Metagross31

Hello new Skylords!
 
The first tournament was fought out and we have a champion. But who might become the first squire? All the newer players may gather to show off their freshly gained skills! Veteran Skylords step aside, it is time for the new recruits to put up a show.
 
Format?
The tournament will be a best of three single elimination tournament. Should a lot of participants register again the format might be changed to best of one again.
The access to the tournament will be restricted, only players who...
...are not part of the top 40
...have a w/l ratio of below 60%
...feel like they are rookies
are allowed to enter the tournament. I will recheck some of the entries personally.
If you have doubt wether you are allowed into the tournament either ask me via discord or ingame.
 
 
Prize Pool! (stay tuned)
1st place  - 1200 BFP
2nd place - 800 BFP
3rd-4th place - 550 BFP
5th-8th place - 350 BFP
And one free Boosterpack for everyone participating!
Big thanks to the devs who sponsor the ENTIRE prizepool again!
 
 
When?
On 17.01.21  starting on 2pm 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. Use your in game account name to make communication and finding your opponent 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: Karlmann90, Lynntaki, TheFatherJack
ingame: Karlo
 
 
 
Rules!
-No bugabuse, cheating or insulting the other players. Penalties may vary from a warning to default loss.
-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 round: Wazhai, 4th: Elyon, 5th: Lajesh, 6th: Uro and 7th: Yrmia (same pool as in ranked duel). The first match of the round will be played on the fixed map, then it is losers choice.  The winning player (who won the last 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 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. Finding your opponent will be a LOT easier this way. If you do not register for the tournament with your Battleforge name we cannot find you for the prizes!
 
Reply in this thread if you have questions, I will check it out later. Also recheck this thread before the tournament starts, there might be changes to rules, format,mods or prizepool.
 
 
Best regards,
Toggy

Hey all,
we already had a large percentage of German players, but since it's going through the roof at the moment, I think we have a very urgent need for a German chat.
I'm not so much interested in having a way to talk German in-game, but more in finding a way for the non-Germans to escape all the German chatter.
I can understand that people who have to permanently follow conversations they can't understand feel left out and that's rude.
We might also need to spread the little-known knowledge about the feature of how to leave and rejoin chat channels. But I'm not quite sure how that can be done.

What do you think?

As a tip generally for 4p expert maps: If someone of your team can start with a Fountain of Rebirth (if possible two, or one by two players each). Healing units time and costefficient is very important when doing a map like Blight and FoR does this excellent in a global manner. 
I always use FoR for the SW and SE positions of Blight, where I have enough experience to be able to take one for the team. On the NW and NE positions I currently don't have enough experience to comfortably invest 60 or 120 energy into buildings at the start. 

Hey guys,
Thank you everyone for the positive feedback, a new tournament will be announced soon.
The Boosterpacks for the tournaments should be added to the account by now.
Note that only people who actually participated got a booster.
 
Greetings,
Toggy
 

One of the most important things in a deck involving Tortugun is that you have a very good way to get back your energy. You need either shrine of war or fof with cultist master since those turtles will die very often. And therefore you definitely need offering as well.
The strategy I use with them is quite simple: Every time a Tortugun would get hungry, you have two options: Either let another Tortugun eat it or use cards like offering or sometimes motivate on it. You just need to pay very close attention to their hunger bar and which tortugun is about to become hungry and tell them the target to eat early enough. Else you could end up with two tortuguns eating the other two you just played and since they get hungry very quickly after eating an undazed Tortugun, they will then eat each other so instead of having 3 full tortuguns, you only have 1 which may even be at low life. Also, keep in mind you can't use offering or motivate on Tortuguns once they are in the amok state. So from that point on you either have to feed or eat them (You can also tell them to move right before they get in the amok state and they will walk to their destination even though they switch to amok state right away. That gives you plenty of time to pick another Tortugun and let that one eat the one in amok state. Another method is using the spell amok. As long as they are affected by amok, they won't eat your units).
Another little trick to that strategy: use both variations of tortugun and always play them in pairs. This way they get hungry simultaneously and you can tell one of them to eat the other. It's way easier to handle them like this.
Oh and it's very important to upgrade them to at least U2. You not only need the lower consumption of food but also the charges.
There are so many more things I could tell you about this unit but I think I covered the most important things.
Anyway. If you play Tortugun correctly, you will have lots of fun with that unit. The hunger bar is one of the most unique abilities in the game and that's why I'm highly against a major change to it.
I agree with the complaint about the animation though. It takes so long and because of that, it's barely useful to eat smaller units like Nightcrawlers from infect or the crawlers from Grim Bahir. A change I see fitting for Tortugun is to pause their hunger bar for a few seconds after they eat something. That would not only encourage people to play them the way it's intended, but it will also make up for the long eating animation.

