Shadowrealm has three separate ways to fight other players, and they reward completely different things. Open-world PvP is opportunistic and cheap. A duel is a challenge a named opponent must accept, and the only format where gold changes hands. The arena is a ranked ladder with a rating, a season, and a currency you cannot earn anywhere else. Confusing the three is the most common reason players decide PvP "gives nothing".
Every ranked character starts at 1,000 rating and moves from there on an Elo system with a K-factor of 24. In plain terms: beating someone rated well above you moves you a lot, beating someone far below you moves you barely at all, and losing to someone far below you is expensive. Rating cannot fall below 100, so a bad run is recoverable.
You may fight up to 20 ranked matches per day. That cap is the real strategic constraint: since each match moves your rating by an amount that depends on the opponent, who you choose to spend those matches on matters more than how many you win overall.
The ladder runs in seasons. At the close of a season, placement pays out Glory, with the champion taking 600. You need at least 10 matches played to be eligible for a season placement reward at all, which stops a single lucky win at a high rating from claiming a prize ahead of players who fought all season.
Placement rewards only pay the top of the ladder, which used to mean that everyone else fought a whole season for nothing. The weekly stipend fixes that: every active ranked player earns Glory each week based purely on their rating, regardless of placement.
The stipend runs from 15 Glory a week at the bottom of the ladder up to 360 at rating 6,000 and above, across 14 brackets. It takes as little as 1 ranked match in the week to qualify, so the stipend rewards showing up rather than grinding.
Glory is spent at the Arena Shop, and it is the only way to get several things in the game: gear enchantments across the full rarity range, an arena-only energy draught, and pristine conveyance vouchers for heists. That exclusivity is the actual reason to care about arena rating, more than the leaderboard position itself.
Attacking another player outside the arena has a per-target cooldown of about 23 hours, so you cannot repeatedly farm one victim. It records a win or a loss and awards XP.
It deliberately does NOT transfer gold. That is a design decision rather than an oversight: a game where the strong can drain the weak on sight punishes exactly the players least able to respond, and it makes logging off the safest strategy. Open PvP here is about record and XP; if you want material reward from fighting players, the arena and its Glory are where that lives.
A duel is a challenge issued to a specific player who must accept it. That consent is the whole difference between a duel and open-world PvP: nobody is duelled by surprise, which is what makes it the one player-versus-player format where staking real gold is fair.
You challenge a named opponent, and the challenge stands for 24 hours before it expires. Nothing happens until they accept, so a duel can never take a player by surprise or catch them at a bad moment. If they let it lapse, it simply goes away.
A duel may carry a gold wager, up to 1,000,000 gold per side, and it is optional: a duel with no wager is perfectly normal and is how most are fought.
When a wager is set, the stake is moved into escrow when the duel is created rather than settled afterwards. That is the important mechanic: neither side can spend, bank or trade away the gold they have staked while the challenge is outstanding, so a duel cannot be won against an opponent who no longer has the money. The stake can be funded from your bank as well as your on-hand gold.
The cap is deliberately conservative compared with other gold ceilings in the game, because a duel is a simulated fight rather than a negotiated trade. It bounds how much a single unlucky roll can move.
A duel is resolved by the same combat simulation as the rest of the game: your stats, your gear and your buffs against theirs, over a series of rounds. There is no separate duelling skill and no way to play the fight itself, so everything is decided before you accept.
That makes preparation the whole game. Repair your gear, take your buffs, and check your opponent's public profile before accepting a wagered challenge. Their rank and equipment are visible, and an accepted duel against someone plainly stronger is simply a donation.
Pick by what you want. Gold from a fight means a duel. Progression and a ranking means the arena. Open PvP is for the record and the XP, and understanding that up front prevents the common complaint that PvP "pays nothing".