Cocofang

I said that your frustration about progression speed is apparent. You said I wasn't even listening and that it's not about getting stuff faster, it's about being rewarded for your time. But it is absolutely about getting stuff faster because for you more rewards for your time is better. If you think players should be able to make more progress on the day, you are absolutely talking about increasing progression speed. So it's bizarre that you would be so adamantly denying that this is one of the core issues you criticize. What the current progression system wants to keep in check is that disproportionate time investment does not result in disproportionate progress over somebody with less time investment. Keeping the required time investment for close to optimal progression speed moderate to low is one of the major goals. And that should be preserved. Otherwise the daunting need to play excessively in order to fully utilize progression becomes another deterrent. The video gaming market is over saturated with games courting attention and time. Skylords has no reason to engage in this as it is a passion project without the incentive to force monetization on players. It's also unwise to do so because games that want to tie players down usually either do so with a constant stream of updates and/or an endless amount of time intensive busywork. The former being unfeasible here, the later having the potential of showing wear rather quickly. So instead of enabling faster progression on the day, which brings many issues, there could be more ways to progress for players on their own speed and terms. You should be thinking into the direction of overarching achievement instead of time sensitive dailies. Something that can be done whenever and finishing it asap doesn't give an advantage. Leading to faster progression overall but without time pressure or the ability to massively accelerate ahead. Additionally, if you want to speed up progression you must have a solution for people with excess resources in place. Because the point of having everything they want will approach sooner and then they need something else to do with their rewards.

If you get 4 dailies for 75 BFP each instead of 2 dailies, then by doing them all you gain 300 BFP in a day instead of 150. In other words you made more progress in a day than you currently can. Your suggestion directly leads to that. You would be affecting progression speed, making people gain more stuff faster. Now, I am in no way dead set on saying the current progression speed is perfect by any means. But be it your primary motivator or not, you are most definitely arguing for higher progression speed and you repeatedly expressed frustration with the current progression speed.

You repeatedly bringing up how long it take to unlock things must have fooled me. More rewards for your time equals faster progression, surely you considered that? But now you are saying it's "not about just getting stuff faster"? With how heavily you protest me linking your issues to progression speed, it seems like you want to empathize that you do not want to get things faster than it is the case now. You want to feel like you are "being rewarded for your time". We can test this by going into the opposite direction: Would you then be okay with, say, taking the rewards for current achievements and daily quests and spreading them across more achievements and daily quests? For example, instead of getting one 75 BFP daily, you get three different dailies that net 25 BFP each. Or instead of directly getting 2 Boosters for draining your reserve below 50 BFP, you have to drain it below 50 two times and get one Booster each. Instead of draining your daily 250 BFP boost in 45 minutes, it takes 90 minutes. That way it would feel like you are getting rewarded more consistently. A constant trickle of rewards albeit slower overall. Problem solved, right? It's not about speed after all. Your friends would have to keep playing the game in order to gain all the rewards. If you wouldn't be okay with that because it would take longer to get the same resources even though you would be more consistently rewarded then, indeed, it is about progression speed.

@MarcoMaar Do you happen to have any updates on anything that's currently going on in the background regarding your work? I am always really looking forward to some UI and QoL improvements on the client side of things.

