Community update #1 - April 23th 2021

[Majora]

Greetings Skylords!

We are happy to bring you the first official community update, a biweekly update to give you an overview of whats happening (and going to happen) in Skylords Reborn. We have heard your desire for communication loud and clear, and as your fresh Community Manager, I will do my best to deliver. 

The goal of these updates is to give you an idea of the things going on behind the scenes and cool stuff that you might have missed. Not every update will have the same content, but we hope to provide you with some cool details and insights. 

Without further ado, lets get to it!

Balance Patch #2
What better way to start than with a new patch announcement! Balance Patch #2 is hitting the live servers soon, bringing with it a lot of PvP balance changes and map updates. We have decided to wait with the release until Toggy's PvE contest is finished to not cause issues for the contenders. You can expect the patch to go live at the beginning of May. The patch notes will be posted soon. 

In-game Tournament tab
Once logged in, you will now be greeted with a tab showing upcoming tournaments and events in Skylords Reborn. Full event details will still be posted on the forums, but we hope this will help tournament organisers with spotlighting their events. 

We would like to take this moment to point out we are still looking for an Event Manager. If you are up for the task, please apply! Check our Open Staff Positions for more information.

Upcoming Community Tournaments
There is a 1v1 tournament hosted by Toggy this saturday. Because we had to delay the patch, it will be played on the test-server.  

Toggy is also giving PvE players a challenge with his speedrunning contest of the map Ocean. 

Both tournaments will reward booster prices. 

PvE
Don't worry PvE players, you are not forgotten. We are not ready to bring you a PvE patch just yet, but rest assured that a lot of work is put into improving the PvE experience. 

There have been a lot of heated arguments in the forum and the discord about what the ideal PvE scene should look like. We will release a philosophy document in the near future explaining our stance on certain topics and what you can expect from the balance team going forward. We cant share any details yet, but WindHunter will soon be in touch with you with more information. 

Balance Discord
Most of you might be aware, but alongside the regular discord we have a discord specifically focused on balancing PvE and PvP. You are encouraged to discuss potential changes and ideas with us here. 

Card Description Project
You might have noticed that cards in Battleforge aren't always very consistent or clear. A group of volunteers has started the huge undertaking to fix this. Not only are they clearing up sentences and details for every single card, they are also adding relevant hidden information like gender (girl-power anyone?), abilities, movement speed, a better reflection of a cards true damage output and much much more. Here is an example:

  *please note this is a mockup and not final yet

With hundreds of cards this might take a while before you see this in game, but I wanted to mention it already. I'm truly baffled by all the hours people put into this project behind the scene. If you want to help out with this project, they are currently in need of a French translator. If you know anyone, please reach out to them via the Description Changes Discord.

Map Testers
Some new map testers are helping us out with the project as well. They have already been a great help and we are grateful for their time. Thank you cswordmaster, LEBOVIM, LegitNacho, Liorans, Mister_Mv, Perthos and Wanky [CH][Ger]. 

New Team Members
To those who missed the announcements, we added two new members to the team in the past weeks. 

Going forward I will be your community manager and will be in charge of keeping the community updated on the latest information, while also making sure suggestions and concerns from the community reach the developers.

Tweeto has also joined the team as a 2D artist. He has already created two beautiful artworks for Amii Phantom and a possible new Amii card. We will have a staff meeting soon to get him underway to create even more awesome artwork. If you are interested in seeing how his artwork comes to live, we can also share that kind of information in the future. 

  

 

We still have some open positions on our team to help with the project. We are looking for map artists, designers, discord moderators and more. Please have a look at the Open Staff Positions for more open positions and information on how to apply!

Twitter and Facebook 
Are you following us on Twitter and Facebook already? They have been inactive for a while, but I have heard from a very reliable source that going over there might be.. rewarding for you. Expect us to use those channels to keep you updated from now on as well. 

In conclusion
And that's it for your very first Community Update! Just to set expectations: we definitely wont be releasing a new patch with every update and some weeks will have more news than others. 

In future updates, we would also like to take a moment to give some information on what we can and can't do in the game, and what a realistic flow of content will be. As you might have noticed, we have added quite a few members to the team lately and in the past week I have been absolutely blown away by all the work that is being done behind the scenes. I look forward to sharing more with you in the future.  

What do you guys think of this first biweekly status update? Is there something you would want to see covered more? We are open to feedback so please let us know. 
 

[Cocofang]

What I would like to see is an archive of community updates that gives bullet points and maybe one short sentence for each of them. Basically a summary that can then maybe be linked to at the end of each update. Could make an extra topic for that, lock it and then just keep editing.

Could've added

 for completions sake.

[Mynoduesp]

Very well written, informative (but not too detailed), compiled and clean. Looking forward to these updates every other week. ?

[itap]

Sounds awesome

Good job @Majora

I would love too see a timeline, like that one at the realese. 

[Tinuvien]

17 hours ago, Majora said:

Balance Discord
Most of you might be aware, but alongside the regular discord we have a discord specifically focused on balancing PvE and PvP. You are encouraged to discuss potential changes and ideas with us here. 

