Here are the news from Capital Games on the Grand Arena Championships. No one still have a clue what it is about, ot at least what the GP divisions is about, but Wall of text will crit you. 1g3759
Grand Arena Championships are a five-week series of Grand Arena events and Feats. Our goal is for the experience to feel like a normal Grand Arena event with a few bells and whistles, and then gradually ratchet up the competition and drive for the players who make it up to higher leagues in later events, until by the end of a Championship, it feels like the sharpest competition that the game has to offer. In this post, we’re going to talk about GP Divisions, a feature that enables us to curate the best experience (AND relevant rewards) for all Grand Arena players regardless of their time in game or collection size.
Your Division is simply your GP bracket at the start of each Championship. Divisions are set the rules and rewards that you are chasing each Championship. Your Division will be reevaluated at the start of each change your Division until the next Championship, but you can reach higher leagues (Bronzium, Chromium, Kyber, etc) within that Division during a Championship to receive better rewards. As your GP creeps up across the five-week championship, your Division will still not change. Leagues are fundamentally the milestones for you to focus on as a player within a Championship. Also note – your inventory is not locked during the Championship (inventory locking per Grand Arena round still follows the same rules), but your Division is.
This is essentially because we want to provide different something that you can still work on in the long-term without worrying about its impact on your Championship progress.
What does this mean practically? Essentially, Divisions allow us to do a couple of things:
- Divisions allow banners to matter at all GP levels towards Championship Score – enough to create a small amount of pressure to optimize attacks & defenses, but not too much pressure to take the focus off of winning the match. A 2M GP player and a 5M GP player are very different in of their ability to be flexible and optimized on earning the most banners – we need to be able to treat their banner scoring differently so that it doesn’t feel unbalanced on either end. (We’ll be paying close attention to this balance and will likely make adjustments after our first “exhibition” championships.)
- update is in players’ hands.
- Players should never feel incentivized to tank their GP before or during a Championship, since a higher GP division means better rewards. This, combined with the move away from raw GP in matchmaking, should result in less last-minute weirdness and closer, fairer matches.
- If the GP difference across players is great enough, the matchmaking will also default to the lowest-number of defenses required by division between the two players (Note: only the very best-performing low-GP players are likely to encounter this, however). Players who are good enough to end up getting matched with higher-GP players will be able to do so on a more level playing field.
- Most importantly, Divisions should create a long-term goal for players and their collections, so that we can reward elite GAC players regardless of the size of your collection, while still encouraging the newer players to build out more and more teams, chase PvE content, and master more characters/ships/squads. We don’t want the only players hitting Kyber League to be the ones with the biggest collections – younger players who consistently beat their opponents, complete Feats and optimize their play should have a shot at glory too.
We have tried to match the number of defenses required and the League Promotion thresholds to fit each Division effectively, and are looking forward to seeing how players clear these hurdles across all GP levels.
Leaderboards
Alongside Grand Arena Championships, we’ve invested heavily in leaderboards, in order to provide a strong competitive background that does not simply just recreate the dynamics of Squad Arena and Fleet Arena, but still essentially feels like a competition. GAC will launch with four leaderboard types – Global, My Ranking, Guild, and Ally.
The Global Ranking is just that – a snapshot of the updates in near-real-time as players get promoted into higher and higher Leagues, and resets at the start of each Championship. Your ranking and basic stats will always be visible in GAC Leaderboards so that you can compare your progress against the very best across Leagues, rankings and even Divisions.
My Ranking is the same ranking as Global, but extending down to where you are in the ranking of Championship Score, in your rank and Division. (Unless of course, you’ve rank thresholds in a League result in slightly higher rewards – and we have plans to eventually further reward the very highest players in Kyber in each Division.
Finally, Guild and Ally leaderboards operate across Divisions and Leagues and provide a bit of friendly competition between you and your guildmates, or you and the list of allies/friends/shardmates/nemeses that you can customize. We’re not rewarding based on these leaderboards at this time but are looking forward to incidental competition and fun amongst friends separate from the hard-edged competition of the global leaderboard!
Thanks for sticking with this long, detailed post, and stay tuned for more information on the Grand Arena Championships schedule and Exhibition Championships in the next couple of days!
