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Community Update #26 - August 2022


Majora

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Greetings Skylords!

A new month; a new Community Update! It's time to bring you up to speed with everything going on in Skylords Reborn!

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 Recent (and upcoming) Patch 
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On the 16h of July we released a small Quality of Life patch, containing some bugfixes, and updating the Free PvP decks to adjust to the new meta. You can check out the patch-notes here

We are also working on a new content patch, which will bring more balance changes and two new cards into the game. We will share more information on this patch in the next community update, but we will reveal one of the new cards today! 

 

 Survey
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First things first: a massive thank you to everyone who filled in our Feedback Survey for 2022! You completely shattered our expectations with over 2000 responses! 

Especially since this project is run completely on a voluntary basis with no profits (which 12% of you were not aware of by the way!) we couldn't be more proud of your praise for the state the game is currently in:

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We will need some time to go over all the comments, but the data and individual responses are very helpful to us, and your kind words are a motivation to continue trying to make this project the best it can be! 

We will share more insight in community feedback on a later date. Thank you for being part of this great community!

 

 Introducing: Hybrid Orbs
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Before we reveal our new card, we have to talk about a new orb requirement coming to Skylords Reborn: Hybrid orbs. 
A Hybrid orb allows you to meet its requirements with one of its two colors. For example, a image.pngimage.pngimage.png card can be played with image.pngimage.pngimage.png or image.pngimage.pngimage.png.

Hybrid orbs are a nice in-between of heavy and loose orb restrictions. Restricting a Twilight card to require double Fire or double Nature, would cause it to be unplayable for half of the Twilight decks. Opening up the card by having the 3rd orb be a neutral orb, would however cause unintended synergies with other factions. For example; access to Nature's heal for a Bandit card, or Shadow's Motivate for a Twilight card. By going for a Hybrid orb, we reward playing a faction deck in tier 3, without locking the other color combination of that faction out. 

 

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We will use this new flexibility to make adjustments to some older cards. We are planning to make use of Hybrid orbs for Treefiend, Twilight Hag, Deepfang and our upcoming new Nightshade Plant design. While we could also make use of this for tier 2 and tier 4 cards in the future, we currently only have plans for using it on tier 3 cards. We won't use Hybrid orbs for Tier 1 cards either, one of the reasons being the first card played decides what orb you get, running into all kind of weird issues with hybrid T1 cards and orbs. 

Hybrid orbs have been the topic of many conversations in the past, and we are very happy to finally introduce them into the game! 

 

 

 

 

 




 New Card: Twilight Slayers
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Our first new card to make use of Hybrid orbs is a card that has been requested quite a bit over the years: a new tier 3 archer unit: the Twilight Slayers! The card will be a common and come in two affinities, impacting the damage output towards certain factions. Let's break down the card. 

Please note: We are still testing the card. While we are generally happy about it and feel comfortable revealing it, numbers and effects might still change before release.

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image.pngBow Attack
Every 2 seconds, unit fires arrows at enemies that deal 19 / 20 / 22 / 25 damage. Deals 50% reduced damage if a hostile unit is within an 8m radius, unless Twilight Slayers are mounted on a wall segment. Has a range of 30m.


image.pngInfused Fury
Deals 50% more damage against elemental units


image.pngTainted Fury
Deals 50% more damage against Human and Ogre units. 


image.pngLike all Twilight units, Twilight Slayers will come with the faction's ability "Transformation". While transforming Twilight Slayers does not trigger any additional effects, we are working on a shift towards more impactful transformation effects for other Twilight units, making transforming your units more worthwhile.


In our Force of Nature patch, we already changed the power cost reduction for Transform effects, and we will also make adjustments to the transformation speed in our next patch. On our balance discord, you can find out more about our future Twilight plans, such as our intention to change the card Nightshade Plant to be an exciting tier 3 Twilight pay-off card.

We hope you are looking forward to this new card and the changes coming to the Twilight faction.

 

 Artwork Spotlight
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The artwork for Twilight Slayers has been created by SpiritedAlpha. As always, there were multiple iterations and feedback sessions to reach the final artwork. Here are some earlier versions, where you can notice a slightly different color scheme and background, alongside other ideas that were improved upon, adjusted, or removed to better fit the piece (sorry Twilight Negator!). A big thanks to SpiritAlpha and everyone who gave feedback during the process. 

image.png    image.png

Twilight Slayers are a recreation of the original NPC enemy, but we found the artwork (especially for a playable card) below the standard we have set for our Skylords Reborn additions. Looking at the artwork side by side shows the drastic difference in quality between them. 

 unit_twilight_windweaver_artwork.png    SlayersFIN.png
2009 / 2022

 Adjustments to Reforging
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It has now been 8 months since the advent of the Reforging system. Back in January, we gave the community an update on the health of the economy, and we would like to do the same again today. 

