Kilian Dermoth

Fastest yes, best not necessarily.

I wouldnt say that amii monument is per se cheating, because it does what it was made for. Only on soul tree I see it as cheating because I doubt that it was intendet to skip the last part of the map. On one side I like the idea of the card and the card itself but I dont think its a good card as it is now, its even better than a real monument! Improvements could be to make it T4 so that it is used for 5 color decks only or make it temporarily like enlightement (a weaker enlightement available for all colors), maybe there are even better ideas. I wouldnt take votes to serious, because they can be faked by multiaccounts and are usually more like an emotional desicion, than a rational one. Also I wouldnt make a difference who says what but more what the person says. If its reasonable for a PvP card but comes from a newbie speed runner its more worth than a bad idea from an expert PvP player. For me its important to know why a change is made and whats the reasoning behind it (this way I think that the forum is better than discord, because you can come back and easily find the discussion about each card). Also its important that everyone could take part of the discussion even if only a few will do at the end. Votes could be used to see if its an accepted change by the comunity or not. But the descion must be made by someone who will be neutral and objective with the right priorities at best (I know its impossible).

@Halis Have you even read the whole thread? Because it doesnt look like you did. You talk completely off topic stuff. Its not speedrunning per se its the cheasy / cheaty parts of the speedrunning. No one want to remove speedrunning but people want to improve the game by remoeving or correcting bad game design or bugs. Your speedrunning collegues (and you?) want to leave everything as it is because of nonsens like comperable all time rankings. This has nothing to do with what you explained speedrunning is about, because I think almost anyone knows that already so that you just explained the obivicious, which wont be affected in any way. Because it will stay the same after balancing the game. Btw. you again proved how conceited you and your collegues are by saying that I dont know what I am talking about... And I bet you would say that to anyone else who would have a contrary opinion, in this case, that balancing the game especially for modes where this is ncessary (as PvP) outweights nonsense like still being able to use bad game design (like Lebovin promoted) or to keep rankings comperable forever. @Pritstift 1.) No one want to take speedrunning from you, but its the least important to consider when it comes to balancing, bug fixing or improveing game design. Even EA added it as the last mode, maybe because the effort to do so was minimal. 3.) Its wrong what you say, this is done! I think I even read about it in your beloved all time speed ranking thread (but not sure if it was there or somewhere else). 4.) There is no proof in what you are saying. The simplest proofs for what I am saying are guns of liar and soul tree. You skip usually essential parts of the map, not just side quest, in a way that wasnt intendet for sure. That doesnt mean that it is done on any map, only that it is done at all. Also its obivisious that you have to know the map to do so but no matter its still a cheat. Even for cheating you have to know how to cheat, dont you? 5.) You will find for any bug or cheat a technical reason, but it doesnt change anything, because the game runs on a technical machine, any behaviour has technical reasons... 6.) Tell me where I did say that? I said that the first priority for balancing is PvP, that means cards that are used or will become used in PvP. I even stated that this should primarily include cards until T3, because T4 is almost not used in PvP. But PvP should still not be the only reason for balancing, so PvE cards which are almost useless should get buffed for example. But this one has a lower priority and even here speed running shouldnt be taken into consideration. The reasons for this are many and most are already said (not only by myself). 8.) Another story, but yeah it should get some balance, but I dont know how besides of buffing non useful cards to get some more diversity. But you shouldnt be able to win with any possible deck.

Again a wrong assumption, I am not a pvp player (even if some interest exists and I might give it a try from time to time), but I undestand that it needs balancing while the other modes dont necessarily need big balance changes. Its for example cheaty if it comes to skipping whole parts of maps, because thats what cheats usually do. Best example: "soul tree and amii monument", thats for sure a bug and a cheat. Another one is to start a map with 4 players and let the other ones leave to have the wells and monuments just from the start and skip a whole or even 2 tiers. Yeah you use built in game mechanics, but you know what? Cheats are also built in or game mechanics which get abused. No difference to what you do, it just doesnt sound as good as "understanding game mechanics" or how you want to call it else. Speedrunners are just a loud minority. It looks like you demand that the devs should built the game just for you, how many, 8 players, because you are the loudest here? Also balance changes shouldnt be made to keep all time rankings, so that this 8 persons or even less when it comes to the top position, can keep their first, second and third place, no one else is carrying about? Thats even worse than pvp players who fear to ruin their win / lose rate ...

