The Test Servers have been updated with the March update, and we could use your help getting some extra testing on it to see how it checks out prior to going to the Live servers.  Please pay special attention to these items:


In this build you will see the first iteration of our connection quality test we talked about last week. As part of initial login, you’ll have the option to select which region you’d like to play on. However, if your ping exceeds acceptable thresholds to a particular region, you will not be able to select it. This will help keep all players in fair and consistent matches.


While this will not be that testable on our test environment, it is important to stretch it as much as we can. Just a note in terms of the plans to roll this out. Our plan is to implement the limits of ping in several phases, with the goal being down to a 150ms cap by the time we start the next Pre-Season.


We have a new version of the Team Follow Cam that not only works out a lot of the kinks, but also makes the overall experience much smoother. In addition, we’ve designed a new Team UI that will be visible during gameplay and as a spectator provides more information about your teammates – what weapon they have equipped, and if they have armor and a helmet. Finally, we’ve also streamlined the teammate colors so that each member of your team will have their own unique outline color which will correspond to their color in the team UI.


Vehicles play a huge role throughout the course of the game and we worked on a number of areas to improve the overall vehicle experience.


The first change you’ll notice is a brand new UI for vehicle drivers and passengers. This includes a speedometer, your life and fuel, as well as an indication of the vehicles parts and overall condition. Condition matters more than ever before, as vehicles will lose performance and functionality as they take damage. If your vehicle is in bad shape, you’ll notice that handling starts to degrade and eventually you’ll even lose your turbo! This will go a long way towards addressing late-game situations where the last few players would drive around in circles with little incentive to engage.


As a related change not mentioned before in the producer letter, the Magnum is a bit too powerful against vehicles right now, especially in team games where an entire team carrying Magnums can take down a vehicle in seconds. We’ve slowed down the Magnum bullets beyond 60 yards and increased the drop rate at 80 yards. So, you can expect Magnums to be just as effective at close range; but it will be a lot more difficult to shoot players and vehicles from long distance.


Another topic we’ve looked into is exiting vehicles at high speeds. We previously mentioned a change to not allow players to exit a vehicle above a certain speed threshold. As we have played it internally, we decided to back out this change as it was not really meeting the goal we had for the change. The goal was to make vehicles a little less desirable in the end game, but this change felt more frustrating and punitive. We are going to investigate just applying damage based on the vehicle’s speed when you exit, but this will not be included in this update and will be worked into a future one. We’ve done some work addressing desync issues that could cause a player to exit a vehicle at an unexpected location – this should be a lot more consistent and predictable.


In addition, there are a few quality of life changes in this build. When you enter a vehicle without keys, you can hold the gas button (default: W) in order to hotwire it. Also, moving vehicle items such as sparkplugs can now be done via drag and drop.


Finally, we’ve smoothed out the collision volumes of many objects in the world that could cause vehicles to unexpectedly explode when coming into contact with them. If this happens to you, please send us a video or screenshot so that we can address any other objects in question. Hit Feedback


As we’ve continued to work on servers to create the best experience possible, we also want to make sure that your actions during combat are effectively messaged to you as a player. We’ve updated the effects, sounds, and UI to make it a lot clearer when you are hitting armor versus flesh, when you’re on or off target, and if you’ve knocked off your targets armor or helmet. These upgrades have also been applied to your character taking damage; so you’ll be a lot more aware of things like losing your helmet and where shots are coming from when under fire.      


An updated version of The Arena is included in this build with a number of changes and improvements. Our focus for The Arena on this patch has been on optimizing the zone to improve overall performance as well as general cleanup of bugs.

• There should be far fewer floating and clipping objects
• Cleaned up a objects that prevented items on or near them from being looted
• Made optimizations to the residential areas. Some house layouts have been adjusted for better navigation. Some homes were boarded up completely, others had their windows boarded up. You’ll be able to tell which homes are boarded up when parachuting in by looking at whether the yard has been kept up. Green grass means loot!
• Optimizations were made to Ranchito and Pleasant Valley to increase framerate in those cities
• Office building layouts have been improved to make them easier to navigate and move through.
• Ammo boxes were made more unique so that you can easily distinguish different ammo types.

