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Community update #15 - December 3rd 2021

Majora

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Majora

Majora 1155

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Greetings Skylords!

It's been three weeks since our last community update so it's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn.

This update is kind of a Bandits-Special, with new card reveals, a Deep Dive for the faction and insight in the process of adding a new PvP card. Let's get started!

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Anniversary Stream Announcement

Mark your calendars because we have some celebrating to do! On December 18th, Skylords Reborn reaches its 1-year anniversary. It has been a wild ride; from resurrecting the game to a playable state, to actively developing new features and even brand new cards. 

Join us for a special anniversary stream on December 17th with news, card reveals, give-aways and more, celebrating the past, present and future of Skylords Reborn! More details will be shared in the coming weeks. We hope to see you there!

New Card Reveal

Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it and feel comfortable revealing it, its numbers and effects might still change. We hope to release this card before the end of the year and will share more information at a later date. 

Today we are excited to reveal a card that might see play in both PvP and PvE, and solve some of the problems Bandits have in PvP. 

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Bandit Minefield is a tier 2 Spell for Fire/Shadow. Upgrading the card reduces its cooldown (up to 10 seconds) and powercost (80 to 70). It will be a rare and won't have an affinity. Here is how the card works:

Creates 4 clusters of mines in a line of 20m. If a hostile ground unit gets as close as 10m to a cluster, its mines will detonate in 6 bursting waves. Each wave deals 100 damage to hostile units and 25 damage to buildings in a 15m radius, up to 300 in total. If no enemy approaches a cluster within 10 seconds, its mines will disappear again. Affects ground targets only. Cannot damage wall segments, Power Wells or Monuments. Cannot be placed nearby hostile units or structures, excluding walls. Knocks back small units. Reusable every 35/35/35/25 seconds.

Bandit Minefield requires the selection of source and target location. Mines will be placed in a straight line in the direction you choose. 

 

Design and expected use

Because this is our first new card that will see play in the PvP-meta, we asked our designer RadicalX to share some insights about the design process of the card. We cover why the card was created, what role it has in the meta and how it was changed during testing. Bandits has been one of the weaker factions in PvP, so we are very excited to see how this new tool will help them out. 

Bandit_Minefield_Design_Choices.pdf

 

Affinity and Rarity

A quick word about this cards rarity and lack of affinity. Affinities were added to every expansion of BattleForge, mostly as a way to increase the number of cards in each expansion. While there are some cards where the different affinities result in interesting choices, there are also a lot of cards that struggle under this design restriction. The Skylord Reborn team decided that going forward, we will add affinities where they feel right, but leave them out when we can't add a meaningful difference between them, or adding them would undermine what the card is supposed to do. 

As for the rarity, we actually wrote a document about rarity, and according to those guidelines, Bandit Minefield will be a rare. It is worth noting that Bandit Minefield will be added to the free PvP-bandit deck. We expect this card to be crucial in the PvP scene, and find it important that everyone who wants to play PvP can do so without grinding for cards or upgrades first. 

Artwork

The artwork has been designed by our talented artist Tweeto, and we thought it would be cool to share some sketches to show you the progress. 

bandit_minefield_sketch_full.png

As always, a lot of time and changes went into this artwork. A big thanks to Tweeto for constantly accepting feedback and improving the artwork. We are really happy with the final result, and hope you are too! 
 

Vote for Cardnames

Just like with Coat of Protection and Wasteland Wing, we need your suggestions for the final cardname. During testing we came up with the cardname ''Bandit Minefield" and ''Treacherous Path" as the effect name. However, part of our promise to our Patrons is to let them help with naming new cards based on suggestions from the community. For this, we will need your help!

Please reply in the comments below what you feel is the perfect cardname for this card and how you would name the ability.  

Example:
Name: Bandit Minefield
Ability: Treacherous Path

Please only suggest one name. We will collect all the suggestions and let our Avatar-of-Frost-tier (and higher) Patrons vote for the final name, starting next week. 
 

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Bandit Deep Dive

Back in July we shared our Deep Dive into Frost; an exploration into what makes the faction tick and how we planned to tackle the issues Pure Frost struggled with. We have since then shifted our focus away from the frosty Lyrish Reaches and moved on to the scorching Southern Wastes; attached you will find the Bandits Deep Dive!

In this document we will be exploring the Bandits-faction in detail, including upcoming changes and even a tease of another new card! It is our goal with documents such as these to give our players a glimpse into how we think about factions and where we are planning to take the game.

Bandits_Deep_Dive.pdf

Upcoming Tournaments & Events

NEW: Official PvE Contest#4 Winter is coming - Until 17.12.2021
For this challenge, we want to see you succeed in playing the map Guns of Lyr, while accomplishing several winter and Christmas themed objectives. This event has a point system and boosters for the top performers. Check out the rules and how to apply here and have fun!


FINISHED: Official PvE Contest#3 Skylords Raid
Our 3th PvE contest has concluded, thanks to everyone who participated! Originally the idea was to have a stream, but because we are already streaming for our anniversary and most of the runs used the same tactics, the winners will instead be announced through a youtube video in the near-future. We also saw a lot less participants in this style of contest, so we will try to stay away from multiple-map contests in the future.
 