Some important information on the data: When it says "Fire Pool" it includes every card in the game which includes a Fire Orb. The data was collected and presented in this manner because this is how Reforging works when it tells you that the output card has an X% chance of containing a Fire Orb. Additionally, all price information presented is an average of actual sales in the auction house over a given period. While some extreme outliers were removed from the data set, such as 5 bfp Harvesters and 400 bfp Northguards, in 99% of instances the data was accepted as-is without tampering from our side.

Data Set: (Click to pop-out and expand)

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Updated Analysis of Data Set:
At first glance, you can quickly see that after the update the following changes occurred (Neutral Cards are excluded from the analysis as they are the control set):

  1. The average, median, minimum, and maximum prices of Common cards increased across the board. 
  2. With two exceptions, the average, minimum, and median prices of Uncommon cards increased across the board, while the maximum decreased. The decrease in average Frost prices can be attributed to 3 outlier cards in the Frost Pool, (Coldsnap, Frost Mage, and Lost Spirit Ship) which pre-reforging were very expensive for Uncommon cards. The increase in maximum Uncommon prices in the Fire Pool is caused by Wasteland Terror, which as a new card is still quite expensive for its rarity. Wasteland Terror is in general causing an inflation of the maximum Uncommon card costs in the Fire, Shadow, and All Card Pools. 
  3. The same thing happened to Rare cards as happened to Uncommon cards.
  4. Average, median, and max price of Ultra-rare cards decreased across the board while minimum price increased. The one exception is the Nature Pool, where the median price of Ultra-rare cards actually decreased. If you look closely, you can see that the median prices for cards in the Fire Pool and among All Cards are almost identical before and after Reforging. The average prices of All Cards is also only slightly negative and has been steadily trending upwards in recent months. 
  5. General booster worth increased from 378 bfp to 420 bfp. This means Reforging has made it more worthwhile to open boosters after the update than it was before. Promos have been excluded from the data set, making this even more true. On average, the daily discounted booster will profit a player 70 bfp post-update versus 28 bfp pre-update. The data is at this point fairly stable.
  6. Reforging established a minimum base worth for all cards dependent on rarity that did not exist prior. This seems to have stabilized around:
    • Common: 5-6 bfp
    • Uncommon: 22-23 bfp
    • Rare: 100-102 bfp
    • Ultra-rare: 200-220 bfp 


Fun Facts about Reforging:
- To date, 2.35 million cards have been Reforged. 64.4% of the cards were Common, 27.2% were Uncommon, 8.1% were Rare, and 1.3% were Ultra-rare.
- Only 0.87% of all Reforges produce Forge Shards (FYI, it usually is not worth it to produce Forge Shards)


Changes to Reforging:
The introduction of Reforging has accomplished many of our goals for the economy. At the same time, we have noticed the total amount of Reforges has steadily decreased as time has progressed, which is expected, but it has also come coupled with a slow increase in the prices of Ultra-rare cards. While prices for the most expensive Ultra-rare cards are down substantially, the average and median prices of Ultra-rare cards are steadily moving towards parity with the old prices. This is an issue, because the average price of all cards has risen due to Reforging, making it harder for new players to collect and charge cards. The introduction of many new beginner achievements last patch has helped to slightly alleviate this issue, but it still exists, even in reduced form. As such, we have made the following changes to incentivize Reforging and to make it easier for all players, not only those with large gold and card stockpiles, to interact with the system. We intend for these to be the last changes we make to Reforging.
 

Gold Cost to Reforge into the Following Rarities:
Common = 125 gold --> 50 gold
Uncommon = 300 gold --> 150 gold
Rare = 750 gold --> 400 gold
Ultra-rare = 1500 gold --> 800 gold

 

Reforging Rates:
We have made it easier to produce an Ultra-rare card when Reforging. For example, 4 identical Rare cards will now guarantee an Ultra-rare card. 
 

The changes to Reforging have been implemented today, and are now live on the server. 


 Tournaments / Events
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Now that the Community Updates moved to a monthly schedule, events might come and go in between Community Updates. Be sure to keep a close eye on the ingame event-tab and the forum calendar to not miss any events! 

There are currently two gameplay events planned by Dutchy and Ultralord, which can be found on the calendar already. More info about them soon!


• NEW - CCC #7 - Contest-ception
A new CCC is now live: a contest to come up with... a contest! Share your wildest ideas and get rewarded for it! We hope to see many cool ideas that we might use in future contest, so be sure to brainstorm cool stuff and join the contest! More information.
 

