With the holidays upon us now, it is a great time to take a look back at the year that was and talk about some of the highlights, as well as some of the missteps, along the way.

Before I begin, I want to thank the community for your continued support and feedback in shaping the game.  We read and discuss so many of the tweets and threads and constantly use them in our discussions about what to change and how to make the game the best experience possible.


2016 brought a lot of really positive updates to the game. 

First, King of the Kill became its own game. This was tremendously exciting for the team and for our community. King of the Kill was really able to come into its own with a dedicated development team that could fully support the community and vision of the game. 

Things really started to pick up in the summer. With the combat update, when we updated crafting and did a pass for all of the weapons in the game, we were able to respond to a lot of feedback that we had collected from the community.  We also updated all of the vehicle physics for a more grounded and realistic experience. This update was the first one that really started to move the game in the direction that we wanted to take it. 

This built up to the large game update on September 20th that added The Arena, an all-new UI, Seasons, and our Twitch integration.  We worked all year on the content of this update to get a lot of those features into a much higher quality state.  While we have iterated on some of these new features, and will continue to do so, we are really pleased with how this update has gone and been received.  It has really provided us with the platform to continue to improve and make the game better and better each day. 

The second annual H1Z1 Invitational at TwitchCon was one of the biggest highlights of the year.  $267,000 in prize money was raised and we had two great games to watch, plus the Qualifier matches.  The Kappa theater at the event was standing room only and more than 118,000 concurrent viewers tuned in online to watch the event. The energy was infectious and I loved meeting so many fans and players over that weekend.  Congrats again to Radek for the win in game 1, and Inboxes for the win in game 2 (to go with a 2^nd place finish in game 1).  I am more excited than ever to build on this and bring some great features to the game in the future. 

We end the year really happy with what we have done, but also excited about the vast amount of work still in front of us.  There are roughly twice as many players playing the game right now compared to earlier in the year, with thousands of new players coming in each day.  The community only gets stronger as it grows, and the stronger the community, the stronger the game will be. 


While there were a lot of positives from the year, 2016 also had many points of frustrations and misses on our commitments to you.  This is where we are going to do better over 2017 -  much better.  We are making changes now to ensure that we do just that.  These changes include filling needed positions, making process changes, changing our infrastructure to catch things in development, and a whole list of other changes.  This list will be bigger than the highlights and I know that makes you frustrated, and it makes me really unhappy as well.  We have to do better, we can do better, we will do better. 

Our biggest frustration has been in introducing new bugs into the live game.  After the update in September, we took a pretty hard stance that we were not going to patch if we had any new known issues.  The result of that has been a lot of delays in features that I will talk about below.  This is a good thing ultimately, but a bit frustrating in the short term.  What is not acceptable is an update like the one we did in early December.  It contained too many speculative fixes to issues that we could not recreate internally that ultimately did not pan out.  We are tackling this one on multiple fronts.  The first is continuing to push quality over quantity.  After a little bit of time, we will settle into a natural rhythm and get a cadence of steady updates.  We are also changing the configurations of our internal testing environments to mimic the live environment to be better able to catch issues before they go to Live.  We are looking at the composition and size of our QA team to be in a position to ensure we can get enough testing to find the issues before going Live.  And finally, we are looking at revamping the way we communicate with you over 2017 to allow for more back and forth with fixes, issues, and other topics.  The biggest thing is a little patience. These are some pretty big changes to the way things have been done for a long time and will not all happen overnight.  This might even take a few months to get everything in place and working well, but we are absolutely committed to getting it right for the long term. 

The shotgun certainly belongs in the struggle category.  I’m not sure there has ever been one single game feature that has been as frustrating as the shotgun in my entire career.  In a way, I am really happy with the current discussions around the shotgun, so let me explain.  We absolutely had an issue that took a long to track down and figure out.  What was happening was some pellets would originate at some point not close to where it was supposed to originate from.  It took a long time to track this one down because we couldn’t make it happen, so any fixes were purely speculative.  We kept adding new logging, which slowly allowed us to narrow in on the root cause until we actually got to it. We did a poor job of being open about that as we were working on it.  Once we did track it down, everything started behaving as expected.  Now this is where I get happy because the discussions we should be having are around the design of the weapon.  Is the spread big enough, is the effective range about where it feels good, does it do enough damage, etc.  The videos being sent my way about shotgun issues are exactly this, and we are discussing these now to determine what design changes we should be making. 

Team Spectate is a feature we talked about some time ago and we really felt good about being able to get it released in November.  Then we ran into a host of unexpected problems that was mostly related to the UI at the end of a match.  We worked through those issues and then put it up on the Test Servers for feedback.  If I were to summarize the feedback, it came in as “better than nothing.”  Our bar has to be higher than that, and we have to continue to hold ourselves to a higher target.  So with that in mind, we have decided to hold onto the feature and continue to work on it before releasing.  Specifically, we want to improve the visuals when spectating your teammates.  We’re going to see what we can do to improve it in the new year and get it into a place where we are all excited by the new feature, and don’t just feel like it is okay and “better than nothing.” 

The quality of our EU servers has been struggling for longer than desired.  We have taken a bunch of different steps over the last month, but at best we have made incremental improvements and have not been able to really fully resolve it yet.  We do have brand new servers en route, which we expect to really improve things.  Right now, we believe these will be in place by mid-January.  There is some long-term good coming from this; we are looking at our entire infrastructure right now and implementing some improvements that will allow us to provide better services that are able to scale much faster when needed. 

Converting airdrop tickets to scrap is another one of those haunting issues.  This looked really simple on the onset, but then as we dug into it, it turned into a big task.  Basically, we couldn’t execute it with enough confidence that new issues wouldn’t be added, or that we would completely get them all in one pass.  We have made really good progress on the issue and it is something that we expect to happen early in 2017.  I can only apologize on this one; it is still a priority and we will make it happen. 

