ImaginaryNumb3r

Still editing the post, as I fat fingered and pressed submit prematurely...

Greetings,
after wanting to share my thoughts about the current state of Battlegrounds for weeks now and postponing it ever since because I am lazy, I finally got the drive to write this one up here.

I want to share my thoughts and suggestions of multiple aspects of its current execution and how they can be improved because let's face it: it is far from perfect. This is not a thread about "hurr durr, nerf Lost Souls , because they are so hard on difficulty 9, the second highest difficulty of them all" and certainly won't start with phrases like: "I don't make suggestions, because I don't get paid when they get implemented."
Obviously the feasibility varies and while some may be easy to integrate, others may be harder or even impossible to realize.
I would like for this thread to become the go to discussion thread about Battlegrounds/rPvE and where it is supposed to go. I am eager to hear about your opinions, ideas and suggestions.
Anyways, here we go:


Map generation and its quirks
Let's start off with something where I think most if not all of us can agree upon; map generation. It works for the most time, but there are times, where your monuments are really close to enemy camps. For Tier 2 and beyond this isn't much of a problem - in solo just build a bigger army than usual and for multiplayer your team mates may assist you with a coordinated push or help you hold your turf. But there are times where your first monument gets immediately attacked on game start before you even summoned any units in which case the game is pretty much over for you either because the camp has long range units that immediately pull the camp or the camp spawns right on top of your monument. This is an issue almost exclusive to difficulty level 10, but I have experienced it twice myself on difficulty level 9 against Lost Souls as well. While it is an extremely rare occasion on difficulty 9, it is much more common on difficulty 10 and happens regularly enough to be a concern. Personally I see this as a priority issue, if Battlegrounds/rPvE ever sees substantial changes.
Other than that, it'd great to see more random/diverse generation. Seldomly you have maps where the path of your team mates directly connects to your Tier 2. I even had a map where my team mates' path after Tier 2 directly went to Tier 4 instead of intersecting at Tier 3. I'd wish to see more of that or completely different spawns, where two or even all four team mates spawn at the same location and have to push a single, more fortified path together. In addition to that more interesting paths or intersections to later camps, as in eight camps that converge to a single bigger area in the middle with each spawn meeting there, so you have one player dedicated to defending the onslaught, which would also promote decks oriented towards defense. Or maps with only few big or one huge camp that inhabits tons of enemies.
Maybe even reverse the roles and have to defend against ever increasing hordes of enemies until the time is up like in Crusade or Defending Hope.
I'll leave it up to debate if you can choose between defensive or offensive Battlegrounds/rPvE maps or keep it completely random.


Balancing and strength between individual factions
This is something where I think a lot can be done to even the odds, but in this small segment I keep it on a rather basic level and get more into detail later on. I think it is pretty much universally agreed on that Lost Souls is considered the most tedious of the bunch, where as Bandit and Stonekin are the easiest factions to play against. Twilight sits somewhere inbetween, although the scale tips more into Twilight's favor with the Evil Eye spam. For most players Lost Souls is the most tedious to play against. Some hate Lost Spellbreakers, others hate Lost Archfiends and some hate everything about Lost Souls. Personally I don't like Lost Vigils in Tier 3 and the inconsistency that Lost Wanderer pretty much only shields at the very beginning, which last indefinitely unlike Stonekin Earthkeeper's. But that's fine, each to their own. Often players want to remove or nerf something of the Lost Souls roster. These complaints often come from difficulty 9 players. 10 isn't up for discussion because it is seldomly played in comparison.
Everybody can think what they like on the part that Lost Souls is "too strong" compared to other factions, the solution to that "problem" is certainly not a simple nerf to a single faction, but rather adjust all factions at once and equalize their power level. It is about the highest difficulty levels after all and Bandits/Stonekin are a breeze compared to Lost Souls or even Twilight. Real strategic gameplay only starts to show if you play difficulty 10, but I will get to difficulty scaling in a bit.
 
Change up and increase the overall spawn pool
One thing that bugs me about spawns in general are the mixed factions spawns. Lost Souls has Twilight units in early camps that for some reason are stronger than in actual Twilight maps. Stonekin is also less Stonekin and more like 50/50 with Bandits in snow maps. And I don't think that needs to be the case. There are quite a few unused AI unit types in the campaign that could be integrated into Battlegrounds/rPvE. Both types of Stonekin Grinder, Lost Shade, Lost Spirit Ship, Gemeye, just to name a few. And I believe that with additional units it will make balancing individual factions much easier.
 
Difficulty rebalancing and scaling
What I don't like about the current difficulty levels is the sudden jump in difficulty between 9 and 10 and the weird thing that lower difficulty levels are harder as in the case with Twilight's 8, where unlike in 9 Evil Eyes are present, but that's only one thing. I'd go as far and move all level but level 10 by one level, so difficulty level 1 is effectively removed and a new level 9 can take its place between 9, which would become the new 8, and 10 that evens out the sudden jump. One that starts out with a spawning camp at Tier 2 and stronger camps overall from T3 onwards, so you can get a taste of what 10 will have in store for you.
This would also mean that when going and revising all 10 levels, all individual levels will have noticable jumps in difficulty which will be reflected not only in enemy strength but also how the map is generated. Unfortunately now difficulty 10's challenge comes from the very first camps pushing for energy wells and monuments and drops down noticably when you have your units ready, at least for Bandits/Stonekin.
I believe the highest difficulties are only supposed to be for decks directly build for it, but as it is right now only level 10 requires a decent amount of game knowledge, coordination and team work, where as in level 9 you breeze through with relative ease, which shouldn't be the case for the second highest difficulty level. I know it is a bit much to ask for coordination and team play with one or more randoms, but the game should challenge you earlier for that matter.
For two player and solo play your time limit is usually higher and suffices for it to be less of a concern.
Another thing that has been mentioned a few times and what I certainly support is increasing map size along with higher enemy count and time limit.


Integrating new factions into the mix
Something that has been brought up by other players and where I think that is a nice idea and worthy to mention here is to add some more variety into the game mode by adding more factions as enemies.
In some campaign maps we already fight against Nature, Fire or Shadow units and with the amount of units and buildings each faction has at its disposal, balancing them would certainly be quite easy.


That's about it from my side. I believe on some things I mentioned here you agree and on other you surely don't, but that's perfectly fine and I want to hear your point of view about basically anything related to Battlegrounds/rPvE.

It takes about 3 minutes and 20 seconds (200 seconds) for a power well to pay for itself, since it produces 1 power per 2 seconds.

For PvP, the big problem really is the lack of transparency with regard to how the card generates power (and how much power it generates).  I pretty much agree with everything Hirooo said here and I think that removing looter is an acceptable interim change while the ultimate goal should be to rework the ability so that it moves power from void rather than generating free power.
I would suggest a slight buff in the meantime (5-10 power cost reduction or a slight stat boost), because I don't think that Thugs will be very useful if looter is removed.  They saw very little use before looter was buffed, and that's not because people didn't try to use them.  They would still be helpful (though far from essential) in fire mirrors, but not worth it vs shadow any more (still nice to have, but not worth the deck slot), I think; so they would only see use in a very fire-heavy meta.
Your idea #3 may actually be a very good compromise for retaining the unit's usefulness in PvE, though I think it would need a slight buff to still be good in PvP (like cost reduction to 55 power) due to the greatly increased amount of micro needed to get use out of the ability with this change.  That said, I still think that reworking the ability to move power from the void is the ideal solution.  Your other suggestions don't really solve the PvP problems, though.  Waiting until Kubik figures out how to change abilities is pretty reasonable too; I don't think that the card is quite problematic enough to warrant immediate changes.

