Kozzrazz

The Girl Power card is awesome.
I have won many PvP Battles because of it and i hope the mecanic will remain.
In pure red vs pure red it makes Firedancer able to take out Enforcer and Gladiatrix can take out Skyfire drake.

 

Hello Skylords, Skyladies and other Skybeings.

It has been some time since the last event and now we are back!
Welcome, to our first PvP Rookie Contest, where every participant gets a booster!

What kind of event will it be?

PvP 1vs1 - Rookie - Best of 3 (Bo3) - Double Elimination (format might change if enough participate)
All Rookies from far and wide,
are welcome to join us in a fight!
We want to see you brawl, compete and maul,
live on stage.. Fight them all.
No real restrictions, not many rules.. Show us what you got and claim the pot.

Join Toggy and Hiko this Friday afternoon, to the clashes of swords!

When will it start?

We are accepting entries until the start of the tournament (08.10.2021 18:00 CEST).
We will stream the tournament on the official Twitch channel of Skylords Reborn.
The stream will start 17:30 CEST.

How can I participate?

Since we already have some experience from past tournaments hosted by Toggy, we will also host this tournament on Challonge.
You can register for the tournament there. You will also find the bracket on Challonge at the start of the tournament. Please use the name of your ingame account to speed up communication in finding your opponent

What are the rules?

The access to this tournament will be restricted to players only, who...
... are not pvp gold rank or above
... have a w/l ratio of below 60%
... feel like they are rookies
Please note: this tournament is for our less experienced players, we will personally check the entries.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
No bug abuse, cheating or insulting other players. Penalties may vary from a warning to default loss.
  Disconnecting during a game results in a default loss. It is possible to have a remake, if both sides agree.
  Not showing up to your match after 15 minutes results in a default loss. The plan is to play a round of matches every ~30 mins.
  After your match, go to Challonge and insert the result. This is done by clicking on your match and selecting the winner/stats . The brackets will be updated automatically.
  Use your account name for the tournament. If your Challonge account differs from your Battleforge account name use the "Sign up with an alternate name" feature or change your name for the tournament in the settings. This will speed up finding your opponent. If you do not register for the tournament with your Battleforge name we can't find you for the prizes! 
   You follow all restrictions. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Map Pool!

The first match of every round will be played on the following fixed maps, after that it is the losers choice.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1st Round:  Haladur 2nd Round: Simai 3rd Round:  Elyon 4th Round:  Lajesh 5th Round:  Uro 6th Round:  Yrmia 7th Round: Haladur 8th Round: Simai 9th Round: Elyon --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------



Sounds fun! What's the prize pool?

The following prize pool will be adjusted according to the amount of participants:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1st place                12 general Booster packs
2nd place              10 general Booster packs
3rd place               8 general Booster packs
4th-6th place        6 general Booster packs
7th-9th place        4 general Booster packs
10th-12th place    2 general Booster packs
participation         1 general Booster pack
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In conclusion

This event is a simple Rookie 1vs1 Tournament with basic rules.
Your Event Mods will be: DutchyDutchy and DDrazard

To summarize everything:
You have to signup on Challonge before the start of the Tournament to be able to participate. Please use your ingame account name on Challonge. You have to play the first match of each Bo3 on the associated map of the Map Pool. Keep in mind, that everyone plays a minimum of two Bo3's (Double Elimination) We will stream some of your games on Twitch. The stream will start 30 minutes before the start of the tournament.
Future events
If you are interested in helping with these kind of events for the community, or want to host one yourself, don't be afraid and simply reach out!
Send me a PM on the forum, or direct message via Discord (Minashigo Hiko#1126).
We are happy to assist you with upcoming events and with sponsoring your prize pool!
We hope you have a lot of fun with this event and are looking forward to casting your games!
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask.

Best regards,
Skylords Reborn Team and Toggy

Greetings Skylords!

