Greetings witches and wizards!
It's time for our Arena 2025 Season 4 Releases!
Release Note: For the time being, our Plasma Pointe section of this release is currently down until further notice. There was an issue with transferring regions with the Plasma Showdown section to live. The health stat is currently not working as intended. It will be updated as soon as possible and sent to live!
NEW Arena Halls:
After many months of hard work, we're happy to finally release our new Arena Halls! The Arena Halls has had a complete revamp, including the removal of old content and the inclusion of new aspects we have to offer. With this removal of the old Dueling Halls, we have now included every gamemode that Arena has to offer - gaining their own areas, which you are able to visit at any time. Additionally, we have now allowed players' pets within the Arena Halls to add extra fun alongside you.
These areas are:
- Dueling Halls
- Flying Falls
- Plasma Pointe
- Racing Ridge
- Rafting Rapids
- Sledding Slopes
Each area has multiple things to offer, ranging from beautiful scenery to activites you're able to engage with whenever you like. We'd also like to note that players are now able to use Arena items within the halls - so feel free to flying around on a broom, pod racer, raft or sled!
Here is what has been included:
Dueling Halls:
- We are excited for you guys to see the updated look of our current Dueling Halls! We did not like the old color choices, so we are hoping that the new look is way more fun to look at while you are dueling. With this, we have also removed some of our dueling maps that we had in our old halls, such as Great Hall and Chamber of Mysteries. Don't worry, they are still options in challenges, but we felt that we had too many arenas at a time and simplification was needed. We have also added a specific 1v1 arena located at the top of the castle, which only two players can get in at a time; check this out if you are looking to practice alone with a friend without the disturbances of others. Let us know how you like the new look!
Time Trials:
- Each racing gamemode now has an attached Time Trial that they can compete in about once a day. With these trials, you can choose to race either forwards or backwards and try to place yourself on each racing leaderboard. With this, players are now able to have access to our seasonal racing gamemodes outside of FFA's in challenges and seasonal challenges all year round.
- Are you able to practice without starting one of the Time Trials? Yes, each time trial is set up and uses the same map that you can practice on at any time with any racer. However, when you are competing in a Trial, you must use the racer designed for that specific course. Give it a go and see if you are able to hold a top 5 time!
Library, Arena History, and Hall of Fame:
- The Library, Arena History, and Hall of Fame are all located on the East side of the castle. What do these entail? The Library is an updated location that explains each Arena gamemode which was taken from our old Dueling Halls with a bit of character added. Our Arena History is a smaller version of the layout of our old Dueling Halls; this has all of our Tournament History reorganized and put into a bigger space, which also includes our MVP's in this space. Our Tournament History cabinet has received a QoL update. Instead of being encased into one, each gamemode, including minigames throughout the years, have now gained their own cabinet.
- Why did we do this? We think this is much more organized, and you can search through the history much faster; with our old GUI, this one had way too many pages attached to it, and it was a cause of major lag spikes anytime we needed to edit it. Our Hall of Fame is a new feature which just shows the current players with the most wins in each Arena-hosted tournament per gamemode. Check these out when you arrive at the castle!
Arena Shop:
- With the revamp, the Arena Shop has been moved to a new location and has had a change in appearance. This can now be found within the centre of the Castle behind the Dueling Halls. Keep an eye out on the shop as we have a NEW Dragon Crown hat added with the release of the Halls.
Plasma Showdown:
- We would like to draw some attention to our Plasma Showdown gamemode, this is located at Plasma Pointe in our new Arena Halls! With this, we have added one new PvP Plasma Arena located at Pointe's Coliseum, along with relocating our Space Hangar arena we had at the Dueling Halls into this map. Within Pointe, we also have 5 new Plasma PvE trainers for you to play against at any time ranging ranging from easy to master. These trainers are meant to replicate a player fighting with sabers and should be a good way for you to practice year round and prepare for our May and June tournaments! We are excited for you to try these out!
Arena Taskboard:
- It is with much excitement that we now have a daily Arena Taskboard! The taskboard includes various rotating activities, granting rewards once completed! It also includes an additional reward for completing tasks continuously for ten days straight, which can help you boost your Arena Score! These dailies can provide you some some AT, Gold, XP, or even House Points. Be sure to check the objectives for that day when you come to the Halls to knock them out and get your rewards, especially if you are not level 80, as trading AT is VERY helpful in the long leveling process we currently have!
Dueling Training Room Update:
- We have expanded more on our Dueling Training Room! We feel as there is a BIG learning curve from new duelists to the experienced ones; yes, this does come with practice but it can also be intimidating and harder to practice when that gap is so large.
