Skylords Reborn Classic

[Halis]

 I think, a lot of long term veterans left SR because they are dissatisfied with some balancing changes. The missing outcry of the Decomposer nerf, compared to the Nether Warp nerf, is indicative for this assessment.

 

The long term veterans played the game for years having a lot of fun and probably would have played it many more years.

 

My suggestion: Make it possible to play with an older version of the game

[Kapo]

The question is: Do you want this game to succeed or not? The old EA-version was utterly broken, and yes, a few people are having fun with it in this state for nostalgic reasons. If you think the SR team can just flick on a switch and there is a second, old version of the game available, you are mistaken. You need to pour resources into such an undertaking – manpower better spent on making the current (objectively better!) version even more awesome.

It's a fool's quest to make the same 20-30 people happy, and not develop the potential for this game to make 1000 happy – or much, much more. Yes, maybe those "would have played it for many more years", but the game will never have any appeal to new players.

[wanky]

So if you are honest you can balance as much on the game where you want, it will always have things that are OP and next to it about 200 cards that are not played 100 times by the community im 1 Month

New players? 1000?? On which star do you live? It feels like after each patch there are fewer players, which is Sad. 

 

In my opinion, 90% of players play the game for nostalgia reasons. 

It's also a shame that some pve tactics were destroyed with balanvinc because it was absolutely oP in PvP.  And now? Pvp is absolutely dead, and the 2vs2, never had a Playerbase. 

 

I would love to have a vanilla version able to play. (end EA f. E. Or even older with OP stampede staking weehls amm.) 

Just my 5 cents. 

 

Pls do not get me wrong about the changes we have ingame, some ar great, others less. For me it was just absolutely incomprehensible that cards like Decomposer are so broken annoyed that you can no longer use them. And did not take into account the vote at that time, which was against this change.

 

/wanky

 

 

 

Edited November 12, 2022 by wanky

[Kapo]

Of course, there can be different opinions on what direction the game should take, and what effect it will have.

45 minutes ago, wanky said:

New players? 1000?? On which star do you live? It feels like after each patch there are fewer players, which is Sad. 

But this point I'd like to refute: When more than 2000 people are filling out the yearly survey, and we get participation of 300+ on an event, "making 1000 players happy" is a low-estimate - on planet Earth.

Edited November 12, 2022 by Kapo

[Volin]

For me playing for nostalgica and enjoying new balance/cards not exclude each other

[Metagross31]

Iirc Mr. @Kubik once said, that such a thing would be in general possible. Question is, if we want to spend any resources on it.

It would probably be a thing that runs on the side and only a handfull of people play every now and then, while the majority plays the new version.

Imo it wouldn't hurt to have such a thing, as long as it is not the "main" version that players get sent to by default. This could be achieved by making it so that you have to somehow connect to that version of the game manually - similar to how the testserver is available to all but not the default way to play the game.

[Riviute]

I can see the appeal of an older version of the game, those are fond memories. But at the same time I'm super excited for every single community update and ingame updates. I'm always looking forward to see what the devs have in store for us, balancing older cards and bringing in new stuff brings fresh wind into the world of Skylords.

But speaking of older Versions of the game I dont wanna pay 400power for my T4 how it was in the beginning of the game 🙂

 

[SunWu]

5 hours ago, wanky said:

Pvp is absolutely dead

 

Seems like some pvp players didn't get the message because ranked 1vs1 is pretty popular at the moment.

[wanky]

23 minutes ago, SunWu said:

Seems like some pvp players didn't get the message because ranked 1vs1 is pretty popular at the moment.

 

If there is no happy hour it looks like this ---> not rly popular. 

[Halis]

New OpenDocument Spreadsheet - Copy.ods

5 hours ago, Kapo said:

Of course, there can be different opinions on what direction the game should take, and what effect it will have.

But this point I'd like to refute: When more than 2000 people are filling out the yearly survey, and we get participation of 300+ on an event, "making 1000 players happy" is a low-estimate - on planet Earth.

Saturday about 16 o'clock european time. 140 player online.

45 matches running, no ranked PvP match apparently.

 

You are free to disagree, but PvP has always been a niche despite heavily PvP focused balancing, in my opinion.

 

7 hours ago, Kapo said:

It's a fool's quest to make the same 20-30 people happy

By that logic, PvP should be irrelevant to balancing, because PvP is a rarely played game mode, because a very low % of playtime is spend in this mode:

Edited November 12, 2022 by Halis

[SunWu]

1 hour ago, wanky said:

If there is no happy hour it looks like this ---> not rly popular. 

With the playerbase as low as it is it would make more sense to compare active players in ranked for example (people who had matches in the last weeks). Comparing those you see that there are more players in pvp than 1 month ago, much more than 3 months ago. Nobody claims its a superpopular mode. But you claimed it's dead, wich is definetly not the case.

Edited November 12, 2022 by SunWu

[Cocofang]

Nostalgia is fleeting. A coherent, solid game is forever. The game is in a better state than it ever was at any point in time, among other things because of various fixes and nerfs, few as they were.