The Skullcrusher Event has been great, and it is allowing us to test some critical long-term backend code.  I know there was some frustration over taking Event Tickets for this after allowing you to scrap them.  The thinking was really the other way around. We felt that making it as an available option in the Event would be another great method for using them.  Clearly, our communication was not great on this one.  Right now, we are discussing whether or not we will have more Events where an Event Ticket could be used as entry.  We do not have anything concrete decided yet, but it is something we may do.  So, if you want to be cautious, there may be future Events where Event Tickets will be handy.  We will keep the ability to scrap them so you will not be stuck holding onto them if we decide continuing to use them doesn’t make sense.  I just want to make sure that you know this is a possibility in case you were going to scrap them all immediately after the conclusion of the Skullcrusher Event. 

Skirmishes fall into a similar category as Team Spectate.  We have Skirmishes ready to go, but ran into unexpected problems with the end game UI.  We are working to get this cleaned up so we can get Skirmishes going again as soon as we can.  Similar to the Team Spectate feature, we will not add Skirmishes if we believe the experience would be sub-par.  The first Skirmish that we will run will be the Ignition ruleset. 

With the large game update in September, we had to end our whitelisted server program.  We want to replace it with a more robust system in the future, and next year we intend to roll out the first phase of this.  We are calling it Hosted Matches and you will be able to find it as its own menu in the UI.  These games will be scheduled to begin at a specific time, and eligible participants will have their accounts entitled for access.  We have been testing these systems for the last few months with the community and plan on officially launching it in 2017.  At this time, it is still a manual process for us to administer and maintain the schedules and environments, so we will be limiting participation to just a few groups at any one time. We haven’t determined participation yet, but if you really enjoyed the community-run events, this will be a way to bring that back. 

Clearly there is still a lot to work on here.  A lot of this is pretty normal in game development -- it just all happens prior to release.  The unique part of King of the Kill is being in Early Access. You get to see everything that happens, as it happens. We will make this better over 2017. This is my commitment to you and the entire team is committed to it as well. 


Let’s start with talking about our interactions with you, our community.  My job pulls me in so many different directions, that often the first thing sacrificed is spending time interacting with you and answering questions.  To help make this easier to manage, we have several things being planned out right now.  The first is a regular recurring open Q&A time on Reddit or other social media.  The other thing that I will be doing is spending more time on our Community Outbreak show to answer questions and provide information.  I may even be available to do some guest spots on others’ streams. Setting aside regular time to focus on this will make it a lot easier for me to ensure that we put more of a focus on this.  Even if I don’t always respond, I do read each and every tweet that you send me, the good and the bad.  I find those really helpful in understanding what issues are the most aggravating at the moment. 


We have taken a hard stance on teaming in Events and solo matches. There is no acceptable amount of teaming in our view.  Any action to help another player take out an opponent is teaming.  If we see this happening or are provided evidence of it happening, we will penalize the offending players, no matter who they are.  You may have seen certain streamers recently were penalized for teaming, but that doesn’t mean non-streamers are going unchecked.  People who report teamers to h1z1cheater@daybreakgames.com with video evidence of how it went down helps us tremendously. We do have GMs in place jumping into matches and catching people live as well. We are working on backend systems that will automate this in a much more efficient way. At this point, think of it as speeding in a car: you know it’s against the law, and you know there are cops out there. We can’t catch everyone but when we do, don’t be surprised if you get a ticket. You can read all about our Rules of Conduct right here. 


There are a few bugs that are driving myself, and all of you, fairly crazy.  We have people looking at these ones now, and will get them rolled out as soon as we feel confident about a fix.  I am just listing some of the more visible and talked about ones here, but we will be putting the majority of our focus in early 2017 on fixing bugs in general, so you should expect fixes across many fronts.

• Reloading and suddenly empty clips -- we finally found some solid steps to be able to reproduce this as needed.  As I said above, when we cannot do that, we have to make educated guesses.  Now that we can make this happen, I am 100% confident we will track it down and fix it pretty quickly.
• Doors - We are still looking into an issue where a door appears to be open for one person and closed for another. It’s a rarer case scenario which is making it difficult to narrow down.  We are investigating, I just don’t have any valid timeframes to provide yet.
• Lack of killer’s information on the death screens -- this is probably the bug that frustrates me the most right now.  Nothing worse than being on the losing end of an intense firefight and then having no idea what sort of damage you did to your opponent.  We have a fix in testing for this right now, so I feel good about getting a fix out for this in our next update in 2017.
• Vehicle bugs – three vehicle bugs are all under investigation.  These all fall in that tough category, in that we do not yet know how to consistently reproduce them.  If you can, please get as many details to us as you can.  Your character name, your region, time it happened, exact steps that you took to make it happen, etc.  These three bugs are: getting stuck in turbo, having the car move forward as soon as you get in, and  randomly getting ejected from your car and frozen in place (the worst one of the bunch).  As soon as we can get a handle on these we will be sure to communicate out when to expect a fix.
• Emote while looting – While not technically a bug, this is an annoying exploit. Yes, players have the ability to do this, but we don’t love it.  We think it goes against the idea of providing a fair experience that is based on skill.  We will be doing something about this to not allow it to happen.  In the short term over the holidays we decided to not allow emotes to play in-game because it is starting to spread too far and wide and it goes against the notion of a fair environment for all.  Doing this will not affect the in-game experience or moment-to-moment gameplay.  We will restore this functionality early next year when we get a more thorough fix in place. 

Again, I just want to sincerely thank everyone that has played, everyone that has left feedback, and everyone that really enjoys playing the game.  We have a lot to improve, and a lot that will improve as we get focused into 2017.  I end the year really excited about what we can do in 2017, and I hope you all come along for the ride and continue to leave your feedback to shape that experience.

 

With the holidays upon us now, it is a great time to take a look back at the year that was and talk about some of the highlights, as well as some of the missteps, along the way.

Before I begin, I want to thank the community for your continued support and feedback in shaping the game.  We read and discuss so many of the tweets and threads and constantly use them in our discussions about what to change and how to make the game the best experience possible.


2016 brought a lot of really positive updates to the game. 

First, King of the Kill became its own game. This was tremendously exciting for the team and for our community. King of the Kill was really able to come into its own with a dedicated development team that could fully support the community and vision of the game. 

Things really started to pick up in the summer. With the combat update, when we updated crafting and did a pass for all of the weapons in the game, we were able to respond to a lot of feedback that we had collected from the community.  We also updated all of the vehicle physics for a more grounded and realistic experience. This update was the first one that really started to move the game in the direction that we wanted to take it. 

