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Forging - Skylord's version of crafting


Sykole

Forging  

15 members have voted

  1. 1. Would you like to see Forging implemented?

    • Yes
      13
    • No
      2


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Hi,

Apparently since something like the booster history, which requires a database connection and client modification, can be developed at a time like this when it is (I assume) a low priority project with no impact on the game at all, then you now have a surplus of developers to afford working on such minor things? 

If so, here goes another idea I had but didn't share due to limitations.

Name: Forging (Comes from BattleForge, duh)

Function: Allows players to forge cards, boosters, and cosmetic collectables.

Features:

- Shards: Can be forged into a random reward.

- Enhancers: XP and Gold boosters.

- Cosmetics: New legacy and time-limited avatars, titles (Like PvE/PvP ranks), name colors on the player list the same way as GMs. It could even extend to the forum where you get a special usertitle.

How it works:

- Shards: Winning a game, you have a chance to earn a shard. Three shards and you can forge them into a random reward, which can be a booster, random card or a cosmetic. Of course, it can be far more intricate than this, so if you want my detailed plan, sure. This post is just the basics. All within a single tab in the client. A couple of buttons and a few images, all the magic happens in the background in the server (really basic stuff though, a simple database and an RNG).

- Enhancers: Super simple yet I don't see why it isn't being added. "You have an XP booster for 4 hours". Can be 1.2x multiplier, or even a more advanced system where it scales with your rank. The higher your rank, the higher the multiplier, but the lower the time the booster lasts for. Can be purchasable with Gold or earned with Shards, or by levelling up. It's temporary boosters of course, noting permanent. The point is to increase play time.

- Cosmetics: A whole new world. Just add more unique and legacy items, like a golden border your avatar for instance. I assume that can be done. Whatever avatar you have is the same way it is, but if the server's packet for the avatar ID is like, "34_0" -> Then you'd have a golden border, since the "_0" is an identifier for golden border, and a LUA script can pick that up. If not, then just introduce new, limited-time avatars. Crop the face of a character from an oil painting of the game for instance, from the loading screens. 

 

Honestly, I can't be bothered to make a more detailed or bigger post because it will most likely die like always and go unnoticed. If you want more information about the technicalities, implementation strategy, or the mechanisms and their effects, let me know and I will reply. I can even make a prototype for you. Peace.

 

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1 hour ago, Metagross31 said:

I like the general idea, but in order to give a yes/no vote I would like to have some more info, like if you can also make shards out of unused cards etc.

The general concept is what I want to focus on, the details like balancing and so forth can be worked out afterwards if the staff wants it to be researched. 

The main question for me is: Would it be a fun addition and actually impactful or not? What do you think? 

Edited by Sykole
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Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but here is how I understand this idea:
You basically want to improve another type of "currency" called shards, which can be obtained in some ways, the details of which are still up to debate, and use these shatds as ingredient to forge several things, ranging from already existing features, such as boosters, to new features, which are yet to come (xp boost, cosmetics etc.).

My first thought while writing this was "do we really need another currency, while the existing ones arguably already have an inglation problem?", but after a second thought, I started to like it. In fact, this might be an elegant way to solve inflation problems of other currencies. My thought behind that is, that you could use shards and the forging system as the main way to get to some future features (xp boost, cosmetics...) and have a way to turn other currencies into shards for a dynamical price while leaving the cost of forging constant. For example, you could buy shards for gold, where the shards get more and more expensive the more gold the player and the whole playerbase have (maybe something like 1k gold per shard for a new player and 10k for someone with loads of gold), while an 2h xp boost always costs 5 shards (these numbers are just made up and I do not claim that they would be a great example for the pricing). This could help dynamically deflate gold/bfp/unused cards.

 

Tl;dr, I kind of like the idea. Maybe you can share your thoughts on what I wrote after it as well. It might also be, that my idea is just bad, given I just worked it out in a few minutes while sitting on the toilet.
Before I cast my final vote on the poll however, I would still like to hear more opinions/ideas by other people as well, maybe I'm overlooking something obviously bad/good.

