[Change play X <nature/fire/...> cards to include PvP matches]

This is a good suggestion. Will see what I can do.

[Get cards from packs or auctions?]

14 hours ago, Morgotheron said:

I have a question. Is it worth to buy packs? Because I can buy specific cards from auctions. So why I should choose packs? I am beginner so I don't have much cards.

There's no question that buying cards from the auction house is more "efficient" with your bfp. If you want to build  your deck as fast as possible, I recommend buying with the daily discount (350 bfp) and reselling for ~420 bfp, then buying the cards you need from the AH or direct trades.

However, a lot of players have fun opening boosters, and it's a great way to find new cards to experiment with. If you're a new player and you don't have a "dream deck" already in mind, it might be more fun to just open the boosters and see what you get. If you're a returning player and you already know what every card does and you're looking to build your bfp empire as fast as possible, then yes--it's more efficient to sell boosters and buy specific cards directly.

[Old Replays]

There is an internal team tool for this, but it isn't publicly available at the moment.

[Skylords league]

I definitely like the idea of a league system, and I'd even be willing to host one (as a YouTuber, not as a game dev).

One of the reasons I rarely participate in tournaments is because of timezone issues. I'd love to participate in an asynchronous tournament, either as a player or a caster.

So you can count on me to sign up 🙂

I definitely think you should give each player a full week to matchmake with their opponent, rather than forcing it to be 5pm on Wednesday or whatever. And if they can't come to an agreement, then there should be a standard time (midnight at the last day of the week) and whoever doesn't show has to lose the match.

[PvE common card upgrades]

15 hours ago, Ggoblin said:

I've noticed that disenchanting the first upgrade of common cards give 140 gold to ALL team members while crafting a common upgrade costs 125 gold per person.

This means that disenchanting level 1 common upgrades is ALWAYS the right choice, even on singleplayer, meaning those upgrades are actually just gold.

One of the fun things of playing PvE is that if you get the upgrade you need you can save up on spending gold to buy it, even without that this situation just feels wrong.

I recommend that these upgrades that are always worth disenchanting are changed to give less gold, to compensate the standard missions would give more gold by base, the increase depending on the % of common upgrades they usually give out times the 140 you get from disenchanting them.

I guess I'm allowed to say that we know about this and it's planned to be fixed.

Thanks for bringing it up though, some team members were unaware but I thought those members wanted to keep it like this 🙂

[Tradable starter cards]

11 hours ago, Asher said:

No reason why these cards shouldn't be as tradable as any other, it's just inconsistent behavior. 

The only counter argument I can think of is that it's a new player protection that doesn't allow to sell all of their cards. That made sense in the original battleforge perhaps, but in the new one cards (especially commons) and bfp are plenty, I can't imagine someone selling all of their cards for bfp and "starving". Another option is to unlock trading of starter cards only after a certain rank has been achieved.

Yeah, this was an important feature upon release (where cards like windweaver, surge of light, etc were very expensive) but it's not that important now. The main reason to keep this feature is to disincentivize players from multiaccounting to quickly trade their important starter cards to a 2nd account, for a faster boost.

I don't think there's a good reason to change the system. While there may not be many people who would be motivated to multiaccount for this reason, I also don't think there are many people who would actually benefit from being able to trade their last copy of the starter cards.

[Lost Souls MOTM lvl 10]

I'm not that good and haven't seen this month's motm, but I have seen @Treim do lost souls 10s on youtube before.

If you're stuck in t1, I think the easiest strategy is usually fire t1 for nomads + mine, focus the spawn camp and erupt it to death. Use mine to kill the incoming waves, and build some blaster cannons to kill lost vigils after you bait them out. Firesworn helps against treefiends as well, and you can also use the nomad ability for some extra burst against lost vigils.

[Adding PvE Map Difficulty Modifiers]

On 11/18/2020 at 12:36 AM, Ladadoos said:

Shouldn't be too bad  
The more I think about it the more I want to start working on one (and to be honest, this modifier feature)

I was talking to @Weak1ings a while back: he was making something similar. We had a bunch of rules and then you would run the program and it would tell you which cards you had to play. Ofc it wouldn't interact with the game so we had to build the decks ourselves, and we knew what we had before starting the map.

