What’s up, doc?
As we announced in our recent Roadmap of Mayhem post, there are a number of new features and improvements coming to the game. We now have more concrete details about each of these and want to share them with you.
We expect these changes to go live by next week.
ADVANCED TUNE-UPS
We are expanding our Tune-Up progression for all toons. This new Tune-Up expansion will allow players to utilize their excess toon pieces to make their favorite toons even stronger.
Advanced Tune-Ups in a nutshell:
- Reach Tune-Up 30 and max rank with at least 1 Toon to unlock all-new Advanced Tune-Ups.
- In addition to familiar materials, the new Tune-Ups require two new materials, Atoms and Secret Stuff.
- Convert your extra Toon Pieces to Regional Atoms automatically. The rarer the toon, the more Atoms you will collect per character piece.
- Earn Secret Stuff by participating in live events with additional Secret Stuff available in the Store.
- Each new Tune-Up increases a core stat (Attack, Defense, or Health).
New items:
In order to use Advanced Tune-Ups , you will need these new items:
- Regional Atoms → you will receive these atoms by converting your excess toon pieces. For instance, if you have maxed out a Farm toon and you convert its excess pieces, you will receive Farm Atoms, which you can then use to tune-up any Farm toon. From now on, any extra toon pieces you receive will be converted to Atoms.
- Secret Stuff → Each Advanced Tune-Up (Tune-Ups beyond Tune-Up 30) will also require a new material called Secret Stuff. At first, Secret Stuff will be rewarded within live events with additional Secret Stuff available in the store. In the future, we plan to distribute more sources of Secret Stuff through other parts of the game.
Dev Notes:
In our last Dev Q&A we revealed that we would be releasing “the next step in toon evolution”. This has caused a fair bit of discussion in the last weeks, and we wanted to take this opportunity to talk about our intentions around releasing these new Advanced Tune-Ups, along with some of the pertinent details.
Historically, it’s been our preference to pair new features with new progression opportunities, as well as new toons, in order to create a differentiated rewarding experience for engaging with each aspect of the World of Mayhem.
We can happily say we are working on gameplay features that will provide new challenges and rewards as players continue to make progress in their collections. In that sense, Advanced Tune-Ups will help set the foundation for some of those experiences you will see in the second half of 2020. Look for more specifics on those new features in upcoming announcements!
But for now, let’s dig in to Advanced Tune-Ups.
The intent behind Advanced Tune-ups:
Our intent with Advanced Tune-Ups is three-fold: we wanted to give value for excess character pieces, to address Common to Legendary power disparity (which will allow for a greater breadth of competitive teams), and to maintain competitive intensity in the late game.
- First Objective – Give value for excess Character Pieces:
- This one is self-explanatory: receiving character pieces for a toon that is already at max rank makes for a really bad experience. In the case of the wheel, it makes a spin feel valueless, and in turn, engaging with the full game loop becomes unrewarding. Many players are experiencing this regularly as they have large balances of excess pieces.
- With Advanced Tune-Ups, we want to flip this experience on its head and not only cement a rewarding experience every time you earn character pieces, but also let players decide exactly what toon they want to invest in. Effectively, offsetting some of the randomness of the Wheel with the agency of picking which Tune-Up to invest in.
- Second Objective – Address Common to Legendary Power Disparity:
- If you’ve followed our Dev Q&As and our recent content and toon releases, you may have noticed a shift towards a team mentality, anchored between Path to Legendary, Roster Filters and the upcoming Team Synergies Indicator. There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to creating teams in World of Mayhem thanks to the synergies between toon relationships and their skill sets (both active and passive). Combining toons this way can grant players with amazing boosts and perfect combos.
- However, we know that some toons of lower rarities are just not powerful enough to be used in a competitive team. A team of 4 random legendaries is currently stronger than a synergistic team with mostly Epic toons.
- With Advanced Tune-Ups, we are enabling toons of all rarities to reach the same tier of base stats at max Tune-Up. This means that toons that have really cool skills but would “fall off” the curve at the late game, can now be tuned up to a more competitive level, especially when paired with the right teams. We are looking at you, Pepe le Bard, Devil Dog, Astro Sylvester.
- To honor the scarcity of Epic and Legendary toons, Tune-Ups for higher rarity toons will be discounted. As a result, a Common toon will earn more stats per Tune Up, but will also require more Atoms than a Legendary toon. The cost of Secret Stuff will be the same for all toons.
