MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 19th December, 2018

Presenters: Masta Don (MD) and Wrkshp Warrior (WW)

Next events: 6 day Christmas Raid then Crystal Siege.

Christmas raid will be 6 days long.  Raid boss will be leaf, multi-boss (may or may not be the same element, MD can't remember) and time based. TvT monsters will be the same element this time. Variety grab will be active for the event.  Merging will be on and traders will be active.  All reward monsters will be evolved.  

Event monsters active for the Christmas Raid will be: three different sets, similar to what BC did during Halloween. One will be a very, very old set from the first ever holiday event, then the set from batterysargent (nutcracker) set, then a set with hollyknight and bunch of leaf ones will be active.   Later confirmed: MysterBox will be active, yes.

Batterysergeant set: https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Pwnguin,Squire-rrel,Corkporol%20Nutmeg,Battery%20Sergeant

Mysterbox set: https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Caribell,Holidoe,Hartwarmer,MysterBox

Hollyknight set:  https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Forestsprinter,Froppy,Arbordog,Hollyknight

The CS following the Christmas event will be shorter to get us back on the regular event schedule. (MiriamRowan's guess: 4 days).

Take regular mobs out of event spins? No, but thank you for asking/suggesting/commanding.

Images on Trading website? BC has talked to the person who uploads the images for the trading site, who he believes had been away on vacation.  MD will follow up with them on this.

Missing Second Evolution? MD is writing it down again. He had started looking at the one mentioned but thinks he became sidetracked. It's very time consuming to do.

Damage Cap update?  BC has done adjustments and gets fewer and fewer reports of this being a problem. If it still effects you, send a support ticket with your account name and the monsters used and when it happens. They can then set it up to test why it's happening in that specific situation with your monsters.  Recently the clues given by damage cap players actually led to BC finding a bunch of hackers, which was a good bonus.  The cap issues are all related to the actives being more powerful in the game than they should be, but BC won't nerf the actives.

BC will look into the dominion visual bug on android phones that max out and don't show the actual damage done on a tower beyond a certain number.   There is a specific person who will need to look at that.

Shield Crusader again for the pvp r epics given in spins?  MD is writing this down.

Leader boards were shown.

Trading second evolutions? Not anytime soon.

Facebook issue? BC has looked into this but duplication has proven difficult. MD believes it has been fixed. It's only effected people who have been bouncing through lots of accounts. BC is trying to figure it out but it seems to be a problem with the way Facebook interacts.  MD doesn't believe that the FB energy is broken for everyone because BC doesn't get constant reports about it.  BC has been having various issues with Facebook over the past year.  Depending on the issue people are asking about, some are sporadic and some have been corrected.

Second evolution reversal?  It's on BC's list and is being discussed to see if it's something BC wants to do.

Holiday star drop rate?  This is the same drop rate for last holidays, Easter, and valentines.  However, BC will be doubling the holiday star drop rate from tomorrow.

The more information that QA has to look through makes it easier to find problems.  They need to work on the pipeline in order though. It's like a giant 2-3 lane highway, they have to deal with the things at the front of the line first.

New items in Avatar Spins?  Not for the January update, but the update after that, will have pipelined changes. It's not sure what will be completed in time, but one of the things that will be addressed around then is avatar spins.

Energy for ultimate spins? Everyone can wait another 24 hours to find out.

Double code? Check back in two weeks to see if that's done, but it won't be today due to the 12 Days of Christmas codes.

Kicked out during PvP? It may be a server connection error. The easiest way would be to clear the cache on your phone. That's MD's best guess, it wouldn't be server side if it's happening that way.

No, Troop Wars and Coliseum won't be back anytime soon as people didn't play them.

No, Ironknight and Ironlord will not be removed from having bonuses CT events. It's important to have monsters that have a regular bonus, and these are the monsters for raids and CT.

Team Brawl will be coming back, but not very often as it feels so similar to Battle Royale and players don't prefer it. BC likes the diversity, but players seem to prefer the random troop matching of BR better.

BC is looking at ways of making reward monsters more useful in the game.  TW is old and boring for the vast majority of players (not veterans who love it). It is more likely that BC will run an event without any event monsters.  Less than 5% of players play TW.

Troop wars - the pet is dead instantly and then players are individually hitting against the flag. WB, players coordinate with farming. Dominion and Team Brawl feel different and that makes them fun.

It's not officially "no troop wars" but it won't happen that soon because of how poorly players participated in Coliseum.  They will sometimes put in veteran favourites, just not soon.

The way MD gauges failures isn't just event spins, but also the participation of players.  TW doesn't have much participation since the event monsters don't have much purpose.  CT only had one set of monsters active and the event was really popular with participation.  Coliseum had many sets of monsters and players weren't active at all.  How many players are active, how often they're active, etc.  Players were coming in and literally only hitting one time to claim the easy benchmarks and then stopping.  Participation metrics don't take into account how much players spend.  The events that are avoided is that low participation events, even though they're popular among the big spenders.

Players with event monsters spent a lot of money to create their team. BC wasn't to create an event without event monsters so players will use their reward monsters. But if BC ran BR without event monsters, then the players with BR event teams won't be happy.

It's an overall design issue in BC. Reward monsters were so powerful that once players had them, other players couldn't catch up to them.  So BC created event monsters so that beginners could spin a few event monsters to help contribute to their troop and compete.  BC has now become a game about event monsters and event strategies.  BC wants to have areas where reward monsters are important and other areas where beginners can spin event monsters to compete. R-boosting created another gap where reward monsters became significantly strong again.  BC is discussing all of this.

More incentive to buy energy? It's too hard to reprogram the energy for gold, so BC has virtual chests that has bonuses to increase the value when players buy gold this way.

BC once tried a Tournament of Champions with top players invited to join, and no event bonuses worked. IT had horrible results as they didn't do it in a good way. MD would like to see it done well in the future.  It's fun for MD to think about, but BC doesn't have the capability to do this currently.

Make LT an event?  BC has considered this. They could have it where troops need to complete LT as often as possible during an event duration.  It's not possible yet.

