August 15, 2019

This Dev Insight is a bit different from the previous ones we’ve done. Instead of talking about things we have already released, we want to talk about a few big things to come, and the reasonings behind them. This primarily covers two subjects:

1. Card balancing changes.
2. Changes to our ‘Standard’ mode.

As can be expected for any competitive games with a lot of moving parts and customizability, there are always a lot of discussions going on about things players consider too weak, too strong, frustrating to play against, and, in our case, there have been a few discussions basically just asking the questions, “why aren’t we changing more of these things?” So let’s start there.

Balancing Physical Play vs Digital Play

One of the goals of Lightseekers has always been to try to keep its physical and digital counterparts as closely connected as possible; so that players of the physical game can replicate a majority of their physical experience in a digital environment. This has often been a primary drive behind why things have not changed as readily as they could have -because it causes rifts between the two versions of the game.

However, when it comes to card balancing and what we can and cannot change, we have come to the decision to simply do what we feel is best for each version of the game individually. There are already some major factors that the physical side of the game supports that the digital game doesn’t and, as a result, the digital game has had to wait for physical parity.

When we have designed and balanced waves of cards from a competitive point of view, we have historically done so in two ways:

1. With 1-vs-1, best-of-3 match-ups in mind, where players can utilise sideboards and play under time restrictions.
2. From early days, we also balanced a lot with multiplayer in mind, where the dynamics of playing three or more players simply solved many issues that could crop up in 1-vs-1.

None of these apply to the digital game. The former (best of 3) is because we don’t want to impose long best-of-3 sessions on a user base whose play patterns don’t align with it. Players typically have multiple, but shorter sessions in a day, and we don’t want ‘Ranked’ play to become a big time commitment and suffer longer queues as a result. The latter (multiplayer) is simply a massive undertaking in regards to workload, and also fragments queues further.

This means that the ability to counterplay stronger decks is much more restricted, meaning that certain playstyles become less viable, and the variety of decks is lower than we’d like it to be.

Using Old Cards

The card pool of Lightseekers is split into ‘Standard’ cards and ‘Legacy’ cards. There have been a few reasons for this, in order to improve the competitive environment:

1. To “get rid” of some cards that are simply too strong.
2. To make it easier to open up the design space for new cards, without overcrowding certain areas, making it too easy to build “perfect decks”.
3. To generate some enforced variety and change-ups of decks.

However, this has created a lot of heated debates and some rifts between players. People that invested time or money into getting cards that are now ‘Legacy’ don’t necessarily want to see that go to waste, and they have decks that they enjoy and want to keep playing.

As mentioned previously, there will be a ‘Casual (Standard)’ queue coming in a future update. For us, this is not really enough. One of the reasons why these players use their decks in Casual is simply because there are no other environments to use them in. A problem with creating a second ‘Ranked’ mode for Legacy is also that we fracture the player base further, and it also suffers from the things that the above bullet points are trying to solve.

So, What Are We Going to Do?

First of all, everything listed here is already well in development, and is currently being playtested. However, it’s still some time away from release (we can’t give any exact dates yet), but we’d also like to hear any feedback on these changes before we get too far, so that we can make any further changes or adjustments if we can improve it further.

Card Balancing Changes

We are going to apply a lot of card balancing changes to cards in the digital game. These will not apply to physical erratas (a few erratas might be cherry-picked for physical as well, but it will be treated separately). This does mean that a lot of cards will be behaving differently in physical and digital play. We know this isn’t ideal at all, but as mentioned before we have to do what we feel is right for both games in their own ecosystem.

Since we are still in the process of playtesting this, we’re not too comfortable to outline exactly which cards are changing. But, to give you an insight into just how big this endeavour is, we can share some details with you:

– At the time of writing, 401 cards have changed in some way (not including any of the upcoming Wave 5 cards).
– Some of these cards have simply changed rarity (due to the ‘Changes to Standard’ as described below), but a majority of them are mechanical changes.
– Most mechanical changes are simply minor adjustments to the balancing of cards.
This includes anything from increasing or reducing values, changing which Elements are Superior on a Hero, changing the weights of Items, or changing around some of the corners on Buffs.
A number of cards have received complete redesigns.

