We are working one some kind of a method for actively re-generating forest battle attempts. The current thinking is that you gain 1 every 2 hours passively for a maximum of 8 stacked and you have a chance to generate new ones as a bonus reward from arena battles.
If I saw correctly, this is a very short round where you are mainly testing a slow (=normal) start scenario?
On the matter of exploiting, pretty much the only time I was allocated battles seemed to be when different sets of 2 others were looking for fights. I wondered if they mainly wanted to fight each other, but I was managing to sneak in. As the battles were giving xp and gold was plentiful it didn't seem to matter that much if I was only winning about half the time. After all, the points system is bugged, as already discussed. One of the winners of the first round managed to peak with very few battles and nobody could overtake due to the swings of losing points even when winning.
It also seems a bit strange to be denying what you call "exploiters" from getting the ped rewards at the start of full launch. After all, this is a beta test, where you should WANT people to be trying to break or bend the systems!!!
That way you find out about them before you launch!
On the forest battle attempts, I was farming through maybe 600 in one hour in attempts to level up from lvl 10 to 12 or so. The reduction to 10 non-auto a day is crazy, in my opinion.
People will at least be moving to 25 gold auto battles, I guess, though, but I really think the selection of opponents by the system needs to be looked at.
Even if people are not working together in a "you beat me a few times, then you put a weaker pet into battle for me to win against" scenario, people will always be trying to find weaker partners to auto-battle against. It will become a game of ambushing auto battles, and who is to say who is intentionally parntnering with someone weaker and who is a genuinely weak player?
Apart from a few criticisms here, it's nice to see communication and work/changes on a daily basis here in beta!