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Remove the BG10 achievement please


Volin

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Let me start by introducing myself. I played Battle Forge since it released and returned about 1 month ago. Without previous knowledge of impactful cards for PvE and knowledge about the basic mechanics of this game ( right camp from tower spawns waves, nature for hand holding shamans till end game, mass cc to take objectives first, void pool management, .... ) the entry skill level for this game is insanely high. In normal RPvE 9s I encounter way too many players who fear to loose their troops when taking a camp, so they stack army instead of learning how to micro or efficiently utilize what they have. The rank says nothing about a player efficiency in RPvE sadly.

On the 5th day into the game I cleared the full campaign  on advanced, about a week later everything on expert. Today I cleared everything which gives a card/booster beside Promo WBG.
It is possible to clear the start camps with all 4 elements. I've seen people who previously kick me out of lobby, because I had a lvl 60 deck and silver rank in rpve 9, play in another match with me and wait till they have a harvester to clear T3 camp although I ran Fire and basically solo it or ran Frost and homesoil it clear.

RPvE 10 is anotehr beast, it raises the difficulty by 1000% while rewards are maybe 10% better. In 9s you don't have split starts or both camps directly at your orb, which needs the other 3 to help you right at the start. Rarely I get a random lobby where players don't play egositically hoping to succeed alone. The only lobbys where I somehow can expect people to use teamwork is when i see multiple Fire start decks. It somehow is a unwritten rule that people help each other out with ( super expensive ) mine or/and (cheap) eruption.

The achievment took me about 2 weeks. It is unreasonable to ask a real beginner to reach that level ever, without putting in real effort and watch guides, videos which are badly voiced by mostly germans havin a bottleneck weird accent when talkin english xD.

I bet 80% of those gold rank and up, are not actively reading up on forum or guides and just play the game as they like = won't ever succeed in 10s without being carryed while not even realizing they are carryed because they succeeded with Lost Ships without wheels and the energy somehow never ran out, but that only happens when somebody plays fire.

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hi Pok100, you are 100% correct in saying that rPvE 10 is an entirely different beast and that one cannot be expected to reach that level without properly investing time to learning how to play it the proper way. 90% of beginners/intermediates get hard carried without knowing it, recently and Volin and I have left those without a proper deck to fend for themselves to actually show them that their deck and/or strat is not up to 10s standard. I've even put a 1000bfp bounty on motm 10 to highlight to players exactly how bad 10s can actually get, sadly the motm this month isn't even the worst possible scenario one can encounter. The veteran rPvE 10 community are all open to teaching new players the basics if you bring a proper deck and you don't have a 'I already know everything' attitude. I often send those wanting to learn 10s the proper way to Volin because he is arguably one of our most experienced rPvE players in the game and is an amazing teacher. Volin will happily spend as much time with you as required until you understand the basics, it's not uncommon for him to spend 3-4hrs helping people starting out. People don't need to read guides, Volin has a Twitch channel with videos explaining how to play 10s for people who are interested and as an added bonus he has a lovely German accent even an Aussie like me can understand xD

 

Edited by Little_Ducky
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4 hours ago, Little_Ducky said:

 if you bring a proper deck and you don't have a 'I already know everything' attitude.

 

There you have one of the major issues already. The game does not tell you what cards are good or how to efficiently cc with T1. For example one can skip shamans if enemy is S sized and you use hurricane (this comes mainly from experiencing PvP). Anotehr one would be to utilize forsakens ability and willingly sacrifice them to clear a camp with motivate on the lowest health unit. Players need to learn to conquer and stop fearing to loose troops. Instead I see too many just run Nox without ever using their skill and hiding behind a soulsplicer when playing shadow, no wonder they won't ever learn how to capture the next camp without going one orb higher. Though, this is more of a speed issue.

How would you be able to bring a proper deck at gold 2/ PvE rank 10 ? At that point if you did not already knew which cards you are going to need in future, you WONT ever have em. A beginner only sees how their T4 Grinder Army, grind their ways through enemy camps, half of their deck is T4. They probably invested in XL units which won't clear anyhing as soon as they run into LS/Twlight CC. So why even bother playing anything below T4, when in RPvE 9 you can reach T4 with just spamming or have the other ally go in first so his troops die and yours stay alive.

RPvE 10 needs people to focus on a strong, efficient and planned early game. This includes ridiculously over priced cards like Mine for fire, Shaman+Dryad blue for nature, Frost Mage / Homesoil + Icebarrier and for shadow Forsaken/Nox + motivate/soulsplicer.
When looking at this, one can see a clear trend = nature is extremly expensive for starters because it's the most versatile throughout PvE. In contrast you look at fire and get no benefit for PvE Maps besides RPvE. Since the most beginners learn that there are no healing units besides Shaman on T1, they go for hand holding nature. This will drain their BFP early on.

