WindHunter

Free PvP decks is a boon for the gamemode. Handicapping the PvP scene at the beginning by removing the free decks would kill the game mode long-term, and removing it later would make the barrier to entry incredibly high. I play Pure Shadow, the most expensive deck in the game bfp and gold-wise. I don't want to grind rPvE for weeks to be able to play my deck, if that's what it turns into I will quit. Only change that is appropriate is locking the free decks into their own card pool like the old tome decks. This way you could mix-and-match between the two weekly decks but otherwise be locked-in. If you want a fully custom deck you would need to level-up cards from your own collection.

If your intent with a fee is to instill the feeling that the deck isn't yours this is already true because you need your own cards in order to change it. Again to use Pure Shadow as an example, I don't like Knight of Chaos and will almost never use it. Instead I like Unholy Power, shadow phoenix, skeleton warriors, Shrine of Greed etc. etc. which I will need to buy on my own in order to include in the deck. Unless these are mechanically different than the way tome cards functioned, I will also need to re-add these cards to the deck every single time the decks refresh. Beyond that, I don't see instilling such a feeling as a worthwhile goal in a PvP-game. Freshness will come from being able to expand your deck and build your own beyond the starter ones and regular balance changes. Battleforge PvP is very fun and holds my attention even in the same match-up over and over again, this just feels like an added burden for no real gain.

@DukeDublin Several decks are entirely unplayable without their legendary cards. Pure Fire and Pure Shadow are the perfect examples. These are also the most expensive cards of the game and gatekeep a players ability to play these decks. @RadicalX Thanks for the answer. @Cocofang Having a fee just serves to gatekeep PvP behind PvE, which is the entire point of this change. If a player consistently picks the same two decks he plays and doesn't collect cards, the chances are he cares about playing PvP, not collecting cards. No reason to interfere with this. But what if one week he doesn't play and runs out of bfp? Charging him to rent the decks means he can't play without doing PvE, which will just make him quit. I personally have been massively turned off playing in the beta because I don't like PvE strategy games and because I have been forced to play PvP decks I don't like. I have played most decks in the game before the shutdown but returning I realize I only enjoy playing Pure Shadow. Except I haven't been able to play Pure Shadow even once since Skylords began because I don't own nether warp or Harvester. I played hundreds of matches against beijingguy alone Pure Shadow vs. Pure Nature in the year before the shutdown and I'd do the same exact thing again. Other decks just don't interest me to the point where I just make more and more variations of Pure Shadow decks.

@RadicalX Really only have one question, why corpse explosion in Pure Shadow? In my own experience the card feels unsatisfying to use and I don't think its worth the power or slot cost. Issue is exasperated by needing corpses to damage while also requiring ground presence. (I've always thought this card should be arcane). Its also not an easy card to use because you have to be tabulating corpses which requires knowing how much health each unit has and how long corpses last. Shadow phoenix seems the better card and also teaches the corpse gathering mechanic. Just continuing to think on the deck. I don't see how it has any possibility to pressure a frost-splash. Is the goal of this deck to teach the player to skip t2 against frost splashes? Its skill floor seems very high.

I would prefer no walls or substantially less myself. Even on areas where archers on the wall can't hit your wells/monuments you can usually place a firedancer behind it with no counterplay available to the non-fire player except to bind a bunch of power in walls that the fire player won't have to do. With many maps already possessing an inherent advantage for pure fire, removing one more that also promotes boring and frustrating gameplay seems appropriate to me. The places I'd leave walls would be where the players both start with one pre-built, since destroying these walls for void power changes the way the maps are played in a way that is worth preserving (Yrmia for example).

I think this is a good first step for this card.

Kubik has already stated earlier in this thread that they will not be adding two different versions of the same card. Even if that were possible, it would be a lot of work. We had this suggestion before, which Phenomic also rejected, and afterward Phenomic rightly deferred to PvP balancing over PvE when cards overlapped since balancing in PVP is substantially more important and has a greater impact on game play. I can't remember more than few cards that Phenomic balanced specifically for PvE, and each of these were the most egregious examples such as LSS, enlightenment, and Amii Monument, and even those they only slapped-on band-aid fixes. That is not surprising when they only balanced 4-8 cards every few months and PvP always needed, and still needs, changes. With a more active Dev team it seems it can change. Kubik I throw in my opinion that you should go ahead with a discord server, at least among the PvP players who are competent and understand theorycrafting. You can even give us some starting guidelines on what type of issues you/the team want us to focus on to begin with.

Can we stop spamming the thread on this subject so we can talk about other things without it getting drowned by this? Kubik has already said he is making the change, and you guys are just throwing a lot of words at the wall saying the same thing other and other again without understanding his reasoning. Kubik I am suddenly understanding your reasoning for discord a lot more. Also, from earlier, will you be able to add/remove unit abilities like Steadfast, Swift, and Slow easily or is that too complicated for now?

Has anyone tried Kaldra's PvP maps with neutral units? I'd be down to try it with someone if they are interested. If it is good we could try to create a few more or modify it.

This is a flawed reasoning, let me illustrate via two examples, one for PvP and one for PvE. (1) Imagine you are playing checkers. In checkers you can only move forward, until a piece is kinged, and you must jump a piece if it is possible. Now imagine you set up a nice 2 for 3 jump trap for your opponent but when he falls for it he refuses to execute the jump. He says that the rules of checkers violates his "freedom" and not only should he not have to jump, and thus give you a piece advantage, but he should also be allowed to move backwards at any time. You would rightfully think this absurd as the game isn't a game without rules and freedom in the game exists only because the rules exist. Your opponent checker nihilism/relativism in defense of his "freedom" would make the game itself unplayable. This is the PvP example. (2) Imagine you are running a 5K race. When you start the race you run the first 2 kilometers and are tied with a fellow runner. At this point your fellow runner stops, walks over to a car waiting on the side of the road, and decides to drive the next 2 kilometers. You run the fastest 5K time ever on that course, but your fellow runner unsurprisingly wins the race and "runs" faster then you, such that he know holds the course record. When you confront him afterwards that he violated the norms of the race and cheated/exploited the system by driving he tells you that "it doesn't sound fair to me to inhibit other runners' freedom by forcing them to only run in the slower way that you like". Now its obvious this person's appeal to freedom is absurd, because unless the norms of the race are enforced, then their is no reason for the competition in the first place. Additionally, his time should be stricken from the record for its exploitation to begin with. This is the PvE example, and I think its obvious to see how to fits the scenario with cards like Amii Monument in Soultree.

While I prefer the forum, I see that discord could work if it were very systematized with individual channels for each card (a different balance specific server would also be good). The ability to ban/allow certain people per server is also a bonus. One issue with discord is the inability to quote someone else, this is especially an issue if the person's post was from awhile back. @Kubik Would you be able to add abilities to units such as swift, steadfast, or slow? Additionally would you be able to add/remove knockback from abilities or change damage modifiers (S -> M, M-> *).

Bandit spearmen suffer from the issue that they can be perma-cc'd due to knockback. Stat-wise the card is incredible with its ability. Spearmen can kill all standard T2 M-units in 10 seconds or less (nightcrawlers, enforcers, burrowers, etc.) and it even beats or comes close to beating some of its own counters (scythe fiends, ghostspears). Its flaw is that it is slow and almost unusable against nature splashes, which is exactly where the card is most needed by bandits. The card, and Bandits as a whole, would benefit from bandit spearmen being given steadfast (knockback immunity). This change would make spearmen an all-arounder card for Bandits (+50% damage against any melee unit, and M-counter), which I would hesitate to add to any other faction, but Bandits lack of CC and building protects means that its units ought to have higher stats compared to other factions to compensate. The only faction this would give Bandits a lopsided match-up with is Pure Nature, since Bandits already wins this match-up and spearmen beat ghostspears in a 1v1 while steadfast would make spearmen useful against deep ones.

In terms of balancing in the PvP community I am pretty optimistic that we can come to a consensus on a lot of the changes while just letting the controversial stuff sit where it is for now. In the last year of Battleforge's balancing, MaranV, myself, and 1 or 2 other major English players were able to present agreed upon changes to most watchlists. The English forum's watchlist on homesoil is a great example where a number of us privately worked out an acceptable homesoil change that MaranV then posted to the forum. The entire rest of the watchlist was just people posting "I agree with MaranV's proposed change." Of course Phenomic then responded by releasing the current slapshod homesoil change that almost no one is happy with. I think these discussions are easier to have on the forum because you can go back and review what someone has said previously easier and long posts don't appear as walls of text. In terms of current Devs making PvP changes, I'd prefer if they just deferred to the top players on issues to avoid more bad balancing like with homesoil and thugs. The current Devs have also made it pretty clear that they don't play PvP anyway.

I voted to remove Yrmia. +1 bring back random maps +1 remove Wazhai. I don't know if it is possible but I'd like to keep Lajesh but remove the walls. They are the entire reason that map is unfun.

I like all the suggestions so far and generally agree with RadicalX's way of thinking. Thank you for being willing to address the problem. Just an an example in all this, I am a formerly active top 20 player (in EA days) and I haven't logged into the game since December, even while following the project, because I have been unsatisfied with the current system. As is, I am being forced to play tens of hours of PvE to get to the game mode which I enjoy so I quit playing until something changed. So I am really looking forward to these changes so I can start engaging with my favorite game again.

Is building, activating, then destroying a Shrine of Greed considered bug abuse?

I think saying that his Twilight deck works is like saying my Pure Shadow no-t3 deck works. Sure, it got to me to 12th on the ladder, but the deck was reliant upon an obscure gimmick with Shrine of Greed that become obsolete once everyone understood it. There was a similar case with Aaaaaabama's annoying Church of Negation deck. Once you figure out he isn't good at T1 and T2 and is just trying to stall for his strong T3 the deck becomes sub-par and he is ELO fodder on small maps where rushing is possible.

I'd love to if I didn't have other obligations that day. The harvesters or windhunters will have to wait.

Pure Shadow has a hard time defending in an even match-up versus Pure Fire. If you are wasting 100 power repeatedly on skeleton army you are going to lose multiple Wells by the time you take anything meaningful. Skeleton army could be useful right after a major shadow attack where you almost take a well, with skeleton army as the finisher, but in practice it doesn't work like that. Pure Shadow can't sustain long-distance attacks in early T2 against fire. In a close well situation skeleton army is worthless. I doubt in early T2 you could deliver enough corpses to a far-off base and do enough damage that you would be able to take the base without a minimum of 2, if not 3 skeleton armies. This would take a minimum of 60 seconds and put the shadow player at -200 power. The fire player should have no problem counterattacking and taking more than he loses. In late T2 skeleton army isn't worth it because you should be spamming harvesters before the fire player can get to T3 for juggernaut.

The looter ability is essentially a double-dip. If thugs kill forsaken (or any 50-power unit) they generate 10 power out of nowhere while the opponent loses his unit with 45 power going to void and with 5 power permanently lost. Now if the thugs themselves die, they send 54 power to the void and 6 permanently lost. This means a thugs that has killed a forsaken has more than paid for itself in a permanent sense. Except this was already true before the looter-change since the fire player had both a temporary positional advantage and a still-living unit while his opponent didn't not. Now on top of that, the fire player has 10 power that appeared from nowhere and which is immediately available to him in the powerpool. Power calculation wise, as long as thugs have dealt 60% of the damage to any 50-power unit before death, they have permanently paid for themselves. And if they kill 2 units, they have permanently paid for 4 50-power units. Any disadvantage a thugs player occurs power-wise can only ever be temporarily, as his opponent constantly loses power permanently from unit-lose while he gains power even while losing units. It violates the rules of the game and succeeded in ruining what was once a very balanced match-up between Fire T1 and Shadow T1. Making the same mistake with strikers would mean that no shadow player (or fire players without thugs/strikers) should even bother playing tier-1, because the match-up would no longer be winnable.

Since the game has been re-opened, and I have been benefiting from it myself, I thought I'd post my old tutorial on how to do King of the Giants solo so that people can have an easier time grinding during Open Stress Test and later during Open Beta/Release. Just one improvement on the video, if you move the construction hut to the side a few feet you can use one Resource Booster for all 6 wells by placing it in the center. Also, you are a bit less stressed micro-wise if you sent the first 4 ships left instead of the 3 shown in the video.

Radical touches upon a general principle above that I'd like to explicitly state: In T1 killing units is usually more beneficial than focusing down a well. This is true for a lot of reasons, (low total power pool, slow units, weak spells, etc.) but for these same reasons your goal in Tier 1 is often to create a snowball that can destroy all of your opponent's defenses and only then start destroying wells and monuments. Even with nomads you shouldn't be attempting burrower-oink style well destruction in Tier 1. You may end up with a slight permanent power advantage, but temporary power advantage matters more in Tier 1 and early Tier 2 and your opponent can easily punish your early over investment.

I enjoy PvE well enough but my primary love and reason for playing this game is PvP. I can't do that without a wide diversity of cards and a fully upgraded deck. I have no urge to grind for upgrades or cards for weeks and weeks just to finally be able to play some PvP. I think "grind walls" are only needed to hide holes in game playability which I firmly think BattleForge does not possess. You should be playing the game for the sake of the game being fun in and of itself, and seeing as such a large community invested so large an effort to bring a game back, I think we can all agree that Battleforge is an incredibly fun game. For this reason, I strongly ask our fearless leaders to not slow down rewards for the sake of those who enjoy grinding and instead focus on promoting what is the greatest asset of BattleForge, its fun and diverse gameplay.

Hello old friend, I'll have to decline the pizza but I will take the party. I'd love to get a few games in together once everything stabilizes.