• Removed the ability to instantly go to prone by side-stepping
• Fixed the smoke grenades so that they do not render out while in gas
• Aligned the range of the gas grenades visual effect and its damage
• Fixed a rare case that could cause vehicle horns to get stuck on
• Lined up the AK-47 reload animation with the actual reload timing
• Fixed a number of clipping issues with several wearable items
• Fixed an edge-case that would allow players to switch seats in a moving vehicle
• Numpad 0 should no longer act like “enter” when splitting stacks of items
• Fixed an issue where shift dragging items could double the amount requested

Of course, if anything else sticks out, please let us know.  Please make use of the community issue tracker - https://dgcissuetracker.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=11004 


You can also head over to Reddit where you will find specific feedback threads dedicated to each of the major changes. Please leave as many details as you can if you encountered an issue to help us track it down.


Test Servers will be open up until the date of the next push to the Live Servers


 

 


The Test Servers have been updated with the March update, and we could use your help getting some extra testing on it to see how it checks out prior to going to the Live servers.  Please pay special attention to these items:


In this build you will see the first iteration of our connection quality test we talked about last week. As part of initial login, you’ll have the option to select which region you’d like to play on. However, if your ping exceeds acceptable thresholds to a particular region, you will not be able to select it. This will help keep all players in fair and consistent matches.


While this will not be that testable on our test environment, it is important to stretch it as much as we can. Just a note in terms of the plans to roll this out. Our plan is to implement the limits of ping in several phases, with the goal being down to a 150ms cap by the time we start the next Pre-Season.


We have a new version of the Team Follow Cam that not only works out a lot of the kinks, but also makes the overall experience much smoother. In addition, we’ve designed a new Team UI that will be visible during gameplay and as a spectator provides more information about your teammates – what weapon they have equipped, and if they have armor and a helmet. Finally, we’ve also streamlined the teammate colors so that each member of your team will have their own unique outline color which will correspond to their color in the team UI.


Vehicles play a huge role throughout the course of the game and we worked on a number of areas to improve the overall vehicle experience.


The first change you’ll notice is a brand new UI for vehicle drivers and passengers. This includes a speedometer, your life and fuel, as well as an indication of the vehicles parts and overall condition. Condition matters more than ever before, as vehicles will lose performance and functionality as they take damage. If your vehicle is in bad shape, you’ll notice that handling starts to degrade and eventually you’ll even lose your turbo! This will go a long way towards addressing late-game situations where the last few players would drive around in circles with little incentive to engage.


As a related change not mentioned before in the producer letter, the Magnum is a bit too powerful against vehicles right now, especially in team games where an entire team carrying Magnums can take down a vehicle in seconds. We’ve slowed down the Magnum bullets beyond 60 yards and increased the drop rate at 80 yards. So, you can expect Magnums to be just as effective at close range; but it will be a lot more difficult to shoot players and vehicles from long distance.


Another topic we’ve looked into is exiting vehicles at high speeds. We previously mentioned a change to not allow players to exit a vehicle above a certain speed threshold. As we have played it internally, we decided to back out this change as it was not really meeting the goal we had for the change. The goal was to make vehicles a little less desirable in the end game, but this change felt more frustrating and punitive. We are going to investigate just applying damage based on the vehicle’s speed when you exit, but this will not be included in this update and will be worked into a future one. We’ve done some work addressing desync issues that could cause a player to exit a vehicle at an unexpected location – this should be a lot more consistent and predictable.


In addition, there are a few quality of life changes in this build. When you enter a vehicle without keys, you can hold the gas button (default: W) in order to hotwire it. Also, moving vehicle items such as sparkplugs can now be done via drag and drop.


Finally, we’ve smoothed out the collision volumes of many objects in the world that could cause vehicles to unexpectedly explode when coming into contact with them. If this happens to you, please send us a video or screenshot so that we can address any other objects in question. Hit Feedback


As we’ve continued to work on servers to create the best experience possible, we also want to make sure that your actions during combat are effectively messaged to you as a player. We’ve updated the effects, sounds, and UI to make it a lot clearer when you are hitting armor versus flesh, when you’re on or off target, and if you’ve knocked off your targets armor or helmet. These upgrades have also been applied to your character taking damage; so you’ll be a lot more aware of things like losing your helmet and where shots are coming from when under fire.      


An updated version of The Arena is included in this build with a number of changes and improvements. Our focus for The Arena on this patch has been on optimizing the zone to improve overall performance as well as general cleanup of bugs.

