Set that 4 ton weight aside and hold off on planning your next act of operatic sabotage: Ultros League is back for its eighth season! Whether you’re a returning player or brand new to the league, the time has come to sign up and join the fun. Sign-ups are now open, and season 8 will begin on Saturday, April 12th at 2:00PM ET.
What’s New for Season Eight?
If you played Ultros League in previous seasons, you already know all the basics: 8 weeks, 4 tiers of competition, the strongest finishers get promoted to higher tiers while the lowest finishes risk demotion. If you’re new or looking for a refresher, check out the full rules and info right here.
Flag Updates
For season 8, the following adjustments are being made to the Ultros League flagset:
Level Scaling is now 2.5x per Character/Esper/Dragon (was 2x)
HP/MP Scaling is now 2.5x per Character/Esper/Dragon (was 2x)
Max Scale Level is now 50 (was 40)
(Note: These changes have been reverted and will not apply to Season 8; see this post for more details.)
Since Ultros League kicked off three years ago, the Worlds Collide community has grown and evolved. While UL was originally one of the only ways for new players to ease into WC competition, we’ve since seen the development of an abundance of guidance and tutorials for new players. We’ve also seen the establishment of a robust new player mentoring program, and the evolution of Moogle’s First Tournament into the ongoing Moogle Cup. Between these successful programs and the overall maturity of Worlds Collide as a randomizer, the barrier of entry to Worlds Collide has dropped down, while the overall skill level of the community has steadily increased.
As a result, in order to give a more engaging weekly experience, we’re upping the base scaling of UL flags. While this is fundamentally a slight increase to difficulty, the goal is not to make the seeds harder. Rather, this change is being made to reduce the number of seeds which are made trivial by even a moderately strong offense, as well as provide more interesting and interactive boss encounters, especially late in the seed. Ultimately, this should result in player skill (rather than check/routing luck) being a larger factor in race results.
A few key examples of how the levels might look in a typical seed:
| Season 7 | Season 8 | |
| Start of seed (3 chars, 0 espers) | 5-8 | 6-9 |
| Mid-seed (4 chars, 2 espers) | 11-14 | 14-17 |
| Minimum Requirements (6 chars, 9 espers) | 29-32 | 36-39 |
| Minimum Char/Esper Skip (9 chars, 9 espers) | 35-38 | 44-47 |
A few other takeaways on the updated scaling:
- Bosses at the end of the seed will likely have access to stronger attacks than previously, especially if players have pushed scaling higher by pursuing a skip or killing dragons; as a result, players may want to consider spending more time/resources on improving their party’s defenses
- Grind fights might be a strategically viable option in more scenarios in Season 8 than previously in Ultros League – don’t be afraid to take a few random encounters if you’re worried about your party’s chances in upcoming fights!
- While the final few bosses in a seed may be more challenging, the scaling changes will likely result in stronger and higher-leveled parties for the fight against Final Kefka
Ultimately, it’s a significant change from previous seasons, but this allows Ultros League to settle nicely into its niche between our Moogle-themed events (which feature very introductory level flagsets) and our major community events (which often feature flagsets a step above in difficulty level), and hopefully will help strike the perfect balance of continuing to be a fun and welcoming experience for newcomers while providing an engaging game experience for higher level players.
Dances: Starting Dances 3-4 (was 1-2)
Dance will never be one of the great abilities in FF6 (and will rarely be useful by the end of the seed), but the command does have a niche early on in some seeds where better options aren’t yet available. However, with so few useful dance abilities, the chances of a seed having a dance featuring one of the viable abilities in one of the top slots is already slim.
This change gives players a few more starting dances, to increase the chances that a starting character (or a character found early) with the Dance command will be useful, and that time spent checking the Dance menu is at least a little bit more worthwhile. Happy whumping!
Divisions and Demotions
The exact number and size of divisions will be confirmed prior to the start of the season – we won’t know for sure what the league size will be until we have the full sign-ups to kick off the season.
Sign up now!
Season 8 sign-ups are available here. All eligible players, new and returning, need to to sign up to participate in season 8. Don’t miss out, sign up today and join the fun!
And as always, more than anything, I beseech you to perish any thought of ever teasing the octopus.