[2021] April Fool's Thursday | April 1 2021

Would be cool if we can find the time! Last year the gold moz was just a silly thing I threw in on the side. This year had a more time put into it by some other awesome designers due to last year's success, but we still have so much to do it's hard to devote much time to it! It's also tough because we want to limit it to 1 day, and don't want to push through a patch for it then a patch the next day (going through console cert and downloads for players and all that). So, we are pretty limited in what we can do just from a technical side. This year the other fine folks were more on the ball ahead of time and got things set up in the 8.1 patch a while ago, just ready to be turned on. (I might be misremembering, sorry if I'm wrong work friends! I don't know your reddit names so reply here if you want sweet reddit glory!)

Fun fact on that! Last year's gold moz was done last minute using a technique we have to overwrite weapon settings values in a temporary way (we use this for quick weapons balance that needs to get in before the next patch goes out). We can't actually make a new gun or piece of loot using this, so we just modified what the "gold" mod did to overwrite a bunch of values, then replaced all of the moz spawns with gold moz spawns. This actually meant that any gold mozambique would be the april fools version, and we definitely didn't want to mess with ranked. So, it was only possible because the mozambique wasn't a regular gold weapon drop for that season at the time. Lucked out!

Yea totally! When we need to make numbers adjustments quick, or disable an item or weapon, or change what drops in what mode and all that, we use this tech! That's how we do some adjustments for pro play too I believe. It's a really great system, great work by designers and engineers of the past who are much smarter than I. We also have a few absolute heroes who are constantly working on testing, releasing, and monitoring these between patch tweaks and changes in addition to all the normal patch stuff. It's a lot of work where you have to act quickly but also carefully, and it's working on urgent stuff constantly. Major props to those folks! (/u/tangentialLogic /u/RSPN_JayBiebs are the reddit names I know, but there are more, sorry if I missed you!)

You're thinking of the console and con vars and the like! This is a separate system built into our script logic and data file parsing.