New mode idea - Draft Arena

I think this game has the potential to offer more replayability than the standard async and arena experiences. In my honest opinion the meta game at the highest league gets stale and daunting because players use pretty much the same strategies and phobies in almost every map.
To help with variety and explore new strategies here’s a suggestion for a new mode that i think would be a breath of fresh air for the game.

Let me explain the basic rules:

  • The mode would be live PvP just like regular arena.

  • At the start of the match both players will be offered a series of the same 4 random phobies from which they can pick 1 to add to their team (on a timer) and the other 3 will be removed from the pool. The amount of drafts per key cost are as follow:
    1-cost: 3 drafts.
    2-cost: 3 drafts.
    3-cost: 2 drafts.
    4-cost: 1 draft.
    5-cost: 1 draft.
    6-cost: 1 draft.
    7-cost: 1 draft.
    If a player fails to choose a phobie within the time limit the first phobie in the current draft will be automatically selected.

  • All phobies including stress level ones are eligible and use base stats to emphasize fair play and team-building skills.

  • Both small and large maps are playable and use a special key ruleset (explained below).

  • The key supply (4) and total reserve (37) are the same for both players in all maps. Player 1 starts with 4 keys whereas Player 2 starts with 5 keys.
    Normally, Player 2 gets a bigger key reserve but the idea of draft arena is that both players will get the same value in keys and only their decisions is what matter. To balance the first turn here, it will take Player 1 one extra turn to draw the last key to make full use of the pool of phobies.
    With these values the tempo of the game is in between small and large maps, allowing more phobies overall to be played in small maps and less in large maps to prevent matches from dragging for too long.

Since phobie levels are 1 in this mode it could be convenient to lock it behind a certain stress level so players still have to invest some time and resources to play it.

But what about rewards? well maybe a new resource “adrenaline” could be introduced that can only be obtained from this mode, players would be able to trade adrenaline to Vendy for specific upgrade cards while halving the tears and xp rewards compared to async/arena.

Also, there would be no rankings for this mode, keeping async/arena relevant for season rewards. This would be a nice endgame activity for those that want to boost their favorite phobies.

Let me know what you think, this is a rough idea of what i’d like to see in the game but i don’t know if such thing would be viable to implement.

3 Likes

Regardless of what is done with this idea, I love it! Sounds like a lot of fun and I like the idea of picking your own upgrade cards via a new currency. I wouldn’t halve the xp though. It’s already scarce enough as it is. I’d do double XP actually because the main reward will be the ability to buy specific upgrade cards. So why not give more xp to actually upgrade with? Love this idea! I hope the devs actually look at it and respond at the very least.

Thanks for submitting your suggestion/s ! We appreciate our playerbase’s recommendations in improving the game, but do note that not all suggestions could make it into the game as it depends on how feasible it is to include in the game, and if the team thinks your suggestion is good it could potentially take a while to see it in the game.

Anyway, I have added your suggestion/s in my monthly Community Suggestions report!