Linvega

Nobody demands anything. The reality is just that there will be people like me who have very little time so with free pvp decks I can actually play pvp. Without them I won't. That's not a demand but a simple fact. Or people like several of my friends, who don't care at all about pve, so if I tell them "well, you have to grind pve for several days until you're on equal footing in pvp" they'll laugh, ask me whether I'm serious, and then play another RTS like AoE or CoH2 instead. Battleforge has many unique traits in pvp and gatekeeping them behind a pve grind is just stupid.

Nobody demands anything. The reality is just that there will be people like me who have very little time so with free pvp decks I can actually play pvp. Without them I won't. That's not a demand but a simple fact. Or people like several of my friends, who don't care at all about pve, so if I tell them "well, you have to grind pve for several days until you're on equal footing in pvp" they'll laugh, ask me whether I'm serious, and then play another RTS like AoE or CoH2 instead. Battleforge has many unique traits in pvp and gatekeeping them behind a pve grind is just stupid.

Nobody demands anything. The reality is just that there will be people like me who have very little time so with free pvp decks I can actually play pvp. Without them I won't. That's not a demand but a simple fact. Or people like several of my friends, who don't care at all about pve, so if I tell them "well, you have to grind pve for several days until you're on equal footing in pvp" they'll laugh, ask me whether I'm serious, and then play another RTS like AoE or CoH2 instead. Battleforge has many unique traits in pvp and gatekeeping them behind a pve grind is just stupid.

We've seen this topic appear from time to time, but I honestly don't think anything will satisfy players who don't like free PvP decks other than good intentions that will destroy the gamemode. I know all the new players I invited to the game would stop playing PvP if they had to grind 10's of hours in PvE first, and I know many others share the same view. It's honestly not a huge community, and PvP can realistically become unplayable with too few players.  
I don't think it is productive to tell the entire PvP community how to best play the gamemode they can already enjoy with no restrictions. Everyone is on the same skill level now, there is no more pay-2-win, and there are even balance updates. Life is good.
Plus, the more you play PvP, the more you want to experiment with new strats, adapt to the meta, which leads you to buy and upgrade new cards. It's just a different grind cycle than PvE, which does not depend on fully upgraded decks to be balanced. 

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I'm really confused which game people were playing before, because this has always been my experience in BF. With the difference that I can now at least start with a lvl 120 deck myself, instead of having to grind PVE until I can compete in PVP.

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I'd invert this. In Ranked, it should be skill that decides where you end up on the leaderboard. Not capacity for grinding. And the reality is that if you fight with a non-optimized deck vs an optimized, you WILL run into situations where you lose against fairly simple unit spams because you don't own a specific key card for that matchup, or it simply isn't upgraded high enough.
Also, talking for myself and my friend group of 4 people who play RTS together from time to time, we play games longer if they're balanced and fun. Grinding purely serves as a barrier to entry. It's much more satisfying to notice how you actually get better at the game and thus win more, as opposed to winning more because you have plainly better cards.
Tbh I have a hard time even understanding the sentiment of wanting grinding for PVP. I can understand liking grinding in PVE, because there you're playing against a (rather dumb) AI and thus balancing makes no sense - if it was balanced, you'd win everytime. But in PVP, adding grinding just means that you're forced to play uninteresting non-games.
I remember back when BF was still an EA game and I started out with lvl ~60, reasonably decent shadow/frost deck on low ladder. Roughly a third of my games, I'd play against a clearly terrible lvl 30 or so deck and completely stomp the opponent, even though I wasn't much better in terms of micro etc. . Another third of the time, I'd play against a lvl 100+ netdeck (often pure fire) and get completely stomped myself and again, not because I necessarily played worse. Actually interesting games, against OPs with similar deck lvls that are similarly optimized, seemed like the minority of matches. Only after I got lvl 100+ myself, reached a higher rank and had all the important cards, games were decided by skill. I don't mind getting stomped if the OP is actually clearly better. But if I had as little time back then as I have now, I don't think I'd have persevered until then.
 

