Ladadoos

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolks!
Today we're happy to announce our new client developer @MarcoMaar joining the team! He will be responsible for adding new features, modifying user interfaces, or fixing bugs in our game client. Up until recently, he was working on a new ingame section, where you are able to see all of your opened boosters. Below, you can see a sneak peek of this new feature. We're very excited to have him with us, and are looking forward to his future contributions!

Best regards, Skylords Reborn Team.

Greetings Skylords!
We are happy to bring you the first official community update, a biweekly update to give you an overview of whats happening (and going to happen) in Skylords Reborn. We have heard your desire for communication loud and clear, and as your fresh Community Manager, I will do my best to deliver. 
The goal of these updates is to give you an idea of the things going on behind the scenes and cool stuff that you might have missed. Not every update will have the same content, but we hope to provide you with some cool details and insights. 
Without further ado, lets get to it!
Balance Patch #2
What better way to start than with a new patch announcement! Balance Patch #2 is hitting the live servers soon, bringing with it a lot of PvP balance changes and map updates. We have decided to wait with the release until Toggy's PvE contest is finished to not cause issues for the contenders. You can expect the patch to go live at the beginning of May. The patch notes will be posted soon. 
In-game Tournament tab
Once logged in, you will now be greeted with a tab showing upcoming tournaments and events in Skylords Reborn. Full event details will still be posted on the forums, but we hope this will help tournament organisers with spotlighting their events. 

We would like to take this moment to point out we are still looking for an Event Manager. If you are up for the task, please apply! Check our Open Staff Positions for more information.
Upcoming Community Tournaments
There is a 1v1 tournament hosted by Toggy this saturday. Because we had to delay the patch, it will be played on the test-server.  

Toggy is also giving PvE players a challenge with his speedrunning contest of the map Ocean. 

Both tournaments will reward booster prices. 
PvE
Don't worry PvE players, you are not forgotten. We are not ready to bring you a PvE patch just yet, but rest assured that a lot of work is put into improving the PvE experience. 
There have been a lot of heated arguments in the forum and the discord about what the ideal PvE scene should look like. We will release a philosophy document in the near future explaining our stance on certain topics and what you can expect from the balance team going forward. We cant share any details yet, but WindHunter will soon be in touch with you with more information. 
Balance Discord
Most of you might be aware, but alongside the regular discord we have a discord specifically focused on balancing PvE and PvP. You are encouraged to discuss potential changes and ideas with us here. 
Card Description Project
You might have noticed that cards in Battleforge aren't always very consistent or clear. A group of volunteers has started the huge undertaking to fix this. Not only are they clearing up sentences and details for every single card, they are also adding relevant hidden information like gender (girl-power anyone?), abilities, movement speed, a better reflection of a cards true damage output and much much more. Here is an example:

  *please note this is a mockup and not final yet
With hundreds of cards this might take a while before you see this in game, but I wanted to mention it already. I'm truly baffled by all the hours people put into this project behind the scene. If you want to help out with this project, they are currently in need of a French translator. If you know anyone, please reach out to them via the Description Changes Discord.
Map Testers
Some new map testers are helping us out with the project as well. They have already been a great help and we are grateful for their time. Thank you cswordmaster, LEBOVIM, LegitNacho, Liorans, Mister_Mv, Perthos and Wanky [CH][Ger]. 
New Team Members
To those who missed the announcements, we added two new members to the team in the past weeks. 
Going forward I will be your community manager and will be in charge of keeping the community updated on the latest information, while also making sure suggestions and concerns from the community reach the developers.
Tweeto has also joined the team as a 2D artist. He has already created two beautiful artworks for Amii Phantom and a possible new Amii card. We will have a staff meeting soon to get him underway to create even more awesome artwork. If you are interested in seeing how his artwork comes to live, we can also share that kind of information in the future. 
  