• There should be far fewer floating and clipping objects
• Cleaned up a objects that prevented items on or near them from being looted
• Made optimizations to the residential areas. Some house layouts have been adjusted for better navigation. Some homes were boarded up completely, others had their windows boarded up. You’ll be able to tell which homes are boarded up when parachuting in by looking at whether the yard has been kept up. Green grass means loot!
• Optimizations were made to Ranchito and Pleasant Valley to increase framerate in those cities
• Office building layouts have been improved to make them easier to navigate and move through.
• Ammo boxes were made more unique so that you can easily distinguish different ammo types.

• Removed the ability to instantly go to prone by side-stepping
• Fixed the smoke grenades so that they do not render out while in gas
• Aligned the range of the gas grenades visual effect and its damage
• Fixed a rare case that could cause vehicle horns to get stuck on
• Lined up the AK-47 reload animation with the actual reload timing
• Fixed a number of clipping issues with several wearable items
• Fixed an edge-case that would allow players to switch seats in a moving vehicle
• Numpad 0 should no longer act like “enter” when splitting stacks of items
• Fixed an issue where shift dragging items could double the amount requested

Of course, if anything else sticks out, please let us know.  Please make use of the community issue tracker - https://dgcissuetracker.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=11004 


You can also head over to Reddit where you will find specific feedback threads dedicated to each of the major changes. Please leave as many details as you can if you encountered an issue to help us track it down.


Test Servers will be open up until the date of the next push to the Live Servers


 

Servers will be coming offline at 10AM PT on March 8th for approximately 8 hours. 


Door desync: We identified and fixed a few issues that could cause doors to appear open for one player but closed for another. We will evaluate if these fixes represent a comprehensive solution.


Vehicle passenger desync: There was a similar desync issue where a player could be in a vehicle but appear out of the vehicle to an onlooker. We've deployed a potential solution and will continue to investigate if there are any other fixes that need to be made.


There was an issue where interrupting a gun reload at the beginning of the animation could cause the gun to fire a ghost bullet and reload again. We've submited another potential fix as well as set up some additional logging to help collect more data when reloads fail. 


Players who die immediately before being struck by a vehicle should no longer cause that vehicle to explode. The team is working on updating The Arena with a number of object and collision fixes to further reduce unexpected vehicle explosions; however, that won't be ready for this Test build (or the next Live update).


We take exploits very seriously and jump on them as quickly as we can. Thank you to everyone who has sent videos and repro information for these - it's very, very helpful and allows us to diagnose and respond faster. If you're familiar with these, please go ahead and see if you can replocate them anymore. 

• Running at full speed while aiming down the weapon sights
• Hiding particle effects
• Skipping prone-to-stand animation
• Throwing infinite grenades

• Cleaned up an issue where you could get stuck moving (without auto-run enabled) while the Inventory is open
• Fixed another edge case that could cause Turbo to get stuck on
• Smoke grenades now have a much longer render distance
• Bleed effect should no longer appear through smoke

 

Servers will be coming offline at 10AM PT on March 8th for approximately 8 hours. 


Door desync: We identified and fixed a few issues that could cause doors to appear open for one player but closed for another. We will evaluate if these fixes represent a comprehensive solution.


Vehicle passenger desync: There was a similar desync issue where a player could be in a vehicle but appear out of the vehicle to an onlooker. We've deployed a potential solution and will continue to investigate if there are any other fixes that need to be made.


There was an issue where interrupting a gun reload at the beginning of the animation could cause the gun to fire a ghost bullet and reload again. We've submited another potential fix as well as set up some additional logging to help collect more data when reloads fail. 


Players who die immediately before being struck by a vehicle should no longer cause that vehicle to explode. The team is working on updating The Arena with a number of object and collision fixes to further reduce unexpected vehicle explosions; however, that won't be ready for this Test build (or the next Live update).


We take exploits very seriously and jump on them as quickly as we can. Thank you to everyone who has sent videos and repro information for these - it's very, very helpful and allows us to diagnose and respond faster. If you're familiar with these, please go ahead and see if you can replocate them anymore. 

• Running at full speed while aiming down the weapon sights
• Hiding particle effects
• Skipping prone-to-stand animation
• Throwing infinite grenades

• Cleaned up an issue where you could get stuck moving (without auto-run enabled) while the Inventory is open
• Fixed another edge case that could cause Turbo to get stuck on
• Smoke grenades now have a much longer render distance
• Bleed effect should no longer appear through smoke

 

Hey everyone! We’ve been incredibly busy since my last update, so let’s get right to it.