I feel you. In pvp Fire/Shadow had the exact same problem with decks slots and it always felt like you were playing with only haf a deck. You miss out on powerful cards of pure faction and end up with a compromise, that forces you to patch your holes with additional cards.
If I understand you correctly you want a mechanic that essentially gives you T3 monster cards for free. Given the slot pressure, that's not unreasonable. However, I don't think this is a "be-all end-all" change. With this ability, we first must have valid Twilight units to begin with.
Realistically, the only T2 Twilight cards you play in pvp are Brute + Vileblood, of which both are mediocre. Vileblood could morph into Mutating Maniac and Twilight Brute into... Twilight Creeper? The target card for evolved Twilight units seems rather arbitrary to me. But admittedly, this is better than nothing.
The proposed alternative is that units "level up", as you reach a new tier. But here I see the the big problem with player expectation and game readability. A "T3 Vileblood" must be visually distinct from a "T2 Vileblood", this is a must (I am speaking from experience). Otherwise you can confuse your opponents with mixing T2 and T3 Vilebloods and expect them to make a bad choice, this is just toxic. You are also introducing a whole range of new de-factor cards that need to be balance and tested, which isn't trivial.
Now, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore this but in terms of deck building, I can't help but feel like using duct tape, rather than having a diverse deck. And again, this make the assumption that all of the Twilight Cards are worth using.
To me, it is clear that the first step must be to make the Twilight Cards viable. I have reservations against "Twilight Evolution", but I'm not fully opposed to it. However, I think with this proposal we get ahead of ourselves. The first step must be to fix the Twilight Cards, there is no way around this.
And I don't think the current "Twilight Transformation" is completely unsavable either. You are right about its issues, can't we fix those issues for the mean time? Just give transformed units full health and not make them use a charge. That alone could make it a good ability to have.
On another note: You mention "players using Deathglider instead of hurricane" -> Why don't we just buff Death Glider instead? Death Glider has essentially the stats of Mana Wing and might be the worst unit in the game. A flying S-counter with S-knockback could be a powerful tool in F/N. I don't care how strong a "T3 Evolved Deathglider" would be, I want it to be good in T2.
Back on the topic of deck slots: I think the deck-slot problem would be mitigated a great deal with more Twilight cards were like Gladiatrix. She's anti-L, she's anti-air and provides a slot-free Disenchant. If the Twilight Cards were multi-purpose oriented we would effectively mitigate the problem with free deck slots. In the Discord the idea has been raised to make Twilight Hag a T2 unit, I think she would be a perfect candidate.
Now, with good Twilight units making up for the shortcumings of F/N you might not even need to change Twilight Transformation and we could play around transformation abilities. Imagine Twilight Minions costing 50e: Suddenly, you have a cheap way of increasing the damage output of your Twilight Units. I know it costs a deckslot, but I think this is a fascinating facet of the faction that shouldn't be discarded.
In general, I think more abilities should trigger if Twilight Units transformed. E.g. if Nightshade plant triggered its effect on transformation, it would be an interesting unit for mass-CC.
But again, I am not completely opposed to Twilight Evolution, I think this can only be a "second step" in making Fire/Nature better. And the Evolution should be very well thought out and designed. For example, a unit should only be able to use Twilight Evolution once. Otherwise a Twilight T2 card is effectively 3 cards (T2, T3 and T4 version), which is unfair towards other decks.
But first things first :-)
#MakeTwilightGreatAgain
Edit: One thing I'm not keen on is forgoing orb restrictions. We should be making Twilight better instead of giving it more access to cards like Frenetic Assault. With Enlightenment and Amii Monument, there are already ways to ignore certain restrictions and I think adding more ways is hurting the game more than it helps.

You are completely right. It was in the heat of the moment and I got carried away...
I sincerely apologize to the people who are still doing all the maintenance, bugfixing and all other aspects that we don't notice from the outside. And it seems like there is actually some progress in making balancing changes for the better.
Thank you @Devs

I feel you. In pvp Fire/Shadow had the exact same problem with decks slots and it always felt like you were playing with only haf a deck. You miss out on powerful cards of pure faction and end up with a compromise, that forces you to patch your holes with additional cards.
If I understand you correctly you want a mechanic that essentially gives you T3 monster cards for free. Given the slot pressure, that's not unreasonable. However, I don't think this is a "be-all end-all" change. With this ability, we first must have valid Twilight units to begin with.
Realistically, the only T2 Twilight cards you play in pvp are Brute + Vileblood, of which both are mediocre. Vileblood could morph into Mutating Maniac and Twilight Brute into... Twilight Creeper? The target card for evolved Twilight units seems rather arbitrary to me. But admittedly, this is better than nothing.
The proposed alternative is that units "level up", as you reach a new tier. But here I see the the big problem with player expectation and game readability. A "T3 Vileblood" must be visually distinct from a "T2 Vileblood", this is a must (I am speaking from experience). Otherwise you can confuse your opponents with mixing T2 and T3 Vilebloods and expect them to make a bad choice, this is just toxic. You are also introducing a whole range of new de-factor cards that need to be balance and tested, which isn't trivial.
Now, this doesn't mean that we shouldn't explore this but in terms of deck building, I can't help but feel like using duct tape, rather than having a diverse deck. And again, this make the assumption that all of the Twilight Cards are worth using.
To me, it is clear that the first step must be to make the Twilight Cards viable. I have reservations against "Twilight Evolution", but I'm not fully opposed to it. However, I think with this proposal we get ahead of ourselves. The first step must be to fix the Twilight Cards, there is no way around this.
And I don't think the current "Twilight Transformation" is completely unsavable either. You are right about its issues, can't we fix those issues for the mean time? Just give transformed units full health and not make them use a charge. That alone could make it a good ability to have.
On another note: You mention "players using Deathglider instead of hurricane" -> Why don't we just buff Death Glider instead? Death Glider has essentially the stats of Mana Wing and might be the worst unit in the game. A flying S-counter with S-knockback could be a powerful tool in F/N. I don't care how strong a "T3 Evolved Deathglider" would be, I want it to be good in T2.
Back on the topic of deck slots: I think the deck-slot problem would be mitigated a great deal with more Twilight cards were like Gladiatrix. She's anti-L, she's anti-air and provides a slot-free Disenchant. If the Twilight Cards were multi-purpose oriented we would effectively mitigate the problem with free deck slots. In the Discord the idea has been raised to make Twilight Hag a T2 unit, I think she would be a perfect candidate.
Now, with good Twilight units making up for the shortcumings of F/N you might not even need to change Twilight Transformation and we could play around transformation abilities. Imagine Twilight Minions costing 50e: Suddenly, you have a cheap way of increasing the damage output of your Twilight Units. I know it costs a deckslot, but I think this is a fascinating facet of the faction that shouldn't be discarded.
In general, I think more abilities should trigger if Twilight Units transformed. E.g. if Nightshade plant triggered its effect on transformation, it would be an interesting unit for mass-CC.
But again, I am not completely opposed to Twilight Evolution, I think this can only be a "second step" in making Fire/Nature better. And the Evolution should be very well thought out and designed. For example, a unit should only be able to use Twilight Evolution once. Otherwise a Twilight T2 card is effectively 3 cards (T2, T3 and T4 version), which is unfair towards other decks.
But first things first :-)
#MakeTwilightGreatAgain
Edit: One thing I'm not keen on is forgoing orb restrictions. We should be making Twilight better instead of giving it more access to cards like Frenetic Assault. With Enlightenment and Amii Monument, there are already ways to ignore certain restrictions and I think adding more ways is hurting the game more than it helps.

