Wet, you need to erase the phrase "p2w" from your mind, it's stopping you from learning to get better at the game because that's all you focus on.

As Luka said Row/column doesn't really matter.

All that matters is action priority. 1, 2, 3, 4.

If I move Mabui up one spot, she'll still be 1st, if I move her foward 1 spot, she'll still be first. If I have more initiative on all 4 team members than my enemy, then my team will only go before the characters in an equal priority slot or lower, Tenten with HIGHER initiative will go before the enemy 2nd, 3rd and 4th team members, not the 1st, no matter how high her initiative. The exception to this is non prompt mysteries which instead take the place of a standard attack, which means since Tenten is a Prompt she will go first before non prompt mysteries.

When it comes to Prompt VS Prompt, you can't go first before a character that is in a higher priority slot, which technically does work based on columns and rows, the only way Tenten in this picture can become Priority 1 is by moving her above Mabui on the same column or forward in front of Mabui. There's a rare situation where if you kill someone and erase them from the fight entirely (Such as by killing them with Beheading Kakashi or Mabui's mystery) then the rest of the team will move up in priority, if my Mabui gets erased, Tenten becomes Priority 1 Mid fight and can start going first with my MC and Mei also moving up a priority slot.

I hope this helps clears things up, Ninja Stars and Initiative do matter in Arena.

I mean I would like to think so, if this doesn't bring about improvement then I don't know what would. It reminds me somewhat of an odd breed of player I've encountered a few times who get stuck on the "p2w" phrase and use that as an excuse to never get better at the game and ignore pretty much any advice given to them that would hugely improve their enjoyment of the game and bring about success. Every single thing they say is in somewhat referring to or about "p2w" player and they absolutely never improve and they'll have some crazy low power like 28k at level 80 with the mindset that only p2w players could get higher than that.

At some point you just give up on them and let them wallow in failure while a lot of other free players who manage to hit like 80k power at level 95 and have a majority of all the good banner Ninjas get to enjoy success.

There's some real dodgy stuff in this game geared towards spending players but it's far from impossible to over come, it just takes time and some smart resource saving/spending. That's it really.