synthc

I've been away from this forum for quite a while, but I came back a couple of days ago and saw the Ardent Peak announcement which has revitalized my interest in this project. So, I've been thinking about the long debated issue of PvP upgrades and came up with the following proposal: Balancing Gold: My idea is to make upgrades work like levels in an RPG, in that each upgrade costs more than the previous one (up to a cap). Each player would have a total upgrade level based on all the upgrades on all the cards in their collection, and the higher the level, the more it costs to apply new upgrades. The purpose of this would be to make it so that PvP players and PvE speedrunners are able to get a fully functional deck fairly quickly without upgrades being a bottleneck. What makes this different from the other proposals I've seen is that it preserves (even extends) the player progression that is collecting upgrades. Since the upgrade costs ramps up with each upgrade you apply, it would still take a very long time to get all 1,617 upgrades (3 for each card in the game); thus preserving the long-lasting, difficult to achieve end game goal for PvE players and completionists. I haven't worked out a perfect formula for this, and these numbers are entirely dependent on the rate at which we get BFP and how much gold the upgrades themselves cost, but the end result should look something like this is terms of how long it takes to fully upgrade your decks: First deck takes 10 hours of play to fully upgrade Second deck takes 15 hours to fully upgrade Third deck takes 25 hours to fully upgrade Fourth deck takes 40 hours Fifth deck takes 60 hours Each 20 cards after the first 80 take 60 hours to fully upgrade (an average of 1 upgrade per hour) When you get to the point of having played 150 hours, you have five fully upgraded decks to choose from (more than most players would even regularly use); but as far as game progress goes, you've only completed 18.5% of the game as far as upgrades go (100/539 cards upgraded), and you'd still have a long way to go time-wise before getting all upgrades. I think it should be balanced so that it would take at least 1000 hours to fully upgrade every card in the game. With the rate of increase in time it takes to upgrade 20 cards I suggested above (capped at 60 hours per 20 cards), it would take 1470 hours to get all upgrades. We could adjust the hard cap to be 50 (1250 hours) or 40 (1010 hours), or whatever seems best (maybe we want to make it take 2000+ hours). We could even replace the hard cap with a soft cap that ramps up more slowly and adjust the entire curve. The idea is that this system would give players a good pace to work with. The goal would be to balance the system so that by the time most players feel like trying a new deck, they have about enough gold to fully upgrade it, but there is still a long-lasting sense of progression due to the large amount of time it would take to get enough gold to upgrade all cards. This is a way to make upgrading cards slower than collecting cards without crippling people in PvP. Balancing BFP: It is also equally important that we properly pace BFP income in order to avoid the PvP grind—you can't upgrade cards you don't own. While decks will be a lot more playable without optimal cards than they would without upgrades and charges (e.g. Witchclaws aren't that much worse than Dreadcharger, and a deck with u3 Witchclaws and full charges will destroy a deck with u1 Dreadchargers), this is still a problem and a big barrier to new players (and veterans that don't want to grind) that doesn't need to exist now that the game is not P2W. The new quest system could be the perfect solution to this problem. The idea would be to do the usual F2P thing and give new accounts a bunch of high reward quests to give them an early BFP boost (or even to give them essential cards, see below). This will help PvP'ers and speedrunners get their first decks built quickly so that they can enjoy the game. This is also a common trick to help with player retention—players are more likely to keep playing if they think they're getting a lot of rewards and making quick progress/generally doing well in the game. All quest rewards should be account bound in order to prevent multi-accounting (BFP/cards gained from quests cannot be sold, traded, or attached to mail). I know that cards can be account bound, but if that's not possible for BFP (I imagine such a thing is currently not implemented), players should be rewarded with a card of their choice (could give the player a randomly generated list of cards to choose from, maybe with a bias towards good PvP/speedrunning cards) for completing these one-time high-reward quests. Balancing Rarity & Enabling Diversity: My original