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Heyho :)

I do like the idea of forging/crafting for Skylords alot and considering that alot of other online TCGs have a simmilar systems like this it just makes sense. 
Im just not sure on the how of it, because SL is quite different from alot of other TCGs out there. A crafting or also "disenchanting" feature is usually put into place in a card game to make it more easy for players to get the cards they want. Say you open a booster and you get a legendary that doesnt fit in your deck. Then you can disenchant that card and trade the gained "shards" for another card youd rather like. This isnt really neccessary in SL, because we have the open market. If you pull a rare card you dont need you can just sell it and buy another one.
Therefore I think crafting cards isnt as useful in SL as it is in other games. 

Crafting Gold boosters might also be a problem, since i think we want people to get rid of their gold instead of giving them ways of earning more.
The XP booster might be better, but im not super sure.

I think cosmetics could be the best thing to craft, cause even the high level players would be interested in that, while they probably wouldnt want to craft cards or XP/Gold bossters cause they are decked out on those. 

To directly comment on @Metagross31s idea: 
I think buying the shards directly with gold feels a bit redundant, since there is no difference between buying  5 shards with 5000 gold and then buying an XP boost with these 5 shards or buying the XP boost directly with 5000 gold. Making the price for shards dependant on the gold you currently have also seems a bit unfair, cause it devalues all the gold that long time players have accumulated. I cant think of another game that did something like this before. 
I do like the focus on "do we really need another currency, while the existing ones arguably already have an inglation problem?" you brought up and trying to maybe make the crafting system into a currency sink. 

My idea would we to cut the new currency of "shards" and use an already existing currency in the games as crafting material: Cards
So lets say there is a crafting exclusive avatar of "Incredible Mo" that you can get.
To craft it you would need to sacrifice one copy of "Juggernaut" and one copy of "Ravenheart". (might be a dumb example, but i hope you get the idea)
This would incentivise players to have more copys of these cards than usual, cause they want the avatar. So highlevel players might spend some bfp again to get these cards cause you can craft a cool avatar out of them.

We could also make the materials be upgrades instead of real cards, then it would be more of a gold sink than for bfp. Or make it upgraded cards then it would need bfp AND gold. 

Okay thats my take on it :) I think its an interestign topic and there a already good ideas on the table. 
Do tell me if Im completely wrong with something here. Im looking at it more from the point of view of other online card games and im just now getting back into SL and stating things mostly with knowledge from before the Release. 

Have a nice day and stay healthy :)

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I would guess to expand the "latest booster" section isnt much work at all, so I dont think much energy has been diverted to that. If you dont have an direct insider source, I wouldnt assume anything about the work that is done / has been done and how much time and effort this took. Maybe it was a 20 minute thing to introduce the new UI developer with something to show off. Maybe manipulating the UI is much harder then we all think. So maybe, from fellow Skylord to Skylord, it isnt the best plan to start introducing your idea through pointing fingers at the Devs.

Besides that, I like any idea that could reduce inflation, and it was a wise choice to not work something like that out in full detail since most inner workings will be decided by those who do the work anyway - so brainstorming such a idea is awesome. I am still not so sure if introducing a new currency is a good idea. If you get them through gold you can just use gold. If you let them drop randomly after games you have another random element and the RNG gods can be very cruel - you will have voices like "I'm just getting shit cards from boosters and I didnt see one shard for a full month now." In my opinion, in games that already involve RNG, crafting/forging should be the bypass route to get some constant progress, not add another RNG element to get the resource and another RNG element what you get out of spending those shards. Thats very, very risky and such a system will have winners and loser, thats not the spirit of crafting/forging something.