This built up to the large game update on September 20th that added The Arena, an all-new UI, Seasons, and our Twitch integration.  We worked all year on the content of this update to get a lot of those features into a much higher quality state.  While we have iterated on some of these new features, and will continue to do so, we are really pleased with how this update has gone and been received.  It has really provided us with the platform to continue to improve and make the game better and better each day. 

The second annual H1Z1 Invitational at TwitchCon was one of the biggest highlights of the year.  $267,000 in prize money was raised and we had two great games to watch, plus the Qualifier matches.  The Kappa theater at the event was standing room only and more than 118,000 concurrent viewers tuned in online to watch the event. The energy was infectious and I loved meeting so many fans and players over that weekend.  Congrats again to Radek for the win in game 1, and Inboxes for the win in game 2 (to go with a 2^nd place finish in game 1).  I am more excited than ever to build on this and bring some great features to the game in the future. 

We end the year really happy with what we have done, but also excited about the vast amount of work still in front of us.  There are roughly twice as many players playing the game right now compared to earlier in the year, with thousands of new players coming in each day.  The community only gets stronger as it grows, and the stronger the community, the stronger the game will be. 


While there were a lot of positives from the year, 2016 also had many points of frustrations and misses on our commitments to you.  This is where we are going to do better over 2017 -  much better.  We are making changes now to ensure that we do just that.  These changes include filling needed positions, making process changes, changing our infrastructure to catch things in development, and a whole list of other changes.  This list will be bigger than the highlights and I know that makes you frustrated, and it makes me really unhappy as well.  We have to do better, we can do better, we will do better. 

Our biggest frustration has been in introducing new bugs into the live game.  After the update in September, we took a pretty hard stance that we were not going to patch if we had any new known issues.  The result of that has been a lot of delays in features that I will talk about below.  This is a good thing ultimately, but a bit frustrating in the short term.  What is not acceptable is an update like the one we did in early December.  It contained too many speculative fixes to issues that we could not recreate internally that ultimately did not pan out.  We are tackling this one on multiple fronts.  The first is continuing to push quality over quantity.  After a little bit of time, we will settle into a natural rhythm and get a cadence of steady updates.  We are also changing the configurations of our internal testing environments to mimic the live environment to be better able to catch issues before they go to Live.  We are looking at the composition and size of our QA team to be in a position to ensure we can get enough testing to find the issues before going Live.  And finally, we are looking at revamping the way we communicate with you over 2017 to allow for more back and forth with fixes, issues, and other topics.  The biggest thing is a little patience. These are some pretty big changes to the way things have been done for a long time and will not all happen overnight.  This might even take a few months to get everything in place and working well, but we are absolutely committed to getting it right for the long term. 

The shotgun certainly belongs in the struggle category.  I’m not sure there has ever been one single game feature that has been as frustrating as the shotgun in my entire career.  In a way, I am really happy with the current discussions around the shotgun, so let me explain.  We absolutely had an issue that took a long to track down and figure out.  What was happening was some pellets would originate at some point not close to where it was supposed to originate from.  It took a long time to track this one down because we couldn’t make it happen, so any fixes were purely speculative.  We kept adding new logging, which slowly allowed us to narrow in on the root cause until we actually got to it. We did a poor job of being open about that as we were working on it.  Once we did track it down, everything started behaving as expected.  Now this is where I get happy because the discussions we should be having are around the design of the weapon.  Is the spread big enough, is the effective range about where it feels good, does it do enough damage, etc.  The videos being sent my way about shotgun issues are exactly this, and we are discussing these now to determine what design changes we should be making. 

Team Spectate is a feature we talked about some time ago and we really felt good about being able to get it released in November.  Then we ran into a host of unexpected problems that was mostly related to the UI at the end of a match.  We worked through those issues and then put it up on the Test Servers for feedback.  If I were to summarize the feedback, it came in as “better than nothing.”  Our bar has to be higher than that, and we have to continue to hold ourselves to a higher target.  So with that in mind, we have decided to hold onto the feature and continue to work on it before releasing.  Specifically, we want to improve the visuals when spectating your teammates.  We’re going to see what we can do to improve it in the new year and get it into a place where we are all excited by the new feature, and don’t just feel like it is okay and “better than nothing.” 

The quality of our EU servers has been struggling for longer than desired.  We have taken a bunch of different steps over the last month, but at best we have made incremental improvements and have not been able to really fully resolve it yet.  We do have brand new servers en route, which we expect to really improve things.  Right now, we believe these will be in place by mid-January.  There is some long-term good coming from this; we are looking at our entire infrastructure right now and implementing some improvements that will allow us to provide better services that are able to scale much faster when needed. 

Converting airdrop tickets to scrap is another one of those haunting issues.  This looked really simple on the onset, but then as we dug into it, it turned into a big task.  Basically, we couldn’t execute it with enough confidence that new issues wouldn’t be added, or that we would completely get them all in one pass.  We have made really good progress on the issue and it is something that we expect to happen early in 2017.  I can only apologize on this one; it is still a priority and we will make it happen. 

The Skullcrusher Event has been great, and it is allowing us to test some critical long-term backend code.  I know there was some frustration over taking Event Tickets for this after allowing you to scrap them.  The thinking was really the other way around. We felt that making it as an available option in the Event would be another great method for using them.  Clearly, our communication was not great on this one.  Right now, we are discussing whether or not we will have more Events where an Event Ticket could be used as entry.  We do not have anything concrete decided yet, but it is something we may do.  So, if you want to be cautious, there may be future Events where Event Tickets will be handy.  We will keep the ability to scrap them so you will not be stuck holding onto them if we decide continuing to use them doesn’t make sense.  I just want to make sure that you know this is a possibility in case you were going to scrap them all immediately after the conclusion of the Skullcrusher Event. 

Skirmishes fall into a similar category as Team Spectate.  We have Skirmishes ready to go, but ran into unexpected problems with the end game UI.  We are working to get this cleaned up so we can get Skirmishes going again as soon as we can.  Similar to the Team Spectate feature, we will not add Skirmishes if we believe the experience would be sub-par.  The first Skirmish that we will run will be the Ignition ruleset. 