It's been two weeks already since our last community update so it's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

A big thank you
We want to start this update with a big thank you to the community. When we posted our feedback survey two weeks ago, we expected maybe 100 of you would take time out of your day to give us some feedback. But you completely blew us away, with over 1150 responses so far!  We will close the survey this weekend, so if you still want to provide us with some feedback (and get a booster) make sure to do so before Monday. 
So far the survey has already provided helpful insights and feedback, and many kind comments. We are glad that overall you seem to be happy with the state of the game and the changes we are making. Everyone is working very hard on this game we all love, so we are glad you are here for the ride.
On a personal note, I am very grateful to be the community manager of such an awesome community. Every single one of you makes this game tick. Whether you are a casual PvE player, climbing the ranks of PvP, helping newer players out with some cards, finding new speedrun tactics, discussing balancing changes with us, or just enjoying the game; thank you for being part of our awesome community!
I would also like to thank everyone from the team who put hours upon hours into the project. It's an honor to work alongside you on making Skylords Reborn the best it could be. 
So thank you, all of you!
 
New Patch + Reveal Stream
Our newest patch has released! After months of balancing, testing, fixing bugs (some even from the days of EA that only now come to light) we have released our biggest balancing patch yet. To celebrate the occasion, we teamed up with Toggy for a reveal stream, where he went over the patch notes, played PvP games and gave away some boosters. You can rewatch the stream here.
This patch has a lot to love, including suggestions from the community that we got as feedback on our community updates or through our social media channels. Suggestions like adding a power well and monument to the forge for testing, or being able to look at lobbies while players are in a ranked queue; we are happy to work alongside you and make this game better. 
This patch also contains many requested balancing changes to cards. Ravenheart finally has its new design, and combining it with the changes to Jorne now allows players to play a viable legendary-themed deck. A lot of effort was put into making Pure Frost more rewarding to play, with many new tools focused on shields and freeze. Speaking of Freeze, the new Warlock allows interesting new fire/frost builds as well. We hope you will enjoy playing with these cards and experiment with new deckbuilds. 
You can read the full patch notes here. Alongside a 15 page document for the balancing changes, there have been so many changes that we decided to post the rest of the minor changes to the Wiki. Among those are description and class fixes, animation changes (for example Brannoc and Backlash) and all kinds of Quality of Life changes. A special thank you to our Skylord of Honour LEBOVIN for helping us with this patch and updating the wiki!
Two things that are notably missing from this patch are the upgrades to our free PvP decks (as mentioned here), and the changes to Avatar of Frost (as mentioned in our Deep Dive for Pure Frost). We expect the changes to the free PvP decks to be implemented in the coming weeks. Because of some unforeseen bugs, the Avatar of Frost changes did not make it into this patch, but we still intend to bring some changes to him. We will continue to work on this card and share our status on the balancing discord. 

Survey data
Here are a few fun insights and pie-charts (who doesn't like pie charts?) from the survey. We will spend the coming weeks going through all the data once we close the survey. 
• Did you play the original BattleForge from EA (2009 - 2013)?
• How long have you been playing Skylords Reborn?
• How do you feel about the economy of Skylords Reborn? 
• How do you feel about the odds of getting promo cards in Skylords Reborn?
• Are you aware that you can adjust the contents of the free PvP decks? For example, swapping a free card for a card in your own collection?
The following questions were regarding your opinion on new content
• Lore / Backstories
• New voice-lines / Sounds
• Adding voice lines to current units that lack them (for example, Amii Phantom, Dryad, Brannoc, etc.)
• New campaign maps 
• Adding pure factions for rPvE (for example, mono Fire as enemies)
• Defence rpve (defend against waves of enemies)
 
Community Updates will move to a 3-week schedule
For the past ~3 months we have been giving you an biweekly insight of the things going on behind the scenes with Skylords Reborn through these community updates. While the feedback has been very positive (thank you!) we feel it would be better for both our workflow and the quality of the community updates to move them to once every three weeks. Time zone differences between team members, fulltime jobs and us wanting to provide good quality content and updates, has resulted in some last minute stress spikes to get the updates done in time and have something worthwhile to share. We feel that by moving to a 3-week schedule, we can keep up the quality and content of these updates. In between updates you can of course always find us on our social media and in the game. Rest assured that our team will keep working just as hard on getting you new features, better balance, and the long awaited new cards!

Open Sourcing of New Sounds Converter
We are excited to announce that we have made great progress in decoding BattleForge's format for sound files. BattleForge uses a special format called "snr" to encode any sounds, and so far we were only been able to convert these sounds from snr to conventional formats like mp3 and wav. Our developers have built a converter from wav to snr, which will allow us to add new sounds or voice lines to the game!
Unfortunately, our converter is not yet perfect, and during conversion a lot of quality is lost, making them currently unfit to be used in the game.
We are open-sourcing this application in the hope that the community can help us solve this problem. We would appreciate contributions to help improve the conversion! Some additional info can be found in the application link above, and this old forum topic. 
 
