With Ryan Red & Baylix attending gamescom 2022 this year, we missed the mark with our Iggy & Scorch content release. We always want to release a new hero with their usual build-up of hype, but with how things lined up, we weren't able to get everything done that we wanted to by our internal deadline. We also didn't want to sit on a hero that was ready to go, as we know how much of you want new heroes in the game. Over the past few months, the community had already worked out who was coming (and thanks to Baylix, confirming it by accident live on stream 😅), so we already knew most of the secrecy surrounding 'who was next' had already been figured out. Therefore, we decided to release him anyway so you guys didn't have to wait. Regardless, this was not how we wanted to do things. We have learnt from this going forward and have made steps to make sure that things are better organized despite other events taking place.
With that being said, we still want to put on a mastery race event, so this is how we are going to do it this time around:
The Hero Mastery Race is a competition to see who can reach gold mastery on our latest hero the fastest! We want the race to be accessible to as many people as possible, therefore we have opted to only go as far as gold for now. We don't want players to play for extremely unreasonable amounts of time to win the race, but we will monitor how long it takes our players to accomplish this goal and adjust if necessary for next time. This is something we would like to continue doing for our future hero releases, so please let us know your feedback in our Discord.
With Iggy & Scorch being released and players already reaching gold tier just by playing him naturally, we have to do things differently. We didn't want to reset everyone's progress so far, so we opted to track mastery XP just for the duration of the event. The amount of mastery XP required will be the same amount needed to reach gold tier, 16,000XP. This will be tracked separately from your current mastery level via a new event-specific quest window on the home screen. By doing this, we can still have a mastery race without affecting people that have already played Iggy, therefore giving people unfair advantages or resetting mastery progress. This also gives us the ability to give the community a heads up on the start time, so they can prepare in advance, should they wish to do so.
Play the game!
Anyone that owns Iggy & Scorch only needs to play the game as you would normally to earn mastery XP. Your match performance and match time affect the amount of mastery XP you earn, so rushing bot games or throwing matches won't help you here! We have also significantly reduced the amount of mastery XP you can earn in PVE games. Play as many PVP games of Iggy & Scorch as you can and you'll be sure to rank up as quickly as possible. If we find any players consistently dodging games, using bugs, exploits or abusing systems to gain an advantage, we will remove them from the race at our discretion and you will not be able to participate in future events. We will be closely monitoring the number of dodges and we will adjust and refine the dodge penalty timers if we find this to be a widespread issue. Play nice and win the race, fair and square!
We also have additional incentives this time around and you can earn rewards by playing any hero you like. Keep reading for more information!
The first person to reach 16,000 mastery XP throughout the duration of the event will win the hero mastery race. The winner will be awarded an ultra-exclusive, golden Scorch avatar and their name etched into Fault: Elder Orb history by being inducted into our Hall of Fame.
That's not all! This time we want to reward the entire community for taking part and not only the first person that wins the race. After your feedback from the Crunch mastery race, we have added additional incentives so everyone can feel involved, even if they aren't shooting for that hall of fame spot.
RUNNERS-UP REWARD
This time around, anyone that reaches 16,000XP on Iggy & Scorch throughout the duration of the event, regardless of if you are 1st or 50th, will be awarded a silver version of the avatar.
In addition to the avatar rewards above, we wanted to add even more ways for players to get involved, even if you aren't about that racing life by adding additional event-specific quests. We will also be adding a community-tracked quest that everyone can contribute to. Here is the list of all the quests with their respective rewards:
MASTERY QUEST:
Earn 16,000 Mastery XP on Iggy & Scorch
Rewards: Gold Scorch Avatar for 1st, Silver Scorch Avatar for reaching the goal within the event duration.
COMMUNITY QUEST:
Deal a Total of 100,000,000 Damage With Iggy & Scorch (Community Wide)
Rewards: 3x Prime Cores & Keys to every player that contributed to the total.
EVENT QUEST 1:
Play a Total of 10 PVP Games
Rewards: 3x Prime Orbs
EVENT QUEST 2:
Win a Total of 3 PVP Games
Rewards: 3x Common Orbs
In the future, we would like to implement a more interactive, systematical approach to event quests but for now, we feel like adding these additional, non-hero-specific quests gives players the opportunity to take part, even if they do not want to race and spam a certain hero all week or that they may not even enjoy.
Yes!
You can follow the progress on our live tracker here: https://www.playfault.com/mastery-race
(We will be tracking the top 10 players with the most mastery XP)
You can also track your progress in-game, even if you are not in the top 10, as well as every other quest in the event from the home screen in our new event-specific quest box.
START:
Monday, 19th September 2022
10:00 PST / 12:00 CT / 13:00 EST / 18:00 BST / 19:00 CET
END:
Sunday, 25th September 2022
15:00 PST / 17:00 CT / 18:00 EST / 23:00 BST / 00:00 CET (26th)
We hope this new approach to the mastery race benefits the majority, rather than the few and hope to hold even more regular in-game events in the future that are not just tied to mastery races. As always we appreciate all of your feedback and support and we hope to see you in-game soon. If you have any additional feedback regarding this new system to make it even better for next time, please join our Discord server and let us know! You can join it here.
At Strange Matter Studios, we are invested in rebuilding and improving upon the 3D action MOBA genre.