With the large game update in September, we had to end our whitelisted server program.  We want to replace it with a more robust system in the future, and next year we intend to roll out the first phase of this.  We are calling it Hosted Matches and you will be able to find it as its own menu in the UI.  These games will be scheduled to begin at a specific time, and eligible participants will have their accounts entitled for access.  We have been testing these systems for the last few months with the community and plan on officially launching it in 2017.  At this time, it is still a manual process for us to administer and maintain the schedules and environments, so we will be limiting participation to just a few groups at any one time. We haven’t determined participation yet, but if you really enjoyed the community-run events, this will be a way to bring that back. 

Clearly there is still a lot to work on here.  A lot of this is pretty normal in game development -- it just all happens prior to release.  The unique part of King of the Kill is being in Early Access. You get to see everything that happens, as it happens. We will make this better over 2017. This is my commitment to you and the entire team is committed to it as well. 


Let’s start with talking about our interactions with you, our community.  My job pulls me in so many different directions, that often the first thing sacrificed is spending time interacting with you and answering questions.  To help make this easier to manage, we have several things being planned out right now.  The first is a regular recurring open Q&A time on Reddit or other social media.  The other thing that I will be doing is spending more time on our Community Outbreak show to answer questions and provide information.  I may even be available to do some guest spots on others’ streams. Setting aside regular time to focus on this will make it a lot easier for me to ensure that we put more of a focus on this.  Even if I don’t always respond, I do read each and every tweet that you send me, the good and the bad.  I find those really helpful in understanding what issues are the most aggravating at the moment. 


We have taken a hard stance on teaming in Events and solo matches. There is no acceptable amount of teaming in our view.  Any action to help another player take out an opponent is teaming.  If we see this happening or are provided evidence of it happening, we will penalize the offending players, no matter who they are.  You may have seen certain streamers recently were penalized for teaming, but that doesn’t mean non-streamers are going unchecked.  People who report teamers to h1z1cheater@daybreakgames.com with video evidence of how it went down helps us tremendously. We do have GMs in place jumping into matches and catching people live as well. We are working on backend systems that will automate this in a much more efficient way. At this point, think of it as speeding in a car: you know it’s against the law, and you know there are cops out there. We can’t catch everyone but when we do, don’t be surprised if you get a ticket. You can read all about our Rules of Conduct right here. 


There are a few bugs that are driving myself, and all of you, fairly crazy.  We have people looking at these ones now, and will get them rolled out as soon as we feel confident about a fix.  I am just listing some of the more visible and talked about ones here, but we will be putting the majority of our focus in early 2017 on fixing bugs in general, so you should expect fixes across many fronts.

• Reloading and suddenly empty clips -- we finally found some solid steps to be able to reproduce this as needed.  As I said above, when we cannot do that, we have to make educated guesses.  Now that we can make this happen, I am 100% confident we will track it down and fix it pretty quickly.
• Doors - We are still looking into an issue where a door appears to be open for one person and closed for another. It’s a rarer case scenario which is making it difficult to narrow down.  We are investigating, I just don’t have any valid timeframes to provide yet.
• Lack of killer’s information on the death screens -- this is probably the bug that frustrates me the most right now.  Nothing worse than being on the losing end of an intense firefight and then having no idea what sort of damage you did to your opponent.  We have a fix in testing for this right now, so I feel good about getting a fix out for this in our next update in 2017.
• Vehicle bugs – three vehicle bugs are all under investigation.  These all fall in that tough category, in that we do not yet know how to consistently reproduce them.  If you can, please get as many details to us as you can.  Your character name, your region, time it happened, exact steps that you took to make it happen, etc.  These three bugs are: getting stuck in turbo, having the car move forward as soon as you get in, and  randomly getting ejected from your car and frozen in place (the worst one of the bunch).  As soon as we can get a handle on these we will be sure to communicate out when to expect a fix.
• Emote while looting – While not technically a bug, this is an annoying exploit. Yes, players have the ability to do this, but we don’t love it.  We think it goes against the idea of providing a fair experience that is based on skill.  We will be doing something about this to not allow it to happen.  In the short term over the holidays we decided to not allow emotes to play in-game because it is starting to spread too far and wide and it goes against the notion of a fair environment for all.  Doing this will not affect the in-game experience or moment-to-moment gameplay.  We will restore this functionality early next year when we get a more thorough fix in place. 

Again, I just want to sincerely thank everyone that has played, everyone that has left feedback, and everyone that really enjoys playing the game.  We have a lot to improve, and a lot that will improve as we get focused into 2017.  I end the year really excited about what we can do in 2017, and I hope you all come along for the ride and continue to leave your feedback to shape that experience.

 

The servers will be coming offline on Wednesday, December 14th at 3AM PT and will remain down for approximately 6 hours.

Live servers are being updated with the latest build changes. This patch is focused on pushing bug fixes for bugs and exploits that we have seen recently. We wanted to ensure as quick a fix as possible for these issues.

New Feature: Kill Cam

• When you are killed, the camera will now follow your killer for a short time so you can see where the killing shot came from.

Bug Fixes:

• Further work on the infamous shotgun. We have beat the heck out of this one for some time and our reporting is showing really reliable shot registration and performance. Please pay attention to it, your quality of hits (how much of the spread hit your target, etc.) and share any videos if you believe you see unexpected behavior.
  
• Reduced the amount of time before the game starts once you get into Fort Destiny. Rolling from one game to another should be quite a bit faster.
  
• Reduced the amount of players that you will see in Fort Destiny. This was done to reduce network load to improve game performance on our servers, and should not really impact your game experience. This has no effect once you parachute into the world to begin the match.
  
• Fixed a known case where winning a game could cause a “stuck cursor” state in the subsequent game, which could lead to the inability to aim or shoot under some circumstances.
  
• Entering a vehicle prone will no longer allow players to move faster than intended while prone after exiting the vehicle. This removes an exploit that popped up recently that we wanted to eradicate quickly.
  
• Cutting the engine of a vehicle will no longer make it completely silent. We were seeing some cases of rolling up on someone in stealth mode that was unintended. This should not occur any longer as you can hear the vehicle rolling.
  
