Producer's Letter - October 28th

An update from Executive Producer Chris Wynn

Hey everyone! 

After our large update in September, we wanted to modify our publish process to ensure a thorough testing procedure, and we set a rule that we will not publish a patch with new known issues.  Of course we may be surprised and find something once hundreds of thousands of people jump in, but if anything turns up in our testing, we will hold the patch until we can resolve it.  The net result of that change was that it took longer than it has in the past to lock down the actual patch and push it out.  I am happy with the result though in that I have not heard of any new major issues yet.  This also affects the amount of downtime to expect when we perform an update.  With more code to test, and more datacenters to update, the standard amount of downtime will be 8 hours rather than what used to be around 4 hours.

I know this patch did not have every single thing that everyone wanted, but it is important to have quality updates that continue to improve the game overall. We made some internal changes to the EU servers and hopefully that will help alleviate some of the lag we’ve been experiencing lately. We will continue to monitor those servers closely over the weekend. We are going to be converting Air Drop tickets into Scrap soon too. You will get 100 Scrap for every Air Drop ticket you have in your inventory. We’ll let you know the timing on that before it happens. With that, let’s take a look at the next patch.

 

November Game Update

Our focus for this next update is the end game flow for Team Games.  This includes getting the follow camera back in so when you die you will have the ability to follow your teammates around and spectate the action.  We will also clean up the UI at the end of the game to show the correct information around XP and finishing position. 

We have continued to work to get some bugs out of the Twitch integration and expect to have that working really solidly in the November update.  This would include the leaderboards and the ability to invite viewers into a game with you as a streamer.  If you are checking out new streamers, the in-game streamer tab will include number of players remaining if you are interesting in just checking out some end of game scenarios to see how they may play out. 

We have slowly been adjusting our ping limits with the biggest adjustment coming in this last patch.  We now have the ability to tune in-between patches, so we will continue to move that limit down further as we collect data and find the desired values. 

In addition to the items mentioned above., a number of bug fixes are going into the November Update focused on The Arena and leaderboards. 

This patch is currently being tested internally by our QA team, once everything is working as intended, we will push it up to our Test server where we will focus on it to ensure no new known issues are being introduced. 

Season 1

You may have noticed that we are still in our first preseason. We are using preseason to watch play habits and the mechanics of the scoring and leaderboard systems.  

We will begin Season 1 with the November update.  While the November update will bring minimal change to the scoring system, we will adjust tier thresholds to ensure the number of players in each tier is close to the targets that we would like to see achieved. 

While pre-season does not include rewards, the end of Season 1 will come with rewards based on which tier you achieved during the Season.  We will add a badge to your scores screen to let you know which tier you achieved in your last Season.  In the future, we would like to get this fleshed out to a full trophy room to see all of your achievements, though, that is a bit further down the roadmap.  We are also working towards end of Season tournaments restricted to your particular tier.  This will allow for some great competition amongst like skilled players. 

We already have some changes planned to roll out for Season 2, but we will also watch the play in Season 1 to see if anything else is needed.  Things being discussed, but we have not yet committed too, are a meta scoring system for Royalty tier players, in-game icons on the kill feed to designate a tier, and potentially an emote to use that shows other players which tier you attained last Season. 

We continue to examine our server performance and stability and are steadily making improvements there to improve the overall experience.  We tend not to talk too much about those, but they are really critical to the game working well and behaving consistently.