[2020] Developer Update: June 9, 2020

Hey everyone, your friendly neighborhood Grouch here with a quick update:

We’ve been keeping a close eye on discussions regarding AFK players and their impact on matches. As I’ve mentioned in Discord and a few reddit threads over the past week, we’re attacking the problem in a few different ways, and the very first of those solutions is slated to come with tomorrow’s update. In addition to updates to battle pass challenges, bug fixes, and some minor quality-of-life changes, we’ll be rolling out the Surrender feature. This feature will allow players to begin a surrender vote during a match, and if it successfully passes, the match will end. No need to stick around and keep AFK players company in unwinnable matches. Don’t worry, AFK or disconnected players don’t count in the vote. This is our first step towards handling AFK players and our design team is actively working on finalizing plans for how we want to disincentivize the behavior to begin with (like taking away rewards and preventing challenge progress). Once those plans are more concrete we’ll be sure to share them with you.

And now, to address one of the hottest community topics: version 1 of voice chat has moved into the internal testing phase! The feature won’t make it in for tomorrow’s build, but assuming we’re not seeing any major issues in testing, it should be coming sooner than later (the team said I could commit to June publicly and they wouldn’t break my legs). The first release of voice chat will be available for use in matches, be an opt-in experience (off by default), voice activated, and have core features such as the ability to mute and report other players. We’ll be working on additional features like push-to-talk once we get v1 out the door. We thought about holding the feature back to get them out together, but figured you’d rather start talking sooner than later.

That’s all for now! We’ll see you again tomorrow.

-Grouch