 
We still have some open positions on our team to help with the project. We are looking for map artists, designers, discord moderators and more. Please have a look at the Open Staff Positions for more open positions and information on how to apply!
Twitter and Facebook 
Are you following us on Twitter and Facebook already? They have been inactive for a while, but I have heard from a very reliable source that going over there might be.. rewarding for you. Expect us to use those channels to keep you updated from now on as well. 
In conclusion
And that's it for your very first Community Update! Just to set expectations: we definitely wont be releasing a new patch with every update and some weeks will have more news than others. 
In future updates, we would also like to take a moment to give some information on what we can and can't do in the game, and what a realistic flow of content will be. As you might have noticed, we have added quite a few members to the team lately and in the past week I have been absolutely blown away by all the work that is being done behind the scenes. I look forward to sharing more with you in the future.  
What do you guys think of this first biweekly status update? Is there something you would want to see covered more? We are open to feedback so please let us know. 
 

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Hello everyone,
I am excited to announce that I will join the Skylords Reborn team as Community Manager!
As Community Manager I will be responsible for the communications between the Skylords Reborn team and the community. This will allow the team to focus more on their own positions, bringing you content and balancing patches faster, where I will be keeping you up to date about everything Skylords Reborn. This also includes on our social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook.
One of the ways you can expect this to work is with biweekly status updates, highlighting things you might have missed and giving you sneak previews on what is being worked on.
I will also be making notes on frequently asked questions and the hot topics that are being discussed in the forums, discord or in-game. If you have any questions or ideas, feel free to post them in the forum or discord page, just as you are doing now. I will make sure to forward your ideas and questions to the team.
I'm happy and honored to join the team, being a Battleforge fan from the very first hour and I look forward in helping the project. If you also want to help, please take a look at the open staff positions here.
For now, please give me a bit of time to get up to date with the things happening behind the scenes. After that you can expect the very first biweekly status update, which I hope will result in a positive tradition.
I hope you are as excited as I am about the future of Skylords Reborn, and I look forward to working (and playing!) alongside all of you!

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

@DieToPlay For a long time there have been ideas about creating a character management feature in-game, where there would not only be more avatar pictures but also in-game borders and titles. They could perhaps be bought with gold or be rewards from achievements and events. Either way, adding new avatar pictures should not be difficult, but it is time consuming.



 

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

A summary of this announcement is written at the bottom.

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and other Skyfolk!

