Majora

Figured people would like to know the final results:

But I even added a big sign-up button for you! 😞

https://challonge.com/tournaments/signup/S2ksqFWMhU#/signup/n3aiqm0zvq8

I'll do some digging. To my last understanding it was on the to-do list but got postponed when we ran into a million bugs with the last patch 😅

This is actually on our to-do list. Check it out: For other ideas regarding maps, check out the map changes document in this community update:

This has come up a couple of times, but we currently do not have plans to add affinities for Twilight Edition cards. In fact, we are even considering not adding affinities to some of the new cards. Affinities were introduced as a way to increase set size in the old EA days. And it makes sense, a 120 card expansion sounds better than a 60 card one, even if a lot of it is bulk. Affinities do have some charms, but in some designs, the difference in the affinity does not matter at all, or one of the two is clearly superior. By forcing yourself to have two affinities ready for each card, you automatically create some restrictions to your designs. Increasing that to 4 is close to impossible. I dont see a world where a card can have 4 different enough affinities, where all get played and its not in the way of an actual new card in design. Adding affinities to the cards from the Twilight Edition creates new problems too. Take Eruption. Adding an extra affinity to it is already tricky. I guess you could say a purple affinity with 200 damage that ignores debuffs or something. But the current Affinity System also requires you to change the basic Eruption. Changing it to a Fire affinity to deal 200 + 100 damage is just lazy design IMO. Then there are cards like Shadow Mage. How would you even go about introducing two different affinities for this card? Affinies are also confusing to new players, so personally (im not on the design team) I would really hate for us to mess with the cleanness of the basic first edition. One other thing: adding affinities would take time off actual new cards, which are way easier to market to the larger playerbase than adding affinities. In a way, some of our patches have dramatically changes units to allow for completely new playstyles, but still people ask ''are the new cards ready yet?'' because they do not think this counts as new units. I expect the same would happen with adding (more) affinities to current cards. We do think there is design space for affinities, and some of our new cards will have them. But our designers feel that if we cant come up with an affinity that actually adds something to the card, we will stick to only one version of the card.

Huh interesting, can confirm your findings as well. I will report this to the team.

The Icon does appear, but keep in mind it only lasts for 5 seconds (with a cooldown of 20). The movement speed buff does get applied, you can test this by walking a unbuffed demon and a buffed demon to the same spot. The biggest difference is the turning speed however. Once buffed, the unit can almost instantly turn, while the unbuffed version needs to walk in a small circle first. The ability is mostly meant as a way of life-control in combat situations, hence the small buff.

We are very much aware of this issue, but have to carefully decide which units Nightguard (for example) should be allowed to take over, since its a very common strategy for PvE. One step in this direction is adding power costs and orbs to every PvE unit (and building, Matter Mastery), so we at least get the option to change this. As for Lost Souls Mind Control immunity, this was a last minute addition from the original developers from EA, probably once they realized how problematic Nightguard was.

Kubik posted a bit more details regarding the sound converter over here. Would be greatly appreciated if you guys can help us crack this one, since it directly impacts voicelines for new cards:

Hey I had nothing to do with this card 😛 The lazy 3th upgrade is one of the leftovers from EA's last days. But since the card is pretty out of place in Skylords and not very popular, i guess the team didn't put effort into fixing it.

Which is actually every single (official) map, since it was one of the (if not the?) last card added to the game. Personally, I think Amii Monument is a stupid card. Enlightenment is also problematic, although it wasn't that broken before Batariel and other late game t4 powerhouses were released. Getting an Overlord or Avatar of Frost was definitely strong, but at least you were limited a little bit. Amii Monument is definitely a problematic design that is not easy to fix without removing what the card is trying to do all together. The only thing I can think of is making the cost of not clearing your t4 camp but instead going for Amii monument higher, by adding a long cooldown-before-use and/or higher powercost to it. If you for example had to pay 400 power for Ami Monument and you had to wait 3 minutes before it actives, it might on certain maps just be better to clear the camp and take your natural 4th orb. It gives players the choice to either turtle and build up towards amii monument, or go on the attack and grab the natural orb. Numbers would have to be finetuned of course, but I can imagine there is a sweet spot.

Ah, yea cause you mentioned ''one game'' I was confused. One match = Best of 3 would make the most sense 🙂

Does it give you a specific error message?

What was the reason of playing only one game against each other? Once you go through the trouble of setting up a date to play, I would prefer to play a best of 3.

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

3005 Did not know this was a thing, but im here for the ride.

Great suggestion, and Id love to participate! Be sure to reach out to our event manager (Hiko) if you want some prizes for support, maybe he can help you out. 🙂

What units and what spells are being used? We are talking about PvP here right? I feel this is a problem especially newer or less experienced PvP players face. When I played the game during EA times, I thought spells were obviously overpowered. The void system balances everything out however, and spells are already mostly being used as a support for your army (the fact you cant throw most spells without units nearby also leans into this). One of the spells that will receive a cooldown increase is Voidstorm. As a global damage spell we found it was too easy to constantly use it as a reset button. Also keep in mind that constant oink/roots/freeze will keep effecting units less and less, because everytime a unit is hit by a crowd control spell, it reduces the duration of the next one. Are we talking about those kind of spells, or do you also mean stuff like Lava Field and Nether Warp? If you want, you can upload a replay for the community to look at of a match where you feel spells were problematic.

