Cocofang

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.

Arguing about what problem takes priority won't change anything about Decomposers issues. Also there are problems with both the reward system and this card that very clearly have nothing to do with one another. Orb tiers are force multipliers. A boosted players power grows exponentially because of that. The performance of one player then completely overshadows what an entire team could do otherwise. Nothing else in the game can transfer energy between players. Decomposer being utilized fundamentally warps how the entire round plays out. What is the „opinion“ here? And where is the connection to the reward system when stating, in addition to the previous points, that the power of a card not always being tied to the amount of use-cases or Decomposer and its power being T1. One would assume if even people defending and relying on a tactic to achieve the fastest times say that it's broken or even a mistake then its power is truly unreasonable. Generally games are balanced around top play, not top players. Top play being min-maxing a game, therefore highlighting what is actually too good and what is too bad. This then seeps down into regular play, which is one of the contributing factors why a meta emerges. In that way speedrunning exposes broken and overpowered mechanics. It identifies outliers. When something is seeing consistent play at the top, the question is usually not "Is it strong?" but "What makes it so strong? And is it too far above the rest?" As was already said, if carrying inexperienced players is supposed to be the aspect worth preserving there are plenty of other ways to do it. And as long as the spearhead player doesn't hog all resources then the things learned from watching can probably be applied to a broad spectrum of scenarios. It's of course not completely void of transferable knowledge but funneling on the other hand is a very specific tactic and therefore a lot of what you learn from it only applies to funneling. Everything a carry achieves is first and foremost enabled by having such excess energy. The execution, no matter how skillful, is only possible because of that. Decomposer also doesn't really have anything to do with unit/building/spell focused decks. What it does is simply supercharge one player and whatever deck gets used. Nor is the existence of the current iteration of Decomposer necessary for people to learn and understand the game. Bringing other T1 cards to the discussion, even those that find usage outside of T1, seems like a big stretch. Where would we even rate the ability to transfer energy, and the snowball effect it can enable, in terms of tiers? Granted a big part of its current power is being able to skip ahead immediately. But just as a concept, surely it would be higher than mere T1. T3 possibly? Akin to how current Shrine of War can negate the void-return system in many circumstances, making the 90% energy return near instant? How Enlightenment can circumvent the rule that you have to have certain orbs? Amii Monument changing the rule of having to claim T4 on the map and the amount of orbs available? It'd probably be in that type of echelon. Yet it's T1, making it stand out even more. Saying that farming would be gone anyway because people eventually own everything is such an odd point to make. What does that even mean? Almost seems like an existential angle. Why bother doing anything, eventually we will reach technological singularity and the AGI takes over. There is no single stat to rule them all, like play rate, either. Play rate of a card tells you nothing except … well, how often a card is played. You learn nothing from this number aside from that. You don't learn when it is used, why it is used, how it is used, how it affects the game when used, with what other cards it gets used, etc. Stats are not the end, they are the beginning. Stats also do not show how limiting the current Decomposer can be going forward because of its excessive strength that is always looming and always demands to be considered. As for wanting to dismiss Decomposer being a potential trouble maker in 2v2/3v3 PvP, I wonder where we should be inclined to make the cut-off point in terms of relevant population. Because if one were to argue that considering PvP in this matter is unimportant because it's just a small fraction of the community then the logical conclusion of that reasoning is that the handful of speedrunners that rely on Decomposer are equally negligible. After all, a repeat-argument is that if map rewards were changed then Decomposer would stop being a problem for regular play, retaining its status as a speedrunning tool. Which would mean it was solely preserved for a faction of the community. So, I'm unsure where that argument is supposed to lead us. Taking Expert difficulty, meant to be the most challenging in the game, as the benchmark for accessibility, is odd. Maybe the problem is that new players notice Expert difficulty is unlocked right from the start. Creating the expectation that they can tackle it right out of the gate. There are a few Expert maps that border unfairness (after all, the initial business model aimed to push people into buying more and stronger cards) and I am not against adjustments at all but it IS the highest difficulty. Not so sure if mud slinging about authority is the thin ice we want to tread on. Plenty could be said there. Reworking gold payout to be based on in-game time like BFP payouts ignores card upgrades once more. They are effectively gold payouts and would these be regulated? Also, might as well just rename the game to "Encounter with Twilight"-lords at that point, as that is pretty much an open secret.

