Hello, Tamers!

The build for patch 1.4 has been sent out, which means that the platform holders for the consoles will review the build, and find any possible issues. Once they give us a green light, the patch is ready to be published on the the planned date, which for 1.4 is June 19th.

Would you like to know more about what’s included in patch 1.4? Let’s go!

A new Season

With patch 1.4 comes Season 4: Splash up! Like you can probably guess, this is a Season filled with pool parties, beach sunsets, chill activities and summer fun.

It’s a Season for splashing around and not fighting the current, but rather following it! There will be two events during this Season, one of them our first ever Pride event, that comes with some extra freebies, and another secret one later along the road, which will make the delight of players who love their Tems!

Also, there’s a slight change to Seasons’ length from this patch onward: Seasons will now last a month longer. We’d like to have more time to polish the content we put out. Some features have gotten out of hand and were becoming too big to cleanly launch in three months, leaving us with no leeway to fix issues or quickly react to unforeseen circumstances. There’s always something popping up from behind us, be it bugs, failures in the certification process, unexpected interactions… so we’d like to have some time to polish both the current patch and previous patches that might need our attention, without that eating into the next Season and patch’s time.

This change will only take place on Season 5 and onwards. Season 4 will work as normal, lasting from June 19th to September 25th, when Season 5 will begin. Season 5 will be the first Season to have an extra month.

The Arcade Bar has been postponed

Some bad news, but we promise it’s only this one! Due to development load and unexpected delays, we’re postponing the Arcade Bar. It’s a huge task, both technically and artistically, so we’re waiting on a more suitable season. We understand this might make 1.4 less interesting for PvE players , but we try to balance PvE and PvP each season. Since last patch, 1.3, had the Challenge Modes, and 1.5 will have the new Mythical, with it’s Lair, quest and route, patch 1.4 is more PvP oriented. We’re, at the time, unable to confirm for which patch it’ll be scheduled, but we’re currently looking at 1.6 or 1.7, since 1.5 is packed. We’ll let you know as soon as we have that secured and well decided.

Dojo Wars v2

Dojo Wars have long been a prickly topic within the community, so a few months ago we asked for your focused feedback on the matter. Following that conversation, we’ve made a handful of changes to Dojo Wars that we hope will make them a bit more enjoyable and less demanding to keep up with:

Dojo Wars will now take place monthly instead of weekly. The sign-up period where players can subscribe to a Dojo War will be a week instead of a day, and it’ll be the week before the Dojo Wars take place. Clubs who sign up for a DW but don’t show up on the actual Wars will be penalized by taking Pansuns away from their Club Vault.

The King of the Hill system that allowed current regents to only fight in the finals has been discarded. Regents will have to compete for the Dojo again from 0 with everyone else.

Besides changes to the main format, there are also several more changes that concern Dojo Wars rounds:

• The matchmaking system will now prioritize matching different players in each round, instead of matching players purely based on points. If a player has already faced another specific player, the system will prioritize not matching them again over their points.
• The timing of rounds has changed as well. Instead of having a set date for all matches, rounds will start 5 minutes after the last combat of the previous round has ended. That is, once the last match of the round ends, a 5-minute timer sets off, and commences the next round. This means you’ll have to pay attention during the day of your rounds, but rounds will be much faster and dynamic.
• Dojo Wars finals will require 9 players instead of the previous 11.
• Players will now also get individual rewards for each match won during Dojo Wars, on top of the Club rewards they might get. Individual rewards include juicy stuff like ETCs, hotfixes, Feathers and even Novas.

Important notice! The first week of the patch would overlap with the first week of Dojo Wars, and with this new system it wouldn’t work. For this reason, there won’t be a Dojo War in the month of June, and the first Dojo War will be on the week of July 24-30. This means the last Club to hold the 1.3 Dojos on the week of June 12th to 18th will hold them for an entire month. They’d only get the rewards for the week they play, but they’ll keep control of Dojo Parks.

Recommended teams on Showdown

During this last patch cycle we’ve been considering how to make it easier for players new to PvP to jump into the competitive scene, as we consider PvP to be a really strong suit of Temtem, but we know how hard to fully grasp it can be. That’s why, working with the balance helper team and the new analytics we’ve been working on, we have created an automatic recommendation system and some pre-defined builds to choose from; both will surely help make the jump into Ranked ladder much easier and interesting.

