Feudals,
anticipation for the “seasonal” transition in the community is palpable, and we are happy to say that the wait is almost over! Since the announcement of the “seasonal” model, the team has been working round-the-clock so that we can deliver new, fresh, and engaging gaming experience as soon as possible. Now, when all decisions are finalized, we are excited to go into details on how the LiF mechanics will work on “Seasonal Arden”.
Moreover, feudals will be able to experience “seasonal” gameplay first hand with the launch of a “pre-season” on October 23th! During this preliminary period, the “seasonal” world will run in a test regime.
This article is designed to give you a timeframe for the “pre-season” and expand on our previous article about the “seasonal” mechanics.
Pre-season
As we’ve already said, the “seasonal” transition will be preceded by the pre-season period aimed to test the functionality of the “seasonal” adjustments. The pre-season world will open for players on October 23th and remain accessible till early December. The team will use this time to fix the potential bugs and monitor players’ feedback on the experience.
World
When choosing a world, apart from “Newbie world” and “Arden” players will see a new option – “Seasonal Arden”. Players can teleport to “Seasonal Arden” by using the teleportation totems at the trade posts in the “green zone”, or via a guild monument in the “red zone” (new ability “Sail to another world”).
When teleporting to the “seasonal” world, a character will suffer the following skill reduction:
- Attributes (stats) capped at 20 (e.g., Intelligence 35 → 20)
- All general skills capped at 30
- Tier 1 combat skills capped at 45 (each personality)
- All Tier 2–3 combat skills reset to 0 (each personality)
- Tier 1 crafting skills capped at 45
- All Tier 2–4 crafting skills reset to 0
- All experience pools reset to 0
This rule will not apply to teleporting to either “green” or “orange” zones. Once the "Season" commences, characters will suffer skill reduction when teleporting to “Green guild Arden” for the first time – this way, “green zone” players will keep their progress, while players coming to the “orange zone” will start on equal ground.
During the pre-season, the available map surface will be reduced to make the experience more concentrated. Frequent player-to-player interactions will let us test the mechanics in various scenarios. During the “Season”, the entirety of the map will be available for players.
During the “pre-season”, the current “red zone” will remain unchanged. With the launch of the “Season”, it will be wiped and transformed into the “Green guild Arden” (aka the “orange zone”) with the adjustments to the PvP rules and a smaller map size. More on that will be revealed in our season release article.
Neither the territory nor the buildings in the “green zone” will be affected by the upcoming reorganization.
Ages
One of our key objectives during the pre-season will be to check that the mechanic of “Ages” and the transition from one “Age” to another works as intended. This mechanic is unique to the “seasonal” Arden and won’t be applied to the “green” and “orange” zones.
During the “pre-season”, the "Ages” will last for about one week each.
Let us revisit some of the special effects that activate with each “Age”:
- Age 2: Increased wood & crop yields
- Age 3: Miner’s bonuses and faster blacksmith’s crafting
- Age 4: Better animal spawns & breeding
- Age 5: Increased PvP damage in the final Age
Starting from Age 3, players receive a leveling speed boost – to help late joiners catch up and develop skills faster.
Moreover, we will be adding one additional modifier:
- Every “Age” unlocks access to more advanced types of fortifications. At the same time, the old defences become obsolete, lose resistance, and become less effective. This modifier is designed to incentivise players to constantly update their fortifications and never stay too comfortable behind the walls.
The “Ages” also acts as gateways to more advanced recipes and structures. Players won’t have all the items and buildings available from the beginning. These changes found reflection in our updated seasonal UI.
Character progression
The launch of Arden gave us a lot of data on how players gain skills and develop a character. After reviewing the data, we made a decision to adjust the overall approach to progression speed.
During the initial stages, “passive” leveling will be the main source of a character’s development, with “active” leveling having a minor share in the overall growth. However, as a skill reaches higher tiers, “active” leveling will gradually step to the forefront with “passive” leveling giving diminishing returns.
This change will apply to both “seasonal” and existing Arden. However, while the residents of the “green” and “orange” worlds may see their general skill gain slow down, in the “seasonal” world a character’s progression will be boosted by the “seasonal” modifiers.
Crafting
The mechanics related to the crafting skills were reworked to keep up with the faster pace of the “seasonal” gameplay. Terraforming does not consume as much stamina. Trees reach maturity faster. During the season, the max quality of wild seeds a player can find has been increased; the same is true for the animals. Players can reach higher-quality farming and breeding faster. More info on the numbers will be included in the pre-season patch.
