Timestopper

Hello Skylords,

The day everyone has been awaiting has finally arrived. After all these years of hard work and dedication we are excited to tell you we have an official release date for Skylords Reborn!
December 18, 2020
As you might know, we will also have a progression reset alongside this release. This means everyone's progress (this includes cards, BFP, gold, upgrades etc.) will be reset on release day. So hold back just a little if you were planning to play before release (or don't if you don't mind losing the progress). We have always said that there will be a reset on release date and it will definitely happen. If you would like to follow what we are up to and what is still left to be done before release, you can do so by looking at our Trello here.
On another note, we are looking for new staff members!
With the game being more stable and bug-free than ever before, and the upcoming release, we will start to look for ways to expand on the current game. This includes adding cards and maps, doing card and map balance changes, holding events and tournaments etc. And this is where we need your help. Listed below are three positions which will be open for applications. If you want to offer your help you can do so by applying in the recruitment section here on the forum. Please apply in the `Development` section and specify what role you would like to fulfill.
    - Designer: Design game mechanics related to progression/quests/rewards. 
    - Map Scripters: Fixes bugs in map scripts, and assists the map designers with map scripting.
    - Map Designers: Makes new maps, or polishes existing maps so they can be added as official to the game.
That's it for now! For more information you can watch the livestream we did here. Thank you for your support thus far and we will see each other around.

Lots of claims, none of facts.
There are technical reasons for the reset, which have been discussed internally and externally since the start of the OST 2 years ago. Don't jump to conclussions about something you have no clue about.
Can you supply your statement that the reset will result in even less players? Cause I'm aware of few 100k+ YouTubers that are just waiting for the release to happen to start playing. Now imagine how much players they could bring. I'm also aware of certain Polish and Russian communities, each with few thousand members out of which maybe a few hundred plays while rest waits for release.
To get many players playing doesn't seem to be a goal for our project? Lol what? Bold statement, won't even try to give a proper response.
Grave store for this genre? Lmfao, yea, we did that, not EA and other Triple-A greedy companies. A simple community revival was the nail in the coffin.
Lots of nonesense in your post, but hey - this is the Internet, right?

Some good stuff in this thread. Just gonna add my two cents here:

There's a lot of comparison going on with the new and old system, but the fact of the matter is, there was barely an "old system". It was purely supposed to be a placeholder, with accelerated progression and rewards as expressed in the booster in 30 mins that was just arbitrarily created without much thought. Alas, with how the project progress turned out, and bigger priorities, we had that up as a placeholder for way too long, that now it feels like a standard that you compare new things to.
Secondly, you are comparing the new rewards with the current market prices, which is a fallacy in itself, because it is generated from the old economy with the old system. There's alot of people who have acquired all the cards they could have wanted, and do not actively participate in the market place anymore, decreasing the supply of cards, causing hyperinflation of prices, and a certain monopoly in some cards, where new sellers can set whatever price they want, which generates alot of fluctuation. This economy could for example look drastically different with a reinvigorated playerbase, and a healthy marketplace environment.

Thirdly, similarly with calculating the "worth of a booster" is a very delicate thing, since that too depends on the supply and demand of a card. As prices rise in AH, a booster will also rise in value, which should stimulate more people to buy boosters. Pure boosters should not be easily dismissed for this reason, as alot of pure cards are also very high in value. We need to make some kind of price difference between all cards boosters and specific boosters or no one would buy the other. Now the actual price difference itself is still very much up for debate of course.

I hope i shed some light on some matters, and implore you guys not to give up on us yet! This is the very first iteration of a brand new untested system. Please don't be too harsh with us!
 
