ARCADEUM ARENA COMMUNITY UPDATES 4/12/22

Hello, this is Jg with another round of updates! We’re in the middle of Milestone 4, which should be completed around the next Game Night coming up next week. The team is busy as always and we have a lot to talk about!

Some Tourney Stats

Arcadeum Arena completed another successful tournament, breaking previous tourney player count records and revealing interesting new things on how people played and their strategies. Let’s go through a bit of it here:

A whole lot of new players battling for Arcadeum glory!

More than 100 players posted their scores — quite an achievement! Some were able to win 40+ matches out of 50 turns, which is incredible. We did detect some players using multiple accounts (tsk, tsk!) but despite that, engagement with the community was at an all-time high! Looks like we can do this week-long tournament for AA as a standard in the future.

Tech Proved Popular, Wizard lagged way behind

We did sweeping balancing changes to our heroes — from stats to skills — and it looked like a success…well, except for the poor Wizard. You can see below how the Wizard lagged behind the other classes.

Compared to last February’s tourney data below, it appears we’re on the right direction. We just need to crack the Wizard puzzle.

What influenced this new play data is definitely the new set of skills we’re testing out. We’ll talk more about Skills in a bit.

Y’all using the default Arcadians too much :P

Looking at the stats below, people have been using the default squad almost 5x more than Arcadian NFTs. It’s interesting, but expected, and we plan to encourage more players to use their NFTs in the future.

What’s next?

The next game night is just around the corner, and we’d like to talk about our planned feature and balancing updates, many of them based on the learnings and feedback from previous game nights.

Skill Selector

We’re bringing back our original set of skills, and each Arcadian class will have 2 skills to choose from! We originally planned to release this earlier, but it needed more refinement so we pushed it back to the next build. To view and swap skills, click the new SKILLS button on the Main Menu, then select the hero to view their list of skills.

Note: Screens not final

Defense takes a bigger role

We noticed over the past game nights that people didn’t really take their time setting up their defensive squad. So we’re doing something about it: now players can win or lose points through defense! This is a relatively minor change, but this should increase the challenge for those vying to get to the top of the leaderboard.

Battle History

Now with the increased focus on defense, we’re testing a new screen to better inform players about their battle history: who attacked whom, heroes used in battle, BP won/lost, and even the ability to view its replay! We’re keeping it to displaying the last 3 battles for now as we develop this further.

Note: Screen not final

FANCY BATTLE VFX

Our art team has been busy making and iterating skill VFX, and now we’re gradually adding them in. All 10 skills will have unique visual feedback, making them easier to identify when they’re cast.

Arcadeum Arena Beyond!

Beyond these updates, we’re also prototyping a lot of things for a much bigger update in the coming months. Let us discuss some of them!

Arcadian Rarity

This has been one of the most requested features, and we hear you! We’re currently testing a system to add a rarity score to players’ Arcadian NFTs, which then assigns the starting stats and skill build. We are being very careful about this because any changes to the system will affect everything else. We hope to do a separate Rarity Score prototype for this that will be available to the community soon.

Arcadian and Skill Upgrades

We want the player journey to reach the top of the Arcadeum to be a meaningful one, and we’re incorporating this experience by way of upgradeable Arcadians and Skills. Arcadians can earn XP as well as other rewards through battles, and players can upgrade their heroes which in turn unlocks more skills. Skills are also upgradeable, unlocking new abilities on top of the base skill. TL;DR: Arcadians get better when used in battles

Campaign mode

That’s right, Arcadeum Arena will have a single-player mode! Featuring a story inspired by Arcadian comic, the campaign mode features multiple realms with levels that offer varied combat scenarios, culminating in epic boss battles. This mode will be the entry point for all new players before they can join the PVP events, so this is the perfect place to earn XP and resources to upgrade their NFTs.

Play Mode Leaderboard

We’d like to test a new feature, which is having a secondary Leaderboard that doesn’t reset like Tourney leaderboards. This means you can play and keep your score progress in this mode outside of tourneys. This should be available to you in Play/Practice mode only — a different leaderboard will be live alongside AA tourneys.

All these future plans will be detailed as we get closer to finishing these features. We might even invite some of you to test them once they’re almost ready for feedback. We’ll have more news soon! — Jg