[Is modding illegal?]

On 5/2/2021 at 7:57 AM, Kapo said:

What could be an ingame QOL change is that you can have more then one building in a group. Then you would have you "buildings hotkey" and can click through faster by hand.

I believe this is technically impossible. It's been asked a lot (along with making nightcrawler's spawn in their own group) and last I heard, nobody was close to figuring out how to do that.

[What improvements should I do in my PvE deck?]

22 hours ago, ackN1 said:

Hi there, what improvements should I do in my PvE deck? I mainly play random pve scenarios and for 6/7 difficulties it works just fine, but I do want to upgrade it to play 8 or 9 difficulty.

Thanks in advance

If you're looking for rPvE tips, you usually don't need shooting towers (maybe in some cases for lvl 10, but at lvl 9 I never use towers). So shrine of memory is good, but living tower is probably not worth the deck slot. In my opinion, ray of light, viridya, and mana wing are a lot weaker than other alternatives (they have niche uses for sure but rPvE is usually about overall power level). 

Furnace of flesh is not that good without a reliable source of corpses, which can happen in defensive situations on campaign maps but not really common in rPvE. I wouldn't use FoF unless you had cultist master--besides, you already have shrine of memory for void manipulation.

If you aren't looking for any kind of deck theme, but just want some really strong stuff, I recommend:

t2: shadow phoenix + embalmer's shrine, really strong and clears all ground stuff. In my best rPvE decks I just take some t1 units (especially archers for air enemies), shadow phoenix, and the only other units are t4.

void manipulation: shrine of memory is okay, but Shrine of War or Furnace of Flesh + culist master is much stronger.

Resource Booster: is soooo strong in rPvE because it will still take 20 minutes for your wells to run out, and the 4p maps will run out of time before that happens.

Breeding Grounds: can save you hundreds of power, so that's always good. On the other hand, it's so common that one of your teammates probably has it

Wheel of Gifts and Incredible Mo: these cards provide buffs to all friendly units, so they're really strong in situations with multiple players.

Spells: earthshaker, thunderstorm, regrowth, frenetic assault (so good I take both affinities), and infect are some of the strongest spells in the game. Matter mastery, revenge, stone shell, equilibrium, and unholy power are also very strong in the right situation. Oink, coldnap etc is still good in t4, because they are cc. Offering is always good, especially if you don't have all charges.

t4 units: giant wyrm, lost spirit ship, bloodhorn, and abomination are probably the strongest t4 units. Batariel is also super super good (with buffs) but you need enlightenment to use him.

So my deck is usually 2x shadow, 1x fire, 1x nature. This gives me access to most of those powerful cards I mentioned, like resource booster, shadow phoenix, frenetic assault, regrowth, bloodhorn, giant wyrm, and shrine of war.

[Proposal: Dev-Sponsored PvP Happy Hour(s)]

8 hours ago, macabi said:

However, that can be resolved by allowing the AI to cheat with resources.

At what point does this become PvE though?

[Proposal: Dev-Sponsored PvP Happy Hour(s)]

5 hours ago, Cocofang said:

Before implementing mechanics that flood more BFP/gold into the game, I'd like to see a dump to get rid of it first.

First, that's a separate issue.

Second, the happy hour would not "flood" resources into the game. Even if there was a significant number of PvP players to actually affect the economy, I'm not suggesting the happy hour should give similar gold/time as bad harvest runs...and anyone can do BH runs at any time.

My idea about "emptying the reserve faster" would apply to queue times. Queuing is by far the least interesting thing you can do in this game, and if you're queuing during happy hour, you shouldn't be waiting long, so it wouldn't even translate to much extra bfp. But you have a consolation prize--"hmm...if I have to wait and can't find a game, at least I'll get extra bfp rather than completely wasting my time, so let me plan to play ranked at that time." Since more people queue during those hours the matchmaking time is reduced, which is the real goal.