 

Introduction
The economy is a delicate and mind-bending thing which is undoubtedly hard to control, a job I don't envy our devs for. It takes little effort to complain about complex topics like this, much more to suggest possible solutions and unending efforts to resolve the issues for good.
Without further ado, here’s my take on the game, its progression system and economic stability.
In this post I’d like to address following topics:
The games dual currency economy gold & BFP Upgrade disenchanting / gold rewards Gold with no end Inflation of BFP The possibilities devs have to influence card prices Possible solutions for an arising problem Various booster packs and their pricing The games economy
We have two currency systems in Skylords reborn: Gold and BFP. Both Gold and BFP are “earned” by simply playing the game. When I say “earned” I mean created by the server which has an infinite supply for both. At this point we need to look at those two currencies separately which is easily doable since they do not interact with each other in any way.
Gold
Gold is not tradable between players and used for upgrading cards, essentially fine-tuning and end game progression. There is nothing that stops the community to greed for gold. The more the players play, the more gold will be distributed. It’s a nice closed system which allows a steady progression for the players. For some it’s too slow, which is a point I will not discuss. However, how this gold is distributed I’d like to discuss. Without messing with the total value of upgrades too much I suggest to normalise the disenchant value. This would probably not prevent Guns of Lyr “goldruns” to be the most efficient way to farm gold but it would allow to players to play their favourite map to farm gold without feeling cheated when only common upgrades show up at the end of the map. Here are chart of the current disenchant values and another chart with my suggestion. Note: these values are not chosen at random, but with a more even distributed gold reward in mind. The target would be to not add or subtract a significant amount from the rewards over all maps combined.

These numbers are a significant gold contributor such as finishing maps, which are the main tools for devs to control “late game” progression of skylords reborn and ultimately pace the endgame grind. The system is quite beautiful since it allows a nonstop grind and constant progress to achive fully upgraded decks.
Inflation of Gold
“I’ve got every upgrade I can wish for, what do I do with the gold?”
For the 0.1% of players who have hundreds of thousands of gold and those who only play a certain deck, it’s a bit of a bummer there is no ultra-endgame usage for gold, but since this currency isn’t tradable, no one really minds.
Question for you, the reader: Should there be a currency sink (a way to delete significant amounts of currency for little effect) for gold?
One option would be additional booster packs which progressively get more expensive: first one would cost 100’000 gold, second 200’000, third 300’000 and so on. If you’re now asking yourself why anyone would ever buy 10 boosters for 5.5 million gold, then this problem does not affect you.
Battleforge points / BFP
In contrast to gold are BFPs tradable between players and somewhat limited by the rewardsystem. Let’s focus first on the big picture:

Players “earn” or more accurately generate BFP daily by completing quests and since the last big patch also with playtime. These points are used to either buy cards from other players (with the auction house or direct trade) or to buy different booster packs from the server for X amount. You don’t need to have a degree in economics to see a difference between gold and BFP: With enough time, the market will be satisfied with most common and lesser used cards. Those will lose value until they’re basically worthless. On the other hand rarer and broadly used cards will significantly rise in prise. We can see this effect right now and could see it 10 years back with EA at the controls. Only difference being, BFP could always get generated with real life currency at a fixed rate and nowadays we have a timely limited supply due to quests.
Maintaining value of BFP / Expected booster value edited 19.08.20
By tying BFP to a fixed booster price our valuable BFP will never lose their value. In a perfect economy the expected value from opening a booster is near but always below its price. The difference in value comes from taking a risk: When opening a single booster you will lose value in the big majority of cases, in some you'll go even and in rare cases you'll profit. How this risk is valued depends on the individual. In general wealthy ppl are more likely to pay for risk and the poor rather play it save by selling boosers or not buying boosters (even on discount).
We could very well calculate the expected value of a booster to confirm this by pricing every card with the actual marketprice, weighting their value by multiplying with the chance to opening this specific card in a booster and add all of them up. Why didn't I already do it you ask? Because we're not in a perfect economy, prices are hard to track by hand and fluctuate immense as well as rapitly due to the small-ish active playerbase. And lastly because of diliberate marketmanipulation/pricefixing by players who rather play the economy than the game (nothing wrong with that, I loved to do this myself in various games too).
Market liquidity edited 19.08.20
The economy will - to a certain extend - balance itself but the effects described above are getting more drastic over time. We can slow this effect down by rewarding players with booster packs directly instead of BFP. As @Ponni pointed out, a higher supply keeps the market liquid/speeds up the economy (many trades are being made because of players competing over prices and undercutting).
On the other hand we can also slow down the economy and therefore speed up the effect described before. By rewarding players with only BFP. Why that is, you ask? Well it’s a fair question to ask and a tricky one to explain. There are many additional human factors influencing this besides demand and supply. As I said, with BFP bound to booster packs they won’t ever lose value, but with more available BFP ppl tend to save their treasure. Thus slowing down the market by not spending it on cards or boosters which will lower the price of undemanded cards and raise the price of cards in high demand. Since the last patch this is what we are seeing. Note: I don’t have any data to back any of this up but would be very interested if there is some to monitor prices of certain cards to watch the effect.
I’m not sure what the reasons were behind the change to reward players with more BFP than cards directly, in my humble opinion: This is the wrong way to wander. There are different approaches to keep the economy liquid, forcing more cards instead of BFP is one of them by creating more supply and less currency in circulation. Another approach would be to trick the market: Instead of increasing the supply we can change the trade system to our wishes. By increasing the auction time significantly supply will increase due to less active players staying in the market for more than 48h (current limit for auctions). Increasing the limit from 24h to 48h was a step in the right direction. Note: I’ll talk about the prices of specific boosters later in this post, just keep reading.
Inflation of BFP
Now we can discuss inflation. This system is inflating, that is a fact. You don’t need to understand economics to see in the picture above that there are more and more cards and BFP circulating the player base. What this system needs is a currency sink: A way for players to get rid of huge amounts of currency for little upsides. Like the suggestion in the gold section of this post, this is meant for players who got it all. By giving the 1% of players a reason to spend their treasure you also even out the playing field for the rest (side note: If you think forcing players to buy more boosters is a solution, you didn’t pay enough attention). So yeah, what do you – the reader – think? How would you get rid of BFP? What’s the thing you’d pay horrendous prices for even if there’s a way less expensive alternative?
Currency sinks
Promo cards. My suggestion will not make everyone happy, it removes the possibility for lucky players to get promo cards with boosters. Now hear me out before you burn me alive: Firstly, removing promos will rise the value of every other card in the game available through boosters since they’re still bound to the 450 BFP cost of the boosters – thus help normalise the market prises of cards. Secondly, promo cards would still be available for everyone in the store for a set amount of BFP and will be accountbound/non-tradeable. Further I suggest that the fist promo card purchased from the store (not a player, this is very important since player interactions are net 0 trades) could be somewhat reasonably priced with… let’s say 5’000 BFP. The second one will cost you significantly more: 10k BFP. The third 15k and so on. This would give even regular players the option to buy their favourite promo cards if they wish to. At the same time it would delete enormous amounts of BFP from player who already own what they want.
Additional – but way less effective – currency sinks would be significant auction house fees. Make them cost significant amounts of BFP (~5-15% of sold price a.e.). I’m completely fine with our current auction house. I think our community is a bit too small to make fees a significant contributor to deflation.
Dev market manipulation
A similar system could be implemented for all non-promo cards too. A static card shop where all cards are available to a fixed price. Those cards would of course not be accountbound and would be tradable, but their prices will be horrendous at first glance. I’ll make another example with numbers which I have not put much thought into: The vendor would sell every common card for 375 BFP, uncommons for 750 BFP, rares for 1500 BFP and ultra rares for 3000 BFP. I know, you would never ever buy an Eliminator or Kobold Inc. for 750 BFP. But what about a Shaman? Seems like a quite reasonable price, right? The point is, by creating a fixed upper limit for cards you ensure the market isn’t inflating over a set limit.
Conclusion
Without implementation of a currency sink (does not have to be my suggestion) there is little to nothing the devs can do to fix this games economy. The only sink we have today, are people abandoning the game and never come back. I think we can come up with something better than that.
I need to point out, reducing the amount of BFP players get from the reward system is an option, but only slows down the inevitable. Furthermore reducing the amount of BFP rewards would slow down the “early game” progression of players. When I started this beta the progression seemed a bit slow to the point I considered multiaccounting (don’t tell the devs). I think slowing this progression down even further isn’t considered an option for the devs. I cross my fingers I’m not wrong about this…
Lastly here’s how the possible economy could look like:

Various booster packs added 19.08.20
This topic is not as related to the economy as one might think, but has a couple of shared points, that's why I decided to include it here.
Since last patch more specific boosters were introduced which limit the cardpool to either a race or faction. Currently the basic booster (without any cardpool restricitons) is priced at 450 BFP, race boosters are set to 155% of the base price and faction boosters 220% respectivly. These values are open for discussion according to devs and here's my opinion to the matter.
Note: I will not discuss the set price of the basic booster nor include the booster discounts right away. The basic booster price is the backbone of this games market and not topic in this part of the post. However I will go into the upprices of the newly introduced booster packs.
Why they exist and how they are priced added 19.08.20
Adding specific boosters is comparable to the suggestion I brought up earlier to have a specific card vendor. It's an attempt help the economy balance itself more consistan.
I recap: In a perfect economy the value of the basic booster is the average value of its content times a individual risk factor. Now I make deliberately a false assumtion to make my point clear: All 539 (correct me if I'm wrong) cards in Skylords reborn have the exact same value. This would mean even with a restricted cardpool in race boosters (approximately 240) and faction boosters (approximately 110) every booster should have the base price times a factor to compensate risk. The factor rises while risk diminish by limiting the cardpool further (making the outcome more predictable).
Let's make an example: When the prices of "Harvester" and "Infect" rise to oblivion, at some point it makes more sence mathematicly to buy "Shaddow" or "Lost Souls" booster packs even when they come with a high upprice.
Conclusion added 19.08.20
Higher prices of specific boosters will push prices prices of specific cards up, while on the contrary lower prices of specific boosters pull prices of cards down.
My suggestion for risk factor and booster prices added 19.08.20
I will try to make some calculaions with an example to have an actual suggestion on how much these risk factors should be with reasonable market prices for specific cards. Unfortunatly I don't have the time right now to do so. Stay tuned.
 
I hope you enjoyed the read, I’m curious about your feedback.
Regards
Myno
 
References
For folks interested in virtual economies, check this YouTube channel out:
MMO Economies - How to Manage Inflation in Virtual Economies - Extra Credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W39TtF14i8I
MMO Economies - Hyperinflation, Reserve Currencies & You! - Extra Credits
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sumZLwFXJqE

Greetings once again, Skylords, Skyladies and other Skyfolk!
First off, thank you all so much for showing up to the major announcement stream hosted today! We couldn't be more grateful for all your support over the years. For those of you who haven't been able to see it, here's a brief recap and a very important announcement:
You can re-watch the stream to catch up over here! We have released a huge update to live servers! This includes the following: 12-player maps are now a thing! We finally got them to work. 2vs2 Ranked is now also a thing! Lots of QoL changes to the Auction House, like refresh rates, setting up multiple auctions at once, and 48h auctions. The ability to play cards from the marketplace in the forge without actually owning them New faction boosters that will help increase your odds for cards of a faction that you like! All 2-color and pure factions now have their own separate boosters costing respectively 475 and 500 BFP. New BFP system that replaces the 30m free booster quest. This system will allow you to earn BFP over time rather than hitting a wall after 30m of play, and will allow those with jobs or less time on their hands to catch up on others in order to give them a chance at auctioning and partaking in the economy. For more details on the BFP system and how it works, check out its most recent thread here. BFP and quests that are missed can be stored up to 3 days (6 quests max, 550 BFP stored max, 100 per day.) Numerous fixes and improvements Please check out this thread for all the details and full patch notes!  We're going to get a brand new updater in the near future, which gives easy access to things such as server selection, the map editor, social links, and much more! Check it out on-stream! PvP players rejoice! We're planning to introduce several pre-built decks to PvP that will be level 120, fully upgraded and charged to get the full PvP experience of being on the same level as your opponents. In the meantime, you can use your rewards earned through PvP to collect and build other decks or refine your current one. These decks cannot be used in PvE. And last, but certainly not least, we are proud to announce the following: We have finally progressed far enough to announce a release time!
Skylords Reborn 1.0 will be released in Q4 2020! Along with one and only reset.
That's October, November or December, depending on how well we progress and how many bugs and difficulties we still encounter. We are confident we can actually get this done in time, after many years of holding back on release dates. 
Recently, our developers @fiki574, @Aviat0r, but most notably @Ladadoos and @Zyna, have done massive work towards the project, as you can see, and thanks to them we have come very far throughout the past few months despite losing a great help to the project, Kubik. We've made a lot of progress too on design decisions thanks to @MephistoRoss and @Ultrakool and of course we wouldn't be anywhere without your support, be it through helping us by reporting bugs, by supporting us on Patreon, or just for sticking along this long!
Please enjoy the fresh new patch that we released on live servers today, and keep up the positivity! We're ever closer to that sweet gold status and to that final reset, and we're insanely grateful to have come this far. We'll keep you updated on all of our developments through the forums, discord, and also our new Trello! Here you can follow the latest developments, future plans, and our roadmap to 1.0!
https://trello.com/b/vvpUdT3b/skylords-reborn-roadmap-to-release-2020-q4
That covers it all for now! For some more information you can refer to the Q&A that we did on-stream! 
Stay frosty, stay healthy, stay undead, and stay burning, guardians of Nyn! See you in the forge!

Hello Skylords  We have BIG news. The HUGE update you've all been waiting for, is coming to the LIVE server this Sunday 9th August 2020. Currently all changes we've done in the past weeks were only available on the test server. We greatly appreciate all of your effort in regards to reporting bugs and other issues. Thanks to your help, we are able to give you all of the following new and improved features: - You no longer need to restart BattleForge if you enter the wrong password - Lots of other bug fixes - New Boosters - 12 player maps - 2v2 Ranked - A new system for earning BFP - A huge overhaul of the Auction House! We will be live on Twitch this upcoming Sunday on 9th August 2020 at 19:00 CEST before the patch comes out. Please note that we are still in the Open Stress Test, and this is not the release yet. However, there will be a very important announcement in regards to the release and reset you are waiting for. You will be able to find the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/skylordsreborn

 
 
This is the changelog for the live server for the end of this week  
General changes/features
- Added new daily reward and reserve system for gaining daily BFP.
- Added daily booster discount after playing for a certain amount of time.
- Added new faction boosters to the store.
- Added 2vs2 ranked matches. 
- Added 12player PvE matches. Keep in mind 12 player matches only reward gold.
- Added randomly generated maps to the ranked PvP maps pool.
- Added ability to click on cards in the marketplace in order to play them in the forge.
- Increased auction amount to 100 per player.
- Added option for 48 hour long auctions.
- Removed the starting 2.5h playtime quest completely.
- Decreased required amount of ranked pvp matches to reach 100% activity from 30 to 15 matches per month.
- Adjusted required ranks for purchasing upgrades: the required ranks are 1, 4 and 5 for upgrade 1, 2 and 3, and is the same for all rarities.
The required rank can either be your PvE rank, or your highest PvP rank.
- Added 'Suggested Decks' button in the lobby to view and select the decks you most recently used for a map.
- Added x16 and x32 speed for watching replays.
- Improved UI and feedback when trying to upload community maps. More improvements to this will be added at a later stage.
- Added /match chat.
- Removed logout button from the escape menu.
- Drastically improved performance of the upgrade tab.
- Improved responsiveness of the marketplace.
- Greatly improved responsiveness while using the leaderboards (may still lag a bit when opening it for the first time).
- Your own auctions in the "My auctions" tab in the marketplace now show the exact time left instead of Short/Medium/Long.
- Improved the interface used for creating auctions. You can now put up multiple auctions at once.
- When searching for auctions, your name on your own auctions will be displayed in bold in order to make them more recognizable.
- Bidding/Buyout fields will be greyed out for an auction if they are not usable or relevant.
- Added the amount of hours next to the different time options when trying to create an auction.
- Minor general improvements to the story book.
- Replaced the "Manual" button with a "Wiki" button in the news section.
- Added a `Patreon` button in the news section.
- Added small counter at the bottom of the `Auction Watchlist` window ingame that shows your current amount of auctions watchlisted.
- Added small ingame pop-up for new players asking if they would like to play the tutorial map.
- Added the ability to navigate the map selection screen (PvP and Community PvE) with your arrow keys.
- Hid the match loot dropdown whenever trying to create a 1 or 12 player match.
- Hid the loot type for rPVE matches in the game selection screen, as rPvE does not reward upgrades.
General fixes
- Fixed many group and match bugs. 
- Fixed many issues with disconnecting/getting stuck in the loading screen.
- You no longer need to restart BattleForge if you enter the wrong password.
- Fixed match running too fast/slow which resulted in stuttering or teleporting.
- Fixed trade button tooltip saying the player accepted the trade while he did not.
- Fixed german version of the 'promo from booster' notification message.
- Fixed replays of community maps not showing in the replays menu in certain cases.
- Fixed a minor issue with trying to upload PVP community maps.
- Fixed BFP desync when bidding more than the buyout on a card in the auction house.
- Fixed incorrect error feedback when setting the bid amount to less than 2 on a card for the auction house.
- Fixed selected map in the create a game window not always being remembered properly between opening and closing the window for PvP and Community maps.
- Fixed quests not properly refreshing in the UI after rerolling a quest.
- Fixed player buildings not being destroyed and units not being killed if a player disconnected or left without doing any action in the match.
- Fixed random (windows) error sounds while playing the game.
- Fixed show and request deck with the tutorial deck not working.
- Fixed gained ELO text overflow in postgame screen for 2vs2.
- Fixed the cause of the error message "A card of this type is already in your deck!".
- Fixed a disconnect which occurred upon answering a direct trade request.
- Fixed minor issues related to need/greed when all players had all upgrades being rewarded.
- Fixed some errors with ingame UI tutorial and updated relevant steps in the tutorial.
- Fixed error after using the filter option in the upgrades window after applying/removing an upgrade.
- Fixed UI overlapping and worldmap UI issues in 1600x1024 resolution.
- Fixed that you could copy a deck (using the view deck window) from another player while being ready.
- Fixed not being able to start games sometimes for players that are on public networks.
- Fixed maximum limit of 2000 quests completed for "Complete some quests" achievement.
- Fixed an issue in the mail from the auction house where it would sometimes say that you sold your card for 0 BFP.
- Properly handle case where the player has not opened a booster yet but tries to view his latest opened booster.
- Fixed issue where you could buy avatars for free.
Card changes
- Increased charge count of Santa Claus, Lord Cyrian, and Easter Egg to 4 so they are aligned with other promos.
- Improved card description of Juice Tank.
- Added missing ability "Siege" to Skycatcher card description.
- Added the range to Area Ice Shield card description.
- Added missing "Swift" ability to Colossus in card description.
- Added missing ability "Swift" to Bloodhorn description.
- Fixed wrong damage on card description of Northern Keep (Blue).
- Fixed wrong tooltip of Shadow Insect.
- Fixed ranged attack symbols not displayed for fire cards at higher resolutions.
- Various other minor additions, updates and fixes (like typo's).
Skylords Reborn Team
 

In fact community is split between those who play and those who dont want to play before wipe.

where you get that 14.5% chance for promo?
199/200 is chance to not get promo in a booster 0,995, if you 0,995*0,995*0,995*...0,995 29 times you will get chance to not get promo in any booster 86,47077%, so chance to get at least one promo in 29 boosters is 13,52923%
Last time I checked most boosters was not worth it, but even 10 expesive cards (based on their sold prices in AH) while acounting for their chance in boosters make opening boosters worth it, while counting every other card to be worth 3
But I do not have access to current AH data, so the cards are maybe much cheaper now. (and I also do not know if the promo chance as changed)

A developer commented on this but it seems the comment has been taken down. However, I completely agreed with the statement - I don't think it is fair for us as bystanders to criticize people who've poured their heart and soul into a project for years without expecting anything in return.
They have done an amazing job reviving this game and even though I strongly disagree with some of the things they do ('nostalgia before balance' and the heavily delayed launch when we don't exploit this window of opportunity for major game changes) I still think they deserve all the support and praise we can possibly give (through patreon or otherwise)