I absolutely believe you. But how many people like you are there? Certainly not all of the current players. 
And for most people, this will be the third time they need to start over from zero. Can't say that sounds like a recipe for fun. And ultimately, there is no new experience to be had.
By now, most people already had their fair share of nostalgia, there is little more to be gained from now on. And all of this only takes the veteran players into account. If the game wants to be a success, it needs to attract more players. Really, you need to keep new players as much as possible.
*Start Rant*
This can only be addressed with careful game design that should have been addressed years ago. Card Balancing is one obvious major factor, but achievements and unique rewards for trying out new and weird things also factors into this. But all I can see is a painfully slow process on a questionable re-work of the BFP income.
For those reasons, I fear the worst for the longevity of the game.
*End Rant*
Edit: Just today I decided to log on again... and nobody was hosting even a single game. It doesn't feel like there are many people left that feel in charge and do their best for the future of the game. *Sigh* And now with Kubik gone, I just don't know man... I try to stay positive, but I can't help but feel a little naive for that.

I absolutely believe you. But how many people like you are there? Certainly not all of the current players. 
And for most people, this will be the third time they need to start over from zero. Can't say that sounds like a recipe for fun. And ultimately, there is no new experience to be had.
By now, most people already had their fair share of nostalgia, there is little more to be gained from now on. And all of this only takes the veteran players into account. If the game wants to be a success, it needs to attract more players. Really, you need to keep new players as much as possible.
*Start Rant*
This can only be addressed with careful game design that should have been addressed years ago. Card Balancing is one obvious major factor, but achievements and unique rewards for trying out new and weird things also factors into this. But all I can see is a painfully slow process on a questionable re-work of the BFP income.
For those reasons, I fear the worst for the longevity of the game.
*End Rant*
Edit: Just today I decided to log on again... and nobody was hosting even a single game. It doesn't feel like there are many people left that feel in charge and do their best for the future of the game. *Sigh* And now with Kubik gone, I just don't know man... I try to stay positive, but I can't help but feel a little naive for that.

I absolutely believe you. But how many people like you are there? Certainly not all of the current players. 
And for most people, this will be the third time they need to start over from zero. Can't say that sounds like a recipe for fun. And ultimately, there is no new experience to be had.
By now, most people already had their fair share of nostalgia, there is little more to be gained from now on. And all of this only takes the veteran players into account. If the game wants to be a success, it needs to attract more players. Really, you need to keep new players as much as possible.
*Start Rant*
This can only be addressed with careful game design that should have been addressed years ago. Card Balancing is one obvious major factor, but achievements and unique rewards for trying out new and weird things also factors into this. But all I can see is a painfully slow process on a questionable re-work of the BFP income.
For those reasons, I fear the worst for the longevity of the game.
*End Rant*
Edit: Just today I decided to log on again... and nobody was hosting even a single game. It doesn't feel like there are many people left that feel in charge and do their best for the future of the game. *Sigh* And now with Kubik gone, I just don't know man... I try to stay positive, but I can't help but feel a little naive for that.

Statements like this are coming almost exclusively from people who want to shove their weight around. There are dozens of games that have ladders for multiplayer matching and are wiped every now and then. Yet people still play these games, even if they have to re-invest up to hundreds of hours. 
The game requires a steady time of like 4-5 hours per week to receive boosters and manage to play a mission or two, or a couple of pvp matches. It's literally not much more than playing CS GO at this point.
Considering this fact it's likely you won't start playing even after a wipe either. Just like all the tards from reddit who are talking about the "glorious days back then". They just talk about the game but won't play it anyways.

Guys to be Honest , you dont have to choose: Nostalgia (pure version) or New content

I see people commenting on Nerfing Amii monument - You could make a secondary ranking system for players using "Banned Cards" just like lots of TCG does.
In this case People prefering the original version can still play the original version use all the cards they like .
While the benefit from new content could be huge for people who just love the World of Nyn and new combinations of cards and creative use of them.

New cards are actually very needed, The community dies off. Thats really bad for the game and the future of us. Some of the Community made maps are reallllyy good but there is no rewards for doing them. This is a drawback that sometimes holds me from doing them. We could make some of them to be official storyline of the campaign

Lots of cards need balancing, buffing and nerfing alike.
think about Wildfire spam, Jugg & Spitfire power cost/stats compared to coredredge (:D) , Using amiii monu on some maps make them childplay, LSS spam kills any map with ease, Some Bandit cards are very weak/useless, Ravenheart and battleship are slow and weak which makes them unusable, I bet you know of this problems.

Even with all the changes to this the game will stay prette Pure Nostalgia. Players can choose by themselves not to include the new cards or play the new maps. And still play on the old ranking system to beat speedruns like in the good old days. While there is also content for the other group.

Just an idea, consider it

Esceeli

Ok I have been around BF since early Beta... and by that I mean 2008.  Love the game, love what its about and I hate Phenom for not doing more of a marketing campaign in the US  ( And Root Network Nerf! ). 
With that said.....
WTH are we waiting on in regards to implementing changes to some of the cards.  Those of us who have been around know damn well that SOMETHING needs to be done to cards.  This project has been going on what 4 or 5 years now and how many have been changed?
I am sorry but I have a problem with this.  The community has come up with several ideas which honestly are GREAT.  Why are they not slowly being implemented.  One of the things that hurt this game is there were cards that flat out needed to be NERFED and many that needed to be buffed.  Having worked on a project I know that most of the changes are simple edits to the scripts that change the cards as well as an edit to the card itself if it is not an auto update based on the script.
We are in Open Stress.... and have been....... for a long..... long ....... time now.  We need to start pushing changes to cards forward and get it done before we go live whenever the hell that will be.   I have seen the posts about a single person holding up card balance.  I do not know how true it is.  But we need to start implementing it.  Imagine just how many we could have done in 4 years. ....... And had time to get it right!

At this point I would like to refer back to @MrXLink's original post which received criticism, as not all player groups were considered and present my closely related proposal. The current BFP reward and progress system clearly shows the limits of its longevity and therefore needs to be revised after the reset. 
Player groups
For my proposal, I have therefore divided the community into different types of players, who should all benefit from the new system:
Beginners: These players are new to the game or start the game again after a very long break with little knowledge.  Due to the enormously small community, such players are of special value. Midfield: All-round players, no excessive playing, interested in all game modes, but mainly PvE. This group currently makes up a large part of the community. PvP: From beginner to expert, only interested in battle against other players. PvE: From beginner to expert, only interested in battle with others against the computer. Some also focus primarily on RPVE. Player goal
Casual / Fun: Players have no declared goal to be the best or to achieve any other ranking. Largest part of the community Speedrunner: Players have as a goal to occupy top positions in the PvE / RPvE rankings PvP Veterans: Players who want to climb the PvP ladder Grinder: Players with the highest online time, who want to reach as many collectible cards as possible and/or complete all quests and achievements It is noticeable that the respective players have different needs and expectations.
Player expectations of a fair system
Time: Those who invest more time should also be rewarded more Success: Those who achieve set goals should also be rewarded more Rookie bonus: If you are new to the game you should be motivated to stay Real-life: The system should take into account the needs of the players because not everyone has the same amount of free time Economic expectations of a fair system
Lower barriers to market entry Countermeasures to price inflation Information transparency Current situation/problems of the BFP system
The current system ...
... is not fully transparent as far as the conditions for fulfilling the quests are concerned. ... adds constantly more financial resources (cards and BFP) to the economic cycle without any permanent outflow. This inevitably leads to price inflation, which puts new players at a disadvantage, as their purchasing power is much lower than the purchasing power of those who have been playing for some time. ... is designed for a daily earning activity of about 30 - 60 minutes, and after completion of all quests there is no incentive for further play. The daily income is currently one booster (~420 BFP) and 2 quests worth 75 BFP each, this could vary slightly due to not fulfilling and/or rerolling the quests, but with constant play, it amounts to about 570 BFP /1 Booster + 150 BFP per day.
On the market, cards have a kind of benchmark price that was determined by the new income levels and by the sellers. Based on this, players have begun to develop an understanding of what prices are appropriate, also with reference to the prices back in the old days.
It is important to remember that players rely on their old intuition, are somewhat avaricious, and do not necessarily lower prices linearly with less income. Furthermore, the community has expressed the wish for the booster to remain in place.
My suggestions/improvements for the new system

