Nate has some really exciting changes planned, which he is listing in this thread. As it is a closed thread so that Nate's announcements are easy to read, let's all discuss the plans here :]

Blood Games

The Blood Games are going to change into multiple one week long tournaments. Each bracket will have its own tournament allowing all levels to compete. Gladiators will need to manually register. The format will most likely be something like the following:

* day 1 = registration (organize gladiators into groups. Groups might be random or by specialty, race, weapon type, etc.)
* day 2 & 3 = group matches, group A only fights other group A members. At the end of day 3, X gladiators from each group make the cut and determine bracket seeds for the 16 gladiators for the round of 16.
* day 4 = Round of 16 (start of the single loss knockout rounds)
* day 5 = Quarter-Finals
* day 6 = Semi-Finals
* day 7 = Finals
I think this is going to be super exciting for everyone. New players/gladiators and old alike. I think it will have certain gladiators really dominate some brackets, due to the sandbagging before the tavern changes, and a gear inequality at the top end of the game, but with it being a week long competition, it's quick enough to dust yourself off and have another crack at it, tweek strats, and so on.



Seasons

Seasons will likely be changing into what is now the Blood Games and last one month instead of two (probably won't be called seasons anymore, since we were already pushing that definition with a two month time scale). Blood God gladiators will fight once (maybe twice) per day on a fixed schedule, no arena fight tokens. Matchups will be handled based on the gladiator's current points like how the Blood Games handles it now. Opponents may or may not be known ahead of time.
I'm liking this change a lot. One month means less time to wait for the next chance at a good ranking if you have decided to retrain your gladiators [which currently writes off 2 months of play if you want to get a good rating]. the bigger change though, is one fight every 12 hours. This is going back to the old school days of PoW, and strategy will be more important than ever. I'm missing a lot of points as to why I'm excited about this change, but I just cant quit explain it properly.

PvP is going to get properly serious now though


/ponders if old badass managers will return, and how Oedi and SOTC will show down with each other.