[2 VS 2]

On 3/25/2021 at 8:20 PM, anonyme0273 said:

To prevent waiting forever, maybe see how many people are in queue so you know if you want to queue up too? And you joining a queue would be visible for others who want to play but are unsure if they'd wait forever? Y'know, keep the game moving forward and making it more user friendly in all aspects

Well, the problem with typing something like that in chat is that anyone worse will leave the queue and someone better will come for free ELO (since you're guaranteed to match). There's already enough ranked sniping going on in 1v1 and in that case there's still a bunch of people queuing ranked, whereas in this situation it's literally just the one team.

[Proposal: Dev-Sponsored PvP Happy Hour(s)]

Since the reset, the PvP scene has been healthier than it has in years. However, matchmaking is still difficult in North American times, and 2v2 ranked is essentially dead, as we've seen by @LordJay trying to self-organize a 2v2 ranked "happy hour."

There are a few problems why 2v2 is especially dead. First, there isn't a "culture" of 2v2--most people just play with random partners without voice, and they would rather mess around in unranked than lose to a team organized with voice. The players who do have dedicated partners need to come to unranked in order to find a match . . . and even if two teams want to play ranked, they will probably just go unranked because they don't think anyone else would be queueing ranked. If you type something like "looking for ranked 2v2 opponents" then most people worse than you will switch from ranked to unranked, and maybe some really good players will come to snipe you.

I suggest that we implement a dev-sponsored happy hour to focus PvP activity into certain time windows. For example, anyone who queues during this time gets 10x bfp return from the reserve while they wait for the match. Or, matches played during the happy hour grant 3x gold.

There could be a couple of these "happy hours" each day, which is convenient for people in different timezones. There should be happy hours for both 1v1 and 2v2. The idea is to create a couple reliable times when other PvP players will be online. Suppose I log into battleforge for an hour each day after work, at random. If I know that logging in from 9pm to 10pm will give me better rewards than any other time, I will probably play in that time instead of a different time. Or if I play both PvP and PvE, I might decide to play my pvp during the happy hour and PvE during another time.

Or imagine that I didn't care about the happy hour reward at all--but just knowing that more players will be online at a certain time, I might also try to be online at that time. Suppose that 10 players would play from 8-9, 10 different players from 9-10, and 10 different players from 10-11, which happens just by chance. Wouldn't it be better if we had 30 playing at once? Probably, we'd see players continue past the happy hour because there would be a variety of opponents to play (I guess a lot of people only play for a few games because they get tired of facing the same opponent).

Advantages:

• Focuses PvP in certain times, improving the experience at those times  by ensuring a variety of PvP opponents and possibly reviving dead modes like ranked 2v2
• Causes more players to play PvP (because happy hour is strictly a bonus)
• Causes players to continue playing after happy hour, because the experience is overall better (less time queuing, opponents closer to your skill level, etc).

Disadvantages:

• If there is no net increase in PvP playtime, but simply players moving from one time to another, then certain times (such as 1 hour before happy hour) may have very few PvP players online, because they changed to only play during happy hour. This would be extremely annoying for PvP players who do not have flexibility when they can play.

Personally, however, I don't think we'd get fewer PvP players at non-happy hour times. Still, one way to improve the experience for players without schedule flexibility would be to rotate the happy hours. For example, there could be 4 happy hours spaced 6 hours apart. On day 1 the happy hours might be 1:00, 7:00, 13:00, 19:00....on day two they would be 2:00, 8:00, 14:00, 20:00...and on day 6 they would repeat The only disadvantage to a rotating schedule is that players may forget when happy hour is, which results in decreased "advantages."

[2 VS 2]

I'm always up for 2v2

Just find me in the sparring lobby.

[Consistency in ability names]

2 hours ago, anonyme0273 said:

All the cards in the image below (those standing next to each other) share a certain ability (Looter, Rage, Burnout, Life steal). Many more cards do.

The problem is, the specifics, be it values or actual functionality, vary from card to card. Strikers gain Power from hitting anything, Thugs only from buildings, yet the names of the abilities are the same. This is confusing, especially since Thugs were recently changed.

I propose renaming those abilities slightly, either completely or just with a prefix/suffix to indicate, as with affinities, that there are differences between those cards. Consistency matters, logically it makes no sense to have this mess ingame.

Well, looter is tricky because thugs were just changed, and strikers are now considered OP so I guess they'll go the same way as thugs.