MiriamRowan's unofficial BC Live Report - 5th December, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don

Next events: Celestial Towers then Dominion (with specials on the drops, not stones)

CT boss last time was wind. This time it will be rock.  Monsters with an active event bonus will be 3 subsets of raid monsters, all wind, plus the "knight looking one".  Multi target boss, and Masta Don is checking to make sure we don't experience that weird bug at the start again this time (where the raids were initially single target).   Boss will be multi wave. Merging and Traders will be back for CT.

Coliseum will never be run again. Masta Don had to write in a variety grab in the middle of the event to keep things interesting. Very little participation was recorded for energy use.  Many people only hit like 5 times and then decided that they were done for the event.  Masta Don doesn't understand why players asked for it.

Banning players?  There are lots of steps before players are banned. It takes four different phases of double checks before players are banned. It is never for no reason. Sometimes people end up in suspicious groups due to who they hang around with. For instance, this one troop that invited all these shady players in, and BC considered simply banning the troop as a whole.

More new events? New events are rough. Despite what players say about old events, very few events get as much participation compared to the older events like raid/WB events, Battle Royale, Dominion and Crystal Siege.   BC could perhaps introduce more raid style events. Masta Don doesn't feel that we need any more match based events because it's a bit rough.

Stackable PvP Energy at the Trader? This wasn't meant to be there. So many players spent a ton of tokens on it as fast as they could, stacking up to around 8k energy.  These transactions will be undone - energy will be removed and tokens returned.  

Things to spend PvP tokens on?  From the glitch today, BC has become aware that there aren't many things for players to spend their PvP tokens on, and some players have earned a lot of them.  Masta Don is considering adding wings and old vanity items into the PvP trader as newer vanity items appear in the leader boards.  Ideally BC would like to give us more things to spend our PvP tokens on instead of us stockpiling them.

Why were these players accused of exploiting the PvP energy when BC made it available for in game trading? "Exploiting" wasn't a term Masta Don used and isn't accurate, but it was disappointing how quickly some players decided to claim it. Masta Don is sorry that Yulun described it as exploiting.  The energy shouldn't have been there and everyone knew that it shouldn't have been there.  It's not exploiting in that sense, but there aren't many words to describe someone who takes advantage of something they know wasn't meant to be that way and does so as quickly as possible.   It wasn't meant in the way of players deliberately doing something wrong, but players knew it would have been corrected. It wasn't meant to imply that players did something wrong.

Christmas raid will be a normal length event.  (24 days for the Christmas raid was only a joke).

Dominion won't have deadshot in the prizes this time. It may be crush for Dominion. Masta Don will take a look.

A bunch of players may have been banned from BCG for... Masta Don will talk to support about it... if they felt that people were trying to orchestrate  some big thing with others who feel the same way, then it's best that it's shut down because it can cause a bigger problem. For a lot of players it's not orchestrating because they want to do what is right but that they want to get people really riled up for their own self interest.  Back in the day, BC had a lot of people who did this.  Several hackers, for example, as soon as they were banned would go onto Facebook and try to get people riled up and create issues. Support might have been a bit sensitive to that. BCG doesn't just ban people for no reason or for just asking for a clarification or something. Masta Don is sorry if players felt that it was undeserved, but it's the way they stop things from getting away from their control.  Wrkshp Warrior: "bans are always deserving".

Bc won't bring back stackable energy for Pvp. The more ways that players have to accumulate energy that is easily farmed, the more alt accounts pop up. BC has recently done a lot of changes, especially in regards to tracking players who are duplicating monsters or trading monsters or hacking grabs and then trading monsters. BC is catching a lot more of these players now since they're able to track them and what BC is finding is that these players run 10-15 accounts and all they do is harvest energy on them, and trade monsters between these accounts.  One way that BC can minimize this is to control how easy it is to get easily farmed energy on alt accounts.

BC doesn't have any plans to produce sellable products related to the game.  They tried it a couple of years ago.  For the t-shirts, they sold them for $10-$15,  made about 90c in profit,  and international players  were charged something like $60 for shipping. Everyone was making money except BC, and players were being charged a fortune that should have only cost them $20.  BC isn't a manufacturing company. For it to have been cost effective, BC would have to buy 10000 shirts and then hope to sell them all.

Crystal Siege problems? Masta Don is making a note to have QA will look into it. Masta Don didn't know there was an issue with losing guardian bonuses or no trophies.  He does know that at the start there were issues regarding the servers.  Different worlds(?) of the servers crashed, so they rebooted. And another time everything crashed.

BC does want to get more players playing BC. They're looking at making their whole first time user experience much better and rewarding for new players... but without giving reason for veteran players for creating 50 new alt accounts.

When will Bogtacle get a sevo? Masta Don is writing it down and will look into it.  He thought BC was up to date with sevos, but this one may have been missed.

No more stones in Dominion. That was a huge mistake.

Can we claim 10 energy from Cool Luke instead of hitting with 5 energy? Masta Don doesn't like the 5 energy cap limit. It was when there was a lot more energy in the ecosystem. It's one of the things that BC is looking at as they examine ways to make the game more appealing for newer users help beginner player retention.

Images of the newer mobs for the trading website? BC will look into this.

Could there be more energy redeem options (like 50/100/500/1k, etc)? BC will look at energy redeem options. Ideally Masta Don would like the energy redeem options to be higher for veteran players, to reduce the number of alt accounts. However this may dissuade new players from playing as they'd be at a disadvantage. It's a bit of a double edge sword.

When BC was created, a huge aspect of it was intentionally social, a huge aspect was the monster collection aspect, and a huge aspect of is built into troops for events.  90% of games out there are built around solo players. BC is heavily pushed for players being in troops and having communication systems in place for troops and for socializing. A big part of Masta Don's design was wanting to bring a game that was a bit like Pokemon and a bit like World of Warcraft, and put it all onboard.

Leader boards were shown for Coliseum.

Trading crystals?  Not at the moment.

Masta Don will look into the new weapons that only have 2 jewel slots instead of 3.  He thinks this is just an error as all higher level weapons should have 3 slots.

Can energy regen beyond 5, perhaps to 10? Energy cap has being considered in the past as this would help new players as well as looking at the general inventory for new players.  These are felt to be a bit rough for new players.

Single element vs Dual element? BC has heard of this, as well as putting normal legendaries back in. A lot of people like a simple attack setup.  BC is looking at a better system for all players. They're also looking at stability.

