It's been two weeks already since our last community update so it's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!
A big thank you
We want to start this update with a big thank you to the community. When we posted our feedback survey two weeks ago, we expected maybe 100 of you would take time out of your day to give us some feedback. But you completely blew us away, with over 1150 responses so far! We will close the survey this weekend, so if you still want to provide us with some feedback (and get a booster) make sure to do so before Monday.
So far the survey has already provided helpful insights and feedback, and many kind comments. We are glad that overall you seem to be happy with the state of the game and the changes we are making. Everyone is working very hard on this game we all love, so we are glad you are here for the ride.
On a personal note, I am very grateful to be the community manager of such an awesome community. Every single one of you makes this game tick. Whether you are a casual PvE player, climbing the ranks of PvP, helping newer players out with some cards, finding new speedrun tactics, discussing balancing changes with us, or just enjoying the game; thank you for being part of our awesome community!
I would also like to thank everyone from the team who put hours upon hours into the project. It's an honor to work alongside you on making Skylords Reborn the best it could be.
So thank you, all of you!
New Patch + Reveal Stream
Our newest patch has released! After months of balancing, testing, fixing bugs (some even from the days of EA that only now come to light) we have released our biggest balancing patch yet. To celebrate the occasion, we teamed up with Toggy for a reveal stream, where he went over the patch notes, played PvP games and gave away some boosters. You can rewatch the stream here.
This patch has a lot to love, including suggestions from the community that we got as feedback on our community updates or through our social media channels. Suggestions like adding a power well and monument to the forge for testing, or being able to look at lobbies while players are in a ranked queue; we are happy to work alongside you and make this game better.
This patch also contains many requested balancing changes to cards. Ravenheart finally has its new design, and combining it with the changes to Jorne now allows players to play a viable legendary-themed deck. A lot of effort was put into making Pure Frost more rewarding to play, with many new tools focused on shields and freeze. Speaking of Freeze, the new Warlock allows interesting new fire/frost builds as well. We hope you will enjoy playing with these cards and experiment with new deckbuilds.
You can read the full patch notes here. Alongside a 15 page document for the balancing changes, there have been so many changes that we decided to post the rest of the minor changes to the Wiki. Among those are description and class fixes, animation changes (for example Brannoc and Backlash) and all kinds of Quality of Life changes. A special thank you to our Skylord of Honour LEBOVIN for helping us with this patch and updating the wiki!
Two things that are notably missing from this patch are the upgrades to our free PvP decks (as mentioned here), and the changes to Avatar of Frost (as mentioned in our Deep Dive for Pure Frost). We expect the changes to the free PvP decks to be implemented in the coming weeks. Because of some unforeseen bugs, the Avatar of Frost changes did not make it into this patch, but we still intend to bring some changes to him. We will continue to work on this card and share our status on the balancing discord.
Survey data
Here are a few fun insights and pie-charts (who doesn't like pie charts?) from the survey. We will spend the coming weeks going through all the data once we close the survey.
• Did you play the original BattleForge from EA (2009 - 2013)?
• How long have you been playing Skylords Reborn?
• How do you feel about the economy of Skylords Reborn?
• How do you feel about the odds of getting promo cards in Skylords Reborn?
• Are you aware that you can adjust the contents of the free PvP decks? For example, swapping a free card for a card in your own collection?
The following questions were regarding your opinion on new content
• Lore / Backstories
• New voice-lines / Sounds
• Adding voice lines to current units that lack them (for example, Amii Phantom, Dryad, Brannoc, etc.)
• New campaign maps
• Adding pure factions for rPvE (for example, mono Fire as enemies)
• Defence rpve (defend against waves of enemies)
Community Updates will move to a 3-week schedule
For the past ~3 months we have been giving you an biweekly insight of the things going on behind the scenes with Skylords Reborn through these community updates. While the feedback has been very positive (thank you!) we feel it would be better for both our workflow and the quality of the community updates to move them to once every three weeks. Time zone differences between team members, fulltime jobs and us wanting to provide good quality content and updates, has resulted in some last minute stress spikes to get the updates done in time and have something worthwhile to share. We feel that by moving to a 3-week schedule, we can keep up the quality and content of these updates. In between updates you can of course always find us on our social media and in the game. Rest assured that our team will keep working just as hard on getting you new features, better balance, and the long awaited new cards!
Open Sourcing of New Sounds Converter
We are excited to announce that we have made great progress in decoding BattleForge's format for sound files. BattleForge uses a special format called "snr" to encode any sounds, and so far we were only been able to convert these sounds from snr to conventional formats like mp3 and wav. Our developers have built a converter from wav to snr, which will allow us to add new sounds or voice lines to the game!
Unfortunately, our converter is not yet perfect, and during conversion a lot of quality is lost, making them currently unfit to be used in the game.
We are open-sourcing this application in the hope that the community can help us solve this problem. We would appreciate contributions to help improve the conversion! Some additional info can be found in the application link above, and this old forum topic.
New Team Members / Open Positions
Some team changes since the last community update. DutchyDutchy has been promoted to Global Moderator, and Madgadget has joined the team as a discord moderator. Their help is much appreciated, as Ultrakool and Bradley left the team as Global Moderators. We want to thank everyone for their contributions!
We could definitely need some more help with the Skylords Reborn project however.
Below are two roles highlighted, but you can find more information, desired traits and all our open positions here. If you are unsure if you qualify, please reach out and have a talk!
Open Position - 3D tool developer
As a 3D tool developer you are responsible to solve one of our biggest technical challenges that will boost the project to the next level: the ability to modify existing 3D models. We already have an internal tool capable of adding new cards using existing re-textured models, but we have no way to meaningfully modify the geometry, animations and special effects. You will be responsible for researching the way BattleForge represents their 3D models and develop tools and a workflow capable of modifying different aspects of those models. The ultimate goal is to be able to add new models with animations and effects never seen before. There have already been very good community efforts and already a lot is known.
Open Position - Backend web developer
As a backend web developer you are responsible to maintain and extend the backend of our current and future web applications. The primary project you will contribute to is a feature rich platform which aims to provide various extensions and integrations for Skylords Reborn. As of now, this platform is for internal use only as the focus currently lies on creating internal moderation tools. However, after the moderation tools reach a satisfactory state, we plan to make this platform public and expand it with features like a new and improved cardbase, leaderboards, a system to download, manage and share your replays, and various other useful extensions. There is a lot of room to contribute in, as this platform is still in its early stages of development!
We are also in need of French and Russian translators. If you speak this language in combination with good English language skills, please help us out!
In Conclusion
Thanks for reading!
We will update you again on the 2nd of October! In the meantime, we would love to hear your opinion on the latest patch.
s always, we are open to feedback so please let us know!
Here is a scratch code you can redeem in-game for 100bfp: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S011
The code is valid till October 2nd. Please note you can also get a booster by filling in our survey.
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