Change for the Arenas

[MrDoudou]

Hello everyone!

Today I'd like to ask for your help with the Arena.

As some of you may have noticed, the arenas have been quite "empty" for a while now.

So I'd like to hear your opinions and suggestions as to what we can do to make you, the players, want to participate in the arenas?

Also, if you have any suggestions or ideas, please list them and try to be as specific as possible, e.g. if you want to talk about arena rewards, let us know what kind of rewards, and not just say "yes then, we need to change the rewards".

Note: Please do not make drama in this thread.

Thank you for your attention and participation!

~V-Staff

[Reikan]

Most of endgame PVP requires at least 5 support classes in order to survive the big bursts of damage, which means it's just impossible to hop in 3v3 arenas without being CC-locked to death. 

I don't think that even changing Arena rewards would help it, people would hop in for the rewards and then leave once they were done with it.

It's more of a root issue than the arena itself. It's been the main reason why you don't see smaller guilds on TWs anymore, or people trying to build bigger guilds to join the thing.

In short: Too much DMG

[Jordan]

22 hours ago, Reikan said:

In short: Too much DMG

Damage reduction is much higher in 3v3 arena and the HP is also significantly higher. Along with percentage healing being reduced so I feel like this answer has nothing to do with arena at all. The issue the post is trying to address is the fact that people aren't even trying the arena in the first place. Balancing plays almost zero weight at this stage of the process as if people where actually motivated to play arena then they would, once activity begins then there would be complaints about balance issues.

So please refrain from blanket game gripes as we are trying our best to keep the game balanced to begin with. Not to mention that these 5 support classes are mostly to provide CC and damage boosts not just stacking -DMG. But again an discussion for another topic...

 

[Reikan]

29 minutes ago, Jordan said:

Damage reduction is much higher in 3v3 arena and the HP is also significantly higher. Along with percentage healing being reduced so I feel like this answer has nothing to do with arena at all. The issue the post is trying to address is the fact that people aren't even trying the arena in the first place. Balancing plays almost zero weight at this stage of the process as if people where actually motivated to play arena then they would, once activity begins then there would be complaints about balance issues.

So please refrain from blanket game gripes as we are trying our best to keep the game balanced to begin with. Not to mention that these 5 support classes are mostly to provide CC and damage boosts not just stacking -DMG. But again an discussion for another topic...

 

I'm just a player providing feedback. Regardless of Arena rewards, it will be there for farming the aforementioned reward instead of actual arena gameplay. Temple Arena has PVP with a big HP pool and DMG reduction, but nobody does it because it's better to just group and farm the PVE resources.

In any case, feel free to ignore my feedback. Maybe I'm just a troll that hops into topics to cause disorder. Maybe i'm not trying to help and/or bring more players into the game. Who knows.

[Jordan]

On 9/8/2023 at 12:58 PM, Reikan said:

I'm just a player providing feedback. Regardless of Arena rewards, it will be there for farming the aforementioned reward instead of actual arena gameplay. Temple Arena has PVP with a big HP pool and DMG reduction, but nobody does it because it's better to just group and farm the PVE resources.

In any case, feel free to ignore my feedback. Maybe I'm just a troll that hops into topics to cause disorder. Maybe i'm not trying to help and/or bring more players into the game. Who knows.

Yeh but thats the point of this topic?

What would give people a reason to queue arena and play. Right now balance isn't really an issue because as far as I'm aware the last time people wanted to try arena they where fine with the balance (Not saying improvements cannot be made). What we're looking for is what would encourage people to try it out and enjoy it. Last time we asked for feedback people requested a bigger map, we implemented it and nobody tried it since. So we're asking for reasons why people don't play it and what could be done to give people reason to play it.

Balance is fine to bring up, but unless you've actually tried arena balance its unfair to rope it in with TW and such when they have different damage reduction values (something you have suggested for TW). It also has less players on each side, so less classes to CC chain and debuff without sacrificing DMG. So we're asking for ideas from the community and a blanket Too Much DMG is not feedback that is really of any use.

Since you brought it up Temple Arena is designed for a similar match type as TW (although when the TW buff was last updated Temple Arena was missed so it has around 5% less dmg reduction in comparisson).

You make a valid point about rewards but at the same time theres nothing paritcularly wrong with farming rewards aslong as its not done in an abusive fashion. A lot of people back at 65-75 cap would do a few arenas for the recommended event buff for gvg and/or the quests. So whats wrong with making that a fun experience. On classic we had a few months while it was active where arena had around 1000 wins on the ranking. It maybe be a different experience but you can't honeslty tell me people did 1000 games of arena in 30 days just to farm a ranking reward, that would be a ridiculous remark.

