What’s up, doc?
On our end, we have been working on the next evolution of the Arena: The Arena League! Our latest Roadmap of Mayhem post already provided you with some info regarding the changes we planned to have, but today, we are excited to share even more details with you!
1. The New Arena League: enter the Arena and fight to climb to the top of the Diamond League!
We are introducing leagues in Arena to ensure that your position in the leaderboard is more accurate, the battles more balanced and the rewards – well – more rewarding! You’ll now fight against players who belong to your own league and have a closer Arena level to yours.
There are now 5 Leagues in the Arena: the Ruby League, the Sapphire League, the Emerald League, the Amethyst League, and the highest one: the Diamond League. What is the advantage of being part of the highest league? Well… the higher the league, the better the rewards!
Climbing to the top of your own league is a good start, but being at the top of the Diamond League is truly remarkable and will require you to develop your strategies and skills more than ever!
2. A new ELO Matchmaking for fairer battles
So far, the matchmaking in the Arena was based on 2 main factors: player performance in recent Arenas and the power of your toon collection. Although this system worked well for the most part, based on data and community feedback we know that outlier cases would sometimes pit players against impossible or too easy opponents. And that is simply not fun.
As we wanted to make battles more exciting, we decided to go for a matchmaking formula based on players’ performance only, meaning the number of Arena League Masks you own. From now on, the more you climb in the Arena, the tougher your opponents will be, and vice versa. In addition, winning against stronger opponents will reward you more Masks and enable you to climb faster to the top of your league. To keep ELO fair, it is now possible to lose Masks too. Luckily, losing against tough opponents will cost you fewer Masks.
Did you know: Our new way to calculate matchmaking is called “ELO matchmaking” in Game Design. This system comes from Arpad Elo, a professor of physics and a chess master who initially invented this system for Chess matchmaking.
[Update 6/11: As we “reset” the leaderboards and implemented an ELO system, it will take a couple of days to fit your proper rank. Thus, at the moment, don’t be surprised if you’re matched with another player who has a different level/strength than yours; IT IS TEMPORARY. After that, you should go back to a more balanced matchmaking. Thank you for your patience and understanding]
Win against tougher opponents to climb faster!
3. New toon Exhaustion for a more diverse strategy
Toon Exhaustion means that in our new Arena League, every attacking toon will be exhausted after a match and will not be available for the remaining battles of this Arena Tournament.
You may wonder why we went for Toon Exhaustion in the Arena? Two main reasons led to this decision.
First, the World of Mayhem has many more inhabitants since it launched, more than 200! You certainly have more than the few toons you always use for all your important battles, and we want to be sure that those many toons you unlocked serve more purpose across the game! We believe Arena is a great place to showcase your breadth of viable teams and further distinguish it from Brawl, our second PvP mode.
Secondly, it’s become apparent that the same few dominant toons (looking at you Imperials) are always used in Arena battles, and as such, outcomes feel predetermined. Arena battles don’t feel as interesting as they could be. This mechanic will spice up the game a bit and offer more possibilities to all players, as you’ll quickly develop many new strategies to win specific battles.
Strategy Tip: While we all adapt to this new meta, you may find achieving a perfect score is harder than before. As this change affects everyone, look to your team deployment strategy. Even those few extra points can determine the winner, as you edge out your opponents with a higher total score.
4. We removed “the Bomb” to avoid predetermined outcomes
Our “bomb” mechanic reinforced a very specific meta on Arena that was interesting in the beginning, but we felt grew stale over the year, establishing a very narrow meta that no longer felt fun for many players. Again, we would like to avoid predetermined outcomes and that’s why we decided to remove this particular mechanic.
5. New Arena Scoring Rules for more viable strategies
We are introducing new scoring rules that still reward dominant and easier victories while allowing more granularity for more viable strategies.
6. Arena rewards that go unclaimed will be sent to your inbox.
What is more frustrating than winning the Arena but forgetting to claim your reward within the next minutes following the end of the timer? If you already experienced this and had sadly lost your rewards, you’ll like this new feature!
With our new Arena League, you can now get your unclaimed rewards by checking your inbox!
7. Replacing Skull Keys with Skull Energy
Gone are the days of needing to swing by the Arena Store to pick up your free daily Skull Keys in order to play Arena.
Instead, joining an Arena will now cost 1 Skull Energy. Skull Energy, like Campaign Energy, regenerates over time to 3 free entries per day. If you’d like to keep playing, you can refresh it with Gems. Keep in mind that more Energy does not guarantee you will win more Masks, though.
8. Smart Arena Bots save time
Bots will now behave more like real players. Take it as a compliment, they may be your clones after all 😉.
But why did we do that?! To make more Arena battles more interesting and to shorten the waiting timers. To give you a bit more context: when we can’t find an opponent within your matchmaking range, we fill the remaining slots with player clones – Marvin’s Bots! Bots have only recently started cloning player attacks – in addition to defenses – making them more competent and thus allowing us to reduce the waiting times. Even if we can’t find a player within your matchmaking range, you may still have an enjoyable and challenging experience against Marvin’s Bots.
9. Time since install League sharding: Meet people who discovered the game at the same moment as you!
So far, you have been matched in the Arena with players according to your time zone. Players above and below you in the ranking belong to the same time zone as yours.
With the new Arena League, you’re now grouped and matchmade with players who have a closer experience of the game to yours. The criteria to group you with your opponents is now the moment you started to play the game. In other words, if you started to play 2 years ago and are an experienced player, you’ll play Arena against players who also have 2 years of experience in Looney Tunes World of Mayhem. Likewise, the new system will protect a new player from meeting a veteran with way more experience than them. Again, we wanted to go for fairer battles and matchmaking.
10. A Better Arena Store
We have improved the Arena Store and hope you’ll like it! You’ll now be able to farm Legendary toons and earn better and more rewards. Furthermore, in comparison to before, you’ll now need to complete only a few Arenas to get an interesting number of character pieces!
11. New Champions Arena
We will tell you more very soon regarding our New Champion Arena that we will launch after the new Arena League.
For the moment, we can only confirm that we plan to have a Champion Arena and that its design might change. Don’t worry, you’ll need the same keys to access it.
12. Special Tournament: Preliminary Arena Games start on June 4th
On June 4th, during a special event that will last 5 days, we will give you the opportunity to increase your starting position in the upcoming Arena League. Your goal will be to Gather The Masks of Transformation from the Preliminary Games Arena Event and secure a higher starting position in the upcoming Arena League! The higher you rank on this event, the higher you will start – the top 100 players will start in Amethyst League, gaining a significant head start on the climb to Diamond!
The Rules (Scoring, Mechanics, etc.) will be the same as the Arena League you just read above with a few tweaks, so you can try them out and get a feel for the new Arena a few days early.
As usual, when we implement a new feature, we set up a closed Alpha where we invite a very small group of players to test it and collect as much feedback as we can in order to deliver the best version possible. Players’ feedback matters a lot for us, and as soon as you could start our new Arena, we’ll be delighted to read your comments. You can share your constructive feedback with us in the feedback sections of our Discord!