Over the past two months project progression has considerably slowed down and it has become apparent that the community is in need of a status update. This announcement aims to provide said status update, where we discuss what has happened the past few months, what the current status of the project is, what some of the roadblocks are and how we plan to alleviate them, what we are currently focusing on and what our plans and expectations are to move forward. We also take a more in-depth look at the current roadmap for new cards and card balancing, and newly added staff members.
General project state and current plans
Let us start by going back more or less 1 year. At that moment @Ladadoos and @Zyna were still only client developers and the only server developer, Kubik, had just left us. With no foreseeable new server developer and the server being in a very unstable state, Ladadoos and Zyna decided to step up and become server and client developers. For the next few months they worked many hours per day to fix as many game related issues as possible and bring the gaming experience to an enjoyable state so that Skylords Reborn could finally release. This lead to the project reaching an unsustainably high update throughput, likely giving false expectations for parts of the community for the future. Just before the project released the only two administrators, InsaneHawk and MrXLink, also stepped down from their role. The lack of a leading role started to show and considering Ladadoos and Zyna had the most involvement in the project at the time they stepped up to also become administrators. As a step in the process of re-structuring the team and improving work efficiency, we noticed that there was a clear need for extra designers. Game design has always been behind and with release coming, we needed to finish design decisions quickly. That is when @ImaginaryNumb3r joined which helped immensely and, alongside other designers, we were able to get game design to an acceptable state for release. 
On December 18th, 2020 Skylords Reborn released. With this milestone achieved we decided to shift more of our attention to ensuring our servers properly handle the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of concurrent players and to start implementing our first ever card balance changes! With the help of ImaginaryNumb3r, Zyna and the discord balancing server we released our first big card balance change on 1st of January, 2021. This was followed by a couple of extra updates, after which the project progression greatly decreased. ImaginaryNumb3r had to spontaneously spend a lot more time at his real-life job and Zyna and Ladadoos had to catch up with university duties like bachelor and master thesis. In the meantime other staff members have also had it busier than usual.
This leads us to where we are now. Two months without game updates and a community without a clear idea of the current state of the project. In the past few weeks we have internally discussed project health and team structure and decided to use the little time we currently still have into adding more team members to the project and improving code and workflow documentations. This process takes a lot of time which unfortunately comes at the cost of even slower game progression. Ever since we made our open staff applications page we have had many new applications come in and a lot of time has been spent processing them. Our goal is to expand the team such that we try to minimize the chances the project hits a complete halt again and as a result you can expect the team to grow in the upcoming weeks/months. We recently also added three new roles (discord moderators, community manager and event organizer) alongside the existing ones, which should improve the current project state. Feel free to have a look!
Faction design and new staff members
That being said, today we are most happy to announce the future for card balancing and potential new cards in Skylords Reborn. To us, card balance is of critical importance to provide new experiences and allow for greater deck building freedom in the game. To accelerate this process we are proud to announce that we have established a team of 5 people which are dedicated to improve the overall gameplay and deckbuilding experience.
With the introduction of this new team, we have created 2 new official titles:
 - Faction Designer: They explore the design space for card changes and create specifications which will be implemented.
 - Balance Developer: They implement features which were designed by Faction Designers or fix bugs of different sorts. They will also help map making in the future by adding new map specific units like bosses.
In other words: faction designers design the cards and balance developers implement them.
The team consists of the following members:
- @RadicalX: Faction Designer with PvP focus
- @WindHunter: Faction Designer with PvE focus
- @Chibiterasu: Balance Developer
- @Razeroc: Balance Developer
- @ImaginaryNumb3r: Lead Faction Designer
Expectations and steps moving forward
Experience has shown that working on balance and faction design is too work intense for just one developer at a time. As such, it goes without saying that you can expect more frequent balance iterations with card changes which won't only address balance, but also bugfixes and quality-of-life changes. Furthermore, we want to use our new resources for improved communication and greater transparency in terms of card and faction design.
Card changes are important steps to make the game more fun, but because there are so many ways one can adjust cards good design is everything. For PvE in particular our ultimate goal is to strengthen the identity of each faction (pure elements and hybrid factions) and give them their own signature playstyles. But for now, our efforts are best spend on cards which don't require a mechanical rework to make viable (like the Mutating Maniac buff). And for PvP, our new development resources allow our expert group (a group of hand-picked community members that help with design) to make faster progress and make more tests. In the future you can expect more detailed short and long-term goals for card balancing.
That is it for now. Thanks for your continued support the past few months and we look forward to what the future brings us!

Summary
Developers and designers are very busy with real-life jobs and university. New open staff roles were made here as an attempt to keep the project progressing. These rules include discord moderators, community manager, event organizer, developers, designers etc. A lot of time is currently spent reviewing applications and making it easier to integrate new staff members. @Chibiterasu and @Razeroc were recently added to staff and are responsible to implement card changes designed by the new faction designers @RadicalX and @WindHunter. This should greatly speed up card/faction balancing.

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk!

Today we are happy to welcome @Tweeto to the team as a 2D artist. He has shown interest, commitment and skill through numerous art pieces he has worked on in our official Discord server. Two of those pieces are attached to this announcement: one is a rework of the Amii Phantom card artwork and another one is artwork for a possible new Amii card. The end result looks very promising and we are thrilled to have him on the team, as having new artwork for cards makes it that much more exciting to add new cards. Although card artwork is a prominent task moving forward, he has shown to also have skills in other areas such as UI. This means that besides card artwork, he could also help with creating new UI elements to be used in the in-game UI. All around a very solid addition to the team! 

