Cocofang

Well, individual convictions don't necessarily change or affect how the general consensus and culture of the community is. Yeah, advanced seems to be the in-between where the map isn't too easy but people also don't instantly resort to the most extreme measures available. And also don't get agitated for not playing the expected way. I don't necessarily think the everpresent speedrunning strats are directly related to the xp and gold grind. If it was only about that, everyone would speedrun Bad Harvest forever. Which many do, myself included, but meta-gaming and speedrunning exploits are used on many different maps that are much slower. However, failure DOES mean you are missing out on close to every reward. So I'd say a big contributor to the culture is the desire to avoid the failure state, no matter what. I don't think most people that use speedrunning strats check their time. I would guess it's more about having the easiest time possible. After all a failure is very punishing in Skylords. If you lose, you don't get upgrades, barely any gold or XP. So many would probably consider it a waste of time. I do however take issue with the sentiment of some people when they act as if certain maps are easy simply because of an existing speedrunning strat. A distinction between regular gameplay and meta-gaming should always be made. If someone suggests a speedrunning strat it should come with the caveat that it interferes with mechanics in unintended ways. Expert difficulty is notorious for being extremely hard, too much so in some aspects. It might be because originally it was intended to create an incentive for collecting and buying all the most powerful cards that make some maps easier. However, it did come with the side effect that people also went looking for solutions outside of official tools. Fighting unfairness with unfairness in a sense. I didn't mean it as an attack that you have to defend yourself against, more as an example how deep that sentiment runs that even extensive resources meant to help people master the game refer to meta-gaming. I highly doubt Mark of the Keeper was designed with the interaction in mind that indefinitely keeping ranged enemies alive while neutralizing them also blocks scripted waves from spawning. It can be argued it was later made into a real mechanic with Lost Banestone but that's a T3 building. And even then it's questionable if it's within the rules of the game. Fact of the matter is that blocking scripted spawns by keeping part of a wave alive completely undermines the difficulty of maps to a point where it's not even comparable. Nightguard, and by extension the entire takeover mechanic, is way too inconsistent to be considered functional imo. If that's the design it's broken design. Wouldn't surprise me with how bad even card descriptions are. Orb and energy requirements for enemies seem to be all over the place, it all relies on hidden information. The amount of viable cards compared to the total pool is disappointingly low, I agree. The total dominance of S tier cards, even outside of meta-gaming, is also on another level. There is like the absolute top, then the viable cards and then the entire rest. And the S tier cards are so ingrained that even the attempt of buffing viable or lesser cards barely has an effect on usage. But that's a different matter. There are many factors why meta-gaming has such a unique role in the Skylords community. Some seem to be: the extreme, sometimes unfair difficulty of some maps the harsh punishment for failure steep requirements for account progress obviously the implementation of an official leaderboard the lack of fixes from the original dev team

Toggle abilities give a full refund into void. You don't lose anything, you merely push the spent power back to be used again later. And since your Defenders ideally never die while executing that slow-push your main expenses are spells and the towers. The biggest hindrance is finding a good spot to build a Keep for offense and waiting for it to finish. After that you have to aggro the army of whichever camp you attack into your immortal Defenders and sit it out. It's a war of attrition basically. But you should always come out on top as long as waves don't come faster than you can destroy their spawns. It is slow and steady, the essence of frost, basically. Since several Defenders stacked on top of each other will distribute incoming damage very equally and melee enemies will all lay into the stack while generally ignoring the towers (as long as there are enough Defenders to attack) being pushed back is very improbable. Defenders + Keep Red is also just the basis for that tactic. Since it's T2 but only requires one frost orb you are free to splash into any other color your desire for additional customization. It is actually pretty crazy what this simple T2 defense set-up can withstand. As long as the Defenders are getting all the heat and consequently the Keeps don't die, you can outlast T4 units.