We're asking simply what would motivate people to play, what would make the experience fun whether it be casual or competative. Since having a couple matches every day or so where people can have fun is better than what we have now right?

[Reikan]

1 hour ago, Jordan said:

We're asking simply what would motivate people to play, what would make the experience fun whether it be casual or competative. Since having a couple matches every day or so where people can have fun is better than what we have now right?

Well, it was a very well-thought answer considering how oblivious I was on structuring out my answer. Thanks for that.

I think the Arena goes through many layers of issues. People will need to gear up to hop in. So expect maybe a couple of months to catch up on stuff, maybe 3 months. Before 3 months, you'll be just hopping in to feel bad.

Then after the gear layer, you have the issue of some classes being able to do multiple roles in small skirmishes, akin to the issue on Holy Blade being able to self-heal, CC, do burst DMG while still lowering DMG received. Reaver, Conjurer and Annihilator fit this scenario aswell. So maybe people feel too much forced into these classes unless they're supporting, which might narrow down the target audience.

And THEN we have the rewards. Well, they aren't really bad, but I wouldn't say they are desirable either. We have a couple of mounts, Mimic costumes and such. We also get warstones, which was the primary reason for ungeared people doing Arenas in the old times. I can't say for sure on what would be a better reward for Arenas, being quite honest. I've put plenty of hours in this subject, and even shared it with guildmates, but we never got to an agreement. Gold would ruin the server economy. Anything in the craft line would be redundant with the other rankings. More warstones could brick the server economy aswell.

In a TL;DR way of thinking, maybe we should tackle the first layers before thinking about rewards, while I do agree they should be touched, arenas should be fun in the first place.

[Fenril]

[This is going to be a long reply, so, please, bear with me and thanks for your time and patience.]

Can I be honest? Like... real honest? I haven't tried Arena this time (after a five years hiatus), but I heard that one of its biggest problems was fixed (a very small map that would favor any AoE class), so I'm in no position to talk about Arena balancing specifically, but one thing I'm 100% sure: some players of this game hide behind stronger players, which powers up/feeds up something I call "pack mentality", and that is the reason why Arenas aren't popular.

In Eden, there is this "pack mentality". I've observed that people here take "guilds" very seriously. Maybe that is why you've shunned down one of my suggestions in the past (the one that would limit the ammount of people per guild, thus inevitably increasing competition). You said that you can't prevent people from playing with their friends if that's what they want, and there is really no argument against this, but in the end, this "pack mentality" hurts the game more than it helps.

Pvp should be about FUN, about challenging yourself everytime you step in the pvp-arena, about unpredictability. If you're hiding behind the back of stronger team mates and you're constantly winning, why the hell would you risk losing to someone that "you" (aka your team) are/is constantly beating up? That would hurt your ego (maybe even your guild's reputation, idk), and who in the world enjoys having their ego hurt? That's why the most played pvp scenarios are TW and GvG, where you can bring your whole gang to back you up. Not to mention that, when you're on top for so long and you lose, you feel dismayed. It has happened before, according to people that have been playing Eden throughout all these years I was away.

Also... it takes A LOT OF TIME to gear up, to actually "be ready to enjoy pvp", and even so, there is no "enjoying pvp" if you're not in a strong guild, mainly because no one likes to lose constantly.  Not to mention that, in order to be accepted by a strong guild, you need to play with what they want/need, as their leaders and most popular members already play the best dps's classes in the game.

Unfortunately, this is something beyond your control. This "pack mentality" favors big pvp modes, server-dominance-goals, which pushes players away from the game. If you're new to the game and, after 6 months, you're still not ready to face the strongest players in the game, you inevitably feel demotivated. You feel like you're worthless and that you just wasted your precious time... and for what? For trying to kill some xXxNaRuToxXx that you don't even know who it is but is constantly jumping on your dead body just to tease you?

It's true that Eden has some serious balancing problems and class-identity issues, but this time, I honestly believe it has nothing to do with your decisions, so don't fret.

The problem is the "pack mentality" powered by insecurities (the fear of losing constantly and feeling worthless) and how it favors massive pvp-modes. 