Do not forget that we are still looking for new members! You can read all about it in our open staff positions thread:
  

We are not opposed to add extra achievements (and we hope to add more in the future!), but especially for end-game achievements a reward such as an ordinary booster or card is sometimes not fulfilling. You don't want to receive a booster when you already have all cards. Some achievements scream to have a custom reward that can only be received by completing this achievement: and if you can show this accomplishment to others, the better. I think an achievement like this is a good example for a custom reward, where you could perhaps receive a custom title that shows next to your name or a fire border around your in-game avatar. The idea is that people see this title and know you can only get it by completing a specific achievement (and therefore are aware of the effort you have been through to get it): an indirect flex, if you will. 

 

We are not opposed to add extra achievements (and we hope to add more in the future!), but especially for end-game achievements a reward such as an ordinary booster or card is sometimes not fulfilling. You don't want to receive a booster when you already have all cards. Some achievements scream to have a custom reward that can only be received by completing this achievement: and if you can show this accomplishment to others, the better. I think an achievement like this is a good example for a custom reward, where you could perhaps receive a custom title that shows next to your name or a fire border around your in-game avatar. The idea is that people see this title and know you can only get it by completing a specific achievement (and therefore are aware of the effort you have been through to get it): an indirect flex, if you will. 

 

It all started out with you publicly complaining about the issue of the lack of tournaments. In that discussion you were already showing a somewhat passive aggressive attitude towards @Ladadoos. A few days later, you approached him via his DMs in a rather aggressive way. He told you that he's not ignoring the issue, but not interested in a personal discussion with you, due to your attitude. Normally we wouldn't mind discussing something like this, as long as there's respect and common courtesy. In fact, I discuss topics like this with @Toggy quite often. It is rare that we decide to ignore someone. So to conclude, it was not the choice of words, but your general attitude you have shown both in public and in private.
He also obviously did not ignore the content of your message, because even before you DMed him we already decided to address these issues. We wanted to make a general project status update, and we wanted to add the positions for the community ambassador and the event organizer role.
We literally put thousands of hours into this project in the last year. Obviously @Toggy is one of the most engaged community members, but you're seriously underestimating how much work goes into this project. A lot of the work we do is generally not suitable for announcements to the public. Especially back in January, we had to spend a huge amount of time on the project just helping out new people with technical support and moderation issues. There was so much moderation work, that pretty much everyone had to help with that.
The platforms Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were in fact not decently managed before release, but also definitely not ignored. In the period from the end of 2018 to early 2020 there were no posts on these platforms. However, starting in August 2020 Ladadoos and I started with helping managing these platforms aswell. Obviously, given our roles in this project, and the fact that we have personal lives, this could not be kept up, especially given that our previously very active server developer Kubik left the team. Looking at the unofficial steam or skype groups for example, they mostly already died down on their own 2-3 years ago. I was able to find barely any posts, even after we announced the release. So these issues did not suddenly start after release.
Also, you really seem somewhat conflicted here. On one hand you say "If the staff do nothing, why should the community?", but on the other one you say "[...] but the future of this game should, UNLIKE the big companies I mentioned, in my opinion be more open and community driven". We believe this project is a community effort, not just a staff effort.
 We post updates when we make progress in development. However, in the last two months there was simply just not a lot of progress. Which is mostly due to the fact, that both Ladadoos and I heavily neglected our studies for the sake of this project in the year before. At the moment, we are the only server and client developers. Expecting constant updates at the pace they were released in the last year is completely unrealistic, especially given the fact that we're unpaid and doing this in our free time. Feel free to read this announcement aswell, we also touch upon the topic of unsustainable progress there.
 
