything you’ve talked about has been mentioned on these forums and reddit since December. Prior to December, we didn’t know about these problems. So why does it take CG longer to discover a problem and roll out a simple solution (remove ship GP from the calculator) than it takes for the gamers to spot it and offer a viable solution? It feels like CG just rolled out a quick game mode with no real thought or testing to go behind it. After months of hearing complaints, they’re finally working on fixes to the problem.

These are all rhetorical questions, so you don’t have to answer. And I wasn’t taking any shots at you.