So the most logic thing would be that you combine a card disenchant feature that requires card(s) to be destroyed (which would be healthy for the economy) and a gold sink to get you STUFF. What would be nice is that if you add more/better cards/gold you get more/better stuff. But I would organize them in tiers - add 8 common cards you get one of this minor stuff items, add 8 uncommon cards you get the medium stuff items, add 8 rares and you get one of the major stuff items - so it will be more predictable. I would hand out (mini?) booster as a very rare occation, but your ideas with cosmetic elements or temporary enhancement buffs are very cool. If those buffs and elements could be represented by cards you could even deepen the economy by making them tradeable. I'm a newbie that needs bfp rather then a rare border/avatar/... ? I can sell it to a big fat dude who has everything else already, and the bfp will flow from the rich to the poor. Minor items could (should?) be designed to be minor enough that you can give it to someone you like for free, as a 'thank you', etc.

Long story short - not more RNG please. I see the (large) number of people that sell boosters instead of opening them as a sign that boosters themselves are risky enough.

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7 hours ago, Sykole said:

Apparently since something like the booster history, which requires a database connection and client modification, can be developed at a time like this when it is (I assume) a low priority project with no impact on the game at all, then you now have a surplus of developers to afford working on such minor things? 

I would like to quickly touch upon this because it is, yet again, a wrong assumption that is just randomly being thrown in public.

  • We are far from having a surplus of developers: there are currently three (client) developers who could work on this feature, being me, Zyna and now MarcoMaar too. There is a reason we have open developer positions as can be seen here
  • The booster history feature was an entry test for the client developer position and not a feature our current client developers worked on.

So please(!) either contact a staff member to discuss these matters to avoid making false assumptions, or even better, leave it out considering it adds no value to the suggestion you are making. To make matters worse: staff need to spend their time correcting this, which is time that could have been spent developing. Those remarks and comments like "it will most likely die like always and go unnoticed" are also completely unnecessary and just distract from what matters: the suggestion.

7 hours ago, Sykole said:

- Enhancers: Super simple yet I don't see why it isn't being added.

Because there is more involved than the implementation and also seemingly simple tasks can more often than not be very difficult or impossible to add. So please let the developers who have the required game knowledge and access to the codebase judge the simplicity of an implementation.

Now, as for your suggestions:

  • Adding a new currency is possible.
  • Adding cosmetics is possible and has been WIP for a while.
  • Adding multipliers is possible.
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1 hour ago, Ladadoos said:

So please let the developers who have the required game knowledge and access to the codebase judge the simplicity of an implementation.

 

1 hour ago, Ladadoos said:

We are far from having a surplus of developers:

You spent a lot of time defending a small point made about the team and it's capabilities with only 3 bullet points addressing the actual suggestion, which while I understand the need to make things clear, I truly believe most people didn't come here to argue, but to discuss the suggestion, its techincalities and usage. Seems to me the priorities of dicsussion are reversed, seeing as noone really went all in to complain about the teams work but rather talk about bettering and enhancing BattleForge.

9 hours ago, Sykole said:

I can even make a prototype for you.

No devs? You just got a volunteer to help with an idea he proposed himself, so no extra burden on the dev team except after a prototype is introduced, at which point integrating outsider code might be bothersome, but definitely easier than starting from scratch. Why not let us know if such actions are possible? I for one am interested, since open positions are promoted left and right, what about volunteering for one off helpouts like this? Could be more general too, not just development - card design, map design, development - none of those have to necessarily be a workload for just the staff. What if someone wants to help like this? What systems are in place to allow the community to contribute with more than just words?

 

Now, as for the suggestions (I wonder... should I compile this into bullet points or go in depth hmm... what do people actually want to read?)

9 hours ago, Sykole said:

Winning a game, you have a chance to earn a shard.

I'd go with opening chests, since gold is plentiful even without those. Makes them more exciting and the chance of a shard drop could just be the number you had in mind divided by the chests in a map.

 

9 hours ago, Sykole said:

Three shards and you can forge them into a random reward, which can be a booster, random card or a cosmetic.

Perhaps more shards = better chances of receiving what you want? No guarantees ever, but a more interesting long term grind system, with BFP and Gold grind becoming less of a bother with the expanded economy options. I personally would leave Boosters out, since the huge amounts of BFP distributed already guarantees a ton of Boosters coming along and oversaturating the market with cards sooner or later. Random card could be fun, within constraints and influenced by the aforementioned 'more shards = better chances'. 