New Team Members / Open Positions
Some team changes since the last community update. DutchyDutchy has been promoted to Global Moderator, and Madgadget has joined the team as a discord moderator. Their help is much appreciated, as Ultrakool and Bradley left the team as Global Moderators. We want to thank everyone for their contributions! 
We could definitely need some more help with the Skylords Reborn project however.
Below are two roles highlighted, but you can find more information, desired traits and all our open positions here. If you are unsure if you qualify, please reach out and have a talk!
 
Open Position - 3D tool developer
As a 3D tool developer you are responsible to solve one of our biggest technical challenges that will boost the project to the next level: the ability to modify existing 3D models. We already have an internal tool capable of adding new cards using existing re-textured models, but we have no way to meaningfully modify the geometry, animations and special effects. You will be responsible for researching the way BattleForge represents their 3D models and develop tools and a workflow capable of modifying different aspects of those models. The ultimate goal is to be able to add new models with animations and effects never seen before. There have already been very good community efforts and already a lot is known.

Open Position - Backend web developer
As a backend web developer you are responsible to maintain and extend the backend of our current and future web applications. The primary project you will contribute to is a feature rich platform which aims to provide various extensions and integrations for Skylords Reborn. As of now, this platform is for internal use only as the focus currently lies on creating internal moderation tools. However, after the moderation tools reach a satisfactory state, we plan to make this platform public and expand it with features like a new and improved cardbase, leaderboards, a system to download, manage and share your replays, and various other useful extensions. There is a lot of room to contribute in, as this platform is still in its early stages of development! 

We are also in need of French and Russian translators. If you speak this language in combination with good English language skills, please help us out!

In Conclusion
Thanks for reading! 
We will update you again on the 2nd of October! In the meantime, we would love to hear your opinion on the latest patch.
s always, we are open to feedback so please let us know!
Here is a scratch code you can redeem in-game for 100bfp: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S011
The code is valid till October 2nd. Please note you can also get a booster by filling in our survey. 
Archive
Community Update #8
Community Update #9
Community Update #10

Greetings Skylords!

It's been two weeks already since our last community update so it's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

Share your feedback, get a booster!
You are currently reading the 10th Community Update! We hope you find these updates interesting, whether you are an active player or someone who wants to keep an eye on the project.
Time for some reflection and feedback. Last month we asked for your feedback regarding the Official PvE contests, but this time we want to know your opinion about Skylords Reborn in general. What do you like? What could be better? We want to keep improving the game and growing our playerbase, and your feedback is crucial for us. 
Please give us your feedback here. As a thank you there will be a booster for everyone who fills in the survey. Your feedback will be anonymous.
 

Next Patch Soontm
Our next patch is finally nearing completion! We expect the full patch to hit the test server at the end of this weekend. Once we are sure no bugs are within these changes, we plan to patch to live as soon as possible. There are truly a ton of changes in this patch, resulting in the patch notes already being 12 pages long, excluding bug and description changes! 
We will post the patch notes on our Patreon first, but of course we will share the full notes with everyone when the patch goes live on our main servers. And for those who are wondering; yes, Ravenheart will finally get its rework this patch. 
 
A discussion of upcoming map changes
The Skylords Reborn team recently discussed changes to PvE campaign maps. The goal of these changes would be to maintain the identity of the map as closely as possible while improving aspects such as major exploits, unused sections of maps, and problem areas where players feel forced to "break" the map to play it. 
It is important to note that all of these changes are proposals, none of them are guaranteed to be implemented! We do not want to make changes to something as fundamental as campaign maps without input from the community and what they want to see or not see change-wise. 
Please discuss what you think of the proposed changes and share your ideas in this topic or the discord. 
You can find all of the proposed changes in the attached PDF. 
Proposed Upcoming PvE Map Changes.pdf

