@Vashzaron said in Either rework Battle Arena for New Genesis or move its SG elsewhere:
I find what you are saying reasonable and but it sounds like you are saying it out of frustration
Particularly the edit at the end of my last post, yes. I hold my hands up to that. I considered simply not making that edit due to the possibility of harming the request, but decided to continue with it for two reasons.
First, it doesn't harm the request. As you describe, the detail of Battle Arena's flaws, recalled examples of how and why it affects players further from the server (and that this is orders of magnitude worse than on JP where the ARP progression rate is balanced), the numbers behind ranking up to and beyond S rank and how unreasonable that becomes with a tangible disadvantage are all still true. No amount of self-confessed whining can really change that.
Second, I don't believe an expression of dismay and despair is inherently out of place. The general unplayability of Battle Arena due to its consistent scale of preferential treatment is not fun, and playing it for two hours only to move backwards makes players hate it and PSO2 just a little bit more. That is feedback, and feedback on how fun a game is to play to an extent needs to be emotive.
What I did do though - many hours before your reply - was reword the original version of that edit. Previously it was far more... let's say "strongly worded". So I have moderated it considerably to try to keep focus on the important detail: Locking vast amounts of a critically limited resource behind a game mode whose flaws are considerably more exacerbated due to natural circumstances than to the original server, to the point of essentially locking some players out of being able to progress beyond a point, is probably something that deserves a bit of consideration.
New Genesis and any SG rebalancing that comes with it seems like an excellent opportunity to do that.
@Vashzaron said in Either rework Battle Arena for New Genesis or move its SG elsewhere:
Having high ping in this mode means you just need to work around the jank even harder and its not all bad.. this game has plenty of client sided hit detection nonsense that can fall in your higher ping favor if it was not a trading blow with the enemy.
I'm afraid I simply cannot agree with this. You are suggesting that just as opponents could hit me long after I have taken cover, I could do the same to them? There are four things that count against this:
First, one drawback of higher ping is enemies sometimes rubber-band. This means I could start to use a ranged PA on an opponent that on my screen wouldn't have enough time to reach cover at normal speed before my attack lands... but then all of a sudden they quick-jump to be behind cover anyway, my PA misses, and I've still lost both the PP it cost and also the time spent essentially shooting the air.
(Can this happen when an opponent attacks me? Yes, but less. All communication goes through the server, right? Suppose my ping is 160ms and an opponent's is 60ms. Both ways (me-server-them or them-server-me) the overall lag is 220ms. But the key communication is between the server and you. I only get to see where the server thought my opponent was 160ms ago - my opponents get to see where the server thinks I was 60ms ago. Combined with the increased volatility of the longer travel time, I am a much more recent and much less teleporty target for them than they are for me.)
Second, this only applies in the situation where I am a ranged attacker that has no fear of repercussion (at least from that opponent). For certain weapons this is obviously impossible, and we don't get to choose our weapons. The likes of jet boots and knuckles are useless to a player with high ping because everything they do is trading blows with enemies at close range. If we are given those, we have to either waste time running to another harvest point or basically give an opponent a free kill. This is particularly troublesome at the start of a matches since everyone only gets one weapon harvest.
Third, since the server gives priority to the most recently-received updates from clients, if a player is moving at their end when I hit them with an attack that should lead into a guaranteed kill combo (Nagrants on what appears to be a standing opponent, Satellite Aim stunlock and so on), they still get to give the server their updated position quickly enough that even though they receive the damage and start a stun animation, it happens outside the reach of the follow-up, thereby cheating death.
(Technical breakdown again, with the same suppositions as before: Imagine I shoot an opponent twice with the second shot meant to kill. I attack them. 60ms later the server receives an updated position which starts being sent to me. 100ms after that, the server receives the report of my attack and damages the opponent. 60ms later, I receive their updated position during their stun animation which is now beyond the reach of the follow-up and I fail to get the kill. Other way around: An opponent attacks me. 60ms after their attack, the server damages me and sends that out. 60ms after that the opponent sees me stunned where I was, still in hit range. 40ms after thatthe server gets to know about where I was when the opponent first attacked me, and it's another 60ms still before I get to know I was attacked at all!)
Lastly, as I discovered to vast detriment yesterday, when you're up against experienced opponents who have you pegged as a high-ping player they can safely kill, they don't even bother running for cover anymore. They just kill you because they know they can get away with it.
I don't deny the possibility that any kill I score in Battle Arena depended on at it's possible I could score a kill on an opponent who hadn't been where I thought they were for longer than a low-ping player could, but that is a rare advantage that on its own is worse than the comparable disadvantage I face from opponents attacking me. It doesn't in any way compensate for the pure disadvantage of all skirmish situations which are - and are designed to be - the primary interaction in Battle Arena.