Not to mention Activision Blizzard is more than happy to let people use multiple accounts because that means multiple subscriptions. They are multi-dipping individual power users for extra cash. And even then they eventually decided that they have to at least crack down on automated multiboxing because, you guessed it, it provided too big of an advantage over anyone not doing it. Sure, in their case it was purely a business decision. They probably noticed increasing dissatisfaction among the population with only one account that threatened their bottom line more than the multiboxing population benefited it. This simply proves the point that multi accounting that is tied to progression can be extremely troublesome. You already got an answer from me regarding that but if you want more, I enjoyed the restrictions of having to work with unupgraded and random cards just as much as I now enjoy having a wealth of resources to build decks from. I even often intentionally restrict myself during deckbuilding, using cards that don't normally see use. I liked trying to make what I had work. Overcoming the difficulties despite suboptimal cards. The short- and mid-term goals were really enjoyable. What progression is more lacking are long-term goals and something to do with excess resources. Please stop pretending like people are getting banned because they innocently want to play the game more. They are getting banned for actively and intentionally undermining the intended design of the progression system in an extremely drastic fashion that would have them advance many times faster than someone that does not. They are not needlessly getting banned. It's not like they are merely trying to get the most out of the progression on their own account. They want to circumvent it entirely. The example about someone wanting to start fresh because they invested their resources into things they didn't end up enjoying is a bit outlandish. You won't get more gold on a new account, so in both cases, you'd start from 0. On the contrary even, you won't be able to do the content that nets more gold in the beginning, so you'd be even slower. And the "failed" collection can always be liquefied into BFP to buy something else. That scenario you try to sell as the "innocent rookie case for multi accounting" doesn't really exist in that form. But one big issue I am seeing from this thread is the disregard and lack of understanding for the underlying psychology that game design strives to adhere to. Almost reducing it to surface level statement like "more stuff faster = better" with little context. Psychology is an extraordinarily important aspect that the current design aims to take into account. What is also missing is, more specifically, an analysis about what the current progression system aims to do and how it tries to achieve that. There are also too few to no critical examination of what the issues of proposed adjustments would be. They're merely presented as being "better", which isn't the case at all. Everything has pros and cons, it's a matter of priorities. One can definitely feel the frustration about progression speed but then it's mostly unguided ranting. It lacks elaborate specifics. All in all, I don't really feel like a lot of helpful thoughts can be salvaged from this. Best anybody can take from this thread is "dissatisfaction noted, guess we can try to figure out something reasonable, maybe". Which, to my understanding, is something that's already actively being worked on.

The current system is meant to reward players with more BFP for playing after quests. But without enabling the possibility of more time investment resulting in insurmountable advantages for progression. How would you design a system that rewards players for playing more without having it feel exhausting, mandatory or it resulting in massive advantages for people that play more, making everyone who doesn't have as much time, feel like their efforts are meaningless? Which boundaries would you set so that people can't exploit the system by simply artificially stretching their in-game time? Which achievements in particular? And how would you stagger them so people don't just do them early on and then still have none to do later? How would you design the dailies so that PvE players don't feel forced to participate in PvP in order to have good progression even though they don't enjoy it? Otherwise this would result in people cheesing PvP missions with faux matches where players search each other out to complete the quests. Which is more tedium and helps nobody.

So what specific changes and additions would you make to the progression system so that, again, there are interesting long-term goals that don't trivialize card and upgrade acquisition yet constantly provide something worth striving for? While taking into account that people need something worthwhile to do with their resources when their collection is nearing completion or they have everything they want. You are only taking about broad concepts. Multi accounting will not happen. So how would you realize those goals on only one account?

No, you don't ... go figure that one out yourself. As to what I am doing, when I feel like it, I am building some whacky off-meta decks and approach problems from a different angle than the established meta way while still staying within the games boundaries. There has to be a balance between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation at some point. Feels like you want to lean way more heavily on the extrinsic side. You know, how about we try to steer this entire thing into a more productive direction because, frankly, allowing multi accounting would undermine the entire progression system. You would then have to rebalance everything under the assumption of everyone having multiple accounts, multiplying their progression speed. Which, in turn, would royally bumfuck anyone that isn't twinking. At which point, as a side effect, you'd also start seeing people burn out from having to manage multiple accounts. A silly notion all around. As such it simply will not happen so you are wasting your keystrokes. Instead, give some ideas on how to improve the current progression system, offering interesting long-term goals that don't trivialize card and upgrade acquisition yet provide a constant, juicy carrot on a stick that's worth striving for. Also, take into account that people need something to worthwhile to do with their resources when they collection is nearing completion or they have all they want. But do it under the premise of only having one account.

