Season 1 - Developer’s Update
Dear players,
First of all, we want to sincerely apologize for the quality of the update we delivered yesterday. We see that the game experience has become worse for most of our players both on Playstation and Xbox, and that the fixes introduced in this update did not actually fix the overall state of the game. In fact, we tried to add as many fixes and Quality of Life changes as possible, but rushed too much.
Most importantly, you trusted us and we failed you. We will now try to do our best to make it right. Let’s discuss the most important issues that appeared after the update and how we will deal with them.
Freezes
Long freezes came back after the update, and the overall performance suffered greatly for both consoles. We are planning to introduce a hotfix this week (today or early tomorrow) that is aimed at fixing this particular issue.
The hotfix should improve the situation with long freezes and shop freezes, as well as reduce the overall number of freezes during the match. To fix the FPS drops, we will need more technical information which we will start collecting now and will concentrate on next week.
Punishment in Ranked matches
The problem with team kills in Hardcore/Ranked has turned around: before there was little to no punishment for team kills, now it is too harsh. Moreover, the system is not clear enough, and sometimes you just don’t understand why you got kicked from a Ranked match.
In fact, the current penalty system considers all types of leaving, i.e. getting kicked for team kills, getting kicked for being AFK and intentional leaving. So, every time you leave the match due to this or that reason, you will receive a penalty. The penalty is cumulative, i.e. it becomes stronger with every subsequent leave within a certain timeframe.
We are planning to introduce the following changes to this system:
First, we will remove any penalty for kills in Free Fire in the client update next week (not in the hotfix). It is called “Free Fire”, after all.
Second, we will temporarily reduce the ban time while we still have issues - you should not suffer because of the problems on our side. This will be introduced in the hotfix.
Third, we will show you a special warning message whenever you violate the rules of Ranked in this or that way, so it won’t be a surprise for you why you get banned. This will be delivered next week.
Fourth, we see it is a pain to play a Ranked game till the end if the teams are uneven due to others leaving the match. Among the potential ways on how to deal with it we see implementing a “Forfeit” feature or allowing players left 2 or 3 against 5 to leave the match without a penalty. This is also expected in the update next week.
Aim assistance
Many of you noticed the changes to aim assistance which we did not announce anywhere in our patch notes. It was intended as a minor fix, and it is a shame it went unannounced - we will try to avoid such situations in future and include even the most minor fixes into the patch notes. In this case, there will be no “ninja fixes”, i.e. unannounced fixes installed in any of our future updates.
In fact, the change was intended to be a bug fix - previously, AA snapped to the body of the enemy in some of the situations it shouldn’t have snapped. Now AA works as intended, it still works, it is not switched off.
However, we have seen many commentaries that shooting with AA has become less fun and just generally worse. Please share your feedback on the current aim assistance system - do you think we should keep it this way, roll back the changes or alter the current system a little bit?
Voice lines
When it rains, it pours, huh? Even the voice line changes we introduced in our update made the situation worse: now the announcer talks more often and later than expected, and characters spam voice lines every now and then, ruining the competitive experience even further.
The hotfix will reduce the frequency of character voice lines and rework the voice announcer, the patch next week will fix a larger amount of voice announcer-related issues.
Hit registration
There is also one thing that didn’t become better with the update, and that is hit registration. After trying to introduce changes into the current system, we understand now that it would be better to rewrite it completely, i.e. the very algorithm of character movement registration.
This is something we’ll have to thoroughly test before we roll it out live, so we expect the new hit registration system to land on our servers in July or August.
New content
We also understand that we need to clarify why we even think of adding new things to the game without fixing all the technical issues.
Let’s be honest - there is not so much content in Warface: Breakout right now, and those of you who played our game a lot, know that at a certain point you could basically “complete” the game with nothing else to strive for.
The main point here is, the delivery of new content does not interfere with fixing the old and existing game issues, as these areas of work are performed by different parts of our team. Without new content any game will gradually become dull and repetitive, and this is not the future we envision for our game.
That is why, even though we will focus on the tech issues in the nearest future, we will also bring you new content on a weekly and monthly basis. Next week we will be ready to share our roadmap for 2020, where you will see all the things we would like to add to our game this year.
Our QA and testing procedure
While it is important to fix these particular things - when it comes to the problems of this magnitude, one should think of changing the whole system. This update exhibited the flaws in our QA procedure - as we said before, updates of this level of quality should never see the light of day.
From now on, we will not rush so hard and will conduct more playtests in different test environments in order to deliver quality content. We know it should have been done earlier, but unfortunately not all the processes that are efficient in theory are indeed efficient in practice, and we did not see that coming. We know now that improving the overall QA phase is something we have to do as soon as possible.
In conclusion, we would like to thank you for being with us during these tough times. Your support and feedback is still our main motivation to move forward, and we hope that in the nearest future we will be able to make your Warface: Breakout experience way better than it is now.
Yours,
Warface: Breakout Team