While we can’t share a full list of cards right now, here are some of the objectives we’ve had behind these changes:

– We want ‘Removal’ to feel a bit fairer between the Orders.
All six primary ‘Removal’ cards (Pathfinder, Shadow Puppet, Crystal Leech, Reckless Spirit, Thunder Slug, and Hammerdown Enforcer) are currently being tested as ‘Burn’ cards and all of them have a conditional way to increase the Remove amount to 2 or apply a negative side effect if it’s always a flat 2 (similar to what Hammerdown Enforcer currently does).

– We want to encourage a greater variety in Hero use.
A common trend you will be able to spot is that we are removing a lot (but not all) of the “this can’t be increased by effects” clause from Hero cards. It’s Leo’s time to shine!
We are looking at ways to make some of the straight-up ‘Draw’ Heroes a bit less straightforward in their playstyle.
There’s a lot of manipulation on Heroes that we don’t feel is up to par (or might even be too good).

– We want to open up some new avenues for ‘Family’ play.
The use of Family tags in effects was first introduced in Kindred (Wave 3), meaning Awakening and Mythical cards have no such tie-ins. This means that a big chunk of our card pool was designed without these things in mind. This is something we want to rectify, so you will be seeing some ‘Family’ related effects making their way into older cards.

– We want to encourage more Buff play.
Some of the design choices we’ve made with the upcoming changes are focused around making it less efficient to run decks containing nothing but Attack and Defend cards, alongside offering some more different incentives for combining such cards with Buffs, while also toning down the “blind spikes” a bit.

– We want to trim down survivability.
One of the very first things we decided in regards to balancing when the game was first created, in order to make the game feel a bit more swingy, was to have healing balanced around an extra point compared to damage. This was alongside the idea that we’d just have less ways to generate perpetual healing and fewer raw healing cards in general. However, the options of ways to survive and recur cards has increased a lot with time, so we are toning down some of the survivability options slightly.

– We want to rein in recursion a bit.
Recursion and stall has always gone hand in hand, and we want to reduce the raw amount of defences that can easily be brought back from the discard pile in order to somewhat reduce the likelihood of a player “running out of damage”. (Without simultaneously devolving into ‘all aggro’.)

Changes to Standard

We are taking a completely new view on what ‘Standard’ is and how it changes. One of the exciting things about new Waves coming out is in how it affects ‘Standard’ play. However, these things tend to settle down relatively quickly, after which point changes take a bit longer to evolve. Additionally, players always have the previous Waves of Standard cards to rely on, and many simply adjust their existing decks a bit, as opposed to making new ones, which often leaves the game feeling quite samey despite the influx of cards.
We want to make these shake-ups happen a bit more frequently, without always having to rely on new Waves, and without leaving players without decks or the–to some–daunting task of having to build new decks from scratch.

With this update, and alongside the digital release of Wave 5, we will take our 5 Waves and effectively split them into 9 smaller Sets.
One of the Sets will be the ‘Core Set’. This will always be part of Standard. The remaining cards will be divided into Sets numbered from 1 to 8. In many cases, cards from the same Waves will be kept together, but this will not always be the case, and a fair amount of cards have moved around quite a lot. This spread of cards will even include some of the Wave 5 cards (even if most of them will come to live in Sets 7 and 8).

At any given point, Standard will consist of 5 of these numbered Sets, while the remaining 3 are Legacy. Every two months, Standard will change up; the previous 3 Legacy Sets will become Standard, and 3 of the Standard Sets will become Legacy. This means that no card will be out of Standard for more than two months. The two Sets that got to stay around are then guaranteed to be among the 3 that move into Legacy in the next change-up.

