We wish a safe and pleasant holiday season to you and yours. We are very thankful to have you with us. We can't believe it's almost 2017! We feel this is an appropriate time to talk about the year's past events and how we got to where we are right now.
...But first!
Let's show off some card backs.
December season card backs
The December Ranked and Pandora seasons end on January 2nd, and here's a sneak peek at the card backs you're able to earn:
The Year 2016
In 2016, our team faced many challenges and, with the help of our community, overcame countless obstacles in an effort to always provide the best general experience possible to our players in Early Access. Needless to say, it's been a very busy year. Whether you've been around for the whole ride or are only recently joining us, we're glad to have you here. Here's a brief summary of the years' events that we have to be thankful for:
- February 28th - Early Access begins
In the early months of this year, we launched into Early Access on Steam. This was a huge step forward. Our goal was to open up to a wider audience of players in order to keep improving Faeria’s core gameplay as well as test, tweak, and polish exciting new features - guided with the help of a larger community.
- March 11th - Crafting introduced, Explore card reworked
In March, we implemented crafting as well as our first big balance patch following the launch of our Early Access. Crafting was a heavily demanded feature from almost every one of our players and was a significant step on the road to a real Free to Play journey.Adding +2 Faeria to the Explore card is a shining example of how opening Early Access helped us improve Faeria. Before this change, when analyzing match statistics we found that the first player won around 63% of games at the time. This raised some serious flags and guided us to the solution we ended up implementing.After the implementation of this change, we observed the following statistics in the coming months. While we're always keeping an eye on things like this, we feel we are in a much better spot thanks to everyone's efforts in Early Access.
- March 16th - Faeria attends GDC in San Francisco
Faeria attended its first major video game convention of 2016 in mid-March at GDC. The experience was amazing for our team as they could gather invaluable feedback from players as well as share ideas about the game’s future.
- April 1st - Localisation introduced
No joke, but on April 1st we implemented five new languages to the game: French, German, Russian, Portuguese and Spanish. This patch taught us it was very difficult for players to take anything serious when updating on this particular day, for some reason.
- April 23-24 - GO Faeria Clash
Before Monthly Cups were a normality, our first major esports event was an invitational with a prize pool of $5000. It was the first time we were able to watch players play Faeria with real money on the line, and therefore provide more fierce competition. It taught us a lot about the state of the game and helped us make improvements to the card base in the future.
Special invitees to this event included known personalities such as:
Kolento, Kripparrian, RDU, P4wnyhof, Lifecoach, Orange, SuperJJ, and thefishou.
Top finishers of this tournament were: Kingdanzz, Lifecoach, and Kerith.
- May 20th - Pandora is unleashed
A long time in the making, our players unleashed Pandora themselves after a special 100,000 game "Highlander battle" event. Designed as a more fun and casual Faeria experience, as well as add another brick in the path of the Free to Play journey, the release of the first iteration of Pandora was an important milestone to reach.
- May 31st - Monthly Cups announced
On this day, not only did we announce the Monthly Cups that our players are now so familiar with, but we launched https://esports.faeria.com/ - a hub which we later updated to now even display Pandora rankings and rewards.
Regular Monthly Cups would set the pace for the best Faeria players to battle it out for a prize pool of over $3000 every month for glory and fame.
- June 18th - Faeria at Dreamhack
With the help of community members Scream and J0k3se, our presence at Dreamhack helped expose the game to even more players, and bring in that always valuable one-on-one feedback. Our partners at Alienware and Roccat helped us organize this event, and you can find a small album of this event on our Facebook page.
- June 30th - Three Wishes released
Faeria's 257th card, Three Wishes, was the first new card to be added in 2016. This was also the day we reworked our Mulligan system to allow you to select individual cards in your starting hand to be discarded and redrawn.
- August 24th - Faeria goes Free-to-Play - Version 0.8
In late August, Faeria was officially ready to transition into Free-to-Play on Steam Early Access. This day coincided with a much larger update which saw the introduction of the Solo Content overhaul, gold fountain, and new supported languages.
- October 12th - Faeria Version 0.9 is released
Our next big milestone update, version 0.9 introduced many new social features, improvements to the solo content, an entirely new progression system, and many other features that are helping us now fully focus on our full release and exit from Early Access that is coming in 2017.
- November 30th - Ten new cards are released
In our most recent exciting news, we added 10 brand new cards to the game. At this point, it seems like only yesterday!
This list is of course not all-encompassing of every event and update this year, but it's a fairly decent summary of the more major milestones.
In the end, we'd like to sincerely thank you all for making 2016 such a success.
We'll see you again in 2017 for a whole new wild ride! It will be the year of full release, new platforms, and our first expansions. And yaks. Always yaks.
- The Faeria Team