Posted by printskaspian (Source)

The Energy Surge Season starts September 25, featuring a shorter 6-week structure, accelerated point multipliers, and unique one-of-a-kind rewards for the top guilds. In anticipation of this unique standalone season, today's patch brings changes to Guild and Faction Warfare, quality-of-life improvements including new Nametag options and better Usage Fee notifications, and new artifact drops in the open world.

New Artifacts Added

As part of the brand-new War Gloves weapon line coming with the next major content update, new artifacts have been added to mob and chest drops in the open world.

These artifacts cannot yet be used for crafting, and only appear in limited quantities for now, but they already offer economic and PvE players a new item line to start collecting and trading.

For more on War Gloves and these new artifacts, watch the latest Dev Talk.

Guild and Faction Warfare Changes

• Entering Hideouts now requires a channel for players who have not set the Hideout as Home
• Removed doors of Castle Outposts to make them easier to conquer by smaller groups, reduced warning messages when outposts are under attack
• Level 6 Crystal League Tokens (5v5 and 20v20) are now non-tradable
• Decreased penalties for enlisting with Factions with low recruitment rates, increased value of red zone Faction kills
• Increased values of areas previously owned by non-Caerleon Factions during Bandit Assault

Quality-of-Life Improvements

• Added option to display guild names of other players without displaying player names, and players flagged to the same Faction now appear as allies
• Added "Tomes" category and "Mount" subcategories to Marketplace
• Popup message now displays when the Usage Fee of a crafting station was recently changed
• When both players in a Corrupted Dungeon are knocked down, get-up time is greatly reduced

On top of the changes listed above, there are also numerous Combat Balance Changes, bugfixes, and other improvements. As always, you can read the complete list of changes in the official patchnotes.