How is this thread still alive?!

[img]http://i.imgur.com/FKlZOzr.jpg[/img]

So I baked this pizza and thought that I would share it with you guys. In case you were deciding if you were hungry or not. :P

I've already eaten most of it and it was delicious. You jelly? :D

Today I baked a pizza too! This thread kinda inspired me to do this a few days ago tbh...

The idea was the missing combination Fraktion.. a fanatic Religion called "Blue fire aszendent"
The toggle is between the 2 modes: 
 
-The way of purity: Unit looses slow and Regeneration, Unit gains swift and becomes unstable (looses 15HP/s)
-The way of worship: Unit looses Swift and unstable, Unit gains slow and Regeneration (gain 15HP/s) 
 
So you have to swap them regulary...with a cool but 1 Sec Long Animation from blue to red fire
 

After a long day strife and warfare a champion emerges victorious from the battle.
Congratulations to RadicalX for winning the Skylords Open#1!
1st - RadicalX, 2000 BFP
2nd - Draken, 1200 BFP
3rd - xHightech, 800 BFP
4th - TopS3cret, 500 BFP
 
Thank you all for the support and stay tuned for more tournaments in the future.
 
EDIT: The Booster packs will be distributed next week as soon as possible.
 
Greetings,
DasToggy

I think it makes sense what Metagross said, if enough people truly want this experience, to grind and play collection mode, then you won't have a problem finding and hosting matches with said players. And the current implementation accommodates this in unranked. Due to the already mentioned principles of fairness in pvp, as well as having a healthy pvp population, ranked pvp needs to be decided by skill not deck level and bf grind/trade timel so I don't understand the desire to change that for ranked. 
As for longevity, it's just artificial longevity, as players are forced to play modes they don't like, just to get on even footing. Even if it is weeks/months, it's still time that is 'wasted' and would feel like a chore, rather than a game you have fun in.

I see no reason to consider changing ranked to even allow for the option of collection only. The whole point of a competitive ranked PvP mode in ANY game is to provide an experience where players can use their skill to outplay their opponent(s) and obtain rankings based on their demonstrated skill. Once you have outside influences giving one player an advantage over another before the match even starts, it begins to trivialize any showing of skill, thus the "ranked" aspect is pointless.
I get that quite a few players enjoyed the fact that you could grind for a maxed out PvP deck and then stomp people who didn't put in that same effort, but this kind of gameplay only heightens the enjoyment of the players on top at the expense of those at the bottom. 
Now separating the playerbase into brackets based on deck level would make these issues less apparent, but they wouldn't be removed completely. It would also be pointless to implement currently as there aren't enough players to consistently have matches in each bracket.

Guess why? It's because the mayority of people want that change.
To quote Blizzard's devs: "You think you do, but you don't."
Without the decks pvp will suck. And people wont play it. Include top lvl people. An this will make it suck even more. See something?

It was our goal to make PvP accessible from the start without forcing players to grind for cards and upgrades. If you are satisfied with only having two decks in PvP, then yes, you do not need any more cards next to the free PvP decks.
Let's say it's the year 2022. The game has been out for a year and plenty of people have been playing for a while now. A lot of them have multiple level 120 collection decks. Now, let's suppose you are a new player who exclusively wants to play the PvP mode. What sounds more appealing:
1. Constantly losing against other players because they have a high level deck and you have a low level deck, while completely ignoring any skill differences.
2. Having the same high level deck as all other players and have the skill difference actually be the decider of the match.
I'd argue the first option will essentially lead to a PvP environment, which will be unwelcoming for all new players. Everyone will be forced to grind PvE or play sparring before they have a reasonable deck. Considering sparring PvP only grants one third of the ranked PvP rewards due to it's potential for abuse, grinding PvE will be the only reasonable option again. In this scenario, does the first option really sound that much more appealing to you than the second option? To me it surely doesn't. PvP will end up with a dead player base after 1-2 years since new players will have a very hard time getting into it.
 