How do we ask questions about event bugs - BCG shuts off commenting, BC Live can be too far away to wait for, etc?  It's not usually the people asking the questions who are the issue, but the players following up on the issue.  There's a difference between good actors and bad actors. We see it every day in the world, where some people may legitimately have a problem with something and ask about it, but then tons and tons of people latch onto those posts and fill it with negativity. Support needs to balance both groups of people, and people asking legitimate questions can get caught in the crossfire of it.  Masta Don will talk with support about this.

New single element monsters? Masta Don is writing it down.

Cost of Merging? Masta Don doesn't think it's a bit too expensive... he guesses that it is a bit too expensive.  It's more a high end thing to fine tune our monsters, which is the reason why it's so expensive. It's more for players who want their Skyrin to have the best stats.

Trophies for farming during World Boss events? Masta Don is writing it down. BC will look at this for world bosses. In a perfect world, the game wouldn't be so divided and there wouldn't be a need for farmers and hitters. However, BC knows that this is needed for lower PR players.

5 matches had issues in CS?  Masta Don knows for a fact that only 3 matches had issues, not 5 matches.  Masta Don is sorry about it. He feels very powerless with server issues.  When servers crash or players are disconnected, there is little he can do, but to try to correct it from the other end of the phone.

Unevolving monsters? BC has had issues where duplicate monsters had been traded and then someone else received them an evolved them. The evolved monster then is treated by BC as a duplicate monster that shouldn't exist.   BC can't allow these to be unevolved as then there would be double duplicates and it would be bad. It would be a nightmare to do.  The best BC could do would be to have a trader who would take an evolved monster and give you back two unevolved monsters.

Farming problems with holiday stars? BC rebooted the holiday stars and haven't seen any reports for farming issues since then. Holiday farming should be working now. Let BC support know if you are still experiencing issues. Masta Don will check the drop rates and see if we're just not seeing holiday stars as maybe the drop rates are too low.  It will be going through December, so the drop rates aren't especially high and maybe people are getting too much bad luck on them so far.

Really old monsters aren't seen much in the ecosystem.  The only way to introduce them back into the ecosystem right now is to add them into spins, but it becomes problematic as they need to be entered manually. BC is looking at redoing the grabs to make this easier.

Players who took advantage of the stackable PvP energy will have that removed and their tokens returned.  The transaction will be undone.

Real crowns for girl avatars please as they only get headpieces but boy avatar get crowns?  Art team will be talked to about this.  Masta Don has a strong dislike that all of the avatar items are gender dependent. Unfortunately the boy and girl avatars have been designed slightly differently and the clothing for one gender can't be worn the shape of the other gender, according to Art.

Avatar grabs are on BC's list. The grabs in general do need to be rebuilt. This is a massive task, and the grabs touch everything in the game. BC is trying to find ways to make it work.

Duel element monsters aren't good? You can't say that dual element monsters aren't good as they have all the same functionality of the base element monsters plus a bonus with the second element.

Raid event monsters rotate through having bonuses in different raid events. To be honest, helmet monsters probably won't have a bonus again. That was just a horrible, horrible, "not my decision" to create those ones.  Basically BC was going to invent a new event but they realized about 10% of the way in that it was going to cost them lots of resources to build, and they already had the monsters, so they pushed those monsters out anyway.

Players commented that some actives weren't good with duel element?  BC actives unfortunately have way too much power compared with gem matching, but no one will let Masta Don return to a gem based setup.

Can we eliminate shielding in Dominion?  Masta Don has brought that up multiple times in the past.  His thoughts on defensive measures is that playing defense is not fun. There should be an attack bonus, not a defense bonus. Just hurting your opponent isn't as exciting as having an attack bonus yourself instead.  He's written it down and will bring it up again.

Pao is still here but he's just very busy. So if there really are 1000 shares for a code then he will be dragged in to have his head shaved. It's been going for over a year and players have only come close once.

Bring back the 20 energy code? Masta Don and Wrkshp Warrior didn't realize that we didn't get a code when streams weren't on.  BC will make sure that we either get 20 energy codes during BC Live or that a 10 energy code will be given out during the alternate weeks. 

Christmas raid will start on a Thursday but will end on the 26th, making it one day extra in length so that it doesn't end on Christmas itself.

BC won't be removing damage caps completely any time soon, as BC needs a way to mitigate players doing ludicrous things with hacks.

Coliseum Nov/Dec 2018 - Raid and Event Monster Table

Higher Resolution Version:

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 20th November, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don

Next events: Crystal Siege (6 days) then Coliseum

Crystal Siege will be 6 days long so that BC can get back onto their normal schedule of events ending on Tuesdays.  The previous event (Serpenta) was shorter so that CS could start before the US Thanksgiving holiday, this will minimize the number of players who are inconvenienced so they can spend time with their families (BC employees can enjoy the holiday with the fewest people having to come into work to start the event). Merging and Traders will be active during CS. They intend to keep bringing these back every second event for us. There won't be any big changes to the functionality to this CS (BC considered this but opted out of it to keep the event stable), it will run as per normal.  There will be some very aggressive promotions at the start of the event though.

Event monsters haven't been decided yet for Coliseum.  It will be based on the bosses that will be used in this Coliseum, plus a couple extra.  The final list of bosses used this time hasn't been finalized yet. Some of these may be from the last Coliseum, some may be from the Coliseum before that, and some may be ones that haven't been used in either Coliseum. Masta Don still hasn't finalized the list. Coliseum will function the same way as last Coliseum, but without all raid monsters having a bonus, only selective ones.  There are five monsters (bosses?) in the coliseum and the monsters having a bonus will be related to these.  Masta Don may do some additional monsters but this has not been decided yet.

Arena? Not this year. Maybe first quarter (Jan/Feb/March) next year?

Leveling system for passives instead of probability? BC has talked about this and the probability system came with the original design of the game. The issue that came up with this is with the UI (user interface), and would have required a UI redesign. Right now BC's UI is more convoluted than it needs to be. Adding in a feature that shows how far along you are for r boosting (or passives?) was too far out there, compared with a simple percentage of success or failure.  That decision was made a long time ago, but that's why it's there.

Evolved mobs in the reward tiers?  This was a feature in the ten day events. When shorter events returned, the unevolved reward monsters returned too.  BC has talked about bringing PE r monsters back in a limited capacity, specifically for Christmas.

Mythic monsters only have better stats than legendaries, can they be made better so that they can be r boosted beyond 99 points?  Mythics are truly the best in game especially once fully leveled up. But being so good, they're also scarce.   BC has had an issue in the game, since the beginning of the game, where some ultras are more powerful than some epics, depending on their actives and passives, and additionally ultras were easier to level up their passives.  So it's one of those things where Mythics are the best in game but they're harder to level up there, whereas legendaries have an earlier cap.

Banning players and duplicate monsters?  BC investigates anything related to duplicate monsters. For example, there were a few players that BC was investigating. They had contacted BC about monsters vanishing from their inventory. BC looked into it and found out that most of these were duplicate monsters. BC looks into these and depending on how long ago trades happened, it can be easy to identify or it can be a lot more work - like forensic accounting of tracking.  BC understands that many players with duplicate monsters ended up with them through trades. This is just how BC is handling it nowadays.  BC isn't actively ban players if they are found in possession of duplicated monsters, as BC doesn't know whether they were scammed or whether they created these monsters themselves. Once BC determines which is which, the players found to be creating these duplicates are then banned.

BC has looked at adding boosters to a trader. They have also looked at, in an ideal world with the necessary server and client capacity, allowing the breakdown of any item into a resource that could be traded for other resources. Essences are a good example of breaking down a monster to be able to craft an egg. Instead BC would be looking at being able to break down any resource in the game into a universal resource and then having a trader for that.  That's on the table but requires a great deal of server and client work and requires a fairly massive overhaul of the game. So it's a high-risk high-investment item, which is why you don't see a lot related to breaking things down or trading boosters.

BC enhances individual rewards on rotation. Sometimes they double the troop rewards, or increased lucky tiers in the individual rewards, or double crystals in the troop reward,  or double the epics in the individual rewards. It's more of a random set up.  Evolved monsters in that reward setup - they're the highest value which is why BC won't use them as tiered rewards.  More players participate when they see evolved monsters in the tiers, which is why they reserve them for special occasions like holidays. BC can possibly look at adding in more rotations, but it's been fairly obvious that players respond best double troop tier prizes and increased lucky tiers.

What is BC doing for players for Christmas? This hasn't been fully finalized as yet. They will be doing something similar to last year with their 12 Days of Christmas promotion.  They may do some extra stuff on top of that.

How many players are currently playing BC?  BC can't exactly answer that. It's kind of a constant churn of players at the moment because BC has been around for so long. When BC does their advertising, they advertise to millions and millions of people, some of whom still play the game or have quit.  It's harder to get players back in those scenarios.  As BC grows, it becomes harder and more expensive to acquire new players, which is why they're seeing everything being very, very flat (regarding their player base).  BC is trying new methods to grow and it's about how effective they are. BC is also looking at their first time user experience to make it more attractive for new players to come in. Right now it's a very, very long route for beginner players to get to the point where they can compete heavily and BC is evaluating that.  Another problem is the way the game operates at a fundamental level, which is that various power degrees of monsters. It is ridiculously difficult for a new player to hit that level.  When everything was created it was balanced around the players at that time.  The balance in the game for new players has been lost as the game has grown. BC is hoping that making changes to their first time user experience will then create a better retention and acquisition of players. This is what BC is doing to help us with recruitment of players down the road. They're focusing more heavily on making sure they don't do anything stupid in the process so that they won't make it very, very attractive for current players to create 12 alt accounts.

Leagues within events?  This is very difficult to do. At best BC may introduce leagues into events late next year. It's just very difficult with the way things were built and the event structure doesn't interact with leagues.  It will require the almost rebuilding how the event leader boards operate.

Get players to join and keep playing because no one wants to trade PE supers anymore?  BC is looking at ways to get new players to join and that's one of the things they're looking at.  PE supers are one of the most fun things for beginners to get because it involves raiding heavily and raiding is naturally fun. But no one wants them for trading because it takes away the fun and also by the time players reach the point where they can trade these, they already have acquired them. BC is looking at stuff like this as well.

4.8.00 release had boonbird and boonhawk event epics that were never used in the game?  This was related to a farming monster that was created and the code for the acquisition of tokens on the monster causes issues. They can't release it until they fix that code with it.

Yes, BC is looking at random energy in the 12 days of Christmas. This is one of the things they are looking at.

Benchmark prizes aren't likely to be enhanced - both from spending a certain amount of energy or acquiring a certain number of trophies.  The reason is that benchmarks are problematic. The players who need them the most, are players on the low end (like new players), and so the early benchmarks are important. But for higher level players, the prizes are insanely easy to acquire because their power levels are massive. It's very difficult to balance benchmarks without it being a system of almost benchmark leagues, where the higher your power rating the harder it would be to obtain the prizes.  BC will definitely not be doing this.

Advancing the story of the game?  BC is looking at, and hoping that this will happen with the Valentine's update.  It's going to be tight though. Masta Don is wanting  to get both new raid and the story enhancement in the same update, but the raid gets the priority and the story may be delayed.  The holiday season will also cause tons and tons of people to take vacations.

Will all new reward monsters be dual element or will we see single elements again?  Masta Don prefers single element monsters himself. But it's hard to sell the idea of new reward monsters that will have less utility than the other new monsters.

Yes, BC has considered a new type of item to help level up passives. What it would be is a new type of special if they add it.

Crystals won't be able to be traded in the near future. This is intentional as crystals gate progression to a point and BC likes to make sure that players can't just load up one account and then second evolve everything.

More endgame content for veteran players?  Introducing very challenging stuff is really hit and miss.  As Masta Don nerfs stuff, the participation level goes way, way higher. What he'd like to do is creating more exclusive challenging content, similar to how Lost Temple was when it was first released.   It's not something that BC is prioritizing as BC is focusing on improving their first time user experience so that new players can catch up with veteran players much quicker.

It's not necessary for players to build dual element teams. Personally Masta Don still uses single element monsters because his monsters are solid and he likes the style of them more. He goes more for aesthetics than power.

Drop rates for event monsters?  They are currently higher than they have historically been.  It may be that the player has had a run of bad luck or it's possible that the pool of event monsters is big and you're looking for a specific one (like WB where you might get a different WB event monster).

