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.

I think everyone is missing the obvious.
If they actually made it fair then lots of whales would be knocked out of the running for the top spots right out of the gate. That would cause dissent and a loss of income. So what it appears they have done is put one whale in with each grouping of 8. It's then on that whale to simply remember to play to get first and move up. There also seems to be 1 out of the 8 who is seriously outclassed. Not sure what the thinking is there.
So in this tier system they're using, the heavy hitters are only getting grouped together later in the GAC. They have been allowed to run up their scores and complete feats to ascend on the backs of the F2P guys and Dolphins. It would be extremely difficult for whales to garner all those extra points if they played each other from the start. The losers would fall below lots of players from lower divisions and with lower GPs. Players that the whales could destroy. A bit of an insult to people that spent tens of thousands.
So they went ahead and put the whales in with the bait in the beginning.

"BootyMcButtsweat;c-1923118" wrote:
I think everyone is missing the obvious.
If they actually made it fair then lots of whales would be knocked out of the running for the top spots right out of the gate. That would cause dissent and a loss of income. So what it appears they have done is put one whale in with each grouping of 8. It's then on that whale to simply remember to play to get first and move up. There also seems to be 1 out of the 8 who is seriously outclassed. Not sure what the thinking is there.
So in this tier system they're using, the heavy hitters are only getting grouped together later in the GAC. They have been allowed to run up their scores and complete feats to ascend on the backs of the F2P guys and Dolphins. It would be extremely difficult for whales to garner all those extra points if they played each other from the start. The losers would fall below lots of players from lower divisions and with lower GPs. Players that the whales could destroy. A bit of an insult to people that spent tens of thousands.
So they went ahead and put the whales in with the bait in the beginning.

Except the bolded isn't happening. This round is the same as the first 2. 4 guys with 8+ g13 and full GR/Malak teams and 4 guys who don't have him....or more than 2 g13...or the maxed Geos the Malak owners have...or the full g12/g13 GG+Seppy droid teams the Malak owners have either.

In this round, there is a guy in my bracket with 13 g13 toons. I have 2, another guy has 3. He also has a FULLY g13 Geo team (yes, including a g13 zBA). Only one other guy of the 8 even has ANY g12 Geos. lol.

It's a joke.

ETA: Sorry - I misspoke. There are 2 whaley whales with full g13 Geos and full g12/g13 GG+Sep droids - and 6 non (not just 1 to 7).

So no, there is no "improvement over the course of the GAC" algorithm. It's all just disconnected GA matches with a running point total. Lame.