For example, the first Standard Set is most likely going to be Sets 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8. After that, Sets 1, 2, and 3 will become Standard while 4, 5, and 6 go to Legacy. And it keeps on mixing up every two months. This leaves players with one Ranked Season of “new Standard” and a second Season of “probably more stable Standard” before we change it up again.
One of the challenges going into this is that a lot of decks will end up containing Legacy cards every 2 months. While some players enjoy the challenge of building new decks every two months, some players find this quite daunting. So, to alleviate this a bit, along with every change to Standard (i.e., every two months) we are also going to create 6 new starter decks; one for each Order. All players (new as well as old) will be able to take one of these 6 decks for free, to guarantee that they have a Standard viable deck at hand to play with or customize in whatever way they want.

New Waves and Battlepacks

Battlepacks will have their own little Set; simply known as the Battlepack Set. These will also be part of Standard. If any Battlepacks are discontinued, they will temporarily belong to the Core set (so that players who might just have acquired them can use them in Standard) for a little while before they become redistributed into any of the numbered Sets (which may or may not be part of Standard at the time).

For new Waves that come out, they will, for the most part, create brand new Sets. These Sets will be part of Standard upon the Wave’s release. Although, there may be some exceptions where a new Wave also brings in a couple of cards into older Sets (in case something needs adjusting).

Beyond These Changes

One of the big statements we want to make with the above changes is simply, “if we feel something is detrimental to the game, we will address it.” Cards will most likely change from time to time after this big sweeping change. We will have gotten a few things wrong, some new cards may turn up that are too strong or too weak, etc.
One thing we haven’t really done in the past is improving cards that have been too weak. The reason for this has been to keep digital and physical in sync, and if we didn’t perceive the changes as “absolutely required”, we didn’t do them. With this new approach to how we balance the digital game, you will also start seeing some of these improvements coming in. As a matter of fact, many of the aforementioned changes have been to make weak cards stronger.

Additionally, cards may be moving between Sets from time to time. We have put a lot of effort into trying to find suiting Sets that cards can belong to. The goal has been to have them in Sets where they have enough synergies to be viable, but we have also purposefully separated some synergistic cards in such a way that how you play them and what you play them with might change from one Standard composition to another.

Finally, please be aware that this doesn’t mean we will go after and nerf every single deck that is “good”. Each case will be evaluated individually.
As usual, we would love to hear your thoughts on this! None of the above is set in stone yet, and some things are bound to change over the next couple of months.

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July 29, 2019

It’s time for Mountain, Nature and Dread to get some Battlepack attention; the second of our exclusive Battlepacks have arrived, and are now live in-store!

In each Battlepack, you’ll find guaranteed and exclusive cards to boost each of your decks; read on to see what the latest cards can bring to your tactics!

The latest 3 Battlepacks include:
– An Exclusive Hero card!
– 6 New Buff cards!
– 3 New Defend cards!

We have reduced the price of each of the Battlepacks from 500 gems to 250 gems, while removing the booster packs from each bundle. We’ve done this due to feedback that the packs were too expensive for all players, and that you all just wanted to get your hands on the new cards!

And here is what each Order can expect in the latest Battlepacks:

Mountain

Nature

Dread

    

Simply head to the Lightseekers Store and see what the new Battlepacks can do for your decks!

 

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July 17, 2019

Updated

The 9th and final zone for ‘A Colossal Find’ is out! With their new ally, the group continues their trek through Dreadmire, towards Fort Havoc…
The second and third bosses of this week’s ‘A Colossal Find’ zone will feature a sneak-peak of SIX brand new Wave 5 cards!
Anyone who logs into the app before July 24th, UTC, will be given a FREE booster pack, as compensation for last week’s Campaign that didn’t include one.

Upcoming

This upcoming weekend will be Nature weekend! From 12 PM Friday (UTC), July 19th, until 12 PM the following Monday (UTC), earn double XP when playing Nature and gain access to a fantastic Nature bundle in the store!