BC can look at Cool Luke energy but this probably won't be adjusted anytime soon.

Troop Wars won't be until probably the first quarter next year. It'll likely have to be in January if it's going to come because in February it will be the Chinese New Year CT and then the Valentines raid.

800 million trophy BR benchmarks was too high last time?  BR has had the same benchmarks forever. BR benchmarks are so high because players with full event teams playing against the highest trophy opponent can easily reach these trophies.  BC should have done the trophies for this event differently. 

Historically last year BR's top place was 600 million for the top player, with most not reaching over 400 million?  For most events this year it's been 800 million. Masta Don will take a look at this. Maybe it was something that happened after they added Team Brawl and that one was copied over.

Single event monsters will become really weak soon if new ones aren't introduced?  BC will bring this back to the discussion table and see if they want to bring in a mixture of single and dual element new monsters.  BC has also talked about whether they want to bring in a "fourth" (third) final evolution. This may be a better use of time than creating more new monsters, but right now BC doesn't want to hit that kind of power burst.

More storage?  BC has looked at this quite a bit, especially as many veteran players have their storage filled up. BC will look at it again.

Why can't BC just release single element monsters?  BC can't do this simply because some players prefer single element monsters.   Anytime BC does something there is what is called an opportunity cost.   If he has an artist work on two monsters, he has to make a decision as to making the two monsters that the most players want.  In that case, if he creates both as single element monsters or one single element and one dual element, and only 10% of players want single element monsters, that monster will be a bust. Players won't be enthused, and it will make a mess of things. So they can't do it just for those who are collecting in small niche of monsters.  BC hasn't done single element monsters in a while though, so perhaps they can create a limited batch with a alternating structure.

Stones won't be returning to Dominion because that's an example of when Masta Don listened to one person on stream.

Serpenta leader board shown.  Fifth place on the individual tiers has a name that apparently translates from Korean into "rump meat" in English according to Google Translate and Masta Don.

10 energy per ultimate spin? This is probably something that BC will consider for Christmas.

Will BC have a Black Friday gold sale?  Players will need wait until Black Friday to see... probably.

Serpenta had a lot of bugs?  BC will look at the support tickets and see how many bugs they had.  Masta Don will look into this. Generally when BC has bugs like that it's related to server scaling and so it's very difficult to track down. Masta Don will see how many support tickets were received to see if it was specifically Serpenta bugs for QA to look at or the more likely server scaling issue.

Better top 3 troop rewards?  Masta Don knows about how players in the top troops sell empty places in their troop (and other "shady stuff"), so BC won't be enhancing troop rewards in events.

Mast Don is aware that there have been a lot of bugs. That's why BC hasn't had much time for developing new content.   When the game was originally developed, they spent a lot of time creating new things without necessarily fixing old things.  People at BC didn't listen to Masta Don. They are now paying for it.  BC is working on all the bugs to try to increase stability.

Why is energy hard to accumulate in the game? If a player had quit for a while they might not know that a while back BC had some issues and made some mistakes with sales and also favored newer players a bit more.  What happened was a bunch of hackers and a bunch of alt accounts and alt accounts that farmed up energy like mad. As a result, BC changed spins to odds based for everyone and energy became a bit tighter.  BC was inundated with a bunch of people that were just being bad actors.  Masta Don doesn't blame them as he optimizes everything, and so BC essentially allowed it to happen. BC is looking at this and as BC fixes up all the bugs, and ban hackers, and take care of loop holes, then BC is planning on loosening up on energy.

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 7th November, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don

Next events: Battle Royale (with merging and traders) and then Serpenta ("Sky Boss 3").

Players asked for stones for Dominion so much that Masta Don did it for us. Masta Don suspects that players were apparently trolling him - asking for stuff to get Masta Don to do it, knowing it would be unpopular and get him into trouble. Next Dominion will be back to specials as these are definitely preferred.  (Stone boosters not working was a surprise to BC, and they discovered this during testing that they cannot work with the tower mechanics. BC couldn't do anything about this.)

Tower damage displayed during Dominion on Android?  (Android has a maximum integer value that can be displayed, and often top troops are exceeding this and can't see their actual damage done).  BC will look at this, it's slated for client and server to have a look at.  This is a higher priority over purely visual problems as it has an impact on how the event runs.  

Any updates for people damage capped? Damage cap requires server to take time to fix this. Server is currently working on hacking tools, figuring out how hackers are doing what they're doing, finding hackers and going into their logs to discover what they're doing, and then fixing this. All of this takes time and manpower. This is a priority for now, and comes before damage cap.

Arena isn't coming back soon. BC has started discussing Arena though, which means that it's possible to return in the future. The raid boss mechanic didn't seem that popular and the simulated (not live) PvP, so BC will bring it back in a more interesting way. They're trying to see how they can make it feel more like traditional PvP. It's not in a state to be returned to the game currently.  When it comes back, it will be with corrections and fixes.

Coliseum has been talked about. It could possibly return in December. Team Brawl is currently scheduled for December but this is too close to BR, so they could possibly swap Coliseum in instead.

Pvp sacrifice bug? This has been on BC's list of things to fix for a long, long, long, long time. There have been other problems to fix as a priority lately.  Their primary issues have been: bug and hacking fixes, more frequent updates and monsters and costumes. Avatar grab returning is a priority too.  PvP will be fixed to become fair and fun, but only when PvP becomes a super big priority. 

PvP is boring right now as it's not very rewarded.  Many games have PvP as their primary focus and so they incentivize PvP highly with rewards.  This makes PvP fun because it's an end goal and players are rewarded for doing well in it.  Right now, you're not rewarded much for PvP and this has become a vicious cycle. BC can't put big rewards for PvP while the sacrifice (and other) glitches exist.  But BC can't prioritize fixing these glitches because not enough players play PvP because there aren't big rewards for it.  It's all a vicious cycle. PvP is buggy because it's not prioritized, but it's not prioritized because people don't play it because it's buggy.  BC prioritizes where they can, and it's the things they need to immediately fix, and these are the areas where more players are participating heavily.   Masta Don knows that more people would play if they fixed the bugs, but they need to prioritize on what players are participating in now with their resources, compared with what they want people to have fun doing in the future. 