I agree 100% on rage--I would like a description that says something like "up to 4x damage" or whatever exists on each card. A written value for charge would be nice as well (although I think that's based on the unit damage--maybe 4 secs worth of damage).

With lifesteal, burnout, etc I think it's fine as-is. The abilities all work the same but with different values--but since those values are written on the card, I don't see any reason to make a bunch of new names just because the effect's value is slightly different. It's not like anyone would be able to know the difference between "deathly lifesteal" and "stealthy lifesteal" without reading the description or having it memorized, so imo adding an extra prefix wouldn't be any QoL improvement. 

For affinities, I like having a slightly different description because many times you can look at 2 affinity cards side-by-side and it's not that easy to tell the difference, but the name change makes it easier. Nobody is confused about the difference between ashbone pyro, bandit gunner, and unstable demon

 

[New Player looking to get into PvP]

5 hours ago, DieToPlay said:

The best advice for a new player who is seeking to improve: watch YouTube.

And if you have given PvP a go and want some feedback, I'm always happy to cast beginner plays in my Rookie Reviews series

[How much afect the free pvp decks to the economy?]

2 hours ago, EngelDunkel said:

In that way too, a lot of new players have problems with pve modes, where are the free pve decks for there?, and i know is a huge difference, you guys are telling me is just a few players who play pvp but, thats all the reason to make free pvp decks with full upgrades?.

The difference is that PvE is not "unfair" if you don't have the right cards. Every expert map can be beaten with common cards--even the free starter cards. Losing against a computer is different than losing against another player.

Imagine if every PvE game was  "race" against another player. If your "opponent" was faster than you, you automatically lost the game. How soon would a new player quit, if they had to play this situation against someone with full cards and full upgrades? But PvE is not like this, so there is no need to give cards.

Furthermore, PvE gives a lot more rewards than PvP. Why should a PvP player be forced to play PvE to get the upgrades he wants? No one is forcing PvE players to play PvP, but PvP players have to play PvE to get gold.

In PvP, no matter how good you are, at a certain point you can't win without upgrades. Imagine you were the #1 player 10 years ago or a really good Starcraft player, and you want to try this game again. For a few games you will be rusty, but you'd be winning very soon. Except that you don't have upgrades. Many old PvP players quit in the open stress test because they didn't want to grind pve to play pvp. The playerbase is 10x higher than it was before free pvp decks.

2 hours ago, EngelDunkel said:

"almost nothing" but was affected, some cards lose 10, 20, 50 bfp maybie 50 is so much but in some situations happens, like the sunderer, some times you can sell it 500 but now is always in 300, but this is acceptable since is pvp and really not much players care that cards?.

You really think this change was due to PvP? I bought enlightenment for 900 bfp after the server restart. Now it's like triple that. Shadow phoenix dropped from like 300 to 150. You can't really compare prices like this. There are more players who just want to collect all cards, than there are who play a lot of PvP. As the game goes on and player start to have most cards, you'll probably see cards like sunderer increase in price just because people want to have all cards.

Prices will evolve simply because of the total bfp in players pockets, as well as their current objectives. Surge of light and windweavers were extremely expensive early on because everyone wanted them for PvE, and now they have them and the prices dropped. The change to PvP cards is no more significant than these changes, so I think it's safe to say that the free pvp decks had no impact on the market.

[How much afect the free pvp decks to the economy?]

Yeah, I was expecting a larger shift in prices but the impact on card economy was almost nothing, since PvP players are a smaller portion of the population.

The only card I can think of that dropped in price was voidstorm, since that has 0 use in pve but is also rare. Players who wanted to use it in PvP could just use the free version, so demand was really small, and prices keep dropping until you can afford it even without the free version. But even cards like harvester, which is used in every pure shadow PvP deck, is used much more often in PvE because there are just more people playing PvE.

 

Regarding making the free PvP decks less than full upgrades: that's been explained as a bad idea many times. Dedicated PvP players can buy their PvP decks because that's what they play, but then other players are discouraged from wasting their gold and bfp in the PvP gamemode  which they might only try a few times. Since the players who need free pvp decks are less experienced in the first place, why should they be further handicapped?

