Producer's Update April 8th

An update from the Executive Producer about King of the Kill!

Hi everyone, and thanks for taking the time to give this a read.  I know that many of you have poured countless hours into H1Z1 and all of the developers thank you for that. 

I am going to change the format up a little bit this week to put a focus on relevant topics to either provide visibility, clarification, or context on anything happening within the game.  Let me know what topics you want to see discussed through Twitter @H1Z1KotK, make sure to use #H1Feedback.

Ignition

We have delayed our next test of Ignition because we were wrestling with a couple of nagging bugs, and I did not want to put up a test scenario with a known problem that would have prevented us from collecting the feedback we need to make it better.  We’ve had several internal playtests, and Ignition is playing much smoother today than it was last week, and we will be scheduling another public run on Test servers as soon as we can.

Removal of Vehicles in the Box of Destiny

Let me provide some context as to why we made this change.  We did have an annoying bug with the vehicles and tombstones causing some real chaos in there.  While we properly fixed the explosion bug, we also talked about the current box of destiny experience and felt that vehicles were a detracting experience.  We received lots of feedback saying that it was fairly obnoxious to have cars flying all over the place, running into you, along with all of the other things that were happening.  We really feel like the experience is better without them for now.  In the future we are looking at revamping the box of destiny and will have a better plan for the role vehicles will play there.

Removal of Fog

To provide context on the recent changes to fog (not poison gas, but fog).  Many players were complaining about the fog effect and its implementation.  Instead of leaving it as is while we work on a proper fix, we decided to remove it for now while we work on it in the background (as the proper fix will take some time).  When we have an implementation that we are happy with, we will put it back up.

Gunplay

Definitely seeing the notes and reports of weapons not behaving as expected.  Currently, the team’s highest priority is looking into these issues.  We are running every single weapon through a test matrix to provide us data on how it is performing and uncovering anomalies that may exist.  I will continue to provide updates on this as we work through it.  Right now we are gathering the data, looking at bullet travel, and hit registration.  From there we can move on to obstructed paths, exploits, and other areas of the gunplay.  The shotgun is definitely exhibiting some unintended behavior and we want to be sure that all of the weapons are consistent and predictable.

Recent Bug Fixes

The team is still focused on bug fixes and quality of life.  We tweaked the bombing runs around air drops, something happened where they occurred too frequently, so we made an adjustment.  We are rolling out some fixes to the spectator cam along with some other smaller bug fixes.

There will be a small update heading out to King of the Kill today with some of these changes in it as we begin to roll into our weekly update cadence.