Next Troop Wars?  Masta Don is considering TW vs Coliseum.  There was very little participation last TW.  It made veteran players very happy, but participation wasn't even close to the next worst performing of all the other events.  If TW can't outperform even a bad event like Team Brawl, and that isn't very popular with players... Coliseum is more likely to run before TW again.  Troop Wars is not dead.  It will be slated in where BC can fit it and when it won't negatively impact the game.  Ideally it could come after a big surge of beginner players so that BC can see how they interact with it too.

Needing to log back into the game after closing it?  There was a bug recently with Android that automatically fixed when Android updated their system (fixed on Google's end automatically). It wasn't a bug with BC but Android itself.  Make a support ticket if this keeps happening to you.

Google login missing?  No, BC didn't take this away. It should still be there.

Missing Monsters? For support stuff, unfortunately support needs to check on these issues themselves.  Recently BC has been hammering down on hackers and tracking people. The problem is that many hackers try to implicate other people through bad trades.  (MiriamRowan's note: It sounds like hackers hack to get good rewards, then trade their monsters away. BC removes the monsters, but it's the innocent recipients of these monsters whose monsters seem to go missing for no apparent reason). It's a bit of an issue, so it's probably taking longer for support to track all that stuff.  Keep on at support and they'll probably get back to you as soon as they can on it.  Support won't literally be ignoring you, but it takes time to check.

Facebook friends gifting issue? This is still on BC's  list to fix.

Leader boards were shown for Dominion FFA.

An event where reward mobs have bonus?  BC has tried this in the past and have received a lot of hate mail for it, mostly from players who have put a lot of effort into creating event teams.  Masta Don wouldn't do that.  BC has instead looked at the overall role of event monsters in the game. BC wants to create other ways for reward monsters to have usefulness without essentially turning them into event monsters.  Event mobs are extremely powerful, beyond reward monsters.  Power levels should ideally be a bit closer. For example, an epic event mob should allow you to excel, but a super event mob shouldn't beat a team with legendary reward monsters.  So it's something that's always come out and there are so many of these monsters out there, and the effort that players have put into actual event teams needs to be considered.

Masta Don is aware that reward monsters are traded to gain event monsters.  If this game didn't have trading, it would save Masta Don many headaches.  But the game does have trading and they thought that trading would be a good idea, and Masta Don is now eternally punished for it. It was introduced so that players could trade to get the right zodiacs for their team. Back then it seemed like an awesome feature. The only repeatable monsters back then were the TW mobs. It was when BC made more repeatable monsters that trading has caused them headaches.

10 energy code was displayed.

Can we Craft bound equipment soon?  Maybe soon....?  It's a feature that Masta Don wants to time in with the Valentine's update during January. This update always includes the Chinese New Year CT event, which is in early February, so the Valentine's update would be before this.

Better rewards?  Masta Don recently compared the leader boards to those that were offered 3 years ago. Inflation has been incredible and the current leader boards are so much better than they used to be.

New land and badges?  BC is talking about this and are considering adding another map zone and another raid zone like Lost Temple. 

Avatar spins?  BC is unique in that you can't win the same item twice. This meant that everyone received everything once and then couldn't win anything more.  Now they're considering offering stones if you receive a duplicate item. Possibly 350 stones, for example.  They could bring back all avatar pieces this way. BC will be looking at the new avatar grabs holistically. They could bring back pieces of old trader outfits or wings from event rewards, for example.    This will make everything a bit more accessible to everybody and bring more value back to the avatar grabs. Exclusivity can create high value for items, but if it's out of reach for the majority of players due to the large power base of veterans. This can hurt newer players as they don't believe they can achieve these items within six months of playing.  BC struggles with this a lot internally.

Currency revamp could come during the Valentine's update.  BC wants to make it so that all monsters can be in the grabs, with increased chances for some monsters.

More than level 70?  BC does have plans for this but it will be matched with when they have the new land ready for us to explore.

Yes, Masta Don acknowledges that BC does have time to create a new land but not to fix PvP.  Most MMO games (like World of Warcraft) have about 70% of their players playing events, and 40-50% playing PvP. There's a weird overlap where 20% of players play both events and PvP, and only 30% of players are exclusively playing PvP.  So events become the focus because this is what the majority of players play. Unfortunately down the road, the more events are the focus, the less and less players play PvP, so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.   "In a way, Don killed PvP, but in fairness it was Don's decisions years ago that slowly led to the dying of PvP".  

BC won't nerf sacrifice during PvP as they'd then have to nerf it in all areas of the game. (MiriamRowan's note: nerf = reducing the effectiveness of something in a game). Sacrifice is not often used in events, but some newer players have them in their teams, and so BC won't reduce the ability.

Increase stone drop for farming in LT? Don can add it to the list but it won't be worked on for ages.

Can BC improve servers?  It's not that BC needs to upgrade the servers. Early on BC created their programming quickly but it's not optimized. BC is working on re-optimizing everything to work better with the servers.  They built too many things too quickly ages ago and are now paying heavily for it now.

Don's favourite monsters are all of the phoenix monsters.  He only knows them by their server name: the Dark Phoenix and the other one that was released with the turtle boss.  He's a huge mythology buff. This is his personal bias.

Wrkshp Warrior closed with: Remember to bug Yulun with all your feature requests.

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 24th October, 2018

Presenters: "Winter" (Wrkshp) Warrior & Masta Don

BC Live was delayed due to what they will call "technical difficulties".

Next events: BC has sent the next update to Apple and Android and are waiting for approval.  The app is currently in review. If it passes review tonight or tomorrow morning, then Darking Mad Halloween Raid (assuming the update is shipped out in time) is the next event. There will be new monsters and new vanity items. If approval is delayed and the update doesn't come out in time then  Dominion FFA will run instead, and then the Halloween raid will be next.  Otherwise, if all goes well,  it's Halloween first and then Dominion FFA.  The goal was to get Halloween out in time, but it's going back and forth as to which will run next.  BC will make an announcement as soon as they know.  Masta Don can't promise anything solid as it depends on Apple and Android's review processes. He knows that this is very frustrating for players to be so last minute. Merging and the traders will be active for the next event, regardless of which one it is.  The Halloween trick and treat grab will be available during the Halloween raid.  Reward epics in the spins will be announced on BCG at the start of the event.