 

Bug Fixes

– Neither ‘Sparkback Channeler’ nor ‘Stubborn Worker’ will now rotate if you opt to NOT use their effects (consistent with cards such as Flying Fortress).
– ‘Ghost Warp’ will now correctly only trigger its damage once if an effect discards multiple cards.
– When the ‘Deep into the Crater’ campaign next comes up, it will give its full rewards.
– Hulking Chargeclaw will now move cards face down.
– Biting Blizzard should no longer have its damage reduced if Defend cards were drawn or discarded through a previous Buff during the Buff Phase.

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July 10, 2019

Updated

Zone 8 for ‘A Colossal Find’ is out. The group has landed in Dreadmire and make an unexpected ally.

The third boss of this week’s ‘A Colossal Find’ zone will feature a sneak-peak of two brand new Wave 5 cards!

Cage of Oppression

A few weeks ago, we changed the healing threshold of ‘Cage of Oppression’ to 2/1/1 (down from 2/2/2). We’ve now had a little while to collect data and wanted to share some of it with you.

In the two weeks leading up to the change, Cage of Oppression featured in 3.2% of all Ranked decks. Across all games lasting at least 1 minute (average of 13 actions per game), these decks had a win rate of 52.1%. As games got longer, beyond 10 minutes (average of 18 actions per game), the win rate got lower; down to 46.4%.

The weeks following the nerf saw some unexpected results. First of all, its presence has gone up to 4.6% of all Ranked decks. The 1+ minute win rate is at 57.4% and it 10+ minute win rate is at 51.1%. We have some theories as to exactly why this is the case, but jumping straight to the outcome: we have changed all three corners to trigger from 1 healing.

Again, we’ll keep a close eye on how this unfolds.

Upcoming

To celebrate this week’s release of the Astral, Storm, and Tech Battlepacks, this weekend will be an Order weekend for all three of them! From noon Friday (UTC) until noon Monday (UTC), you will be earning double XP when playing with any of these three Orders, and some special deals will be available for them in the store!

Bug Fixes

Taleweaver Cassini now has 31 health. This had always been her intended health, but the Battlepack card was from a slightly older card import and had missed this somewhat late adjustment.

Abyss Tentacle should now be correctly increased by Amplification Hex.

Gutbelch Shaman should now be properly restarted when cards are discarded.

Keywords for the Battlepack cards should now properly show up when inspected on the board.

Fixed a typo in one of the Adventure Mode lore bits.

Tainted Ooze in the ‘Deep Into the Crater’ campaign should now be correctly shown as an Elemental.

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July 5, 2019

You’ve heard the news and you’ve seen the preview, now you must be wondering, what exactly IS a Battlepack?! Wonder no longer, we’re here to tell you all about our upcoming Battlepack release this Monday 8th July.

On Monday, we will be release 3 new Battlepacks; one for Astral, one for Storm and one for Tech. Don’t worry; Mountain, Nature and Dread will get their Battlepacks at the end of the month, and we will be sharing what the contain very soon.

But right now we can tell you more about what you’ll be getting in a few days time!

Each Battlepack is guaranteed to contain the following:

– One New Hero Card
– 3 copies of 3 New Action Cards
– 1 Uprising Booster Pack
– 2 Kindred Booster Packs

Each pack will cost 500 gems, and are great ways to augment your existing decks with guaranteed new and powerful cards. And we can now show you those cards!

Astral

  

Storm

Tech

We hope you enjoy the new Battlepacks and as always please let us know your thoughts on our Discord, Twitter and Facebook channels!

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July 3, 2019

Tomorrow on the 4th of July we bring you a brand you Independence campaign!  So get your fireworks ready and get ready to take on a new adventure!

The campaign contains 3 major bosses starting off with Liberty Blossom.
Miss Blossom will be playing lots of buffs to keep her in high spirits! Next off is Uncle Vandil; you will want to watch out for his combos as he just wants to get the party started. And finally, you get to play as Talia Fireborn, try and keep the party going by setting up the best firework display Tantos has EVER seen!