What aspects of the game would enhancers be able to influence? All numeric gains? (XP, Gold, BFP from reserve?) Not sure I agree, perhaps just XP? But then that's limited to PvE, whereas in PvP you can't really increase ELO gain, so I wonder what an appropriate counterpart would be.

Cosmetics is a chapter all on its own, discussed in many different threads, so this could be a way of getting there. Same as new game+ (which I believe was discussed here once too), unique progression rewards need an enticing and hard to reach goals, this could be one of them - a ton of shards.

Some questions to throw out there - would shards be tradeable in Direct Trade? I think multiaccounting is being monitored closely, so it's a small concern there. Some people may appreciate the uniqueness of shard rewards while some might enjoy the extra BFPs or Gold in hand, so it would be an economic variable to take into account when researching this.

All in all, I like the idea, if tweaked, fleshed out and executed properly

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Just to clarify something from my post earlier:
I did not suggest, that those potential shards can ONLY be purchased with gold, but ALSO.
So it would be possible to have a system, where shards can be gained from playing matches/opening chests, but also bought from existing currencies to give players the possibility to sink them in order to gain shards more quickly. Maybe my idea of having dynamic price ranges for shards bought by other currencies was dumb though. However, it brought me to another idea. This idea does not fit this thread, so I will instead post it in the currency sink brainstorm thread. (nvm, a lottery was already suggested :D)

Edited by Metagross31
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@Kapo @Ladadoos Hi. About the assumption of the devs thing, I am not trying to fight or blame here. I only mentioned it that way because my suggestions seem to have a history of being complicated for implementation, so I took the recent update as an example as to how it is similar on the backend. And even if I was being a jerk, criticism should always be accepted in all its form, instead of getting all defensive. Regarding your suggestions, I replied below.

@Metagross31 @LittleLegend Yeah true. The main focus is to reduce the importance of BFP and start venturing into different directions, so as you said, buying it with gold can be problematic, so in general we can have Shards be tied to the seasons update, if it comes out; where each season you have a certain amount of Shards that you can earn. It can also be integrated with quests and achievements. There is even the possibility of introducing a system where the more different cards/decks you use in-game, the more Shards you gain. This way players will try out new gamestyles, as well as increase demand on cards, while also balancing out that demand through the Shards they will earn. Forging the Shards themselves can cost Gold as well.

We can even expand more onto it. The beauty of a crafting system is that it accepts different mechanisms, so something along the lines of:

- Combine three common cards and you get one random common card.

- Combine three uncommon cards and you get one random common or uncommon card.

- Combine three rare cards and you get one random common, uncommon or rare card.

And so forth. The scaling can be different, like being harder in the sense that if you combine three rare cards, you can only get as high as uncommon.

@Kapo I just read the second paragraph of your suggestion right now and it's similar to what I just wrote above haha, I didn't mean to steal your idea I swear! :D But yeah, sounds great as well.

@Ladadoos I made this post at 8am because I was coding for 15 hours straight, so perhaps I have some knowledge? Who knows though. Either way, great, so multipliers are possible, hence my suggestion. I was not blaming you, was merely suggesting to bump it up on the priority list. Suggestions are give and take. Maybe I said something new that can be beneficial to the project? All you and I should care about is improvements, and that is achieved through suggestions, their implementations and criticism of their functionality. 

@anonyme0273 I love chests, not only are you forced to collect them, but you also have to collect keys, which adds another layer of gameplay. In League of Legends for instance, you get a chest for playing really well with a champion, but that's it. You can't get another chest playing that same champion until the end of the season. While keys can be earned by getting honored by others, which is also another suggestion I had, but was waiting for the the season/cycle update. Remember Ladadoos' Skylord of honor? That would be nice to see in-game.

Regarding them being tradeable, it will entirely depend on the balancing. Are shards for cosmetics, or do they include everything I just mentioned? If it's the latter, then I'd say non-tradeable, because it's a concept made to push players into playing more and play in different styles, as I said above in the reply, and since the Forging system can accept pretty much any mechanism or reward (the ones I said were just examples really), then it would be better to make them untradeable, and even expirable if deemed necessary. 