To make this short : At Rank 10 you do not have the card pool / proper deck for RPvE 10 ! You won't even learn what is needed without investing effort learning. They go for stupid stuff like Frost Avatar, who won't ever help him clear RPvE 10.

In conclusion : I would suggest to just raise the bar on the restriction. Raise it to PvE rank 20. At that rank collectors probably have a sufficient pool to make any deck they need, since they just do daily boosters/BFP for a looooong time. This would atleast open up the chance to learn RPvE 10 without being limited by card pool.

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56 minutes ago, Pok100 said:

I am 27th on 10 solo 😄 Can I have it ?

Clear both camps in T2 row of the 4p motm 10 starting with anything except fire T1 in under 8mins the 1000bfp is yours. If you're wondering mana wings and shamans don't work, many have told me 😄

In all seriousness if we are talking about locking the achievement behind ranks, archon (pve rank 14) is reasonable because it is at that rank where players have all the cards in the game (possibly only missing a few promos) therefore they are not playing it for the sole purpose of acquiring boosters. Locking the achievement behind 9s will have zero impact because being able to play 9s has zero correlation with knowing how to cope with 10s.

Edited by Little_Ducky
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  • 2 weeks later...

Doing again a lot 10s lately. Yeah doing a lot of gate keeping - and sometimes you get some most pleasant groups, but it is crazy how many people I offend because I kick them.

Still I hear often that they are driven by that boosters. And today I had a rank 20 who needed a longer explaination why wheels are a kinda super bad idea in 10s where everybody usually should play a better buff via spells.

I know it probably is senseless to dig this out, but I need to share my feelings somewhere to keep my patience ingame.

And ofc always even before the achievement there were a lot people comming that did not understand how big the step up from 9s to 10s is. But it is really crazy this days.
 

 

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I dare say we have at least 5x the number of '10s' players but only a dozen players have managed to beat motm 10, this speaks volumes about quality vs quantity. I'm hearing a lot of 'I'll wait for an easy month to get my 10 boosters', it's disappointing to say the least but sadly it is a reflection of the current state of the 10s scene

Edited by Little_Ducky
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30 minutes ago, DieToPlay said:

If fire t1 is the only faction to clear 10's reliably, aren't the other factions supposed to be buffed?

I'm curious since I was told that the game is being balanced around casual play 🙂

1. Ofc it is doable with any color. But you should know it is a bit more complicated why fire is commonly asked for.

2.  10s are not casual content at all?

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4 hours ago, Volin said:

1. Ofc it is doable with any color. But you should know it is a bit more complicated why fire is commonly asked for.

How do you beat a lost souls map where you get insta attacked by Lost Vigils at t1 without even spawning a unit with anything except fire? If players dont work togther with Eruptions its game over at least in my experience.

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3 minutes ago, Fundus said:

How do you beat a lost souls map where you get insta attacked by Lost Vigils at t1

Very good 10 random groups just skip any LS with air-T2 immediately. This is so out of line in balancing, that you only play this as motm if you have a sane mind 😄

That's how I was taught it by the master, and that is how I see it myself these days🙂

Edited by Volin
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no reward in playing any faction except fire for BG 10's, unless you go for a shadow start with support from team for early resource boosters.

Ofc there will be some situations where you might need the occasional nature player for a random MOTK or some cheese roots tactic, but overall this is quite rare based on my experience in BG speedruns.

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11 hours ago, DieToPlay said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there is no reward in playing any faction except fire for BG 10's, unless you go for a shadow start with support from team for early resource boosters.

Ofc there will be some situations where you might need the occasional nature player for a random MOTK or some cheese roots tactic, but overall this is quite rare based on my experience in BG speedruns.

See it exactly the same!

Fire lets you work together over the 4 starting positions and no other color comes close to that. Yeah Shadow rewards with early RB, what is a HUGE advantage if executed correctly, but that is rather a speedrunners topic imo. Even more as it helps vastly to know the map to utilize the Shadow start perfectly.

Also I share your inventory on Nature starts, yes they can be helpful in very certain situations, but here you also have a big advantage to know the map in advance (and utilize that as a team). Plus this comes with the downside that either the Nature starter needs to be bombed through with the help of Fire players or is way slower in a scenario where time is pressing even if you are not speedrunning at all. Plus you have less firepower for the other 3 fire-starters. Just to mention that.

That is the reason why all solid 10 players usually choose a Fire start for random matches. As soon as we are speaking about motm/speedrun things may change ofc.

One more reason for fire starts: Even if you have 4 really good players, every few matches one of them will missplay slightly and need some help, there's so many things that can go wrong in a BG10   T1 phase. Happens to all of us. Here you need fire starters or the player that made a mistake is blown from the map.

