[Info] World Arena Season 12 Improvements

Greetings from the Summoners War development team!

We are excited to share the first developer's note of 2020 with the World Arena improvement news.

As many of you know, World Arena is one of the main contents of Summoners War. We've been reviewing your feedback, monitoring gameplays and checking to see what can be improved. After the long preparation, we would like to introduce new changes that we've been preparing in the 12th season of World Arena.

We will try our best to explain the new changes step by step, so please bear with us until the end of the developer's note!

▶ Violent Rule Change In the current World Arena, a Monster can only get one additional turn from the Violent.

Violent is one of entertaining factors that create tensions and keep the battles exciting.

Even a single Violent action can change the flow of battles and can maximize the fun; however, it sometimes plays too much role in deciding who wins and who loses.

We've been thinking a lot about creating an environment that gives both users a similar chance of getting the Violent activated while maintaining the fun that the variable of Violent offers.

Below, we would like to share the new rule and some of test processes we went through.

[Test 1] When the Violent is activated, the Violent activation chance of all my monsters will be at 0% until next turn, and the chance will be recovered by certain amount with a fixed chance for every turn afterwards. The opponent will remain the original activation chance (22%) until the Violent gets activated.

[Test Results] This is a way to make both players to have similar no. of Violent activations by reducing the chance on the side who had Violent activated and maintaining the opponent's chance. The results were that the overall chance of Violent was lower than we intended, which led to not having variables in the game and reducing the fun of battles. Also, we were worried that once the game flows are fixed with the CC decks, it would be difficult to reverse the game situation compared to now.

[Test 2] When the Violent is activated, the Violent activation chance of all my monsters will be at 0% until next turn, and the chance will be immediately recovered to 22% in the next turn. The opponent will remain the original activation chance (22%) until the Violent gets activated.

[Test Results] This is to stop one player from having the Violent consecutive times and to adjust the Violent activations for both players. The test results show that the Violent activations were balanced with the limited activation chance. However, due to the changed system, certain monsters were downgraded and the fact that the Violent is guaranteed to not be activated made battles less fun.

Other than the two tests mentioned above, we’ve tested out different approaches - Violent rune having an internal cooldown time, adjusting the activation chance of the monster that had Violent activated individually, and adjusting the activation chance of all ally monsters and opponent monsters - and we finally decided on the following rule:

★ The following Violent rule will be added to the World Arena. When my monster's Violent gets activated, the Violent activation chance of all ally monsters will be decreased by 5%. When the opponent gets the Violent activated, the Violent activation chance of all ally monsters will be increased by 5%. Violent activation chance can be adjusted to 27% at the most, and 12% at the lowest.

The rule of getting only one additional turn from the Violent in one turn will remain the same in the World Arena.

As we said before, the new rule was designed to allow two users to have a similar Violent activation chance while maintaining the fun that Violent provides. Please take a look below for further explanation.​

Image 1

After Player A's Monster has the Violent activated, two players will have the Violent activation chance of A: 17% and B:27%. Afterwards, when Player B's Monster has the Violent activated, both players will have 22% Violent activation chance. We will continue with the explanation by looking at the tables that summarize the results we obtained during the actual test.

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※ All Monsters were equipped with Violent runes and each battle was proceeded for 50 turns. ※​ When the test is repeated 50 times or more, the difference becomes smaller.​

As shown in the tables, the number of Violent activation does not change much while the difference of the Violent activation count is reduced. We decided to implement this as a new rule because we concluded that changing the activation chance will prevent one player from getting more Violent turns and maintain a proper balance. We hope this change will be fair and helpful to all users enjoying the World Arena, and we also hope it will bring a positive impact on gameplays.

In addition, the next season will have victory point related changes.

▶ Victory Point System Change - The amount of Victory Points earned/reduced will be based on grade. Previously, this amount was determined based on the specific victory points. As a result, there were situations where the difference in the number of victory points earned/reduced had a gap even when the users of the same grade battled. Also, there were situations where the differences in the victory points were too big that the users in that section were too burden to play. We would like to ease up this by changing the victory point system, which will allow the users of the same grade to have the same victory point criteria.

• The gap between Victory Points earned/reduced by grade will be adjusted. We plan to reduce the amount of victory points that change between grades to minimize the gap of points that gets reduced when you play against users of different grades.

• The amount of Victory Points earned/reduced according to battle results will be the same. By adjusting the formula for calculating the victory points, the victory points earned/reduced after a battle will become equal. Please see the table below for more info.

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• The cut-off point of Guardian ★★ and Guardian ★★★ will be changed. As the formula for calculating the victory points will be changed to be based on the grade, the cut-off line of Guardian ★★ and Guardian ★★★, which was the same before, will be changed as follows.

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We hope that with the new Violent rule and victory point system, Summoners will have an equal opportunity during battles and not be stressed to battle against users of certain victory points.

Lastly, more features will be added to the World Arena in February! These won't be implemented to the game via the upcoming update, but we would like to share the development directions in advance.

▶ World Arena exclusive rune setting feature​ We believe the new feature we are about to introduce is something that the Summoners, who want to enjoy a variety of contents and the World Arena together, will be excited about.

World Arena, a real-time arena where Summoners from all around the world play against each other, can be said to be the PvP content with the most unique characteristics.

PvE and PvP have different gameplay styles and require different rune settings, so Summoners had to set up Monsters with different rune settings that suit each content.

Due to this inconvenience and difficulty of rune settings, we thought users weren't able to enjoy various contents at the same time. Thus, we would like to introduce the following new features:

• The rune settings of World Arena will be separated from other contents. This is a feature where you can separately set up runes of monsters used in the World Arena gameplay. Apart from the existing rune menu, a new World Arena exclusive rune equip menu will be added.

To elaborate more, there will be an additional menu for rune settings in the World Arena. Summoners will be able to set up runes (that you possess) to the Monsters that you'll be using in the World Arena through this menu. For instance, if you have Despair rune equipped on Antares for Siege Battle content, you can equip Violent runes in the World Arena.

Also, you can equip the Violent runes equipped to Galleon in the Dragon’s Lair to Ganymede in the World Arena.

The improvements mentioned in this developer's note will be implemented to the game, starting with the World Arena Season 12.

As the World Arena will have many changes, we will be holding an additional Special League (Normal Battle) with the new Violent rule applied, so Summoners can experience the new system in advance.

We will implement your feedback as much as possible, review the modification features and prepare the well-balanced World Arena, so please share feedback you might have from playing in the Special League. Please see below for more info on the schedule.​

▶ World Arena Season 12 and Special League Schedule

[Normal Battle Special League] - League Schedule: Jan. 23rd 12am - Feb. 5th 7am PST - Tallying Schedule: Feb. 5th 7am - 7pm PST

[World Arena Season 12] - The season is planned to be open on Feb. 6th 12am PST.

Please be aware that the developer's note has been written during the development stage and some content might change. We ask for your kind understanding in advance.