Recently players got to experience The Stable Boy Tournament Grounds event, and we got a lot of feedback, so let’s talk about it!
Journey to the Tourney
One of the hot topics from this event is the recipe limit on exchanging Tournament Favors for Tokens of Valor. In last year’s early event previews, we focused on presenting the event mechanics rather than the final rewards and recipes. We understand how this created an assumption amongst players who experienced that version, or talked to friends about it, and we apologize for not anticipating or doing more to better set expectations going into the new year.
So let’s talk about the design intent for this event.
One of the ultimate goals of this event is to design it in such a way that it requires a predictable amount of engagement to claim the budgeted rewards. It is not intended to be a non-stop farming event, and that means the recipe limit on exchanging Tokens of Valor is intentional.
This may be a departure from other PvE events you are familiar with, like Breach at the Wall. In these, farming enemies on the combat map can continue for 48 hours straight, and if you’re not farming you may feel like you are falling behind.
We love PvE events like Breach at the Wall or the Great Hunt, but we do not want players feeling like they can never put their phones down. Having every event like that is a recipe for burn out. So this event is intentionally designed to be completed in a reasonable time frame and we do not intend to remove the recipe limits that ensures that.
In terms of rewards, we still believe this is a worth-while event. In its current state, it is one of the top awarding gameplay sources for Oaths across the event catalog. To put that in perspective, the average player can earn 6-7 times the Oaths from Tournament Grounds enemy reward drops compared to what they could gain from continuous PvE farming in Breach at the Wall.
Now that being said, we still intend to make some changes based on feedback, including increasing some rewards in other ways…
What’s Changing
For the next run of Tournament Grounds we will be making the following changes:
- Level 30 Tournament Veterans drop roughly 5 times more gear materials upon each defeat compared to last run.
- Difficulty to defeat Tournament Veterans has been tuned to be a bit easier
- The event will run later in the week to reduce the number of other events spawning enemies on the map at the same time. This was requested to improve scarcity of Tournament Strategic Terrain nodes and Tournament Veteran spawns.
As discussed in our live Stage on Discord this month, it is important to be mindful of how many changes we make in a single go. Too much at once can make it hard to attribute trends to any single thing, which we learned our lesson from this most recent run of the event.
So please give the event a try with these adjustments and if you think it misses the mark for you, then keep letting us know. This event has evolved with every iteration, and we’re committed to continuing to update as needed.
A big thank you to everyone who responded to the surveys sent out after the last event as well. We had one of our highest turnouts yet, with responses from kingdoms across the board and players of all levels!
When will the Tournament Grounds open next?
This event will return Thursday, February 12th!
Note: Kingdoms 1721 & 1727 had an opportunity to preview this event last year, so they will be excluded from this next run to give other kingdoms an extra opportunity to earn rewards.
Have feedback on these changes? Join us over on Discord in the #tournament-grounds channel, and be sure to fill out any surveys you receive after the event!