First, since my last letter, the game has continued to grow at an unprecedented pace, which is huge for us, but it has also presented an entirely new set of challenges. In response to popularity of the game, we’ve reorganized the development team to be able to roll out more frequent updates with bug fixes and quality of life improvements (like this week’s update), while still developing the game and improving the overall live service. This includes growing the team substantially and adding more international support staff to handle the global nature of the game’s appeal.


We have been rolling out service improvements as we make them, usually without needing any downtime or a client update to do it.  For example, over the last weekend, we identified a new technique employed by some players to circumvent normal gameplay. The team implemented new security solutions, and we have banned and continue to actively ban those using the new technique. We are now in the process of cleansing the leaderboards in all regions as a result. We’d like to thank the community for their on-going support to identify and prevent this kind of activity. We are committed to a fair and competitive service and we will always need your help to keep it that way.


I have covered some notes on servers in the last several Q&A’s; server work continues to be our number one priority and will continue to be so until we are happy with how they are performing.  We have been rolling out improvements each week, sometimes multiple times per week, as we monitor performance and collect feedback on how they are doing.  This goes across the board from game servers to login servers and everything in between. 


A number of changes have already been rolled out to improve performance. For example, we’ve essentially eliminated queue times.  To achieve this, we installed entirely new hardware in Europe, and we have quadrupled capacity in Asia along with increasing it in every other region. This is something we are constantly working on.



There’s a lot more in progress now to continue to improve server performance.  One of the most noticeable focuses is on the early game lag, which can cause some side effects, such as not being able to interact with objects or, in severe cases, falling through the world.  In addition to other optimizations and improvements to packet sizes, we should continue to see a more stable and consistent server environment. 


On the hardware front, we just moved our Asian datacenter to Tokyo which we believe provides a better connection throughout Asia compared to where we were.  In North America, we are beginning work to establish an East Coast server.  When we roll it out, this will appear as a second NA region with its own leaderboard.  Over time, I would like to combine all NA leaderboards into one, but we are focused on getting it out as an option over ideal functionality.  I expect the East Coast server to be available within the next several weeks.  


Perhaps the hottest topic in the community right now is “region locking.”  We are currently testing a feature that will force a connection test from your local machine to each datacenter to see which ones you have a reasonable connection to.  We will allow you to play on any region server that you have a reasonable connection to, but if your connection is too poor to a given region, we will not allow you to play there.  I also expect this to be available in the next content update. 


We are prepping an update to go live this week with a group of fixes that are currently on our Test servers.  We intend to roll out smaller updates like this every few weeks. If you didn’t get a chance to play on Test, here is the summary of what to expect.


Door Desync: We identified and fixed a few issues that could cause doors to appear open for one player but closed for another. We will evaluate if these fixes represent a comprehensive solution, or if players continue to encounter the issue.


Vehicle Passenger Desync: There was a similar desync issue where a player could be in a vehicle but appear out of the vehicle to an onlooker. We've deployed a potential solution and will continue to investigate whether there are any other fixes necessary.


There was an issue where interrupting a gun reload at the beginning of the animation could cause the gun to fire a ghost bullet and reload again. We've submitted another potential fix as well as set up some additional logging to help collect more data when reloads fail. Definitely let us know if you encounter a reload issue!


Players who die immediately before being struck by a vehicle should no longer cause that vehicle to explode. In order to reduce unexpected vehicle explosions, the team is working on updating The Arena with a number of object and collision fixes; however, that won't be ready for this update.


We take exploits very seriously and jump on them as quickly as we can. Thank you to everyone who has sent videos and repro information for these - it's very, very helpful and allows us to diagnose and respond faster. If you are familiar with these, please go ahead and try to do them on Test and send us your feedback!

• Running at full speed while aiming down the weapon sights
• Hiding particle effects
• Skipping prone-to-stand animation
• Throwing infinite grenades 

• Cleaned up an issue where you could get stuck moving (without auto-run enabled) while the Inventory is open
• Fixed another edge case that could cause Turbo to get stuck on
• Smoke grenades now have a much longer render distance
• Bleed effect should no longer appear through smoke

When I talk about Content Updates, it will be referencing a larger game change, usually introducing a new set of features or significant improvements to existing features.  I mentioned at the end of last year making a lot of changes internally. One of those changes is how we plan and execute the work in front of us.  


We have changed up a lot in the background, which is the reason why it has been awhile since the last content update - we had to reset things a bit. This next Content Update (detailed below) will land on Test in the next few weeks. After we’ve had some time to evaluate it, we’ll announce a firm release date. 


This one is pretty loaded with good stuff going into it.  More details in the coming weeks, but from a higher level, here is what we are planning:



To help keep quality connections within appropriate regions, a new connection test will be implemented.  This test will check your ping to each of our datacenters.  If your ping exceeds 150ms to a region, then you will not be able to choose that region as one to play on.  It will simply not allow it.  This will help keep all players in fair and consistent matches. Look for this new flow in the character select screen as you start the game. 


We have a new iteration that worked out the kinks and the camera is now much smoother as it follows your teammates around.  There will also be some new UI elements to help you understand the current state of your team.  I am really happy with how this turned out and am excited to get it live.


A few vehicle changes are going in to help prevent end game situations with all cars just driving around in circles.  The first will be vehicle performance degradation. Cars will lose more performance based on the amount of damage they have taken, including losing their turbo. This will be pretty obvious with a new UI element to display the amount of damage and warning lights with the current state of your ride.  Secondarily, you will now not be able to exit a vehicle that is travelling above a set speed threshold.  We look forward to your feedback on these changes, particularly when they arrive on the Test server.  We want vehicles to provide an advantage, but not become a negative experience at the end of the match.


While we continue to work on servers to create the best experience possible, we wanted to make some changes to how combat is messaged back to you as a player.  When players talk about hit registration, it is actually a much more complicated problem that includes messaging and feedback during combat.  We updated the effects and sounds to make it a lot more obvious when you are hitting armor versus flesh, when you are on target vs off target, or when your armor pops in the middle of a gunfight. 


There will be a change to the imposed seven-day trade lock on items received in your inventory.  The seven-day trade lock will now only be imposed on any new items you receive from the game.  If you received the item via trade, no seven-day trade lock will be enforced.  Essentially, it just means there will be a seven-day lock applied once to each item when it is originally obtained, but not again after that.  A caveat on this one that there are some other priority contentions, and we may end up pushing this out after the next content update.  Our goal is to include it as part of it, but there is a chance we may have to move it a little.


A new iteration of The Arena will be included in this patch with a number of changes and improvements including:

• Cleaning up floating objects and objects penetrating other objects
• Cleaning up some objects that could not be picked up off of other objects
• Some collision volumes were updated to help with vehicles randomly exploding when least expected.  If this happens, please send us a video or screenshot so we can fix any objects in question.
• Optimizations were made to the residential areas.  Some homes are boarded up completely, while others have just their windows boarded up.  House layouts have been tweaked to make them easier to navigate.
• Optimizations have been made to Ranchito and Pleasant Valley to increase framerate in those cities.
• Office building layouts have been tweaked to make navigation easier while moving through them. 

I am pretty excited to get this patch out there; it has a lot of things that have been in progress for a long time, along with a lot of foundation stuff to setup some other much-needed fixes to the game. Between now and the next major patch you can expect more communication from us. Big thanks to everyone who comes out to our Q&As on Reddit and Twitter and everyone who provides feedback from their experiences on the Test Server.


 

Hey everyone! We’ve been incredibly busy since my last update, so let’s get right to it.


First, since my last letter, the game has continued to grow at an unprecedented pace, which is huge for us, but it has also presented an entirely new set of challenges. In response to popularity of the game, we’ve reorganized the development team to be able to roll out more frequent updates with bug fixes and quality of life improvements (like this week’s update), while still developing the game and improving the overall live service. This includes growing the team substantially and adding more international support staff to handle the global nature of the game’s appeal.


We have been rolling out service improvements as we make them, usually without needing any downtime or a client update to do it.  For example, over the last weekend, we identified a new technique employed by some players to circumvent normal gameplay. The team implemented new security solutions, and we have banned and continue to actively ban those using the new technique. We are now in the process of cleansing the leaderboards in all regions as a result. We’d like to thank the community for their on-going support to identify and prevent this kind of activity. We are committed to a fair and competitive service and we will always need your help to keep it that way.