thought for balancing card rarity was to remove the card charge system. The charge system serves no purpose in a true F2P game (it's purely a money grab) and it causes problems with rarity distribution (it's much harder to fully charge an UR card than a UC/C card). This can make decks such as pure shadow, pure nature, (and also pure fire due to the market not being flooded with promo Firedancers) unplayable for players until they've amassed a huge amount of BFP to buy four copies of those essential ultra rares. In the end, I realized that removing the charge system is probably unnecessary, as we can fix the problem more easily using other methods. The simpler solution is just to to greatly increase the chances of getting URs and Rs in packs. Let's think about the purpose of rarity in CCGs. Sure, it's exciting to open a pack and get a super rare card in it, but that's really not primary purpose—it's just a small side benefit. The real purpose of rarity systems is $$$. By making a few very powerful/specialized cards that are required to play certain decks, companies can get players to buy insane amounts of card packs in order to get those super rare cards—that is the real purpose of card rarity; and what EA has done with Battleforge is no different. So, if we increase the chance of getting URs, we're essentially 'unlocking' those decks that need URs to function properly—thus allowing players to play the decks they want to play and increasing the overall diversity of decks played. Otherwise we'd just see endless shadow/frost and fire/nature (which we'll see a lot of anyway, but at least this way we get some pure shadow, pure fire, and pure nature too). Another possible solution is to create four main questlines—one for each color. These questlines would be a series of quests that give players some big rewards in the form of essential PvP (and maybe speedrunning) R and UR pure cards. These quests should be fairly involved and should take a while to complete—the quest conditions should be things that make the player commit to a certain color (at least a little bit). I'm not sure what kinds of in-game stats the devs have access to, but quests like "Play X shadow cards", "Build X nature orbs", or "Upgrade a fire card to U3" would work. Here would be the total rewards that each questline should give (in no particular order): Fire: Firedancer, Juggernaut, Wildfire Nature: Parasite Swarm, Shrine of Memory, Spikeroot Shadow: Harvester, Nether Warp (B), Shadow Mage Frost: War Eagle, Area Ice Shield, Northstar (B) Players should receive four copies of each card upon completing the corresponding quest. This would give players the necessary PvP URs (and many of the Rs) needed to build a competitive PvP pure deck. Speedrunning cards could be added as well, but I'm not familiar enough with speedrunning to know what those would be. I'm aware that the rewards in the list above are not evenly balanced in terms of rarity/usefulness, but note that these cards will become nearly worthless on the AH anyway since every player gets them for free, so it doesn't really matter. Final Thoughts: As a final note regarding rewards, I would strongly urge the developers to make PvP and PvE rewards equal (per time spent playing); there's no reason for one to give more rewards than the other. I would also (less strongly) urge the developers not to have recurring PvP/PvE specific quests. While it's a good thing to have one-time quests of this type just to get people to try each mode of play, it must be realized that some people simply don't enjoy PvP, and likewise, some people just don't enjoy PvE—players shouldn't be forced to play one or the other in order to keep up in rewards. It is very important that we both prevent returning veterans from not coming back because they can't bear the though of doing all that grinding again in order to get a playable PvP deck (many people have already said they won't play the game again if they have to grind to get their decks back), as well as prevent new players from being daunted by the amount of time it takes to get the cards and upgrades to become competitive in PvP. This also applies to speedrunning in the same way, as upgrades are vital there as well. I want the playerbase to be as big as possible, and I want this game to be as good as it can possibly be. Notice that every successful F2P game has given players a very large boost in rewards when they first start playing that slowly drops off. We should do the same, as it's very important for player retention. Battleforge is also a special case, since most of the player base will have already done the grind, and many are not willing to do it all over again. Let's not make the same mistakes EA made back when they had no clue how to manage a F2P game.