Halloween monsters - three sets of Halloween monsters will be reused this raid event, and one set definitely won't be. Masta Don was able to provide some monster names and some server names for these monsters but gave enough information to be able to find them on BCrank as follows.

Halloween sets being reused:

2017: https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Crowst,Yuktopus,Zombunnie,Draugfoal,Limbolurker,Limbone,Creagle,Nightyowler

2016: https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Tyrantula,Yuktopus,Draugfoal,Nightyowler

2014: https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Creagle,Sumopanda,Missfortune,Limbolurker

The Halloween set not being reused is from 2015. That year there were rock monsters wearing helmets, these ones will not be used because they're "hideous" and Masta Don refuses to put them in the spins again. https://bcrank.us/catalog/?q=Slingkong,Blockbottom,Stalactank,Rockmancer

Masta Don is 90% sure that the Darking Mad boss was fire.  There will be multiple targets for the boss.  Ideally Masta Don wants all the raid events and CT events to be multi target since many other events have single targets (like CS and Dominion). 

Apple update will be for iOS 8+ only from now on. iOS7 is no longer supported by BC.  This is less than half a percent of the BC devices out there. If you are using iOS7 then you will need to update your iOS in order to keep playing BC. Most devices are on iOS 11 or 12 now.

Sanctiflyer limbs ending early for some troops?  It appears that the timer was running out, but from the server end it looked like it was all working, so BC wasn't able to see what was actually happening live.  BC just doesn't have a good answer.  The person who read it in the ticket caught it immediately and brought it to server, but all seemed to be working there. BC will need to look at it if it happens again.

BC will be making support tickets more secure in time.  They know and are looking into the issue.

PvP bugs. Feel free to complain about them every stream. Masta Don also complains about them and needs to find the time to fix this.  Hammer him about this and he may be granted more time to work on fixing them.

There won't be any 10 energy ultimate spins for Halloween. If this is to happen, it will be for Christmas. BC is working on hack prevention things and they want to have this in place first before they make this energy available to us.

Sizing with legendary second evolutions? Sometimes these need to be resized by server.  Unfortunately if quality assurance doesn't catch it, then BC relies on player reports.

Why can't FFA Dominion monsters have the same x3 advantage over regular teams that TB monsters get over BR monsters?

Friday event starts won't be happening because there are so many apps releasing updates on Friday and this causes possible delays. Thursdays allows for a quicker update process.

Reward monsters?  BC is considering it with events. It could be related to Troop Wars, or having events without any event monsters. BC would prefer not to give them an event bonus. The reason BC has event monsters is that it bridges the gap for new players to be able to compete.

Can blight+ return to rewards?  Not many players liked this active. They preferred venom. BC can bring it back though.

BC is looking at how to bring TW back into regular rotation, but this won't be for a while.

No, the gold trader can't be changed to sell boosters.  That would require client side programming which is much harder than server side programming, at least for bandwidth.

Leader boards were shown for what Wrkshp Warrior believes was Sanctiflyer. Masta Don agrees that Battle Sushi is dominating events but there's nothing BC can do about that.

10 energy code was given.

Winter Warrior played two games of PvP, lost both and apologized for swearing on stream.

MiriamRowan's BC Live Report - 10th October, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior and Masta Don

Next event: Crystal Siege then Sanctiflyer. The Halloween raid event will hopefully follow, but this requires an update to come out first and there's a chance it could be delayed a week.

BC is trying to stick to a regular schedule of events as much as possible. That's how players were able to guess that Crystal Siege would be next.

Event announcements on Tuesday?  In general, Masta Don will think about it. He doesn't like event announcements in general as some players take advantage of this. He doesn't think one day would make much difference though.

PvP during BC Live may return soon, but may need to wait until Pao's return. Wrkshp Warrior isn't ready to play us yet.

Wrkshp Warrior wears a mask to give him an edge.

The event monsters for the raid have not been decided as yet. The Darking Mad set will definitely be used, but there will be more than those. In general, Masta Don like to reuse holiday monsters, so there's a chance there could be a lot of Halloween monsters reused that event. No guarantees though, as other monsters could be used..

Troop Wars? There was little participation last TW aside from the top 500 players. Masta Don is still considering it. November would be the earliest it would happen, but this has not been finalized.  Coliseum is a maybe.

Benchmarks during TB?  Masta Don will consider them, but for those with event monsters these were really easy to achieve.

Merging, monster trader and gold trader will be active during CS.

Legendary eggs from salvaging epics?  BC doesn't have the time for this currently, but they have a general plan for how they can better use essences as a side currency in the future.

Not getting epics as often?  Epic spin odds are increased on all spins. For the featured spins, the odds are about 10% better due to the balancing.  It can seem to be spread between the 5 reward epics because you're not winning the spin epic as often. 

Event monsters from PvP wars? These monsters are occasionally being reused in other raid events now. BC likes to have them as they add diversity to the monster ecosystem.

Troop Tournament to determine the best troop?  Bombard Ricky Hanson about that.

Stones for Dominion instead of specials?  Masta Don will speak to server, and it's possible that either Dom or Dom FFA may get stones instead of specials dropping.

Improving in the game? Increase power rating. Be very active (opens opportunities for farmers).  Start winning some ultras and some crystals to evolve them. Grab a set of repeatable event monsters. Then you'll get lots of benchmarks and get better. Trading is the best way to move up.

Next update has two new monsters and a bunch of second evolutions. Magmascourge may possibly be one of these?  BC has actively been looking for the monsters that have missed second evolutions.

More content? Currently there is too much background stuff and bugs to be solved.  In order to expand, BC has to go back and change the fundamentals programmed into the game to be able to grow.

10e per ultimate spin? This would probably happen around a holiday .

Variety grab? Usually returns for all holiday events.

Leader boards were shown.

Why are codes usually energy?  Energy tends to have the widest appeal to players.

All events will continue to run from Thursday to Tuesday.

Cool Luke to allow stacking? This won't be happening. It's an overall design flaw in the game, in Masta Don's opinion, that the game allows energy to be stacked beyond a maximum level.

Usefulness of reward monsters?   Wrkshp Warrior will work on his translations from Spanish.

PE reward monsters may possible return in the rewards over Christmas, but won't otherwise generally be awarded.