One of the most critical elements of PvP is having people to play against. The removal of free PvP decks would nuke the population of ranked PvP players. Age of Empires Online learned this same lesson; its PvP scene was virtually non-existent until the introduction of Champion Mode, which removed the disparity between players who grinded out gear and those who hadn’t. 
 
This is one of those things that sounds logical to certain people, but it ignores the facts of human psychology. If I, or almost any other player, find ranked PvP frustrating because it is determined by deck level and not by skill, we’re not going to go out and grind for a PvP deck. We’re just going to not play PvP. If we aren’t playing PvP, queue times will increase, which will further lead to player loss for PvP as people who are less willing to spend their limited playtime in a queue quit PvP as well. If we aren’t playing PvP, eventually neither are you, because you run out of players. 
 
This isn’t about rewarding or not rewarding you for grinding out a deck. This is about ensuring you have players to play against with that deck you spent all that time grinding out. History has shown, every time, that allowing for benefits earned outside of the PvP match being played to impact the outcome of the PvP match, in any game, is unpopular and leads to decreased PvP participation. The majority of PvP gamers want PvP to reflect their skill, so even if you disagree with that, it behooves you to enable it, because it gives you people to play with. That’s why nearly every other MMO has moved to equalize stats in PvP and reduced the impact gear has on it. To paraphrase  Metagross, “you think you want this, but you really, really do not”.

Friend every post that i read that you created is you complaining about something that affects only you. Apart from what Zyna answered to you above you want to match pvp and rpve 2 completely different gamemodes to suit you.

If you want gold specifically then go play rpve. If you did not want to play rpve today then that is on you. Pvp in every game that i have played in 15 years i game is a different mode that does not emphasise on farming something that you can also farm in pve but in fighting other players and what that means. 

2 days ago you wanted achievements toned down or outright removed from the game cause YOU personally couldn't do them. Now it is gold issues cause YOU felt like playing a mode that is not the most viable way to earn a resource. Game does not revolve around you pal. We have the chance here for constructive feedback from the community which as proven time and time again is taken seriously by the admins and implemented into the game. Pls keep in mind that that feedback is for the entire community and what the majority likes and not a select few.

Otherwise we will have posts like 'remove a faction cause i dont feel like playing it myself' or 'today is was bored to play pve so you should give me extra gold for playing only pvp' 

We are not going to remove the free PvP decks and we are also going to keep them at level 120. We also are not looking to encourage the collection mode over the unlimited mode. The collection mode was added as a secondary option for players who enjoyed playing with messy decks in the early stages of the game against other beginners. Forcing players to use the collection mode in ranked play will eventually result in beginners facing veterans with fully upgraded decks, which they have earned after months of grinding. Do you think it's fair that the player with the low level deck loses, even if they might actually be better at the game than the player who just happened to start playing earlier? I will be moving this to rejected, as the original suggestion was to "Remove lending of free PvP decks". If you have any other suggestions, such as introducing a fee for the free PvP decks, feel free to make a suggestion.

Best regards, Zyna.

cool

Mauler buff when? 

No. Just no. I want to have at least the feeling that I have a chance to compete and not get bashed by people with 120 decks that grinded for weeks. I dont have a lot of time to play and want to play fair pvp before the year of 2025. If this is implemented I will not play ranked anymore and lose the interest in this game within the next few weeks.
 
Also this will make the ranked ladder a joke. It will no longer show you, who is the best player, but who has the most time and patience to grind. This will also turn off many pro players as well I'd guess. The game will thus die again faster than you can say Promo Lord Cyrian and we will be back where we were 5 years ago. And nobody wants that.
 
tl;dr: No.

