PvP Arena

The Arena is the one on one ladder of the game. You pick a rival from a list, your build fights theirs, and the only thing at stake is your rating.

You will find it as the Arena tab in the Battlefield menu. It opens at battling level 50 and it does not need a squadron, so you can climb the ladder on your own from the day you unlock it.

Duels

A duel is asynchronous. You attack whenever you want and your rival does not have to be online: the game takes the build they left behind and fights it against yours.

Your side of the fight is exactly the one you prepared in the PvP Setup tab: your clones, your PvP stats, your PvP gear and an active Velari pet. It is the same setup Squadron PvP uses, so there is nothing extra to build for the Arena, and anything you improve for one shows up in the other.

Nothing is looted. No credits, resources, materials or badges change hands, and neither side loses anything from its inventory. A duel moves your rating, your record and your position in the ranking, and nothing else. The defender receives a notification telling them they were attacked and where their rating ended up.

Attacks and cooldowns

• You get 10 attacks per day. They reset at 00:00 UTC, and the tab shows the countdown.
• After fighting someone, you cannot attack that same player again for 12 hours. Rivals on cooldown show the remaining time instead of the attack button.
• Being attacked costs you nothing from your own daily attacks. You can be challenged any number of times a day.

Finding opponents

The list only offers players inside a rating band around yours. The band starts at 150 points and opens up to 300 and then 600 until there are at least 10 rivals to show, so a small realm or a rating at the very top or bottom of the table still gets a list.

What you see is a random sample of the players in range, not the whole table. Use the Find opponents button to draw a fresh sample.

A player is only offered if they are within their offline actions window, meaning they logged in within the last 24 hours, or 72 with an active premium subscription. Accounts that are disabled, guest accounts and admins never appear.

The band is checked again on the server when the attack lands, so a rival that drifted out of range while the list was open is refused.

Rating

Everyone starts at 1200 ELO. The rating cannot fall below 800, no matter how many duels you lose, and your best rating ever is kept separately from the current one.

The exchange is zero sum: whatever the attacker gains, the defender loses, and the other way around. How much moves at a time depends on two things.

How new you are. For your first 5 duels your rating moves at more than double the usual speed, so a player who just unlocked the Arena climbs to where they belong in a handful of fights instead of grinding for weeks.

Who was favoured. Beating someone rated above you is worth more than beating someone below, as in any ELO ladder. On top of that the defender is counted as 30 points stronger than they really are, because every draw and every timeout in the fight engine goes to the defender. Attacking a build is slightly harder than defending it, and that offset is what keeps the ladder from paying the attacker for a disadvantage they cannot control.

Remember

You are unranked until your first duel. An untouched starting rating is not a position anyone earned, so it does not appear in the ranking.

Your position is listed in the Rankings page under Arena ELO, sorted by rating and then by wins.

How a fight plays out

The Arena uses the same fight engine as Squadron PvP, with one player per side.

• The defender strikes first every round.
• Every attack rolls a hit chance of precision / (precision + evasion), so neither stat ever caps out.
• A landed hit is still your clone's hit: critical chance, critical damage and dual shot roll here exactly as they do against NPCs.
• Each PvP gear piece assigned to a skill adds a 5% chance for it to trigger, except Focus, which adds 2.5%. Stun, Block, Focus and Damage over time all behave as they do in Squadron PvP.
• The kill debuff that punishes a winning streak in squadron battles never comes into play here: it only lands when a whole player is wiped, and in a duel that is where the fight ends.

If both sides are still standing after 300 rounds, the winner is decided by remaining HP. If that is tied too, the duel goes to the defender, and so does a round where both sides fall at once.

Replays

Every duel is saved with its full combat log and can be replayed from the Battle Log tab, next to the squadron fights. Only the two players who fought can open it.

Duels are kept for 7 days and then pruned. The replay draws both fighters with the ship and cosmetics they fly today, not the ones they flew that day.

TL;DR:

• Battling level 50 opens the Arena, and you never need a squadron for it.
• 10 attacks a day, 12 hours before you can hit the same player again.
• Rivals come from a band of 150 rating points around you, widened until the list fills.
• Only rating is at stake: no loot, no losses, no cost for being attacked.
• Your first 5 duels move your rating much faster, so climb early.
• Attacking is slightly harder than defending, and the rating math already accounts for it.
• The build that fights is your PvP Setup, the same one Squadron PvP uses.