• FINISHED - CCC #6 - Back to the Roots
Kapo hosted another successful Crappy Community Contest, this time on a very special map. This custom map is a copy of the Introduction map with a few new jumps and turns, where you play with a Shadow/Nature deck instead. As with all CCC, the more players attended, the better the prizes became, resulting in a free booster for the whole community! View the event and the code.
 

• FINISHED - Skylords Bounty Spring Forge
It has been a while since we have closed this bounty and players have been wondering what happened to the Spring Forge. While we had a clear winner (congratulations Wanky!), the entry was not fully ready for release yet, and working on it took more time from the team than we had anticipated for a community bounty. Since spring is long gone, we will move this Forge over to next year. 


• Host your own tournament / event
Want to host a tournament or event? Please reach out to our Event Organizers Hiko and/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. 


 Contribute to the Project
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In our last Community Update, we went over various features that could be added to the game if we get the right people to work on them, please take a look if you haven't done so already.

We have also added a new contributor (non-staff) role:
Internal Tester
As an Internal Tester, you will be testing and exploring in-game mechanics with additional information that is normally hidden from players. Your contribution will allow us to fix bugs and create new designs. 

 
As always, we hope you will consider helping out the project. Please take a look at all our open positions on how you can do so. 

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 In Conclusion
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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 Twilight-booster: 
MORE-PLAY-WITH-ORBS

The code is valid until September 1st, when we will bring you another Community Update. 

As always, we are open to feedback, so please let us know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments! 

 

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Archive
Skylords Reborn Documents (Deep Dives, Behind the Scenes, PvP Guide)  
Overview Community Updates
Community Update #25

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  • Majora unpinned and pinned this topic

Hybrid - Awesome
t3 archers - Awesome
Slayers - Awesome

But please make sure that new unit wont be weak with moderate stats S size its drawback (+slayers as defensive unit are... weird? wall mounted defenders definitely sounds as frost :P) . I'm still sad - that transcendence isn't worth taking to casual decks.

Nevertheless - hype

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49 minutes ago, Draconnor said:

 I'm still sad - that transcendence isn't worth taking to casual decks.

I have used Transcendence to some success as a substitute for Motivate in some units spam decks, such as Emberstrike, Rifle Cultists and Death Ray. It worked out quite well I think. Maybe this can give you some ideas on how to use it. Just try it out, maybe it works for you 🙂

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5 hours ago, Ktaius said:

(rarer=better.. or not?)

Not neccessarily. It's basically "rarer=more complex", but there are already lots of cards out there, where rare does not mean strong, e.g. when you compare Lost Horror and Nox Carrier.

4 hours ago, Dallarian said:

There exist a short document which help you understand why.
"Designing for Card Rarity" is the title, you may find it over there:

 

Check out what Dallarian posted for more in depth info 🙂

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11 hours ago, Metagross31 said:

Not neccessarily. It's basically "rarer=more complex", but there are already lots of cards out there, where rare does not mean strong, e.g. when you compare Lost Horror and Nox Carrier.

Check out what Dallarian posted for more in depth info 🙂

@Dallarian@Metagross31 Thank you!!! With this Document i understand all about the Ranks! 🙂👍

WindHunter, Majora and Dallarian like this
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14 hours ago, Stiflex said:

Is there perhaps a release date on any of these updates?

We are also working on a new content patch, which will bring more balance changes and two new cards into the game. We will share more information on this patch in the next community update, but we will reveal one of the new cards today! 

Next Community Update comes in a month, we should be able to have a release date for you then 🙂 SoonTM

The reforging changes are already live. 

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Have you thought about making the orb spawn from hybrid T1 dependant on affinity? It's not ideal, since you'd still have to grab a specific affinity for your deck but better than nothing...

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5 minutes ago, General_Thugdil said:

Have you thought about making the orb spawn from hybrid T1 dependant on affinity? It's not ideal, since you'd still have to grab a specific affinity for your deck but better than nothing...

This would mean though, that every T1 splash unit would need to have affinities and they would have to match the required colours. This not only limits freedom in design, but also is rather tough to communicate to the player.

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24 minutes ago, Metagross31 said:

This would mean though, that every T1 splash unit would need to have affinities and they would have to match the required colours. This not only limits freedom in design, but also is rather tough to communicate to the player.

Which is why I said it's not ideal... Maybe someone can come up with a better solution, I'm not familiar enough with the code to really get into it... Best solution would be to simply let the player pick when playing the first unit but I'm guessing that would be a nightmare to add to the code base...

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  • Majora changed the title to Community Update #26 - Augushttps://forum.skylords.eu/index.php?/topic/9202-community-update-26-august-2022/t 2022
  • Majora changed the title to Community Update #26 - August 2022
  • Majora unpinned and unfeatured this topic

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