Highly Abnormal Ship Arena Shard
As a preface to this post, I'm not making it to garner the sympathy of folks on this forum (although I would appreciate your support if you agree with my conclusion below, if not that is okay as well). My objective here is to call attention from a developer to a sorting issue that has created a very abnormal ship arena shard (already infamous out there as being unreasonable competitive).
With that said, the ship arena shard myself and many other folks out there is on is highly unusual (compared to any other I've seen) and incredibly competitive. I am in contact with a lot of the other people in the top 20 and we have logically concluded that the following happened. In sorting the shards, the developers applied the following filters:
The algorithm they applied to put people in ship shards made sense for most of the SWGOH population, but it was fundamentally flawed in our case. For example, when you use that criteria for people who started in January / February, a high percentage of folks are level 80+ and have a top 5 character power of let's say 40k+ (or whatever the cut-off is). However, when you apply the filters above to people who have been playing since July / August / September, the result is that you create an insanely competitive and unreasonable shard. To have started 2-3 months ago and be level 80+ with an arena power of 39 or 40k+ (just taking a random cutoff) would almost by definition mean that you are a very active player. This would also capture an insanely high % of whales (multiple times above any other shard). Just to give everyone a perspective, here is what the top of our shard looks like (taken yesterday, people have gotten even stronger today). Literally every person in the top 25-50 has a power of 130k+:
http://imgur.com/a/LwIml
This is extremely unfair to not only whales at the top of the shard (as we have an exponentially harder server than our guildmates who have deeper rosters and have been playing for much longer), but also to very active F2P folks or small dolphins. I know someone else who is on our shard and is a light spender and he cannot crack the top 500 in our shard. In any other shard, his power would be easily be in the top 50.
In summary, the algorithm applied here makes sense for other servers, but is completely broken when you apply it to people who have started playing recently and there needs to be a reshuffling. I guarantee if a developer or someone from CG actually looked at our shard and see what they've created, they will see how inconsistent it is with the average or anything else out there.
With that said, the ship arena shard myself and many other folks out there is on is highly unusual (compared to any other I've seen) and incredibly competitive. I am in contact with a lot of the other people in the top 20 and we have logically concluded that the following happened. In sorting the shards, the developers applied the following filters:
- The first filter was when you started playing. Everyone I spoke to at the top of our shard (more than 10 people now) started this game in July / August / early September
- The second filter is level, with 80+ being a bracket
- The last filter must be something related to Arena power, so maybe 39-40k+ is a cutoff for the high end (could be lower as well)
The algorithm they applied to put people in ship shards made sense for most of the SWGOH population, but it was fundamentally flawed in our case. For example, when you use that criteria for people who started in January / February, a high percentage of folks are level 80+ and have a top 5 character power of let's say 40k+ (or whatever the cut-off is). However, when you apply the filters above to people who have been playing since July / August / September, the result is that you create an insanely competitive and unreasonable shard. To have started 2-3 months ago and be level 80+ with an arena power of 39 or 40k+ (just taking a random cutoff) would almost by definition mean that you are a very active player. This would also capture an insanely high % of whales (multiple times above any other shard). Just to give everyone a perspective, here is what the top of our shard looks like (taken yesterday, people have gotten even stronger today). Literally every person in the top 25-50 has a power of 130k+:
http://imgur.com/a/LwIml
This is extremely unfair to not only whales at the top of the shard (as we have an exponentially harder server than our guildmates who have deeper rosters and have been playing for much longer), but also to very active F2P folks or small dolphins. I know someone else who is on our shard and is a light spender and he cannot crack the top 500 in our shard. In any other shard, his power would be easily be in the top 50.
In summary, the algorithm applied here makes sense for other servers, but is completely broken when you apply it to people who have started playing recently and there needs to be a reshuffling. I guarantee if a developer or someone from CG actually looked at our shard and see what they've created, they will see how inconsistent it is with the average or anything else out there.