OK. I saw you going back and forth between that idea and just having the same free deck for everyone. This would work better, but it still has the problem of multi-accounting. Even if you don't get the rewards on your main account, you can still mail them to yourself or even run two clients at the same time and do bogus trades (I doubt the devs will put that much effort into detecting and stopping this). I think that your idea isn't bad, it's just that the thought of not being able to tweak the decks at all is horrible. This is why I proposed the 60-100 card free tome that allows you to build your own decks. Regarding your points on this being too inconsistent, I absolutely agree. Each tome should be guaranteed to have certain essential cards. It would basically be your system, but with more flexibility. Basically you're given all the core cards for a deck and you could use them to play the standard deck if you wanted to, but there's also a bunch of randomly chosen cards that you can include if you're feeling adventurous. Maybe we're both missing the obvious easy solution: put the existing tome ranked in the same pool as normal ranked so that you can actually find tome matches. This is only a partial solution though, as it's very subject to RNG, which is very bad in an RTS. But if you combined this with free tome decks (which already existed IIRC) and maybe some tweaks to how tome cards are chosen (some of the ideas I outlined for my mega-tome, like no t4), I think it would help a lot.

Theoretically lowering the PvP entry barrier will indeed encourage new players to keep playing, but, as much as I hope we do get a steady stream of new players, realistically I really don't think it's going to happen. I think that 6 months or so after the game's release, the game will consist mostly of a small group of players from the original game. After a year or so, all active players will have all of the PvP decks they ever intend to play, so locked decks wouldn't be used. I guess it's somewhat of a moot argument though, because the whole purpose is to retain new PvP players—it's just that I think that if we don't have many new players this feature will be less useful than just fixing the upgrade system in the first place (it would also be harder to implement and maintain). I understand what you mean. A few variations isn't going to be enough to stop people from building counter decks to these locked decks. Sure, it will help prevent a few specific cards from wrecking these decks, but the overall counters will still exist. E.g. it's pure fire week, so everyone plays pure frost to counter it—that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. I know what you mean, but the goal here wouldn't be to make it ramp up so fast that it takes months to upgrade your third PvP deck or something like that. The idea would be that you could get one deck fully upgraded at the same rate you can acquire the cards from the auction house. Once you have a single deck to play, you can at least fully enjoy your PvP experience while collecting gold and BFP for new decks. For your second deck, gold would be a little bit of a bottleneck compared to BFP, but not much (depends on the rarity of cards in each deck and just generally how much they BFP cost). The third deck would take a bit longer to get, but you could still get it in a reasonable amount of play time. This all depends on how quickly you gain BFP, but I would like to see something like this: First deck takes 10 hours of play to fully upgrade Second deck takes 15 hours to fully upgrade Third deck takes 25 hours to fully upgrade Fourth deck takes 40 hours Fifth deck takes 60 hours Each 20 cards after the first 80 take 60 hours to fully upgrade (an average of 1 upgrade per hour) At that point you've played 150 hours and you have five fully upgraded decks to choose from (more than most players would even regularly use); but as far as game progress goes, you've only completed 18.5% of the game as far as upgrades go (100/539 cards upgraded), and you'd still have a long way to go time-wise before getting all upgrades. I would want it to be balanced so that it would take at least 1000 hours to fully upgrade every card in the game. With the rate of increase in time it takes to upgrade 20 cards I suggested above (capped at 60 hours per 20 cards), it would take 1470 hours to get all upgrades. We could adjust the hard cap to be 50 (1250 hours) or 40 (1010 hours), or whatever seems best. We could even replace the hard cap with a soft cap that ramps up more slowly and adjust the entire curve. The thing is that most people find one or two decks they really like and tend to stick with those for the most part. For example, I played every deck there was except for pure frost; but in reality, probably 80% of my 1v1 matches were played with pure nature or shadow/frost. My 2v2 was a bit more diverse, but still probably 70% of my games were with nature/frost or pure fire. Diversity is mostly limited by what people want to play, rather than what they're able to play in terms of upgrades. The idea is that this system would give players a good pace to work with. The goal would be to balance the system so that by the time most players feel like trying a new deck, they have about enough gold to fully upgrade it, but there is still a long-lasting sense of progression due to the large amount of time it would take to get enough gold to upgrade all cards. This is a way to make upgrading cards slower than collecting cards without crippling people in PvP. As for PvE, I think that this is where the slower progression really matters the most. PvP players will always have things to strive for (e.g. rank), but PvE players need a longer lasting game progression, so I think that the slower upgrading after a certain point for PvE decks would be a good thing—you could still get a wide variety of decks to play, but fully upgrading everything would be a very long term goal. As far as speedrunning goes, I get that it takes more cards than PvP, but I still think that you could have a solid number of decks to optimally speedrun a good number of maps within a reasonable amount of play time. A lot of the same cards can be used in different maps in speedrunning and there are a lot of different strategies for each map, so I don't think that this upgrade system would be too much of a limitation. Also, if the pacing we originally decide on turns out to be too slow (or too fast) we can always adjust it.