With that being said though, I myself am strongly in favor of providing a Legacy BF version. Although there would have to be a strict hands-off policy because when you would get into talking about which things to fix and which additions to implement it's another can of worms. So no popularity voting like "X was disliked by most, that should be fixed. Change Y was liked by most, that should be implemented". It has to be an as-is version of the game from a pre-release point. Simply a time capsule. Straight performance/stability fixes are of course fine but absolutely no additions and changes that affect gameplay in any way.

And the patch the legacy version would get pulled from has to be decided on as well. Simply the very last official version is the most straight forward. And would probably make the most sense too. But maybe an even older version would be more desirable? Although I wonder how accessible these older versions even are.

I doubt it would split the playerbase in any meaningful way as people really interested in such a version of the game and those that want the current, changed version seem to be somewhat different audiences in the first place. Logging into this Legacy BF could function similarly to how logging into the testserver functions.

[Kapo]

2 hours ago, Halis said:

 

By that logic, PvP should be irrelevant to balancing, because PvP is a rarely played game mode, because a very low % of playtime is spend in this mode.

Don't know why you are switching the topic to PvP now, but I have criticized the SR team that too many resources go towards PvP, so it seems we might agree partly on that. Maybe you have mistaken me for someone who is a big PvP guy? I don't know otherwise, possibly you can explain why the topic is switched to PvP.

I'm wondering because most of the hated changes of the "nostalgia players" have nothing to do with PvP.

(And just as a sidenote, a “measurement” of 140 online players at 16:00 CET rather proofs my claim of 1k players than disproofs it.)

Edited November 12, 2022 by Kapo

[Lans]

I would consider myself as one of the "nostalgia players". Now, while I saw early news of SR, I wasn't keeping tabs on it so I only joined earlier this year (I guess I am now getting closer to almost 1 year mark of joining). So at least of the balance changes that I have seen, I thought SR team was very mindful of PvE impact even as they made changes for PvP. I don't think it makes sense to do it any other way and feels to me, some just don't want any change.

 

So how many unique players for PvE vs PvP and how many players actually play both? Just wondering if there is only a handful of PvE players playing a lot of games as opposed to many PvP players playing a few games. Probably not but I do think the presented data is a bit lacking.

 

I assume to play some original version of game, it'll require both separate older game client as well as a separate server. If it is mostly just a minimum one time human cost (dev resource)  to set it all up then I think it would be nice also (assuming server resource is small enough to manage). Actually, I am wondering if a added bonus would be being able to view old replays (if anyone has them around and/or can dig it up in the interwebs somehow). 

[Sacriefice]

I suspect there is a way to revert to an older version e.g. Twilight Edition or would it be enough to get the game files from an older CD?
Otherwise you'd have to undo every known change and only get an approximation of what it used to be.

Restoring the latest EA version would probably be relatively simple, but you'd still have to set up separate servers and accounts. Of course everyone playing Skylords would have to re-acquire every card, but the original game doesn't have any means of acquiring free bfp outside that horrible old Play4Free system. So you either give everyone every card (might ruin the point of a TCG) or you'd have to apply some changes to the classic version anyway. 

There are a few changes in SR I'm not super happy with, but generally there is no way I'm going back to a classic version.
SR has way more 'good cards' that are worth using, QoL changes etc..
Maybe in the future we get some achievements to clear campaign maps only with a Twilight Edition cards or PVP/sparring options that allows us to limit usable cards (picks/bans) to achieve the same. This would be sufficient nostalgia for me.

[Kubik]

We do not have source code for the game, for the current version, or any previous one.

All changes we did are kind of extensions to the latest version of the game, and we can relatively easily remove all these extensions, but for that server would need to be written again (or we could use our old version of the server with all the bugs that was there).

We could also try to selectively remove "extensions" we did to keep the server as same as possible to the current version, which would only shift the work elsewhere.

We also can relatively easily remove all balancing changes, and use current server, with disabled anti-cheat (instead of spending time on implementing anti-cheat for that specific version).

But to go to any older version of the game we would need to redo everything we did to make this version work, it would take less than 7 years to do similar thing for the second time, but still too much time to be spend on something only few people (if any at all) would actually use. So no getting a CD would not be enough to get an older version to work.

[Cocofang]

@Kubik What would be the easiest and most straight forward solution when it comes to making an older version (for example the Sunset-BattleForge version the game shut down with) available? Akin to how the test-server is available.

[Raxaaa]

the new cards are great, but changing the old is also the reason why i lost fun playing the game.

Edited November 15, 2022 by Raxaaa

[BoltyGER]

I play since Stress Test and in my eyes i don't know why it is such a problem having bug fixes, balance changes and else, the game has reformed pretty good, new content is what thrived me to have more fun with this game, since if you completed everything theres not much to do then farming gold and bfp. New content with the recent card changes and the new cards itself bring in more farming and more enjoyment to work and test out new deck combinations and as we know the game is actually being worked on, instead of keeping it on one spot all the time. It may be extensions but its still a so called DLC content which gets added to the game. Custom Events or Season Events also give it a nice touch which i really liked already just like as the Special Halloween Event which was very fun to play! It was something new and challenging and i hope you guys never stop,

Additionally i would like to know what kind of playerbase is leaving and not liking the changes are people from PVE so mad or PVP people? Since i know theres always this huge problem of nerfing/buffing cards since affects PVP and PVE matches.