All these changes are to be seen as one big proposal that only works if all these steps are taken together, as everything is interrelated.
The currently available Daily Booster Pack for 30 minutes playing time is removed, but it can still be purchased for 450 BFP in the Market.
Currently, the market becomes extremely flooded with cards, as every active player can earn automatically 8 cards a day. Players are a lot more willing to open the booster if they have it already, compared to actively spending their earned BFP on buying it. Hence this measure in combination with average less income should slow down the total growth of available cards.
  The current 3 initial Boosters Quest and the Achievement System remain in place and many of those suggestions in the Forum (https://forum.skylords.eu/index.php?/topic/4166-quest-achievement-suggestions-megathread/) will be added to reward players with Boosters and Gold for completing them.
These Achievements should be designed to be a skill-based incentive for players that have already reached a higher level.
  Introduction of the first victory of the day: Receive 20 BFP for winning a game of any mode, for Campaign Standard difficulty / RPVE < 5 / PVP, the gold awarded is quintupled.
This is a small incentive besides the quests for players to return every day. The first victory of the day is especially designed towards beginners, that yet cannot beat higher difficulties.
  Time played per day is directly rewarding players in the form of BFP (Reset of time played per day with the quest reset)
For minute 0- 30: 3 BFP/min,
For minute 31-90: 1,5 BFP/min­,   
For minute 91-180: 1 BFP/min­, 
Afterwards 0,5 BFP/min





As the current BFP system had been tuned to accelerate BFP gains this is a decrease in total possible BFP gains per day if the same amount of time is played, but allows now playing past 30 minutes or even all day long to remain time being rewarded and excessive Grinding to even exceed the old reward system. The numbers are kept simple and immediately graspable for everyone.
Secondly, the new first win of the day and the updated quest distribution system make up a lot for players that can only play fewer times. Also playing less than the old 30 minutes is now always worth something.
   First Hour of Uninterrupted Ranked PVP queue time is paid at 1 BFP/5min waiting time completed.
This is a small compensation for firstly the lower PvP player base and secondly PvP veterans with especially long queue times. capped to prevent abuse.
  The conditions for PvE quests (RPVE and PVP quest are not affected) are changed to require either 10 minutes of play per game to be counted OR 10 accumulated minutes of shorter game time victories.
This is a change targeted for the Speedrunners, to make too fast victories as much worth as in total equally long time play resulting in defeat.
  The currently repeating random pool of  6 quests remains worth 75 BFP per quest, however, the description is changed to provide full transparency of all the conditions and information about all other income possibilities is given in the same tab. Ideally, upon first Login, this information is also displayed on a popup window.
This is to ensure that new players can find all information ingame and no one is at an information disadvantage on how to make BFP. 
  The amount of new quests out of this pool is increased to 3 (from 2). The Reroll penalty of 25 BFP remains, can now be used once per quest per day. The first time a player uses the reroll function a confirmation popup should inform again about the quest’s value deduction.
This is part of the compensation effort for not receiving a booster pack anymore. Secondly, players should be allowed to sacrifice income (permanently drain BFP from the system) in return of getting a higher chance of the quests they like.
  Up to 3 Carry Forward Quests instead of 1
Right now players can carry 1 unfinished quest out of this random quest pool forward to the next day and still receive 2 new quests. Now this change should allow players to stack quests for up to 3 days of absence. Hence on the first day of absence, the player carries one quest forward, on the second day he can carry 2 quests forward and on the third day finally 3 quests. This results in players that cannot play that frequently to be able to earn at least one out of the 3 potential new quests per day for each of the first 3 days of absence. Players that play constantly/ every day are still at a big advantage regarding the total number of quests, but someone who for instance can only play once a week has at least on that day 6 quests instead of 3 as of right now.
  New players receive for the first 7 days (not necessarily consecutive) of completing the new ‘first victory of the day’ quest, also a lower value booster for free that contains 5 Common and 3 Uncommon Cards.
This is a further incentive for new players as they can thus focus on spending their earned BFP on the more exiting big cards and do not have to worry too much about getting the trivial small stuff.
  BFP can be converted into Gold at a rate of 1 BFP à 100 Gold, only in this direction
The overall goal is to more connect both currencies. With Gold becoming more needed overall this is a feature that players can use to prioritize. For instance, a player that already has one deck and want to get this upgraded as fast as possible could transform his BFP. This can also be utilized by PvP players as their Gold income is lower.
  Current base gold auctioning costs are increased tenfold for players with PVE rank 9 and above, and a hundredfold for players with PVE rank 13 and above. The gold payable will only be permanently deducted once the auction is actually sold. Otherwise, the Gold will be refunded.



Currently, PVE players with a higher level tend to swim in Gold, that they cannot use. This, on the one hand, feels bad and is also lost potential to lower the total BFP in the market. As players will now face significantly higher Gold prices in later stages of the game, they might (have to) opt for permanently removing BFP out of the System by converting BFP into Gold. There should be no issue that players try to avoid getting past level 9 as some cards require level 10 to purchase the last upgrade. 
  Trading incurs the same gold costs per successfully traded card. This is a personal trading fee that will always only be based on what cards you have put in.
This is necessary to prevent players from circumventing the increased auctioning gold prices by direct trading.
  Every card except Promo cards can be used to “forge” new ones. ­   3 cards of the same rarity create a new card of the same rarity ­   3 cards of mixed rarity create a new card of the lowest rarity invested ­   5 cards of the same rarity create 1 card of greater rarity (not available for Ultra Rares)

This is a new feature that again helps to reduce inflation as cards will be permanently removed from the system. As currently, the correlation of rarity and price is not necessarily high, outliers like Shaman should have changed/swapped their rarity with cards like Oracle Mask, to prevent abuse of the system. Final remarks
These measures are designed for implementation after reset. Required development time is therefore available. This is my opinion and what I believe might be a good start and beginner-friendly approach (remember after the reset we all start as new players), just like MrxLink's proposal this is only a theoretical concept which does require testing to remove potential flaws I may adjust this proposal in response to criticism.

I am fully convinced, that PvP in Battleforge is a fantastic gamemode, but has certain flaws, that we might need to adress in order to make the game mode more attractive, especially for newer people. I want to make a longer post to get a discussion going about what we can do to get a more attractive gamemode and a larger playerbase, especially post reset. I'm following the current thread, where new player experience got discussed, which mainly focussed onto reward system, so I will move away from that in this thread, trying to adress some other problems and possible solutions. If you are looking for the discussion it is linked below. 
 
