Something to be clear on is that changes (or improvements) to the battle system are not intended for just people who currently consider themselves battlers. I really appreciate the feedback (and this thread beyond the bomb I lobbed in it is really valuable!) but a feature that takes up thousands of items / time / functionality on the site cannot be for a smaller and smaller group of people. I'm making notes for lots of quality of life improvements (speed is the name of the game on kumos - getting between pages and reducing the number of clicks, and just making the process faster hopefully)

When I'm talking about making broad changes to something like how you start a battle there is tons of room for intrepretation here. Moving around the site and doing quests could fill up a battle log of who you've been challenged by in that time, it doesn't need to be "you're on this page and you have to do it now or in the next 30 minutes". Things like Battle Quests would be the same and just mean that you're challenged immediately by an increasing set of opponents. Lures, items that you could craft to have opponents challenge you more often. Maybe each opponent is released with a matching lure that you can use to immediately fight them, which yeah means you'd have to grind those up from where they come from (shops? crafting? idk!) but you'd have an 'easy' avenue.

I have specific problems with how battle works now and "it works fine now" isn't it, unfortuantely.

What I'm trying to solve for:

1. Once you've beat an opponent 10 times, there isn't a lot of reason to continue going if battling isn't your main focus on the site. If you can't just select an opponent and battle it 10 times the minute it's come out, and we can make it more random (yes -- which means RNG) then we can extend the life time of opponents beyond the first thirty minutes of release
2. Scaling is wonky. The amount of work that Jason does to try and make weapons and opponents that scale with you (to make anything resembling a challenge for high level pets) is really unworkable, and just creates more failure points in the bc code. I would like to release opponents in a tier, with weapons from that tier, and expect people in that tier and above (and crafty ones below) to be able to beat it.
3. I'd like loot to always drop. I want to give these opponents a loot table (and still have promised drops after x wins, maybe even more of those, beat them 50 times and get x, 100 times and get y - replacing some of the achievement functionality here) and use that as a real method of getting items out on the site. There isn't any reason that low level opponents shouldn't be dropping needed crafting materials that battlers can sell to fund their (very expensive) activities on the site.
4. You should be able to continue getting EXP after x wins. Right now we can't because someone will build a bot that battles automatically (and they already exist - I want to make this not feel worth it!) and earns a ton of xp. If you had to be challenged (or go through battle quests or whatever) we could make it so that you always get XP (with obviously diminishing returns the more 'powerful' your pet is over the opponent)
5. I want to use battle as a more explicit way of getting items out. When we have holidays, we should have opponents that challenge you while you're doing the activies. Morostide is coming up, every time you trick or treet and get tricked you should get challenged, for example. That would fill up a battle challenge log quickly!

TLDR: I want to reward fighting opponents for the 500th time just as much as the 3rd time.

Edit: Also, we have systems in place to prevent RNG death by a thousand cuts. Battle tokens dropping is a way for us to move things into teh shop if we need to.

I'll be totally honest that I'm still going to toy around with this because it solves a lot of problems that I see with battle and how it is for us on the opposite side of the desk trying to release new opponents / weapons / etc. It's not really a separate road from some of the other work that I'm doing, since "starting a battle" is just a piece of the puzzle and can be shifted out ("click button on battle page" vs "click button on battle challenge log page") if it is really a disaster in testing!

I think I explicitly said that I'm trying to tinker around the edges to solve long standing issues with features around the site. How a battle gets started is a pretty significant part of battling, but it's not like I'm talking about changing how stats work or how weapons get used.

I know that change is difficult, and especially the idea of change without being able to see it in front of you, but change is coming.

100% agree with everything you said! Being more transparent with requirments before setting something up is a muscle we just aren't good at flexing. I'm sure it'll SHOCK everyone to hear, but especially for a lot of the earlier site, we were setting targets as we went because we had no idea what to expect, and I think that kind of mentality just kind of solidified into the way that we do it, and I'd like us to move away from that.

Also agree on things that we have that are RNG focused now that just don't feel good. I think Tempest is a good example, it's a poorly managed random event (which means you first get hit with the system choosing a random event, 1/x options, and then the 1/x chance of the event actually firing) in a system built 20 years ago - literally! I'd love to revisit that with some of the things that modern games do to make it not feel miserable - automatically making it fire after x amount of time, making it so that you could challenge her if you haven't seen her in some amount of time, etc etc. There are ways that games have adopted to make RNG not punishing that I feel like we could start to adopt! Random events in particular are something I haven't even bothered to move to Kumos yet, because I feel like we've got so many better opportunities. SBQ is an interesting example, I'd love a different and more interactive (or even just interesting) way of getting those out than shoving them into a RE.

Mentioned above, but a part of that is getting as much out of custom code as possible and shifting it to something that can be easily shown in a tooltip or explination page. The reason we can't show that now is because so much of it is hidden in the code. What I'm doing for that is essentially finding the patterns and then writing a script to find all of the items that use the same pattern and turn that into something more digestible by a newer system but it's a lot of manual work and there are a lot of items!

Finally I'm not trying to avoid "easily accessible instantly", but more trying to figure out how to thread a needle that is maybe impossible! How to make it so that there is value in repetition and coming back to the opponent for days / weeks / months / years AND making it so that it's not easily abusable or just a clicking machine (what it is now). If you could continue to earn exp and good loot from the opponent, you'd want to keep battling it when it came up and not just in service of making it to 100 or 200. I also just shouldn't worry so much about people using bots and cheating on Subeta, it's annoying but at the end of the day I should really make that a back of the mind kind of priority.

Thank you 😭 😭!! That is incredibly valuable.

I guess a basic question (for everyone) is that if a database of battle information was created, what would you want in it? I think in the past (I'm talking 15+ years when all of these decisions were made) we were trying to be more secreative and tight lipped about what how these things worked (keeping formulas hidden, not showing opponent details outside of just their stats) to make it more 'fun', and I think we've all moved a long long way past that in terms of it being fun to have to dig for information in 20 year old forums.

So, if we were going to make a battle enclyopedia, what would you want inside? Each opponent, their weapons/scrolls/etc, and what they do? What the crystals do? What the scrolls do?

Oooooooohhhhhhhhh. So it's folks who are all online and looking to battle right at that moment, getting assigned to a (i assume equally power'd) team, to fight the boss?

I like the idea a lot of co-op fights, especially if you could group up with your friends instead of randomly... 👀 Could see battle folks organizing 'runs' for people.

Oh, another thing to just drop in here before I run away 🤣 One of the big things I was considering for the homestead feature (which - per this thread and others, I've scaled back the ambition on. Instead of trying to rebuild everything from scratch, playing around the edges and making smaller improvements until the future) was "seasons", where every quarter we'd release a batch of updates all together, that fit around a theme.

One of the major pushes (for me) for seasons was that once a year we'd have a major update that included a new tier (raising the cap), new opponents in that tier, and new items using some kind of new mechanism that is included with that tier (so opponents would be using those mechanics as well). Thinking about when something like Hearthstone releases a new expansion, there are new game play mechanics and you're encouraged to keep moving forward. After a few years of those, we'd have an entirely new range of top tier weapons, and we'd be able to stop worrying so much about how the current top weapons are given out.

I haven't reconciled seasons with the less ambitious path forward, but it's something to think about!

got me to add a link to jump back into a battle with the default set (unrelated to most of the conversation here lol)

That's great feedback!

I wonder if actually having them on separate lines would help mentally break them up, more than having them next each other but in a different order?