Pro League, Competitive Play, and You

The Pro League and more...

We’re excited about today’s announcement of the H1Z1 Pro League, which  reinforces our commitment to H1Z1’s competitive core.

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about the game’s future and we want you to know that we’ve been listening and absorbing it all. We are extremely grateful to have such a passionate community; it’s not something every game is lucky enough to have.

So, what does this announcement mean for the main game? It means that we’re taking the community’s feedback about focusing on the competitive core of the game very seriously. That means we’re going to put even more effort towards bug fixes, gameplay tuning, performance optimization, outplay mechanics, and a continued focus on our anti-cheat measures.  We hope you can already see and feel this change in emphasis in our last two updates, which have both focused on improving overall gameplay, bug fixing, and anti-cheat.

It also means we’re going to invest more heavily in involving the community about the future of the game. You’ve all poured hundreds and thousands of hours into H1Z1, organized some amazing teams, and coordinated must-watch tournaments.

For H1Z1, our goal is to ensure everyone has an opportunity for discussion and feedback surrounding the game, leading to changes and adjustments for the betterment of all players.

Our commitment to you is that we are going to do a better job of communicating both the rationale and player-experience goals behind our design decisions and ideas, as well as letting you know that there’s always room for change. We want to collaborate to create the best game possible.

Let’s talk about how we are going to not just discuss this, but put action behind it. Most immediately, we will be doing a reverse AMA. Instead of us answering your questions, we have questions for you, especially in the lead up to TwitchCon. We’ve seen the reddit, Twitter, and Steam posts (to name a few locations), and we want to make sure we comprehensively respond to the community. Our goal is to gain direct constructive answers from all of you, compile your answers, and discuss on a livestream after TwitchCon.

Some of these topics will include weapon adjustments, match pacing, outplay mechanics and more. To increase your constructive feedback and working with our community, we’re also planning to expand our remote focus groups, along with more frequent Q&A’s, and developer letters.

H1Z1 has a bright future as a game and as an esport. We are going to focus on keeping H1Z1 competitive, providing a more consistent and rewarding gameplay experience, and making the game more spectator friendly, so we can all continue to enjoy this game.

We can’t wait to build it with you.

- Anthony