Balancing
While there was alot of dicussion in the seperate balancing discord, we haven't seen any progress for a while, because access to the testserver has benn denied. In terms of PvP balancing we somewhat got to a consensus about what needs to be adressed, but it was hard to find a solution that really fixes the problem. We really need access to the testserver in order to make a progression, so we can implement changes, that make the majority of players happy 
 
What I'd like to talk about the most is the T1 diversity. With Nature and Frost being very underwhelming, alot of deck variety gets shut downed, especially for 1v1s. With only Shadow and Fire T1 being consistently viable at a high level, the amount of T1 matchups we can watch, consists of:
Fire vs Fire - Shadow vs Fire - Shadow vs Shadow
This is only a small part of what would be possible. If all T1's would achieve a "viable state" we could see 7 additional T1 matchups:
Nature vs Nature -Nature vs Shadow -Nature vs Fire  - Frost vs Frost - Frost vs Nature - Frost vs Shadow - Frost vs Fire  
In order to win with Frost or Nature you either have to play much better than your opponent or abuse the enemies inexperience with the matchup, which just is not a consistent win condition, especially if you want these factions to be played more frequently. With a static gamestate alot of people get frustrated about the current balancing situation. 
In addition to that, there are 3 T2s (pure Nature, stonekin, pure Frost), that completely get shut downed by this deficit. Their T2 strength is actually decent, but you just don't want to play that frost or nature T1. 
 
Back then I really advocated nerfs to mortar and Phasetower and I'm still fully supporting this idea. It is not possible to make healthy balancing changes around these two cards with their current stat cost efficiency and an almost nonexisting building counter system in the early stages of the game. That said, in order to fix the entire T1 issues, we need to adress more than just these two cards (but that would make a good first step). 
Nature is too weak at defending a +1 well situation. Even after taking a lead in initial fights, you won't be able to well up as split attacks are just destroying the faction, that can't fight on low unit number with these units being super expensive. Similar issues occur once you get into a T1 vs T2 situation with more bound power than your opponent. The dps/power against M and L units is just way to low in order to allow healthy defences. 
Frost got gutted through Homesoil getting nerfed and the faction can't fight on open ground effectively. You always need a power well close to your unit in order to contest. Against Mortar and Phasetower you can't even win these close well situations making things alot worse.
 
Current proposals from the skylords balancing discord:
Phasetower: 
Nerf idea 1: Decrease the damage by roughly 20% 
Nerf idea 2: Increase the cost per Tower by 10  
 
Mortar:
Nerf idea 1: Increased costs by roughly 15 power 
Nerf idea 2: Cooldown increase 
Nerf idea 3: Adding an initial cooldown to weaken the card against high tempo. 
 
These are different single nerf ideas and NOT a single combined proposal!  
 
 
Maps
I've seen many players (especially newer ones) complaining about the map pool and also some people seem to dislike map X for various reasons. Just to give some examples. 
-> Lajesh has Walls close to the main base. Once you make a mistake and give one up to the opponent, he might win the game of that, especially in lower elos. 
-> Some people seem to dislke Yrmia for making some matchups very difficult to play
-> Alot of people dislike Whazai as you can cliff onto the main base.  
While there is the issues of generated maps not being included to the ranked pool for some reason, I think it might be a good thing to just widen the map pool rather than reworking the existing PvP maps. I think we could work out some more balanced, fun and interactive maps to get less repetitive games. High ranked players could work around some balanced maps and we've got really good map creators, who could easily create those maps if they're willing to work with us here. After some testing you could consider which new maps might be introduced into the new ranked pool, which would give us some fresh, new content. 
 
What does a good map need? 
I think we need some different maps, that adress different kind of win conditions to give different decks and playstyles small advantages or disadvantages. Battleforge has very low RNG based components in the game, so games might feel repetitive on the same map, if you play the same matchup or player many times in a row. 
 
1) The amount of Monuments 
I think having a range from 7-8 is the best number for orbs on 1v1 maps. 
2) Orb placement
I think T2 should be easily achiveable for both parties. Maps like Uro do have this poor condition, where Frost doesn't get to T2 without contesting it, which is really bad. T2 should be uncontestable, for T3 the case can be different. Lajesh for example has good orb placements in my opinion. If the map is played without offensive wall action, it can provide strategically interesting gameplay. 
3) Well distance
Needs to be carefully selected as there are alot of components, that make matchups either toxic or snowbally 
4) Center of the map
Can grant a strategic advantage due to shorter attack paths, but shouldn't be a win condition itself as some colors simply can't contest in these early fights. The center on Simai is a good example for a healthy  center positioning.
5) Terrain/Cliffing
Choke points are very important to increase the value of cc and AoE, while open space allows more micro management based fighting. In addition to that, important well & orb positions shouldn't be accessable by cliffs to avoid long range Sieges without proper counterplay. 
 
There are more important aspects, but this could be discussed internally with the people, that are willing to work on these kind of map creations. In the end there could be community votings, if a finished map should be included into the ranked PvP pool. Maybe there could be specific tournaments to promote and test these maps beforehand.    
 
 
Activity requirements
I think they are straight up too high. 1 match per day is way too much for a game like Battleforge in order to stay relevant in the leaderboards. Right now alot of players are inactive and aren't motivated to play 30 ranked games with long que times, lower game quility compared to current sparring matches & the low comparability based off your current rank. There are probably about 
Suggestion: Lower the acitivy requirements to about 10 games per month. This makes the leaderboards alot more interesting and meaningful, because you can compare yourself to a much larger playerbase as base elo is the much more relevant stat. Since we are a rather small community I feel like this is important to keep people motivated after dropping inactive.
 
Player Base
We need a higher amount of players to enable fairer matchmaking. There are large skill gaps in and they lead to very snowball based games. Top 5 base elo beats Top 20 base elo with 90%+ wr, Top 20 base elo beats Top 50 base elo with 90%+ wr etc. leading to very frustrating game experiences between stomping and getting stomped. Games are very fast and you don't really get to enjoy the game, especially when you haven't experienced the great games of PvP, that happen upon facing an enemy on a similar skill level. 
Ideas for improvements: 
-> Increased game promotion to attract newer players 
-> Support the current Tournaments like the Stress Test Open 
 
 
Overall it would be nice to collect some ideas on what we could do, to give people a better experience while playing PvP, especially post reset. So let me know your ideas, so I can implement them into this thread.
 
TL DR;
-> Balancing changes are important: Getting a testserver to evaluate proposals would be huge to make progress
-> Adding more maps would be nice, maybe someone of the community map creators could work with PvP players on this
-> Activity requirements are too high, especially when there is a rather low ranked participation
-> We need to build up a solid player base after the reset (attract new players, keep the current ones)
 
 
Best regards, 
RadicalX

I am personally not against increasing deck slots, although a careful analysis would need to be done. It may also not be possible.

But about t4, imo there is no place for t4 in pvp. If you really have extra slots everyone will just take earthshaker, but t4 cards are so crazy OP that you can't even consider having proper counters and healthy gameplay. Even in t3, 90% of t3 cards are just basenuking or countering a base nuke. Games won't reach t4 (even if there are slots) unless wells and orbs get an additional hp buff, but then that will mean games won't end in t1/t2.....
(btw, random thought but I wonder if it might be cool to have maps with different hp levels for different wells/orbs? That might be a cool way to spice maps up, and might also prevent certain rushing from happening, for example if the wells on wazhai cliffs had like 2500 or even 3000 hp, the person who wins the center fight may not auto win....)f
 
But anyway, even if wells had a ton of health so t4 was the norm, nothing in t4 is balanced for healthy gameplay. There is a community map called something like "maze of survivors" which is kinda cool because you have to t4 fight your opponent, but after playing this map a couple times it is clear that t4 fighting is pretty silly and frequently reaches stalemates....
 
