Arkheron’s Friday Night Fights starts soon! 

This week, we’re playing a limited time game mode - Turbo Ascension, dropping 8 teams of 3 directly onto the Second Floor. It’s faster, scrappier, and high-stakes from the second you land.

Check out the full list of activities here[arkheron.com], including our solo player leaderboard & dev livestream on discord[discord.gg]. 

New to Friday Night Fights? 

• Play Arkheron Now: We’re currently playable on our Experimental Client! Grab your key here[bonfire.firstlook.gg] to download, and start practicing in training, bots, and custom games before the Friday queues go live. 

• Join the Hub: A lot of the action - including Dev Q&As, custom games, and team finding - takes place on Discord! Join the Arkheron Discord here[discord.gg]!

Regional Queue Times

To keep ping low and matchmaking healthy, each region has its own play window.

Asia / Pacific | 12PM – 2PM UTC

• 9PM – 11PM JST / KST

Europe | 8PM – 10PM UTC

• 9PM – 11PM CET

• 8PM – 10PM GMT

South America | 11PM – 1AM UTC

• 8PM – 10PM BRT

• 7PM – 9PM AST

North America | 2AM – 4AM UTC

• 10PM – 12AM EDT

• 7PM – 9PM PDT

Heads-up - queuing during a region’s window will connect you to that region’s servers, no matter where you are in the world. If you’re queuing outside your region, expect high ping. 

New Players Welcome - Bring Your Friends

If you’re new to the Tower, Friday Night Fights are the perfect time to dive in. The team at Bonfire and our community hang out in our discord to party up and help people get their footing. You can join the Discord[discord.gg] to ask questions, watch streams, or find new friends to play with. 

Stream, Clip, and Share 

There is no NDA - go wild! Stream your matches, record your best plays, and share your favorite moments. We love seeing the clips, the fights, and occasionally the bugs.

This build will be playable on our Experimental Client. Get access to the client here[bonfire.firstlook.gg]. 

Play the latest build during Friday Night Fights (check out times for your region here[arkheron.com]!) or by jumping in to custom games at any time. You can create your own Custom Game through ‘modes’ in the game client or jump into games using codes you find in the community. 

LIMITED TIME TEST -  Turbo Ascension

• This week, Friday Night Fights will be experimenting with starting on Floor 2 in teams of three, with 8 teams competing. 

ETERNAL ROTATION

• Leodin, Vaton, Grimwold, Irenna, Karriv, Hollow, Edani, Dahla, Penelope, Tsu’bo

GAMEPLAY CLARITY

We’ve been working to improve hit registration on the networking side. Specifically, we’ve updated ‘mispredicts’. 

What is a mispredict? 

• On the client, we predict your actions ahead of the server and we also do remote prediction of enemy characters. 

• When you hit someone, we play some hit effects (visual and audio effects). 

• When the server confirms that you did hit them, we send that to the client and play more hit effects and update the health bar showing the damage. 

• A mispredict is when those two things don’t agree. 

False Positive = The client predicted a hit, the server said no - “I saw the effect but it did not damage!” 

False Negative = The client missed the hit, the server said yes - “I saw effects and damage but maybe they were late?” 

The changes

• Melee Lag compensation has been implemented. This means that the server can compensate for your lag and more closely match what you saw versus the ground truth to reduce mispredicts.

• Remote Prediction Smooth has been improved to prevent mispredicts while lerping between states. 

• Mispredicts in stats have been added to track what players are seeing and how many mispredicts are occurring. 

These changes are just part of an overall effort to improve the experience of hit registration in Arkheron. 

ETERNAL ITEMS

KARRIV

• During transformation, Karriv now does damage during his stomp which matches the visual effect. 

LEODIN

• Leodin’s Hammer Righteous Swing ability has had some polish on its hit. It now has a larger radius and always moves you forward, similar to Dahla’s Stab. hit polish, larger radius and this ability always moves you forward like Dahla’s Twisting Thorn.

TSU’BO

• Tsu’bo’s Make Them Prey ability will now move you a bit farther. (1m more)

ECHO ITEMS

• Scimitar has received a pass to improve combat clarity. The hit ranges have been modified with reliability as the focus. Its speed and movement has been smoothed with updated visual effects. This is part of a larger clarity pass across several areas of combat. 

GAMEPLAY MISC

• The cost to portal to Lifts has been reduced to 500 (down from 600)

• Challenge Rifts now offer Legendary Chests instead of Mythic. The abundance of loot available in Mythic Chests was resulting in over-geared matches. This change should support better balance. 

• Some character and weapon parts on the observed player were hidden during stealth mode. This has now been fixed.

UI / HUD

• In the front end customization panel, you can now rotate your character. Drag with your mouse button or use your right stick on controller. 

• The customization camera for executes is better viewed from the player’s perspective, as it gives a clearer sense of how the character looks when using the selected execute.

• Added a background color to player's clients

• Added a party icon to the footer so players can easily see their own mute, unmute, speaking status.

• Added new loading screen tips. 

PERFORMANCE HITCHING

Last week, players reported seeing hitching in the build. We've been digging into this issue and we've narrowed it down to some hitching in our UI. The most common cause appears to be when a player's friend presence is updated - i.e. your friends come online/offline. We're hard at work on getting it fixed and have made some improvements in this build and expect it to be fully resolved next week. Thank you for your patience!

BOTS

• Bots now have a bot-specific tag to prevent players from pretending they’re bots. 

BUG FIXES

• Fixed a bug where Scimitar’s Whirling Slash would not pass through someone using Dual-Axes Bull Rush

• Fixed a bug where a wall in Bloom / Prison would not dissolve. 

• Fixed a bug where the Shrine could spawn in a wall and prevent players from interacting with it. 

• Fixed cases where there was environmental flickering.
  Fixed an occlusion flicker bug with water. 

• Fixed a bug where players could select Floor 3 starts in Custom Games but the match would start on Floor 1. 

• Fixed a bug where the client would stall when a server is found. 

• Fixed a bug where the pots in The Bunker would not dissolve. 

• Fixed a bug where players could see outside of the map from a loot room on Floor 3. 

• Fixed a bug where the ‘Start Match’ sound effects were missing. 

• Fixed a bug where the Floor 4 environment would not immediately load when players are warped back into playable space from far out of bounds. 

• Fixed a bug on Floor 4 where the braziers attached to short walls could block players’ jumping abilities. 

• Fixed a bug where the Floor 4 Minimap was slightly cutoff. 

• Fixed a bug where chests were spawning on top of each other. 

• Fixed a missing dissolve on a stack of books in The Archives. 

• Fixed various loading screen tip inconsistencies. 

• Fixed a bug where statues were missing. 

• Fixed a bug where teammates would not resurrect after Ascension. 

• Fixed a bug where the background in the frontend of the client was missing environmental art. 

• Fixed a bug where players could be facing the wrong way after going down the portal on Floor 3. 

• Fixed a bug where items were showing in the background of the map. 

• Fixed a bug here fullscreen settings could display where the art stops when logging into the client. 

• Fixed an error where there could be too many request failures while matchmaking. 

• Fixed a bug where Healing Ward could pick up the Eternal background. 

• Fixed a bug where the second half of Dahla’s Dancing Blade Twisting Thorn would not do damage if the affected player had a Hollow wall behind them.