And just to stress this out once again: Of course any color is viable, even more in perfect teams. Kybaka for example plays sometimes an excellent frost start. Seen Treim starting with any colour or a group around Donaar and Gameover played 10s even with a pure frost setup over the whole team. That is totally possible, but for above reasons nothing that is ever suiting in a random group.

Same goes by the way for the rest of the deck ^^ Yeah ofc you can play almost any faction (with small exceptions) in 4 player 10s. But it will lower your win-rate drastically as certain situations are not possible when not some quite meta decks are around.
 

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1 hour ago, Volin said:

See it exactly the same!

Fire lets you work together over the 4 starting positions and no other color comes close to that. Yeah Shadow rewards with early RB, what is a HUGE advantage if executed correctly, but that is rather a speedrunners topic imo. Even more as it helps vastly to know the map to utilize the Shadow start perfectly.

Also I share your inventory on Nature starts, yes they can be helpful in very certain situations, but here you also have a big advantage to know the map in advance (and utilize that as a team). Plus this comes with the downside that either the Nature starter needs to be bombed through with the help of Fire players or is way slower in a scenario where time is pressing even if you are not speedrunning at all. Plus you have less firepower for the other 3 fire-starters. Just to mention that.

That is the reason why all solid 10 players usually choose a Fire start for random matches. As soon as we are speaking about motm/speedrun things may change ofc.

One more reason for fire starts: Even if you have 4 really good players, every few matches one of them will missplay slightly and need some help, there's so many things that can go wrong in a BG10   T1 phase. Happens to all of us. Here you need fire starters or the player that made a mistake is blown from the map.

And just to stress this out once again: Of course any color is viable, even more in perfect teams. Kybaka for example plays sometimes an excellent frost start. Seen Treim starting with any colour or a group around Donaar and Gameover played 10s even with a pure frost setup over the whole team. That is totally possible, but for above reasons nothing that is ever suiting in a random group.

Same goes by the way for the rest of the deck ^^ Yeah ofc you can play almost any faction (with small exceptions) in 4 player 10s. But it will lower your win-rate drastically as certain situations are not possible when not some quite meta decks are around.
 

I agree with what you said, that's why I'm saying maybe it's time to look for some t1 changes if fire is so dominant. By that, I don't mean to nerf fire t1.

Edited by DieToPlay
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4 hours ago, DieToPlay said:

I agree with what you said, that's why I'm saying maybe it's time to look for some t1 changes if fire is so dominant. By that, I don't mean to nerf fire t1.

I don't think that would make much sense tbh.

RPvE 10 is kinda specific to do drastic balancing changes to whole factions, every color has its own strenghts and weaknesses and at RPvE 10 fire happens to be the best, don't see a problem with that.

I mean in my very own opinion fire t1 is always the best choise for everything but I doubt that everyone would agree with that 😉

 

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7 hours ago, DefAnske said:

I don't think that would make much sense tbh.

RPvE 10 is kinda specific to do drastic balancing changes to whole factions, every color has its own strenghts and weaknesses and at RPvE 10 fire happens to be the best, don't see a problem with that.

I mean in my very own opinion fire t1 is always the best choise for everything but I doubt that everyone would agree with that 😉

 

DieToPlay meant that it can be good idea to make other factions more useful for T1 part

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41 minutes ago, Loriens said:

DieToPlay meant that it can be good idea to make other factions more useful for T1 part

However, this will automatically bring you into conflict with PVP balancing, which unfortunately will probably be weighted higher.

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7 hours ago, Loriens said:

DieToPlay meant that it can be good idea to make other factions more useful for T1 part

This^, but aren't you guys bored of the same default decks?

t1 fire > shadow phoenix > double shadow for frenetic spells and infect

t1 shadow > resource booster > double shadow for frenetic spells and infect

 

Hopefully it's going to change soon, and not by nerfing the current combos but rather adding more good and strong cards.

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6 hours ago, Dolewan said:

However, this will automatically bring you into conflict with PVP balancing, which unfortunately will probably be weighted higher.

As the person, who is mainly responsible for PvP changes, I disagree with this. Fire is considered the best starting faction in rPvE 10, yet cards like Nomad or Mine are not even viable in PvP. While the impact on different game modes might lead to change restrictions towards a specific card, there are almost no limitations in terms of what can be done for a faction as a whole. 

To give a super oversimplified example: Add a 90 energy spell that destroys a building with 1200 or less hp (not castable on power wells/orbs). Put this on any T1 faction and it would be highly valued in rPvE 10 immediately with zero impact on PvP.

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2 hours ago, DieToPlay said:

but aren't you guys bored of the same default decks?

I can of course speak only for myself on this issue, but: Not at all!