These pvp modes have its particularities, its own metas, which also hurts the game. Imo, the only way to remedy this is to limit the ammount of players per guild (10 members max) and developing battle-royale pvp modes to bring back classes that cannot be used in TW (or mobbed GvG's) simply because they won't even be able to reach the enemies to begin with. (Do you remember Elysian Island? I played it a few times and I found it really fun. With a few tweaks, maybe you can create a fun pvp mode that people can play.)

You can keep Territory Wars open, but this pvp mode needs a rework... the game should be able to divide the guilds equally on both sides, otherwise, there will be days where we won't be able to enjoy pvp because there will be 10 guilds on blue side and 2 on red side...

Plus, everything I mentioned here would actually make things easier when balancing the game in general. When the most played pvp modes are those with tons of people in it, buffing/nerfing one single class could disrupt the entire scenario and it's hard to predict the outcome. I heard you suffered backlash when you first nerfed Gravity Manipulator. If my memory serves me well, back in cap95/100, we had tons of GM's jumping around, one-shotting people. Despite the terror that GM's brought to TW's and GVG's, those were good times, and we could see a lot of different classes being used.

I've been studying other mmorpg's (not to mention recalling how things were in other mmorpg's I played throughout my life), and I have noticed that I've never experienced anything like Eden TW/GvG before. The only two exceptions being Royal Quest and Albion, which I did not play personally, but I've been watching videos recently and it's crazy... so much effects going on, so much things happening at the same time that it's completely overwhelming. I doubt people are exactly aware of what's happening there 100% of the time, which, in my opinion, impoverishes the game experience.

Oh, and just so you know, in these past months, our guild have been trying to equip a lot of people...  we actually managed to equip some, like around 10 members or a bit more, but they left the game. When questioned (because I'm inconvenient as fu... lol), their answers were practically the same: It takes too much time for everything, plus, I depend on you guys too much, and we're past this era... look at the most popular games nowadays and see it for yourself... I may depend on my team, but if I'm good enough, I can beat my enemies single-handedly and they don't require months of preparation before I can actually experience pvp fully.

 

 

 

[Nanami]

Soz Arena... it's been dead since maybe 100 let's be honest.

1. Personally I think that for Arena to be any good with awaken classes it will need to be balanced towards them. So I'll start with; The removal of potions happened which I felt like was just awful because people queue in on classes with 2-5 CCs in skills + procs. Classes like Reaver/Conju/LA/DE for some examples. It was really hard to combat all of it and we used to get to pick immunity for a "price" for a short amount of time to one of the many CCs that happens in PvP.

2. The biggest issue(s) in my eyes are not having it locked to a "gear score" to be able to queue, too many people throw in non-geared alts and afk, they refuse to even stop queueing because their goal is just to ruin everyone's day.

When you're rank 1-3? I believe it was, you can preview the gear of those players in the PvP rankings and there it shows a gear score as well as all the gear they last had equipped when the rank was updated. That being said, I believe basing arena queue ability off gear score per it's level bracket would be a good way to get rid of the alt queues unbalancing it.

3. The ability to queue up as a set team regardless of guild! This would be such a nice feature, we could pre-plan our party classes and get to play/queue up with friends and guildmates, everyone would have a more enjoyable time.

4. New "mode" maybe instead of 10v10 it can be come 5v5 as we are a smaller server and the majority of 10v10 ques included a lot of alts which heavily unbalanced the teams. I understand that the number isn't as big a deal and while we can get 20 to queue that are not alts if we take our TW numbers as an example, it is just extremely hard to find that many interested in arena and on at the same time.

Under the topic of a new mode, you could maybe implement more "classic" PvP into the mix with the death of Classic Vendetta (RIP) and the arrival of poopy XL, not to mention all the other poopy random popup servers. 🙃


Misc things to improve it would be finding out what rewards players would want from arena rewards that will interest them into participating in Arena. My suggestion for this is to get feedback from the community and put up a poll for people to vote on.

o/ All I had to say, good luck ~

[Jordan]

On 9/9/2023 at 11:54 PM, Reikan said:

I think the Arena goes through many layers of issues. People will need to gear up to hop in. So expect maybe a couple of months to catch up on stuff, maybe 3 months. Before 3 months, you'll be just hopping in to feel bad.
 

12 hours ago, Nanami said:

2. The biggest issue(s) in my eyes are not having it locked to a "gear score" to be able to queue, too many people throw in non-geared alts and afk, they refuse to even stop queueing because their goal is just to ruin everyone's day.

