I already posted launch day review of Arena of Valor (Free), and really can’t say enough good things about the game. It effectively is League of Legends on my iPhone. It is absurd how good this game is. The TouchArcade guild is wrecking things too, coming in at #14 in North America last week, and currently sitting at #18 and climbing this week. For a giant Chinese free to play game, you’d expect the freemium shenanigans to be off the charts, but for Arena of Valor, that really isn’t true at all. I’ve been playing the game for a week solid now, and the amount of free stuff Arena of Valor has blasted my way is sort of absurd.

The way most MOBAs monetize is by selling permanent character unlocks, and Arena of Valor is no different. You buy heroes in Arena of Valor for anywhere between $5 and $10 a piece, and the annoying part of getting onboard with any new MOBA is this upfront cost of getting access to the characters you want to play. Currently the game is “soft launched" in North America, and during the soft launch it seems like Tencent is giving away an absurd amount of these unlocks via in-game events.

The main one is the “Road to Glory" event which awards two free hero unlocks per day. All you need to do to get them is play three games for each unlock (or six total) throughout the day. The cool part is, the event doesn’t care if you’re playing full-on 5v5 Grand Battles that can take upwards or 20 minutes or if you’re playing 3v3 Valley Skirmishes which can last only a couple minutes. Also, you don’t even need to win, as long as you’re actively playing. Just by diddling around in six games you’ll get the equivalent of $10-20 worth of free characters.

Also, while you’re doing that there’s other events rolling. “Challenger’s Treasure" awards a permanent Veera unlock for logging in three days in a row, and then a permanent Thane unlock after logging in for seven days in a row. You don’t even need to play a game, all you need to do is launch Arena of Valor and collect your rewards. While you’re doing that, you’ll be collecting Valor Badges just by logging in as well as by playing games. Using Valor Badges you can unlock an exclusive “Catacombs" skin for Arthur, which turns a sort of boring looking knight character into this wicked lich skeleton king guy. The skin requires 20 Valor Badges, which again, are super easy to get provided you log in daily and play some games.

I haven’t spent a dime on character unlocks, and just by fiddling around in these events I already have permanent access to just under half of the heroes in the game. If this is your first MOBA rodeo, that’s a really good value. Even if you’re not sure if you’re going to stick with AoV long-term, if you ever decide to get into the game after these soft launch events are over you’re going to be really annoyed you missed out on these freebies (particularly with how expensive heroes are).

So, for real, download the game, log in every day, and spend 15-30 minutes or so winning or losing quick 3v3 matches and max out those freebies.