 

As I already said:
adding/removing "official" maps to/from the ranked pool is literally 1 number, and 1 comma in the code.
random maps have one (not publicly disclosed) disadvantage for us, but if team decide to add them it is same as above. (Fiki is working on solution to get rid of that disadvantage)
random maps was not removed from ranked pool, I need to write that pool from scratch, and I did not know EA have them in ranked pool so because of the disadvantage I did not add them.
adding community maps would be much more complicated, especially because EA's file checking is broken, because each player can have different map just with same name.
Zyna, and Ladadoos should be already working on converting community map to "official" map, and after that it would be same as above.
Changing units/cards on test server is not a problem, changing it ONLY on test server is, because of how EA made the game (this one actually is not blame to them). Aviator is working on new updater, that will allow us to overcome this issue. (But MrXLink said no changes before release)

Your comments about t1 imbalance, i fully agree with. nature and frost t1 both are not up too par (for different reasons and it would be hard to find balanced fixes for this imo. damn, now i wrote an essay about it... again...).
still, we should also examine fire and shadow t1 as well as they do contain some quite problematic elements. mostly it's the towers, but i feel that overall, ranged units seem too dominant in t1. in almost any matchup a ranged unit spam is par of the course (with some exceptions in the form of thugs spam, which needs a nerf), where as in t2 you can see much more variety in units being played. as there are 2 primary ranged units per faction, this often leads to a real lack of variety in what is being played and the ranged units matchup is a big part of why nature t1 and frost t1 fail as well.
this is especially prominent in the nature t1 vs. shadow t1 matchup, where you can't even dare to start with a swift unit as the nature player on the vast majority of maps. you can forget about dryads as well for the most part and you usually start spearmen and hope your lack of swift does not get abused too hard when you so much as dare to take a well. your t1 basically got reduced to two s units, none of them swift (unless you play werebeast but i am not convinced of those yet). I don't see how your suggested changes would fix this. with the amazon buff, fire t1 would be in real trouble tho. I think the cost reduction on the swap is too much to ask for as it can already be quite usefull. I get that you want it to be better vs. split attacks, but this is going overboard. scavangers already need to avoid the unit due to the damage reduction, which helps quite a bit. Main problem with this is also that it doesn't help vs. shadow (pretty much nothing aside from -5 on werebeasts is), which means that we have a matchup specific solution only, which might get a problem if you want to further buff the faction to do better vs. shadow t1 as well.
 
i'm not saying that counters should not exists, but in t1 it has gotten to a point where you can just entirely forget playing certain units in certain matchups. even in some very problematic t2 matchups, it is rarely this one-dimensional in terms of unit-viability. in t2 you see burrowers being played into pure fire decks and harvesters against frost-splashes. even if viable counters exist, those cards aren't just removed from the game like it is the case with t1 and can turn the game if used in the appropriate situation. T1 tho? Not so much. In some matchups you are basically playing half a deck and that just isn't going to work out. i feel this needs to be adressed if we want to have a properly balanced t1, but i don't think it would be possible to find the support needed to make this happen, so best can likely do is buff frost t1 and nature t1 into viability somehow, which comes with its own set of issues:
 
nature t1 is amazing when there are 3-4+ units on the field and some power is avialable for spells. cc often gauarantees favorable trades and allows to kite back and heal units without much counterplay in open field. damage reduction, s unit counter spell, mele unit counterspell, units with heals, archers with multishot and a very good healing spell, not to forget shamans, all scale like crazy into mid and late t1. problem is, as you pointed out, that this advantage is gone when split attacks are used and the units are costly on top of it, so you can really abuse the faction hard.
but what is the fix to that supposed to be like? Make the units cheaper and you will hit the power-spike sooner, making the faction really good in a mid-fight without wells and a terror in late t1. On the other hand, so much of nature t1's power comes from the synery with cc and heals, so you most likely can still chesse the faction as usual. Don't get me wrong, it's entirely ok that the faction has issues when dealing with split attacks or otherwise low power levels. It's just too extreme to properly balance that out considering just how well the faction scales. You often feel forced to just go t2 as otherwise you are pretty much guaranteed to get steamrolled if you don't play t1 towers.
Personally i think some of the utility nature t1 has needs to adjusted while the units get a bit of a buff to be able to hold their own on low power levels. the t1 heal is really strong, especially considering cc and damage reduction can be used to juggle damage and keep units alive. root and hurricane destory the vast majority of staple units of other factions in late t1, which in my opinion is really out of line. the issues are not as prevalent in t2, where cc is ubiquitous and cost efficient aoe damage spells present some working counters.
 
frost t1 is so map dependent and passive, it's not even funny. aside from the loss of map control and the voulnerability to swift unit rushes, the faction can barely fight in open field, has problems counterattacking (at large well distances. good luck grabbing a clost well tho, since the enemy would love to fight you in open field and you have no swift) and lacks any sort of meaningful engage to start a fight (if you do it right, you can just mass firesworn vs. frost t1 without giving much of a change for the enemy to go t2 and make them lose because they can't force a fight. it's just really dumb!). In short, 90% of the time you are forced to play reactively and hope the enemy messes up somehow (like walking into an obvious gylph of frost in a mid-fight). on the bright side, any non-cheese attacks likely don't get very far. home soil, glacier shell and ice guardians are so good at defending single wells, most player don't even try anymore. but how on earth do you buff frost? make the units good enough to reliably counter swift spamm cheese tactics? what about large maps? what about mid-fights? what if you want to engage without having your ig kitet around?
let's say you managed to fix those issues somehow, but then what? how am i supposed to attack frost t1 then? standard attacks are not working out already it will only be worse if the faction is buffed. do i still get to try the swift unit cheese even if failure is much more likely? if that strat goes bad, it tends to go really, really bad. the matches would essentially be very volatile and still very map dependent.
 
In short, frost t1 and nature t1 are problematic and fixing them without, making them op in situations those decks already excell at, will be much harder than excpected.

As for pvp maps, i really think we should have a contest, preferably an official one where maps get added to the ranked pool. Making good maps takes quite a bit of effort and it sucks not seing them played at all and maybe just winning a few bfp in a contest. I agree that with some measure of care taken for cliffs, center of map balance, map size and t2 oppertunities, we can make some really good and interesting maps and it would be great to roll out new maps for when the game gets released. This should be really low effort for the devs, since the community is going to be in charge of making those maps and voting for them in the end. Since it was already possible to remove random maps from the ranked pool, i am hoping it should be rather easy to add maps as well.

It is easily possible, but what about players that do NOT play fire, or shadow?
Forcing players to a specific color seems like bad idea to me. And I think that most people aggree on this.

The "booster quest" is the heart of this game. I think that is why many players come into the game every day for that reason. I think the worst decision if you take this away from us.
 
The "90 mins game" quest is too much, I think. Almost for nothing'. Somehow I wasn't convinced. Let's change things, but millions of players don't play here. Keep in mind that there aren't as many online players at the same time in the game as to not get bored at a glance. I mean playing 90 minutes every day.... a little worrying in the long run
 

Im afraid this is gonna make the entrance to pvp even harder. Imagine having to grind for several months just to get viable units in starcraft, and then if u wanna switch from terran to protos you had to grind for another 3-4 months. Im afraid this is going to hurt the longevity of the game. It is an RTS after all. As a completely new player you won't even know if the deck ur going for is the one that feels good to play for u. And you cant try one out either. Slowing down the progression might be good for people who enjoy the PVE, but it might ruin the game completely for some or allot people who want to get into the pvp again. I never even got to that point before the reset, and i actually have time to play quite allot compared to most people i know. And yes for sure i could play pvp with a shit deck and still earn some BFP and stuff. but will that be fun, loosing to people who have had the time to fully optimize their decks, because they had more time and more free days to play.