Sorry if I missed some of your points guys.

Edited by Sykole
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40 minutes ago, Metagross31 said:

Whoops, I thought we were talking about the gold chests you find ingame >.< :D

Hey, that still sounds awesome. Can be a great addition as well! 

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It's a nice idea although speedruns should be taken into account to farm shards. A bh speedrun takes 3-5 min so players now could farm shards gold and xp all in one run. There could be a "hidden" limitation saying complete a map in over x amount of minutes to prevent this.

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25 minutes ago, DrunkenGummyBear said:

It's a nice idea although speedruns should be taken into account to farm shards. A bh speedrun takes 3-5 min so players now could farm shards gold and xp all in one run. There could be a "hidden" limitation saying complete a map in over x amount of minutes to prevent this.

Or simply a limited number of shards every seasonal cycle, which is not yet implemented. 

For instance, completing a campaign map for the first time gets you a shard. Also, it could be like: Defeat it on Expert to get 2 shards, this way players will have to think twice before winning a campaign map.

Do they play it on easy and get 1 shard and that's it, or wait until they have a stronger deck to win it and get 2 shards? Could be something along those lines.

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2 hours ago, Sykole said:

Or simply a limited number of shards every seasonal cycle, which is not yet implemented. 

For instance, completing a campaign map for the first time gets you a shard.

Thats a neat idea, I would just have a little different approach.

What I am thinking, if you really add a new currency, I think a shard should be something rare. We already have Thousands of BFP and hundrets of thousands of gold. So a shard should be something precious, so: Per month (or season), for each completed expert map you get one extra shard. The rest you would have to buy through gold and/or bfp and/or disenchant cards. That would be enough to lure people into doing different expert maps and not just farm one. At the beginning of the month, "lets go shard farming" by taking a tour through all maps could be a thing. Single Player maps that people have long forgotten about cause they already finished them could see some play. New Players would have a easier time finding veterans helping with maps. So basically if you are shard-hungry you have a limited number per month/season you can work towards, the rest will cost you.

About that RNG thing again: in Youtube/GMTK they speak about different game mechanics, and there is a great one about RNG. What I learned is that depending on RNG to progress makes players really unhappy. But RNG can make players rejoice when it is applied as very rare, positive effect. To apply this to this concept, if the gold chests on maps have a very low chance dropping a shard will make farming them useless, but every once in a while when you open one you get some nice animation, a special sound and a shard, people would love that.

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Ah yes, the issues we have, the development time that doesn't exist ^_^ You see, we have inflation, so instead of doing anything about that, we're gonna introduce another currency, just like in communism/failing states :O (le funny, when I was defending non free market lol)  (do we really have inflation?)

The least we need is a simple trade bot account who you send cards to, and he sends you BFP back, so you can open another booster and pray to gods... (RNG gods) It's a community project, not everything has to look like it has big budget behind it, it just has to function. (heck even gold would be nice, but currently only for the new players...)


I do like the idea of colours, like the GM's have and while XP boost is really useless, you should just be able to buy a custom title for like 1m gold, or something, these cosmetic things could also be temporary, shades similar to ones used by staff could be made unavailable. Also, a bit off topic, but IDK who thought that making gold account bound was a good idea, TBH,  quite a commie concept.

Edited by Ca7
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3 hours ago, Ca7 said:

Ah yes, the issues we have, the development time that doesn't exist ^_^ You see, we have inflation, so instead of doing anything about that, we're gonna introduce another currency, just like in communism/failing states :O (le funny, when I was defending non free market lol)  (do we really have inflation?)

The least we need is a simple trade bot account who you send cards to, and he sends you BFP back, so you can open another booster and pray to gods... (RNG gods) It's a community project, not everything has to look like it has big budget behind it, it just has to function.