So its better to give no bug report at all?

@wanky Nice written, really, but it doesnt represent the truth. But I think, I never played with you or just cant remember so that it might be true for you and how you act but sure not for the speedrunner community! I already played more than once with speedrunners (it looks again conceited that you accuse my experience is based only on one game) and there was never talk about speedrunning upfront, because this way I would leave or would say that I am fine with it. And if I say never, I mean never! The talk (usually with insults, threats or by leaveing) came always mid game when I didnt play that cheese. And I bet I am not the only one who experienced this more than once! @Dion my experience is similar. But I use global effect buildings, too. Void manipulation only if its needed for my deck (spell casting) or to make it easier for the other players (especially new ones on expert maps). Funny is that there are even players who get enraged if you build such buildings yourself and want to make you to destroy them so that they can go almost afk and feel helpful.

Dont know if we are talking about the same message. Mine apperead mid game and asked for reporting if bugs appear. I have seen that message but didnt experience any bug. Also if you contacted me, then I just didnt recognize it. Btw. I think that rPvE and normal PvE players are the biggest part or I am wrong? Because rPvE != PvE != speedrun. Wrong. I dont care about that. There are 3 main reasons why I dont like speedrunners: 1. Playing with speedrunners (non single player maps) means like playing with people who abuse the game mechanics in such a way that it feels like cheating. You may like such a playstyle, like other speedrunners (had to laugh many times about the amii monument and soul tree discussion because its just to obvisious that the speedrunners want to protect their "cheaty" game mechanics as much as possible). I dont like that "cheaty"-playstyle. If you play with such a guy he will even force you to play his shitty "cheaty" game, too. It became nearly impossible to play guns of lyr without skipping the most part of the map. They even insult you if you play "normal" instead in the way they want, I just recall some games with Lebovin for example... 2. They are way to conceited for knowing their "cheaty" game mechanics and think they are better than other players and show their behaviour every single time you read something, one of them is saying. 3. They seem to care less about others, they want only their pervert way of playing this game to be protected as much as possible. Wrong again and a perfect prove for the 2. point. I for sure know many of this tactics and sometimes I use them too, but usually I dont force anyone and often I prefer to play without using them. For example the amii monument soul tree bug was the first thing I tested when I had amii monument for the first time (at ea times) without being told about it from someone else. First I thought it cant be that EA overlooked this, but they really did... Btw. I think that changing cards on game mod is a really bad idea. This would lead to very much confusion especially for new players but not exclusively to them. It might work for people who will play only one mode and talk exlusively to people who play only this mode. But if people start to play different modes or talk with people who play different modes they would rarely talk about the same thing. Extra text on cards wont fix that, too.