Also, theres the cardgame component. The boosters is a really addictive but not optimal way of optaining cards. Whats a card game without boosters, the excitement of opening a pack and hoping for that Trox General of Destruction (dual masters refrence). Sure i do enjoy the auction house, but maybe some of the quests should give u boosters, its more tempting to open one once you have one in ur face on the screen. Its easier to avoid opening when u have to use the bfp u earn, when you know you can use it on the spesific card you need.

Again, im really afraid slower progression will kill this community. Does it cater more to the hardcore players? yes for sure. But what aboute us casuals, i think most of us won't enjoy this at all. Very concerned with this.
 
Pretty high level... 
1,5 years as mentioned above is apparently to fast.. this is unsettling. Put yourself in the working mans shoes. Who just wants to come home and play some pvp... nope, you have to grind for a couple of months before you can do that. Do you think people would like that? 

Im asking because i want to start a conversation about this, cause this concerns me regarding the games longevity. Not to be offensive.
:-)

Maybe a dedicated PVP server where you can just play PVE and the progression is getting better. Worked for most RTS games.
Maybe make a huge strawpool, see if most people actually want slower progression. If they do, sure go ahead, its super for the game. But if they don't, it will make a serious dent in the amount of people actually playing. Tread super carefully with such a small playerbase, the game is nothing without it.

I haven't been active on any forums for years, but this game was my jam when i was a teenager, and i don't want to loose it again. Im trying to set feelings aside and just air my concerns with you. I have noe clue how much the community has been involved and how much you have communicated and listened to them. But i really hope you guys do. 

New system does not equalize people who may spend different time amounts per day. It shifts problem from total time played per day to how many times per day you can play with some breaks to make your time spending most effective.

Real MAX daily income determined only by one factor, refill speed. So for 0.5 BFP per minute we have 0.5*60*24 = 720 BFP per day.
Most effective way to gain maximal amount of BFP on long run, its to keep pool saturation below MAX value constantly. So you miss some BFP every minute while your pool is full...
 
But maybe if you tune system not for daily income, but for weekly, it will cause less "time pressure" on players. This may be done just by pool increasing.

Hello MrXLink,
First of all thanks for making this thread. I'm really convinced that a remarkable part of the PvP community would benefit from higher gold incomes and it can clearly enhance the overall game environment. Sorry for the upcoming wall of text, but I really need to talk about this topic!
 
Current PvP Values 
I would like to start with some basics about the current reward system and potential problems. So let's get into the current formulas to check current rewards (They should be accurate as I double checked my calculations with gold incomes in some of my own games).  
 
1. Winning player
During the interval [0;2] the gold reward is at flat 250. 
During the interval [2;20] the amount of gold f(t) get's calculated as a function of time (t=minutes) -> f(t) = 250+((t-2)/18 * 1100) 
After 20 minutes the gold cap of 1350 got reached and it won't get higher regardless of gametime. I assume this is done to prevent abuse of 2 people agreeing on completely afk'ing in the game. 
 
2. Losing Player
During the interval [0;2] the gold reward is a flat 100.
During the interval [2;20] the amount of gold f(t) get's calculated as a function of time (t=minutes) again -> f(t) = 100+((t-2)/18*400)
After 20 minutes the gold cap of flat 500 got reached. 
 
What does this exactly mean? I'll show some rounded GPM values at 5 relevant game spots throughout the game for some clarity. 2, 5, 10 and 20, 30 minutes marks will be used here.
time -> Winning player (Losing player) [50% wr player]
2min -> 125 GPM (50 GPM) [88GPM]
5min -> 87 GPM (33 GPM) [60GPM]
10min -> 74 GPM (28 GPM) [51 GPM]
20min -> 68 GPM (25 GPM) [47 GPM]
30min -> 45 GPM (17 GPM) [31 GPM]
Comparison: I'll take your rPvE 9 value from one of your previous posts for that (145GPM). This implies that our average rPvE player aproximatly needs 29 minutes on average to win one map. Given that I think the average game time is faster, but there is no 100% winrate for all of these players that may be a quite accurate value. The average player in PvP has a 50% winrate in a normally distributed PvP environment. I'm pretty sure it isn't given (players with avg. skill should sit at sub 50% winrates), but I hope some gold changes may motivate more players to step into action again to fix that matchmaking problem. Anyways, these numbers lead to some problems I see with the current system and make me think that just raw stat increases won't be the solution to the issue. 
 
The big problems I see right now
-> GPM constantly decreases with increased game time. 
-> Winning PvP (highly skilled) is getting compared to average rPvE times (moderately skilled)
-> Losing income is really low, which is very counterintuitive for new players
 
The constant decrease of GPM over time is a problem for balancing. If you straight up increase GPM values on by putting in a multiplicator onto the formula you end up promoting the easiest way of abusing the game which is straight AFK'ing & wintrading. An AFK player will always be finished off after 2-4 minutes. If GPM are at their peak during this time this is a problem for potenial buffs to gold rewards. The question about rewarding 30min games over 20min games is another discussion (maybe you could check the percentage of 30min PvP games, if that is possible for you). From my perspective I would set a soft cap for these last 10 minutes rather than stopping at 20min. If equally skilled players face off against each other in certain matchups games tend to last much longer than average PvP games once the players reach higher tech stages. 
Another problem I see with most arguments is that the PvP Winner gets compared to the average rPvE player. I would consider myself pretty experienced in rPvE, but not top tier. I still get to finish 4 rPvE 9's in an hour. This puts me at a GPM of 280, which is completely out of the range of what I would achieve with my current 92% PvP winrate even in the proposed improved system. This is something that really should be put into consideration when talking about these calculations. 
 
Matchmaking issues
So let's talk a little about this problem beforehand. Right now GPM are vastly decreased by high que times and a very high participation of Top 10/20 players in ranked games resulting in que times. I really hope that after the upcoming reset and potential improvements to the PvP environment it may be possible to overcome some of these issues. With more motivated PvP players there would be a higher gold outcome for everyone as it minimizes the loss through que times. When talking about values it should always be considered, that the gold loss during waiting times has a clear implication onto the true outcome. That said I don't want to include this inconsistent variable too much into my arguments.  
 
Abuse of strong gold incomes 
Let's talk about it as you emphasized potential abuse as an issue. I don't think it is possible to abuse the system in a way, where it ruins game experience for serious players. If a change manages to make PvP interesting enough to attract abusers it will attract more serious players aswell, which has a much greater positive impact onto the PvP scene. There are 2 ways of abusing a high gold outcome for PvP:
 
1. Que up and stay AFK
2. Try to delay the game as much as possible
 
For the first case, this may be a delay of 2 minutes. Finishing off an AFK is an easy task, should be done in less than 2 minutes and grants some valuable gold. I don't think anyone will be too sad about a free win. Since there is a report system nowadays you could also just threaten to ban people that are doing such things. The second case I mentioned is doable aswell. People that try to delay by turteling or running away will run out of gas pretty quickly. Mass towers allow early free wells that result in a fast T3 finish while running away without ressource generation will also be a death sentence, since ressource generation just works through immobile buildings, that can get targeted directly.  
Sure there may be different ways to abuse the system to get gold with a friend, but that doesn't ruin the game experience for anyone as you won't participate in these matches. Even with an increased gold income for PvP it will never get close to certain abuse strategies. You could also team up with a friend in dwarfen riddle expert to let him solo the map. You can make some food during this time and get a 500 (?) GPM value for that. Soultree is also an option to boost gold incomes into different levels in case you are a solo player. Unless PvP rewards for losing players start being competive to 
 
What are my goals?
Before I start talking about real numbers, I want to talk about long term goals. Overall I want to see an attractive game with enjoyable gameplay for the majority of players in all gamemodes. I think the PvP community right now is quite small, but this wasn't always the case. During early 2013 times we had a very strong community and a strong PvP environment. 
 