But it would be the deck that a significant portion of the player base uses (especially early on, when almost nobody would play anything else). This also depends on how many new players join the game after the first few months (realistically, probably not many, but I guess we can hope for the best). If we end up with one, fairly static player base, then there will eventually be nobody playing these locked decks. Of course not everyone would be playing these decks, but there would still be a significant enough portion of the player-base using them that it would have a major impact on the meta-game. It would slow down the rate of change since not everyone has the cards to adapt to new strategies and instead rely on the locked decks—thus creating a more stale meta. It would be stale not only because a lot of people would be playing these same locked decks, but also because people would build decks designed specifically to counter these decks—what your opponent will be playing just becomes more predictable and thus easier to build against. Fair enough. I suppose the multi-accounting probably wouldn't be as bad as I had originally thought, though it would still incentivize it; whereas there would otherwise be little incentive to play with multiple accounts. Read my whole post here: Towards the bottom I outlined a system that would make each upgrade cost increasingly more. I think this is the best possible system, because it removes the messy and useless charge system, allows players to fully upgrade a one or two decks quite quickly (the first deck should be upgradable at the same rate they acquire their cards for the PvP deck, thus those early PvP upgrades are a non-issue), and it actually significantly extends the amount of time it takes to get all of the upgrades (100% the game). It would serve the same purpose that your locked deck proposal would serve: giving players a good deck to use in PvP while they work on building and upgrading their own deck. I agree that the current tome system needs no changes—this would be an addition, and perhaps tome is not the best name for it. It's just a free, rotating, fully upgraded card pool that players can use to build decks. The biggest difference is that you can still choose which cards you want and build your own deck, rather than having to play a deck built by someone else.

I don't think this is a good solution to the PvP upgrades problem. Here's why: It takes away the deck-building factor of the game. Deck-building is an integral part of any CCG and it was one of most fun aspects of the game, for me, at least. I can't stand the idea of having someone else decide what cards I have in my deck. The meta-game is artificially controlled by a small group of people. Even if many variations of each deck are added (which becomes somewhat time consuming and can only go on for so long before you get decks that are repeats of older ones), the meta-game is still determined by what a small group of players think is good at the time. It leaves no room for experimentation and will ultimately lead to a (more) stale meta-game. Sometimes cards that were previously thought to be very weak turn out to be quite strong when used correctly, and sometimes this is found out because some previously unknown player (or even a new player) who decided to try something new. This format does not allow for this kind of experimentation—it's completely at the mercy of consensus, which is definitely not always right. It strongly encourages multi-accounting. I won't go into why multi-accounting is generally a bad thing, but if different accounts have access to different free decks, people will absolutely have as many accounts as they can until they have access to all the decks. This also completely circumvents player progression, because people effectively have access to all the mainstream PvP decks from the start. The only ways to prevent this would be to make each region have access to the same decks (likely hard/impossible to implement right now, and would lead to an imbalance of which decks are available) or to make only one free deck that everyone has access to (this might work later on, once most people already have a couple of fully upgraded decks, but early on this will result in nearly everyone in PvP playing the same deck). It's not really necessary if we remove the card charge system and balance gold rewards properly. See: All that said, I do like the concept of having better, fully upgraded tome decks that allow players to experiment with cards/upgrades they don't own. I don't think that something like this should be implemented on release, because of the issues I noted in point #3 above (and because I don't think it would be a very important feature), but I think that a while after the game's release when many players already have a couple of fully upgraded PvP decks to choose from, it would be cool to have a free, fully upgraded weekly/bi-monthly tome something like this: Would be quite large with 60-100 cards. Would not be locked—it would function like a regular tome in which you can build your own decks from the tome's card pool. Cards would be randomly chosen from a pool of 'viable' PvP cards. The only real constraints would be no T4 and no cards that are universally considered to be completely unusable in PvP. There would be two pseudo-randomly chosen colors (constrained to prevent repetition within the weekly/bi-monthly cycles). Each color would have enough pure units to play a pure deck in either color; and, of course, you could play a splash deck using the two colors. Card ratios would be controlled to be half of one color and have of the other. Tier ratios would also be controlled to include mostly T1/T2 cards (like 75% t1/t2 and 25% t3). This system would still allow players to build their own decks and it would prevent the multi-accounting issues noted above. But again, I don't think that this is something that should be implemented early on. One downside to this idea is that there would be a lot more pure decks than splash decks... perhaps the formula could be tweaked to allow for more splash decks. You could maybe do something like what Faeria does with their arena and have 3 of the 4 colors available each week.

