Talk with Designers: Chains of Eternity

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01/10/2025

Hello, everyone! We have recently revealed some thrilling details about the Chains of Eternity season across our community channels, and we're thrilled by all the feedback you have shared. Thank you for your enthusiasm!

The countdown to the big launch on January 17 is officially on, and we can't wait to see you in action. In the meantime, we want to highlight some key optimizations and adjustments coming with the new season. Consider this your early briefing to help you get ready for the new season, and we're eager to hear your thoughts about this!

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I. Core Seasonal Modes

Your Game, Your Choice

In the upcoming season, we're excited to introduce a new reward system tentatively named Your Game, Your Choice (in-game name to be determined). This system gives you the freedom to focus on your favorite game modes while earning key rewards to progress your journey.

Here's how it works: we'll consolidate rewards from most game modes over a week of play, increase their overall value, and deliver them through this system. This ensures you'll have a steady flow of upgrade resources throughout the season.

Each week, active players can earn 1 S-Level Soul Sigil and 20 hero-exclusive Temporal Essences—or rewards of equivalent value—through this feature. Look forward to its debut in version 1.3.2, the second update of the new season!

Clashfronts

Clashfronts is a mode we're working to improve over the next few seasons. In the Chains of Eternity season, we'll be introducing several optimizations to enhance core gameplay, hero deployment, and battle experiences. These changes will include more balanced reward and promotion/demotion rules, as well as increased variety in real-time battle performance.

Our goal is to provide an engaging experience for players who enjoy Guild modes, offering clear objectives and strong motivation to fight. At the same time, we'll keep the reward threshold low to accommodate more casual players, ensuring they can still earn plenty of upgrade resources for Celestials and Hypogeans just by participating in the Clashfronts event.

Once the core gameplay is optimized, we plan to increase the availability of this event. So get ready for an exciting new version of Clashfronts in the upcoming season!

Magic Charm Sources

In our previous Talk with Designers episode, we shared some upcoming optimizations for Dura's Trials. Building on those changes, we'll be increasing the Charm Essence yield in the new season and introducing Nightmare trials. Clearing Nightmare trials will boost your Charm Essence gain when sweeping through trial stages.

With this new challenge, we aim to provide a greater sense of accomplishment as you earn more resources.

Business Simulation Mode

Since the official launch of AFK Journey, we've received a lot of great suggestions about adding a business simulation mode. We're excited to announce that we're dedicating more resources to developing this feature, with the first version expected to launch around mid-year. Be sure to check it out and let us know what you think!

II. Reward Upgrades & Paragon Tier Adjustments

Balancing the needs of players with different purchasing habits has always been a challenge. In the new season, we'll be rolling out significant reward boosts for all players through the new "Your Game, Your Choice" system and other features in Version 1.3.2. Our aim is to keep players engaged and motivated to continue progressing their heroes.

1. The new Your Game, Your Choice system will combine the weekly rewards from Honor Duel and Arena, giving them a significant upgrade.

2. Hero-exclusive Temporal Essences will be available in the Dream Store starting in the new season. These items will refresh daily.

After a thorough discussion, we've decided to introduce the following adjustments to Rivalry Stats in the first update of the new season (Version 1.3.1):

1. Adding two new Rivalry Stats: "Intimidation" and "Inspiration" for Supreme+ Celestial & Hypogean heroes and Paragon heroes from other factions.

2. You'll be able to increase the Rivalry Stats for Celestial and Hypogean heroes after upgrading them to Supreme+. But the boosted stats for Celestial and Hypogean heroes upgraded to Paragon +4 will be on the same level as those of Paragon +4 heroes from other factions.

Remark: Rivalry Stat bonuses apply exclusively to PvP battles, such as Arena and Supreme Arena. These bonuses do not affect PvE modes or PvE ranking modes, like Dream Realm, Ravaged Realm, AFK Stages, and Dura's Trials.

For more details:

1. The Rivalry Stats provided by Paragon tiers are not equally beneficial for all heroes. For instance, heroes like Damian and Smokey & Meerky see minimal improvement from these upgrades. As a result, the difficulty of advancing their Paragon tier does not align with the benefits they gain. To address this imbalance, we decided to introduce two new stats, Inspiration and Intimidation, enabling Support heroes to benefit more from Rivalry Stat increases at higher Paragon levels.

2. Heroes from the Celestial and Hypogean factions are harder to progress due to their higher resource demands. With the introduction of the new Inspiration and Intimidation stats, the impact of tier gaps in modes like Arena and other competitive gameplay will be even more pronounced. To ensure fairer matchups, we've decided to adjust the Rivalry Stats for Celestial and Hypogean heroes, allowing heroes with similar progression challenges to compete on more equal terms.

III. Off-Season Period and Season Duration Optimizations

We've heard from some of you that the off-season and the 4-month season duration feel too long. To address this, we'd like to share our plans:

The minimum number of days a server must be open (the Starter Story period) to enter the ongoing season has been reduced from 40 to 35 days. We plan to divide each season into 3 interconnected phases (each lasting 35 days), plus 1 preseason phase, all within the 4-month season cycle. While this may seem similar to the current 4-version season structure, each phase will offer richer content and progressive goals, designed to keep you engaged and motivated throughout the season.

We'll be testing this new structure in the upcoming season and optimizing it during the second and third seasons of the year. More details will be shared as the seasons progress, so stay tuned!

That's it for this episode! Once again, we want to thank everyone for supporting AFK Journey, and we can't wait to see you in the new season. If you've been away for a while, the Rekindled Glory event is live, offering generous rewards just for you. As always, feel free to share your feedback and suggestions in our community forums!

Here's an overview of the event rewards available in the new season: