Cocofang

Any update on the numbers or "boost stacking"? 90 minutes does seem a bit excessive. Especially with the added incentive to utilize the reserve pool.

Exaggeration to unreasonable heights isn't necessarily the same as making a point. 2/10 for effort too because you mostly only copied my post. The most used argument I see against the strength of certain cards is "I don't like it when other people don't play the game the way I want it to be played". You will always have this problem when you group up with randoms! That's not a balancing issue, it's a human one. Go out and search for like minded individuals if that is so important to you. The dumbest thing about Amii is that it's cheaper than a natural T4. Fix that and move on. I get that balancing is very important in PvP but why is everyone so overambitious for PvE? People go like "THIS SHALL NOT STAND! *slams fist on table* I DEMAND WE UN-BREAK THE GAME!"

Amii creates loads of options for possible decks and strategies that would straight up not exist without it. While doing so it can be argued that it overshadows alternatives but it does not remove a single one. Strictly speaking Amii is a purely enriching card as far as possibilities go. The current version of Amii literally enables a 5 color deck as well. If someone so chooses they can do that right now. Making Amii T4 means removing ALL possible approaches and decks that need it to be T3, while creating not a single new one. It is a powerful card and should cost more than a natural T4 orb but it doesn't remove any possibilities for deckbuilding.

An argument for Amii as a reward for completing expert maps that I have heard is that the game would benefit from a motivator to get people to play story maps. darkwarrior on discord just threw an idea into the room: Have promo cards as rewards. This idea is infinitely better since promo cards are nothing more than fully upgraded regular cards with a different skin. So absolutely no options would be gated behind this approach. Unlike with Amii, where LOADS of possibilities would get shut off from most people. I am pretty much always in favor of more options, not less. People love the promo cards so removing them from the booster drop pool and instead utilizing them as achievement of sorts would definitely be a motivator for players. Currently there are a total of 14 promo cards in the game, I am sure they could serve well as a guiding force for players to give them goals they can strive towards. And all without locking unique options.

I would assume it's because playing Advanced difficulty is worthless. It's better to get U3 from Expert and use extras to buy U2 and U1 with gold. It feels like in Advanced the time investment doesn't really justify the gains. Also, who bothers becoming good, efficient and fast on the medium difficulty? Not to mention, the community consists of either people just wanting to play a bit of BattleForge again or hardcore enthusiasts without much in between.

"Amii is so OP and broken! People are using it to finish maps too fast! That is so bad for the game." "We should give Amii to the good players only to widen the gap between what options they have and what the rest does. Sounds good." Anyone else sees the disconnect in logic here?

I'd say you play mono decks for flavor. Because you enjoy it and not because it's good. I don't think there is literally ANY mono deck that couldn't be improved by changing one or two orbs. The T4 mono cards are all pretty underwhelming for how restrictive they are. Green Forest Elder is nice. But Nature itself is such a good allrounder and can get away with playing it mono. Dreadnought is powerful but clunky to use. Shadow Worm is pretty useless without support to sustain it. Moloch is slow and therefore worthless. Batariel is strong but also works best with support. Meanwhile just slapping one nature orb into any deck gives you amazing T4 with Grimvine and Giant Wyrm. And insane support spells like Regrowth, Revenge and Equilibrium. Give me those any day over any mono T4 cards. You can probably beat any campaign PvE map with a mono deck. But I wouldn't expect to ever be as efficient, fast or successful as a mixed one. As an added drawback your concerns regarding the price are probably justified. You always have to consider that the market value is extremely volatile with how small the community will be. The prices for certain cards can be easily manipulated, the market can be cornered and the lack of supply can just generally have all kinds of wacky effects. With that being said, judging from the AH prices during this stress test the mono T3 and T4 cards were mostly pretty expensive. Avatar of Frost, Juggernaut, Spitfire and Abyssal Warden are the mono T3 cards that end up being on the more expensive side. Satanael is mid range. Northland Drake is cheap because it is so common. Mono T4 is expensive with Dreadnought, Shadow Worm and Forest Elder. Batariel is dependent on the affinity. Either low or mid range. Moloch is somewhat cheaper. That's all just from memory. Of course that assumes that you really want to fully commit to mono and not only actually need 3 orbs of the same color but leave your deck mono anyways.

So some of these are from crashes during character creation where you have to pick your profile picture and name. If you idle there too long you get booted from the server. Others are from trying to see decks and starting games. They are from the test server and they all asked me to share them with an error box. _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_1.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_0.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_2.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_3.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_4.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_5.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_6.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_7.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_8.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_9.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_10.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_11.log _launcher_trace_2019.07.30_12.log

It was just taking your example to make the point clear. Apparently unsuccessfully so. Balancing isn't about making everything equally strong or thinking of every possible curve ball. That's a complete misunderstanding of what balancing is supposed to achieve in games. Attempt that sets you up for failure. That is true in every game. I would much more say that balancing in PvP is the attempt to make it so no strategy or no single mechanic (unit, spell, etc. in this case) is overbearing at some level of play first and foremost. While everything can probably be countered through some means, there shouldn't be a scenario where one approach is too notably dominant. Secondarily you can then look into making unused cards or strategies a bit more attractive. Generally agreed but you get too hung up on the example. The aim of PvP balancing should be that no particular card or strategy is too overbearing. Even OP combos or cards can have counters they get beaten by but that is not an argument against them being OP. It's about how dominant something is at certain skill levels overall. If people were to just throw around statements like "lol if you get beaten by X, just play Y" then you might as well not ever change anything at all because that's probably true for everything. And for what it's worth the game saw a steady decline and died. So ... might not be the best idea to take too many approaches from the original Battle Forge onboard. Maybe taking care of both PvE and PvP is an idea worth looking into after all. It's generally a good advice to be critical of the "Well, it's always been like that" mindset, which I would consider especially true in this case.

I'd say that is straight up untrue. Sure, the environment gets more volatile the less people know what they are doing but there will still be prevailing approaches and metas. Let's take that as a thought then. High level players consider Aggressor a bit too weak because it is 150 power bundled into a single unit that can be played around. Low level players consider Aggressor OP because it knocks their units around. Then lets say the high level players, which would be in charge of balancing in this example, say that Aggressor needs a bit of a buff, maybe reduce its cost a bit. Now it's more viable on the top end and sees occasional play. While suddenly it is completely out of control on the low end because all the new people are mesmerized by the constant CC for a lower cost. This sort of thing can happen with any card or strategy. You have to take that into consideration unless you want to risk turning certain levels of competition into a serious cesspools. Top level players think about top level competition first and foremost. But a healthy game shouldn't be out of control on any skill level.

What? While I agree the PvP mode is the most sensitive one in terms of balancing it absolutely doesn't have to continue to be the central point of balancing. That's nonsense. Depending on how the playerbase turns out the PvP community might even end up being smaller than the PvE community so that could also be a consideration. There can absolutely be arguments for both sides, claiming that it MUST BE that way because it was that way doesn't hold much weight. This suggestion only makes sense on the absolute surface level. A council like system could make the process faster but in no way is it certain that his would end up being the best for the games overall health. Cards and strategies can be of VASTLY different effective power when used at low, average or expert level of PvP play. If you decide to only balance top heavy then the balancing in lower level play could get massively skewed. PvP would most likely end up being incredibly beginner unfriendly. You have to consider all skill levels when attempting changes. You are for some reason assuming individual skill and intricate knowledge about cards and strategies in the top end of competition automatically come with the ability to think holistically, while in many cases the exact opposite is the case. You can think of some very skilled players as sitting on an island of expertise where they are indeed incredibly knowledgeable but because they are so invested into their particular field, they don't see or care for the big picture. Just as an example, say a card is easy to use and very straight forward in its effect. Such a card would obviously see more play at the lower end of PvP. But at the higher levels opportunity costs and combinations are a much bigger consideration, people start coming up with calculations to make their decks and moves more efficient. Suddenly a simple card might not be very attractive anymore because its simplicity is limiting it. So then the top players might decide that this card is kinda weak because other options are much better if you actually heavily look into it. They vote to change the card to be viable in the top end and suddenly it might end up being completely busted and overpowered for beginners or too hard to use effectively.

Does anyone has an idea WHY the healing is increased when casting the warp close together? The description of the card suggests that the healing is applied on actually getting teleported. But the actual mechanics behind this could be different. Is the healing applied by simply standing near the entrance and exit zones? Is the healing applied by both entrance and exit zones to all unites that have been teleported? Is the buff getting refreshed every second while near the entrance point, even if the unit has already been teleported? At the very least it is safe to say that the card does not behave the way the description suggests.

Well, apparently figuring out bugs from no reports at all didn't work out so well either. Lowering the hurdle for people to submit reports would be one way to get more. At the very least the "How To Report Bugs" pinned post could be condensed into half its length or less without losing anything important. This too would make it faster and more convenient to report a bug. Because even being greeted with an overly long instruction can and will make people just not bother. From what I have read this entire discussion about whether balance changes should be made at this point mainly spawned from the fact that there is nothing else to work on because of no reports so that is at least something to do and might get people invested. If that is such a massive problem then I think you have to work on multiple fronts to get reports going.

Amii and Enlighten are examples for rule-bending cards. It's what they are supposed to do. You can of course disagree with the design but they are still working as intended. Also, straining the games mechanics is what speedrunning is literally all about. Learning patterns, exploiting them, manipulating them. Finding and min-maxing the most optimal solution that trumps all others. That is an integral part of the process that you are arguing against for nothing but the pipe dream of a "balanced" game operating on absolute commandments. As a side-point; I'd argue that mono-decks are suboptimal because of the fact that pure T4 is so lacking that mixing it up will almost always be straight up better. Are there even any mono-T4s in the game worth having without the support of differently colored cards? Green Forest Elder maybe but that's because Nature itself is such a powerful all-rounder.

The first issue you describe is only applicable in custom maps, no? Every map that is inherent to the game is either strictly PvE or PvP, never both. And if these custom maps are different, you could let people decide whether PvP or PvE rules apply to them. Basically a tag system. And NPCs on maps are subjected to the overarching rules. If it's a PvE tagged map, they work under PvE rules (in that case, every scenario and rPvE map would be tagged as "PvE"). If it's PvP tagged, they use PvP rules. Again, whether it is even possible from a technical standpoint is a different topic, but purely conceptually speaking it seems simple. Reality might differ, because of coding shenanigans but nobody knows that yet. I'm gonna be a real cheeky brat and turn what you said before around on you, don't let it sound too mean in your head. It's teasing a bit but still true You don't really have anything else to do right now with the game because you don't get reports for issues you can fix, right? So why not look into the possibility of making separately balanced cards for PvE and PvP? Might as well. Just to check if it's possible to split them like that. Might be interesting. Might be a place to get a deeper understanding on how the game works. In my opinion that would definitely be a project worth spending time on instead of waiting for a report to pop up. Development seems to be in a very tough spot right now. Can't keep improving servers because of lack of reports. Can't release because of lack of polish. Players are less engaged because everything will be wiped. Players expect a reasonably well running game that is "fully released". Caught between a rock and a hard place. Gotta find some ways to get people reporting and make it as quick and easy as possible.