Again, account progression and map rewards are different issues that just happen to overlap with Decomposer. The problem with Decomposers function not being intended is just a small faction of the entire deal and not a main point. Although I highly doubt it would still be able to do what it does, had the game not faced an early decline and death. The question is what effects the card has. The second the Decomposer tactic is used a good chunk of the game (if not all of it) plays out significantly different to the point where it isn't even vaguely comparable to a strategy without it. Supercharging one player has huge ramifications. The fed player has much more agency in the round and can progress at a much faster rate. Meanwhile every point of energy transferred from the feeding players equals less agency for them. Since orb-tiers function as force multipliers (every point of energy spent on a higher tier nets greater results) the boosted players power grows exponentially as they use their advantage to skip ahead. That reaches a point where one players performance vastly overshadows what otherwise could be done by the entire team without Decomposer. It also interferes with two parts of the game that no other mechanic can: The starting power of each player is theirs alone and players cannot trade power they have acquired. This shows that the Decomposer tactic fundamentally warps the game when it is used. It is so strong that even people that rely on it as a speedrunning tactic to achieve faster times on certain maps made the admission it's broken. But it is a tool that significantly boosts performance, so where things drift apart again is that some people want to keep it because its power is what they desire. A repeat argument is that some fastest times on multiplayer maps could no longer be achieved without Decomposer and by a big margin at that. So if that is true then there is absolutely no question about its excessive power. Something being too strong is also not always related to it seeing play everywhere and all the time, that's a misconception. Niche tactics can be unreasonably strong when their circumstances align. Because what matters is how it plays out when it can be utilized. Nobody would argue Enlightenment is a weak card because it can be used to prematurely summon Emberstriker or because it isn't very useful on maps where T3 and T4 are very close to one another. Or, just to illustrate the point further with a different example, say in a team VS team egoshooter players only buy cheap pistols in one round but a certain pistol is much more powerful than others. So despite this strong pistol not seeing use in rounds where all kinds of weapons can be bought, it's still too strong within its niche. You mostly measure its power by its effectiveness when there is an opportune situation to use it. Those circumstances being more plentiful only elevates an issue further. Similarly, while the Decomposer tactic cannot be used on singleplayer or maps where orbs (and their necessary force multiplier) are too far apart, when the situation allows for it, it provides power like nothing else. Additionally, all of that has to come with the consideration that Decomposer is a T1 card. That means that one of the most powerful tools in the game, that can entirely warp how a round plays out, and intersects with the fundamentals on how energy works between players, is available at the very moment you start a map. If you'd compare tactics within their respective niches is there anything even vaguely similar to the power the Decomposer tactic enables? The argument that finishing times for maps would be much slower implies not. And, like I stated previously, the tactic can always find its way into average play and warp it with its power and influence. Attempting to preserve it by changing other things in the game to accommodate it would mean that it's still there, waiting to be a problem again. Not to mention it would always have to be considered when making future balancing/progression decisions. A repeatedly brought up concern is how PvP balancing limits and affects PvE balancing. But what about how a mechanic like this would unjustly limit design space on multiple fronts for the entire game? What can, cannot and must be changed because of how it would interact with this excessively strong mechanic is a question that will always have to be considered. And if something is missed the game is in shambles once more until that is addressed. Finally, to touch on the aforementioned PvP again, it was already noted that Decomposer can be problematic in 2v2 and 3v3. Orbs are accessible from the start and therefore the force multiplier by one player ascending tiers faster could prove oppressive. It's simply not meta yet but that can change. All of these problems have nothing to do with account progression and only with Decomposer.

