As we’d expect after months of big-budget competition, Arena of Valor is taking a little time off for Easter. Not in any real official capacity – the servers aren’t going down or anything – but there’s a noticeable lack of any real news this week. If you haven’t played in a week or two, there isn’t much to get excited about right now.
Catch up on last week’s edition here.
Liliana’s Magical Draw Finally Shows Up
You know it’s a quiet news week when we’re essentially focusing on skins first.
This week saw the release of two premium skins for two very powerful mages: Liliana’s Natsu Matsuri outfit, and Heavenly Maiden Ilumia. These are two skins with very clear inspirations, and how you obtain them reflects that in its own masochistic, greedy way.
Acquiring either of these two skins can’t be done with Vouchers alone – like many of us have come to expect at this point. But they’re not unlocked through the usual methods, either. Instead, these two skins have been used to finally introduce a new system – Liliana’s Magical Draw. One we heard about a very long time ago.
You’d be mistaken by the Natsu Matsuri skin redeem page into thinking that it’s a free skin that just requires collecting a few tokens like the Easter event. It’s not. Instead, you have to spend vouchers on the Magical Draw system in the hopes of obtaining a total of 10 crystals. They’re not even close to being guaranteed, so even though you get to carve out your own magic summoning circle for a bit of fun, there’s no evidence to say this isn’t just another harsh RNG roll.
Ilumia’s, on the other hand, is obtained through the roll itself, with no focus on crystals or any other kind of token. It’s cheaper to roll in her box, and you even get a few free rolls through a timer, but it’s the same old song and dance: buy vouchers, buy scrolls, roll for potential garbage. Though Reddit users are having some luck drawing phalluses. Because of course they are.
Ranked Still Isn’t Fixed
If you are still experiencing issues with deranking, please provide your player information to Customer Service so that we can investigate any lingering problems, thanks!
— Arena of Valor (@ArenaofValor) April 12, 2019
We’re going to breeze through this one, but several weeks after players reported being instantly demoted in ranked play whether they won or lost, things still haven’t been fixed. Arena of Valor staff reassured affected players through several social media channels that things would be fixed by around April 12. And, as planned, they released another quick statement on that day to say things were in fact fixed.
Fast forward a few hours later, however, and another message showed up stating how the team would look into any “lingering problems” for those “still experiencing issues with deranking”.
If you’re still having problems, it’s best to get in touch with the support desk again. You can bet you won’t get the kind of compensation you deserve!
Read About How Tencent Maintains AOV With Unity
It’s always exciting when a big brand or publication does some kind of deep dive into Arena of Valor. It often feels like Tencent has abandoned plans to conquer the West with AOV given the severe lack of marketing and a bunch of other customer-facing problems.
But still, the folks over at Unity – the engine used to produce and maintain the game – recently published a lengthy article detailing how Tencent’s development team leverages the popular and powerful engine to work on essentially 9 different versions of the game at once. There’s even talk about plans to bring the mobile game up to the same Unity version used in the Nintendo Switch port which should “give the game a big visual boost” according to Mellow Yue, one of the game’s technical directors.
If you’re up for a bit of a long read, you can get insights from the development staff themselves, and absolutely no info on that supposed PlayStation 4 port. Shame!
Brawler Punches Through
With Cephany on the horizon and Pippi looking to be next on the list, we’re quickly catching up with other versions of Arena of Valor around the world. But we’re not there just yet.
We have a habit of talking about new heroes a little too soon in the AOV roundup, so we’re going to keep this one relatively short. Brawler, the newest hero to hit the test server over in the East, is obviously getting a lot of attention right now. She’s a punchy monk-type melee character that expels lengthy shockwaves with her fists. It’s like martial arts movie or something from Blade & Soul.
There’s no word on when we – or even Asia – should expect her, but at the rate Tencent is releasing characters in the West these days, it shouldn’t take too long.