When you're rank 1-3? I believe it was, you can preview the gear of those players in the PvP rankings and there it shows a gear score as well as all the gear they last had equipped when the rank was updated. That being said, I believe basing arena queue ability off gear score per it's level bracket would be a good way to get rid of the alt queues unbalancing it.

One suggestion I recieved in the past that might remedy this situation in regards to arena specifically. Was to have easy to obtain arena set versions of something like Abyss sets. I'm not sure how people feel about something like this but it was pitched to me a few months back when at the time I was focused on other tasks. There is no gear score system in the game so I'm not sure where that number comes from if it exists.

As much as this would be a good system to implement it wouldn't really be worth the time and effort unless arena became active in the first place.

On 9/9/2023 at 11:54 PM, Reikan said:

Then after the gear layer, you have the issue of some classes being able to do multiple roles in small skirmishes, akin to the issue on Holy Blade being able to self-heal, CC, do burst DMG while still lowering DMG received. Reaver, Conjurer and Annihilator fit this scenario aswell. So maybe people feel too much forced into these classes unless they're supporting, which might narrow down the target audience.

I don't think its such a bad idea to have classes fill multiple roles. Aslong as there isn't like, this class is the only way to win kinda balancing issues I think people could still have fun having a small pool of say 10 classes atleast being S Tier while others being A and B Tier. Most games are like this now including MMORPG's where some classes are just favoured because they're stronger than others.

17 hours ago, Fenril said:

To be honest I agree with a lot of what you say outside of the guild limit features. But to be honest this is what makes EE unique to other MMO's. The guild system is what most players are playing for and I've got to admit it was one of the things that kept me playing back in the day. Whenever I play other MMORPG I just tend to get bored of PvP after a while since its kinda souless matches.

I don't wanna give up on things so easily and count them out as I do believe an active 3v3 is possible (as I mentioned above in classic there was a time where 3v3 was very active). So I believe with the right changes this can be achieved. But it needs community ideas to make it possible.

[Reikan]

1 hour ago, Jordan said:

I don't think its such a bad idea to have classes fill multiple roles. Aslong as there isn't like, this class is the only way to win kinda balancing issues I think people could still have fun having a small pool of say 10 classes atleast being S Tier while others being A and B Tier. Most games are like this now including MMORPG's where some classes are just favoured because they're stronger than others.

I agree with you in the general idea, but as Nanami pointed out, we used to be able to work around some of the "S Tier classes" which were basically the most CC-heavier ones, using the pots. I'm quite sure we can't have a "Tenacity" status to lower CC durations, but the pots would be an easier (and more comfortable) approach for this community.

If pots were still available, then we'd have the general idea of DMG dealt / DMG taken being the priority, and we have multiple classes that work around these status, so I guess maybe we'd have more S-Tier classes to play around with, instead of being defaulted into Conjurer/Reaver because these classes offer that much in skirmishes.

Also, +1 to Nanami's idea of 5v5 arenas.

... And I'd like to adress Monster Battle Arenas too, since they were one of my favourites. Maybe just "setting up" the player status (instead of using Penthos) to the exact same amount every time, would help it being decent. Also, it would be cool to see VGN exclusive content in there, such as CC bosses or maybe stuff from AT/DF.

[Nanami]

6 hours ago, Jordan said:

One suggestion I recieved in the past that might remedy this situation in regards to arena specifically. Was to have easy to obtain arena set versions of something like Abyss sets. I'm not sure how people feel about something like this but it was pitched to me a few months back when at the time I was focused on other tasks. There is no gear score system in the game so I'm not sure where that number comes from if it exists.

As much as this would be a good system to implement it wouldn't really be worth the time and effort unless arena became active in the first place.

I for one am disgusted at the thought of arena sets, so that's my bias take on it.
Unbias, I don't think that will help anything tbh, people who just wanna spam arena will only make the "Easy" to make arena sets and not bother farming PvE for actual gear to enter other forms of PvP like TW/GvG/GA.
I just see it making things worse for PvE parties to fill up, it's already extremely hard to fill older content PvE and AT DF  now that a lot of people finished it, they have nothing to gain out of continuing to run it so my concern is that PvP sets will just add to those issues.

[Aironade]

Hello,

Well, we could make it similar to the monster arena where you pick up a weapon and everyone has similar status, this could help even those who are just starting out in the game. Regarding the rewards, maybe 1 Ec for each member of the winning team, a fortification stone or perhaps EP, a lot of people only do the temple arena just to get EP and who knows, maybe direct these people to the 3x3 arenas.

Sincerely Aironade.