• FOV range is limited in the useroptions.ini to match the in-game range. We were seeing some abuse at really wide FOV’s that were giving players an unfair advantage.
  
• Procoagulant was appearing as craftable even if you were missing ingredients. This will no longer happen and it will correctly indicate if you are able to craft it or not.
  
• Appropriate right click options have been fixed on Makeshift Armor.
  
• AK-47s can now be equipped via proximity right-click like other weapons.
  
• Holiday Hoodies will now correctly have the hood down when equipping a helmet.
  
• Fixed some clipping issues that occurred when wearing body armor and a parka, and the Frostbite Beanie and a face mask.

We are prepping another patch before the holidays that will focus on server performance to get as much out of our current servers as we can. We will share more info on this next week.

And finally, expect a Producer’s letter before the holidays to talk about Team Spectate and a lot of other stuff.

Thanks for the continued feedback and bug reports as it is helping us hone in on issues and get them resolved.

The servers will be coming offline on Wednesday, December 14th at 3AM PT and will remain down for approximately 6 hours.

Live servers are being updated with the latest build changes. This patch is focused on pushing bug fixes for bugs and exploits that we have seen recently. We wanted to ensure as quick a fix as possible for these issues.

New Feature: Kill Cam

• When you are killed, the camera will now follow your killer for a short time so you can see where the killing shot came from.

Bug Fixes:

• Further work on the infamous shotgun. We have beat the heck out of this one for some time and our reporting is showing really reliable shot registration and performance. Please pay attention to it, your quality of hits (how much of the spread hit your target, etc.) and share any videos if you believe you see unexpected behavior.
  
• Reduced the amount of time before the game starts once you get into Fort Destiny. Rolling from one game to another should be quite a bit faster.
  
• Reduced the amount of players that you will see in Fort Destiny. This was done to reduce network load to improve game performance on our servers, and should not really impact your game experience. This has no effect once you parachute into the world to begin the match.
  
• Fixed a known case where winning a game could cause a “stuck cursor” state in the subsequent game, which could lead to the inability to aim or shoot under some circumstances.
  
• Entering a vehicle prone will no longer allow players to move faster than intended while prone after exiting the vehicle. This removes an exploit that popped up recently that we wanted to eradicate quickly.
  
• Cutting the engine of a vehicle will no longer make it completely silent. We were seeing some cases of rolling up on someone in stealth mode that was unintended. This should not occur any longer as you can hear the vehicle rolling.
  
• FOV range is limited in the useroptions.ini to match the in-game range. We were seeing some abuse at really wide FOV’s that were giving players an unfair advantage.
  
• Procoagulant was appearing as craftable even if you were missing ingredients. This will no longer happen and it will correctly indicate if you are able to craft it or not.
  
• Appropriate right click options have been fixed on Makeshift Armor.
  
• AK-47s can now be equipped via proximity right-click like other weapons.
  
• Holiday Hoodies will now correctly have the hood down when equipping a helmet.
  
• Fixed some clipping issues that occurred when wearing body armor and a parka, and the Frostbite Beanie and a face mask.

We are prepping another patch before the holidays that will focus on server performance to get as much out of our current servers as we can. We will share more info on this next week.

And finally, expect a Producer’s letter before the holidays to talk about Team Spectate and a lot of other stuff.

Thanks for the continued feedback and bug reports as it is helping us hone in on issues and get them resolved.

• 26 all-new items featuring the ultra-rare Rainbow Unicorn Mask.
• Ice the opposition with the ultra-rare animated Frostbite AR-15!

• Leaderboards and Stats have been reset for Preseason 2.
• Preseason 1 participants will be rewarded with the exclusive Tribute Backpack.
• We’ve changed the Score Thresholds for Bronze through Diamond Tiers to improve the distribution of players within those Tiers.   

• Events are scheduled games that can be entered with Event Tickets or Crowns
• Starting on December 13th and running until January 10th, players can participate in scheduled Skull Crusher Events to compete for Skulls and Legacy crates.
• The Legacy Crate, for now only available as a reward in the Skull Crusher Event, has some of the coolest “classic” skins in the game.  

• Streamers who link their Twitch account in-game will be able to invite their viewers directly into their Duos and Fives groups. 
• Viewers must also have their Twitch accounts linked to be eligible to receive an invite.
• Don’t forget to check out Twitch Prime Month, which kicks off on 12/7!

• A new POI, Scott’s Airfield, has been added north of Ruby Lake.
• Fire extinguishers have been added to building interiors and will release smoke when shot.
• More ATVs have been added to the outskirts of the map.
• Added more cover to some of the larger open areas (e.g. west of PV).
• Added more loot camps to some of the open areas.
• Long fences now have more openings.
• Trees can no longer be chopped down.
• Fixed missing collision in the Hospital stairwell and dozens of other minor bugs such as double-doors and misplaced objects.

• Progress bars make it clear when you can craft an item.
• Reorganized the list of recipes based on what’s most commonly crafted.
• Added buttons for Craft and Craft Max.
• [Known issue] We are aware of the bug causing Procoagulant to appear ready to Craft despite missing some ingredients.  The new Crafting panel makes this bug a bit more obvious; be sure to check your recipe ingredients before attempting to Craft!  All other recipes behave as intended and we’re working on a fix for Procoagulant.

• The Scrapyard now displays the available items.  Go get favorites like the Heavy Assault Gear or the Mask of the Jester! 
• Scrapping an item is now done via Right-Click (this still occurs in the Appearance window).
• The confirmation window will now only appear for Ultra-Rare items or if the item being Scrapped is your last one.
• The amount of Scrap you’ll gain from an item will now be displayed

Scrapping bug fixes:

• Items will no longer be scrapped twice by spamming the Scrap button very quickly.
• It won’t be possible to Scrap the wrong item by moving the mouse to a different item while Scrapping.
• Items that are scrapped will no longer move to the first slot in the appearance window
• The preview character will no longer be wearing an item if the last one is scrapped.