For each boss you beat, you will receive a new Independence chest (which you will also be able to buy in the store). Each chest contains an amazing 3 rewards, with a chance for EXCLUSIVE rewards which include:

ALTERNATE HERO ART cards. There are 6 to collect!
Playmats and Card Backs (3 Playmats, 1 Card Back to collect)
10 Avatars (5 common, 3 uncommon, 2 rare)

 

There will additionally be an Independence Bundle available:
1x Bundle of 10 Independence chests for the price of 7 (3 free!) and 1 guaranteed ALTERNATE HERO ART card!

The campaign will be active until the 20th of July, all Premium Loot Chests in the store during this time will be replaced with Independence Chests. That’s not all! Over the weekend (July 4th until July 8th, 12:00:00 UTC), you will earn 50% bonus XP in all Orders.

Good luck Lightseekers, from wherever you are, we wish you a great weekend and hope you enjoy our Independence campaign!
The PlayFusion Team

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Upcoming Content

Battlepacks

From Monday, July 8th, Battlepacks will be available to purchase in the store!
To kick it off, we will have the Astral, Storm, and Tech Battlepacks, each one including full playsets of 4 brand new Wave 5 cards–3 Action Cards and 1 Hero–along with 2 Kindred booster packs and 1 Uprising booster pack. More news on this over the weekend!

Independence Campaign

From the 4th of July until end of day July 19th (UTC), we’ll be running a special holiday event – Read more about it here!

 

 

Main New Live Features

Copy Opponent’s Deck – You can now copy the deck of your opponent at the end of a match. If you do not wish for your deck to be copied, you can turn off deck sharing in Settings.
Achievement Leaderboards – A new leaderboard has been created where players are ranked by Achievement Points.
Inbox – You now have a personalised inbox where you can receive game messages. Access it from the top bar.

 

 

Adventures

Adventure Leaderboards – All Adventure bosses now have individual leaderboards based on the highscores against that particular boss.
Zone 7 for ‘A Colossal Find’ is now available; Ferrus escapes Steadfast Peaks and meets up with some strange noxin.
You now require level 10 or higher to access ‘A Colossal Find’.
Heroes in Adventure now have an icon at the top of their portrait to show how many Lightstones they have equipped.
The ‘end of game’ screen for Adventure bosses has been sped up.
You no longer see the score and objective screen if you lose to an Adventure boss.

 

Weekly Campaigns

You now require level 20 or higher to access the weekly campaign.
5 new weekly campaigns have been created and added to the weekly rotation.
The weekly campaigns now run from Wednesday morning to Monday morning.

 

Deck Builder

You can now filter the deck builder by Wave number. The filter bar is now scrollable (scroll to the right to get to these!).
You can now hide Legacy cards in the deck builder.
A graphic has been added to the deck builder to show which button to add cards with when in controller mode.
You can now filter your decks by Order on the deck selection screen.
11 new Challengers have been added. (These are the AI opponents that challenge you every few days.)
The ‘X’ button has been mapped to ‘Play’ on deck select menus, to let you get into the game faster when in controller mode.

 

Bug Fixes

Some broken animations on the Adventure map have been fixed.
You will no longer be notified of a campaign ending if you have already finished it.
The deck summary of Draft decks should now be correct.
How many power cards you have should now be visible in-game on all resolutions.
The ‘+’ and ‘-’ button shortcuts in controller mode will now properly work if you try to leave a PvP queue.
Vibrant Plumetail will now work properly if your discard pile is empty.
Colax in ‘A Colossal Find’ should no longer lock up your game if you have no Action Buffs among your top 4 cards.

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June 28, 2019

Hey Lightseekers, 

Next week we’ll be kicking off our next season of Organized Play for Lightseekers, just in time for you to experiment with some new strategies found in Uprising, which releases on our new store this Friday (keep an eye out on our news pages for when our store goes live!). We have a few changes to our previous season, reflected by the feedback we have received from the community. 