Going pure is hard to justify as it is. It's basically just for flavor and fun. A card like this would render pure decks absolute meme-material. This card would especially break T1. The one stage of the game that can be somewhat balanced around a clear, available pool of cards. Frostmages and Windweavers. Sunderer and Shamans. Firesworn and Motivate against L units. It also heavily affects pure T2 units. Harvester being the most notable example. Also, it would just be yet another card like Amii Monument where people just start to completely depend on it.

There is no such thing as going pure being worth it. It can be viable but it will basically never be as good as splashing because there are some really good cards that only require one specific color. Most notorious is probably the 1 Nature splash for obvious reasons. Hey, how about your expensive T4 units don't die? Yeah, I'll take that I guess. Pure is all for flavor and style. Here is something interesting for your consideration that I learned some weeks ago: Defenders + Northern Keep R. An immortal stack of Defenders for 20 seconds that deals 30% more damage and cannot be knocked back. Frost Mage benefits too. Home Soil them if you like. Live out your immovable object frost-fantasy as early as T2. Give it a try in the forge! Stack like 5 or 6 Defenders on top of each other, build two Keeps behind them and then spam a nice, mixed T1 up to T4 twilight army.

You can burn up one of Satanaels Snapjaws with Bloodhealing. Doesn't have long range but it's something.

I mean, yeah that's a novel concept. But what situation would you imagine where you'd actually have to make this choice?

So I think Skylords has a very unique relation to speedrunning that you usually never see in other games. To illustrate my point, imagine this situation: In some ego-shooter there is a very difficult room you have a shootout in and enemies come from all sides, there is little cover and ammo. Now imagine someone is searching for advice online and asks a community for help. What you can expect (aside from some "gitgud" replies) is probably people explaining where enemies come from, where to take cover at what moment and which enemies to focus on to get through. You know, normal gameplay stuff. Now imagine there is also someone that comes in and goes "lol this room is SO EASY, all you have to do is jump on the crate in the corner and shoot it with your revolver. the recoil makes it fall through the floor and you with it. now you are on the ground level. ezpz". What sort of reception do you think this sort of advice would get? Definitely not a positive one. That's because speedrunning and regularly playing the game are usually kept as two very distinct and separate ways to interact with a game. In Skylords, it's different. It has blurred together. Meta-gaming (approaching the game in a way that directly interfers with mechanics or uses hidden information of the game to gain advantages, playing outside the rules of the game) became part of normal gameplay. You see it expressed in sentiments and advice like: "the map is easy, just build Mark of the Keeper to mess with the ranged AI. if you keep them alive then scripted waves stop spawning" "yeah, it's pretty easy with Nightguard. that absurdly strong unit can be take over by her on this map, so just do that" "the timer doesn't matter. just block Jorne with buildings so he cannot follow his intended path" Many people have accepted this as the norm, the regular way to play Skylords. I don't know any other game where meta-gaming and exploit-strats from speedrunning are normalized to the point where when anyone asks for advice for specific maps the very first reply will most likely be something along those lines. Even the ambitious guide to all Expert maps lists known exploits as possible solutions. Some issues that come with this unique environment are: People start to completely and utterly depend on meta-gaming. Not only does it seem that many have never even played some maps without it, I regularly see people argue that exploits are downright necessary to beat some maps. Playing regularly gets looked upon unfavorably in multiplayer. If you don't do "whatever it takes" to win (as in, use the common exploits), you wasted everyone's time. It warps perceived power levels. Completely overpowered cards may be looked upon as - and I have fallen into this trap myself - "not so bad" because after all, there is this speedrunning exploit that's way more powerful. It warps perceived difficulty. Many Expert maps are extraordinarily difficult and require many tries and adjustments to deck and strategy if you attempt to solve them from scratch. But if you simply break the game, many hurdles downright vanish. You can perceive campaign PvE as "done" much sooner. Meta-gaming makes many maps much easier and quicker. You can tick them off, probably never revisiting them again because they are "solved". What I don't intend is to discredit speedrunning as a way to interact with the game and enjoy it. There is a lot of planning, learning, trial and error going into each speedrunning strat and many solutions people come up with are really clever. Trying to strain the games mechanics to their limits until they break and finding quirks to exploit for that one additional advantage that shaves another minute off your time is an impressive process. Not to mention some speedrunning strategies are very high-execution. What I am talking about is the various ways this game is affected by the blurred line between speedrunning and regular gameplay. The various exploits and meta-game strats that are commonplace in this approach across all video games do affect this game in very unique ways. What are some thoughts and experiences with this special environment?