• We’ve tuned ping restrictions and fair play systems to be more consistently messaged.
• We’ve made some enhancements to the projectile code that should result in fewer “ghost bullets” and improved hit registration with all guns.
• Firing as a reload animation completes will no longer result in incorrect ammo counts.
• Cleaned up the end of match screens (for death and victory) to display correct information across all game modes.
• Winning teams will no longer incorrectly finish in second place.
• Pressing the Escape button should correctly close in-game menus after winning a match.
• Explosive arrow damage should be much more consistent.
• Explosive arrows should no longer damage players through walls.
• Terrain and trees should no longer block damage from HE grenades.
• Bandages and first aid kits will be placed in the empty hotkey slot when looted from proximity.
• Fixed an issue where military backpacks don't auto-equip over normal backpacks when looted from another player.
• Guns should always correctly animate off-center when firing is blocked.
• Lootable items on elevated surfaces should now correctly display in proximity.
• Fixed a bug that would allow players to slide quickly while prone.
• Underscores can now be used in character names.
• Pressing "Escape" should always correctly exit in-game menus.
• Police cars should no longer get wedged under guard rails and abandoned cars and explode.
• Fixed the shred times on Kitsune Plated Full Helmet and Tactical Goggles.
• Moving while crouched on certain wooden surfaces with stealth shoes will no longer be silent (but should still be very quiet).
• Fixed an issue where the team member UI could occasionally disappear during match start.
• Exiting a vehicle while looking backwards in first person will no longer briefly invert movement controls.
• Basic skins should no longer be duplicated on the appearance screen.
• Cleaned up the transition between the throwing animation and swapping weapons.
• Bullets should once again make a sound as they closely pass by players.
• Cleaned up the error messages indicating players have been disconnected for being idle (this will still occur if you go AFK for an extended period of time).
• Back Your Match info text has been cleaned up to better describe how the feature works.
• Cleaned up some display bugs on the Leaderboard page.

• 26 all-new items featuring the ultra-rare Rainbow Unicorn Mask.
• Ice the opposition with the ultra-rare animated Frostbite AR-15!

• Leaderboards and Stats have been reset for Preseason 2.
• Preseason 1 participants will be rewarded with the exclusive Tribute Backpack.
• We’ve changed the Score Thresholds for Bronze through Diamond Tiers to improve the distribution of players within those Tiers.   

• Events are scheduled games that can be entered with Event Tickets or Crowns
• Starting on December 13th and running until January 10th, players can participate in scheduled Skull Crusher Events to compete for Skulls and Legacy crates.
• The Legacy Crate, for now only available as a reward in the Skull Crusher Event, has some of the coolest “classic” skins in the game.  

• Streamers who link their Twitch account in-game will be able to invite their viewers directly into their Duos and Fives groups. 
• Viewers must also have their Twitch accounts linked to be eligible to receive an invite.
• Don’t forget to check out Twitch Prime Month, which kicks off on 12/7!

• A new POI, Scott’s Airfield, has been added north of Ruby Lake.
• Fire extinguishers have been added to building interiors and will release smoke when shot.
• More ATVs have been added to the outskirts of the map.
• Added more cover to some of the larger open areas (e.g. west of PV).
• Added more loot camps to some of the open areas.
• Long fences now have more openings.
• Trees can no longer be chopped down.
• Fixed missing collision in the Hospital stairwell and dozens of other minor bugs such as double-doors and misplaced objects.

• Progress bars make it clear when you can craft an item.
• Reorganized the list of recipes based on what’s most commonly crafted.
• Added buttons for Craft and Craft Max.
• [Known issue] We are aware of the bug causing Procoagulant to appear ready to Craft despite missing some ingredients.  The new Crafting panel makes this bug a bit more obvious; be sure to check your recipe ingredients before attempting to Craft!  All other recipes behave as intended and we’re working on a fix for Procoagulant.

• The Scrapyard now displays the available items.  Go get favorites like the Heavy Assault Gear or the Mask of the Jester! 
• Scrapping an item is now done via Right-Click (this still occurs in the Appearance window).
• The confirmation window will now only appear for Ultra-Rare items or if the item being Scrapped is your last one.
• The amount of Scrap you’ll gain from an item will now be displayed

Scrapping bug fixes:

• Items will no longer be scrapped twice by spamming the Scrap button very quickly.
• It won’t be possible to Scrap the wrong item by moving the mouse to a different item while Scrapping.
• Items that are scrapped will no longer move to the first slot in the appearance window
• The preview character will no longer be wearing an item if the last one is scrapped.

• We’ve tuned ping restrictions and fair play systems to be more consistently messaged.
• We’ve made some enhancements to the projectile code that should result in fewer “ghost bullets” and improved hit registration with all guns.
• Firing as a reload animation completes will no longer result in incorrect ammo counts.
• Cleaned up the end of match screens (for death and victory) to display correct information across all game modes.
• Winning teams will no longer incorrectly finish in second place.
• Pressing the Escape button should correctly close in-game menus after winning a match.
• Explosive arrow damage should be much more consistent.
• Explosive arrows should no longer damage players through walls.
• Terrain and trees should no longer block damage from HE grenades.
• Bandages and first aid kits will be placed in the empty hotkey slot when looted from proximity.
• Fixed an issue where military backpacks don't auto-equip over normal backpacks when looted from another player.
• Guns should always correctly animate off-center when firing is blocked.
• Lootable items on elevated surfaces should now correctly display in proximity.
• Fixed a bug that would allow players to slide quickly while prone.
• Underscores can now be used in character names.
• Pressing "Escape" should always correctly exit in-game menus.
• Police cars should no longer get wedged under guard rails and abandoned cars and explode.
• Fixed the shred times on Kitsune Plated Full Helmet and Tactical Goggles.
• Moving while crouched on certain wooden surfaces with stealth shoes will no longer be silent (but should still be very quiet).
• Fixed an issue where the team member UI could occasionally disappear during match start.
• Exiting a vehicle while looking backwards in first person will no longer briefly invert movement controls.
• Basic skins should no longer be duplicated on the appearance screen.
• Cleaned up the transition between the throwing animation and swapping weapons.
• Bullets should once again make a sound as they closely pass by players.
• Cleaned up the error messages indicating players have been disconnected for being idle (this will still occur if you go AFK for an extended period of time).
• Back Your Match info text has been cleaned up to better describe how the feature works.
• Cleaned up some display bugs on the Leaderboard page.

