Producer's Letter - January 18

An update from Executive Producer Chris Wynn

Welcome to 2017!  It’s a new year and we have a lot of really exciting things planned for King of the Kill. This update has some much needed bug fixes and general polish that we are anxious to get into the game. It’s already on the Test Server and your feedback will be very important.

Next Game Patch – Jan 25th

We are lining up our next patch to go to live on January 25^th as the target date. The Test Servers will be updated with all of this today. Here is what to expect in this update.

• Reload: We were able to address all known weapons issues including reload issues on all weapons. It should be consistent now, but I could use some people really watching this one to see if there are any other cases that may have been missed. These should be few and far between if any. 
• End of Game UI: The end of game UI should now show you who killed you. I can say from experience, the inability to see how close the person who got you was to his/her own death was very frustrating.
• Car Ejection: You should no longer be ejected from a car and then stuck in place with no ability to do anything. This one bug was driving many people nuts (no pun intended), and I am glad to see this one go away.
• Infinite Inventory: There was an exploit allowing some users to have an infinite inventory, this has been addressed.

Speculative Fixes: We believe we will have fixes for the following issues in place before the 1/25 game update. There are still a few edge cases present that we will need your help and feedback on before we completely nail these down.

• Crouch Spamming: We have addressed crouch spamming. The current fix is to slightly delay how quickly you can return to standing so the reticle, camera movement, and animation are all in sync to remove the exploit of rapidly crouching and being able to remain accurate.
• Crouch Blocks: If you crouched next to an object, it would usually block you if you tried to stand back up and you would need to back away slightly in order to stand. You should now be able to stand back up (assuming there is not something directly above your character’s head).
• Emotes: We’ve cleaned up Emotes so that they can no longer be played while another action (such as looting or shooting) is performed – actions like these will always interrupt Emotes. We also have an incoming fix (not on this build) that will prevent binding emotes to the same keys as other actions to solidify the fix and clean up any last edge-cases.

 

EU Servers

The EU servers were hit pretty hard over the holiday break and a series of login interruptions made things even more challenging. I want to apologize for the issues encountered over there; we have been working towards a better hardware solution that should make a difference in the near future. The game is seeing the most growth in Europe, and all of our server focus right now is on serving the region better than we are currently. 

Next week we will deploy a software change with the intent to maximize the capabilities of all servers. After this, we will switch over to the new servers and see how they do. I’ve started a thread on Reddit about this issue specifically and I would love your direct feedback, you can find that right here.

 

Cheating

We are seeing a lot more chatter around cheating in the game. I want to assure you that we take cheating very seriously, and every time we have clear evidence of cheating, we have taken action and will continue to do so. Point being, we have been steadily kicking people out that get caught and that will not subside. No one is or will receive special treatment.

 

Test Servers

Starting this week, we are going to be utilizing our Test Servers differently to help us test the game at scale prior to deploying live and to get more time around difficult to reproduce bugs. We are going to lock the Test Servers as a default case and then unlock them at specific times and ask you guys to switch over and play some matches on Test to look at specific changes, etc. We will post what changes have been pushed to Test and what to specifically look for and provide feedback on, along with the Test Server schedule. We believe this will help catch any new issues before they go to live.

For this week, we are still a little limited in the number of players that we can support on the Test Servers. Over the next couple of weeks we are going to increase the capacity to be able to handle more people and add Test Servers in Europe for our EU friends. All of that to say that this week there could be some queue issues if a ton of people try and help us out, but we should alleviate that over time. 

This week, we could use help keeping an eye on the issues listed above to ensure they are indeed gone for good. Members of the dev team will be on testing as well, so be sure to say HI!

You can find the full calendar for the Test Server right here.

 

Airdrop Ticket to Scrap Conversion

We have this scheduled to happen with our next downtime when we patch the live servers. Again, I want to thank you for your patience on this one. We wanted to be thorough and ensure we had everything identified and lined up to make this as smooth as possible. 

We are also using this opportunity to update the items that you can receive from the Scrapyard. We added items from the Marauder, Vigilante, Mercenary, Showdown (2015), and Ronin crates (plus a few others) so there is quite a bit to pull out of it now.

 

Pre-Season 2 Ends; Pre-Season 3 Begins

Pre-Season 2 will end with the next game update. We will also grant the shotgun skin reward for anyone that completed a Top 10 score and is placed on the Leaderboard. This shotgun matches the backpack given out with Pre-Season 1. 

We are going to immediately begin a Pre-Season 3 because there are quite a few changes in the patch that warrant solid testing. 

The first is new score values for both finishing position and more importantly kills. We wanted to reward aggression in the game more so than we are now. Finishing position still matters the most, but you will now be rewarded more for your kills than you previously would have. These changes brought all new values for both finishing and kills so we want another Pre-Season to test out how they do and collect feedback from you on how you feel about it. We will be publishing an article that specifically shows the new values when we begin Pre-Season 3 so that you can see how it is changing. 

Additionally, we added Kill Count and next Kill Value elements to the game HUD to make it easier to know where you are in your match. There is also now a leaderboard tier icon associated with your name in the kill feed UI element so everyone can see your status.  

The end of Pre-Season 3 will come with an award, likely an emote, that will be slightly different based on what tier you finish the season in.

 

Current Bugs in Development

Here are the current bugs that are next up on our list to tackle:

• Vehicles: Two of the three vehicle bugs are all still under investigation. I spoke about these in my last Producer’s Letter. We are still looking at vehicles auto accelerating and getting stuck in turbo.
• Recoil: There is a bug that we are calling the recoil bug. This is when your gun has returned to center faster than the crosshair.You can actually fire accurately prior to the crosshair telling you that you are on target again. We are going to make the crosshair match what the gun is actually doing so that we do not mess with any muscle memory and learned skill that is in place now.
• Throwables & Mouse Sensitivity: If you use a throwable and then go ADS (aim down sights), your default mouse sensitivity gets messed up. We are looking to fix this one.
• Doors: One of the more difficult bugs on our list that we are trying to track down is where a door may appear open for one player, but closed for another.

Some good fixes to get out and I am excited about how using the Test Servers differently will help our live stability.