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The card charges (second row) are displayed as if U3 is applied with all charges, but only on the outline. The card abilities do not have any stars (*) though, This is always the case even if there is no upgrade or charges applied. However, cardcharges are litteraly U0 cards charging the upgraded card up. So they should be U0 like they are in your Inventory (see image below). Did this in suggestions since I'm not sure if it is a deliberate decision or a bug. :^)

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.