Why don't u implement draft/sealed (MTG style) gameplay modes into the game? It would dramatically increase your playerbase.

[gastluy]

I would gladly play a limited mode.

[Kubik]

What is preventing you from buying N boosters, and building a deck only from what you get in those boosters?

[gastluy]

Fair gameplay and competing with other people + draft fun

[Kubik]

And how could we affect any of these aspects?

[gastluy]

By implementing the modes into the game.

[Kubik]

I do not know if MTG officially have such mode, but when I played it, each group have the rules slightly different, so I repeat my question, what prevents you from playing such mode?

[Metagross31]

There used to be a Tome gamemode back in EA days and sometimes people host Tome PvP tournament, where you get assigned a pool of 8 Boosters and build a deck from that.

Look out for those, as there might be more of them in the future.

[gastluy]

It is something else.

Ingame modes that u can join to compete with other players, draft with them, steal their cards in the process to win ingame rewards and on the other side some fandom tourneys. These are two different things. Tbh I have never played a community tourney in my life (in any game: HS/MTG arena/HEX TCG/GWENT, maybe I should, but I think there is more ppl like me who avoid fandom tournaments.

I understand that implementing such an ingame game mode requires a lot of resources (mostly work), but if u plan to develop Skylords Reborn u should consider implementing something spicy in the game. BF has mechanics that appear one in a million so this game is worth being developed.
I would draft for sure. MTG Arena drafts are most played mode. People in CCG GameDev underestimate the hidden potential of draft mode.

[Kubik]

I never played official MTG tournament organized by Wizards of the Coast, I do not know if they ever have one in my country.
But I want to point out that BattleForge, and MTG (the original game) are TCG (Trading Card Games), so anyone can organize such tournament.

MTG Arena is CCG (Card Collecting Game) so people are not able to organize any such tournament there, because the designers of the games did not alowed them to.

And BattleForge it property of EA (Electronic Arts) so if you want an official tournament, you will be probably waiting forever, because EA is not interested in BF right now, and no one know if they will ever be.

[gastluy]

I meant Skylords Reborn not BF.
Not tournament, just an additional game mode - a DRAFT mode.
You should implement another game mode in your game - Skylords Reborn - to entertain players and ad some valuable content to the Game.
Drafts are complex, this game mode needs to be implemented into the game. Otherwise players will be forced to use 3rd party software to conduct the "drafting process" and then check if they have "certain" cards in their collection, etc. etc.
Instal MTG arena and check how it works. U will know what I mean.

It would be a gamechanging experience, playing matches with cards u drafted vs 7 other players in your lobby.
I would play it for hours.  🙂

Just a thought, I work in GameDev myself and I am a huge fan of Card Games and other creations based on Card Games such as BF/Skylords Reborn.

[Kubik]

Skylords Reborn is not a game, it is only a name of project, that is about game BattleForge.

Magic: The Gathering Arena do not support my phone, and the steam version have quite bad reviews.

What if you would drafted cards, that would not allow you to play anything, that sounds like really terrible experience, lose every match, because you will not be able to play any of the cards.

I think no one from the teams works in game developlment industry, but if you think it is so relevant, why you not join the team and not implement it yourself?

[gastluy]

Everything is a matter of balance.
U draft cards to avoid playing with "unplayable cards" from different colours. Same as MTG, u can't build a 4-color deck, u need to draft wisely and carefully.

I am not a dev myself. I co-run a GameDev studio as a non-technical co-founder and we dont have resources to develop projects that don't belong to us.
Just mentioning that implementing draft mode into BF/SR would be something new and hopefully both present and future players would love it.

[Kapo]

6 minutes ago, gastluy said:

and we dont have resources to develop projects that don't belong to us.

you realize this is a volunteer project, right?

Kubik didnt ask your company to join, Kubik asked that you join private, on your free time, for no pay.

this most likely also answers why some game modes and features that were a thing of the past (like tome mode in EA BattleForge, which is basically the same as draft in MTG) arent implemented yet.

Edited October 7, 2023 by Kapo

[Kubik]

In MTG draft formats I seen you could not create deck that would be unplayable, because with some long forgotten exceptions every card is playable. Some require less many than others. But practically it is very likely that you will have a card that requires 3 mana or less in your deck.
In comparison Battleforge have no guarantee that you will get card that requires only one orb.

Orb and mana are not equivalent. In MTG if you draft badly and have most cards cost more than 4 mana, you might consider adding more lands to have higher chance of having enough mana to play. But in BF if you will not have Squad requiering exactly 1 orb you can not play (very theoretically you can play with a building, but you would be too slow).

And side note in MTG draft 5 color deck might be just fine.

You can look here: https://forum.skylords.eu/index.php?/staff/ to see how many people have time for an project that does not belong to them.

[gastluy]

Hey guys, I didnt say that helping develop the non-profit SR project is wrong, I said I would be useless as a non-technical support so I can't help myself.

I don't remember tome mode in BF so my knowledge is limited in this matter.

You are right about the 1orb thing, but it could be manipulated/changed, like booster packs in drafts contain x2 tier I units and other cards. Or else. It is a matter of gameplay/balance.

[Kubik]

Changing probabilities in boosters would have the very negative effect, that people would have even more useless cards they do not want, and less cards they want.

[gastluy]

Something like "choose a runner" feature could be a solution where u choose tier 1 unit from 3 given options at the beg of drafting from outside the game.

[WindHunter]

We want to create a deckbuilder mode where you progress through increasingly hard challenges while using a limited pool of card which slowly increased sei-randomly over time. We just have not had the development capacity to implement it yet.

[gastluy]

Don't get me wrong but implementing PvE modes like LOR did (u draft with yourself) is boring. They closed the mode forever and asked why noone bothered playing it. Competition is fun, outsmarting your enemy. cooperating with other players. This is a trading card game man, not a "dino and the aliens", u collect/upgrade cards mostly to flex in front of other people, Why would I want to challenge myself. I would prefer to challenge others instead.

BF is not lacking multiplayer content, it was created as multiplayer, but it could be even more multiplayer focused.

[Kubik]

Why you think multiplayer is fun for everyone? And especially PvP?

[Majora]

11 hours ago, gastluy said:

Don't get me wrong but implementing PvE modes like LOR did (u draft with yourself) is boring. They closed the mode forever and asked why noone bothered playing it. Competition is fun, outsmarting your enemy. cooperating with other players. This is a trading card game man, not a "dino and the aliens", u collect/upgrade cards mostly to flex in front of other people, Why would I want to challenge myself. I would prefer to challenge others instead.

BF is not lacking multiplayer content, it was created as multiplayer, but it could be even more multiplayer focused.

Im a Magic the Gathering player myself, and Draft wont work for SR as well as you think it might.

Lets first explore it from a sealed perspective:

We had a couple of tome tournaments in the past, and sometimes the pools were ''technically playable'' but resulted in you basicly having your playable cards spread so thin you couldnt really effectively counter your opponents. For example, my tier 1 lacks a range unit, so you can just kite me out. Or you getting a flying unit and me lacking anti-air. In Magic this is way less drastic, sure you might lack a good number of 2 drops, but you might be able to make it up by good 3 drops or removal. A single flyer doesnt suddenly control the whole battlefield either. Splashing in Magic is also less drastic then ''just take another orb''. 

We solved this by sometimes rerolling the pool if it was too unplayable, but that was manual work. I can imagine it could be quite tricky to create an algorithm that can properly indicate if a pool is playable. 

Now for draft:

Draft could solve some of the issues previously mentioned, cause part of the skill is knowing when to pick certain essentials for your deck. However, for draft to work, you would need a couple of people to join the que in the same time (maybe 8, like in Magic, wouldnt be needed here, but any less then 4 would kinda defeat the point I think). This is problematic. Our PvP playerbase is already spread quite thin (which is why we have happy hours), but among those players you would also need X players all interested in playing this mode in the same time. We could obviously guide this a bit better (every Sunday between X and Y, draft pods open) but even then, there will be some players who cant find fellow drafters. Newer players would have even more issues, cause they will probably get paired with the hardcore playerbase (cant really be picky about your opponetns if you already had issues gathering enough for draft). 

It would be interesting to maybe try out a draft tournament outside of the game (load the database into a website, and create a draft-experience tool, where you then export your deck to play on the test server). But that will take some manual organizing from the event managers.

Which brings us to the critical point for both draft and sealed:
Besides the above mentioned arguments against it, it takes a bunch of time of our development to implement this, including a completely new UI to actually allow for draft. This development time would be taken away from other aspects of the game, which would be a bit silly to do considering PvE is much more popular compared to PvP. I know you said ''it would increase your playerbase drasticly'' but that is a bit of a chicken-egg situation; we first need more PvP players to justify  working on a huge PvP specific modes like this. 

TLDR:
Roguelike deckbuilding mode for PvE: maybe in the future
Sealed for PvP: Tome is currently possible but only on a do-it-yourself-base
Draft for PvP: too much resources needed to make work, especially compared to the PvP playerbase.

[gastluy]

Drafts/sealeds can be also for PvE. U draft with 4 people to team up with them and beat the map with the drafted cards. It would make people laugh. Making a working engine is not so time consuming, u just ad 2-3 lines to determine "certain stuff".

PvP is dead, because the playerbase is low and to play PvP u need all tier 3 upgraded pvp deck, if u have tier 3 pvp deck u spent on game billions hours and u don't want to sweat and grind on pvp.

Draft would change that, because for "relatively" low entrance cost, new players could play the game and compete "on equal terms" with other players.
Skill is dependant, You could always make more or less specific ranks for drafts to make the game more fair.

Noone wants to grind for 6 months just to be able to play pvp game normally.
After all these resets, not so many people stayed. Losing whole collection and starting over is exhausting. Why would sb waste 10 months of hard and exhausting grinding if the game dies in a long run.

U basically get tired and don't feel rewarded for doing good in pvp grind and it consumes much more energy than pve. Playing PvE u can flex, show of your cards, skills, help your teammate, beat PvE together.

Drafts/other game modes are different, U join them for a flat entrance fee and u just play without any limitations. In Hearthstone the most played mode is "Battlegrounds" and it looks fine, u compete with others with equal chances for the same entrance cost. Skill is based on ranking.
Games don't die because there is too much sweaters/flamers/angry kids in it, it dies because it gets boring and pointless to grind.

I don't think that gathering 4 "similar division" players would be challenging. This game has a lot of sleepers, a lot of fans who are waiting for something to come back to, I didn't join discord, but I wouldn't feel shocked if there is a listening, dormant community out there.

[Kubik]

PvP have free cards, so that explanation does not apply.

Draft is much more about skill and knowledge, than normal play. Because during normal play people play cards they understood, while in draft they are forced to play cards they never seen before.

"After all these resets" 🤔 How many resets? What resets are you talking about? Why 10 months? There was people that collected 100% of cards 4 times (for charges) in under a month.

And you still did not explain why any PvP should be more interesting that PvE, but in your last message you said that PvP is more energy consuming than PvE, which means it is less interesting than PvE.

[gastluy]

It is similar to all games.
PvE exists bec at the end there is a reason to grind for PvP. Even if u never played a single PvP match, u still grind to eventually challenge someone with full pvp deck, even if u don't plan playing PvP.
GameDev teams analysing data from PvE/PvP games come up to the conlusion that players prefer PvE over PvP because there is a difference in playablity. Teams focus on developing Pve and dont care about pvp. At the end there is only pvp and showcase in front of others, u collect cards to show of, to posses.

PvP doesnt need free cards, why would someone need free PVP cards, asigning free PvP cards was the worst idea u could ever think of. U unlock cards and grind with PvE and build PvP Deck.
How do u want to grind with PvP decks? Tell me whoever came to the conclusion that unlocking free pvp decks is a good idea. U should do it like they did it originally, there are free cards every week so people grind PvE with free "random" cards.
Do u think that EA didnt consider unlocking pvp decks? They hired Product Owners/Product Managers for 100k$ month and came up to the conclusion to not do this. Why do u think they decided not to do it?

Someone unlocking whole collection doesnt change anything. He will stop playing eventually, he is not a future of this project, not your target audience. He doesnt affect anything if he plays or not.

 

My opinion is that PvE/PvP drafts/sealed modes would change this game. BF has thousands of fans who are dedicated, but asleep.

[Kubik]

4 minutes ago, gastluy said:

PvE exists bec at the end there is a reason to grind for PvP. Even if u never played a single PvP match, u still grind to eventually challenge someone with full pvp deck, even if u don't plan playing PvP.

That is 100% wrong.

If you have such big plans for the game, and "co-run" a GameDev studio, why don't you buy BattleForge from EA, and do not implement all these ideas, when it will be your game?