And that disadvantage cannot be understated. Points three and four above combine in very unpleasant ways. Allow me to list two:
One (Edit: And I see when reading the rest of your post, you mention this one yourself), skill use happens client-side and does not force the server to retrospectively change events. If the server receives a message from RedGuy saying "I hit weakened BlueGuy with enough damage to finish them off", and 50ms later receives a message from BlueGuy saying "I used Cure 1 time and can now survive an attack from RedGuy", even if BlueGuy sent the message first they are still not only dying but also losing one of their Cure uses to a temporal impossibility. Late edit: By the way this works the opposite in reverse. You can get killed by an opponent that should be dead but they popped Cure or Protect after you hit them and the server heard about that first (and you don't get to know about it until after the server is also told they've killed you instead).
Two, this drawback ruins defensive options. Guarding may as well not exist when the server is told you got hit before it hears you were guarding at the time. Sometimes I can't even throw a defensive Nagrants as some enemies can just walk into the sphere and kill me anyway. How is this possible? Because clients don't tell the server when they think they got hit. Only when they think they hit an opponent. This means an opponent can enter my Nagrants safely as long as they hit me with something lethal faster than my client can tell the server they just committed suicide. This morning I had an opponent doing this on purpose. They had their ping advantage figured out and consciously exploited it.
Is that abusive? Maybe. But Battle Arena permits it! What am I supposed to do about it? 
@Vashzaron said in Either rework Battle Arena for New Genesis or move its SG elsewhere:
I feel best results would come from letting your teammates do anything directly confrontational if possible
It's always sensible to tailor your play to minimise the occurrence or impact of any disadvantages you have, whether the cause for them is fair or not.
But what you are talking about here is obeying the constraints caused by that bad situation. Operating under the limitations that come with the way Battle Arena gives preferential treatment to lower pings. Making choices that would not be optimal on a level playing field but are regrettably mandatory at a disadvantage.
This is not a solution. It is a compromise.
When Battle Arena was more populated, and when my friend group hadn't given up on it in what I can accurately describe as agitated disgust, I was able to compete with them with options like the three sword PAs (especially Ride Slash). Last night in particular getting any of those basically forced me to keep harvesting because trying to use any of them was essentially choosing to hand the opponents 10% of my points.
And where is the biggest hot spot for confrontations? It's mid! Where the rainbow emblems are. Rare is the game that we get to ranged support from away from mid to help protect the teammates who are in there collecting the emblems. And if we're doing that, not picking up emblems ourselves, we're generally not in the top 3 which means we're also wasting the chance to be an ambusher. And oh, could I ever tell you stories about having one or two teammates simply refusing to enter mid even with covering fire, leaving uncontested rainbow emblems just sitting there!
@Vashzaron said in Either rework Battle Arena for New Genesis or move its SG elsewhere:
but I have made it to legend since the first month, but I no longer play it and just get the monthly rewards
I believe it's worse than it was in the first month. Not the delay, but the mix of players. My hypothesis is that players more disadvantaged by high pings are more likely to have given up on Battle Arena entirely and forever between then and now.
I base this on common sense, personally knowing people who have done that, and past experience in other games. Random example, StarCraft II league divisions about 10 years ago. Originally the bottom 80% of league divisions for more casual competition were divided evenly at 20% each. But many players in the lowest Bronze league didn't like being categorised among the worst and quit, which meant 20% of the remainder got demoted from Silver to Bronze and many of those would quit too. Because of this the division structure was reworked to dramatically cut the proportion of players assigned to Bronze. If players broadly respond badly to being told "you are bad", I can easily imagine they also respond badly to being told "you've got a permanent unconditional handicap".
The recent lack of a Battle It Out! campaign which encourages everyone to at least play 10 games usually for an emote might not be helping either. After last night I'd consider a temporary increase in low-ranking players (regardless of ping) a blessing over getting constantly beat on by low-ping experts.
@Vashzaron said in Either rework Battle Arena for New Genesis or move its SG elsewhere:
I dont even disagree with moving SG out of there and somewhere nicer for the whole "Global" audience to partake in fairly, but I don't expect that. NGS is very likely going to introduce new methods of gaining SG on top of our current ones
If I had to guess that's what I'd guess too.
But then, we have this suggestions forum. Why not use it? 
I do believe strongly enough that this needs addressing - and on top of that, why the amplification of the issue on Global deserves extra consideration - to dedicate some time to explaining the situation and making recommendations.
If for instance the New Genesis plan is to simply add the Star Gem supply of new sources in NGS to the enduring supply in pre-NGS, this suggestion would be less about "move some of the SG from Battle Arena to NGS" and more about "do something to rework how SG is given by Battle Arena or how ARP is gained and lost". In that situation we could be looking at rebalancing the ARP loss on defeat particularly at A and S rank, or maybe having campaigns that increases ARP or simply having other shops or exchanges (perhaps even NGS ones) provide ARP Tickets so it can be raised without suffering pre-NGS Battle Arena in the first place.
I guess that might make it seem open-ended as a suggestion, but that's kind of my point. There's a ton of viable ways they could address this! The suggestion is just that they make the most of the opportunity presented by the arrival of NGS and do something because the status quo is not in a good place.