Xanatoss

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.
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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

I can understand this rationale completely. In particular, the tightrope walk between a supposedly elegant reverse engineering solution and its merciless empirical performance.

But because Sunderer and Harvester are currently unique in their size-to-tier-ratio wouldn't it be obvious to add one/two points to T1-Large and T2-XL in the complexity table and scratch the artificial S-Knockback from both unit-sheets? That way potentially future T1-L-Units would automatically be rare and T2-XL-Units automatically ultra-rare while still leaving some design space _while_ being more consistent to the other L/XL Units _and_ still being empirical robust overall.
First I thought there was another restriction to this suggestion, like the cost-increase for lower tiers following some kind of Fibonacci sequence, but the T1-Flying (+4) and T1-XL-Knockback (+10) neither do fit such patterns. So what am I missing?

Btw: I find it interesting that there is a cost for T1-XL-Knockback in the first place, while there is none ("X") for T1-XL-Creatures, which indicates to me, that there is a future design space for the former but not the latter.

I'm glad you like it overall.
In terms of units like Sunderer and Harvester receiving "extra" points for their size's inherent knockback: One of the hardest parts of developing this system was putting aside what we wanted to be true and focusing entirely on what leads to the highest success rate in terms of explaining rarity. I did not want to commit the equivalent of double jeopardy for these units but the numbers required it. Our focus here was not "what we think rarity should be" but "what was rarity to the original devs" so that we could do the best job of explaining the existing system and providing ourselves a template which would result in design consistency moving forward.

Was able to read the Rarity-Document now. Once again I am very impressed by the structured approaches to so many considerations regarding SR and thus had a great pleasure reading.
Only thing which bugs me is the example of Sunderer "paying" twice for S-Knockback and beeing a L-Unit. Current Mountaineer would fit that kind of budget better instead.

I'm glad that you think about security aspects in our software. And you're indeed right with what you say. Admin privileges are actually a "No Go" for today's software.
The Updater itself doesn't need any administrative privileges in the system. The fact that it still forces the user to start it like that is a problem from the past where we were still in the development process of how the packets were sent to our server instead of the EA ones. Fun fact ... even the EA BattleForge Bootstrapper required admin rights. 🙂 
In the past, our little piece of extremely important software (let us call it Injector for now) was started along with the BattleForge executable and injected itself into the BattleForge process. The injector itself was invisible for the user and ran as a background process. The injection however was only possible with admin privileges since you have to call a method where you need those privileges. Otherwise the method call would fail. We decided to transfer those permissions over to the Updater since all processes called by it will also start with the same privileges (also called AsInvoker in manifest files). The reason for that was, that the user doesn't get a system popup for a software he can't see (the Injector) and maybe denies the execution of it. If he would, the game wouldn't start and connect to our servers at all. That's for the history of the injector.
Unfortunately at some point there were some pieces of information which got stored afterwards at some places on the user's PC which can only be accessed with write permissions when the software will be started with administrative privileges. This wasn't the intention in the beginning. And the information isn't stored by the Updater, but by the game. That information will need to be stored somewhere else before we can remove the admin rights request for the Updater. But we're of course in the process of doing so. I actually expect an update for the current Updater in the upcoming days/weeks to remove that whole thing.
Side note: I was always against an Updater which needs that high level of privileges. Some users (and I count myself to that group of users) don't like software, which require these permissions, at all. And maybe that's also a reason for them to not use that software.

When we remove those permissions, we need to make sure, that the Updater and the game can access all files with all needed permissions. That's also the reason why our installer doesn't accept directories as installation location which are protected by Windows. Those locations are however hardcoded.
I hope you can live with the fact that it requires those permissions for another few days or weeks. They will for sure be removed in the near future.
Sneak preview: The new Updater won't have that requirement at all.

Huge respect to the developer department which, despite all obstacles,  keeps pushing the live release forward. You guys are the unsung heroes of SR.

Huge respect to the developer department which, despite all obstacles,  keeps pushing the live release forward. You guys are the unsung heroes of SR.

With the release of the now third official document I made a wiki page dedicated to providing an overview of the various pieces for quick and easy access.

Huge respect to the developer department which, despite all obstacles,  keeps pushing the live release forward. You guys are the unsung heroes of SR.

Hello Skyladies and Skylords,
the new PvP patch is coming closer and in the Skylords Open many battles were fought. It is time for a little fun... with a tome tournament! This means: the tournament decks will be built out of the content of 8 Boosterpacks!
 
Format?
The tournament will be played as a 1on1 best of 3 double elimination tournament, grand finals will be best of 5, no reset. The grand finalist coming from the winnerbracket will start with  a win (1-0) already. Oh and it will be tome.
 
When?
On 08.08.21 starting on 1pm CET (Berlin time), the stream will start about 30 minutes in advance.
 