There are so many little things staff could do all the time. Give responses to all posts, ask for clarification on bug reports, remind people to send their logs, offer to help people with technical issues, participate in feature discussions, and the list goes on. The issue here is simply that all of these little things, some of which are in fact not little, together do in fact take a lot of time.
This is just a another example of things, which might seem like they don't take a lot of time, but they in fact do. Who looks at all the replays? Who decides what's the funniest entry? Who hands out all the boosters? Who organizes the challenge? Who manages the challenge? And even then, people do have quality standards, and they don't want to waste their time with half-baked challenges. It's also generally not good for our image if we just try to pump out content with no real thought behind it. Generally we would like to go for quality over quantity, although we're aware that currently there are no challenges or tournaments. Staff members had been working on both a challenge, and a tournament in fact. They simply couldn't find the time to continue with these plans, hence why we're looking for more volunteers. As you can see from @Toggy and others, staff involvement is not a must for challenges or tournaments.
Obviously we care, and we try our best. And the best we can do right now is to get more volunteers on board, who can help us solve the exact issues you're bringing forward. It's disappointing that you imply that staff doesn't "really care" about tournaments, challenges and growing the community after more than 5 years of hard work.
I really think we're doing the best we can in the current situation, and I'm honestly not sure what you expect us to do differently, given the circumstances. @anonyme0273 in this post you only mention all the issues, and how you don't care that we're hiring new staff to attempt to solve them. Given the current circumstances, what do you expect us to do differently now?
You mentioned that Ladadoos and I participate in a lot of topics. We believe though, that there is a difference between particpating, and actively contributing. Here's how we participate in all things you mentioned:
Staff recruitment: yes, we handle that alongside the respective lead roles. Client modification: yes, we handle that completely, we're the only client and server developers at the moment. Community management: I would argue we're not doing the job of a community manager, but feel free to correct me. The most we do in that regard are maybe official statements. Project planning: there are examples of multiple different projects which work independently from Ladadoos and I: There is the Skylords Reborn Descriptions group, managed by @Mynoduesp. They are working on revamping all of the ingame descriptions. Our participation in this so far has been mostly limited to a meeting, where we discussed their proposals. There is a group working on additional rPvE factions. It started with @CrazyCockerell, and since then @Emmaerzeh has been looking over that project. There is the balancing team, which is managed by @ImaginaryNumb3r and will work autonomously. At the moment I'm still training the balancing developers a bit, until they can work on their own. Game design: we just give feedback on proposals (independently worked on by dedicated designers) in regards to technical limitations, and as server and client developers we implement finished proposals. Cloud you clarify what you mean with "pretty much everything else"? I hope it's clear that we have a team of more than 20 people who are putting their time into this project. They handle moderation, balancing, design, map creation, technical support, etc. Obviously we do a lot, which is to be expected as both an admin and developer, but to claim we do everything is absurd. You could even say that there are already multiple "project administrators" in the project who are overlooking a general process:
@ImaginaryNumb3r is the lead in game and faction design. @Emmaerzeh is the lead in map making, and organizing the map making effort. @RadicalX is in charge of the PvP expert group for balancing. In the future @WindHunter could be in charge of a similar process for PvE. It really does not seem like you are aware of the limitations we are facing. Our current biggest limitation in this regard is the lack of active developers.
Currently we have freund17, and Maze, who are working on a (for now internal) web interface/admin tool for Skylords Reborn. They are organizing themselves and the features they work on are currently determined by the moderators, who are in need of a moderation tool. We have Chibiterasu and Razeroc, who are part of the balancing team. There is fiki574. He's not as active as he once was, but he's maintaining our public APIs. He also listens to feedback from the community there. We have Aviat0r, who is also not too active at the moment, who has been working on a new updater tool. There is also empty, who's currently inactive. So unless you want to manage Ladadoos and me, there's unfortunately not a lot developers to manage right now, hence why we are looking for new developers rather than such a position right now. If with "developers" you mean people who are not in staff, you are generally welcome to organize these kinds of special projects without staff involvement. We're generally happy to assist you if we believe you are working on something which can help out the project. For example, Maze made this useful tool before he was added into staff:

We hope that we could answer all your questions. If everything goes well, all of these things will be less of an issue in the future. We plan to add the positions we are currently lacking to the staff team in the upcoming weeks.