PvP Improvements in development

We are also looking at ways to make it easier to find matches in PvP. One of the low-hanging fruits here is better rewards. Currently, the reward system is heavily favoring playing PvE over PvP. The low number of players currently playing PvP also isn't helping with completing Daily PvP Quests, and can cause for a lot of idle time for players. To counter this and reward players for playing PvP, we are currently looking into options like draining the BFP-reserve while being in the ranked queue.
Another nice feature we are working on are PvP Happy Hours. During specific time periods, players will receive additional rewards playing PvP. We notice the current PvP is quite scattered, with a lot of players wanting to play, but going offline again when they cant find opponents. We hope that by clustering those players together during certain time frames, we can encourage the PvP scene. As mentioned in a previous Community Update, it will soon also be possible to still see sparring lobbies while being in the ranked queue, without having to cancel your matchmaking. We also expect the next balance patch to cause a breath of fresh air.
Currently we are planning to offer Happy Hours for both 1vs1 and 2vs2. During Happy Hours, there will be an in-game announcement and the icon on the world map will indicate Happy Hours are active. When we have fleshed out our ideas a bit more, we will announce more details. 


 
Tournaments & Events
• Finished: Community Tournament: Toggy's Tome Tournament - August 22th
Last weekend Toggy hosted another Tome tournament, meaning players had to build a deck from a selection of random cards and play PvP matches with them. You can rewatch the stream here in case you missed it. 

• Host your own event / tournament
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizer Hiko to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 
 
New Team Members / Open Positions
We have a new Map Tester! We are very happy to welcome Rawne!
At the same time we are sad to see our balance developer Razeroc go. We want to thank him again for all the hard work he put into the project, and we hope to still see you in the forge from time to time!

We could definitely need some more help with the Skylords Reborn project however.
Below are three roles highlighted, but you can find more information, desired traits and all our open positions here. 
If you are unsure if you qualify, please reach out and have a talk!
 
Open Position - Balance Developer
As a balance developer you are responsible to implement design changes to in-game cards using our internal balancing tool. In other words, you are responsible to implement new cards and changes to existing cards. These implementation requests can come from balance updates and content patches from our Faction Designers but also from the official Skylords Reborn map making team (for example, new bosses for a new map). An integral part of this role is learning our internal balancing tool, as that is the tool that allows us to perform all these changes. You are by no means required to have any programming experience.

Open Position - Map Artist
As a map artist you are responsible to polish the aesthetics of a map. This includes texture the map, add decorations and add different effects and sounds. In other words, responsible for making the map look and feel good.

Open Position - Client Developer
As a game client developer you are responsible to maintain and develop the game client. This mostly includes add new pre-game features (content outside of matches, so no game mechanics) through .pak files used by the game. You will be responsible to create and design in-game interfaces for new features, add networking support for new features that require it, solve bugs etc. using LUA, XML and little bit of Rust. BattleForge uses LUA and XML in their .pak files which are loaded by the client. Communication with the server happens through a proxy written in Rust.
 

In Conclusion
Thanks for reading! 
This marks the 10th Community Update already. Is there anything you wish us to cover in upcoming community updates? How do you feel about the structure of the updates? As always, we are open to feedback so please let us know!
Here is a scratch code you can redeem in-game for 100bfp: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S010
The code is valid till September 11th. Please note you can also get a booster by filling in our survey. 
Archive
Community Update #7
Community Update #8
Community Update #9
 

Patch #400029
Greetings Skylords, Skyladies, and Skyfolks,

this is a minor update that contains mostly behind the scenes changes that were required for our maintenance we had on the 22nd of May. It also contains a new feature that allows players to see all of the boosters they have opened in the past!

General fixes
Fixed postgame screen (after a match) showing a negative BFP gain occasionally.  Players will no longer receive a warning in the middle of their screen that their in-game mailbox is full while in-game. Improved numerous tooltips in the in-game Rankings page. General changes
The selected auction duration will not reset to its default after placing the auction. Instead it will stay at the last selected auction duration. All Snapjaws Promo are now tradeable. They still cannot be obtained from boosters. Changed the `Complete Quests` achievement to reward an All-Editions booster every 20 completed quests. Removed the `Latest Booster` button and replaced it with a `History` button that will open a window showing the complete history of opened boosters for that player.

Hello fellow Skyladies and Skylords!
 
Another 1on1 tournament, who is the strongest Skylord? We will find out on the Testserver.
To get to the testserver start "LauncherTest.exe" in you Battleforge folder.
 