To the bug reporting thing: At first the whole thing is just to complicated (giant overcomplicated template, multiple forums, 1000s of bug reports and so on) and when the open stress test began there were already over 1000 bug reports from closed beta testers that just appeared at once for non closed beta testesters. So, especially at the beginning it was hard to tell (for non closed beta testers) if a bug was already reported or not while the reactions of the staff were sometimes totally unfriendlay to already reported bugs or there were even no reaction at all (did they read, will they do anything, is this report even appreciated?). Also the reactions I have seen to bug reports that didnt use the template were unfriendly, too. Thats why I thought: fuck it, there are others who will report the same bug, let them have the hassle with that overcomplicated template, searching the forum and the reactions of the staff. But sometimes I just felt, maybe its a not so common bug or its a new bug, so I just wrote a little bit on discord about it and got sometimes also a bad (aggressive looking) answer by the staff about why I am not writeing in the forum? No this reaction didnt made me to write in the forum because of some of the mentioned reasons and I even thought: fuck it, next time i think twice about even reporting on discord. This happend some times and every time my interest in reporting in any way got lower, especially because the game looks very stable for me now. Yeah thats critisism on the staff and how bug reports were handled, especially at the begin of the open stress test. I know you might have another opinion or another point of view but I am not interested in discussing this further, just take it as my (bad) experience and do with it what you want. Another reason for not reporting bugs is that most of the bugs I encountered were common bugs where I thought I couldnt provide that much of new information, because most of them just appeared of a sudden and werent possible to reproduce. Most of them also appered while interacting or playing with other people, so maybe they did something (while I did something?) so that its impossible to reproduce without knowing what the other person did. So I just could say, hey I had that bug, but really dont have a clue why and it often didnt happen again for a while. Other people might have other reasons for not reporting or are just lazy. And to the message with the bug reporting. I have seen that message but if it only apeared while a specific bug happend, I just didnt recognize that bug at all, just the message. And that discord has its own bug report section is completely new to me, I even had to check if it is really there after I have read it in this thread. Especially because of the reactions of the stuff I thought there wont be a simple way to report a bug. The section is new, isnt it? To the balancing thing: PvP: should be the main aspect for balancing (until T3) because its most important here. PvE: should only be balanced in a way so that unused cards get also used. Further than that there shouldnt be much balancing, because its not necessary that the cards are all competitive to each other. Thats not how PvE works. Speedrunners: I wonder why they are even mentioned that much? You shouldnt care about them at all, because speedrunning is playing PvE in a (usually abusive) way to achieve lowest times. So if balancing for PvE doesnt matter that much why should it even matter for speedrunning? Especially because speedrunning is about abusing unabalanced cards. So balancing speedrunning would mean to remove that unabalance in some cards, speedrunners are using, and not to keep this unbalance in some cards. Also this would be more of a PvE and PvP balancing than a Speedrunning balance. Even if they are affected by balance changes there is really no reason to consider especially speedrunning while balancing cards. A good speedrunner should also be good with changed cards, also this could lead to new challenges to them.

If my nick wont fit, I am against, especially because I dont see the relevance for clans...

Its one thing if its agreed to do so its another one if forced by others. I wonder what someone who does that might think, but it might still be retarded... And this is everthing but teamplay...

You shall not play nature xD! Its odd but somehow funny xD. You didnt play on the test server?

Starting to make a map, even if you never did before? Here is where you start: Paper & Pencil, no I am not joking. The first thing you need is a concept. If you dont have one you wont do maps even if you knew how to handle the map editor. Otherwise its easier to look exactly those things up on how to do it in a map editor if you already knew what you wanted to do.

No, I hear about extra hard difficulty the first time. Would it be possible to add it in the UI of the game, so that those who want a challenge can try them? To the frustation thing: yes and no. It might make someone rage more and maybe swear but I think its still less frustrating because its easier to get over it and just forget a loose. I have seen such modes in Elder Scrolls Legends and Hearthstone. I dont have any numbers but I think they are still well visited. To random decks: they shouldnt be completely random, not like frostmage and mine in the same deck, that wouldnt work. But for example master archers instead of frost mage or even both instead of frost glyphe. There should be a system behind the random decks. First step would be to choose the orbs, that could be done completely randomly. Next only all cards are filtered by those, that can be played with the orb constellataion. After that you should get at least 1 unit by tier. The units should be one that can be played alone in a tier (like windweavers, magma hurler, shadow phoenix). Units like frost sorceress would make it necessary that you get another unit. Maybe a unit ranking should be involved. Then you should get some spells, not necessarly 1 per tier, but here should be also a ranking involved. If you have creeping paralysis, curse of oink should be very unlikely to be put in the deck, too. And so on. And a few slots, maybe 4-6 are completely randomly chosen among the playable cards.

Yeah I know the cards. A few hours ago I tried to build a deck based around bandit sorceress ability. But it didnt really work... Never used lost converter as far as I know. But I usually dont play lost souls at T2. I somehow dont like frost (except stonekins). And to fleshbender, yeah I used it once for RPVE9 xD. Maybe its possible in the futre to add new game modes. Because of thinking about TCGs, the modes where you build a deck out of random cards and play afterwards are kind of fun to me. They are always somehow different. I think they could also lower the entrance barrier to PVP because this way new players could have luck with cards and good players hava bad luck. So the first group would get a chance and the second group a challenge, this is what both groups want. Also loosing with a random deck is less frustating because you cant blame that the other just had alread all cards upgraded and you had no chance because of this, also you could think if loosing: "bah, just bad luck, next time I will be luckier and win some matches, instead of: no chance, lets leave".

Tried to turn of AV, and redownload it?

