Blast-powered idle strategy game Gangster Arena is heading into Season 5 on Wednesday, September 25th, giving everyone a free to play to earn experience to enjoy on mobile and browsers while introducing a variety of improvements for a better web3 gaming experience. Before you start competing for various rewards though, an S5 Gangster free mint will take place on September 20th that you might want to participate in for a potential head start to the new competitive period. Let’s check out what this mint is all about before diving into the key changes and prize pool of this new season.
What Is the S5 Gangster Arena Free Mint About?
The S5 Gangster Mint begins on September 20th, at 11 AM UTC+8 and allows the community to free mint a chest containing varying amounts of Gangster NFTs. Gangsters represent the main starting units of this blockchain game, as they not only give you a bit of reputation and passively generate the claimable, non-tradable offchain currency xGREED, but they can also be used to participate in gang wars, raiding other players to take their resources. They’re the only type of units in the game that can actually attack other bases.
This mint comes with a whitelist phase and FCFS round. Players who participated in past seasons are awarded whitelist spots, and so are those who won a whitelist from a community partner. If you aren’t eligible in any way, then you can try your luck at the FCFS round, which has only a 500 supply. Each free mint in both phases gets you a chest you can open to get at least 1 Gangster NFT, guaranteed, but you also have a chance of getting up to +99 Gangsters. The mint link will be shared from the game’s official Twitter/X profile and developer Uncharted’s Discord server closer to the starting time.
What’s New in Gangster Arena Season 5?
The biggest new addition coming to Season 5 is the introduction of Thugs, a new type of unit that players get for free when logging in, with up to 50 extra Thugs also claimable by linking wallets part of partnered communities. This unit is getting added to this high-stakes web3 game in order to make it easier for new players to try out the strategic title “without significantly affecting the core game mode,” according to the wiki. Thugs automatically generate a new non-tradable currency called $POOR, which you can then use to get even more Thugs, but also to bid for rewards at the auction house. As such, $POOR is essentially designed to foster the free to play part of the game’s economy, giving you a chance of winning more useful assets from the auction house that include Gangsters, Goons, xGREED, $GREED tokens, and Blast Gold.
There will also be a Beginners Bundle that will let new players buy Gangsters and Goons at a 20% discount for one time only, with the price of the bundle being 2.5k $POOR and an unspecified amount of ETH.
Next to Thugs and the Beginners Bundle, this new season brings with it raid improvements to rectify issues noticed in last season in order to make raids more tactical than before. Among these changes include making pistols and shields one-time use items while rewarding players who attack considerably weaker targets with 50% less points. You will also now simply be able to “opt out” of raids to avoid getting constantly attacked. A defense streak mechanism is also getting added, where losing 2+ wars in a row makes your gangsters stronger for the next defense, while winning 2+ wars will reduce your defense. It will also be now less likelier to have negative points, as the game will reward players after every war with a growing number of extra points.
In an effort to provide more ways to play to earn various rewards, this season also introduces midseason leaderboards. 35% of seasonal rewards is allocated to a midseason leaderboard that is said to end after 5 days, with the rest of the prizes reserved for the end of the season. While leaderboards will reset, units and earnings won’t, requiring players to strategically decide whether to focus on getting midseason rewards or play the long game for potentially bigger prizes.
Alongside the new leaderboard type is also a new referral system that lets players give a 1% $GREED discount to their referrals while in turn getting 1% of what their referrals spend. The discount can be increased to 2.5% through a custom code that partnered communities and creators can get.
More changes introduced for this season can be found in the official wiki page.
Gangster Arena Season 5 Prize Pool
For Season 5, the developers have allocated 12.5 million $GREED, 2 ETH, 0.2 $xU, and 43k Blast Gold to the prize pool, said to be valued at $50k+. This reward pool grows through player spending actions. Specifically, 100% of the ETH spent in Gangster presale goes to the pool, and so does 90% of $GREED spent, with the 10% getting burned in the process. 2% from $GREED trading gets turned into ETH that is then distributed to reputation and raid rewards.
Thanks to community feedback and discussions with the Blast Foundation, the Gangster Arena team has adjusted Blast Gold reward distribution, allocating it across 4 categories: Early starter bonus, Thugs Auction House, Midseason leaderboard, and Content.
The first category contains 4000 Blast Gold that is reserved for the first 200 players to claim Thugs, getting 20 Gold each.
For the Thugs Auction House, 15k Blast Gold has been allocated for players to have a chance of getting by spending $POOR at the auction house to bid for rewards, with the following gold rewards available from September 25th to September 30th:
- 250 pouches of 5 gold
- 50 pouches of 20 gold
- 15 pouches of 50 gold
The third category is the Midseason leaderboard, which comes with the biggest prize pool of 22,799 Blast Gold, rewarded proportionally to the number of U points players have on the leaderboard by September 30th, noon UTC. Last but not least is the Content category, where 1000 Blast Gold can be shared among the 5 best Twitter threads or content, with the community voting on September 29th to decide which content is deserving of getting 200 gold each.