There have been some developments after this post, please check it out.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2693940/view/525342544971695923
We will keep this post up as an archive.
Greetings Duelists!
My name is Bahadir “Baho” Van, and I’m DiceHit Games’ Game Designer on Neoduel: Backpack Monsters, with a message on the future of our game.
Since the conception of Neoduel: Backpack Monsters, creating such a game has been a significant task for us, and running an asynchronous multiplayer game server for the first time in many of our careers has made the past year especially difficult. Despite the number of players, the efforts of our publishers, and a very positive Steam rating since launch, some features of the game need to be scaled back to be sustainable as a business, without the need to completely shut down or delist the game. Because we are a small indie studio, our solution was to remove the asynchronous multiplayer aspects of Neoduel and make it a complete offline experience, reducing the need for a live server in all regions, and put on hold for now any further additional content (including the planned Lava and Storm fusion elementals).
Starting the next update we’re resetting all Elo to the base one for all players, and as you win more games in the ranked mode, you’ll still rise up to the ranks and face more challenging builds. These builds are based on around half a million in the year of the game being live in all forms (demo, early access, live game), so the chance of you facing the same opponent in your rank again is less than 0.002500%. Basically, to make the long story short, the game Elo system will be offline, with the build database being read on your own device instead of fetching it from an online server.
The game as you know will look pretty much the same, with the only major removal being the leaderboards. You’ll still be able to know your Elo thanks to your player card showing off your stats, but we as developers do not get any info from you players, nor any new builds or Elo, so no way to populate a leaderboard. Majority of you will only experience an Elo reset and that’s it. The game will feel and play as it was online, which is something we wanted to make sure remained the same.
On a personal note, making this announcement is bittersweet for me. I am really proud of the DiceHit Games, Rogue Duck Interactive, and The 4 Winds Entertainment teams for creating such an excellent game that has received rave reviews since its release. I'm grateful to have witnessed a community of passionate Duelists and their dedication to the game and its improvement, as one of the most positive and supportive game communities any of us have ever seen. Thank you for this experience, and while we continue our adventure with Neoduel: Backpack Monsters, we aim to show you some other projects in the near future that are just as unique, if not more, for all of you fans to test.