Greetings Skylords!
Happy Anniversary! Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the Skylords Reborn project. We hope you had a lot of fun reliving your BattleForge memories and are excited to give you a look into the future.
• Anniversary Stream
In case you missed it, we hosted a special anniversary stream yesterday. We celebrated the past, present en future of Skylords Reborn, with news, card reveals, give-aways and more!
Sadly, something went wrong with the playback of yesterdays stream that we are not sure we can fix. Since we recorded it live with the 3 of us, and 2 audio tracks are broken, it does not make much sense for the viewer anymore. We are sorry for those who missed the stream and now can't watch it.
If we cannot fix the video, we plan to do a retake for youtube, adjusting it to be some kind of looking back at 2021, that people can watch to see everything that has been added to Skylords Reborn since release.
• Patch Reveal + Toggy Stream
Our biggest surprise from the Anniversary Stream: our Anniversary Patch releases today!
See the brand new cards and features in action during a special celebration stream hosted by Toggy tonight!
There will also be a quiz where you can win the new cards, so be sure to check it out!
The Stream is happening at twitch.tv/dastoggy
We are very grateful for Toggy's support over the years and have officially rewarded him with Skylords of Honor today. Well deserved, and to many more years!
• New Cards
This patch will release five brand new cards into the game! We are excited that you will finally get your hands on the cards we have been working on for the past months. The following cards will be added to the game:
Coat of Protection
Coat of Protection is a new incentive to play Pure Frost. This tier 4 spell can be seen as the frost equivalent of Regrowth, helping the faction with some lategame support. Check out the full card-reveal here.
Bandit Minefield
Bandit Minefield is a new tier 2 Spell for Fire/Shadow that should greatly help the faction in PvP. It is a rare and does not have an affinity. Check out the full card-reveal, including the design process, here.
Banzai Lord
Banzai Lord is a powerful new tier 4 unit that can be splashed into, requiring only one shadow and one fire orb. He collects the corpses of fallen foes and allies to summon his darling birds. The card appears in two affinities, one with destructive birds, one with healing birds. You can find more information in the Bandit Deep Dive.
Bandit Sniper
Bandit Sniper is a new, ranged M counter for the Bandits-faction. It is an uncommon that does not have an affinity. It's ability Focus Shot allows the Bandit Sniper to live up to its name, dealing devastating damage to enemies at long range.
Amii Paladin
The shroud surrounding the Amii-faction is slowly lifted. Amii Paladins is our first look at the Amii-faction, after the never followed on tease from Amii Phantom back in the day. It's special ability ''Reflective Armor'' allows the unit to reflect 100% of incoming damage back into enemies, making them a challenging foe to fight.
Amii Paladins has the new Amii Passive Ability "Elusive". Units with Elusive have the duration of the immobilizing effects of Freeze and Paralyze reduced by 10%. This ability will be added to all current and future Amii units.
Amii Phantom
While not a new card, Amii Phantom has received a brand new look! Both her artwork and ingame look have been adjusted to fit with the vision of the Amii-Faction. Elusive has also been added, and we plan to change her voicelines (she currently has those from Nightguard) to complete her makeover.
A word on Wasteland Terror
Some of you might be wondering why Wasteland Terror (previously Wasteland Wing) is not included in this patch, even though he was revealed in an earlier communtiy update. Sadly, we were not able to make the anniversary deadline and could not include him in this patch. Rest assured that he we will be implemented in a future patch, though we are not able to tell when just yet. Until then, may you enjoy the clear blue skies while you still can..
• Voice Actors Update
Now for some disappointing news. With the help of some talented voice actors, we have created some great voicelines to go along with our new (and some old) cards. Sadly, we ran into technical issues. For some reason, the game keeps crashing inconsistently while playing the new voicelines. Because this did not happen during our initial testing, we could not pinpoint the issue on time to solve it for this patch. Sadly we have to ship the new cards without their matching voicelines. We are really disappointed about this, and we hope to be able to find the solution soon and patch in the new voicelines in all their glory. For this we would love to get your help.
Beside the new cards, we will also be adding voicelines for Dryad, Mountain Rowdy and Amii Phantom in the future. There are also already plans for other cards that are currently without voicelines, like Bandit Lancer or Warlock.
We would like to give you a sneak peak of what we have been working on and give you a proper first impression of two new cards.
Here is what you can expect from the sinister Banzai Lord:
And here is what you will hear leading the Amii Paladins into battle:
We would love to have the help of the community fixing the issues we ran into implementing these voicelines. If you have any understanding of coding and/or sound, please head over here and join us in solving this issue.
• Balance Changes
Alongside new cards and features, we will also release some balance changes this patch.
Following the Bandits Deep Dive, there are a couple of changes in this patch, including Amok, Commando's, Windhunter, Sandstorm and Corsair. Further PvE-focussed balance changes will be implemented for Frost, with adjustments to Ice Age, Battleship, Maelstrom, Northern Keep, Retreating Circle and fan-favorite: Juice Tank.
There are also some changes to popular cards like Sunderer, Dryad, Master Archers and Stormsinger, in combination with the new cards you can expect a fresh meta for PvP as well.
You can check out all the details and explanations for the changes in the patch notes.
Patch_400031_-_December_18_2021.pdf
• Free PvP Decks Updated
We expect new cards like Bandit Minefield to shake up the PvP scene and find it important that everyone who wants to play PvP can do so without grinding for cards or upgrades first. We have upgraded our free PvP decks to include the new cards, alongside adjustments to most decks to adapt to the meta changes that have happened since the introduction of the free PvP decks. Please note: to update the decks, we had to reset all the current decks. Sorry about the inconvenience.
Here is a quick recap on where you can find the PvP decks:
- Select the sword on the top right of the menu to select your 2 free PvP decks.
- Free PvP decks are fully upgraded decks, that can only be used in PvP.
- You can select two new decks every day*, if you want to switch things up.
- You can freely swap around cards in those decks with cards in your collection to customize the decks to your liking. You can do this by clicking the tab in your inventory on the top left and changing General to Free PvP and vice-versa.
*We have reduced the timer to change your two Free PvP decks from 7 days to 24 hours.
• Updated PvP Starter Guides
On top of changes to the standard free PvP decks, RadicalX and Hirooo got together to update their starter guide for PvP. Want to get into PvP but not sure where to start? In this guide you will find everything you need: deck descriptions, tips and tricks for every match-up, an overview of the pro's and con's of your deck and how beginner friendly the deck is to play!
The guide ended up being longer than your average thesis, but we made sure to provide it with a clear layout so you can easily find your favorite deck and browse through the information you need.
You can find the updated starter guide here, and be sure to join the Tutor and Apprentice discord that is specifically designed to help new players get started. Feel free to ask all your questions there.
• New Fire rPvE Preset
It is now possible to face the Fire faction in all its blazing glory in rPvE! You can expect a fresh new challenge for rPvE, including new bosses to fight against. While we did a lot of testing, we would love to hear your feedback on the balance of this new enemy.
Please let us know your feedback on the forum or discord!
• Reforging
One of our biggest and most requested new features this patch is Reforging. The idea behind this new system is to give players a use for their spare cards without listing them on the Auction House. Players have no use for 40+ copies of the same common, and listing them for 3BFP on the AH has proven to be quite tedious and often unsuccessful. Additionally, the rise of expensive ultra rare cards is becoming a problem. We hope to tackle these issues with this new feature.
Here is how it works; players can reforge four cards from their collection to create one brand new card, destroying the four cards in the process. The card that is created will depend on different factors such as the rarity and color of the input cards. Players can also increase their odds by selecting cards that have something in common, for example four buildings. Using higher rarity cards will also increase the odds of an ultra rare dropping. Should the odds of reforging into an ultra rare card ever exceed 100%, players will get some spare Forge Shards. These Shards can then be used to get a mini-booster. It is not possible to use or get a promo card when reforging.
We expect this feature to have a large impact on the economy as a whole. Being able to exchange rares and cheap ultra rares for the chance of getting one of the more expensive ultra rares should bring their prices down. At the same time, this feature should increase the price of cheap ultra rares, since they are now valuable resources for reforging. While some of you might be worried that destroying four ultra rare cards to create one random one will further decrease the supply; please note that reforging multiple ultra rares is designed to be inefficient, thus discouraging the use of more than one ultra rare at a time, since the odds of getting an ultra rare does not improve over using a combination of rares and ultra rares. After the dust has settled, we expect this will bring a better balance to prices within a rarity. Because of the big shake-up this will have on the economy, we have closed the Auction House between the announcement of this system and the release of it.
• Legacy Avatars
We have added additional features regarding the player avatar you can select. It is now possible to buy the avatar that was previously only selectable with the creation of a new account for 15.000 gold. Additionally, once you have bought one of those avatars, they will be added to your collection, allowing you to swap freely!
In the future we are also planning to add additional avatars that can be collected through special events or achievements.
• Advanced Filtering
Our developer Kubik has been working on improving the filtering of search results, both for the inventory and the auction house. Some of you showed interest in this progress, so we put together a document explaining how the current filtering works, why it's far from perfect, and how it will be changed. It's a bit more technical than the other documents we have shared with the community so far, but we hope you will enjoy this look behind the scenes!
Advanced filtering.pdf
• Booster Discounts + Santa
As a special treat for our one year anniversary, all boosters in the game will be 100BFP cheaper between 18-12-2021 and 18-01-2022.
Additionally, every player will receive the Santa Claus card after playing a game. Happy Holidays Skylords!
• Team Changes / Open Positions
It has been a wild ride getting Skylords Reborn to the state it is now. We still have more new cards and exciting game modes in development, but need help getting them to you sooner. If you love the project, please consider helping us out, we would love to have you on our team.
Below are three 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! At the same time, we are sad to announce Carofex has left the team as a balance developer. We want to thank him for his contributions and wish him well!
Open Position - Map Tester
As a map tester you get early access to new maps and gamemodes and are responsible to playtest them and provide feedback to the other map developers about possible issues or improvements. This includes check how balanced the map is, how fun it is to play, if there are any exploits, if areas on the map need to be prettified etc. Map developers/designers/artists should be able to rely on you to make sure maps that are released or changed are done so properly. More information.
Open Position - Client Developer
As a game client developer you are responsible to maintain and develop the game client. This mostly includes add new pre-game features (content outside of matches, so no game mechanics) through .pak files used by the game. You will be responsible to create and design in-game interfaces for new features, add networking support for new features that require it, solve bugs etc. using LUA, XML and little bit of Rust. BattleForge uses LUA and XML in their .pak files which are loaded by the client. Communication with the server happens through a proxy written in Rust. More information.
Open Position - Game Server Developer
As a game server developer you are responsible to maintain and develop the game servers. This includes add new features, track and fix bugs, optimize code, roll out new server updates, improve server monitoring etc. The servers are written in C++17, use boost asio for networking, MySQL as database, Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring etc. More information.
• In Conclusion
And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading!
Remember; as a special treat for our one year anniversary, all boosters in the game will be 100BFP cheaper between 18-12-2021 and 18-01-2022.
We also have a scratch code for you, which will reward you with a general booster: SKYL-ORDS-REBO-RN1Y
The code is valid until January 8th 2022, which is when our next community update will release.
We hope you will join us in the celebrations playing this new patch, and we would love to hear your feedback on how you experienced the past year of Skylords Reborn! Please let us know below.
Happy holidays!
Archive
Community Update #13
Community Update #14
Community Update #15
It's been three weeks since our last community update so it's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!
As we mentioned in an earlier community update, new cards are in development. Last time we showed you our first new card: Coat of Protection. We are very excited to show you the second one today!
New Card Reveal:
Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it and feel comfortable revealing it, numbers and effects might still change. We hope to release this card before the end of the year and will share more information at a later date.
Joining Windhunters in the sky, Wasteland Wing is an extremely strong tier 4 dragon. With strong stats combined with Life Steal, this new tool will be a great incentive for playing Bandits. It will be uncommon and come in two affinities, each having a different effect for its Cleanse ability. Let's break down the card.
Breath of Embers
Every 3 seconds, unit spews fiery sand out that deals 630/660/690/720 damage to enemies in a 35m radius around its target, up to 945/990/1035/1080 in total. Knocks back small and medium units.
Infused Cleanse (Fire-affinity only)
Cost: 110 Power - Cast Range: 30m
Activate to immediately remove all debuffs from up to 5 friendly units in a 15m radius. Will also revert all status effects like Freeze or Paralyze. Additionally, affected units deal 100% increased siege damage for 10 seconds. Reusable every 30 seconds
Tainted Cleanse (Shadow-affinity only)
Cost: 110 Power - Cast Range: 30m
Activate to immediately remove all debuffs from all units in a 15m radius. Will also revert all status effects like Freeze or Paralyze. Additionally, affected units will be immune to all major debuffs for 10 seconds. Reusable every 30 seconds.
Life Stealer
15% of the damage dealt by the unit will be added to its life points.
Wasteland Wing is a Pure Bandits alternative to Tortugun for those players who enjoy the Bandits playstyle and aesthetics but who do not want to interact with Tortugun's unique hunger mechanics. With an area-of-effect disenchant ability it will enable the typical Bandits playstyle of hard to pin down agents of destruction.
Artwork Reveal:
The artwork (and ability icon) has been designed by our talented artist Tweeto, and we gladly show it off in all its glory:
Just like with Coat of Protection, a lot of time and changes went into this artwork. We thought it would be cool to show you some sketches to show the progress. A big thanks to Tweeto for constantly accepting feedback and improving the artwork. We are really happy with the final result, and hope you are too!
Vote for Cardnames
Just like with Coat of Protection, we need your suggestions for the final cardname. During testing we came up with the cardname ''Wasteland Wing'', and abilities named ''Infused Cleanse'' and ''Tainted Cleanse''. However, part of our promise to our Patreons is to let them help with naming new cards based on suggestions from the community. For this, we will need your help!
Please reply in the comments below what you feel is the perfect cardname for this card, and how you would name the ability. Please note that Infused and Tainted are part of the affinity name, and will not be changed.
Example:
Name: Wasteland Wing
Ability: Tainted/Infused Cleanse
Please only suggest one name. We will collect all the suggestions and let our Avatar-of-Frost-tier (and higher) patreons vote for the final name.
Voice-actors Update
Last Community Update we opened up applications for voice-acting the new cards. We are very happy with the results, and want to thank everyone for taking the time and effort to apply! We have made a selection of fitting voice-actors and will now work with them for the final script. If you applied but did not get a reply to your e-mail, please reach out to me.
We hope you are looking forward to them bringing the new cards alive!
Updated 2vs2 Maps (test server)
We have released new versions of the PvP 2vs2 maps to the test server. Now we need your help to test them! Please go on the test server and try out these maps and share your feedback with us. The sooner we have good feedback, the sooner we can bring them to the live server (and create observer versions!). Toggy mentioned multiple times already that he will host another 2vs2 tournament if we have observer maps, so if you enjoy 2vs2, please test them out!
You can find the latest list of map changes on the Wiki.
Promo Vote Results
As mentioned in our last community update, we plan to add a new promo to the game. The vote was locked behind Juggernaut-tier patreon, but we got permission to make it a community vote instead! Even though Sunderer was ahead on our Facebook poll, after collecting all the votes we have a clear winner: the next promo to be added to the game will be Mana Wing.
We received both negative and positive feedback about our plans to add new promo cards. While some people were hyped about the upcoming new content, some felt the choice of promos was unfair, and others said more than one promo card should be added. We would like to remind you again that we are restricted in both time-resources and fitting artwork. We want to add cool stuff, but everything we do, no matter how small, will take time away from other areas. Currently our top priority is getting the new cards to you as soon as possible. We are always open for feedback, but please keep this in mind when voicing your opinions.
We will share the final look and how you will be able to collect the new promo in a later update.
Tournaments & Events
NEW: Skylords Open - 14.11.2021
The Skylords Open return! It's been a while since the last edition, so let's see if the players from the last Rookie tournament have made it to the top ranks since then and if someone has what it takes to take the top spot from RadicalX! Join Toggy on Sunday or watch the action on stream! Find all the information here.
NEW: Official PvE Contest#3 Skylords Raid - Until 27.11.2021
We hope you didn't have a fallout with your team after the rPvE contest, because you will need a team for our latest event! For this event, show your skills on not one, but three different maps! There are prizes for just participation, so check out the rules and how to apply and have fun!
FINISHED: Official 4p rPvE Contest#1 The Bandit Hunt
Our rPvE contest has concluded! We hope you had a lot of fun, and we were glad to see some new players trying on rPvE. We will definitely do this kind of event again, so keep an eye out for that. The winners were announced on Twitch, which you can rewatch here. A big thanks to Volin for helping us with this event!
• Host your own event / tournament
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer Hiko to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you.
New Team Members / Open Positions
We have added two new global mods to the team; a warm welcome to Lontzek and Parity! Together with the rest of the mod-team they will make sure everything is running smooth.
We are also happy to add Progamer001 to our team. If you are active on our discord, you might have seen some of his alternative color schemes for units and buildings. He will help us with creating bosses for our rPvE modes and help out with our new cards.
We are in dire need of Balance Developers!
As mentioned in our last Community Update, we are in dire need of Balance Developers. If we do not get new members, we will not be able to release new cards in the future. Balancing will also have to be put on hold and/or drastically reduced.
If you want to help, we would love to have you on our team. 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 - Balance Developer
As a balance developer you are responsible to implement design changes to in-game cards using our internal balancing tool. In other words, you are responsible to implement new cards and changes to existing cards. These implementation requests can come from balance updates and content patches from our Faction Designers but also from the official Skylords Reborn map making team (for example, new bosses for a new map). An integral part of this role is learning our internal balancing tool, as that is the tool that allows us to perform all these changes. You are by no means required to have any programming experience. More information.
Open Position - Map Artist
As a map artist you are responsible to polish the aesthetics of a map. This includes texture the map, add decorations and add different effects and sounds. In other words, responsible for making the map look and feel good. More Information.
In Conclusion
We hope you liked this Community Update, thanks for reading!
As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. But this time you get to choose!
One code will reward you with a mini-booster, the other will give you 100BFP.
Once you select one, the other one will be blocked. Choose wisely!
100 bfp: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S14P
Mini booster: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S14B
The code is valid till December 3rd.
We will update you again on December 4th. We will reveal another new card, so you don't want to miss it!
As always, we are open to feedback so please let us know!
Archive
Community Update #11
Community Update #12
Community Update #13
Did you install any new software or drivers (maybe with Windows update) when this started to happen? Did she change some settings in the game? These are the first things you should look for.
Of course you could also start with deleting the game configuration, but I think this would be too early if you want to find the cause in case this happens again in the future.
Could you try to remove all files starting with "sr-" in the subdirectory base\pak\ ?
It's possible that there have been some recent changes which were only supposed to be valid for the test server but became active on the live system. Maybe these files cause a kind of crash on your systems.
If this doesn't help, try to remove/backup the config.json file locates in your Documents\BattleForge directory. Let me know if this helped you guys.
