[2021] Weekly Feedback/Discussion: 6/29 - 7/5

Hey all, you know the drill - please post any feedback, suggestions, concerns etc. that come to mind! As always, please keep things civil and be respectful to one another. Thanks a ton for all the feedback you provide us, and we appreciate your patience as we work on the engine update. <3

This week was a catch-up in terms of our meeting, as we had quite a few people not able to make it last week. Feast your eyes on our meeting notes below!

• We're switching 80 player servers to 64 player servers. This should help with client performance (your fps) and may or may not help with packet loss/network issues on the server side of things.
• We're looking into engineer spam. We don't want to ruin the engineer playstyle, but we're looking to balance things to prevent D-Day levels of fire-ballista machinegun spam. We're looking into ways of keeping the impact of the fire pit and mounted crossbows but limiting how oppressive they can be, as right now a few of them can lock down objectives and destroy nobles instantly.
• We're tweaking our matchmaking logic to prioritize filling servers, at the moment they like to put people in empty lobbies for some reason.
• Latest mod tools updates: Epic will be looking at our SDK in July :(((
• Horde maps will now have some peasant weapons :)
• We've began testing with the new Horde AI spawning system, which seems very promising.
• Camp's audio facelift is nearly done, and it should be super immersive. The river actually makes noise now! Crossroads is next, which is getting some audio/ambiance improvements as well.
• Our new chat logging system will allow community server owners to log their server's chat to a Discord channel - pretty much the same functionality we'll have for officials in the future.
• Speaking of servers, RCON is getting some improvements.
• We've been trying some experimental changes to the filter system on the server browser.
• More optimizations - the FPS train don't stop. We've been working on Arena and a few other maps/areas this week. Coming up this week, we'll be doing an optimization pass on Camp.
• Animation work is ongoing - 1H+shield animations are being polished, and morph animations are in the process of being tweaked as well.
• Some backend work on map selection is ongoing. This should allow us a bit more options for how maps are presented on the vote screen, which will be nice for the upcoming maps and for when we do more map variations.
• We're looking into Hardware ID (HWID) bans, which could help massively if we're able to get that working.
• We talked to our server providers, who haven't been able to find issues on EU servers that we're getting reports about. We're still investigating, and more information is always useful.
• More work on Noria - some snippets coming this week!
• Castello work is ongoing - the bottom has been reworked and opened up for better gameplay, among other things. We're also looking to add a minor objective to the map as well, mainly to help with some pacing and spawn issues. In addition to this, the portcullis objective will be getting some tweaks that make that objective more focused on fighting outdoors instead of fighting over a doorway.
• Some more AI tweaks, animations backend work, and some changes to some backend code for combat. The last thing might help a bit with combo consistency and will allow us to explore combo slowdowns on missed attacks.
• We're also looking into a simplified way to do a combo-feint-to-parry. Skilled players don't really have any issues doing the inputs, but for new players it just adds another hidden and frustrating mechanic. Having a one-button press for it just makes things easier for new players to start getting up to speed. Currently experimental.
• The Armory Update is chugging along. Some improved search functions have been worked on, and things are going well.
• Some Javelin skins are being made - they look like a handheld ballista bolt, aka war darts. :)
• A snippet will be posted on the discord today - discord.gg/mordhau :)

Whew, quite a bit this week! You can see last week's post here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Mordhau/comments/o5qkq7/weekly_feedbackdiscussion_622_628/