Discord link is wrong: <a href="https://discord.gg/BYumbXE%20" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">discord specifically focused on balancing PvE and PvP</a>
Remove  "%20" on the end :)

[Majora]

57 minutes ago, Tinuvien said:

Discord link is wrong: <a href="https://discord.gg/BYumbXE%20" rel="external nofollow noopener" target="_blank">discord specifically focused on balancing PvE and PvP</a>
Remove  "%20" on the end

Thanks for the headsup! Not sure what went wrong there, but it should be fixed now. 

[Xamos]

Nice, thanks for your effort!

 

Although not that much new infos here for me,
I was just hoping to get some insight already on what the Plans of Balancing and new implementations are. I´d love to see a List of cards and their planned changes.
Yes there is the wiki-page for the actual balancing, but I´d like a small summary with statements like: Shadow Worm will have lifesteal in the future, to become a strong 4x card!
Also, as you are the community manager - it would have been nice if you catch up on some liked ideas (for card-changes) from the Forums and Discord and state them in your update, so that the majority of the community who are f.e. not that active but read your Post would know about the things the community is thinking about. And could add there opinion about these ideas here then.

But maybe this would be too much for this status-upate i suppose. Only I was expecting something like it, but it makes more sense to wrap up the things that you wrote here. I do understand that.

For me the game is nostalgic and awesome, but I would love it even more if we get new stuff - even in the form of new balanced cards like Battleship. So I´m mostly interested in stuff like that. Really looking forward to Ravenheart-Changes f.e.
Don´t get me wrong, I don´t only want/expect buffs to cards - I like to see nerfs aswell.

PvP balancing is fine, I just think myself that this doesn't have that much impact in the game as some nice card-function changes would to open up new ways to play or new strategies, like the Battleship-change did. And yes I play PvP every now and then, I´m just not that much of a pro that these tweaks affect my game I think.
Moreover I´m actually hoping and waiting for the happy-hours update mostly cuz I rather spend time in PvE matches than endlessly waiting for PvP opponents.

 

Nevertheless, I´m very glad that things are happening and thankful for all the work that is put into this!

Edited April 27, 2021 by Xamos

[Deadman]

cool

[Majora]

On 4/25/2021 at 2:45 PM, Xamos said:

Although not that much new infos here for me,

Part of the idea behind these updates is also to give players an overview of the things they might have missed. You are already a very active member of the community, so im not suprised most of these things are known to you  I hope in the future we can still provide some new insights however. 

  

On 4/25/2021 at 2:45 PM, Xamos said:

I was just hoping to get some insight already on what the Plans of Balancing and new implementations are. I´d love to see a List of cards and their planned changes.

The original idea was to have the patch ready at the time of the community update, but we emergency delayed it to not mess with the PvE contest (an oversight on our part). The list and reasoning of changes will be posted when the patch is ready for the live servers  

  

On 4/25/2021 at 2:45 PM, Xamos said:

Also, as you are the community manager - it would have been nice if you catch up on some liked ideas (for card-changes) from the Forums and Discord and state them in your update, so that the majority of the community who are f.e. not that active but read your Post would know about the things the community is thinking about. And could add there opinion about these ideas here then.

But maybe this would be too much for this status-upate i suppose. Only I was expecting something like it, but it makes more sense to wrap up the things that you wrote here. I do understand that.

I will consider this for the future, but I am not sure how feasible it will be. I think the balancing discord with its open channels are a good place for these kind of discussions, and we have seen in the past that if we announce something that is not final, it can cause concern and unclarity in the community. Please note that I read most of the suggestions and ideas but dont always comment on them (right away) because I am A) not in charge of balance changes and/or B, have to check with the dev team if its possible. A good example would be wells and monuments being added to the forge for testing. I can only be the messenger (and i forwarded it to the team who is looking into it right now). 

  

On 4/25/2021 at 2:45 PM, Xamos said:

For me the game is nostalgic and awesome, but I would love it even more if we get new stuff - even in the form of new balanced cards like Battleship. So I´m mostly interested in stuff like that. Really looking forward to Ravenheart-Changes f.e.
Don´t get me wrong, I don´t only want/expect buffs to cards - I like to see nerfs aswell.

I can only communicate what is currently ready or at least ready to communicate about im afraid I too would love to say ''hey guys, 20 new cards and 50 changes to older ones" but if those are not available yet, i cant communicate about it ofcourse  All i can say is people are woking on stuff like that every day, so I hope to be able to share some results of that hard work soon. 

 

On 4/25/2021 at 2:45 PM, Xamos said:

PvP balancing is fine, I just think myself that this doesn't have that much impact in the game as some nice card-function changes would to open up new ways to play or new strategies, like the Battleship-change did. And yes I play PvP every now and then, I´m just not that much of a pro that these tweaks affect my game I think.
Moreover I´m actually hoping and waiting for the happy-hours update mostly cuz I rather spend time in PvE matches than endlessly waiting for PvP opponents.

As far as I know, happy hours are being discussed internally among the devs. As for the other part, I replied to you in detail here.

Thanks for the feedback!