• Host your own event / tournament
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organisers Hiko or Metagross to have your event prizes sponsored by us. If you have a cool idea for a PvE event, or want to host a PvP tournament, please don't hesitate to reach out to us, we will gladly assist you. 

 

New Team Members / Open Positions

We are very happy to announce a new addition to our team: RookieN has joined the team as a Map Designer / Map Developer / Map Artist! You can expect great things from him, and we hope to be able to share them soon. 

We also added another Event Manager to the team; Metagross will work together with our other Event Manager Hiko to provide you with a steady stream of contests and tournaments. His community contest on King's Ridge was a success, so we are happy to officially welcome him to the team. 

At the same time we are sad to see Kerkk leave the team as a Web Developer. He unfortunately does not have enough time to help us out anymore. We would like to thank him for his time and all he did for Skylords Reborn! 

Last Community Update we posted our cry for help for Balance Developers, and we are very grateful for the response. We hope to add new Balance Developers to the team soon, who will help us implement new cards and balance changes. We did experience some delays because of the lack of staff for quite a while now, but we hope this will improve with new members being added to the team. This is always an area that we need help with, so if you are still interested, please let us know. 

There are still some other areas we would like additional help to expand and grow Skylords Reborn. If you want to help, we would love to have you on our team. Below we have highlighted some roles, but you can find more information, desired traits and all our open positions here. If you are unsure if you qualify, please reach out and have a talk! 

 

NEW: Open Position - Video Editor
As a video editor you are responsible for creating exciting video content for Skylords Reborn. This can range from short card reveal videos to exciting trailers and cutting up Twitch-stream content for highlight videos on our Youtube channel. If you have any experience with audio post production, you can also help us out with the process of adding new voice-lines and sound effects into the game. More Information.

Open Position - Artist
While we absolutely love Tweeto's output, one artist can only do so much. As an artist you are responsible to create the visuals required for new content. This is a broad position and there are many areas where you could help in, depending on your skills and interests. Think of loading screen artwork for new maps, card artwork for new cards, visual UI elements for new features that involve adding UI to the game, banners for events/tournaments/community challenges/large game updates etc. More Information.

Open Position - Marketeer / Outreach Coordinator
As a Marketeer / Outreach Coordinator you are responsible to spread the word and create awareness about Skylords Reborn and to attract veteran and new players alike. This includes actively researching and reaching out to potentially interested streamers, youtubers, Discord channels, game magazines, among others. You will be responsible for the communication to and from interested parties and for any promotion deals (for example involving scratch codes). Please note that Skylords Reborn cannot do any paid promotions. More Information.

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In Conclusion

And that's it for this Community Update, thanks for reading! 

As is tradition, this community update comes with a scratch code. 
The code will reward you with a mini-booster: COMM-UNIT-YNEW-S15B

The code is valid till December 25th.

We will update you again on December 18th, during our 1-year anniversary! The next community update will probably stick to the 3 week schedule, meaning it will be posted on the 25th. 

As always, we are open to feedback so please let us know! 

Archive
Community Update #12
Community Update #13
Community Update #14

Metagross31, Dutchy, Ggoblin and 12 others like this
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  • Majora changed the title to Community update #15 - December 3rd 2021
Cocofang

Cocofang 332

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Tweeto continues to do such a bang up job emulating the artstyle.

As for the name, I would lean a bit into the naming scheme of less serious, rugged names that you can imagine being bellowed across a tent while everyone is getting drunk. Things like "Boom Bomb" from Artillery. Bandit Launchers "Firebug". Corsairs "Big Fat Cannon" and Rioter's Retreat "Uproar". Descriptive, visceral names that you can yell even while drunk on gold and booze. "Treacherous Path" sounds a bit to lofty to catch on with Bandits.
And a different name would help differentiate the card from "Mine" and Soulhunters "Minefield".

Name: Desert Carpet
Ability: Toeclippers

The idea is based on carpet bombing as the area is similar. It is also something that I can imagine crafty Bandits saying. "Let's lay out the desert carpet for these folks.", making fun of the more civilized nations and their customs.
The ability itself is the more grounded version and represents a type of dark, macabre humor I see as very fitting for Bandits. Since mines are equally meant to cripple and kill I imagine Bandits might have fun ironically belittling them as Toeclippers. Knowing fully well how devastating they really are. "Harhar, hope they don't mind some Toeclippers."

Dutchy, Kubik and Metagross31 like this
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JarodDempsey

JarodDempsey 13

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Name: Gifts from Ym
Ability: Death Underfoot

fyi Ym is a traveling desert kingdom and provides a loose relation to shadow (via moon and related shadow abilities originating there) via the card's desert aspect without contradicting potential goblin origins of the technology introduced by the original mine card. I like to think the ymian people coopted the technology and began a practice of using it in areas they left behind to deter any who would wish to encroach on their historic migration range.

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Metagross31

Metagross31 446

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:hypetrain: :hype: :hype: :hype:

Great update, I am very excited for the new content and the anniversary!

I do not have a definitive name suggestion for the new card yet, but I would rather name it "minefield" instead of "bandit minefield". The word bandit seems a bit redundant in this context. Other cards such as Sandstorm also do not have bandit in their name, so it would be fitting.
But there are probably other people out there, who will have some great name suggestions 🙂

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