I want to throw in the idea of some map specific one time achievement.
I had to play through encounters with twilight a few times lately and after a while I gave myself a challange that would make a perfect one time achievement imo. Once you reveal the bottom right corner of the map, there's an NPC frost mage that gets attacked by Twilight enemies. She dies pretty quickly and my goal was to protect her and keep her alive until the end of the mission. It's quite hard but I managed to do it after a few attempts.
Another idea is to complete the mission defending hope without losing any of the 4 default towers.
I think you can find one of those achievements for most maps in the game. Not sure if those are even possible to implement but I would love to have small optional things in missions as achievemts in the game.

I've been kind of wondering about this myself.    This effort is different in that it's re-launching an already-complete product, and will be facing different challenges than other games. I don't know if there will be additional content added, but I'm wondering about the longevity of this thing.  It seems like the game is mid-boost due to nostalgia and people realizing it's now live (like me),  and I imagine people will sort of drift off.  player-base attrition could be a lot worse for this game than a standard game.  I'm wondering what actions can be taken to continue to grow the player base.  If nothing else, to counter the constant atrophy I'm expecting.

We added a new mode in sparring which does not allow the usage of the free PvP decks. Free PvP decks will be allowed in the ranked mode just as before. We do not want players who get lucky with boosters, or those who have spent the most time grinding upgrades and gold in PvE maps to have any kind of advantage.
 
 
 

I'm really confused which game people were playing before, because this has always been my experience in BF. With the difference that I can now at least start with a lvl 120 deck myself, instead of having to grind PVE until I can compete in PVP.

-> The absoluteley unique Voidsystem and the mechanic of passive ressource income, which makes this game less APM heavy and allows you to focus on combat and strategic decisionmaking only
-> Full information gameplay allowing you to make alot more precise calculations
-> The ability to adjust your cardset and individualize your faction based on your playstyle and strategy
-> The possibility of spawning units and spells directly into the battlefield
 
 

In open stress test I was playing a bit of PvP. I was running across Shadow and Fire decks all the time as well, and about free decks, I think there were either none, or just 2 stages of upgrades, so nothing changed in that matter. If PvP is putting you off because of decks you play against, then perhaps it's not a gamemode for you? Nothing changed in here over past few years.
Making free decks a bit weaker (in different ways) could be a good thing, because some decks are just perfect. However, I believe cards with 2 upgrades, was a tested solution at some point, and for some reasons it was not appropriate.
Also splitting already small PvP community into smaller parts is a bad idea, this is why Devs are not eager to split queues and so on.

Yes, because this thread is titled "Remove lending LVL120 PVP decks"
I am fine with alternations such as requiring you to pay a fee to rent them (when I first suggested this, I wanted them to be random each week but you can also rent a chosen one by paying BFP), but I need to defend their existence.
From a statistics standpoint, there were over 600 PvP games played today iirc, so this system definitely encouraged new players to try PvP. The advantage of this system will become especially apparent in the future, once new players come and they want to compete with people who can have level 120 decks naturally, while in a month this topic will be irrelevant to the people who want to build a deck from scratch.
But why do you care if the higher deck score is PvP vs PvE? If you want to grind just to see upgrades go up, wouldn't a better metric be to find all cards U3? It just seems like grinding PvE for a PvP deck is so arbitrary--meanwhile, level 120 PvP decks are a prerequisite to play PvP.
Yes, I can mentally understand wanting to grind for a certain reward, but why does it have to be PvP decks--since as you've already said, you are exclusively a PvE player?
What if I liked grinding PvP matches, and I wanted the reward of being in the top 20 ranked ladder to be the ability to play rPvE? You would probably tell me to leave your PvE game mode alone, rather than prevent you from playing rPvE just because you have no interest in trying to rank in the top 20?
 

I don't understand? If a player enjoys the grind, then they should grind. If they don't enjoy the grind, they should skip it?
What does the reward of the grind have to do with whether you enjoy it or not?
 
How would you feel if you weren't allowed to play campaign mode until you won a bunch of PvP games? It is a senseless restriction imo.

I mean, you can still grind? But now you can also play (2) decks while you wait
And so you are not at a disadvantage vs someone just because you didn't grind enough, and newcomers can get directly into PvP without having to grind their way around.
There are still many cards missing that can't capture every possible deck combo; I probably play 3-5 pvp decks every day, and many times I change out another 4-5 cards each deck depending on how I'm feeling
The free decks give dedicated pvp players access to pvp with no barrier except if they want certain tech cards. Anyone interested in grinding for pve must still use the regular, unupgraded cards.