[2020] Upcoming Tournament changes

Dear Humans and Elves,

A few weeks ago, on our Beta servers, we have posted a Behind the Scenes announcement detailing some upcoming Tournament changes. Many of you have seen our video as well, and some have even played the Tournaments on Beta and have shared invaluable feedback with us. Today, we bring you more news on these changes, and what the next steps will be. Please note that the below changes will not be applied to the running Tournament.

We are currently aiming to release the new Tournaments to Elvenar International (EN) on the 18th of August. This will allow us to extend the amount of people playing the new Tournaments greatly, as well as provide technical testing on a larger scale. The new Tournaments will not go to further Live worlds than EN for at least another 3 weeks after the start of the first new Tournament on EN. To ensure that our development team is available during the start of the Tournament, the first Tournament in the new system will start at 15:00 CEST instead of 19:00 CEST.

For those of you who haven't played the new Tournaments on Beta yet, or haven't seen the changes, please have a look at the full details listed below.


Tournament changes

• Tournament Encounters are now played directly from the World Map. To achieve this, the 4 Encounters per Tournament Province have been merged into 1 Province Encounter, combining the efforts of 4 Encounters into just 1. This also means that the Goods required for Catering, and the Units faced in Battle have been scaled up accordingly, to keep the general requirements of each Province comparable while having only one Encounter.
• The Balancing of Tournaments was reworked completely, aiming to allow for an easier entry into Tournaments and better Tournament contribution from new players, while maintaining an interesting challenge for more advanced players:
  • Tournament difficulty is no longer determined solely by Squad Size, but rather by a series of progression factors, which involve city development and research in general.
  • The difficulty of a Tournament province no longer exclusively increases for each level in the Tournament, but now also with each Province, providing a steady increase in difficulty with each Province and level completed. At the same time, the entry into the Tournaments is made significantly easier than for any previous Tournaments ever since the implementation of the feature. Below, you can see how difficulty increases with each Tournament Encounter played:
    
  • To make Catering a more viable option and to bring it back on par with Battles, Catering costs have been lowered significantly. Costs per Province on comparative difficulty level was about halved in comparison to the old Tournament system. This allows for more strategic options and brings the balance between investments for Battles and Catering on a more comparable level.
  • Requested Goods in Catering a no longer tied to Tournament types (e.g. previously mostly Planks, Silk and Gems in Planks Tournaments). Instead, a random selection of resources available to players in specific Chapters is made for each Encounter. These resources can now also include Coins, Supplies, Mana and Orcs. The table below indicates in which Chapters certain resources can appear in Tournament Encounters:
    
  • Enemy armies faced in Tournament Battles will now always come to the battlefield with 5 Squads, instead of having alternating numbers of Squads as opponents. This should enable for easier assessments of battle difficulty and subsequently which player units should be selected to counter and defeat the enemy.
  • Enemy unit types for each Tournament Province are selected at random, with different weighting based on Tournament type. This means that, while it is possible for each enemy unit type to appear during any Tournament, there are higher probabilities for specific units to appear than for others, allowing for some preparations, but still bringing a challenge by throwing further unit types into the mix.
• Tournament Bonus Chests are added to provide a new challenge for any Fellowship that previously managed to finish 10 Chests in the weekly Tournaments. Upon having completed the 10th Tournament Chest, a new set of 9 additional and very challenging Chests is unlocked, allowing Fellowships to progress further and to grab some additional rewards as they do.
  • Each Bonus Chest contains 1x Royal Restoration and 1x Ancient Knowledge 10. The contents are rewarded along with the contents of all other regular Chests at the end of each Tournament.
  • Bonus Chests are meant to be very challenging to achieve, and thus have an increasing amount of points required to reach them. Being a long-term challenge, we don't expect even the most dedicated Tournament Fellowships to finish all Chests in the first weeks after release.

The changes listed above were also presented in more detail by Andreas, Rike and Steffi on our YouTube channel. You can find their explanation for more details on each change, as well as the reasons for each change, below:



Please note that the information provided in this video was accumulated prior to the initial release of the new Tournaments on Beta and that, while explanations and reasoning still hold true, small details have changed since the initial release of the video. To complete the picture, we have listed all changes that have been made on Beta based on feedback from testers since the original announcement was made:

• No optional Squad Size Upgrade requires Guest Race Resources anymore. This change has been made on all Live worlds already, where it was part of version 1.110, and allows to more easily complete these Technologies if you had already progressed to a next Chapter.
• For each Tournament type (Marble, Steel, etc.), a certain selection of Units is more likely to appear in the enemy army. This is not necessarily one Unit type. Example: The Steel Tournaments will have a strong focus on Mage units as enemies, and the Crystal Silk Tournaments have a focus on Light and Heavy Melee enemy units.
• The impact of placed Expansions on the costs formula has been reduced. This was done for both Regular and Premium Expansions, where Premium Expansions' impact was reduced more than Regular Expansions'. Note: Premium Expansions have always had a lower impact than Regular Expansions. This change will also affect the Spire of Eternity, and will be part of the 1.111 update on all Live worlds, and will therefore be released separately from the new Tournaments.
• The chances of Coins and Supplies as possible costs for Catering a Tournament Province were lowered. The same was applied to Orcs and Mana, but these resource requirements were made even more rare than Coins and Supplies.

In addition to these changes, we're still looking into further adjustments and improvements that we believe could be helpful with the new Tournament system, but which may also affect other areas of the game (e.g. the Spire of Eternity, or the general City progress). We will announce more on these potential changes at a later date, when we have more information available on what exactly that would look like. Stay tuned!

We're very interested in your feedback and experiences as you discover the new Tournament system. As stated above, we will be using the first 3 weeks of the new Tournaments to not only analyze the technical stability on Live worlds, but also to monitor whether or not the changes are meeting our expectations, and to see if further improvements can and should be made. In the meantime, please share all your feedback in the discussion thread.

Kind regards,

Your Elvenar Team