So Albion Online has some bad news this week: Sandbox Interactive is bringing its long-running Crystal League Championship PvP tournaments to an end, with the final event slated for mid-September, although the regular Crystal League will continue.
“We’ve seen some fantastic moments in these tournaments, and we truly appreciate the passion and joy with which our players took part,” the studio says. “But it’s time to move forward, and following this tournament the Lethal Crystal League will be removed from the game altogether. Furthermore, the Crystal League will no longer grant Season Points from the beginning of next season, in order to place a greater emphasis on other guild activities.”
It doesn’t really sound as if the studio is replacing the tournament with anything; it simply suggests that the Albion “community can stage their own exciting tournaments and perhaps other competitive formats” and that it aims to “support Custom Matches with a new Observer Mode to encourage this.”
It’s not entirely clear why now is the “time to move forward” with the elimination of these tourneys; earlier this month, Sandbox told Twitter followers that it was still clocking 300,000 daily active users – one of the reasons we have argued that Albion ought to be considered a top 10 MMORPG. However, numerous players have weighed in on the forums expressing anger and confusion over why anyone would participate in the league without adequate rewards and why SBI would decapitate quality small-scale PvP.