Servers will be coming down for maintenance on the morning of 11/30. Downtime should begin at 4:00AM PT and last for approximately 6 hours.

This maintenance should help promote server stability and fix the following issues:

• Vehicles randomly exploding
  
• Ammo disappearing into the ground
  
• Doors off their hinges

Servers will be coming down for maintenance on the morning of 11/30. Downtime should begin at 4:00AM PT and last for approximately 6 hours.

This maintenance should help promote server stability and fix the following issues:

• Vehicles randomly exploding
  
• Ammo disappearing into the ground
  
• Doors off their hinges

Hello again everyone.  We have a number of game updates coming in the next several weeks, so a lot to digest and take in on this update.


We updated the game today with a patch to make a few improvements that were really important to us to get out before the Holiday weekend. The changes we made required us to rebuild all of the game assets. So while the amount of change is small and focused to make improvements to hit registration and server performance,  the size of the download will be quite large.


We are spending a considerable amount of time investigating reports of poor hit registration.  This next patch has a few changes that we believe will improve some of the situations we found watching videos and investigating our logs. The shotgun usually manifests this in the most visible way given the range of engagement, etc.

One other thing to look out for is cases where your weapon may not fire. This may be new behavior as a side effect to some other fixes. I am asking everyone to look out for it, because in theory the code should be triggered, but it is very rare and we have not so far reproduced it. Having this happen could be a little frustrating, but it will actually be a good thing for us because it will give us a very clear clue on where a particular problem may exist. So please help us out and keep an eye out for this one and let us know if it happens to you.


We are continually working on all of our servers to ensure the smoothest experience.  We have done a significant amount of work for our European center and things look much improved there, but we still have a few updates planned out for our European players.

We plan on increasing capacity in South America and Asia over the next week or so as well.

As we continue to ensure server stability, we have been getting more and more aggressive with the ping limitations.  We are not quite yet to our ideal target, but are moving it down more and more each week.  I expect this to take a couple more weeks and then we will dial in our desired target.


After the Thanksgiving break, we are prepping more updates that will focus on the following.

In my last producer letter I mentioned some plans around Season 1 and the thinking there.  Since then, we decided to change things up a little bit. We are going to run a Pre-Season 2 because we have decided to change up the scoring to make kills more meaningful, and change the thresholds for the various leaderboard tiers. We want to see how this balance plays out before starting an official season.  We will have an article on our website soon that will detail out these changes.  

Because of this, we are going to change our thinking on rewards for participating in both of the Pre-Seasons.  Everyone that completed ten matches and took a position on the leaderboard will receive the reward.  The reward for Pre-Season 1 will be the Tribute Gold Star Backpack.  Pre-season 2 will award the matching Tribute Gold Star Shotgun.  Both pretty cool, I think people will like these a lot.  The Tribute Gold Star Backpack will be awarded sometime soon and automatically be added to your account if you were placed on a leaderboard in Pre-Season 1.




One more cool thing to check out during Pre-Season 2 will be the Leaderboards on our website. These are searchable by player and region. You can see a few additional stats per player, as well as clicking on a player will show you how their score broke down to their top ten matches. 

We will get Season One kicked off after this Pre-Season 2 with a more formal reward structure like I talked about in my last producer letter. 


A number of improvements to duos and fives that have been a long time coming.  First is the team follow cam.  If you are eliminated before your teammate(s) in a game, you will have the ability to have your camera follow your surviving teammate(s) to see the rest of the match play out.  In Fives, you can switch between teammates to see all of the action. 

The final game information screens have been reworked and cleaned up.  This includes displaying correct finishing positions so there is no confusion there. 

In the future, duos and fives will continue to get better as we look to add them into our seasons and scoring systems. 

• The Arena will be updated after a big pass on polish and bug fixing.
• You should come across fewer floating objects. 
• There was some loot that was difficult to pickup that should be fixed now. 
• Long fence lines now have more openings to make navigation easier.
• More ATV’s have been added to the outskirts of the map to make traversing the large map easier from the edges.
• Trees cannot be chopped down. 

A few other fun additions will be added as well.  A new POI, Scott’s Airfield, has been added north of Ruby Lake.  This was done to fill in an area that was a little too empty to our liking.  Look out for fire extinguishers in the environment.  Shooting one will cause it to explode and empty its contents as a smoke screen which could be useful to get away from a firefight. 


Watching people use the crafting screen caused us to go back and rework that screen to make it easier to use.  Recipes are now ordered vertically based on the most commonly used at the top of the list.  Progress bars are more visible and easier to read.  Buttons were added to Craft and Craft Max so you do not have to rely on the assigned button to craft. 


If you are a streamer, a future live update will add the ability to invite your current viewers into a duo or fives match with you.  Information about your current viewers will be easily viewable right on the screen to invite from. See who is a sub, who is a follower, etc.  Simply select a viewer and invite to your party.  Should be really easy to accommodate games with subs or other activities as a streamer.  


We are still working on getting everything in place to convert your airdrop tickets over to scrap.  This is taking a bit longer than expected, but we need to ensure that it happens correctly, and until we can do that, we will have to push it out a little further.  I do anticipate this happening before the end of the year, stay tuned for more info.. 


We have been paying attention to a lot of the reports of teaming happening in solo matches. Our game admins have been investigating these as well as pro-actively joining games to catch it happening live. Suspensions and bans have been consistently handed out over the last 6 weeks. 

Going forward, we have more in-game detection coming to find it happening in real-time. Anyone penalized for breaking our rules will be removed from the leaderboards and will not be allowed to join any in-game events or tournaments in the future. We will continue to monitor and take whatever steps seem reasonable to catch it and penalize anyone breaking our rules.


I will include a little less detail here and will detail these out in a future producer’s letter, but for now here is what to start to expect. We plan on running an end of year special event called the Skull Crusher Event.  This will require an event ticket to enter, and will have a pretty cool prize to have a chance at winning. Our goal is to bring Skirmishes back started in December as well.  Our plan for the first Skirmish is to run Ignition through the month of December. 