Agreed. Also, many people say "they take away a part of the game, i.e. grinding for a PvP deck", but imo it's the opposite, they open a new part of the game for me.
The thing is, that I do not have that much time to play because of family and work. But with the free PvP decks I can still play some PvP when I have the time and, at least in theory, compete with everyone. If I had to build a PvP deck from scratch, I would already have a disadvantage, because I wasn't able to play over the weekend. This would make it, that even with perfect gameplay I would start with a disadvantage from having worse cards/upgrades. This would snowball over the months to come and I would virtually be locked out of PvP until I have a competitive 120 deck, which might take months. In the meantime I would have to grind BG9 for months, if I wanted to get into PvP as quickly as possible, which would get boring and repetitive very quickly, making me lose interest in this project.
Long story short, if you want to grind - go for it, but don't force everyone to do it, since it makes people have to do "shores" in order to even play the game. If I wanted to grind 24/7 I would play World of Warcraft or smthng.

I'm really confused which game people were playing before, because this has always been my experience in BF. With the difference that I can now at least start with a lvl 120 deck myself, instead of having to grind PVE until I can compete in PVP.

Enlightenment/Amii Monument

Hey everyone,
I have something new that I want to share with you.
In the last two days I tried something new and built a simple Discord Bot that allows you to set notifications for card prices.
 
DISCLAIMER:
Please note that to use the automated notifications you will have to subscribe to the bot, meaning that you need to confirm that your publicly visible Discord ID and all your personal notification settings for this bot are stored in one of my databases. You can unsubscribe at any time, which deletes all your user data including all notification settings for this bot from the database, never to be recovered.
 
Here are some things it can do right now:
Set multiple notifications for different cards with criteria for when there are buyout prices below (for buying) or only buyout prices above (for selling) a set price available Unset all notifications for a specific card, so you can set new ones, if your criteria change Unset a specific notification Show all your current notification settings Show all current buyout prices for the cards you have set notifications for Show all current buyout prices for a specific card, or cards that include a specific set of characters (no subscription needed) I set the Bot up so that it checks for new data frequently and sends notifications each time a previously set criteria is met, which should be not later than 1.5 minutes after new data is available from the API.
 
If you are okay with subscribing, just want to use it for displaying the buyout prices of a card or simply want to stay updated on changes to my website or bot, join my myDiscord Server and start interacting with the bot in your DMs. If you joined the server, when the bot was not online, simply DM the bot with !help once it is online again. You can join it here:
https://discord.gg/m5Dm5fweSV  
Also, since I haven't spent a lot of time with programming this little bot (or Discord Bots in general) yet, there might still be some issues and other stuff, like a not so understandable command documentation or the nonexistent description on my Discord server.

Nonetheless, I hope you still like it and find this simple bot useful.
 

Patch #400021 
Greetings Skylords,
This update contains mostly minor tweaks/fixes and quality of life improvements, but also an important new mode for PvP that allows players who want to grind their PvP decks to do so. We have heard your feedback on the free PvP decks and hope this is a good compromise. 
General changes
Made mini boosters untradeable. These boosters were meant to be opened and not traded, and we noticed some players were trying to scam with this booster.
  Added "Unlimited" PvP mode for sparring. In this sparring mode players can use both the free PvP cards and the cards from their own collection. This is unlike the "Collection" sparring PvP mode which was changed to allow players to only use cards from their own collection (and will not allow free PvP cards to be used). Ranked PvP works as before and players can freely choose what cards they would like to use.
  Matches played alone will now not kick the player if they go AFK. Instead, they will not receive any BFP from their daily boost and will also not progress in any quest or achievement. They will still receive the rewards for completing the match (this includes the upgrades).
  The Ravenheart card as reward from the achievement "Blight's Black Heart" is now tradable. All Ravenheart cards from this achievement have been made tradeable.
  Added an option to save your password in the login screen. General fixes
Improved the description and translations of several achievements and quests. Minor adjustments to UI elements in the quests window. Fixed very rarely being able to open gold chests multiple times. Fixed various issues with distributing rewards and updating UI in the post-game screen.