Developer Directive Games has pushed out a new patch for their Ronin-powered top-down hero shooter, The Machines Arena. This new update adds in a new Detonation map called Highrise, alongside new Heroic Quests for the ongoing Play 2 Airdrop event, and more.
What’s New in Patch 0.26.2?
The key highlight of this update is the release of the new map Highrise, which has players battle it out high on top of a Metatech facility. Considering the height of this structure, every fall from it is lethal, and there are plenty of gaps scattered over the map that you’ll want to avoid as you blast the opposing team. In some cases, perhaps the map layout itself is the bigger danger than the opposing players if you’re not paying attention, so you best watch your step in every moment to avoid a silly death.
You can only play this map in Quickplay and Custom Lobbies for the time being. Whether it gets added to Ranked or not will depend on community feedback, so be sure to voice your opinion in the game’s official Discord server to help the studio decide on this map’s competitive (or casual) future.
What else is new? Well, if you’ve been enjoying the game’s current P2A event, then you’ll be glad to hear that there are actually new Heroic Quests. These new quests are bigger and longer than usual according to the patch notes, awarding a sizeable number of points, so you’ll probably want to complete them while you still can in order to further climb the airdrop leaderboard, which now displays the top 6000 players. The game’s official website now also features a section showing a history log that shows how you gained your P2A points so far.
A number of quality of life improvements have also been made, fixing various issues while updating audio and AI for a better and more polished overall blockchain gaming experience. For the detonation game mode in particular, the Nightcore clone will now no longer try to take the fuse and follow the player, but will simply move around through its own pathing. As for matchmaking in general, penalties are now in place in the form of an incremental ban timer. This means that if you leave a match before it ends, you’ll be placed on a cooldown timer that prevents you from queuing up for a specific amount of time. The more times you make this offense, the longer the ban timer will be. Also, you won’t win any P2A points for leaving, going AFK, or getting disconnected during a match.
You can check out what the new map looks like in the video below, and try it out for yourself by downloading the open beta version of the game for free on PC and Android devices to start your play to airdrop journey for a chance at earning the game’s upcoming $TMA token. If you finish in Gold 3 during Open Beta Season 2, you could end up winning this exclusive skin.
New Skins Update
Before this patch was released, the developers issued an important update regarding Skins earlier this month. In the announcement, the team has revealed that they’ve decided that the main way to control asset liquidity from now and onwards is to use the Stock Limit feature. What does this mean? Well, this means that each asset now comes with a limited number of stock, and once it fully runs out, that asset will no longer be available for purchase.
Previously, the idea was to remove the ability to buy Skins and Familiars at specific dates, which allowed players to buy unlimited amounts of these assets before that predefined date was reached that would remove them from the store. But now that there are stock and predefined limits, the phase-out schedule that was initially planned will no longer be used.
One of the key reasons for making this change is to ensure long-term market health. The Machines Arena team has noticed throughout the use of the phase-out schedule that players were more willing to buy rarer assets because they give you more P2A points. This meant that eventually the market would actually have more Rare and Epic assets circulating instead of Uncommon ones, which would ruin the rarity system entirely as higher tier assets should be lower in supply, not the other way around. Had this system continued, it could’ve eventually devalued these “rarer” assets.
Skins and Familiars that have been retired using the previous system will not be coming back, so this change only affects Skins and Familiars that are still in stock. Another part of the little FAQ at the end of the announcement also clarifies that Skins and Familiars will no longer be available in unlimited supply ever again, as the plan is to keep stock limits in place forever, so if there’s any asset you’d like to get, then you’ll want to do it while they’re still in supply, as once they’re out of stock, the only way to get them will be from holders themselves using the Mavis Market.
The floor price for Uncommon Skins there at the time of writing is 0.67 $RON (~$1.05), while the minimum for a Rare Skin is 3.20 $RON (~$5) and the lowest price for an Epic Skin is 17 $RON (~$26.40). While airdrop points can be earned by playing for free, owning an Uncommon Skin is rewarded with 50 more points, while Rare Skins add 300 points, and Epic Skins a whopping 1500 additional points. The amount of points these Skins award can actually increase by 10% for each 10000 $RON traded.
Players who own exclusive early-released skins can get even more points:
- Holiday Limited Rare Skins – 600 points
- Holiday Limited Epic Skins – 2000 points
- Loyalty Reward Skins – 3000 points
- Beta Reward Skins
- Level 25: 2000 points
- Level 50: 2000 points
- Level 75: 3000 points
- Level 100: 4000 points
More details on how owning Skins can affect point earnings is available in the official P2A FAQ page.