Format?
The tournament will be played as a 1on1 best of 3 double elimination tournament, grand finals will be best of 5, no reset.
 
Prize Pool! (subject to change)
1st place  - 4 Booster packs
2nd place - 3 Booster packs
3rd place - 2 Booster pack
4th place - 1 Booster pack
 
Big thanks to the devs who sponsor the booster packs!
 
 
When?
On 24.04.21  starting on 3pm CET (Berlin time), the stream will start about 30 minutes in advance.
 
Organisation?
The tournament brackets will be on Challonge, so register and join the tournament there. Please use your in game account name to make communication and finding your enemy easier.
The streaming channel that will be covering the tournament is DasToggy on twitch.tv.
In case of problems contact me or one of my mods via Discord, Battleforge or in the stream.
 
Twitch mods: LynnTaki
 
 
Rules!
-Disconnection during a game results in a default loss. If both sides agree it is possible to have a remake.
-Not showing up to your match after 15 minutes results in a default loss. The plan is to play a round of matches every ~30 mins.
-After your match, go to Challonge and insert the result. That is done by clicking on your match and selecting the winner/stats . The brackets will be updated automatically.
-The Map Pool is:
1st round: Haladur, 2nd round: Simai, 3rd: Elyon, 4th: Lajesh, 5th: Uro and 6th: Yrmia (same pool as in ranked duel, we are using the new maps). The first match of the round will be played on the fixed map, then it is losers choice.  The winning player (who won the previous match in this bo3) also has to lock in his deck first.
-The brackets for the tournament will be shuffled before the tournament starts.
-Use your Battleforge name for the tournament. If your Challonge account differs from your Battleforge account name use the "Sign up with an alternate name" feature or change your name for the tournament in the settings. Finding your opponent will be a LOT easier this way.
Bonus rules for the testserver:
All cards that have an affinity that does not exist on the lifeserver are forbidden.
 
 
 
Please notice, that the tournament is on the testserver to use the newest balance patch. This brings the balanced maps, which we will use. Wazhai is not in the pool any longer (finally).
Reply in this thread if you have questions, I will check it out later.
 
 
Best regards,
Toggy

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

Heya Skyfolk!

There have been increasing concerns lately about people selling and buying in-game content for real-life currency. We'd like to clarify that we do not and will never sell any BattleForge content for real-life money. This is due to the project being non-profit and a revival passion project in which we do not own any of the rights required to sell anything that's part of the game. Also, we like giving you a free experience of this amazing game without you ever having to worry about it being pay-to-win!
ANY kind of activity in the games, the forums, or our official discord server that involves trading in-game content for non-in-game content, be it real-life currency, accounts, games, literally anything that's not a part of the game, is strictly forbidden and not condoned by the Skylords Reborn Team. We do not and will never tolerate any kind of transactions that go beyond the game, such as account sales or trading BFP for real-life money, even if it was meant as a joke.
These kinds of malpractices put the entire game at risk for everyone involved; they could and will shut down the project entirely, never making Skylords Reborn available to the people again.  We don't want that to happen, and hopefully neither do any of you. We're very proud and happy to provide the BF experience to you and we intend to keep doing so!
For the safety of the community as well as the entire project's future, please consider the following:
If you see anyone attempting to sell or buy in-game content for out-of-game content on any platform report this to SR staff as soon as you can! We will do what we can to crack down on these cases as soon as possible. You can report someone by right clicking their name in the game and then clicking the report button, using the report function on the forums, or sending a DM to the SR Staff Mail bot on our Discord server. We will never sell you in-game content for real money. If someone does, report it. Attempting to sell in-game content like this is considered a threat to the entire project and its community, and will result in a permanent ban. This ban is NOT negotiable; you will never be able to access the game again. Period. We take these kinds of issues very seriously and we will always do what we can to keep Skylords Reborn a safe and enjoyable place for you all, and that means we try to keep it free from black market practices. By reporting, you can help keep Nyn safe and keep the game alive for all of us!
Thanks for keeping the game safe and enjoyable with us! Stay cool, stay safe, and enjoy the forge!

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

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

A summary of this announcement is written at the bottom.

Greetings Skylords, Skyladies and other Skyfolk!

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

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

Big thank you to both. I actually just needed to unpack the Battleforge.rar as the two of you pointed out. BattleForge is running smoothly! Big thank you again (: