[2021] Weekly Feedback/Discussion: 8/24-8/30

The armor set is something we're figuring out - atm we could make it super expensive in terms of gold, or do some different kind of unlock system for it. We're leaning towards the latter, but we're not sure how exactly we want to do it. Once we figure that out it will be shown, but we don't want to string people along by teasing it and then not releasing it.

Yeah, we're gonna get more fast and loose with it. Atm we're having lots of weird issues with the backend and 2X XP/Gold would probably exacerbate that. I'll definitely talk to the team and schedule some dates for it going forwards.

Yeah, I think scheduling around holidays/updates and having regular ones would be nice. Definitely weekends too!

There will definitely be more stuff than what's been shown in the Eastern Invasion update, but yeah this patch will be a little light on cosmetics. What we've been trying to focus on is the engine stuff and tech side of things, since there have been quite a few problems.

As for what comes with UE4.25, we'll have native DDOS protection, and more importantly whenever epic updates UE4 they tent to not only fix a ton of things, but make it easier to work on actually making games. This means that going forwards

On the tech side of things, pretty much every weekly meeting notes (you've all probably gotten bored of it) say something about optimization. Optimization rarely means that we can fix some issue and everyone gets 5 more fps, instead, it's a ton of little changes that end up resulting in like a quarter of an fps gain in performance. While that sounds lame, if you do enough of those you actually start to see some big improvements. Aside from DDOS protection, there's been a bit of network stuff we're doing behind the scenes that should help with server problems. This is both game related netcode stuff, as well as annoying the hell out of our server providers to investigate potential issues on their end.

Overall though, our idea is that content is great; new content definitely brings new players into the game and entice existing players to return - the issue that we've seen, though is that they don't stick around. We have been working on fixing the issues that mess with retention, so that way the big content updates planned for the future have a good 'foundation' to build upon.

p.s. cloaks aren't in the cards at the moment - we've experimented with the idea and there are a few potential ways to add them, but they're not really like other armor pieces - we'd need to do some backend coding stuff to get em working, and everyone's tied up with the engine upgrade.

Okay, yep there is a reason for this.

The old maps were designed with BR in mind, so they needed a somewhat circular playing field, whereas frontline/invasion just need weird rectangles. This results in a lot of dead space on the maps. We are going to do more objective variations, especially on Feitoria, and we're probably gonna get some variants for existing maps too.

Also with Castello, most of those random areas are getting deleted for performance, we've been cooking up some FPS in the oven :)

We've been messing around with tint stuff, out current system is weird though. If we increase saturation too much the armor turns lime green due to grass reflections, etc. We are probably looking at a different method of doing tints that could allow for more color variation without looking ugly as sin.

It's a good idea, I'll see what we're able to do.

There is a period of early release, but it's weird. New animations might help in this regard, but this is kind of a pretty niche suggestion - it's still an entirely valid point though, so we can take a look at it when we're able to 👍

The game goes down every Tuesday due to Steam maintenance. It also goes down on other days of the week because things on our end break, which is exactly why we're focusing on a boring engine update before big content drops. :)

bloodlust is a pubstomp noob destroyer perk, and the noobs need to be protected. also, bloodlust in its current state is kind of a point-and-click adventure, it's too easy

ok i will hit the patchie button