Two entirely separate issues are being conflated here. With gold/XP progression is mostly being used as a deflection to protect Decomposer. Say Decomposer was fixed. Instantly the times to finish certain multiplayer maps would rise because it is by far one of the most powerful tools there is to speed up progress. Undoubtedly a new "most efficient" way to get gold would surface. It would be noticeably slower than currently. Maybe it would even be achievable through regular play. Passage to Darkness comes to mind. Or rPvE9. The point is that the margin between the "most efficient" way to farm gold and the "average" way would be significantly smaller. For now. However what a Decomposer fix wouldn't protect from would be some other speedrunning tactic/strategy finding it's way into the "mainstream" and being now used to finish maps quickly for massive gold returns, exploiting the current gold/XP reward system once more. So now say gold/XP returns were changed. First of, it's important that the reward system is intuitive. So some messy formula that gives you a % of whatever gold for orbs or objectives or whatever is nonsense. But it's not impossible to rework the system, maybe the initial implementation just didn't hit the mark. Let's assume a new reward system gets implemented that is both intuitive and simple (maybe something with bounties on side objectives or placing gold chests in key locations) but also does not reward the same gold/XP simply for finishing maps as fast as possible. That would immediately discourage straight forward goldfarming. However, something I have not seen talked about a lot are upgrades. Rare and especially Ultra Rare upgrades are expensive to unlock so it incentivizes people to instead play their respective maps. Even if someone got very low gold/XP for b-lining a map as fast as possible, they'd still be rewarded with upgrades. Would you then tie getting upgrades to in-game actions? Getting the ones you want is already slow because of RNG and distribution among players. Leaving an upgrade on the map would be a big hit to progression. Something else to consider with strictly tying gold/XP rewards to objectives/chests/whatever is that a pressure would emerge for all participants to go for these key points. We have already seen that in the beginning with the Passage to Darkness gold chest achievement. People were constantly pushing to open all chests and complain after the match if something was missed. Also, if only gold/XP rewards were changed and Decomposer would retain its current function it would just be a matter of time until it rears its head again to be a problem once more. Instead of farming gold/XP, people could continue farming upgrades with it. Or maybe eventually a strategy emerges where, even with a changed gold/XP reward system, you'd be able to finish a map exceptionally fast while also hitting most objectives. Speedrunning tactics constantly trickle down into regular play in this game. You'd always have to be on the lookout, all you'd do was to push back the problem. Both the current gold/XP reward system for maps and Decomposer are separate issues that happen to overlap here. Addressing only one will just result in the other becoming a problem again somewhere down the line.

Making it a reoccurring birthday code sounds okay-ish. You also raise a valid point about the game not having a collection achievement for cards. There is one for upgrades but it's not quite the same. I could also see an Achievement "The Completionist" for getting all obtainable cards in the game. But Promo Snapjaws as a reward for that would suck for people that already had them from launch.

What I would like to see is an archive of community updates that gives bullet points and maybe one short sentence for each of them. Basically a summary that can then maybe be linked to at the end of each update. Could make an extra topic for that, lock it and then just keep editing. Could've added for completions sake.

Good communication channels are important. Nice to see the team has found someone to be on top of that. Will you also be handling communications with event hosts, for example regarding rewards?

Been watching his art for some time on the Discord, it looks really good and mashes well with the artistic style the game already has. Also brings in his own flair. His progress and results look professional, does he have an official online presence?

I'd like it if default gold/xp rewards for playing wouldn't become a totally convoluted mess with numerous conditions attached. "You get 1000 XP if you had 4 monuments and 200 gold for clearing each side objective with 46% bonus on a waning moon when it's also summer on Jupiters eye, etc." No, thanks. Empathizing key positions on the map by overhauling gold chest placement and gold content would be something to consider.

Another banger by Asraiel.

I think Mana Wing is a feast or famine card. They can cheese some cPvE maps because there isn't sufficient anti-air or ranged. In direct confrontations they are strictly inferior to Windweavers, even against S units because of their multi-shot. Honestly not sure why you even feel like you need additional T1. Even on their own WWs supported with Surge of Light are enough to push through most things you encounter on T1. Shaman is nice but every Shaman healing is also one WW not dealing damage, so it slows you down. WWs are also better than Wearbeasts against S units. If they don't get burst down Wearbeasts can tank decently and they are a cheap swift unit, which can be nice depending on circumstances. If anything, I'd add a Dryad B, so your T1 army takes less damage. That also means that heals become more effective. Also note that Werebeasts are buggy. When they lose a part of their squad and it then respawns because of regen or healing they stutter while running.