Firstly, we are introducing Casual and Competitive event structures that will fit around our existing tiers. In short, Bronze and Silver tiers will be Casual events while Gold and Platinum tiers will be Competitive. The reason for this change? We want casual events to fit the playstyle we’ve come to know that Lightseekers players around the world want – a way to play with their friends and family. 

So how does this work? We will chat with stores worldwide to get them an Organized Play offering that fits them; whether that’s regular league play with a core group of players or perhaps more demo days to bring in a brand new group of adventurers to enjoy Lightseekers. There is no “one size fits all” for Organized Play, hence we want to give stores and therefore the players (that’s you!) the chance to play things the way they want to. 

Casual events can be run by any store and will come with a range of Organized Play goodies of all shapes and sizes, including new Uprising Playmats! We are also going to be including unique digital prizes as well (which we will reveal in the near future), meaning we are increasing our store range!

 

Stores will be able to reach out to us to run our latest Competitive Events (Gold/Platinum), which will be the new way for the most experienced players to win exclusive and remarkable prizes with their best decks. Our store team will qualify each store that wishes to run one of our Competitive events, and once approved will have full reign to create a Gold Event, signifying that this is one of the top events in the Lightseekers Calendar. We will be adding Platinum events to the calendar at a later date!

And last but not least, we are going to be bringing Lightseekers to Gencon in just 5 weeks, where we will be running the Lightseekers Gen Con Championship. We’ve updated our prizing to include a larger selection of ultra-rare items, so head to the event page to sign up. We are also hosting Draft Matches, Sealed Tournaments and Casual Demos throughout all of the 4 days of Gencon, and we can’t wait to see you there at one of the biggest gaming conventions in the world!

Thank you all, 

The PlayFusion Team 

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June 26, 2019

Uprising! 

Now we know some of you avid Lightseekers have already picked up our latest Set: Uprising from your favourite store or at an event such as UKGE! However this Friday we will be opening our Shopify store for you to order directly from us. Keep an eye out for further news on this when we launch!

Gold Event 

We have the first SEALED Gold Event this weekend in Sheffield, with Uprising legal too.
If you haven’t signed up yet and want to join in the fun, there is still time! Check out more information here: https://bit.ly/2Za3Bi3

 

Latest Patch Notes 

Zone 6 for ‘A Colossal Find’ is now available; join the hunt for the stolen colossus!

To go with the upcoming kreebal weekend (see below), an achievement for playing Kreebal cards has been added.

Cage of Oppression has been slightly changed – Instead of rotating when you heal for 2 or more, the healing threshold is now based on its corner values, which have been set to 2/1/1.

 

Upcoming

This weekend, from noon Friday, UTC, until noon Monday, UTC, there will be a special Kreebal Bundle available in the store. This bundle contains a guaranteed Kreebal card from each Order along with a copy of Epic Banquet! 

 

Bug Fixes

Gust Frog now correctly increases self-damage from Combos.

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June 19, 2019

Updated

Zone 5 for ‘A Colossal Find’ is now available; Colax the Historian has made his way to Lushlost Forest to investigate the colossi temple, but he is not alone.

Upcoming

This coming weekend will be Midsummer weekend, celebrating the Solar Maiden, Mina! From 12 PM Friday (UTC), June 21st, until 12 PM the following Monday (UTC), any Draft reward chests you open (except the Gold Champion chest) will also contain a guaranteed Astral card. Additionally, there will be a great deal on Common-Free Astral boosters in the store!

Bug Fixes

Anchored Soul now also protects Combo Buffs.

Ancestral Communion will no longer act unexpectedly if cards you play also draw cards or shuffle the deck.

Starhorn Tusker should no longer increase damage done if you don’t have access to Solar.

Treetop Tribunal can no longer be removed on its 4th corner.

Time-Jumper Rylox will now work correctly if you play multiple Time or Lightning cards before the other one.

The animation for cards moving from discard pile to deck while Anti-Matter Field is in play will now work correctly.

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