Nightmare's End Deck Everyone and their mom does this map with T2 flyers or some Amii Monument snoozefest, but I wanted to try something else and it was extremely effective. One part of the strategy is something I learned from another player on Crusade and it can be applied here as well: Stack like 5 Defenders and one Crystal Fiend on top of each other, have them hunker down and build two Northern Keeps behind them. You can defend the bottom wall indefinitely with this approach. You open the gate, stack Defenders behind it and they will hold. When waves get stronger sometimes you have to use the Keeps ability. Bandits can do this even better with Commandos B and both types of Retreats, they hold forever without needing any attention at all. But early Juice Tanks are a big deal. Top wall gets defended by the army of Stone Tempests, Fiends and Defenders that you build up to eventually push. Let Defenders tank for the time being with Northern Keep support. You can also add one Tempest behind the Defenders to feel more comfortable at the bot wall. Once you are comfortable (I did it with like 9 Tempests or sth) you go top. Get your Defenders in range of the artillery and have them hunker down. They will tank the cannon for quite some time with Ray of Light and Crystal Fiend support. Have the Tempests clean up whatever reaches your Defenders. Roots if necessary. Focus on keeping Tempest alive, Defenders are fodder for distraction. Then push Tempests in to clean up the artillery cannon. Finish the rest of the camp. You need your Tempests to defend until you got a few Necroblasters going. After that you can switch to Ashbone for the top mid camp. Leave two Tempests as aggro magnets in front of your Necroblasters. Originally did it with Swampdrake support but I think Lost Horror is better. Or just plain Ashbones. Ashbones wreck bot mid camp as well. You will notice your Defenders are still all fine at your initial orb. Last hurdle is T4 but Ashbones and Lost Horrors with spell support have insane AoE clear. Mid can hold with Necroblasters and your eventual T4 army. Necroblasters can also hold your orbs. But expect to maybe lose one. Juice Tanks make energy a non-issue. Spam spells to support your teammate if necessary. I even added Offering to the deck because I was mostly gated by charges in the end. 2x Fountain of Rebirth (in Construction Hut area) is a 90 energy investment for a permanent 25/3sec reg. That's massive for the T2 push, Defenders on defense and for Ashbone. Ashbones have crazy synergy with HoTs overall. T3 and T4 is flexible in this deck. Can use most other things instead. The important thing is T2. Tempest, Defenders+Keep, Crystal Fiend, Juice Tank. Those are the center pieces, I'd say. Budget option would be Razorshard G instead of Fiend. But heals makes base defense and top push much more comfortable.

And if everyone uses the market instead then boosters become more lucrative.

Another thing you aren't taking into account is the extremely powerful FOMO. Say it's implemented, then just the fact that you CAN buy three additional boosters with gold and trash cards per week would make people feel both incentivized to grind for gold, which could become an off-putting, mind numbing grind for people that they still feel like they have to do to get the most tangible benefit, and it would feel bad for the people that can't do that in the first place because they are leaving boosters on the table that others can get. That's something you have to be careful with. The balance between making it feel like an okay-ish gold sink but also making it just bad enough so it's merely a last resort if you have nothing else to do with your gold is important.

While I do think some sort of gold-sink would be nice eventually, I don't like this. Even 50k for a single booster would mean speedrunning generates a booster every 10 minutes on average. That is insane. Even if you double it, an additional booster would be added to the total pool of cards in the game every 20 minutes. Still crazy. And at this price point people would either only speedrun like crazy for it or be outraged about the unobtainable cost. It also does not consider people that focus on only a few cards. Say someone plays and cares for only 50 cards. He would stop needing gold like ten times sooner than someone that likes to diversify and upgrades most of them. And with nothing else to do such a player would dump his gold on boosters to fuel charge upgrades. But I do like the idea of raising the value-floor while simultaneously lowering the value-ceiling for cards by giving them all some inherent value and use. It would also help taking cards OUT of the game again, which is currently impossible, aside from naturally quitting players.