Some exploits (by far not complete): Soultree: Amii Monument Guns of Lyr: Using cultists to destroy the building that leads to the last wave Sunbridge: Quick Gate Switching Convoi: The Nightguard trick Dwarven Riddle: Flying Units which can go to the other side Different Maps: Blocking quest units (Jorne, Bandit Walker, ...) General: Decomposing others units, Takeing others monuments, wells, and such All are exploits. Its odd that people who use such exploits usually are those that complain that maps are to easy... Back to topic: the main problem I think can be summed up in one word: repition. To break it, you need (new) content or something that makes it feel less repititive. RPVE is one way, even if its basically always the same there is still variance, not so for campaign maps, they are always the same. Still despite the variance RPVE is the same, so that it gets boring after a while, too. Campaign maps in contrast are different, some even with unique ideas but they lack variance, because a campaign map stays always the same, no variance. One role does play the AI, because it is really stupid, basically it is: spawn this units after this time and run to this point, thats it. Everytime exactly the same way. Another way could be PVP, here you have variance because you dont know how the other person will act. Maybe its not the case on high ELO because people tend to play some known tactics after a while. But PVP has its own problems, for example the high entrance barrier. Campaign maps, because of limited maps will always lead to repition. Especially because the AI isnt fixable, is it? Maybe it is possible to build community maps, that have some variance, like RPVE, dont know if that is even possible with the map editor. Otherwise you had to keep building more and more campaign maps to keep it entertaining. Btw. I am eagerly waiting to play the 2 12 player maps (which feal like 4 new campaign maps) again. At the end of the game at ea times i liked to play them most. RPVE will depend on the personal gusto if its entertaining but after a while everyone will get bored, doing the same even if there is some variance. The thing is that this seems to be the main content of the game after finisihing the maps once. But people who doesnt enjoy RPVE can feel to be forced to play it because of 2 reasons. First most players are playing RPVE, it is more difficult to fill a campaign group than a RPVE group. Second you get something for playing RPVE and you exactly know before what it is. It isnt the most rewarding in average but it is still high rewarding and you know for sure what you will get. But playing campaign maps is a bit of a gamble for the normal player (I dont car about speed runners and you shouldnt either, because they are only a small part and not representative for all players). Also it depends on the difficulty: Standard: is easy, boring, less rewarding, almost a waste of time if you dont want to chill a bit in the game. Expert: is to hard and time consuming for many players, especially if you dont have a good (or even specialized) deck yet and if you loose you gain nothing. And winning could give you still something bad, something less worth than rpve. Also seeing that someone else got something of worth while you got nothing of worth can lead to frustration, if you choose campaigns as main resource to boost your cards. Advanced: Even increased problem with the rewards, because they are always less worth and I doubt that this is more rewarding than RPVE but it wil take usually a bigger effort. So RPVE is still superior for farming for most people. Because they get for sure a good amount of gold and they can buy anything with that. You even can count the matches you need to get the upgrades you want. I think from a psyhcological view getting a upgrade you dont have will promte campaign play more than it is now, because you will know the chances are good that you get the upgrade you want after some games, because it must drop somewhen, while when it is completely random it could happen that it even doesnt drop after 200x of play. This way campaigns would get more interest by people who like to farm their upgrades by doing campaigns than paying them by gold and it would decrease the amount of people who play campaigns because they are in average more rewarding, because you had to have all upgrades of a map first before you get gold, and not just you, all had in the group had to, to get more gold than you would get by playing RPVE. This would also slow down the gold supply for Speedrunners. Another completely different aspect to break repitition is one of the game mechanics itself: the TCG part. A TCG should lead in people haveing diversity in decks but this somehow doesnt work for battleforge. I have nature as starter, so I put atleast windweavers and ensnaring roots in. Something else usually makes less sense. Yeah there are other ways to play nature as starter but they usually dont work as well as this combo. Or Fire as starter without Nomads (Green) or at least Mine? Frost as starter without Frost Mage? Ok good shadow can be played in many different (map specific) ways. Then i had to choose, spell based damage deck, tower / root based defense deck or unit based offensive deck? And based on this descion and the colors I have the deck should roughly be fixed if it should work. Its is finally the problem of balance among the cards that lead to this. For example: how often have you seen something else than church of negotian on bad harvest at position 3? Its really rare and if you try something else you get called out... This way the community even prohibits this kind of diversity. Another problem in this context is that most of the cards that work a little bit different than usually and could lead to a bit diverse gameplay are often damn expensive so that you had to farm a week just for one card. I think many people begin to get bored before they can affort it to get other cards to play around. That are two contratry points. First you describe the skill discrepancy. But the second is that high elo players tend to stay with their working strategies. Both is bad. While you might think that multiaccounting could improve the second thing, and it might, it would also make the first point even worse. Thats why I think that prohibiting multiaccounting is a really good thing. I didnt play much PVP since the release, just tried 2 or 3 times and got raped very quick by spitfire, juggernaut and co, while my deck level was very low and I had almost no rare cards. But in the past days I played a few PVP matches after I had almost any card almost fully upgraded and I somehow liked. But then I met from time to time a highranked multiaccounter that was matched with me, sometimes even manytimes in a row. And I began to think: "fuck that shit, I am doing something else" So I can tell you for sure that mutliaccounting will lead to even less people getting into PVP, because it will lead to high elo players playing against low elo players, what shouldnt be satisfying as you described. But I dont see that big of a problem with people who have "ranked axiety". They are already in PVP and there is always something that is called "unranked", which would lead to the same thing as playing as low rank multiaccount with the exception that you arent necessary matched with low ranks who dont want to play against high elo players.

Because usually exploits are used to do this, thats why it is an exploit

Today I recognized also several freezes. It did not affected me personaly but at almost any 4 player rpve match today, one of the group was kicked or frozen (and could still chat with us). Usually I dont get disconnected ingame but if someone else got disconnected, I often get a disconnect after finisihing the map.

I think he mean the promo cards. I know that swamp drake promo was one of those cards you got when you preordered the game once back on release. And yes promo cards are in skylords reborn, but the chance to get one is very little. Didnt got any yet (after opening several boosters). But if you eagerly want one you can get one by trading.

It is not the only way to stun bosses @On Topic: Battleship: yes Construct: dont know

I remember Primeval Watcher having a good damage output against multiple units (but bad against single units). Combined with the green Forest Elder, Wheel of Gits and maybe other damage buffs and you could maybe reach a fast killing speed of bases. But I have never tested it, because the cards are just almost unobtainable without 3 months or more of grinding...

Healing close buildings: works as intended and like it was at ea times... Expanding the afk time? One of the worst suggestions I ever read. Beeing afk for more than 5 min is totally disrespectful to anyone you play with. Ok it can happen that there is something in real life that makes that necessary but then you should live with getting kicked, especially because you are the one that dont play and why should you even get rewarded by being pushed by others while you take energy wells and monuments but dont do anything in return? I even suggest to decrease this time to 1 or 2 min. And if being afk happens on a regularly to consider bans.

The problem is the GPU. I dont know how it compares to the usual Intel HD Graphics so I cant tell you for sure. At least I played the game once at EA times with 1,6Ghz, 4GB RAM and an Intel HD 3000. It worked but I had to use the lowest possible graphics settings. So I think it might work but you probably will have to decrease the details a lot. Also I wouldnt pay much for such a (especially used) notebook. I wouldnt pay anything above 100€ to be honest and even this would be to much for my opinion. What about Bootcamp?

Come back xD, battleforge is more important! The game has a big latency (> 100ms to several of 100ms) even for EU players. But I think that the game was made to deal with a big latency so it could be that it almost doesnt differ to the experience EU players have. Still I know that the routing to asia or south america can be shit, so you had just to test.

True that a Lost Souls Ship is only strong with multiple enemies around. It is really weak against single enemies compared to many other units. But even 2 Wyrms (energy cost: 600) win easily against 3 Lost Souls Ships (energy cost: 720). Plus the wyrms retain their damage output against single targets and can even focus against single targets in a groups, so that they have to fight lesser enemies. So the pure damage is NO advantage of the Lost Souls Ships, almost any other T4 unit is better here. Besides the ability to attack while moving there is another advantage: it attacks fast and can attack multiple units at the same time. Melee units for example can attack very slow and only unit by unit. So if you have multiple units standing far away of each other the Lost Souls Ship will be always quicker, even if the melee unit would do more damage.