Prize Pool! (subject to change)
1st place  - 3 Booster packs
2nd place - 2 Booster packs
3rd place - 1 Booster pack
 
Bonus prizes:
Beat RadicalX in a set - 1500 BFP
 
Organisation?
The tournament will be organized in challonge and access will be limited. If you want to participate contact me via Discord, you should have pretty much a complete collection and experience in the tournaments already. I will send you a list of your cardpool ~1h before the tournament starts (I will not send you actual 8 boosters) . The usual rules apply.
 
List of participants
1.  RadicalX
2. Majora
3. Crossbow_andy
4. Afro
5. Yuah
6. Killbuster
7. Hirooo
8. Carofex
 
 
Best regards,
Toggy

That Fire/Frost tease becomes unbearable xD
I like the addition of bandit stalkers to Free-Bandits. Just yesterday I had a conversation with a pvp-rookie who did not like the free bandit decks because they contain so few bandit cards.

I bought that Mortar you cut out from free pvp-decks, now make it 15sec pls :<

The swift spam against Frost is somewhat tricky if there is a respectable distance between the main base and your power well. If both players execute it correctly the Frost player will lose a power well but maintain relevant in the game. I recommend avoiding Lightblade at all. Additional well + Light Blade + Taunt = 195 Power. There is no way to win a combat fight with Master Archers anymore and too many Ice Guardians are also a problem, because they never catch up to the swift units that will simply run around your bases. Even if you kill the taunted Scavy, the other ones will run into your main base and destroy 2 power wells in the worst case scenario. Nomads simply destroy the Lightblade in 2 seconds, so that would be even worse. To be successful in this matchup your ressource distribution needs to be thoroughly considered. 
You need to make sure, that you have some Master Archers at your power well, while making sure, that you have still some power in your backpocket if your opponent decides to go for your main base. If your opponent tries to fight your Masterarchers, spawn more stuff and kite backwards. If he goes for the powerwell play an Ice Guardian and prepare your Glacier shell. Make sure to use it at the perfect timing (which occurs when the power well has around 700 hp left). Keep in mind that red Nomads do have insane damage (Green Nomad spam is easier to play against anyways). You will lose your powerwell without glacier shell. If your opponent goes all in at your powerwell, you should be able to hold your position. Most players will use their swift advantage though to bait out some units and head down to the main base. This is harder to defend and this is why I recommend to hold back 150-200 power as long as possible. This allows your to play one or two Iceguardians + Glacier Shell to buy some time up until your main army catches up. 
Even when you play it perfectly you may lose one powerwell, but this doesn't mean you end up beeing behind. Most of the time you will remain more units, so you can pick up the power well again without worrying about an incoming counter attack. If you manage to buy some time your additional powerwell will give you 50-70 power and in addition with the 20-30 additional permanent power loss through the dead nomads (your opponent will lose alot during the well focus and 10% of that power is gone aswell) you end up beeing almost even, which is worth it because you didn't lose mapcontrol, which is your main task with Frost on some tricky maps like Haladur for instance. On some maps (Yrmia for instance) the well distance is close enough to pick up a powerwell without having to worry about all that.  
If you still struggle against Nomad spam, you can try to pick up either Wintertide as a cheese card (the stomp effect can kill the entire Nomad army) or also use Glyph of Frost to buy more time for your units. But both cards can be seen as a double edged sword as a missuse will put you even further behind. 
 

Radical touches upon a general principle above that I'd like to explicitly state: In T1 killing units is usually more beneficial than focusing down a well. This is true for a lot of reasons, (low total power pool, slow units, weak spells, etc.) but for these same reasons your goal in Tier 1 is often to create a snowball that can destroy all of your opponent's defenses and only then start destroying wells and monuments. Even with nomads you shouldn't be attempting burrower-oink style well destruction in Tier 1. You may end up with a slight permanent power advantage, but temporary power advantage matters more in Tier 1 and early Tier 2 and your opponent can easily punish your early over investment. 

In my childhood there was this animated television series called "Gargoyles" . Highly recommend it; like Shakespeare for kids ^^ (nothing like the "3D-everyone-is-yelling-at-everyone-all-the-time"-BS kids get to watch these days). Xanatos was the main antagonist of the series. I really liked his complex character and his multilayered schemes (and of course he was rich and had an armored gargoyle suit... so basically he was Iron Man ^^)
Later on I played Baldurs Gate, where one of my party members was a recruitable character called "Xan", a highly intelligent but utterly pessimistic and dreadful elf; a hilarious but fitting combination.
During my studies I played Starcraft 2 as Protoss, short 'toss.
So my Nick is a culmination of these 3 identities and reads as Xan-a-toss or Xanatoss 😉
 

I disagree that the solution to pvp attraction is "obviously and simply" more rewards, because if that would be the case, devs would have amped it up already (and gladly i guess).
The main issue is, that pvp for many players is stressful, especially 1v1 because it puts you on the spot. Nobody to blame (except balance :>, though devs doing a great job of improving it) and your opponent preys on your errors unlike the AI in PvE. As I read though, there are PvP-Modes in development which are more like Arcade (like Deathmatch Arena) and therefore less stressful. I think that is a step in the right direction.
There was a chat-discussion recently where players interested in pvp argued that they would get roflstomped by veteran players if they would queue up. I responded that if at least two of those rookie players teamed up, they could play sparring games against each other instead of feeding their ladder points.
Following that thought, I started a format this evening called the "Rookie-Fightclub"  (shameless copycat) and repeatedly invited players via chat to join my spectator 1v1-lobbys to either play, observe or discuss pvp-questions. Main issue so far was driving out the seasoned players who would "just watch"; but by doing so blocked the lobby and startled the rookies away.
Nevertheless my first attempt went promisingly and I am going to continue this format during the next weeks. 

I disagree that the solution to pvp attraction is "obviously and simply" more rewards, because if that would be the case, devs would have amped it up already (and gladly i guess).
The main issue is, that pvp for many players is stressful, especially 1v1 because it puts you on the spot. Nobody to blame (except balance :>, though devs doing a great job of improving it) and your opponent preys on your errors unlike the AI in PvE. As I read though, there are PvP-Modes in development which are more like Arcade (like Deathmatch Arena) and therefore less stressful. I think that is a step in the right direction.
There was a chat-discussion recently where players interested in pvp argued that they would get roflstomped by veteran players if they would queue up. I responded that if at least two of those rookie players teamed up, they could play sparring games against each other instead of feeding their ladder points.
Following that thought, I started a format this evening called the "Rookie-Fightclub"  (shameless copycat) and repeatedly invited players via chat to join my spectator 1v1-lobbys to either play, observe or discuss pvp-questions. Main issue so far was driving out the seasoned players who would "just watch"; but by doing so blocked the lobby and startled the rookies away.
Nevertheless my first attempt went promisingly and I am going to continue this format during the next weeks. 

I disagree that the solution to pvp attraction is "obviously and simply" more rewards, because if that would be the case, devs would have amped it up already (and gladly i guess).
The main issue is, that pvp for many players is stressful, especially 1v1 because it puts you on the spot. Nobody to blame (except balance :>, though devs doing a great job of improving it) and your opponent preys on your errors unlike the AI in PvE. As I read though, there are PvP-Modes in development which are more like Arcade (like Deathmatch Arena) and therefore less stressful. I think that is a step in the right direction.
There was a chat-discussion recently where players interested in pvp argued that they would get roflstomped by veteran players if they would queue up. I responded that if at least two of those rookie players teamed up, they could play sparring games against each other instead of feeding their ladder points.
Following that thought, I started a format this evening called the "Rookie-Fightclub"  (shameless copycat) and repeatedly invited players via chat to join my spectator 1v1-lobbys to either play, observe or discuss pvp-questions. Main issue so far was driving out the seasoned players who would "just watch"; but by doing so blocked the lobby and startled the rookies away.
Nevertheless my first attempt went promisingly and I am going to continue this format during the next weeks. 

I disagree that the solution to pvp attraction is "obviously and simply" more rewards, because if that would be the case, devs would have amped it up already (and gladly i guess).
The main issue is, that pvp for many players is stressful, especially 1v1 because it puts you on the spot. Nobody to blame (except balance :>, though devs doing a great job of improving it) and your opponent preys on your errors unlike the AI in PvE. As I read though, there are PvP-Modes in development which are more like Arcade (like Deathmatch Arena) and therefore less stressful. I think that is a step in the right direction.
There was a chat-discussion recently where players interested in pvp argued that they would get roflstomped by veteran players if they would queue up. I responded that if at least two of those rookie players teamed up, they could play sparring games against each other instead of feeding their ladder points.
Following that thought, I started a format this evening called the "Rookie-Fightclub"  (shameless copycat) and repeatedly invited players via chat to join my spectator 1v1-lobbys to either play, observe or discuss pvp-questions. Main issue so far was driving out the seasoned players who would "just watch"; but by doing so blocked the lobby and startled the rookies away.
Nevertheless my first attempt went promisingly and I am going to continue this format during the next weeks. 

I disagree that the solution to pvp attraction is "obviously and simply" more rewards, because if that would be the case, devs would have amped it up already (and gladly i guess).
The main issue is, that pvp for many players is stressful, especially 1v1 because it puts you on the spot. Nobody to blame (except balance :>, though devs doing a great job of improving it) and your opponent preys on your errors unlike the AI in PvE. As I read though, there are PvP-Modes in development which are more like Arcade (like Deathmatch Arena) and therefore less stressful. I think that is a step in the right direction.
There was a chat-discussion recently where players interested in pvp argued that they would get roflstomped by veteran players if they would queue up. I responded that if at least two of those rookie players teamed up, they could play sparring games against each other instead of feeding their ladder points.
Following that thought, I started a format this evening called the "Rookie-Fightclub"  (shameless copycat) and repeatedly invited players via chat to join my spectator 1v1-lobbys to either play, observe or discuss pvp-questions. Main issue so far was driving out the seasoned players who would "just watch"; but by doing so blocked the lobby and startled the rookies away.
Nevertheless my first attempt went promisingly and I am going to continue this format during the next weeks. 

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.