Greetings, this is the Shadow Arena Dev Team.
We would first like to offer our sincerest thanks to the Shadow Arena players who gave advice and encouragement during our renewal these past two months.
Just as we announced last December, we made a pivotal decision regarding the future direction of Shadow Arena. From then on, we have been focusing on improving the game and its content through specialization of each Hero, adding the shop system along with new objects, and reworking the UI.
With the update of Hexe Marie on March 4, the remake of all the previous Heroes before the renewal is now complete. We are confident in believing that the work needed to increase the quality of the game and its tactical nature is well under way.
Therefore, we are now preparing to invite more players for the long run.
First, we would like to work on the basic but important aspects of Shadow Arena. We will be starting with a renewal of the tutorial, reorganizing the matching system, as well as clarifying the goals for players based on an improved tier point system.
■ Tutorial Renewal
Gameplay becomes more stimulating with the increase of actual players, and we felt that laying down the foundations for the influx of new players was a top priority. As such, we placed especial emphasis on helping new players adjust to the game.
In several external tests, we asked new players what they felt were the most difficult aspects of playing Shadow Arena, the areas they struggled most with while adjusting, and factors that prevented them from immersing themselves in the game.
With the result of these tests in mind, we decided that the game tutorial was much lacking and in dire need of improvement. We are continuously gathering data and testing Shadow Arena so that new players may take better advantage of the tutorial for an even better gameplay experience. Our renewed tutorial will become available in the near future.
We will provide more information on the tutorial in future update notices.
Furthermore, we recognize that advanced Shadow Arena players and gaming veterans often skip tutorials altogether. In light of this, we will not be ending improvements with just the tutorial. We are working on different ways to assist our players in increasing their knowledge about the features unique to Shadow Arena, so that all players can adjust to the game.
■ Reorganizing the Matching System
Once the tutorial renewal is complete, our next step is reorganizing the matching system.
This is a point that our players have raised to us for a long time, and we have indeed made a number of improvements along the way. However, we do recognize that said improvements are not that noticeable to our players. On this point, we offer our apologies.
We are beginning to form some concrete ideas of where we want to take the reorganization of the matching system, and we will be starting on development soon. However, the specifics may change during the development process, and we cannot offer any details on the matter at this time. What we can say is that we expect it to improve our players’ experience by matching parties by tiers, so that matches feel more balanced. As for the party invite function, we will make it available after the matching system has stabilzied.
■ Reinforcing Game Goals
After the new matching system is implemented, we plan to change the tier point system to strengthen the players’ goal in Shadow Arena.
Currently, the system is focused too heavily on overall matches won rather than individual performance within the team. As a result, climbing tiers became too easy and players had less incentive to focus on each match.
Therefore, the new point system will weigh kills and assists more, making it harder for players to climb the ladder just by playing more games.
Additionally, the new point system will take into consideration the player’s tier, their party members’ tiers, and the overall tier of the players in the match. For example, if your party members are lower-tiered, but the overall tier of players is high, you will be able to earn more points. Ultimately, we want to make climbing the ladder the main goal so that every player looks forward to their next match.
Going even further, we plan to add rewards for Hero Mastery, Tier, and the individual Hero Rankings. Currently, we are considering adding profile icons, emotes, victory motions, and various other rewards.
We are also preparing many other rewards for goals met outside of combat, so that players may have more varied goals to pursue.
We will provide more information once we get details worked out.
■ Mastery (development name) System
Additionally, we are preparing a “Mastery (development name) System” for a more varied battle experience than what the current simple Hero selection allows.
Put simply, the system will allow players to adjust their Hero’s characteristics as they wish.
For example, a player may choose to reduce the recovery powers of the support Hero Herawen and make her more aggressive or decrease the defensive skill effects of the Hero Jordine to increase his offensive effects.
Through this new system, we hope that players will develop their own methods of Hero application and game strategy, which in turn will create stimulating battles in Shadow Arena.
However, we are aware that these additions by no means complete the game. We plan on improving components–in addition to character balance and new items–of Shadow Arena, as well as staying open to various opinions on how the game could be improved.
We ask for your continued interest in and support for Shadow Arena. In turn, we will try our utmost to facilitate active communication and robust content development, as well as opening various other events to ensure a high-quality game experience.
We would like to once again express our sincerest gratitude to the players who continue to enjoy our game. Please look out for more updates to Shadow Arena in the future.
Thank you.