Best Of

Hello everyone. For the last two Banquet events I have written post-mortem design thoughts, explaining our design decisions for the event after it ended. At Summoners Fest, I was chatting with Seatin about changes to the upcoming Banquet event and he suggested this year I publish my thoughts before the event. So I welcome you all to the first Banquet pre-mortem! Mike already shared a lot of this on the recent live stream but this post should hopefully help players understand why we made the changes we made.

I am going to try to keep this post as far from editorialization as I can. Last year on a live stream I shared my personal thoughts about my excitement for the event and that wasn't well received. This post isn’t about trying to convince anybody to do anything. When the event launches you can all decide for yourselves if you want to participate or not. This post is simply to outline design changes we have made and further explain why we made them.

What is the same (or similar) to last year’s Banquet?

First I’m going to start by talking briefly about what isn’t changing, or at least isn’t changing very much. As you will see, the overall structure isn’t changing much.

• There are three Milestone events, a Solo Event, a Realm Event and an Alliance event, and every player Conqueror and above gets the same events. Generally the milestones of these events are structured the same, though the Solo Event is slightly cheaper to finish in terms of Units, halting the trend of increased costs which we have seen in recent years.
  
• There are three tiers of Banquet crystals. Conqueror and above have access to Banquet Crystals and Greater Banquet Crystals, Thronebreaker and above have access to Superior Banquet crystals (SBC).
  
• There is a box of six champions being featured as part of the event.
  
• There will be a trophy champion (Punisher) as a rare drop in the crystals and in ranked rewards.
  

What is changing?

Superior Banquet Crystal Design

Last year the biggest point of criticism was that the crystals felt bad to open. This year we have made a lot of changes to the Superior Banquet Crystals in an effort to improve the crystal opening experience.

First, we have increased the number of drops in each crystal. Last year, each SBC dropped three items, a Main Prize, some ISO, and some Gold. This year, each SBC will drop five different items. The additional drops were not factored into the value of the Main Prize, they were added on top to provide more value in the crystal. Here is the list of the drops and the rationale for why we made these changes:

1. A Main Prize - As with past Banquet crystals, there is a Main Prize drop in every crystal.
   
2. Progression Catalyst Fragments - Last year the Banquet crystal ended up being imbalanced because we thought it felt bad to pull lower tier catalysts from the crystal. This year, we have separated T6B, T3A and T5CC from the Main Prize. This allows us to balance the catalysts required for 7-star champions without players getting these lower catalysts from the Main Prize drops. (Note from Mike - I wrote T6CC instead of T5CC on the Livestream Slide for the Progression Catalyst Fragments under bucket 2. T5CC is correct.)
   
3. A small amount of 7-Star or Titan-Shards - For players still building out their 7-Star rosters, every crystal will be guaranteed to drop some champion shards in addition to the Main Prize.
   
4. Relic Alloy Fragments - We wanted Summoners to have an opportunity to progress their Relics as part of the event, but know that many players would not want to see Alloys take up the Main Prize drop slots. So we decided to simply add some Alloy Fragments to a supplementary drop.
   
5. Gold or ISO
   

Second, we wanted to create a more consistent experience with exciting rewards for more Summoners. To facilitate this, we have created a new Jubilant Crystal, which contains the most exciting stuff we have to offer. It has a 7.77% chance of dropping from every SBC, but critically, to achieve our goals, the SBC is set up to work with the Grandmaster’s Grace system. Summoners will be guaranteed one Jubilant Crystal for every 15 SBCs they open. The Jubilant Crystal includes only a single drop and does not grant any points in the event.

Ranked Rewards Design

• We have also made substantial changes to the Realm Event ranked rewards, with the goal of making them more attractive to a larger group of Summoners:
  
• We have added more granularity at the top to account for the very large discrepancy in Units spent between the 4th and 30th spots from last year.
  
• We have also added more value to the top spots, aiming to create a durable reason to chase these ranks. This includes a Rank 6 Punisher (not a typo) for the top 3 finishers, which will be the only three Rank 6 Champions that will exist in the Contest for close to a year.
  
• Including more value at the top means we are able to spread better rewards down deeper into the ranked rewards. For instance the top 600 will get a Rank 5 Rank Up Gem Crystal. Last year, Rank 4 was only awarded to the top 90 spots.
  
• We have added a number of vanity-related rewards to top spots, including First Appearance Champions and custom profile pictures (work with a Kabam artist to design your own 1 of 1 profile pic).
  
• We have added other exclusive perks meant to increase the value of ranked rewards. For example, top ranks will vote on a champion rework, and will be the only ones with access to that champion’s Ascension for an exclusive period of time.
  
• 2026 Champion Vouchers will award chosen champions as First Appearance at Rank 4 Sig 200.
  

Alliance Event Changes

Additionally, we have made a few changes to the Alliance Ranked rewards:
Similar to Solo, we’ve added much more granularity to the ranks. Last year’s event had reward buckets to top 10, then it jumped to top 5%. This year has buckets all the way to the top 200, then 1%, 3% and 5% buckets.
We also slightly increased value for Alliance ranked rewards. The focus remains on the Realm ranked rewards but there is a little more on offer in the Alliance Event as a whole.

Summary

Our main design goals for Banquet 2025 were to improve the crystal opening experience and to increase the perceived value of Realm Event ranked rewards. It’s not possible to make everyone happy, but we hope the changes we have made will improve the overall experience for all Summoners who choose to participate in the event.