id love to see someone complete the entire game on 5 different accounts in a single day completing all the color/unit specific achievements in a single day. looking at the rankings most missions seem to be around 10-20 minutes+ and the game has 27 missions not to count extra time assembling decks/transfering cards to new accounts ect. basically a full time job working at max efficiency to be able to buy a single promo firedancer perhaps. what is the player doing wrong? actively playing the game? not allowing players to work harder to get stuff quicker will only lead to them doing things like buying from players via black market. Those numbers come from only the by-the-by achievements that I listed. Not finishing all maps on expert. Not boosting your deck level to 120. Just the straight-forward ones I listed. There are relatively quick maps that can be done with any color, especially on Standard. That means in like an hour or less all the Mono-color Boosters are done. The T4 Building, Shrine and Dragonkin achievement can all be done in one go on a single map, netting 750 BFP in, say, 20-25 minutes. After that it's time to simply drain the reserve, which can be done in the background. Could also just skip the much longer below-25 achievement and haul 3 instead of 6 Boosters. Might even be more time efficient. One such haul per day for each account. And once all those twinks are set-up, they could be drained for their daily boost and Booster discount without any effort at all. Might as well just play on the testserver where all cards are unlocked.

I'd prefer the ability to mark multiple auctions and cancel those for more control. Like you'd mark files in a folder. With Shift-Click to mark everything from the first to the last clicked item.

Let's take a look at the low effort achievements. Reserve below 25, which merely takes time but can be done in the background: 6 General Booster Rogan Kayle, Brannoc, Viridya, Moon together with a couple other cards for pure decks: 1 Frost, Fire, Nature, Shadow Booster each. Dragonkin: 250 BFP T4 Buildings: 250 BFP Shrines: 250 BFP So we have 10 Boosters with a total Store value of 4700 and 750 extra BFP. If the Boosters got sold to other players at 20 BFP discount, that's 5250 BFP. But of course people wouldn't really need to buy Boosters anymore. They could create new accounts ad infinitum. Each time relatively quickly gaining 10 boosters and 750 BFP. Say someone had 5 accounts. One main, 4 twinks. That's 30 General Boosters, 20 Mono-color Boosters, 3750 BFP. Just for those achievements alone, which can all be done on a single day. Add to that 2000 BFP each day for dailies and boosts, if the player is so inclined. Hell, just make it 1250 from the boost alone. Basically, if you would allow multi-accounting, people could grab 10 Boosters each day and have infinite BFP. Doesn't sound like a recipe for healthy progression. Or a healthy economy. Not to mention you wouldn't really get more people playing, you'd just endlessly inflate account numbers. And you would even IMPROVE rewards ON TOP of allowing multi accounting? In hopes people would focus on one account instead of creating endless trow aways for easy free stuff? The achievements are both mid-term goals as well as starting boosts. You can do several relatively early to get up to speed for a new account. And some require a bit more investment, so you have things to work towards for a few weeks. Where it falls short is long-term goals, which is also one of the reasons why the original game died. Nonetheless progression is WAY better right now than it ever was. By allowing multi accounting people could endlessly go for the head-start achievements and generate absurd amounts of Boosters and BFP.

Since the map editor is getting worked on, are there any news on the weird behavior where randomly generated rPvE maps crash in-game while generating if even the slightest modification was made on them? @Emmaerzeh @LEBOVIN know what I am talking about. Emma had the same problem as me. Curiously, Lebovin somehow had a version of the editor or whatever that worked.

@Tweeto The new logo fits very well, amazing job. The Firesworn artwork always stood out, especially the weird blob arm with messed up anatomy. Great to have skilled artists on board of the project that can make things like this a reality. Can't wait to see the new cards. I hope at some point in-game textures will see some love too. Thinking mostly about Ironclad and how its card artwork looks absolutely stunning with all the hues of blue and slight purple. Yet in-game it has these ugly dark green and turquoise tones. Never stops being a disappointment when I summon one. I really enjoy these updates because it just shows how much is going on with the project and how many different people on all kinds of fronts are pouring their time and effort into it.

I am a bit surprised that making one affinity affect only own units and the other affect allies and own units isn't an option. Any particular reason why that didn't make the cut? Seems like a "best of both worlds" solution to me. The downside being that you'd probably have to scrap one of the current affinity effects. In which case I would lean more towards ditching the heal and making both affinities grant damage reduction.