Can we un-sevo monsters? Not at this time. They may allow us to trade a sevo monster back into an evo monster, but this could open a door to hacking. BC is hesitant to allow players to go backwards. If they were to do it, it wouldn't happen for a very long time. BC doesn't have the resources at this time.

Alts?  Even back during the conference calls days, Masta Don has gone on record that having alts isn't bannable. However, Masta Don doesn't appreciate those who create 40 alts and then abuse stuff, but usually these players get caught and banned for doing other stuff anyway.

Higher than level 70?  Masta Don doesn't want to make them for no reason. He'd need a story expansion first.  Server is focusing on hackers and removing hackable bugs currently, and banning players who are hacking. BC has to make the game more stable first before they can expand.  Most veteran players who have played for over 1000 days are at level 70.  Masta Don hasn't reached level 70 himself as yet and he's been playing for 4 years.

Coliseum?  BC is considering both TW and Coliseum for November and December. We may see both or only one. It's uncertain at this time.

Next BC Live in 2 weeks.

MiriamRowan's Unofficial BC Live Report - 26th September, 2018

Presenters: Wrkshp Warrior & Masta Don

Next events: Team Brawl (5 day), then Celestial Towers (wind boss)

Halloween raid?  Syganthor raid... no, Masta Don  doesn't think the Halloween raid will be Syganthor afterall.

New update is out in the store, or will be in the next 24 hours.  Everyone will experience a forced update before the next event starts tomorrow. The next update will be shipping much sooner than BC has been releasing them, in about 4-6 weeks. BC has a better pipeline and they hope to be more efficient and grow a bit faster.

Facebook energy? Server is looking at this during their downtime. They haven't been able to figure this out yet though.

New event?  There is unlikely to be a new raid style event. BC made a new world boss, but people complained that it was yet another world boss. The old raid events used to be 10 days long and then disappeared.  New events don't seem to be as popular as match based events.  They may consider a different raid style or world boss.

More storage?  Storage has historically had issues. Ideally, BC would eliminate storage boxes and then implement a sorting system. We probably won't see anything messing about with storage for some time.

New things in the game?  Resources are currently more focussed on new monsters and vanity items (like wings).  A new event style is kind of fun for a few times but then it's just another event. Players like to earn things that they're able to collect and show off.   They're trying to make sure they have their pipeline for getting second evolutions and vanity items out.

CT will have a multi style boss. BC will stick to this for raid type events.

Exodawn glitch? Report the limb glitch please. This will how to help BC to figure it out.

Trophies are possible for world boss events, but not implemented yet. The bosses are much easier to summon, so farming isn't such a chore.

Arena won't be back until BC has lots and lots and lots of dead time to fix it.

Crowns and wings will be in rotation. These are the most popular for players. More vanity items will come with the next update.  Vanity items are mostly in the troop prizes to encourage players to work together as a troop.

Tvt is always at the same time, during the most active time zones.  The server demand requirement skyrockets during these times, so they need staff on site to make sure it runs smoothly.

Sevo (second evolution) trading?  Masta Don  isn't sure if this will happen. Trading is already problematic and enhancing the trading functionality opens that up even more.

Rewards will not have PE monsters anymore. This was to make 10 day events more bearable for players.   Giving players finished products isn't as fun, and BC would rather give you something to work on instead.  They may return for special occasions.

Halloween raid?  It won't be the Syganthor boss. It will be one that comes with the next update. It will be Barking Mad or Darking Mad, he can't quite remember which is the right event title. BC doesn't know what they'll be doing for the event monsters.  (MiriamRowan's comment, the event is Darking Mad from Halloween in October, 2016.  Event monsters were all water, so it's likely a fire boss!  BC Rank's event page is at: https://bcrank.us/events/?e=131&m=individual)

Trader?  Masta Don  activated merging and the gold trader for the last event. The monster trader has a special activation and the person doing that perhaps didn't have time. Masta Don  will try to get it up for CT.

Code from last BC Live reached a redemption limit?  Last BC Live Masta Don had to set up the code himself and didn't pay attention to the redemption limit. He'll look at this for us.  This week's code will be safe as he didn't set this one up himself.

World boss monsters will not work for the Halloween raid. They only work for world boss events.

PvP event?  Players who don't like PvP, really don't like PvP.  BC would think about it, but they'd have to restructure it and remove the tokens.  It could be fun, but then all of the exploits in pvp would be even more problematic.  BC would have to fix that first.

Leader boards were displayed.

Could Dom and FFA interchange dropping specials with stones? Masta Don  will consider FFA dropping stones instead of specials.  Masta Don  is looking at it more holistically that players want more stones in the game!  Probably the players who specialize in Dominion are starving for stones and Raid event players are drowning in stones.

More Jewel spins?  Players don't seem to like these.

25 event spins?  BC limited this to players who were active during a particular time span, so they weren't old accounts and they weren't newly created accounts set up to intentionally receive these.

Variety grab will probably be back for the Halloween event.

10 energy per spin? That's a possibility for something like the Halloween event.

Halloween event monsters will probably be using old Halloween monsters, and some others.

Masta Don does play with a team of barriers, sacrifice and a venom. He prefers playing PvP, but not the farming for raid events.

Next BC Live will be in 2 weeks.

How to use merging to fix a non-PE monster

How to fix a non-PE monster using Merging.

As a simplified numerical example...

Imagine that your monster would have 1000 attack points if it was perfectly evolved (PE).

Yours wasn't PE and only has 800 attack points.

Its (attack) perfection percentage is 800/1000 = 80% and everyone knows it's not PE when you go to trade it.

You have an evolved monster of the same rarity that has 1200 attack points.

You merge it into your non-PE mob, so this now has 1200 attack points.

It's perfection percentage then becomes 1200/1000 = 120%, and everyone knows it's better than PE 🙂

Note: the trading perfection percentage is actually the average of the percentages for the three statistics. If you raise attack to 105%, health to 110% and recovery to 115%, then the trading perfection percentage will be the average of these, 110%.

(To find out what stats a 100% PE monster would have, simply look that monster up on BCrank.us as the stats in the catalog there are for maxed PE monsters).

A special thank you to Troublini for asking me to explain and encouraging me to share the answer with everyone. :)