Update 4.5.0

A lil somethin somethin: You can find the details for this event on the announcement page here.

Update 4.5.0
Halloween is here!
We’ve got an all-new event with 27 collectible rewards and an explosive addition to the World Tour maps starting tomorrow, sponsored by HOLTOW, who reminds you to carve your pumpkins with extreme caution!

For today…

Join the Treat Hunt Collection Event

Feeling dizzy, Contestant? It might be the copious amounts of OSPUZE-flavored Halloween candy you’ve been eating, or it could be our brand new feature - the Wheel!

The Reward Wheel is something we’ve never seen before in THE FINALS! We realized that we could not be the World's greatest game show without a flashy wheel of amazing prizes!

This Halloween, instead of adding all of these amazing cosmetics to the store, we’ve added them to the Reward Wheel. In order to spin the wheel and win something, you must have a ticket, and you can earn up to three tickets per day by completing daily contracts!

There’s an equal chance of winning every item, and if there’s a specific item you want from the wheel you can buy it using either VR’s or Multibucks (depending on the item) - no luck needed! If you spend a ticket on a spin and wind up on a reward you already have, you’ll get some VR’s back - so every spin is a win!

If you collect all the rewards featured on the wheel, you’ll get the grand prize: the Stealth Specter Bundle, which is sure to make you stand out in The Arena!

The event goes live right now, and will be live for two full weeks - so make sure you hop in right now, work your way through those contracts, and…

SPIN.

THAT.

WHEEL!

Do you know what makes this Halloween event extra scary? We’ve never done anything like this before. We want to keep finding new ways to reward and amuse you while keeping the game new and fun! Because this is so new, we would love your feedback on this event. So when it’s over, we’ll ask you to fill out a short survey about your experience.

In this update, the store is Spookier than ever! If you’re still unsure about what to dress up as for Halloween the Seas The Day bundle has you covered, it even comes with a pirate’s booty worth of Multibucks!



For those of you fighting for the top 500, this week, we are introducing Ruby level to the leaderboards!

Check out this week’s balance changes and a longer dev note on how we approach balance changes this season:


Balance Changes
A note on balance changes–

Our approach to balancing the game has evolved since the first season of THE FINALS! In the beginning, we made a lot of changes because the game was brand new and we suddenly had a constant flow of players to provide feedback, telemetry, and information that we could use to quickly calibrate and experiment with.

As time marches on and we start to see this game reach a more stable state, we want to fall into a more sustainable and reliable rhythm that gives us time to plan larger and more meaningful shifts in balance based on how we see the community engage with the meta.

As such, our intent is to do those larger, meta-altering balance passes at the start of each new season, where we can introduce new strategies and ways to play. Then, as needed, we’ll perform another pass halfway through each season aimed at polishing the current meta and addressing major feedback points from our core without fully resetting the meta and causing confusion.

Between these two major balance passes, we’ll only perform smaller nudges to the balance that aim to smooth out the current experience when absolutely necessary.

We’re hopeful this approach will lead to a smoother and clearer experience for you and help set better expectations regarding the weekly game updates while being kinder to our players and to our team!



Weapons

Model 1887

• Increased inner pellet radius from 0.45 to 0.65, making the weapon less accurate at longer ranges
• Increased outer pellet radius from 1.3 to 1.7, making the weapon less accurate at longer ranges
• Decreased damage falloff multiplier from 65% to 60%, causing the weapon to do less damage at range

Dev Note: One way we investigate the balance of weapons is to look at effectiveness in gameplay (i.e. stats like damage, kill rates, headshot rates, and accuracy), in addition to stats like usage and win rates. Looking at this data alone, the Model 1887 is good but not exceptional when it comes to effectiveness during play. However, we’ve seen a large uptick in usage, mostly in higher-skill tiers which has led to the gun being very prevalent in matches and leading to a somewhat stale meta. This ‘nudge’ to the effective range will hopefully disrupt this trend, without making the weapon weaker than its nearest competitors when it comes to effectiveness (i.e. the AKM, Famas and Pike-556).

XP-54

• Increased damage falloff start distance from 15m to 20m, making the weapon more impactful at range
• Increased damage falloff end distance from 25m to 30m, making the weapon more impactful at range
• Decreased damage falloff multiplier from 65% to 62%

Content and Bug Fixes
Contracts

• Added new Halloween Contracts as part of the Treat Hunt event
• Fixed an issue where the damage values earned on Contracts could be broken, showing large negative scores

Specializations

Cloaking Device

• Fixed an issue introduced in 4.4 that caused refraction effects like cloaking, and parts of the dematerialize effect, to not be visible when the effect quality is set to medium

Dematerializer

• Fixed an issue where environmental kills were not detected when the dematerialized ‘floor’ was an air vent or other small prop

UI

• Fixed an issue where players might not be able to equip an item immediately after purchasing it
• Fixed various issues where player outlines could have the wrong color
• Fixed an occasional issue where new players could become stuck in the account linking flow
• Fixed an issue where the Contract screen would unlock at the wrong time for new players during the first-time user experience

Sponsors

• Increased the number of Fans that can be earned by 50% to 100%, depending on the action type
• Disabled the ability to earn Fans with the Healing Beam

Dev Note: We’ve disabled the earning of Fans via the Healing Beam as it was too easy for players to exploit this mechanic to farm Fans, at the cost of good, competitive matches. We only want Fans to be earnable for actions that can be completed regardless of the Contestant setup.

VRs

• Increased the VR cap from 3000 to 5000

Weapons

Alternate Scopes

• Fixed an issue where weapons with an attached sight could have a skewed pose when aiming down sights, causing the sight to be misaligned with where the weapon is aimed