I have covered some notes on servers in the last several Q&A’s; server work continues to be our number one priority and will continue to be so until we are happy with how they are performing.  We have been rolling out improvements each week, sometimes multiple times per week, as we monitor performance and collect feedback on how they are doing.  This goes across the board from game servers to login servers and everything in between. 


A number of changes have already been rolled out to improve performance. For example, we’ve essentially eliminated queue times.  To achieve this, we installed entirely new hardware in Europe, and we have quadrupled capacity in Asia along with increasing it in every other region. This is something we are constantly working on.



There’s a lot more in progress now to continue to improve server performance.  One of the most noticeable focuses is on the early game lag, which can cause some side effects, such as not being able to interact with objects or, in severe cases, falling through the world.  In addition to other optimizations and improvements to packet sizes, we should continue to see a more stable and consistent server environment. 


On the hardware front, we just moved our Asian datacenter to Tokyo which we believe provides a better connection throughout Asia compared to where we were.  In North America, we are beginning work to establish an East Coast server.  When we roll it out, this will appear as a second NA region with its own leaderboard.  Over time, I would like to combine all NA leaderboards into one, but we are focused on getting it out as an option over ideal functionality.  I expect the East Coast server to be available within the next several weeks.  


Perhaps the hottest topic in the community right now is “region locking.”  We are currently testing a feature that will force a connection test from your local machine to each datacenter to see which ones you have a reasonable connection to.  We will allow you to play on any region server that you have a reasonable connection to, but if your connection is too poor to a given region, we will not allow you to play there.  I also expect this to be available in the next content update. 


We are prepping an update to go live this week with a group of fixes that are currently on our Test servers.  We intend to roll out smaller updates like this every few weeks. If you didn’t get a chance to play on Test, here is the summary of what to expect.


Door Desync: We identified and fixed a few issues that could cause doors to appear open for one player but closed for another. We will evaluate if these fixes represent a comprehensive solution, or if players continue to encounter the issue.


Vehicle Passenger Desync: There was a similar desync issue where a player could be in a vehicle but appear out of the vehicle to an onlooker. We've deployed a potential solution and will continue to investigate whether there are any other fixes necessary.


There was an issue where interrupting a gun reload at the beginning of the animation could cause the gun to fire a ghost bullet and reload again. We've submitted another potential fix as well as set up some additional logging to help collect more data when reloads fail. Definitely let us know if you encounter a reload issue!


Players who die immediately before being struck by a vehicle should no longer cause that vehicle to explode. In order to reduce unexpected vehicle explosions, the team is working on updating The Arena with a number of object and collision fixes; however, that won't be ready for this update.


We take exploits very seriously and jump on them as quickly as we can. Thank you to everyone who has sent videos and repro information for these - it's very, very helpful and allows us to diagnose and respond faster. If you are familiar with these, please go ahead and try to do them on Test and send us your feedback!

• Running at full speed while aiming down the weapon sights
• Hiding particle effects
• Skipping prone-to-stand animation
• Throwing infinite grenades 

• Cleaned up an issue where you could get stuck moving (without auto-run enabled) while the Inventory is open
• Fixed another edge case that could cause Turbo to get stuck on
• Smoke grenades now have a much longer render distance
• Bleed effect should no longer appear through smoke

When I talk about Content Updates, it will be referencing a larger game change, usually introducing a new set of features or significant improvements to existing features.  I mentioned at the end of last year making a lot of changes internally. One of those changes is how we plan and execute the work in front of us.  


We have changed up a lot in the background, which is the reason why it has been awhile since the last content update - we had to reset things a bit. This next Content Update (detailed below) will land on Test in the next few weeks. After we’ve had some time to evaluate it, we’ll announce a firm release date. 


This one is pretty loaded with good stuff going into it.  More details in the coming weeks, but from a higher level, here is what we are planning:



To help keep quality connections within appropriate regions, a new connection test will be implemented.  This test will check your ping to each of our datacenters.  If your ping exceeds 150ms to a region, then you will not be able to choose that region as one to play on.  It will simply not allow it.  This will help keep all players in fair and consistent matches. Look for this new flow in the character select screen as you start the game. 


We have a new iteration that worked out the kinks and the camera is now much smoother as it follows your teammates around.  There will also be some new UI elements to help you understand the current state of your team.  I am really happy with how this turned out and am excited to get it live.


