Jump to content

UPDATE: Free PvP Decks and upcoming livestream


Zyna

Recommended Posts

Greetings, Skylords, Skyladies and other Skyfolk!

The time where PvP players had to grind cards and upgrades in PvE in order to unlock the PvP mode will soon be coming to an end. Today we're rolling out a patch where we'll be introducing free pre-built level 120 PvP decks. All cards in those decks will be fully upgraded and charged. This will reduce the entrance barrier to PvP and ensure fairer conditions. Every week you will be able to choose 2 out of 16 different PvP decks. These decks are not locked! You will be able to freely modify these decks by adding cards from your own collection. However, the cards offered in these free PvP decks will not be usable in any of the PvE modes.

We'd like to offer thanks to RadicalX, Hirooo, and TopS3cret, as they were the ones who designed the decks! They are among the most experienced PvP players, and have carefully arranged these decks so they are accessible to both new and veteran players.

On a side note, we will be live on Twitch this upcoming Sunday on the 1st November 2020 at 14:00 CET! We want to talk about some future plans and answer some of your questions. There will also be a very important announcement in regards to the release and reset you are waiting for. You will be able to find the stream here: https://www.twitch.tv/skylordsreborn

You will be able to choose between these decks:

Tainted Darkness (Pure Shadow)

Spoiler

PureShadow.png

Gifted Darkness (Shadow Nature)

Spoiler

ShadowNature.png

Blessed Darkness (Shadow Frost)

Spoiler

ShadowFrost.png

Infused Darkness (Shadow Fire)

Spoiler

ShadowFire.png

Tainted Flora (Nature Shadow)

Spoiler

NatureShadow.png

Gifted Flora (Pure Nature)

Spoiler

PureNature.png

Blessed Flora (Nature Frost)

Spoiler

NatureFrost.png

Infused Flora (Nature Fire)

Spoiler

NatureFire.png

Tainted Ice (Frost Shadow)

Spoiler

FrostShadow.png

Gifted Ice (Frost Nature)

Spoiler

FrostNature.png

Blessed Ice (Pure Frost)

Spoiler

PureFrost.png

Infused Ice (Frost Fire)

Spoiler

FrostFire.png

Tainted Flame (Fire Shadow)

Spoiler

FireShadow.png

Gifted Flame (Fire Nature)

Spoiler

FireNature.png

Blessed Flame (Fire Frost)

Spoiler

FireFrost.png

Infused Flame (Pure Fire)

Spoiler

PureFire.png



Best Regards,

Zyna.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Zyna pinned and featured this topic

Wow, I'm really hyped for these decks, they all look very nice!
I especially like the fact, that you can switch your two decks every week, so if you don't like the playstyle of the one you chose one week, you can still switch.
Also making them editable is a huge plus imo! So you can for example trade the nature T1s for Aragorn style T1 or add/remove sunderer from some of the fire T1s, just to name some examples of the possibilities this gives you.

Great work! I'm looking forward to play with those. Also looking forward to the stream.

:hypetrain:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Can I suggest that the t3 orb should always be the same as the t1 orb?

This gives a bit more deck variety (for example, there are no fathom lords except for pure nature) and if all else is equal, it's better to have 2x of your t1 orb.  For example: if I play shadow-frost-shadow and you play shadow-frost-frost, if I lose my frost orb I will still have half of my t2 units and all of my t1 units, but if you lose your shadow orb you only have a couple t2 units.

 

If you used the pattern of t3 orb matches t1 orb, the following changes would be made:

Shadow Frost: timeless one --> cultist master

Nature Shadow: cultist master and evocator's woe --> fathom lord and brannoc

(Nature frost can stay as-is because frost nature has no t3)

Nature Fire: Giant slayer --> Fathom Lord

Frost Fire: Giant slayer and virtuoso -->timeless one and silverwind lancer

Fire Frost: timeless one and silverwind lancer --> giant slayer and virtuoso

 

I understand why the fire frost and frost fire t3's might want to match their t2 orb rather than their t1 orb, but I think this kind of pattern would be good for newer players.

The deck I most-suggest changing is Nature fire to have t3 of fathom lord and brannoc. Not only does this fit the pattern, fire nature can have a very hard time countering an enemy brannoc with giant slayers. Fathom lord is the best XL counter and is a great way to kill the enemy brannoc if he spawns first (even if it's changed so both teams can have a brannoc, if yours is attacking a base somewhere else, it's good to have another XL counter).

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I may be alone with my opinion but for me this takes away one very unique aspect of the game and it is collecting the cards and working towards your deck. I have not much interest in PvE so I just have to get one card that is missing for PvP and will have no use for bfp anymore. So no need for trading, playing PvE, buying booster or doing quests. I think this will have a huge impact and I do not like it. I remember that I found an old online card game that has a similar history like Battleforge. Its Might and Magic duel of champions. Some guys revived it and you can play it with all cards available from the start. So I instantly dropped the game because the aspect of collecting was gone. Other example was an action rpg (think it was Diablo 2) A friend of me gifted me super strong gear so I could just slay monsters and did not need to pick up anything. It was super boring. I am hyped for the release was already planning how to manage my collection but as it looks I do not have to do anything. Just my two cents. Cheers 

Edited by HalloBob
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think they are trying to soften that blow by making you pick 2 decks at a time for one week. So you don't have *everything* at once, always only one part.

I guess it depends on what you consider the bigger issue. PvP being virtually locked for you until you have upgraded cards and can even begin to compete on a raw power level? Or the economical impact of providing a set of cards for free and undermining of the collection aspect?

You also have to consider that originally all these things were baked into the monetization model. Want more charges? Pay up. That means that being more competitive in PvP was an incentive to spend money. That's not the case anymore, you can't just buy progress. So they have to somehow try to dissect these methods out of the game design.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I like it. It only lets you choose two decks at a time. If you want to play more than 2 decks in PvP you still have to collect cards.

PvP is not that popular unfortunately. Those free deck system might change that. Of course it could backfire as well and even fewer people could play PvP because they don't see the reward for their time the spend on collecting all the cards anymore. But I think it's worth a try. Better than tome decks in any case.

 

Though there's one thing that bothered me when I saw that menu: It took me a few minutes to realised how to actually select the deck you want to play. The check box is right next to the orbs and to me it looked like an empty 4th orb so I didn't pay much attention to it.

I would prefere a design like this:

PvP_Deck_System.thumb.png.40a42e0206be42d2648890d419e60604.png

 

It's only a small thing and I'm probably the only person who didn't get it at first glance but I think it looks better if the check box isn't right next to the orbs.

RuneSeeker likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

6 hours ago, HalloBob said:

I may be alone with my opinion but for me this takes away one very unique aspect of the game and it is collecting the cards and working towards your deck. I have not much interest in PvE so I just have to get one card that is missing for PvP and will have no use for bfp anymore. So no need for trading, playing PvE, buying booster or doing quests. I think this will have a huge impact and I do not like it. I remember that I found an old online card game that has a similar history like Battleforge. Its Might and Magic duel of champions. Some guys revived it and you can play it with all cards available from the start. So I instantly dropped the game because the aspect of collecting was gone. Other example was an action rpg (think it was Diablo 2) A friend of me gifted me super strong gear so I could just slay monsters and did not need to pick up anything. It was super boring. I am hyped for the release was already planning how to manage my collection but as it looks I do not have to do anything. Just my two cents. Cheers 

I have an idea about this, because this may be a more important point than people realize. I love the idea of the free PvP decks, and I believe it is a strong step in the right direction in getting more people to play PvP. However, I also agree there may be some unintended consequences with this.

Taking the idea of the necessity of a currency sink for the long-term economy in this post, what if there was a small BFP or Gold amount that players need to pay to access the PvP decks every week? You might think, whoa whoa, that doesn't make these decks "free" anymore! But wait.

For example, what would happen if it cost 100 bfp or 250 gold (or both?) to have access to 2 PvP decks for the week? 

Benefits:

  • There is still an incentive to collect cards because of the feeling that PvP decks are "temporary". Similar to some services where you can pay a subscription per month, or a one-time flat fee that is larger and then you do not need to pay monthly anymore. This would be like the PvP decks (small recurring expense) vs making your own (large expense).
  • Entry fee is small enough that it takes only one or two games to get
  • Incentive to play PvP or PvE for additional bfp/gold to get the free decks every week
  • BFP/Gold sink for the economy as this removes bfp/gold, and counters inflation

Disadvantages:

  • Decks are no longer "free"
  • Additional coding required to implement and time needed to discuss among devs on the appropriate cost
  • Eventually the small fixed cost would have a reduced effect on the economy as there will be vastly more bfp/gold accumulated among players
Cocofang and gemeiner Lauch like this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

7 hours ago, HalloBob said:

I have not much interest in PvE [...]. So no need for trading, playing PvE

That was the point, there were a lot of complaints from players who wanted to play pvp exclusively and dont want to play 20+ hours of PVE first. With this system you will hopefully get players that otherwise wouldn't have played at all.

I don't see a point in paying for these temporary decks, won't make a significant difference economy wise and also takes away from the purpose of the system: PVP players not being forced to play PVE.

Shoutout to Radical, Hirooo and TopS3cret for chosing blue netherwarp indstead of the lame green one :P

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I like the idea of having to rent 120PvP decks for BFP! It creates and incentive to still invest into your own collection and a modest fee would make sure at least some opportunity cost is associated with using the premade sets.

Even a small, reasonable cost of like 100 BFP would nudge people some more towards making their own decks long term, partaking in the economy.

32 minutes ago, SunWu II. said:

I don't see a point in paying for these temporary decks, won't make a significant difference economy wise and also takes away from the purpose of the system: PVP players not being forced to play PVE.

PvP players still generate enough BFP to sustain a small fee and save up for their own cards on the side. The premade decks aren't meant as a long-term solution to play PvP anyway. They're supposed to even the playing field when starting out.

gemeiner Lauch likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I hope you all like the PvP decks. If you have any questions regarding specific card choices, feel free to ask! I will try to provide our reasonings for the decisions.

 

Our priorities during deck construction were the following ones:

-> Create beginner friendly decks, that immediately perfom well in PvP games without any changes and don't require high end micro to be playable in 80k-110k base elo range

-> Create competitive decks, that can be played in 110k base elo and above with no to few adjustments

-> Provide a solid overview about the current meta, so players get an idea about powerful choices in the realm of PvP and things to care about

-> Avoid promoting too many toxic strategies (hello Curse Well) 

-> In some very difficult occassions we prioritized card rarity*

 

*(Mountaineer vs Lost Reaver is something f.e., that comes down to personal preference in deck choice, but Mountaineer is incredibly hard to buy & upgrade and alot of players were unable to use the card during the Stress-test for a very long time)

 

@Eirias Fixed T3 patterns would go against our principle, where we try to make the decks as competitive as possible. In many occasions there is a clearly superior T3 path and we tried to follow that one. In the case of Lost Souls Cultist Master T3 is, while being very powerful, alot harder to execute than the current Timeless one T3 counterpart. Giant Slayer is almost always better than Fathom Lord considering that Fire Nature usually wants to use earyl T3 to quickly end games. In Shadow Nature Cultistmaster + Heal is way too powerful to be contested by anything else. Fire Frost does allow a 4 card T3 with the Fire T1 path, but ends up being more slot intensive with the Frost T1 start. Considering that double Fire works really well on 2-3 T3 slots, while TImeless one T3s often start to perform better around 4-5 T3 slots it doesn't make sense to follow a fixed pattern here, which might weaken the deck on both ends. 

@Cocofang In regards to no T3 choices there are decks like Fire Nature, that could work really well without a T3 and we also discussed this aspect, but it requires a certain amount of strategic experience (what map positions and power wells do I need contest to punish T3 accordingly) and a solid level in terms of micro management to execute these type of strategies. We did not think this is beginner friendly enough to be proposed for everyone. The "small T3" choice still performs very well in high elo games, but makes games much more consistent in mid to low elo matches, therefore we wanted to stick with that. Stonekin has alot more tools to fight against T3 though even without the highest level of micro. The deck also has many viable cards in T2, therefore the extra slots generated by cutting T3 work extremely well here. 

 

If you have some personal preferences the edit function will be very valuable of course and quickly provide a playable deck for everyone without too much effort in terms of gold/bfp grinding. 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

19 hours ago, HalloBob said:

I may be alone with my opinion but for me this takes away one very unique aspect of the game and it is collecting the cards and working towards your deck. I have not much interest in PvE so I just have to get one card that is missing for PvP and will have no use for bfp anymore. So no need for trading, playing PvE, buying booster or doing quests. I think this will have a huge impact and I do not like it. I remember that I found an old online card game that has a similar history like Battleforge. Its Might and Magic duel of champions. Some guys revived it and you can play it with all cards available from the start. So I instantly dropped the game because the aspect of collecting was gone. Other example was an action rpg (think it was Diablo 2) A friend of me gifted me super strong gear so I could just slay monsters and did not need to pick up anything. It was super boring. I am hyped for the release was already planning how to manage my collection but as it looks I do not have to do anything. Just my two cents. Cheers 

You are not alone, I also like the collecting aspect - and initially thought that free PvP decks might be bad idea.

But the matter of fact is that PvP is almost dead now. And if you find match it will be with 120 lvl player - so you get veteran and with better deck - again many people dont find this challenging (or lets say challenging too much). Even in EA times the PvP was quite struggling compared to PvE - and most likely after release we will have smaller population than back then.  PvP makes very bad impression for newcomers. As a newbie you somewhat design reasonably viable deck and then you meet things like Harvester or Sunderer or Firedancer etc. Expensive cards, somewhat not typical (wtf, shadow so OP, XL units at T2!omg!! 2000BFP wtf?) and these players might drive off (basically ragequiting PvP forever). So we need to make extra effort to grab every newcomer.

Also, I can barely level 1 or 2 PvP decks, effectively locking me out of Battleforge variety - of course I could grind more, but I do not have time for that.

 

So I welcome these changes as current state of PvP is dominated by single fact - not enough activity. We can balance the card however we want, make the best game ever, but if we will not get new players then the PvP will die.

gemeiner Lauch likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

1 hour ago, Rankerz said:

As a side note, you can decide to not take the free handed decks and build your own journey towards the game as original

Which leaves you in a disadvantage. Especially in PvP with that system you almost have to use it to compete against others in the early state of the game. I understand that people don't like it but I think especially in PvP it's more important that you're able to play with the same requirement as the enemy. The collecting part of the game shouldn't be as important at that.

 

But I noticed that is apparently impossible to put a card back into the PvP exclusive deck after you removed it. That means if you change the original PvP deck, then decide to change it back, you have to have the card at U3 to be able to get the original deck again.

Maybe you could create a copy of the deck automatically when you change something so that you're still able to get back to the original version of the deck. Or just add a button to create your chosen deck again in case you messed it up.

 

Edit: Okay I saw the option to get access to the PvP cards to add them back into the deck. But it's pretty hidden imo. Maybe my mentioned feature still might be a good idea ^^

Edited by Chibiterasu
Link to comment
Share on other sites

sidenote :they count to maximum maximum deckslimmit. if u take them u can build 2 own decks less. you can delete them but then they are gone until u can choose new decks.

not exactly sure how it is is if u allready have maxinum decks and then choose the free decks. i think u can have 2 decks more then normal then.

Not sure about this statements.

Maybe someone know it better.

 

Kind regards

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@Karl Lavafeld You can view your free PvP cards in your inventory (in the same way you could view your tome cards in the old BF), by clicking on the dropdown menu top-left of your inventory. This means you can also create new decks from the cards you get from the two decks you select. In other words: some players might consider looking at the cards in the decks instead of the deck themselves, so they can form a new deck based of the cards from the two selected decks.

About maximum deck count: yes, they count as a deck and therefore also for your 100 deck limit. It should not be possible to have more than 100 decks this way. If it is, then it is a bug and should be reported.

image.png

Maybe we should clarify that you can view your free pvp cards using that dropdown here
image.png

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

sorry for my english. what i expect from the game was to make my own pvp deck, build it up gradually. Running out of cards, having to play with only certain cards. It also allows games to start with unpredictable decks on both sides. please at least set that these 12 decks are only playable in game unranked pvp. Thank you.

gemeiner Lauch likes this
Link to comment
Share on other sites

3 minutes ago, MrBao said:

sorry for my english. what i expect from the game was to make my own pvp deck, build it up gradually. Running out of cards, having to play with only certain cards. It also allows games to start with unpredictable decks on both sides. please at least set that these 12 decks are only playable in game unranked pvp. Thank you.

Your English is fine! We do realize that there are some players who want to still gather cards and play PvP. That is one of the reasons why we didn't give PvP players all cards. Also I believe there are many more PvP players who want to play PvP (so they need upgraded cards) than there are players who also want to collect the cards, so looking at the bigger picture this feature is beneficial for the community and the PvP gamemode. This feature still allows you to collect cards, and you are not forced to use this feature. These PvP decks are only usable in PvP (ranked and unranked), but not usable in PvE.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

@RadicalX

Really only have one question, why corpse explosion in Pure Shadow? In my own experience the card feels unsatisfying to use and I don't think its worth the power or slot cost. Issue is exasperated by needing corpses to damage while also requiring ground presence. (I've always thought this card should be arcane). Its also not an easy card to use because you have to be tabulating corpses which requires knowing how much health each unit has and how long corpses last. Shadow phoenix seems the better card and also teaches the corpse gathering mechanic.

Just continuing to think on the deck. I don't see how it has any possibility to pressure a frost-splash. Is the goal of this deck to teach the player to skip t2 against frost splashes? Its skill floor seems very high.

Edited by WindHunter
Link to comment
Share on other sites

I would have loved to play this Nature/Frost Deck since it is very close to my old one, but as long as every other Shadow and Fire Deck get Phasetower/Mortar that would be just annoying to play. 

Also it looks like Shadow/Frost and Pure Fire get again the best builded Decks what puts them even higher in the top tier. So it would be clear to me I would have to go again for my Main Decks Lost and Pure Fire with the 2 Decks that i can choose, and that would be quite boring .  
 

Edited by ImperatorSK
Link to comment
Share on other sites

2 hours ago, gemeiner Lauch said:

What about making these free cards upgrade 2? This way everyone would have a very good deck and could compete, but the free cards would not be "perfect", so it is "worth" to earn your own cards and upgrade them. 

Tomes were this way, right? 

This would defeat the purpose of having comparable decks with the "elite" - U3 upgrades are the most expensive, and often are "step change" like cost reduction - thus important.

And you couldnt fix that just by upgrading to U3, because card is not yours, so to fix this gap you would have to buy and level up from very beginning.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Zyna unpinned and unfeatured this topic

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. Terms of Use