This change applies only to “seasonal” Arden.
Guilds
Let us revisit the previously announced changes to the guilds mechanic:
- Guild membership can’t exceed 50 unique accounts (100 characters);
- Guild assets can now only be accessed via assigned guild roles. Other guilds or individual players will no longer be able to interact with property they don’t own;
- “Ally” standing will be disabled;
- We changed a limit to the number of outposts a guild can have depending on a monument’s tier and added limits for T4 monument.
These adjustments are designed to discourage mega-alliances that strangle the competitive gameplay in the long run.
These changes would not be complete without a much needed rework of the guild ranking system. Currently a guild’s “wealth” determines guild’s rank and frequency of Judgment Hour (JH) exposure. However, the current formula does not accurately reflect a guild's real power or resource holdings. This can lead to unfair advantages or loopholes, where wealthy or influential guilds avoid higher ranks and their corresponding JH conditions.
To promote a more just PvP, balanced JH distribution, and more accurate representation of a guild's strength, we reworked the formula and finetuned the weight of each variable:
- The formula still takes into account the general cost of a guild’s possessions. However, the weight (“base price”) of buildings, esp. outposts and monuments, will be increased;
- “Territory size” relative weight was reduced, while the weight for "wealth" has been relatively increased;
- The method for calculating the final standings of top-ranking guilds has been slightly revised. The formula still sets a guild’s rank relative to the other guilds, but there always will be rank 1, 2, 3… guilds, regardless of total number of guilds.
The system does not put “orange” world guilds in the “seasonal” world rankings to avoid distortions. We will be monitoring the effectiveness of the new formula during the pre-season. Adjustments will be made if needed.
Rules of engagement
- Local sign-up for Instanced Battle (IB)
We have reworked the Instanced Battle (IB) sign-up system to restrict player registration only to direct interaction with the attacker’s or defender’s guild monument. This is a part of our ongoing effort to make actions feel more meaningful and rooted in the world – tied to your guild’s land and presence, not just a UI click away. - Barkboxing
Following players’ feedback, we have reintroduced the “Barkboxing” mechanic for the Seasonal Arden world. It is now possible to place movable objects on top of each other to climb over walls and ascend fortifications.
This mechanic is enabled during Judgment Hour (JH) and Holy Judgement Hour (HJH) within guild and outpost fiefs.
Players can pick up and place various furniture objects (ex. chairs, tables, wardrobes) and similar movable props. Objects that are enclosed inside buildings such as “houses”, “warehouses”, cannot be picked up or moved. - Trade posts as new points of interest
In our view, trade posts on guild claims were too reliable of a source for feudals to make money for guild upkeep. They are also frequently used for for purposes outside of their primary trade function. That is why we made a decision to remove a "trade post" from recipes available for players on “seasonal” Arden. Now, similarly to knoll camps, trade posts will be scattered across the map, and they will serve as a point of potential conflict. In order to sell items and obtain coins, feudals will need to make a (potentially deadly) trip to a nearest trade post. - Protective Judgement Hour (PJH)
We have been changing the military outpost to restore its primary function as an attacking tool for guilds. For instance, a military outpost is the only outpost which can launch a Holy Judgement Hour on neighboring fiefs. However, this raised a question of how a guild can effectively protect its territory from such an assault without expending one of the MOP of its own. That is when we came to the idea of Protective Judgement Hour. It can only be initiated from a non-military 3rd level outpost. It can only target enemy military outposts on the neighboring fiefs. During a PJH, all structures on the launching outpost and the target military outpost become vulnerable. Aside from that, PJH works exactly the same as HJH in all other aspects.
Let’s do a little recap
Mechanics which are unique to the “Seasonal Arden” world:
- “Ages” as tier gateways with age-specific modifiers to accelerate progressions;
- Faster quality increase for trees, animals and crops;
- No option to grant permissions to characters outside a guild, disabled “Ally” standings;
- Local sign-up for Instanced Battles;
- Barboxing;
- Players can’t build trade posts.
What’s next?
This article covers the core changes we want to introduce to the LiF gameplay with the “seasons”. However, we have more things in store!
- The pre-season patch (October 23rd) will shed more light to the numerical changes in the mentioned mechanics.
- Other novelties, such as new jewelry and cooking recipes, changes to structures, armor repair adjustments, and – the ultimate prizes for the winning guild! – are to follow in our next publication, right before the “Season 1” launches.
We made it our mission to make “seasonal” Arden the world which will bring the LiF PvP mechanics to a new high. Stick around to learn what is to come to the world of Arden!