When you head over to Showdown to create a Ranked Showdown squad and choose your first Temtem, you’ll now be offered recommendations. The system will suggest Tem options as you go building your team, and it will shift and readjust its recommendations to accommodate the Tems you choose. The analytics that power this system drink from the actual PvP players of the game and what they’re building, so they’ll change and adapt to each Season.

After picking each Tem you’ll be able to fully customize it, as usual, but there will also be two pre-defined builds for each Temtem (single evo, or the last stage of the evo line). These builds have been made to cover their most common roles in Ranked matches, and sometimes it’ll incorporate two different roles, or one same role in a different way. These builds were hand-made by our balance team, keeping in mind the current meta, so they’ll be updated as it changes!

Both of these systems are fully integrated within Showdown, so it only works on Showdown squads. Of course, we encourage you to investigate on the reasoning behind these recommendations, as learning a new playstyle is complex and takes time but it’s the only way to know how to make it work. We hope this will help onboard new players into PvP!

To top this off, we’ve also been working on a series of official video tutorials for players who want to have a guide to take that next step into competitive. It has been created with a lot of help from our pro community, and it covers the less evident, more complex strategies that are played in the higher tiers of the Ranked ladder.

Changes to the rotating Premium Store

The Premium, rotating store will now have 2 Premium item slots as opposed to 3. In exchange for this, we’ve duplicated the daily item rotation, from 4 to 8. As it already happens, 2 slots out of those 8 will be purchasable with Feathers, following the current pattern.

We’ve noticed the 3 featured items were always unbalanced between each other, and that the rhythm was hard to sustain for both purchasing players and the dev team. We’re giving you more options on the daily, because soon the items from previous Tamer Passes will start population them and it’ll be a huge pool, and we’ll be spacing out the featured ones so we can have more time. We’ll still be working on them, and nothing has been scrapped out, it will only take a little longer to appear in the weekly featured shop.

Plus! The mounts available through the Premium Store and the Tamer Pass (both free and premium) will let you pre-visualize the surf version of the mount before you buy it. No more asking about the surf version in the Discord server! We know there’s more pre-visualization stuff to work through, but we hope this is a step towards clarity and that it’ll be good!

Battle camera toggle option

Following community feedback, we’ve decided to include a battle camera toggle option in patch 1.4. You’ll be able to turn on and off your idle battle cameras from the Settings option in the main menu! Although this is not a huge change to the game as a whole, we understand it’s very important for some players and wanted to give it a bit of a spotlight here, since we know some peeps are really hoping for this.

Sponsoring community-created events

Historically, us at Crema have not been able to support or sponsor community-run events, because we lacked a way to do so without getting in legal shenanigans and because we were too caught up in development. In the past month we received a petition from a community member to let them split their TemCS prize into more codes so they could give them as prizes in a tournament they were organizing. This sparked a conversation, and we’ve decided to create an official form to ask Crema for prizes to encourage and motivate people to take part in community-made events. This doesn’t mean we’re going to be supporting all the events that pop up, but we’re hoping to be able to help a little and champion the events we love and would like to see more of.

Check out the form here!

There are some rules to all this, like prizes can only be already existing in-game items, that the community-run event has to fit certain standards, and that we’ll keep the right to choose what events we support. We’re also for now only considering events that have a reputable and trusty history, so we encourage you to create community events of your own and share them in our community-event channel!

A huge surprise one week after launch!

There’s something else, an extra new thing, coming a week after 1.4 that we haven’t done before and are very excited and nervous about! We’ve been secretly working on it for a while now, and it’s taken a toll on our development time so we’re really eager to talk about it, but it’s not the right time yet. It’s arguably a new feature to the game, and we believe it’ll help us expand Temtem, its userbase and its longevity. It won’t be as exciting as a proper new feature for existing players, but we hope everyone will join us in the excitement this represents and the shared goals it covers. Since it won’t be available until one week later, expectedly on the 27th, we hope you’ll help us build up hype for the new players this will (hopefully!) attract, and that you’ll show them around.

And more!

As usual, there’s more than we can fit here! From changing the amount of players required for in-game tournaments to happen, to including the community guidelines in-game, to reducing the price of teleports, a new OX indicator in battle, a lot of balance changes and more! Read the patch notes once they’re live on the 19th to get the full gist of it!

See you soon on relaxing new shores, Tamers! 🏖