- Third Objective – Maintain Competitive Intensity:
- Tune-Up 30 has been the Tune-Up limit since before the game’s launch. The result of this is that many players have already maxed out the progression of a considerable number of toons. This makes for more competition of maxed vs maxed toon teams and reduces competitive differentiation in the late game.
- Looney Tunes: World of Mayhem has always been meant to be a live evolving world. Since release, the game has expanded with puzzle-like PvE in ACME R&D, high stakes PvP with Arena, strategic Alliance vs Alliance combat with Wars. The WoM inhabitants have been engaging for a while in all these features and have grown to level 59, Tune-Up 30, Rank 7.7 for 10s of toons. Much like raising the level cap, the time has come to raise the limit for Tune-Ups to prepare for the next wave of gameplay experiences and offer new collection goals for our long time players
- As you Tune-up, you will notice PvE content should start to become easier, notably Marvin’s Invasion and recurrent Events.
- On the PvP front, we should see some separation in mirror matches that should distinguish those that have Tune-Ups higher than 30 and those that do not, as well as a shakeup in the meta, with a lot more toons becoming viable.
Tune-Up Recipe Changes and Crate Tier 8:
In addition to the introduction of the two new material types – Regional Atoms and Secret Stuff – Advanced Tune-Ups will continue requiring the familiar materials as part of their recipe.
To support the new demand for Tune-Up materials, we will be introducing a new tier for all Crates in Brawl. Tier 8 Crates will have enough materials to sustain a healthy, regular progress in the new Tune-Ups, as well as speed up the time it takes to tune up a toon from 1-30.
In addition, we are taking this opportunity to balance some anomalies in the Tune-Up recipes that have historically led to weirdness in players’ inventories. Namely, regular Boosters being more in demand than Fine Boosters and Anvils accruing in perpetuity and losing value. We are addressing this issue with Tune-Up 31+ recipes; Tune-Up 1-30 recipes will remain unchanged.
As always, we will be monitoring how these changes will actually affect players and will intervene with further adjustments as needed.
Advanced Tune-Up Portrait Rings:
One of the parts of the game we are excited for and want to do more of is figuring out ways for players to distinguish their progress from other players. We have loved player stories and aspirations to collect pages of “Gold” toons in their collection.
The introduction of Advanced Tune-Ups brings additional novelty to the Portrait rings. All new Tune-Ups will have a distinctive permanent Gold ring and an all new hexagon bezel, in addition to the familiar journey down the colors of the spectrum, so that they are easy to identify in battle, and hopefully, exciting to collect.
MORE ROSTER FILTERS
We are also bringing an all-new Toon collection screen with comprehensive filtering capabilities and a Favoriting function.
Soon you’ll be able to filter and sort toons by:
- Theme: Magic, Mastermind, Explorer, Hero, Rural, Outlaw, etc.
- Archetype: Attacker, Defender, and Support.
- Region: Farm, Town, City, Avalooney, Space, etc.
- Race: Human, Bird, Wolf, Cat, Dog, etc.
- Character: Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Granny, Gossamer, etc.
- Availability: locked or unlocked.
In addition, you will now be able to Favorite your… favorite toons and find them easily at the top of your collection.
LEVEL CAP INCREASE
We will be expanding our level cap to level 69. Similar to what happened with the previous level cap increase, the excess of XP points you may have accumulated won’t be carried over. All players at level 59 will start leveling up from there onwards.
New Campaign Difficulty → Take on the toughest enemies in the next chapter of Marvin’s Invasion!
New Daily Quests → With updated rewards for the new levels 60-69.
Stay tuned to an exclusive launch event where you’ll get rewards needed to level-up and tune-up your Toons!
Developer notes:
Over a year since the last level increase, we are looking forward to bringing some of that visceral excitement of progressing by gaining levels back to the World of Mayhem.
A lot has changed in World of Mayhem since level 59 was introduced, including gameplay, toons and new progression axis – adding more levels will also help us tune experiences a bit more accurately between players with significantly different account progress but same level (59).
The journey to level 69 is tuned to take some time – longer than 50-59 – but in contrast to when 59 was released, players can leverage their extra energy and the updated Campaign we introduced in February to make faster progress if they so choose.
In terms of cost, we have adjusted the XP and Gold curves to level up a toon to 69 so that it is (a) worth the very significant base stat increase that comes with it but also (b) makes sure it is affordable given the current XP Pot and Gold inflows, primarily driven by the recently updated Challenges.