I do like the idea of colours, like the GM's have and while XP boost is really useless, you should just be able to buy a custom title for like 1m gold, or something, these cosmetic things could also be temporary, shades similar to ones used by staff could be made unavailable. Also, a bit off topic, but IDK who thought that making gold account bound was a good idea, TBH,  quite a commie concept.

I have to be honest, all your posts bemuse me haha.

17 hours ago, Kapo said:

Thats a neat idea, I would just have a little different approach.

What I am thinking, if you really add a new currency, I think a shard should be something rare. We already have Thousands of BFP and hundrets of thousands of gold. So a shard should be something precious, so: Per month (or season), for each completed expert map you get one extra shard. The rest you would have to buy through gold and/or bfp and/or disenchant cards. That would be enough to lure people into doing different expert maps and not just farm one. At the beginning of the month, "lets go shard farming" by taking a tour through all maps could be a thing. Single Player maps that people have long forgotten about cause they already finished them could see some play. New Players would have a easier time finding veterans helping with maps. So basically if you are shard-hungry you have a limited number per month/season you can work towards, the rest will cost you.

About that RNG thing again: in Youtube/GMTK they speak about different game mechanics, and there is a great one about RNG. What I learned is that depending on RNG to progress makes players really unhappy. But RNG can make players rejoice when it is applied as very rare, positive effect. To apply this to this concept, if the gold chests on maps have a very low chance dropping a shard will make farming them useless, but every once in a while when you open one you get some nice animation, a special sound and a shard, people would love that.

The way I saw it is that every season, you would get like 6 shards maximum, so that's like 2 rewards every season. 

And regarding the nice animation and such, yeah I really wanted things like that but I believe it's hard to compose high quality music and integrate animations due to the project's limitations. There is always the possibility of having the "Shard Forging" on a website with special effects, cool animations and all that, even better is to have that webpage integrated into the client itself through a webbrowser element in one of the tabs, but I doubt it can be done.

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On 5/12/2021 at 4:53 AM, Sykole said:

Honestly, I can't be bothered to make a more detailed or bigger post because it will most likely die like always and go unnoticed. 

Maybe the system in game should have an hourly reminder for using the forums, currently it seems pretty desolate here.

Was gonna say, maybe the home page should be improved and link directly to popular forums with big buttons, but apparently I can't even reach it currently, IDK.

Edited by Ca7
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18 minutes ago, Ca7 said:

Maybe the system in game should have an hourly reminder for using the forums, currently it seems pretty desolate here.

Was gonna say, maybe the home page should be improved and link directly to popular forums with big buttons, but apparently I can't even reach it currently, IDK.

Yeah same actually. I also think that the forum could use a makeover to make it look more Battlefield like with an improved layout. 

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3 minutes ago, Sykole said:

Yeah same actually. I also think that the forum could use a makeover to make it look more Battlefield like with an improved layout. 

Haven't used them before, but taking a quick look, I don't think it's the best example to copy.

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  • 4 weeks later...
On 5/12/2021 at 12:17 PM, Ladadoos said:

I would like to quickly touch upon this because it is, yet again, a wrong assumption that is just randomly being thrown in public.

  • We are far from having a surplus of developers: there are currently three (client) developers who could work on this feature, being me, Zyna and now MarcoMaar too. There is a reason we have open developer positions as can be seen here
  • The booster history feature was an entry test for the client developer position and not a feature our current client developers worked on.

So please(!) either contact a staff member to discuss these matters to avoid making false assumptions, or even better, leave it out considering it adds no value to the suggestion you are making. To make matters worse: staff need to spend their time correcting this, which is time that could have been spent developing. Those remarks and comments like "it will most likely die like always and go unnoticed" are also completely unnecessary and just distract from what matters: the suggestion.

Because there is more involved than the implementation and also seemingly simple tasks can more often than not be very difficult or impossible to add. So please let the developers who have the required game knowledge and access to the codebase judge the simplicity of an implementation.

Now, as for your suggestions:

  • Adding a new currency is possible.
  • Adding cosmetics is possible and has been WIP for a while.
  • Adding multipliers is possible.

Fair enough

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