Hello everyone,

A month ago Cointiply introduced the Arena, a rather intriguing new feature with the promise of a huge prize pool. At first glance, Arena looked like a "fun" giant gambling game with, maybe, a very slight positive Expected Value for players overall (all player's purchases go into the prize pool and Cointiply supplies an initial 5,000,000 coins prize).

In my initial article I gave my impressions, expectations and "strategy' for this first month. Now that the dust has settled I'd like to review and discuss my results as well as the overall results of this 1st round of Arena. It went as weirdly as expected...

Well Done Cointiply!

First things first, well done Cointiply for this very creative new feature. Well done because it seems that it gave a lot players, including myself and a few people I know using Cointiply, an incentive to complete more offers in order to funnel more coins into upgrading heroes in the Arena. The final prize pool was well over $20,000!!

The combined "lottery + moderate strategy" aspect of Arena seemed to have been balanced enough to keep the interest of users rather high through the whole month - $1,275 were spent on the top 5 heroes only!

I'm not sure though if the excitement and the large prize pool will continue in May. Given my results and the overall top 100 results I'll adopt a different strategy and spent much less in May.

My Heroes

I did as I said and only upgraded my "blue man lucky hero" throughout the month whenever the level rates per upgrade were high enough.

I was looking to strictly upgrade at CPL 50 or higher. That didn't happen very often, once every couple days at best, but that was enough for what I wanted to spent in my hero. Level upgrade rates change quickly, within 2 to 5 minutes, and good rates didn't last long for sure. But they occur frequently enough in my opinion, I was ready to be patient to optimize my spendings here.

Here you can see that it took almost a week between the two big spikes in level upgrade rates. "56 to 84 levels" per upgrade is about the best I saw. I upgraded my hero as much as possible during that spike, which was about 10-12 upgrades.

A few minutes later, the level upgrade rate was back down to "2 to 3".

In the end, I finished with these 4 heroes, with my top guy at level 4513 with a CPL of 21.

My Earnings

As you can see in the image above and below, I won cumulative of 136,876 coins. I had spent about 154k coins total in my heroes. So I'm down by about $1.8 in April. It's more or less what I had expected, +/- 10% gains/losses.

Each one of my heroes won 1 battle and lost 1 battle, they didn't go very far. You can also see that the earning for each hero is very different, it actually correlates with their level. The higher the level, the higher the gain. Only my "blue man" hero earned more coins than he cost me (+3,000 coins), my 3 other heroes cost me more than they earned me.

I know that even if you lose your first battle you are still earning some coins. Overall the battle and earning system is still confusing and not clear to me, even more so when looking at the top 100 heroes...

The Top 100 Heroes

After several rounds of battles where heroes were supposed to meet equivalent level heroes, they would all meet in the top 100 for a more random battle system.

What was kind of expected but very surprising nonetheless was too see a lot of very low level heroes in the top 100. Many level 1 with no upgrade could be seen in the top 100. I guess that's the lottery aspect being showcased here, if you're lucky enough you can make it to the top 100 and win "big". Remember, the top 100 fought and shared 20% of the prize pool, over $4,000! Some of these level 1 have probably won over $100, for a $0.1 investment...

I didn't screen shot it but the top hero in that list was "Buy AMC GME" hero, the 2nd best hero in April. With a field much much weaker I would expect him to win it all. But that also means that the top hero "Digitalcash" has likely been eliminated early, maybe even by "Buy AMC GME" in the early rounds as you are supposed to battle against equivalent level heroes at first. If that's how it played out, "Digitalcash" most likely lost a lot of coins in the Arena this month.

May Round

Well, I'm not feeling like grooming one, or any hero at all, for May Arena. It really was not too bad for me in April but if anything this first month confirmed the lottery aspect of it all. Even if the average EV per player is slightly positive the variance on player by player basis is likely to be very high. With one "drawing" per month it might take several months before you break even or end up slightly positive.

Given April results I'll adopt a very different and much cheaper tactic in May. I'll simply buy a bunch of "blue man" heroes (maybe about 10) , no upgrade at all and will hope to make it through several rounds for a net positive gain in the end. We'll see if this pays off...

How was your experience with Arena in April? Did you make any coins in the end? Let us know in the comments!

Thank you for reading,

-OMS

Follow me on Twitter - https://twitter.com/MillionSatoshi

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