Greetings Champions! In this Developer Insights blog, we're going to be sharing some larger changes coming to various game modes in the Street Style: World Tour update! Oh yeah, if you missed our announcement, Street Style returns with all new skins for Tyra & Seris, adding a few more popular Champions to the Realm's fashion pop group. We also are sharing PTS Notes tomorrow, including a lot of changes to the previously revealed Talents of last Insights blog. All that aside, let's hop into the content of this blog!
Arcade 2.0
Over the past year, we’ve had a difficult time balancing offering all the game modes we’ve wanted to while preserving quick queue times and pushing for improved matchmaking, usually solved by rotating modes in and out of the Core rotation to accommodate all players. In an ideal Realm, we’d be able to offer all of our Core modes in their own queues and allow players to Multi-Queue into whichever they want to most. However, Multi-Queue has a lot of flaws that make this increasingly hard as time has gone on. All non-Siege modes struggle to ever appear if in a Multi-Queue with the mode, leading to most uses of the Mutli-Queue system being “anything but Siege”. This still however leads to issues with splitting players into multiple matchmaking buckets (as each queue still uses its own when in Multi-Queue) and Onslaught often still overpowering the other modes. After running several data tests, we feel the best path forward is making Arcade a permanent queue.
How will it work?
Arcade will feature all of the non-Siege modes that have ever been in our Core Rotation. This includes Onslaught, Team Deathmatch, Payload, King of the Hill, and Survival. We’ve curated the starting Map Pool in order to try and provide the best experiences in each of these modes as well as make it easy for players to not get confused by which mode they are playing on a map. Here’s the starting lineup:
Onslaught - 30% Odds
- Foreman’s Rise
- Magistrate’s Archives
Team Deathmatch - 25% Odds
- Abyss
- Dragon Arena
Payload - 20% Odds
- Hidden Temple
- Frostbite Cavern
King of the Hill - 15% Odds
- Marauder’s Port
- Trade District
Survival - 10% Odds
- Primal Court
- Snowfall Junction
While we’re testing Arcade with a larger audience, the Onslaught queue will remain available as well! Team Deathmatch will be on hiatus as we want to have the largest number of people possible test out Arcade. Your feedback will help us shape this queue in the future and we want to ensure any changes to the queue brings the benefits players want in matchmaking and queue speed.
What about Quests and rewards?
Starting in this update, Arcade will be compatible with all quests and rewards normally associated with a casual queue! This includes Daily Queue Bonus, Trials of the Realm, and any other places we call out certain game modes other than Siege!
Will modes within Arcade still see improvements?
Yes, our goal with Arcade is to better support and improve all the modes within based on the fact that they will be permanently available, starting with changes to Survival and Payload this update. Speaking of updates to modes...
Siege
Map Pool Additions
- Stone Keep (Day)
Map Pool Adjustments
- Stone Keep (Classic) odds are normalized now.
Onslaught & Arcade
- When looking for a match, these queues will now prioritize matching parties of 3 or less with each other. Parties of 4 or 5 will be prioritized towards other larger parties. After a significant time in the queue, this restriction will be dropped.
- Arcade and Onslaught now share the same skill rankings for players when searching for a match.
We’ve often gotten complaints about how frequently smaller parties would find themselves face-to-face with a full stack of opponents within the Onslaught queue. To help ease these pains, we’re adding some logic behind team sizes in both Onslaught and Arcade that incentivizes teams of similar sizes queueing against each other. This should only slightly affect queue times, mostly for those in a group, but also increase match quality in these faster-paced modes. Alongside this, we wanted Arcade to have a single ranking type to allow the MM to improve over time, so it will leverage player’s Onslaught stats as a baseline to iterate on.
Payload
- Now utilizes 2 Checkpoints on each map
- The first attacking team will start with 3 minutes, then gain an additional 2 minutes per checkpoint passed.
- The second attacking team will start with 3 minutes, then gain a scaling amount of time back based on how quickly Team 1 finished their push.
Veteran players will remember the earliest iteration of Payload, where Checkpoints were available to increase push timers and help prevent spawn camping behaviors. We’re excited to get this system back up and running for Arcade, allowing Payload to play out at a pace much closer to the other modes within the playlist. However, the Checkpoint and multi-round versions of Payload have never coexisted, so some new mechanics had to be built to facilitate the merging of the two iterations. Checkpoints will provide the first team attacking a static amount of time, and the second team a scaling amount of time to ensure that Team 2 always has less time than Team 1 as the modern Payload functions. This is basically a brand-new iteration of how the mode handles Checkpoints, so please provide feedback as you play!
Survival
- Added support for Anti-Healing scaling throughout the match.
- Scales 5% every 20s.
Survival hasn’t seen significant changes since its return earlier this year, but now that it’s joining as the most infrequent mode within Arcade, we want to start looking to modernize the mode in a way that makes it feel distinct and enjoyable to more players. We’re increasing the speed of the fog and round wait times to get players right back into what makes the mode unique faster.
Ranked
Requirements
We toyed around with it in waves and did some testing internally, but we’re now comfortable raising the Ranked level requirement from 20 to 35. This is a large shift in who is able to utilize the queue and will have impacts on matchmaking speed and quality. However, we’ve heard calls from the community to make this experience require more from players to achieve it so we’re giving it a proper shot!
Map Pool
High Frequency Maps
- Serpent Beach
- Stone Keep (Classic)
- Stone Keep (Night)
Normal Frequency Maps
- Ascension Peak
- Bazaar
- Brightmarsh
- Frog Isle
- Jaguar Falls
- Ice Mines
- Splitstone Quarry
- Warder’s Gate
After positive feedback and player interest in Siege, Stone Keep (Classic) is replacing Stone Keep (Day) in the Ranked queue to provide the competitive experience with a version that has cleaner visibility.
Wave Defense
We've still got some optimization work we need to do on the mode & a few bugs that have to be resolved (We're looking into Champion Difficulty not providing the Quest reward) but with Arcade's permanent status we have room to also offer Wave Defense Public Beta on a 24/7 cadence as well! In the future, we still want to make this mode run better and improve the core experience, and hopefully expand it once those goals are met.
Summary
All in all, this update introduces the largest support to existing game modes we have done in years, allowing for the most varied ways to play Paladins ever in a single update. Arcade allows us to invest and explore modes that have been neglected in the past. Survival and Payload are being modernized and made to fit Paladins as it is today & accommodate expansion in the future. Wave Defense returns to continue to offer a place for build crafting and low-stakes fun. This is a large shakeup to the game, so feedback will be key to both improving all the modes offered as well as making sure players can play what they want when they want.