A few vehicle changes are going in to help prevent end game situations with all cars just driving around in circles.  The first will be vehicle performance degradation. Cars will lose more performance based on the amount of damage they have taken, including losing their turbo. This will be pretty obvious with a new UI element to display the amount of damage and warning lights with the current state of your ride.  Secondarily, you will now not be able to exit a vehicle that is travelling above a set speed threshold.  We look forward to your feedback on these changes, particularly when they arrive on the Test server.  We want vehicles to provide an advantage, but not become a negative experience at the end of the match.


While we continue to work on servers to create the best experience possible, we wanted to make some changes to how combat is messaged back to you as a player.  When players talk about hit registration, it is actually a much more complicated problem that includes messaging and feedback during combat.  We updated the effects and sounds to make it a lot more obvious when you are hitting armor versus flesh, when you are on target vs off target, or when your armor pops in the middle of a gunfight. 


There will be a change to the imposed seven-day trade lock on items received in your inventory.  The seven-day trade lock will now only be imposed on any new items you receive from the game.  If you received the item via trade, no seven-day trade lock will be enforced.  Essentially, it just means there will be a seven-day lock applied once to each item when it is originally obtained, but not again after that.  A caveat on this one that there are some other priority contentions, and we may end up pushing this out after the next content update.  Our goal is to include it as part of it, but there is a chance we may have to move it a little.


A new iteration of The Arena will be included in this patch with a number of changes and improvements including:

• Cleaning up floating objects and objects penetrating other objects
• Cleaning up some objects that could not be picked up off of other objects
• Some collision volumes were updated to help with vehicles randomly exploding when least expected.  If this happens, please send us a video or screenshot so we can fix any objects in question.
• Optimizations were made to the residential areas.  Some homes are boarded up completely, while others have just their windows boarded up.  House layouts have been tweaked to make them easier to navigate.
• Optimizations have been made to Ranchito and Pleasant Valley to increase framerate in those cities.
• Office building layouts have been tweaked to make navigation easier while moving through them. 

I am pretty excited to get this patch out there; it has a lot of things that have been in progress for a long time, along with a lot of foundation stuff to setup some other much-needed fixes to the game. Between now and the next major patch you can expect more communication from us. Big thanks to everyone who comes out to our Q&As on Reddit and Twitter and everyone who provides feedback from their experiences on the Test Server.


 

Hey everyone!

We made some good headway on the “running man” (that's when you load up you game and it sits on the animation of the running guy) issue recently. The fix we put in place is for the bulk of the reports but there may be some outlying issues we need to address. The best way for us to quickly get these nailed down is for you to send us your Logs. Logs give us a hyper detailed look at what is happening at any given moment with your system and the connection to our servers.

We appreciate you taking the time and extra effort to provide this level of feedback. Here’s how you can turn on logging for your computer.

1. Edit your useroptions.ini file within the game directory where you have it installed and add the following entry as a new section in the file, all on separate lines, single-spaced:

[Logging]
Address=
FileLogLevel=6
LocalLogLevel=6

2. When in the infinite loading screen issue occurs, please zip up your entire LOG folder found in the game directory where you have King of the Kill installed.

3. Create a support ticket at help.h1z1.com and attach the compressed log files within the ticket. Put the subject line as "Running Man Log files attached" so we can quickly find them.

4. You may want to remove the extra logging after collecting the information as it will add considerable extra logging and take up space.

Hey everyone!

We made some good headway on the “running man” (that's when you load up you game and it sits on the animation of the running guy) issue recently. The fix we put in place is for the bulk of the reports but there may be some outlying issues we need to address. The best way for us to quickly get these nailed down is for you to send us your Logs. Logs give us a hyper detailed look at what is happening at any given moment with your system and the connection to our servers.

We appreciate you taking the time and extra effort to provide this level of feedback. Here’s how you can turn on logging for your computer.

1. Edit your useroptions.ini file within the game directory where you have it installed and add the following entry as a new section in the file, all on separate lines, single-spaced:

[Logging]
Address=
FileLogLevel=6
LocalLogLevel=6

2. When in the infinite loading screen issue occurs, please zip up your entire LOG folder found in the game directory where you have King of the Kill installed.

3. Create a support ticket at help.h1z1.com and attach the compressed log files within the ticket. Put the subject line as "Running Man Log files attached" so we can quickly find them.

4. You may want to remove the extra logging after collecting the information as it will add considerable extra logging and take up space.