Of course there can occur very easy 10s where the common meta starts and decks are a bit over the top, but this is more rare then maps that can even challenge a good team. And as a 10 team is (should be) a bunch of very good players you can still run for a good time on that easier maps - just for fun.

Just a few days ago I had a set where I played with a good pal that is an really good 10 player, we both played Fire into Shadow starts - and we rolled some maps where we lost 3 or 4 games in a row to the timer. Could we have won the maps with perfect execution (and probably voice for faster communication)? Yes for sure. Still none of us did a major miss-play. It was just the little things that added up (T3/4 spawners, double T3 incomes, very close T4 with boss, T3 close to Pos4 T2, a very weak team (or rather one player) on the other lane that we had to bail out instead of receiving help from that easier lane). It was often just one slight execution mistake on our side that denied our victory in the end.
And as long as you can't guarantee to win every game, it is a challenge, and as long it is fun to me.

There is a thread here in the forums were Kybaka asked for just a tiny little extension to timer of 10s. Ky is an awesome good player and many other very experienced players supported this (including myself). But as long as timer is an issue even for good groups, I see no problem with the card balancing at all. The early game in a 10 can easily take 12-15mins, so even if players are taking the best possible start, they still need a crazy long time for getting T3 and then T4 on a map - and exactly that is what I like about 10s so much. While 70-80% of a BG9 happen in T4, in a BG10 most of the map happens in the early game. This early game is most enjoyable to me, because I do not only need the best possible card setup, I also need good teamplay and perfect execution of all players.
And even tho random maps are not thaaaat random to people with a high experience level, there is still many factors that you just see as you encounter them. You need to react very quickly and accordingly, in addition to that high level of experience to know what happens if you do this or that.

And I go with the statement of Anske here:

18 hours ago, DefAnske said:

every color has its own strenghts and weaknesses

Yeah Fire starts are superior (seeing them stand-alone) in every BG level or player amount. But as we often said, Shadow has its strength in the early RB and is speedrunners choice. Fire and Shadow work insanely good together.
But see the performance and strengths of Nature and Frost also: I would make a high bet that Nature is the most used start for PvE overall. Beginners love Nature starts, they are most easy to handle and give players a good feeling. Nature can also be a good teamplayer in almost any casual pve scenario, do we need to rebalance the non-nature T1 to this level for that - I don't think so.
Frost T1 is also very popular, often seen in many BGs and cpve scenarios and the Mage alone with its superior early match CC is worth the pick. It feels most pleasant to play and we not even looking at more experienced strategys like Northern Keep for invincible units, a good dmg buff that scales great into late game, the highest dps T1 archers, an incredible good tanking unit it has on T1 and the very good CC spell.

I feel that every T1 has its pros and cons. And that fire is the fastest start (if seen stand alone) and that it offers more team-play options as other colors in BG 10 due to the very special circumstances in a 10 has nothing to do with a bad balance imo. Its just this special situation why it shines so bright here.

tl;dr: I feel all T1 have their pros and cons and I feel it not boring to bring the same start to a certain situation over and over again, as long at it is still challenging.

 

EDIT-PS: Don't get me wrong, if the team finds a way to strengthen other T1 colors in BG10, without impacting pvp and without burning too much dev-resources you could say nothing against that! But I fear this would cost too much resources for a thing that is not really a problem, this issue is not worth much dev time, if at all (to me personally). For me this is a non-issue for above reasons.

 

Edited by Volin
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Can only really speak to the original 4 factions in rpve 10, but in my experience the only real scenario where Nature, Frost and Shadow are basically unplayable in random maps is against Lost Vigils at t2

In every other scenario you can build robust t1 card combinations to reliably clear t2 (and I did so). That might entail 1 or at most 2 extra deckslots compared to fire starts and those factions are still slower, but they are viable if you know what you're doing.

Without any other changes the viability of those other t1's already drastically increases. I think they will still have a harder time in certain scenarios (close/double camps, treefiend/mana biest incomes at pos1/4) but that is all manageable imo.

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11 minutes ago, Treim said:

Can only really speak to the original 4 factions in rpve 10 [...]

Fire enemy can also be beaten by any faction in that skill level we are speaking about. Fire is in between the other factions usually in both T2 and T3. And even for the late game high fire power bases of fire any faction has a tool. (with very minor exceptions, looking at you with my Frost Deck, Mr Fiend of Fire)

And fun fact: Fire rpve even trys to counter a bit our strong fire start (meta) with many ugly M Counters. Sometimes against Fire you are even better with a non fire start yourself. But here too everything is doable.

Agree in everything in general, just emphasize the high skill level we are speaking about. Fire can not only solve your problems, but also the problems of your mate, what makes it absolutely superior as starting option imo.

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