Great work, appreciate it!

No, that's backwards. It's a fixed loot table that incentivizes playing different maps. Because you only need each upgrade once, you wouldn't hunt after them when they switch maps.

So from what I have seen now, the amount of struggle you experience is very dependent on your luck. People that get lucky pulls can build up a big pool of BFP in a short time. Which enables them to open even more booster, forcing a good pull eventually, recouping their BFP and so on. It also depends on how much cards you want to collect. If you don't care for certain, valuable cards it means you will build up much more BFP through sales. Another common approach is to sell the daily booster for a profit. But I think that only becomes viable after you have a solid card inventory. In the beginning you just need so much stuff that it's probably better to just go with boosters for a solid foundation and lucky pulls. An exception are probably people that only want one deck or two and play nothing else. For them selling their daily booster is a viable strategy. Overall, I think you can progress steadily and even if you keep most cards to yourself, rather quickly. HOWEVER, it is important to note that boosters are 100 BFP cheaper by default now. Even if you keep your booster, you are left with 150 excess BFP. That's a very solid amount. Will be a different story once boosters leave you with only 50 BFP extra. Add to that whatever extra BFP you drain from your reserve. Then the decision to sell or open a booster will be much more important. It might also influence BFP prices for cards across the board. That's when the current progression system will truly be put to the test.

The "value" of boosters would also have to consider the distribution of rarity, right? A shaman for example makes a booster much more valuable because it is just an uncommon than an equally expensive ultra rare. Or is that not the case because the uncommon pool is bigger than the ultra rare pool? Would cards need to have to have a "weight" depending on their rarity and possibly by the pool of cards they share their rarity with? Don't know, I am not a statistician

Please do Kobold Engineers next! They drive me fucking nuts when they run off to fight. I would love it you could disable their ability to fight so they only repair, no matter what. Wouldn't even mind if you removed their damage entirely.

Sounds great! Really appreciate the site. Looking forward to more improvements.

Site just died.

Ah, interesting. Never considered that patreons have an economical advantage.

Skylords first, official Patchnotes Hopefully the changes to PvP queues will be a good compromise for people that rely on the 120 decks to compete and those that wish to collect and build their own decks. Speaking of patchnotes, when can we expect the first balancing patchnotes? The ETA for the balance patch was 01.01.21, right?

It's a fan project. Non-profit. No contract. Allowed by the verbal go-ahead of EA because they obviously don't care for the IP. But they still own it. Don't know what kind of advertisement, aside from word-to-mouth, is even possible with an IP that you don't own. Or if anyone should be willing to take the risk to find out.

Charges have been frontloaded so that upgrades become less mandatory. 24 charges: 6+6+6+6 -> 12+4+4+4 20 charges: 5+5+5+5 -> 10+4+3+3 16 charges: 4+4+4+4 -> 8+3+3+2 12 charges: 3+3+3+3 -> 6+2+2+2 8 charges: 2+2+2+2 -> 4+2+1+1 4 charges: 1+1+1+1 -> 1+1+1+1

I think the opportunity cost is fine. One shadow orb and two deck slots to have vastly increased T4 charges if you need them.

Shiny or not, it's like they say: Can't polish a turd. The colors are just atrocious.

I suggest to "fix" Ironclad. On the card artwork it looks amazing. Silver, nice shades of blue, a slightly violet hue. A really strong thematic and harmonious coloring. Now, in-game on the other hand ... Garbage. Ugly bronze on the clogs. Disgusting dark green and blue cannons. Dark brown with a blue shine on helmet and shoulder plate. Castle has such drastically different colors. The colors clash heavily and don't fit together at all. Just how gross it looks makes me not want to play it. So my suggestion is to make the card artwork as ugly as the in-game model. Wait ...