[2020] Epic Store difficulties and some unrelated updates.

I've removed that comment from the post saying that this was triggered by a Rocket League update because that was just my supposition given the timing and I can't know that for sure.

The Avatar submissions have been temporarily closed until we develop a better method for processing them, we don't currently have a date for when they will reopen.

I'm told that yes, we are planning something for 2021. We are not ready to announce anything more than that for now.

We'll add this as an option at some point. (Except for the melee).

Done, this will be on 349 that we'll push in a few hours. We'll add an option to enable the old behaviour in case somebody prefers it.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, could you follow the "Create a MTR" procedure here?

https://kb.i3d.net/topic/Network/10/How-to-create-a-MTR-report-Windows/316

Except once you generate the info instead of emailing it to i3d like they say, DM it to me along with your IP, which you can check on http://ip4.me/ (You can DM me on Discord or Reddit) and I'll bring it to them.

Use 213.179.197.5 for the Ashburn IP, which is missing from that list.

We don't have plans for this at the moment but it's something that we have already discussed internally and that we'd like to do in the future.

I don't think so, sorry. If you want to elaborate on the reasons why you'd like to see that happen, we can always try to improve the game in those certain areas. We are always iterating on performance, latency and stability.

Yes. Can't give you an ETA but we are very interested in having a decent clan system.

On netcode: yes, we are very familiar with the idea of mixing half/half BR/extrapolation. It has been our plan for a while to implement extrapolation as an option so that people can try the half/half approach in custom games for a while, and then based on feedback from the community we would use it in matchmaking as a default or not. My expectation is that this will be the preferred option and that we will end up making it a default.

On Vulkan, I don't want to talk with certainty about things that I haven't had the chance of testing empirically, but I suspect that whatever latency improvements we could get with Vulkan we can get eventually with a Direct3D 12 port (or at least roughly similar results) and that is much more feasible. For the time being we must support Direct3D 11-only GPU's (although it's a massive hassle) and maintaining two versions would be perhaps not a good idea considering our limited resources. I think a realistic path for us is waiting for the next version of the game to jump to Direct3D 12.

I've made a note to do this soon. But I have written it down as "way to add recent teammates as friends" instead, rather than part, any objections to that?

Yes, this is a frequent request. I'll try to prioritise it.

Removing Rotterdam would be a bit mean to UK right now :)

We are currently working on trying to get a good Paris location. It's easy to just get a consumer-grade dedicated server or a cloud location, but for important locations like that we want to stick to something proper with a support crew on-site that understands our gaming concerns (minimal routes, latency stability, etc). Also we want companies for those locations with a level of support where we can take to them any traceroute of a user having problems and they can address it, contacting this users' ISP or whatever it takes. This is why we have some important holes in our coverage right now, but don't worry, we take coverage very seriously and we are not willingly ignoring certain areas.

Yes, that'd make a lot of sense. Noted.