Best regards,
Ladadoos and Zyna ~

@DieToPlay For a long time there have been ideas about creating a character management feature in-game, where there would not only be more avatar pictures but also in-game borders and titles. They could perhaps be bought with gold or be rewards from achievements and events. Either way, adding new avatar pictures should not be difficult, but it is time consuming.



 

@DieToPlay For a long time there have been ideas about creating a character management feature in-game, where there would not only be more avatar pictures but also in-game borders and titles. They could perhaps be bought with gold or be rewards from achievements and events. Either way, adding new avatar pictures should not be difficult, but it is time consuming.



 

On the old dev platform, there were only patch notes for the most part. Since release, we started posting all development updates in the updates section of the forums. Here is the most recent update:

That's essentially the replacement for the dev platform. One thing which is currently missing there are the updates for the test server, those are only being posted on discord right now, but we're planning on starting to post them on the forum aswell. For announcements, there's always been the "Announcements" subforum. We're definitely aware that we can substantially improve transparency and the communication between staff and the community in general. We're hoping to improve this with the upcoming community ambassador role.

Ah yes, I think I read this somewhere already, but thx for the info, however I probably 'd have taken that ap already
ok so borrowing cards is allowed in general I suppose

A summary of this announcement is written at the bottom.

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and other Skyfolk!

Over the past two months project progression has considerably slowed down and it has become apparent that the community is in need of a status update. This announcement aims to provide said status update, where we discuss what has happened the past few months, what the current status of the project is, what some of the roadblocks are and how we plan to alleviate them, what we are currently focusing on and what our plans and expectations are to move forward. We also take a more in-depth look at the current roadmap for new cards and card balancing, and newly added staff members.
General project state and current plans
Let us start by going back more or less 1 year. At that moment @Ladadoos and @Zyna were still only client developers and the only server developer, Kubik, had just left us. With no foreseeable new server developer and the server being in a very unstable state, Ladadoos and Zyna decided to step up and become server and client developers. For the next few months they worked many hours per day to fix as many game related issues as possible and bring the gaming experience to an enjoyable state so that Skylords Reborn could finally release. This lead to the project reaching an unsustainably high update throughput, likely giving false expectations for parts of the community for the future. Just before the project released the only two administrators, InsaneHawk and MrXLink, also stepped down from their role. The lack of a leading role started to show and considering Ladadoos and Zyna had the most involvement in the project at the time they stepped up to also become administrators. As a step in the process of re-structuring the team and improving work efficiency, we noticed that there was a clear need for extra designers. Game design has always been behind and with release coming, we needed to finish design decisions quickly. That is when @ImaginaryNumb3r joined which helped immensely and, alongside other designers, we were able to get game design to an acceptable state for release. 
On December 18th, 2020 Skylords Reborn released. With this milestone achieved we decided to shift more of our attention to ensuring our servers properly handle the hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of concurrent players and to start implementing our first ever card balance changes! With the help of ImaginaryNumb3r, Zyna and the discord balancing server we released our first big card balance change on 1st of January, 2021. This was followed by a couple of extra updates, after which the project progression greatly decreased. ImaginaryNumb3r had to spontaneously spend a lot more time at his real-life job and Zyna and Ladadoos had to catch up with university duties like bachelor and master thesis. In the meantime other staff members have also had it busier than usual.
This leads us to where we are now. Two months without game updates and a community without a clear idea of the current state of the project. In the past few weeks we have internally discussed project health and team structure and decided to use the little time we currently still have into adding more team members to the project and improving code and workflow documentations. This process takes a lot of time which unfortunately comes at the cost of even slower game progression. Ever since we made our open staff applications page we have had many new applications come in and a lot of time has been spent processing them. Our goal is to expand the team such that we try to minimize the chances the project hits a complete halt again and as a result you can expect the team to grow in the upcoming weeks/months. We recently also added three new roles (discord moderators, community manager and event organizer) alongside the existing ones, which should improve the current project state. Feel free to have a look!
Faction design and new staff members
That being said, today we are most happy to announce the future for card balancing and potential new cards in Skylords Reborn. To us, card balance is of critical importance to provide new experiences and allow for greater deck building freedom in the game. To accelerate this process we are proud to announce that we have established a team of 5 people which are dedicated to improve the overall gameplay and deckbuilding experience.
With the introduction of this new team, we have created 2 new official titles:
 - Faction Designer: They explore the design space for card changes and create specifications which will be implemented.
 - Balance Developer: They implement features which were designed by Faction Designers or fix bugs of different sorts. They will also help map making in the future by adding new map specific units like bosses.
In other words: faction designers design the cards and balance developers implement them.
The team consists of the following members:
- @RadicalX: Faction Designer with PvP focus
- @WindHunter: Faction Designer with PvE focus
- @Chibiterasu: Balance Developer
- @Razeroc: Balance Developer
- @ImaginaryNumb3r: Lead Faction Designer
Expectations and steps moving forward
Experience has shown that working on balance and faction design is too work intense for just one developer at a time. As such, it goes without saying that you can expect more frequent balance iterations with card changes which won't only address balance, but also bugfixes and quality-of-life changes. Furthermore, we want to use our new resources for improved communication and greater transparency in terms of card and faction design.
Card changes are important steps to make the game more fun, but because there are so many ways one can adjust cards good design is everything. For PvE in particular our ultimate goal is to strengthen the identity of each faction (pure elements and hybrid factions) and give them their own signature playstyles. But for now, our efforts are best spend on cards which don't require a mechanical rework to make viable (like the Mutating Maniac buff). And for PvP, our new development resources allow our expert group (a group of hand-picked community members that help with design) to make faster progress and make more tests. In the future you can expect more detailed short and long-term goals for card balancing.
That is it for now. Thanks for your continued support the past few months and we look forward to what the future brings us!