There are a number of bug fixes in the works as well.  We will detail these out in patch notes to go with the updates.  Some of the important ones to call out:

• Explosive damage will no longer go through walls
• Bandages and first aid kits will be placed in an empty hotkey slot when looted
• A fix to the prone slide bug
• Bullet fly by sound effects will properly play
• A fix for the reload bug

 

 

 

Hello again everyone.  We have a number of game updates coming in the next several weeks, so a lot to digest and take in on this update.


We updated the game today with a patch to make a few improvements that were really important to us to get out before the Holiday weekend. The changes we made required us to rebuild all of the game assets. So while the amount of change is small and focused to make improvements to hit registration and server performance,  the size of the download will be quite large.


We are spending a considerable amount of time investigating reports of poor hit registration.  This next patch has a few changes that we believe will improve some of the situations we found watching videos and investigating our logs. The shotgun usually manifests this in the most visible way given the range of engagement, etc.

One other thing to look out for is cases where your weapon may not fire. This may be new behavior as a side effect to some other fixes. I am asking everyone to look out for it, because in theory the code should be triggered, but it is very rare and we have not so far reproduced it. Having this happen could be a little frustrating, but it will actually be a good thing for us because it will give us a very clear clue on where a particular problem may exist. So please help us out and keep an eye out for this one and let us know if it happens to you.


We are continually working on all of our servers to ensure the smoothest experience.  We have done a significant amount of work for our European center and things look much improved there, but we still have a few updates planned out for our European players.

We plan on increasing capacity in South America and Asia over the next week or so as well.

As we continue to ensure server stability, we have been getting more and more aggressive with the ping limitations.  We are not quite yet to our ideal target, but are moving it down more and more each week.  I expect this to take a couple more weeks and then we will dial in our desired target.


After the Thanksgiving break, we are prepping more updates that will focus on the following.

In my last producer letter I mentioned some plans around Season 1 and the thinking there.  Since then, we decided to change things up a little bit. We are going to run a Pre-Season 2 because we have decided to change up the scoring to make kills more meaningful, and change the thresholds for the various leaderboard tiers. We want to see how this balance plays out before starting an official season.  We will have an article on our website soon that will detail out these changes.  

Because of this, we are going to change our thinking on rewards for participating in both of the Pre-Seasons.  Everyone that completed ten matches and took a position on the leaderboard will receive the reward.  The reward for Pre-Season 1 will be the Tribute Gold Star Backpack.  Pre-season 2 will award the matching Tribute Gold Star Shotgun.  Both pretty cool, I think people will like these a lot.  The Tribute Gold Star Backpack will be awarded sometime soon and automatically be added to your account if you were placed on a leaderboard in Pre-Season 1.




One more cool thing to check out during Pre-Season 2 will be the Leaderboards on our website. These are searchable by player and region. You can see a few additional stats per player, as well as clicking on a player will show you how their score broke down to their top ten matches. 

We will get Season One kicked off after this Pre-Season 2 with a more formal reward structure like I talked about in my last producer letter. 


A number of improvements to duos and fives that have been a long time coming.  First is the team follow cam.  If you are eliminated before your teammate(s) in a game, you will have the ability to have your camera follow your surviving teammate(s) to see the rest of the match play out.  In Fives, you can switch between teammates to see all of the action. 

The final game information screens have been reworked and cleaned up.  This includes displaying correct finishing positions so there is no confusion there. 

In the future, duos and fives will continue to get better as we look to add them into our seasons and scoring systems. 

• The Arena will be updated after a big pass on polish and bug fixing.
• You should come across fewer floating objects. 
• There was some loot that was difficult to pickup that should be fixed now. 
• Long fence lines now have more openings to make navigation easier.
• More ATV’s have been added to the outskirts of the map to make traversing the large map easier from the edges.
• Trees cannot be chopped down. 

A few other fun additions will be added as well.  A new POI, Scott’s Airfield, has been added north of Ruby Lake.  This was done to fill in an area that was a little too empty to our liking.  Look out for fire extinguishers in the environment.  Shooting one will cause it to explode and empty its contents as a smoke screen which could be useful to get away from a firefight. 


Watching people use the crafting screen caused us to go back and rework that screen to make it easier to use.  Recipes are now ordered vertically based on the most commonly used at the top of the list.  Progress bars are more visible and easier to read.  Buttons were added to Craft and Craft Max so you do not have to rely on the assigned button to craft. 


If you are a streamer, a future live update will add the ability to invite your current viewers into a duo or fives match with you.  Information about your current viewers will be easily viewable right on the screen to invite from. See who is a sub, who is a follower, etc.  Simply select a viewer and invite to your party.  Should be really easy to accommodate games with subs or other activities as a streamer.  


We are still working on getting everything in place to convert your airdrop tickets over to scrap.  This is taking a bit longer than expected, but we need to ensure that it happens correctly, and until we can do that, we will have to push it out a little further.  I do anticipate this happening before the end of the year, stay tuned for more info.. 


We have been paying attention to a lot of the reports of teaming happening in solo matches. Our game admins have been investigating these as well as pro-actively joining games to catch it happening live. Suspensions and bans have been consistently handed out over the last 6 weeks. 

Going forward, we have more in-game detection coming to find it happening in real-time. Anyone penalized for breaking our rules will be removed from the leaderboards and will not be allowed to join any in-game events or tournaments in the future. We will continue to monitor and take whatever steps seem reasonable to catch it and penalize anyone breaking our rules.


I will include a little less detail here and will detail these out in a future producer’s letter, but for now here is what to start to expect. We plan on running an end of year special event called the Skull Crusher Event.  This will require an event ticket to enter, and will have a pretty cool prize to have a chance at winning. Our goal is to bring Skirmishes back started in December as well.  Our plan for the first Skirmish is to run Ignition through the month of December. 


There are a number of bug fixes in the works as well.  We will detail these out in patch notes to go with the updates.  Some of the important ones to call out:

• Explosive damage will no longer go through walls
• Bandages and first aid kits will be placed in an empty hotkey slot when looted
• A fix to the prone slide bug
• Bullet fly by sound effects will properly play
• A fix for the reload bug