1. Better new player experience (increased rewards for losing players that tried their best)
2. The possibility for veterans to grind without spamming PvE 
 
I'm convinced, that the amount of people that would try out PvP within a much more begginerfriendly environment gets a little underestimated in general. A more consistent income would increase the ability to get decks and cards, that you see in your first games, where you surely end up getting crushed. But with a quicker removal of competitive discrepance through ressources you can start learning the game much faster and enjoy its beauty when the real PvP gameplay starts. Under equal conditions it is much easier to identify mistakes and improve. At that point the wins start to come in which brings in more motivation to go on.  
 
So the next thing I'm talking about is also about the veterans, that used to play PvP during 2013. I think the majority of people in the PvP community do want to achieve their first playable PvP deck within one month of active gameplay. To get the big picture that means 170.000-260.000 gold depending on the faction you want to play. Sure you somewhat can start playing seriously with some cards being on U2, but I made the estimation, this value may probably the difference, that my final modell doesn't catch due to the loss of gold through que times. With a GPM of 125 this would range from 22-35 hours. Looks bearable for the cheaper decks, but keep in mind only the best players do have winrates above 80% over many games and I used the winner values here. Average values of 125 for winning and 35 for losing imply a 80GPM for 50% winrate players. Back to 35-54 hours of raw gameplay for the first deck again. But without a competive deck the winrate will most likely be lower than 50% at the start even as a veteran. A state where grinding for a deck still isn't worth it.
 
Sparring grounds
Not much I can add here. The potential for abuse is very high, but no rewards at all aren't satisfying especially for people who are afraid of ranked and the ones who want to get practice beforehand. Setting up a low percentage based on ranked income seems like a good solution for me. 
 
 
What changes I would like to see
The gold value I would like to see for a reasonable grind would be the possibility for people to get an upgraded PvP deck in about one month of gameplay. If we say Mr. XYZ plays 1 hour on average each day, this means we "ideally" do have 30 hours of gameplay. A full deck roughly costs 200.000 gold on average. In order to achieve that, we would need 111 GPM. An average player shouldn't earn less than that if PvP should end up in a reasonable state in terms of gold gains. 
The second value that I use to adjust my final proposal is the rPvE average value of 145 GPM. If an average PvP player ends up earning more than that, PvP might get vulnerable to that. So I would like to see an average GPM between 111 and 145. This would push PvP into a position where it still gets outshined by rPvE and especially cPvE, but may be able to bring some satisfaction to the people, that simply don't enjoy playing PvE. 
So let's try to get to the final formula. AFK players shouldn't be rewarded here, so flat loss income for the first 2 minutes should stay the same, while the flat bonus for the winning party could get increased by a little bit. It's less vulnerable to abuse and brings more excitement to very dominant games and decreases potential frustration upon facing an afk player. 
I decided to keep the income between 20 and 30 minutes for now in my modell. It could see a slight change in the future, but for now it should affect the lowest percentage of games.
My model also brings rewards for the losing player, that ended up putting a long fight. Unless the enemy manipulates the game aswell no abuser will last long in these games and I really think PvP needs to be much more beginnerfriendly than it is right now. 
 
Final formula and comparison to initial values and other game modes 
Winning player:
[0;2] -> f(t) = 300
[2;20] -> f(t) = 300+((t-2)/18*3200)
[20;30] -> f(t) = 3500
 
Losing player: 
[0;2] -> f(t) = 100
[2;20] -> f(t) = 100 + ((t-2)/18*1700)
[20;30] -> f(t) = 1800
 
Gold income comparison by using the marks of 2, 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes
time -> Winning player (losing player) [50% wr player]
2min -> 150 GPM (50GPM) [100 GPM]
5min -> 167 GPM (77GPM) [122 GPM]
10min -> 172 GPM (86 GPM) [129 GPM]
20min -> 175 GPM (90 GPM) [133 GPM]
30min -> 117 GPM (60 GPM) [88,5 GPM]
 
These GPM values are what I would look for. It would be possible to farm upgrades for an entire deck within a month and a decent PvP player still gains below avg rPvE values while high lvl PvP player are still out of contention with PvE speedrunners.  
 
TL DR;
-> Increased scaling for losing players by 240% 
-> Increased flat winner bonus for winning games during the first 2 minutes (150% -> 200%)
-> Decreased gold over time multiplicator for winners (175% -> 88%)
-> GPM for an average PvP player will roughly stay 15% lower than the average rPvE player
-> GPM for a high ranked PvP player will roughly stay 70% lower than a top rPvE player
 
Thanks alot for reading and I really hope, that the PvP community can come back strong again! If there is anything you want to talk about, I'll be around for discussion 
Best regards,
RadicalX

I will make it a tiny bit smaller Every line you see on the health bar is a very small black widget, I am adding them after the health bar is created.
 
It is optional, yes.

If you want to solve the issues with Frost at the start of the game (lack of swift units), you would seriously need to re-think how the faction works in T1. Right now, the slow start of Frost is one of the things that stops the faction from being too good in T1. It's not ideal, but it's not entirely broken either. Another possibility would be to balance the maps and diminish the early game advantage of swift units. But that should be a topic of its own and should involve people such as RadicalX.
As for the main topic: If a Fire/Frost faction would be made, it would realistically consist of re-skins of existing units (for the most part at least). I explored this idea many years ago and made some "coule-be" Fire/Frost cards accordingly. In case somebody's interested here are some of the edited cards and the link to the topic with all the cards I made.

 
 

I've played Totruguns for a very long time in the original Battleforge and they were my first deck I build in Skylords. A pure Tortugun Deck is by far my favorite deck because they are very strong but are a hell to manage. Perfect Risc and Reward unit. You got many things wrong about the AI of those turtles:
1. They never walk in random directions when they are in amok state. When they become hungry, they will walk to the last place you told them before their amok state and only when they reached that place (even when it's on the other side of them map), they will look for food nearby and walk straight to that unit to eat it. (Pro Tip: You can hold Shift to give your units a path they shell go with more than one destination. With that you can tell your Tortugun to walk back and forth and they will ignore any friendly units until they finished that path even when they get in the amok state right away. This way you can delay the time when they will eat your own units and time it with the amok state of other Tortuguns.) When they are in Amok state and no friendly unit is nearby, they will just stay there until you send or spawn a unit next to them.
2. They will always eat the unit that is closest to them. Not being able to eat their own kind would elimiate the most efficient way to play them. The best strategie is to cast 2 Tortuguns at almost the same time. This way they will also reach the amok state at the same time. You just have to feed one with the other. Then you got from 2 Tortuguns in amok state to 1 Tortugun with almost full stomach. Using Bloodhorn to feed them isn't ideal. Most of the time Bloodhorn isn't at full HP so the amok state is only delayed for a few seconds. Another way is to sacrifice the Tortuguns with Offering before they get hungry. That is a good strategy when you only have one Tortugun with low stomach (you can't offering them when they are in amok state though).
In general this unit need much care. You always have to pay attention to their stomach bars and think ahead. I don't think they need a better AI. Once you know how they behave, they are very consistence and every time they eat a unit you don't want them to eat, you know you didn't pay enough attention to them