Disclaimer: The following thoughts are from me as a player, not me as a community manager or representation of the Skylords Reborn team. In general, I'm against making the game easier and in favor of removing map abuse. People complain about the lack of new maps/content all the time, yet we see mainstream map abuse or weird interactions that clearly should not work, resulting in maps being way easier than they should be. This again results in people ''completing'' the game at a faster phase, which is not helpful for player retention. Now I'm not saying every map needs to be insanely hard, but there can definitely be a few hard ones that requires a few restarts. My favorite memories of the game include struggling with my friends on a hard map, slowly gaining more knowledge and skill to complete it. The game has plenty of maps, so especially the ones that are unlocked late in the game and don't block any other maps can be harder to complete without scaring people away. We should also keep in mind that the game has an expert mode for a reason. Making expert maps easy because newer players are struggling makes little sense to me, we already have standard and advanced for those players. In my opinion, expert should embrace the idea of the map, challenge you in a good way, and assume you have a decent collection. Convoy Convoy is clearly one of the harder maps, and the one I was struggling with the most. I think it took me two nights with my friend to complete, but it still holds a fond memory. I think getting rid of the abuse is a good thing, but I disagree that the number of walkers have to go from 3 to 5. Suggestion: - Remove walker trapping and other tricks that can get you into the canyon (which is clearly not intended in the map design) - Keep the number of bandit walkers the same Crusade + Defending Hope I like these changes. Empire Empire was the last map added to the game, and it shows. The idea is cool, but it is still completely unclear to me which side is supposed to be the past, and which one is supposed to be the present. The fact that the side quest with Kobold Engineers and Midwinter doesnt really do anything does not help. Suggestion: - Agree with the suggestions - Maybe make it more clear which side is past, which is present, and how things actually impact each other. Encounters with Twilight I like these changes King of the Giants I agree with all suggestions. Nightmare Shard I'm against making expert maps easier, but if newer players indeed do struggle on standard, I'm all in favor of making Standard easier. I do think the map can be a bit tedious with its low power. However, increasing starting well capacity does not help with that. I'm more in favor of suggestion 4 (increasing void power to get slightly faster start). Nightmares End I actually would prefer to see this swapped the other way: make it so you have to destroy the power shrine to build the orb. Since the map is already quite long, I'm not against speeding the early game up a bit by adding some void power. Ocean No strong opinion on this map, except that it feels like there is too much going on that does not actually do anything for you. This was especially visible on the speedrunnig contest of Toggy, where you can just skip huge parts of the map. Oracle Flavor wise it makes no sense that the ritual doesn't do anything, so I'm in favor of this. Siege of Hope Don't have a strong opinion on this one. I remember playing it the first time and thinking it was insanely hard, but it has a good learning curve and is definitely playable. Slavemaster I never ran into this issue, but it can be long map so I'm not against these changes. Sunbridge It makes absolutely no sense that advanced is harder on expert on this map. I'm hugely in favor of getting rid of the switch abuse. I'm also in favor of making the boss fight harder, since by then you already dominated the map, and its currently no challenge at all. I'm not really in favor for swapping the dragon with Abomination, but it's something I can live with. The Dwarven Riddle I'm not really sure how I feel about adding a 4th orb. I never felt it was needed on this map, and it's part of the charm that some players fill a more supporting role. The guns of Lyr Guns of Lyr on expert is a very hard map if you don't trick it, but very satisfying to play with some friends. I'm all in favor of removing all map abuse here. The Insane God The transformed priest does feel a little bit lackluster, but it still has very decent stats. I don't think it needs to be changed, but a strong burrowers wall spit sounds like a cool idea. The Soulstree I agree with these changes The Treasure Fleet This one is actually one of my favorite maps (without exploits). Adding another fun challenge to it, without impacting the nostalgia or making it easier, sounds very cool to me! Titans Sounds like good changes to me. On closing notes, I'm also in favor of removing Nightguards Ability to take control of units she is clearly not meant to swap with. This also makes some maps way easier than they should be. Part of the charm of BattleForge is finding ways to beat certain challenges. Nightguard is one of those one-size-fits-all problem solvers that clearly is not meant to be used like this.

Do you mean a higher focus on unit combat and less spell support options? Personally, I don't think so. Part of the charm of BattleForge that makes it stand out from traditional RTS is the current system. Its the reason why Fog of War is not in the game, being able to instantly spawn reinforcements and support with spells makes it differ a lot from the traditional ''build a bigger/better army and attack key points in the map''. The game is also heavily balanced around (Crowd Control) spells. The spell-system is just too ingrained to adjust it without breaking the current game. The void-power system also results in players having to be careful throwing their spells around. If your eruption only killed 50 power of units, you are set back. If you oink or freeze constantly without actually getting rid of the units, you are falling more and more behind. What is the specific reason you dont like spells?

We can design these variations, but as far as I am aware, there are no leftovers from EA times no.

But but but.. my community updates 😞

What do you mean with ''rank only pack''? As a PvP player myself, I definitely agree it would be cool to add an incentive to reach top X.

Sadly, adding in completely new animations is currently not possible. There also aren't that many un-used models, as far as I'm aware there is only one. Since BattleForge last days under EA were kind of dire, I suppose they already used everything they could.