Summary
Developers and designers are very busy with real-life jobs and university. New open staff roles were made here as an attempt to keep the project progressing. These rules include discord moderators, community manager, event organizer, developers, designers etc. A lot of time is currently spent reviewing applications and making it easier to integrate new staff members. @Chibiterasu and @Razeroc were recently added to staff and are responsible to implement card changes designed by the new faction designers @RadicalX and @WindHunter. This should greatly speed up card/faction balancing.

Patch #400026
Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and Skyfolk,
this is a minor update that for the most part includes a few fixes for the server crashes which happened during the last couple of weeks, and also the new spectator maps which were published on the test server last week. We also handed out the boosters which were promised for the players who were experiencing issues during the server instabilities back in January, and to the players who participated in Toggy's last tournament with sponsored prizes. We're sorry for the people who had to wait for their boosters until now. If you're wondering why the frequency of updates has drastically decreased recently, please read this announcement:
General changes
- Fixed various causes of server crashes.
- Added official spectator maps for the 1vs1 pvp maps. These maps are based on the recent reworks on the test server.
- Added the completion date for achievements.
- Reordered and added some loading screen hints. - translations done by LEBOVIM, Liorans, and Irisunna
- Reworked russian translations for many UI-Texts (Mostly surrounding Quests) - translations done by Liorans
- Removed Wazhai from the PvP ranked pool.
General fixes
- Fixed edge case where the UI would say that the player had an active booster discount when they did not.

We're expecting a downtime of around 30 minutes from approximately 8:30 to 9:00 CEST.

I would like to mention that the approach taken here is not the right one when it comes to notifying us of (unfair) bans. The best thing to have done would be to have created a Ban Appeal thread or to have contacted us on Discord using the staff bot (and not in public chat), as Ultrakool said.

We indeed have full history of all in-game transactions and can easily check the flow of resources between different accounts. We are more than willing to spend the time to investigate the case and unban if necessary, if you approach us through one of the two previously mentioned ways. But you need to have a little patience and should not expect an immediate answer from us.