- What have we done to make this better? We have added some "Basic Combos" in front of our stand still dummy that any player can come in and practice getting comfortable with some real dueling combos on a mob that won't shoot back. We are hoping this can make it easier for people to practice and try new things. We have also removed one of our old stand still dummies, we did not feel like both were needed and have replaced it with a dummy that shoots cc spells at players in the arena. Players are encouraged to go in and practice countering these CC abilities such as fire, poison, stun, etc. We have added some information on how players can do that with the spells they have in front of the dummy so you are informed on what to do before going in.
- We have also taken some steps to try to reduce any form of lag where can, we have removed any extra entities and mobs that we feel like were useless so that the server wasn't having to check all of these things at once. You will notice that there are less standstill dummies in the back, as we feel they are the most useless in comparison to the other mobs we use. With the back right room, we have added some QoL, when you enter that region, it will inform you on how to play the game with the wand provided; with that, we have also dramatically reduced the cooldown on this game so you do not need to wait minutes in between to play this over and over. If you feel like it is helping you, we do not want to restrict that for you anymore.
- Lastly, our Student Trainers in the back have received some attention with this update as well. Our Curse Breaker team had been working hard on finding a healthy solution to making these mobs feel a bit more real. As we know, they previously had a 99% accuracy rate. This has been changed; we also know that the mobs walked in a straight line. Unless you hold W the entire duel, this is a very inhumane movement that we do not recommend you take note from when learning to duel.
- So what did the Curse Breakers do? They have done their best to make the mobs movement look alive; is it perfect in any way? No, however, we feel that this is much more accurate to a real players movement and should help you practice tracking opponents better than before. With the accuracy reduction and movement update, we have also increased the speed of casting to balance out the accuracy reduction. This is to make the duel feel more immersive and you feel the regular pressure of a duel without actually getting bodied by the AI. With previous feedback on the difficulty of these mobs, we feel that they are intended to help newer duelists learn and practice instead of being toys for the experienced duelists.
- What have we done? We have added a "Student Brawl" Category which players can choose up to 5 of these students to duel against at one time. You get to pick your own poison, if you want to fight 5 of the graduate students at one time now, go for it and best of luck! We hope you all try out these new features in the Arena Halls and encourage newer duelists to train here as well so that dueling is more fun for everyone!
We're super excited for everyone to finally see and experience the new Arena Halls!
Arena Maps: We are continuing to make edits to all of our existing maps: Flying, Dueling and Seasonal as well as making QoL improvements to them.
We appreciate your patience with us as we continue to work on making our maps more up-to-date. Additionally, new maps we have in the works currently will be released in the future!
Progression System
With the end of season two of the Battlepass, we have now rotated in new content for season three! Here are some of the new things to expect:
NEW - Firework
NEW - Collectable
NEW - Wand Name
Arena Token Shop Update: We have rotated the shop once again. You may spot some old returning items!
Alongside this, we have also added some new items to the shop:
NEW - Rotated in new Season Three Choco Hop Cards
We're continuing to work on new items for the shop, which will be sure to hit the shop in a future release!
QoL Updates: The team has been working hard behind the scenes to provide new and fun updates!
These new QoL updates include;
- Did some QoL updates to Galdrakademia - including region fixes, grass layer removal and an easter egg addition
- Fixed a Training Session bug that allowed players to claim items while in the lobby
The team are always looking at new ways to improve the QoL experience for everyone and will continue to do so!
Arena Discord: We're continuing to explore ideas and suggestions that we could bring to the Arena Discord. Additionally, we post a community-update post each month to share what we have been working on.
If you'd like to join and be a part of the Arena Discord, click here.
What can I look forward to in the future?:
We are continuing to work on our current projects and QoL improvements we have in the works. Currently, projects have slowed down due to the teams IRL schedules, members of the team going on hiatus, and members leaving. We hope to be able to announce new additions to our game modes and content in a future release.
Additionally, the team is a lot smaller than what it used to be, which means less manpower to work on completing our projects at a faster pace. If you want to be a part of brainstorming and creating these projects, we recommend that you apply for Arena Squire to help!
Arena Credits: Dismana, jacquas, ravioleigh, ShatterdHeart, SynonymsForSky, xMye
Arena Halls Project Lead: jacquas
Arena Halls Credits: jacquas, ravioleighh, SynonymsForSky, xMye
Build Credits: CraftyKanna, jacquas, Lannifox, ravioleigh, Riverrr, ShatterdHeart, 0ceqn, xFleur_
Banner Credits: Teheeo
Curse Breakers: jacquas
Grounds Keeper: Danieliis, M_Engel, SubtleAsh404, Teheeo
And finally, we'd like to credit you guys! This update wouldn't have been possible without all your feedback. We hope you enjoy this release, and we're looking forward to seeing you at our future Challenges and Tournaments!