But as @Dallarian has said, even this would have no impact on card prices. Dedicated PvP players still buy a lot of PvP cards so they can play different decks, and use surprise cards. The "occasional" PvP player wouldn't care about buying PvP cards because they'd rather focus on PvE, so they'll just play even less PvP. Basically the only players who'd be affected are new players who want to get into PvP, and there are so few of them it would make no difference to global prices.

[The Skylords Open #3 (2on2) 13.02.21]

On 1/30/2021 at 8:47 AM, Toggy said:

Map Pool is:  1st round: Fyre, 2nd round: Turan, 3rd round: Danduil, 4th: Nadai , 5th: Zahadune, 6th: Gorgash. The first match of the round will be played on the fixed map, then it is losers choice.  The winning Team (who won the last match in this bo3) also has to lock in their decks first

Does that mean we can't counterpick any other maps, like haladur2n2, simai2v2, or koshan?

@Toggy

[The Skylords Open #3 (2on2) 13.02.21]

Any update on the map pool?

On 1/30/2021 at 9:23 AM, Dallarian said:

What does mean "no reset"?

This implies that there is a loser's bracket. There is an ultimate winner from the winner's bracket (loses no sets) and an ultimate winner from the loser's bracket (loses one set).

In a regular double elimination tournament, you only lose once you have lost 2 sets. So if the loser's bracket player beats the winner's bracket player, the match "resets" since the winner's bracket player has not lost twice yet.

This means that in a best-of-5 format, you could potentially play a 10-game grand finals. These are super hype imo, so I'm not sure why there's no bracket reset.

[Trashcan for useless cards]

On 1/13/2021 at 3:42 PM, Ladadoos said:

Here are two questions that come to my mind:

How are you going to make sure everyone doesn't buy the (cheap) cards and converts them, leaving basically none for the new players? Is relying on supply/demand really enough to prevent this?

You could make it something like "trade 10 of the same type of card for 10 bfp." That way you can only trash once you have more than 10 (could also be 5 cards for 5bfp), so there's still some incentive to put these cards on the AH just in case, and you'll probably have some on-hand in case there's a new player in the chat looking to get some commons for cheap.

1 hour ago, Cocofang said:

One might argue that people would then simply buy up all the cheap rares and ultra-rares to reroll. But that rise in demand would then also mean that those cards rise in value. And with boosters having a fixed price, it would make even "bad" cards in boosters have some sort of innate value.

I like this idea--although as a consequence, it would also mean that super-expensive cards like enlightenment or infect go down in value. But I'm all-for reducing the price discrepancy across cards of the same rarity. I guess one restriction should be that you need to have the rerolled cards at U3, so you still have to invest the gold and you can't get rid of your last copy?

[Northguard buff]

28 minutes ago, Dallarian said:

Do you want to increase number of top S counters in game which are in Frost faction from 2 to 3?

It's already 3  

There's just no need for 3, so people just take the 2 strongest. But northguards would be ridiculously busted if they were a fire card, for example.

[Creeping Paralysis not working as intended or am i missing something?]

2 hours ago, WindHunter said:

but the ensnaring roots is only half duration if cast while oink immunity is still present on the unit

Actually, I believe roots is unaffected by cc immunity, although it still adds cc immunity. So if you root, then oink, oink will last 1/2 as long. But if you oink, then root, the root still lasts the same duration. So if you oink, then root, then paralyze, although root will still last the full length, paralyze will be 1/4 as long.

But you are correct that Rogan's cc neither adds to cc immunity, nor is affected by it. So its a way to set up permanent cc chains by letting the time expire on the other cc's.

[PvP "Chess" snapshot puzzles]

I've been trying some speedruns and I think the snapshot option would actually be soooo useful for practicing the runs. Like if you consistently fail the aura placement at Bad harvest (which I do), I'd rather not make 3 other people feed me for 3 minutes so I get one opportunity to practice it. At that point I don't even need feeders (or there could be the option to manually add +1000 power in a "snapshot editor") so that I can practice just the final part of the run by myself.

It seems like this should be possible to export a timestamp of a replay into a map editor, so does this already exist and I just don't know about it?