Good job on the Booster History @MarcoMaar Looking forward to your next project. What was the reward interval on the "Completed Quests" achievement before?

If the story is supposed to be continued the world map probably wouldn't even change but just highlight different locations. There is continuity after all. Like a drop down menu at the top with "Chapter I" (showing the current locations of the Twilight and Renegades story) and "Chapter II" with anything new. Of course a different continent is also possible.

Skylords invoking entities is just creating a mimic. However, if the game would not have died, there would've been another campaign expansion introducing new factions. Just like Twilight/Lost Souls/Bandits were first introduced as campaign enemies. As such Amii as a shadow/nature faction can very well be independent, real entities in the (not yet existing) lore and Skylords then summon mimics of them as they do with everything else. Think of a "Rise of the Amii" or "Rebirth of the Amii" expansion that introduces them as an ancient, extinct race that just now attempted to re-create its former glory. Or maybe it was planned and before they were wiped out, they secretly wove a spell that created back-ups in their image which they now inhabit like vessels. It just has a massive delay.

So I guess Amii was some now extinct race of beings that were able to weave all kinds of magic. The remnants of their existence are all the walls, monuments, wells etc. Basically, previously they were like master of all sorts of magic and rituals. Frost, as the most enduring faction, has uncovered/preserved one such ritual because it fit their way of thinking and identity very well. Eventually the Amii were wiped out. Now, with the bodies shaped for themselves, they are kind of alive (nature) but also kind of dead (shadow). They probably still have their unique relationship to magic and power but in the end they are just vessels now.

Drag and drop would be comfortable, obviously. But if that's too much trouble, maybe a right click on a deck could open a tooltip/menu with "Move to:" which features a list of all folders where you can click which one it should go to. You could also add another button where the "Delete", "Rename" and "Clone" buttons are with "Move" and clicking on it gives you a list of all folders where you can then pick. Folders themselves sorted alphabetically. A way to minimize them is very important imo. A + and - on the side to open them up or close them. If it is at all possible, could add some extra info to a deck tooltip. Like when it was last played or when it was created. The presentation of the decks themselves is also quite barebones. Instead of just a gray slab with a name, icon and deck-level it could also feature the orbs used in the deck. Obviously not automatically but picked by the player. Quick and dirty mock-up: You could also add the default decks you start out with into the "Beginner" folder.

Right now all decks you make are just in a giant dump that you have to filter with names and/or which orbs they contain. As someone who doesn't focus on any particular deck not only did I hit the 100 cap a few times and had to clean up, I also naturally have a giant list of decks. But I noticed that there are already something like subfolders present. Namely "General" and "Beginner". My suggestion is to implement the feature of creating such folders yourself and the ability to open/close them.

Bought U3 for Envenom R. Applied it together with a charge. Error popped up. Deck I had selected appeared entirely empty all of a sudden. Upon relog the deck was normal and I had U3 Envenom R applied regularly. _log_proxy_latest.log

Best of luck, been nice talking to you on occasion. Always seemed equally passionate and level headed. Thanks for contributing so much time and effort to bring this game back in the best shape it ever was.

Under what circumstances would you want that?

We are slowly approaching unhinged levels of conspiracy theories. You can literally learn "wtf they were thinking" by giving the patch notes a read. They are linked in the official announcement. There are 650 people on the balancing discord, over 100 being online right now and probably also at most times. What sort of Illuminati are you fighting in your head where that qualifies as a secret? You can find the discord right here on the forum, in the wiki or by simply asking someone about how balancing decisions get made. Get a grip.

Could see it as an option in addition to "General" and "Free PvP" in the collection tab. Renaming "General" to "Own Collection" and adding "All Cards" for this feature. The cards are already portrayed as sitting in gray sleeves of some sort. Unowned cards could be empty sleeves showing a grayed out U0 version of the respective card. But still allowing to check upgrades and mouseover tooltips. Maybe @MarcoMaar can explore possibilities.