This is an interesting idea. Make upgrades cost more after fully upgrading your first 20 cards, then 40, and 60, and etc. This way you could get one deck upgraded quickly but would have to spend more time for each additional deck. It could also be a non-linear curve so that you receive bigger and bigger penalties for each 20 cards you upgrade (making it hard to upgrade every card). This would probably be pretty hard to implement though.

This would definitely be reasonable, and is pretty much exactly what I'm asking for. You can get a fully upgraded deck within maybe 20-30 hours of play. Of course you won't have all the R/UR's you want by that time, but you will at least have a fully upgraded deck of commons and uncommons and maybe 1 or 2 rares—and you will be saving up enough gold by playing that you will be able to upgrade your new R/UR's by the time you have enough BFP to buy them. This way PvP players can actually have fun while earning gold for new decks because they can play a fully functional PvP deck without too much unfairness (there will still be luck involved in opening boosters, but hopefully the AH prices will level out quickly enough on release that you can buy all the cards you need from there). I have no problems with player progression and I realize its value, but I'm very strongly opposed to players have to choose between grinding and being at a disadvantage. In the original Battleforge it took literally hundreds of hours of grinding PvE to get a fully upgraded deck, which was absolutely awful.

Exactly this. And this is what we have the opportunity to avoid now that the game is no longer pay to win. EA designed this system to be absurdly grindy in order to milk as much money out of the game as possible. It is NOT necessary to keep all the grinding for player progression and a lot players, if not most players, do NOT enjoy it. Earning daily BFP is plenty as far as progressing the player experience goes. Card upgrades should be more a completionist goal (to upgrade everything), or could honestly just be removed entirely.

Are you suggesting that we get the same, nearly-nonexistent amount of gold from PvP as in the original BF? Grinding was the worst part of the game by far in the original game. If the gold income from PvP isn't massively increased I won't be coming back. I loved this game and IMO it's the best multiplayer game ever made despite it's flaws, but I just don't have the time or the patience for all that BS grinding.

In BF having no upgrades is completely crippling. In LoL I think a gold player without runes/masteries would win almost 50% of the time against a silver player with them, but of course we're both just guessing—my point is that in LoL runes and masteries have a relatively minor affect on overall performance. Yeah, I mis-wrote there. What I meant to say was "I think you should have enough gold to upgrade all cards you would use in a single deck". I don't think you should be able to upgrade every card you get in a booster pack right away; but if you're picking individual cards to buy from the AH or just using the few useful new ones you get from boosters, you should be able to instantly upgrade those cards. Everyone will pretty much have a full deck within a few days anyway (because they will have enough commons/uncommons). The difference is that the ones who grind for gold will be at a significant advantage because their cards are upgraded. This is a terrible thing for an RTS. Why? Why should PvE players get more upgrades than PvP players?

The problem is that you're not collecting upgrades if you only play PvP (some of us just don't enjoy PvE); you're earning gold. There's a big difference between actually getting new cards and upgrading existing ones—the former is an exciting experience that changes how you can play, while the latter is nothing more than grinding if implemented in the way you guys are suggesting. Sure, some unit gain new abilities when upgraded, but that's a relatively minor change in most cases. I fully understand the concepts behind this sort of player progression, but I really strongly think that it shouldn't play any significant role in determining how powerful the units are in an RTS. This was one of the game's fundamental flaws IMO, and one of the reasons why it never had a big player base. I think that player progression should never directly effect how strong your units are compared to another player's; personally I would much rather we just do away with the upgrade system altogether (as has already been suggested on these forums), but I think that providing enough gold to upgrade all cards as soon as you get them is a good compromise for completionists. If you look at other F2P games like LoL, you will notice that they don't include anything in the player progression that significantly affects your champion's overall power level (maybe with the exception of not having some essential summoner spells, but you can get those really quickly through normal play). There are runes, but they have a pretty minor effect overall. The big aspect of progression is earning IP with which to buy new champions (this is equivalent to BFP for new cards in BF). In Battleforge, however, a highly skilled U0 player will get slaughtered by an average U3 player (I've tested this before), because the stat and ability differences are just massive. This is not at all how it should be. From a PvP perspective, nobody wants to have to farm in order to have a competitive deck, and being forced to do so can really ruin the experience—especially considering the fact that we've already spent countless hours grinding upgrades only to lose it have and have to do it all over again.

Honestly they can do whatever they want with the game. They're already breaking the law by providing copyrighted content for free without permission from the copyright holder. Of course, if they were to sell in-game content for profit EA would shut them down immediately; so this is all about doing things in a way that will make EA the least likely to C&D or sue. Selling BFP actually wouldn't be a huge problem if they are planning on making a non-profit organization or LLC (which they are), because then there would be detailed and reliable accounting which would prove that the sales are not for profit, but only for server maintenance and charity. As for rarer card upgrades costing more gold, I guess it's fine as long as the gold cost stays roughly proportional to the BFP cost of the card. In the end, all I want is for gold to not be a bottleneck for a deck—I don't want to have to go out of my way to farm it, I should have enough to upgrade my cards just by playing normally.

When I first read this proposal, I was very strongly opposed to not being able to buy BFP. This is because while your system makes a lot of sense for a new game, Battleforge is not a new game. Things like daily quests and slowly earning new cards are great for player retention and preventing new players from being overwhelmed by tons of new cards all the time, but the problem is that the vast majority of at least the initial playerbase is going to consist of Battleforge veterans—players who have already spend countless hours grinding PvE for card upgrades and gold before losing everything. In the original Battleforge, grinding upgrades was a horrible experience for me, because I didn't like PvE and the very existence of upgrades mades PvP matches unfair (when both players didn't have max upgrades). I remember trading BFP for gold and paying people to grind 2 or 4 players maps for upgrades while I alt-tabbed (which I know is a violation of the rules, but I couldn't have cared less at that point). After thinking about this for a while, though, I think that your proposed system can work if it is implemented properly. The two most important things are that you balance PvP and PvE to give equal rewards for the amount of time spent, and that you provide enough gold to fully upgrade any cards you buy from the auction house. Before the introduction of Battle Tokens in the original game, PvP rewards were an absolute joke. If you wanted to get any upgrades at all you had to grind hours and hours of PvE, which nearly ruined the game for me (but once I had all of my upgrades, then the game became amazing). The rewards system needs to be balanced in such a way that players will have enough gold to buy upgrades for all of the cards they are able to buy with their daily BFP. This would prevent frustrating gold bottlenecks and unfair matches where one player has more upgrades than another, despite both playing the game for the same amount of time and doing all of their quests. Of course, in order to accomplish this, you either need to make all cards equal in upgrade cost (regardless of rarity), or you need to make upgrades fairly cheap, so that even decks with many R/UR cards can be fully upgraded quickly. BFP should always be what regulates the rate of new content in the player experience (getting new cards is the only thing that significantly changes the experience, not upgrades). After thinking about it for a while, I changed my mind and decided that your proposed system can work. I will admit that although I would still rather just buy BFP and gold and get all the cards and upgrades I need for my PvP decks, I somewhat look forward to slowly buying cards from the auction house and building my decks bit by bit (simply because it will be a different experience from what I had before—a handicap, but one that everyone will have). What I very much would not be looking forward to, however, is playing unfair matches. I understand why the upgrade system exists from an MMO perspective, but I think that it has no place in an RTS. TLDR: Make the reward system give enough gold to fully upgrade every card you buy (not necessarily every card you get in a pack, just the ones you would use in a deck) in order to help prevent unfair PvP matches. This way PvP won't be perpetually imbalanced for players who play for equal amounts of time and do all their quests, and completionists can still get satisfaction from upgrading every card they own.