Greetings!

My name is Derek, and I am the Head of Production at New World Interactive. I am happy to share this holiday season update with all of you! This month we’ll be discussing several key development decisions related to our game, some of which many users have likely been waiting to hear about for quite some time. Our efforts at optimization are well underway, and I’m excited to have some guest commentary from our Level Design Director pertaining to these efforts.

Firstly, we’ll be hosting a FREE WEEK for Insurgency: Sandstorm from December 10th - December 17th. This will fall on the heels of our most recent update, Update 1.5. We wanted to be able to showcase how far our game has come since we released nearly a year ago and given our success related to free weekends, we thought we might try a longer duration for the event. Secondly, over the past month, we enrolled the assistance of Altagram to further our localization efforts. Insurgency is now localized into 15 additional languages, which further improves our reach to players from various regions around the world. This is the perfect time to give our game a try or to recommend it to friends!

Additionally, we’ll be taking our first shot at rolling out a leaderboard feature, which will be further supplemented with a reset to rankings, as well as some adjustments to decay rates. We’ve created and rolled out a brand new support website, which should drastically improve our forward-facing service capabilities for troubleshooting, bug reporting, and providing feedback to the development team. In an effort to help better enforce our community guidelines, as well as to improve our player’s general experience, we have also rolled out an alpha version of a player reporting system. This should help us to slowly and steadily document toxic behavior that is prevalent in our game, and to identify the worst offenders for eventual removal from our ecosystem.
I’ll be closing with some announcements pertaining specifically to our alpha rollout of modding tools, some prior commitments we have determined we will not be supporting moving forward, and some updates on the console release. Without further ado, let’s dive into SoP#4!

Key Points of State of Production #4

• Optimized map performance for Outskirts, Precinct, Refinery, and Summit
  
• Introducing localization to 15 new regions for Insurgency: Sandstorm
  
• Introducing a competitive leaderboard, competitive rank reset, and adjustments to rank decay
  
• Introducing Support Desk 2.0; Getting help when you need it
  
• Introducing a prototype “Player Reporting System” as a means of measuring, messaging, and tracking of toxic behaviors within our community
  
• Alpha rollout of our first wave of modding tools for content creators and enthusiasts
  
• Redaction of select commitments
  
• Console Updates

Optimized Map Performance

In a continuous push to improve our game’s performance, one of the first necessary elements was to try and improve the memory requirements and frame rates of some of our most demanding maps. As mentioned in the previous SoP, the 4 maps we chose to focus on were Outskirts, Precinct, Refinery, and Summit. In order to best detail some of these changes, I’ve invited our Level Design Director, Jeroen van Werkhoven, to provide additional commentary and detail on this month’s SoP.

“Over the last couple of months we have been working on improving the performance in the four maps Derek stated above. Our main goal was to improve frame rate and peak memory usage. We noticed in our benchmarks that, even though we previously conducted optimization passes, that some of our maps are still using a high amount of memory, and the frame rate isn’t always optimal and inconsistent. The first map we conducted our optimization pass on was Outskirts. We went through the map with our Art Director, Michael Grills, and the art team was able to find opportunities to optimize the level further. We didn’t look at it directly from a technical standpoint, but more from how the player would experience the level. We repeated the same steps for our other maps.

Sometimes it would mean simply cutting things from the maps, like reducing grass or removing props that were barely visible for the player and don’t have an impact on gameplay. Also, we had a large number of merged meshes in our levels. A merged mesh is a set of modular assets combined into a single mesh. We used this technique to improve the frame rate, but at the same time, this leads to increased memory usage because each mesh is unique. Precinct’s peak memory was close to 6GB, which had a significant performance impact on lower spec machines. We reduced it to nearly 5GB. Outskirts average FPS was previously 69, and now in our latest benchmark it climbed to 92. On Refinery and Summit we improved the FPS stability; less severe frame drops should occur. Of course, we have to wait for the results on different machines when the update goes live, but the numbers so far look very promising.”

Insurgency: Sandstorm: Now Available in over 20 Languages!

One of our biggest initiatives within Insurgency: Sandstorm is to expand the visibility of our title to numerous new regions and demographics across the globe. In the original Insurgency, our translation efforts were predominantly done by community volunteers. This helped us to improve our reach, but at a quality level that left a lot to be desired. We recognized the value of this community initiative, which is why we recently collaborated with Altagram to help localize our game in over 15 new regions. Insurgency: Sandstorm is now available in the following languages:

• Czech
  
• Danish
  
• Dutch
  
• Finnish
  
• Hungarian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Norwegian
  
• Polish
  
• Portuguese (Portugal)
  
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
  
• Swedish
  
• Thai
  
• Chinese (Simplified)
  
• Chinese (Traditional)
  
• Turkish
  
• English
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Italian
  
• Russian
  
• Spanish (LATAM)

Leaderboards + Rank Reset + Adjustments to Ranked Decay

Over the past 30 days, we have made a concentrated push to start talking with our competitive community. We hosted several community discord sessions, began a dialogue with the leadership of the DGL, and have even discussed plans to collaborate with competitive organizations to expand tournament participation and visibility. These talks are on hold while we act on the first wave of feedback. As we continue to assess and evaluate what we’d like to do vs. what we are actually able to do, we chose a few of the highly-requested features to implement in the holiday update. We’ll resume our dialog with these organizations in the beginning of 2020.

Some of the feedback we’ve discussed related to a lack of queuing and participation. There were many attributable factors at play here, but one commonly recurring statement related to competitive rank decay being too minimal to encourage people to regularly queue and play. Given that we’re hosting a free week from December 10th - December 17th, which may appeal to players who also have a competitive mindset, we decided we’d like to reset all rankings in an effort to measure participation from a day-1 perspective. This will give us the ability to identify participation rates and the impact of reducing ranked decay. In an effort for players to have better visibility into participation rates, their standing within the community, and their overall ranking, we’re also introducing a competitive leaderboard that will be available via your web browser. After we collect and weigh said-feedback, we can determine what additional development time (if any) would be dedicated towards fleshing it out more comprehensively.

Introduction of our New Support Site

One of the most persistent problems we’ve experienced as a company historically was a lack of bandwidth to provide comprehensive troubleshooting solutions to our user base. Previously, we were using Happyfox, but we experienced a myriad of issues related to administrative controls and the distribution of tasks within the desk. As a result, players who were reaching out to us with feedback on gameplay issues, technical problems, or feature requests to improve the quality of life of our ecosystem went unheard. I am pleased to announce that our Support Manager, Nick Ward, has been working tirelessly over the past two months to completely overhaul and re-design our support capabilities.
We decided Freshdesk was the right decision for hosting our support suite over the next 12 months. We based this decision on its capacity for easy scalability, user-friendly nature for filing troubleshooting requests, and ease of navigating knowledge base articles. The support website can be found here: https://support.newworldinteractive.com. This page will not be limited only to Insurgency: Sandstorm, but will also provide support for all of our titles in our portfolio. This is a new initiative for us and will be continuously improving over the next six months. We welcome all feedback regarding layout, flow, and proposed documentation suggestions.

Introduction of a Player Reporting System

A somewhat prevalent complaint that we’ve observed and received emails about pertains to players who are engaging in activities and behaviors that go against our established Community Guidelines. In an effort to reduce toxicity within our pre-existing player base, as well as to better message to players when they are engaging in disruptive behavior, we’ve introduced a prototype player reporting system. This system is accessible via the scoreboard on a drop-down menu, and can be accessed mid-game.
Player reporting will work in a variety of ways. Reports will carry a certain “weight” threshold; this weight is identified based upon the number of reports a player files vs. the number of reports that are accurately filed where action can be taken. Players who accurately report players the majority of the time will have more impactful reporting weight; players who attempt to use the system to troll or as a means of harassment will have a “lighter” weight, meaning their reports will be less impactful/actionable as a whole. If you are reported repeatedly, you will receive a text-box notification informing you of your intolerable behavior. When an accurate report is filed and action is taken, the reporting players will also receive a notification alerting them to the fact that they were helpful in identifying and reporting toxic behavior, and that their efforts have helped to improve Sandstorm’s community as a whole.
As this is our first implementation of this feature, some degree of bugs may exist; we are welcoming constructive feedback to improve our system. This addition should help us to better understand what types of offenses are most prevalent, who the worst offenders are, and in time, help to refine and tighten our Community Guidelines to be more representative of the type of play experience we’re seeking to establish as a standard for Insurgency: Sandstorm.

Modding Tools: Part 1

I know everyone here has been waiting for news on when NWI is planning to roll out mod support. I’m happy to announce that our first wave of mod tools has entered a closed-alpha state with this update. We’re sharing our tools in a level editor with basic functions that will be similar to the options our team currently has available at their disposal. We are currently accepting sign ups from experienced community level designers to help our team bug fix and gather feedback. Community members who are interested can sign up at the link below: https://steamcommunity.com/app/581320/discussions/0/1744512174760308602/
We’re doing this in a graduated rollout capacity to ensure that what we have is working as intended and functional, as well as to limit initial participation to experienced modders. In turn, this will allow us to focus our efforts to best determine where we will need to commit development time to the refinement of these tools, so that when we eventually deploy an “open” rollout that it is accessible, easy to use, and working as intended.

Redaction and Confirmation of Null Commitments

In the previous SoP, I had mentioned that we were re-evaluating our roadmap that was drafted earlier in the year. It was a very long and thorough meeting, but we emerged with a clearer picture of what we were and were not able to commit to in the new year. I know many users across various mediums have been asking us about some of these originally-promised features for some time, and I want to speak on the things that we will not be committing development time towards in our path forward. Here are the features we have decided do not make business sense for us to pursue in the future:

• Story mode/Campaign
  
• Mac Support
  
• Linux Support
  
• Local Play on PvP modes
  
• Weapons on Back
  
• New foregrip upgrade options

We did not take this decision-making process lightly; all nominated cuts have been reviewed, re-reviewed, and discussed numerous times internally. At the end of these discussions, our criteria came down to “Does this proposed content present a reasonable business case in exchange for the additional development time required to deliver these features?” and in these cases, the answer was “No.” We recognize that these were things that, at some point or another, were promised by the studio, and we apologize for mismanaging expectations. Moving forward, we will be more deliberate in our messaging and our commitments to our players. We’ve grown a lot with Insurgency: Sandstorm, and we’ve learned a lot throughout that process. These lessons will make up our future projects going forward.

Console Updates

In closing, I wanted to share with the community that our team is plowing full speed ahead with our efforts at bringing Insurgency: Sandstorm to console. Over the past few months, our partner, Black Tower, has been helping us to define and navigate timelines to deliver a release candidate which will be used for the TRC (Technical Requirements Checklist). We’re happy to report that everything is on track, and in the next State of Production in January, I’m hoping to be able to share more concrete details on when you will be able to play our game with friends on console ːinsfistː

Update 1.5 is here with performance improvements, changes to the matchmaking system, a new PvP game mode “Domination”, a player reporting system, gameplay adjustments, and more.

Thank you to everyone who shared their feedback with us since our last major update. We’ve made a bunch of improvements to the matchmaking system based on your input. In addition, we’ve further optimized the game and added a new Versus game mode, Domination. Although this mode was originally intended as a sample mode for modders, we decided to include it in 1.5 officially due to how well it performed during testing, its ability to function as a strong onboarding experience for new players, and to respond to the requests we frequently get to permanently reintroduce Team Deathmatch into the game. We’ve made a number of gameplay changes including adjustments to weapon sway and recoil, a slight sprint speed reduction, improved reliability of smoke grenades, and more advanced optional separation of vault, crouch, slide and jump keybindings. In celebration of the update and the holidays, we’ll be running 2x XP across all playlists.

See the full changelist below:

• Optimized CPU by preventing characters from ticking each frame when they are not being rendered. After benchmarking internally on higher end systems we have deduced this is now saving 0.5 to 1.0 ms per frame, or the equivalent of 6 frames per second. However, the impact of this optimization will be mostly felt by mid to lower tier systems where this gain could be more considerable.
  
• Made major art and optimization passes on several maps. The target of this optimization pass was to increase average frame rate, improve frame stability, and increase visual fidelity.
  
  • Outskirts
    
  • Refinery
    
  • Precinct
    
  • Summit
• Optimized environment assets by turning off tick events where they were not needed.

• Playlist Selection & Queueing
  
  • Multiple playlists within a single game type may now be queued into at the same time.
    
  • Added an estimated queue time measurement that will give a player in queue an estimate of how long it will take to find a match.
    
  • Removed the player count for playlists to prevent potential player bias that may have affected playlist population on certain playlists like Firefight.
    
  • The Ground Battle playlist has now been separated into Push and Frontline playlists.
• Team Balance
  
  • Added ability for players to manually switch teams if there is an imbalance.
    
  • Added team auto-balance feature where if teams go unbalanced for too long the game will automatically switch players from the excess player team over to the team with fewer players. Players will be notified with a warning in case they want to volunteer themselves manually.
• Joining Friends Mid-match
  
  • Added ability for players to join other party members who are already playing in-game.
• Player Reporting System
  
  • To report a player, pull up the scoreboard with Tab, right-click the offending player’s name, and press “Report Player”.
    
  • Offending players will receive a notification box informing them of their disruptive behavior.
  • We will continue to monitor and refine the system’s weights and penalties over time, this is just a first implementation.

• Fight over three objectives which give points to the controlling team.
  
• All weapons are available while playing this game mode.
  
• Respawn quickly in random locations around the map similar to Team Deathmatch.
  
• Domination is supported on the following maps:
  • Hideout
    
  • Hillside
    
  • Farmhouse
    
  • Crossing
    
  • Ministry

We’ve worked hard to listen to the players and make improvements to various gameplay mechanics. Our intent is to directly address player feedback about shooting and aiming not being rewarding enough of skill, to improve player movement and acceleration to feel more controlled, and to add some flexibility to certain key bindings which have been popularly requested.

• Made weapon sway more predictable and less punishing when standing and moving.
  
  • Set up Lissajous curve fixed pattern for sway instead of the more random current Perlin noise pattern seen in the public version since release.
    
  • Reduced sway speed by 20%. Sway magnitude has not been changed.
    
  • Reduced incentive for crouching and proning to reduce sway (crouching now reduces sway by 50% instead of 60%, prone now reduces sway by 70% instead of 80%).
    
  • Reduced sway penalties when moving (sway magnitude now increases by 15% instead of 50%, sway speed now increases by 50% instead of 200%).
    
  • Slightly reduced the sway speed and magnitude reduction when focusing to counterbalance the other sway changes (focusing now reduces sway speed and magnitude by 60% instead of 80%).
• Made recoil when standing and leaning less penalized compared to other stances.
  
  • Reduced overall recoil when aiming down your sights (ADS) by 15%.
    
  • Increased recoil when crouching and proning to compensate against the above change (crouching now 20% less recoil instead of 40%, prone now has 30% less recoil instead of 60%).
  • [Reduced recoil penalty for leaning when low weight (lowest weight now has 10% more recoil when leaning instead of 20%).
    
  • Recoil penalty while moving should be consistent across all weights rather than favoring players who are heavier (heavier players previously had a greater reduction in recoil).
    
  • Increased Mk 14 EBR recoil.
• Reduced top sprint speed by 8%.
  
• Smoke Grenade Improvements
  
  • Fixed an issue where smoke grenade clouds were inconsistent for players on a server. Now smoke clouds appear the same for all players.
    
  • Smoke grenades expand faster to make them more useful and is no longer frame-rate capped.
• Advanced Keybinding Options
  
  • Jump and vault can now be bound separately or as a combined key. The combined key is bound by default.
    
  • Crouch and slide can now be bound separately or as a combined key. The combined key is bound by default.

• Fixed an issue where it was possible for the player’s weapon selection to become soft locked when picking up and throwing back explosives under certain circumstances, which prevented them from being able to change weapons after it occurred.
  
• Fixed an issue where smoke, incendiary, and Molotov explosive particles would not be rendered if the player was inside a game menu before they detonated, leading to cases of invisible fire and smoke.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Rocket Barrage fire support that would prevent fired rockets from landing on their targets if they were called on a position too far away from its origin.
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented players from being able to switch to the C-4 or IED detonator when in a vehicle.
  
• Fixed an issue with Lesson prompts potentially creating a hitch on lower tier systems when displayed.
  
• Fixed an issue where floating shells could be seen on the M870 while ADS and cocking the weapon.
  
• Fixed an issue where an animation would play twice when firing the last round of weapons with hold back bolts.
  
• Fixed an issue with the third person mesh for the 4x C79 optic, which had some visibly jagged edges.
  
• Fixed an odd visual issue which was related to the bare arm cosmetic and forearm weights.
  
• Fixed an issue with the M9 pistol, where a hole in the rear of the first person model allowed you to see the loaded ammunition through it.
  
• Fixed a visual issue where fingertips could be seen protruding through certain glove cosmetics.
  
• Fixed an issue where weapons could briefly disappear when scavenging in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue where the VHS-2 would not receive more than one magazine when the Extended Magazines attachment was equipped.
  
• Fixed an issue where magazines could appear in the bottom left of the screen while speed reloading certain assault rifle type weapons.
  
• Fixed a third person reload animation issue with bolt action rifles while prone.
  
• Fixed an issue with the scale of the AT4 launcher causing it to become partially invisible.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could potentially stand while performing a slide.
  
• Fixed an issue where third person grenade launchers could look visually broken at certain distances.
  
• Updated the RPG-7, M3 MAAWS, AT4 and Panzerfaust 3 first person iron sight and hip fire animations to time them more directly with the audio and the projectile leaving the launcher, this should prevent cases where, when firing a rocket, it could leave the launcher at an unpredictable angle.
  
• Fixed an issue with the Panzerfaust 3 launcher using the incorrect first person sprint animation.
  
• Fixed an issue with the settings menu that caused the reset to defaults modal window to appear behind the settings window.
  
• Fixed an issue with the end round reason displaying the generic reason instead of the correct one.
  
• Fixed an issue where the M240B could be seen as flickering.
  
• Fixed a weight painting issue with the third person VHS-2 grenade launcher, which caused visual artefacts at certain distances.
  
• Fixed an issue where a player would resume their third person gas mask equip or unequip animation on respawn after being killed during that animation sequence.
  
• Fixed an issue where under barrel grenade launchers could occasionally be rendered invisible after the insertion sequence in Checkpoint.
  
• Fixed an issue where player gear would jitter erratically when initially rendering.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s leg could not be seen correctly when breaching a door in local play after respawning.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s arm would look odd while reloading a shotgun prone or crouched in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue with the first person mag release animations for the FAL base reloads.
  
• Fixed an issue where the range computer UI would list certain available actions with inverted wording.
  
• Fixed an issue where the screen could fade to black and remain black if the player switched player or view when watching another player die.
  
• Fixed an issue with the missing default action on some key action icons in the replay controls, that caused the playback speed action to always be displayed as a mouse scroll icon even though they were bound to different keys.
  
• Fixed a visual morph issue with balaclava and neck gaiter cosmetics.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s third person arm meshes would clip with the body while in vehicles.
  
• Fixed an issue where when prompted to play the tutorial as part of the users first time experience, clicking the popup would not take the player to the tutorial as suggested.
  
• Fixed an issue where if the player rolled a vehicle and all vehicle exits were blocked by objects they would not be able to exit the vehicle.
  
• Fixed an issue with crouched reloads on M3 MAAWS.
  
• Fixed an issue where kicking used the incorrect sequence when the player was equipped with anything other than a rifle.
  
• Fixed an issue where the third person fire particle was missing in third person for Molotovs.
  
• Fixed an issue with jumping in first person when equipped with a detonator.
  
• Fixed an issue with vaulting while equipped with binoculars.
  
• Fixed an issue where the “Do you want to save” prompt was behind the settings window in the replay.
  
• Fixed an issue where if you changed options in the video settings menu and returned to the game without applying your changes, on returning to the video settings menu the non applied changes could still be seen.
  
• Fixed an animation issue with shotguns while sprinting in Hardcore or when the Slow Movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where there was a visual disconnect between first person and third person sprinting animations in Hardcore or when the Slow Movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where if the player performed a high vault directly after throwing a grenade, on landing, their primary weapon would not be visible and they would need to reselect it.
  
• Fixed an issue where animations for detonators were hilariously broken.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Fragger class in Team Deathmatch and Domination had access to the underbarrel explosive launcher when they shouldn’t. Sorry noob tubers.
  
• Fixed an issue where the low scalability preset and low texture quality setting would not not correctly display anisotropic filtering x2.
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the scalability options from resetting properly when backing out of the video settings menu.
  
• Fixed an issue where underhand Molotov throws would not set the rag on fire.
  
• Fixed an issue where it was possible for players to decrease the amount of time taken to reload a weapon with a Bipod or Foregrip Bipod attached.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could perform a vault from the prone position.
  
• Fixed an issue when switching to and from grenade launchers would cause a noticeable delay before they could be fired.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Loadout menu character would always have a primary weapon in their hands, even when all weapons were removed from the players loadout.
  
• Fixed a rendering issue that caused the 4x M150 optic to have geometry visible inside its scope view.
  
• Fixed an issue where several first person pistol magazines would appear to have rounds remaining in them, even when the magazine was empty.
  
• Fixed an issue where when equipping a barrel attachment to the FAL would not prevent the stock barrel from being removed.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Alpha AK would not play the correct ready animation when the player had a drum magazine attached.
  
• Fixed an issue where, when spectating, the player would be shown the incorrect key bindings for change player and change camera, if they had re-bound those particular keys.
  
• Fixed an issue with the RPG-7 rocket projectile collision mesh also encompassing the fins when it should not have. This could have potentially contributed to some unwarranted deaths when firing through windows.
  
• Fixed an issue where the roaming spectator camera would be able to snap when zooming in and out.
  
• Fixed some additional roaming spectator camera snapping issues when roaming without any other players in the map.
  
• Fixed an issue where the mouse smoothing option was not being reset when “Reset To Defaults” was selected in the settings menu.
  
• Fixed floating left hand during the first person SVD reloads.
  
• Fixed a potential issue with the MP5A2 reload not being completed if you skipped the bolt release during the reload and completed it when you pulled it out again.
  
• Tutorial
  • Fixed an issue where the player could still trigger audio instructions by resupplying, even after finishing the current objective.
    
  • Fixed an issue where a tutorial waypoint could not be triggered if the player only creaked opened the door instead of opening or breaching it.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players could occasionally not validate the “Enter Building” waypoint under certain conditions.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could utilize the debug menu, thus allowing them to fly out of the playable area.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could potentially complete the “Pick Up Weapon” objective without properly validating it and thus not be able to progress.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could become stuck between a vehicle and a wall on the opening bridge sequence.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could move their character and camera during the opening moments.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could reach the extraction point by utilizing an Insurgent vehicle.
    
  • Fixed an AI navigation issue where AI could become blocked by a wall during the sequence in which the player must destroy a weapon cache.
    
  • Fixed an issue where respawning as the Commander class, selecting and calling in the Gunship before the related Objectives prompted the user to do so would block progression.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could not validate the “Scavenge Weapon” waypoint if they killed the AI while it was reloading.
    
  • Fixed an animation issue that would cause weapon animation to break during the scavenging section of the tutorial.
    
  • Fixed an issue where reaching the "Equip Binoculars" objective with the Binoculars already equipped did not validate the objective.
    
  • Fixed an issue in the tutorial, where using the Loadout Menu instead of holding F to resupply when prompted, would prevent the player from progressing.

• The Loadout UI now gives sound feedback unique to that category as you customize your equipment.
• Localization has been added for the following regions:
  • Czech
    
  • Danish
    
  • Dutch
    
  • Finnish
    
  • Hungarian
    
  • Japanese
    
  • Korean
    
  • Norwegian
    
  • Polish
    
  • Portuguese (Portugal)
    
  • Portuguese (Brazillian)
    
  • Swedish
    
  • Thai
    
  • Chinese (Traditional)
    
  • Turkish
• The tutorial will now end 25 seconds after entering the vehicle turret during that section of the tutorial. This is to ensure players are able to complete the tutorial and not be prevented from doing so by any more unpredictable issues caused by vehicle physics or AI behaviors.

• UI
  • Updated the style of icon utilized to indicated servers that are XP gain enabled.
  • Removed the “Customize” button from the bottom of the menu UI, it is now an option on the side right under tutorials.
    
  • The “Profile” menu option has now been moved further down the list and has been renamed to “Stats”.
  • “History” has now been renamed to “Replays”.
• Weapons & Equipment
  
  • Added new third person Hardcore sprint sequence for LMGs.
    
  • Added new prone gasmask equip & unequip third person sequences.
    
  • Added a new third person toss sequence for discarded launchers.
    
  • Added new third person standing and crouched reloads for the M240 machine gun.
    
  • Added a new third person standing and crouched bolt cycle animation for the Mosin.
    
  • Unified third person and first person Hardcore sprint pistol animations.
    
  • Added a new folding bipod for the first person and third person FAL rifle, it was utilizing an incorrect bipod type before.
    
  • Added a specific foregrip animation to the MP5A2.
    
  • Added first person drum magazine speed reloads for the VHS-2 assault rifle.
• Translucent glass rendering has now been improved to prevent cases of flickering.

• Outskirts
  • Fixed a number of clipping and flickering issues.
    
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to spawn on top of another player in Firefight West Security spawn.
    
  • Fixed collision issues with certain columns near the H objective which prevented grenades to pass between them on Checkpoint Insurgents.
    
  • Fixed an issue with incorrectly rendered shadows near the A objective on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Eliminated a line of sight that allowed longer range rockets to destroy the final cache on Push Insurgents.
• Crossing
  
  • Fixed an issue where players on the Insurgent team could potentially spawn under the map on Frontline when the last objective was captured.
    
  • Fixed being able to destroy the cache, objective D, from a far distance on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed being able to destroy the cache, objective A, from a far distance on Frontline.
• Summit
  • Opened a new path to improve level flow for approaching objective A on Push Insurgents.
    
  • Added a missing blocking volume behind the H objective on Security Checkpoint.
    
  • Fixed various places where players can get stuck.
• Refinery
  • Fixed an issue where players could become stuck between a piece of sheet metal and a chain link fence near the Security spawn on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed a collision issue which would block the player from using a door.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the players could leave the playable area near Push Insurgents final spawn.

• Farmhouse
  
  • Fixed a collision issue where weapons could become stuck in a specific metal fence near objective A on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could see through the map if deployed and prone near Objective C Firefight West.
    
  • Fixed an issue with a specific light being overly bright in objective B building on Push Security.
• Ministry
  • Fixed an issue where players could become stuck in an area near the restroom entrance.
• Hillside
  • Fixed a collision issue which prevented players from throwing projectiles over a specific wall near Push Security B.
    
  • Fixed collision issues with certain columns near the F objective which prevented grenades to pass between them on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where you could cap the B objective in Firefight mode from an unintended position.
• Hideout
  • Tweaked the post processing settings to make the map a tad less dark.
    
  • Fixed collision issues with certain columns near the A objective which prevented grenades to pass between them on Push Security.
• Precinct
  • Fixed an issue allowing players to destroy the cache, D objective, from a long distance on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue which allowed players to vault on a specific prop in ways they should not be able to near the E objective building on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed multiple collision issues near to the A, D, E and F objectives on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players could pixel walk to an unintended position near the B objective on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed collisions on crates near objective H on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could stick through the roof when vaulting on a stack of crates near objective H on Checkpoint Security.

Over the last couple of months, the team has been communicating with competitive players and collecting feedback to improve the competitive scene and overall experience with ranked games. Along with an increase of support for community tournaments and other competitive events, we have made the following changes to competitive:

• A reset of Competitive ranks to address issues of players not being able to find matches at various tiers.
  
• An increase in ranked Elo decay for inactive users.
  
• Created competitive leaderboard that can be accessed here. Please note that this leaderboard will populate itself as people play, and updates every hour.

We intend for these three changes combined to help address the current low population in Competitive and generate more interest. We’ll continue to monitor feedback on these systems and make adjustments as needed.



As we get closer to the first public deployment of our mod support, we’re looking for community members with experience creating custom levels for games in Source Engine/Unreal Engine to participate in our Sandstorm Level Editor Alpha. If you’re interested in participating and are willing to bug test and provide feedback, please sign up here. Also included in these tools is the ability to make custom game modes and new gameplay configurations, but we are looking for feedback specifically on level creation at the moment.

Hotfix 1 - December 9th

• Added potential fix for a frequent crash which could prevent certain players from being able to progress past the initial splash screens, or crash after approximately 5 to 10 minutes of game time. If you continue to have this issue please report it here.

• Fixed an issue which prevented the pre-order cosmetic tattoo from being accessible.
  
• Fixed an issue where Firefight mode was not awarding players the correct XP boost as advertised.
  
• Fixed a visual layout issue with the vote kick popup window.

• Adjusted Weapon Sway while using Focus back to be closer to pre 1.5 values.
  
• Increased objective capture time in Domination from 10 seconds to 15 seconds.
  
• Enabled the objectives column in the scoreboard in Domination.

• Sandstorm Competitive Leaderboard: https://leaderboard.sandstorm.game
  
  • Fixed a caching issue that caused old matches to be displayed instead of matches post-reset.
    
  • Fixed username search order so the closest username match now appears first.
    
  • Increased the players-per-page display from 10 to 25.
    
  • Fixed calculation to determine ranked division.

• Added new image for the Push playlist under the Versus section of the Play menu.
  
• Removed the player name and Steam avatar information from the loading screen. This was done to create a cleaner presentation and draw more attention to the game mode information and gameplay tips.

• Refinery
  
  • Fixed a player collision issue which prevented players from being able to access a staircase.
• Hideout
  
  • Extended the playable area slightly to fix a spawn that was too close to the border of the playable area in Domination mode.
    
  • Tweaked the overview area location to improve the readability of the tactical map in Domination mode.

The Community Test Environment for our next update, update 1.5, is now live. Go to your Steam Library and download “Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Test Environment” to play.

We’ll be having a “Play with the Devs” event on the CTE on Tuesday December 3 & Friday December 6 from 11:00 AM MST - 1:00 PM MST. We’ll be testing playlist improvements on the US servers in the official matchmaking of our new game mode Domination (see more information below), NOT on a server under Community Servers as we’ve done in the past. To join us, just boot up the CTE, go to Play, select Domination, and Find Match. All the devs won’t necessarily be in one game, but you’ll see us floating around your matches!

This update features a ton of quality of life improvements, gameplay improvements, optimization, and bug fixes. Please share your feedback on the CTE forums here. The highlights can be seen below:

We’ve made both game and map changes to further optimize Sandstorm. This is part of an ongoing effort to address performance issues with other maps and the game as a whole. Changes include:

• Disabled AlwaysTickPose to minimize CPU overhead of character animations which aren’t rendered on the screen
  
• Performed optimization pass on the following maps:
  
  • Refinery
    
  • Outskirts
    
  • Summit
    
  • Precinct

Before




After



Over the past couple of months, we have received and read numerous pieces of feedback from the community relating to playlist changes that were implemented earlier in the year as well as the overall matchmaking experience. The new playlist-based matchmaking introduced several issues and had some undesirable impacts on our queues’ health. We’ve made the following improvements:

• Players are now able to queue for multiple playlists within a game type (Versus or Coop). This should help to ensure that players are spending less time waiting in the queue, and more time playing the game.
  
• We’ve removed the player count for playlists, and replaced it with estimated queue times instead. This should reduce situations where players feel like it isn’t worth queuing into a playlist that doesn’t have a lot of players, which could have led to some playlists (like Firefight) not having a healthy population.
  
• Team auto-balancing will ensure that teams are always made even automatically by the server. Autobalancing will occur whenever a team has 2 or more players on it. If you are in a party, the system will work to ensure that you are placed on the same team.
  
• Players can manually switch teams if they become unbalanced as a result of leavers, disconnections, etc.
  
• Players can now join in-progress matches their friends are already in. This was something technical we had been meaning to do for a while.
  
• We’ve separated Ground Battle into separate playlists by the mode: one for Push mode and one for Frontline mode.

These are the playlists available in the CTE and will be eventually available for 1.5:

Versus

• Push
  
• Frontline
  
• Firefight
  
• Domination

Coop

• Normal
  
• Hardcore
  
• Frenzy

We know that a lot of players would love to see Skirmish make a return here, especially since multi-queueing would help its population. However, we still have issues with the mode’s vehicles, including their bugs and performance issues. We also still feel that the Skirmish gameplay experience as a whole isn’t as strong as these other modes, especially for new players. We can expand our mode selection with the new playlist improvements, but we can only go so far until we risk too much fragmentation and a weak gameplay experience for incoming new players. For the time being, Skirmish will continue to be available on community servers for the players who really want that experience.




We’ve added the popular game mode Domination to the game, which some of you may already be familiar with from games like Unreal Tournament, Battlefield, and Call of Duty. In Domination there are three objectives: A, B, and C. Your team’s score will increase faster the more objectives you own. Once one team reaches the score limit, or time runs out and they have the highest score, they win the round. Domination uses the same instant respawning system and weapon loadout as Team Deathmatch, which means you are always in the action and you can use just about any weapon in the game. Right now Domination supports the Hideout, Hillside, Farmhouse, Crossing, and Ministry maps, but more may be added in the future.

We know that adding a new game mode risks further fracturing of the playerbase, something we are trying to address with the playlist changes above. We also know that there may be other game modes that some players would like to see before Domination, such as Outpost, which was discussed in our last roadmap for 2019. Domination was originally created in Sandstorm as an “example mode” using Unreal Engine 4’s blueprint system to demonstrate to modders how they could build custom game modes using our upcoming modding tools. It ended up being really fun when we tested it, and so we decided to include it as an official mode. Domination will still exist as that example mode, and modders are free to use that as a basis to build totally new game modes.

In addition to already having it ready as this unique “sample mode” for modders, one of the main reasons we made it an official mode was because a lot of players have requested that Team Deathmatch be reintroduced as an official playlist. We feel like those players can get their fix from Domination in a way that, in its objective-based gameplay, is less mindless than Team Deathmatch, and thus truer to Sandstorm’s identity. Also, with our upcoming console release, we’ll be getting a lot of new players. Domination mode is a bit more casual and easy to learn, which means it’s an excellent way to ease those players into the more hardcore experience that is Insurgency: Sandstorm. Finally, to be blunt, we see an opportunity to attract some of the new Modern Warfare’s audience. If a player isn’t feeling the experience there, they’re welcome here with a familiar game mode as a vessel for our unique brand of gameplay.

We’ve worked hard to listen to the players and make improvements to various gameplay mechanics. Our intent is to directly address player feedback about shooting and aiming not being rewarding enough of skill, to improve player movement and acceleration to feel more controlled, and to add some flexibility to certain key bindings which have been popularly requested. Additionally, we were able to make improvements to smoke grenades so that particles are visualized reliably across all clients, which has an important gameplay impact of making smoke grenades more dependable. The changes include the following:

• Weapon Sway
  • Set up Lissajous curve fixed pattern for sway instead of the more random current Perlin noise pattern seen in the public version since release. This Lissajous curve makes the sway pattern more predictable.
    
  • Reduced sway speed by 20%. Sway magnitude is the same
    
  • Reduced incentive for crouching and proning to reduce sway (crouching now reduces sway by 50% instead of 60%, prone now reduces sway by 70% instead of 80%)
    
  • Reduced sway penalties when moving (sway magnitude now increases by 15% instead of 50%, sway speed now increases by 50% instead of 200%)
    
  • Slightly reduced the sway speed and magnitude reduction when focusing to counterbalance the other sway changes (focusing now reduces sway speed and magnitude by 60% instead of 80%)
• Recoil
  • Reduced overall recoil when ADS by 15%
    
  • Reduced recoil incentive for crouching and proning (crouching now 20% less recoil instead of 40%, prone now has 30% less recoil instead of 60%)
    
  • Reduced recoil penalty for leaning when low weight (lowest weight now has 10% more recoil when leaning instead of 20%)
    
  • Recoil penalty while moving should be consistent across all weights rather than favoring players who are heavier (heavier players previously had a greater reduction in recoil)
    
  • Increased Mk 14 EBR recoil with same magnitude as the recent FAL recoil increase
• Movement

[/b]

• Sprint speed reduced by 8%

Key Binding Changes

• Jump and Vault keys can now be bound as three separate binds: Jump/Vault, Jump, and Vault. This means you can jump in places where you would otherwise be forced to vault, because they keys were shared by spacebar. The default key is still Spacebar for the combined Vault/Jump key.
  
• Crouch and Slide can be bound separately. If you want to go from a full sprint to an immediate crouch instead of an automatic slide, you can now do so. The default key is still Ctrl for the combined Crouch (Hold)/Slide.

Client Side Smoke Reliability

• All smoke grenades should now utilize the same seed for all clients so player A will see the same smoke coverage as player B. Smoke also expands faster to be more useful and is no longer frame-rate capped.

[/list]
Thanks and enjoy! Remember to share your feedback on the CTE forums and let us know what you like and don’t like!

Hotfix 1 - December 4th, 2019

• Fixed a major issue where occasionally the player’s weapon selection could become locked after attempting to pick up and throw back an explosive, preventing them from being able to change weapons when it occurred.
  
• Fixed an issue where a blank name was shown for cosmetics in the confirmation dialog when attempting to buy a cosmetic which does not have variations.
  
• Fixed a third person issue where the C-4 and IED detonators would be floating in front of the player.
  
• Fixed and issue with Japanese localization for objective letters and the North-West direction on the compass.
  
• Fixed issue that prevented the scalability options from resetting properly when backing out of the video settings menu.
  
• Fixed an animation issue with shotguns while sprinting in hardcore or when the slow movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where there was a visual disconnect between first person and third person sprinting animations in hardcore or when the slow movement mutator was active.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Fragger class in Team Deathmatch and Domination had access to the underbarrel explosive launcher when they shouldn’t. Sorry noob tubers.
  
• Fixed an issue where the low scalability preset and low texture quality setting would not not correctly display anisotropic filtering x2.
  
• Fixed an issue that would allow the roaming spectator camera to snap when zooming in and out.
  
• Fixed an animation issue that would cause the weapon animation to become broken during the scavenging section of the tutorial.
  
• Fixed an issue where the pre-order tattoo was not set correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue where underhand molotov throws would not set the rag on fire as it should.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Tutorial Level where respawning as the Commander, selecting the Gunship, and calling in the Gunship before the related objective prompted the user to do such would block progression.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Tutorial Level where reaching the "Equip Binoculars" objective with the Binoculars already equipped did not validate the objective
  
• Fixed an issue that prevented mouse smoothing settings from being reset to defaults from the settings menu.
  
• Fixed a minor UI label overflow with the [Cancel] button while running the Dutch localization.

• Hideout
  
  • Fixed issues related to Domination capture zones.
• Farmhouse
  
  • Fixed issues related to Domination and Firefight capture zones.
• Hillside
  
  • Fixed an issue where players could capture the A objective on Domination while hidden behind a curtain.

• Players might "vibrate" or switch between states rapidly while idle or moving after respawning.
  
• Players will spawn into the level during the map voting screen.
  
• Not all of the players are able to connect to the subsequent match after a map vote. Some players may be placed back into the queue and become backfilled into another region’s game.
  
• If an automated team balance occurs during a respawn wave, it is possible for the player to be prevented from respawning with the "You will respawn when your team captures an objective" message on screen, even after an objective has been captured.
  
• Dying mid weapon transition can potentially lead to the player’s primary weapon not being available on respawn.

Hotfix 2 - December 6th, 2019

• Fixed an issue where if a player was killed during the door kicking animation, on respawning their character model would seen to be switching rapidly between animation states by other players.
  
• Fixed an issue where smoke, incendiary, and molotov explosive particles would not be rendered if the player was inside a game menu before they detonated, leading to cases of invisible fire and smoke.
  
• Fixed an issue where when submitting a player report the user would see an infinite progress spinner instead of the report being submitted.
  
• Fixed an issue in the Tutorial Level where using the Loadout Menu instead of holding F to resupply when prompted would prevent the player from progressing.
  
• Fixed an issue where players could perform a vault from the prone position.
  
• Fixed an issue when switching to and from grenade launchers would cause a noticeable delay before they could be fired.
  
• Fixed an issue where players would be automatically respawned after a Domination match had ended, showing them in first person while the post round screen and map vote UI elements were on-screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Loadout menu character would always have a primary weapon in their hands, even when all weapons were removed from the players loadout.
  
• Fixed a rendering issue that caused the x4 M150 optic to have geometry visible inside its scope view.
  
• Fixed an issue where changing the spectator camera from free roam to first person view would cause an odd transition with the character being spectated.
  
• Fixed an issue where several first person sidearm magazines would appear to have rounds remaining in them, even when the magazine was empty.
  
• Fixed an issue where when equipping a barrel attachment to the FAL would not prevent the stock barrel from being removed.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Alpha AK would not play the correct ready animation when the player had a drum magazine attached.
  
• Fixed an issue where, when spectating, the player would be shown the incorrect key bindings for change player and change camera, if they had re-bound those particular keys.
  
• Fixed an issue where the correct map ambience and weapon environment sounds were not being applied to a number of spawn points in Domination.
  
• Fixed a number of line break UI issues with Japanese & Traditional Chinese localizations.
  
• Fixed a number of issues in the newly supported additional localizations.

• Domination mode will now show players non-neutral held objectives above the score bar UI element for each team.
  
• Domination mode will now play the last man standing music when the win limit is approaching to notify players a win is imminent, this is by default, 20 points.
  
• Domination mode now has the kill feed disabled by default.
  
• Co-op and Versus playlists now have Push, Domination, and Normal playlists selected by default. This is so new players can have an idea of which content to start with that is more accessible and newer.

• Hillside
  
  • Fixed an issue where you could capture the B objective in Domination and Firefight modes from an unintended position.
• Hideout
  • Fixed an issue where a spawn point was too close to the playable area boundary.
    
  • Removed duplicated player spawn points in Domination mode.
• Ministry
  
  • Fixed an issue where a number of spawn points in Domination mode where intersecting with props, this would potentially cause those spawn points to become invalid and lead to players being spawned elsewhere.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players could become stuck in an area near the entrance restrooms.

• Not all of the players are able to connect to the subsequent match after a map vote. Some players may be placed back into the queue and become backfilled into another region’s game.
  
• If an automated team balance occurs during a respawn wave, it is possible for the player to be prevented from respawning with the "You will respawn when your team captures an objective" message on screen, even after an objective has been captured.

The nominations for the 2019 Steam Awards are here! Insurgency Sandstorm has been out for nearly a year now, and the team has worked non-stop since release to bring players free, fresh content. Since releasing last December we have added:

• 3 additional maps
  
• 10 new weapons
  
• Dozens of added cosmetics
  
• 3 new game modes
  
• And more!

While there are a few categories that you can nominate Insurgency: Sandstorm! We feel Sandstorm is a game played, “Better with Friends”. The tactical gameplay requires important communication between teammates to best capture objectives and come out on top, which is way more fun to do with friends! If you agree, please feel free to nominate us!

By the way, Sandstorm is 50% off from now until December 3rd!

We are releasing a hotfix today that addresses several issues with last week’s 1.4.2 patch. Some changes not intended for patch 1.4.2 were accidentally included. This hotfix tweaks things to be closer to our intentions. They are still however a work in progress. More changes are to come as needed, including an improvement to sway that will replace the current Perlin noise weapon sway pattern with a fixed and more predictable Lissajous curve pattern. For more information on this and our other plans, see our third State of Production post here. The hotfix changelist can be found below:

• Toned back some of the movement acceleration and deceleration changes from the 1.4.2 patch.
  • Increased default movement acceleration speed.
    
  • Increased sprint acceleration speed.
    
  • Increased friction and deceleration.
  
  
• Fixed issue where low stamina had no effect on weapon sway. Low stamina used to increase both weapon sway magnitude and speed before 1.4.2, but now has been tweaked so it only increases weapon sway speed.
  
• Low stamina sway speed is less than before, 150% instead of 200%.

• Removed camera shake from pistol and rifle sprint animations.
  
• Improved knife sprinting animation to better time with footstep audio.

• Fixed an issue where the tutorial level might not be able to be completed due to the extraction vehicle not being able to properly navigate.

Critical Fixes

• Fixed an issue on Crossing Frontline, where if an Insurgent player dies just before the Security captures Objective F, the Insurgent player could potentially respawn under the map.
  
• Fixed a crash caused by viewing the weapon model in the Loadout menu.
  
• Fixed a client side crash that would happen when certain types of friendly fire were applied to the player.

Greetings!

My name is Derek, and I am New World Interactive's Head of Production in charge of scheduling and scoping on the team, here to give you an update on what's been happening in the past month. It’s been a busy month here at New World Interactive. We’ve continued to immigrate more members of our design and programming teams in to Canada. Our efforts at ramping up have continued full speed, and our team is starting to take on some scalable structure as we quickly move towards 2020. In response to community feedback, we made some significant adjustments to our internal roadmap, as well as a decision pertaining to publicly posting our roadmap. Additionally, I’m going to be clarifying our stance on competitive, as it seems like our video announcement was misunderstood. Let’s dive right in to this next State of Production.

• Delaying our 2019 Roadmap goals and removing them from the Steam Store Page as we have refocused development on optimization and console release.
  
• Improving playlist system by removing player population count from playlist, allowing multiple playlists to be selected, manual team switching, auto team balance, and a “pre-match” Team Deathmatch mode where players waiting to queue into Versus or Competitive matches can play TDM against other players also in queues while they wait.
  
• Continuing competitive community outreach as stated in our last video in publicly joinable VoIP meetings in our official Discord.
  
• New Art Producer and Associate Producer have been hired; offer has been extended to a prospective Head of Marketing to follow.
  
• Analyzing lower performing maps Refinery, Outskirts, Summit, and Precinct as part of our initial optimization pass.
  
• Creating for modders an alpha build of our level editor, and the ability to auto-download custom maps upon connecting to a server.

I’m anticipating some anxiety/concerns over our decision to remove our roadmap from the store page, so I want to try and get ahead of that. “Why is New World Interactive removing the roadmap?” It’s a fairly simple answer: our plans have changed. Given the immense amount of feedback we’ve received about the needs to optimize, the development impacts associated with clearing TRC/co-dev of the console version of the game, and our efforts towards providing mod support for our players, we have had to make some adjustments in order to ensure we can achieve all of the things that the community is looking for. Given how much content we provided throughout 2019 already for free, including 3 new maps, 10 new weapons, 3 new game modes, limited time “mutated” game modes, and dozens of new cosmetics, we felt it made the most sense to focus on getting our pre-existing content into a better state as opposed to focusing on the introduction of even more content. Let me address the major concerns that are likely to bubble up:

• We’ve delayed night maps and associated equipment until next year. Given what a large undertaking this is (Multiple types of night vision goggles, night vision scopes, IR lasers, night maps themselves, lighting, AI overhauls, etc.) we decided it would be better to give these features more time in the oven than to release them preemptively. We’ll still be releasing one of the night maps for our Halloween event, so you’ll get a teaser of where we’re headed there!
  
• While not in our Roadmap, we have heard feedback and begun working on an AI overhaul which unfortunately must be delayed until next year as well. In order to best-service our cooperative modes, as well as our night maps, we’re working on reducing inconsistencies within our AI’s behavior trees. However, this is a time consuming process, and given how loaded our sprints are between now and the end of the year, we didn’t feel there was time to complete this task in its entirety at the level we desired.

As we get closer to completing TRC, which is one of our biggest challenges (as we’ve never done a console release before as a studio) we’re hoping we’ll be able to put up a better, more accurate roadmap for 2020. At this time, however, things are shifting around on a per-need basis of our console co-dev partner and community feedback.

We understand that a lot of people responded negatively to our introduction of the playlist system in 1.4. It’s important to note that the main design motivations for introducing the system were to (a) keep players contained in a single continuous game experience of their preference without being arbitrarily matched across multiple dissimilar game modes. The idea was that players would stick together in a server with map voting in between matches, and that servers would not need to be generated, taken down, and repopulated over and over (b) create a more intuitive and visually appealing way for new players to learn about and select which game modes to play (c) to allow for the use of limited time playlists leveraging the new mutator system and, in the future, community made mods.

We acknowledge there have been unintended consequences of the addition of this system. It’s important to us that we achieve the design intentions above, but also address the shortfalls of the system since its debut. We know that the quick-fixes we’ve done since the system was released have not been ideal, so instead of applying band-aid solutions to get better player distribution results, we are now in the process of developing a ‘take two’ on the system which we will unveil when ready. Some of the changes we are working on include the following:

• No longer seeing the amount of players playing each playlist, but instead letting people know an approximate queue time once they’ve started queueing so that if it’s longer than average players have the option to back out.
  
• The ability to select multiple playlists to potentially queue into rather than only one. While this may not prove to be immediately handy with our currently available playlists as they are so different in experience, we may consider making further adjustments to which playlists are available in such a way that multiple playlist queueing would be appreciated.
  
• Solutions for team balance issues, including the ability to change teams manually and an auto team balance feature that triggers if players don’t address team balance on their own. This should help with matches where teams are stuck at being uneven, causing people to leave prematurely and harming playlist population. As well as just being a generally frustrating player experience.
  
• Allowing players to play in a pre-match Team Deathmatch round while they wait in the queue for a Versus or Competitive playlist match to be formed.

We anticipate that these changes should result in a better distribution of players throughout the different playlists, so there will likely be some adjustments to the available playlists themselves to accompany this change in response to the aversion we’re seeing towards game modes being grouped together. We appreciate your feedback and we hope that these changes clearly demonstrate we are acting on your input. Please keep in mind that these changes and this iterative process takes time. If you have any more input for us, or if you appreciate these changes, by all means please share your feedback and we will continue to work to improve the playlist system.

I’d like to start off by saying that this announcement was my idea. Feel free to direct all hate at me accordingly if you felt neglected, slighted, or trampled as a result.

The purpose of this announcement, however, was not to say that “We are going all in on the competitive scene.”; it was to express our interest in establishing a dialogue with players and communities to get a better understanding of what it would take to develop and grow a competitive environment within our community. At this stage we can’t make any full commitments to improve the competitive experience. We want to be very honest and open about that. However, we do recognize that there are things we might be able to do within our resources and current production plan to improve the health of competitive gameplay. This may include fixes, minor new features, assisting the comp community in running tournaments or events, etc.

As for “Why create a video announcement?” for the formatting, it was a goal of mine to develop a digital messaging presence within the studio. We thought it would be a neat idea to compare the traction and stickiness of the medium from which we messaged, with the hypothesis that our players would respond better to a video dialogue than written blog formats. Moving forward, I’d like to use even more digital messaging in the future; this was merely our first attempt at doing so to get a better idea of what we can do well, where we need to shore up our skills, and to assess our production capabilities when it comes to creating video content in the future. We recognize it wasn’t perfect, and we’re going to experiment with presentation styles a lot in 2020.

I’d also like to speak to the community, especially those who seem to have taken our initiative most personally. Many comments along the lines of:

• “Competitive is dead”
  
• “NWI let competitive die”
  
• “This is a slap in the face to those of us who have been advocating for competitive since the game released”
  
• “We’ve already told you what the game needs before”

We definitely understand why you feel this way. We acknowledge our team has room to improve in regards to how we interface with and support a competitive ecosystem. The primary reason for this absence of proper attention to competitive is because post-release we prioritized other content that satisfied the broader playerbase. That includes optimization, weapons, levels, polish, general improvements, etc. There was a lot we wanted to do to fix up and flesh out the game. However, these changes take time, and we are currently in the process of determining both what those changes are and if we have the resources to do them. Some of our efforts at establishing a feedback loop, while small in nature, include:

• Improving our community feedback loop via centralized documentation
  
• Establishing an active conversation and a dialogue with players who have an interest in helping us to improve our competitive scene and overall gameplay moving forward
  
• The establishment of a dedicated support manager, who is building us a service desk entirely from scratch via Freshdesk as opposed to HappyFox
  
• Chatting with the leaders of various community leagues and organizations to identify opportunities for collaboration and intra-league events in the future

These are not excuses; this is the way we are moving forward. We are HAPPY to have a dialogue with players who want to help us continue to develop and grow this game. We had over 200 people show up to our first day of open dialogue, which was exciting and rewarding for all of us here at New World Interactive. We recently conducted 4 separate sessions for competitive feedback (2 for the North America region, and 2 for the EU region) which we’ll be analyzing and processing over the next few weeks. We’re hoping to conduct more of these focused discussion sessions in the future, but for the time being, we have hundreds of feedback items to measure and parse.

Continuing the format from the prior SoP, I’m going to break it down by a few key talking points.

• Personnel

The last month represented a very big and exciting milestone for me personally. We carried out dozens of interviews, and we were able to find some exceptional candidates for a few of our most-needed positions. The Production team is now nearly fully fleshed out. The Production team is responsible for scheduling, scoping, managing and cutting features, and identifying quality concerns for deliverables that make it into the live game; with the expansion of this team, we’ll have significantly more eyes focused on all aspects of development. Once on-boarded, we should be able to hit projected milestones with greater consistency and quality, in turn establishing a newfound trust in what we promise and what we are able to deliver. We now have a dedicated Art Producer, as well as a new general Associate Producer starting with us on November 1st. This should help our efforts at optimizing the game, as well as ensuring we are more organized and on-top of our day-to-day on a company-wide basis. We’ve hired a new additional programmer, who specializes in gameplay programming and the creation of tools for our programming team. We’re closing in on our Head of Marketing, and expect to announce their hire within the next month.

• Art Audit + Optimization

Our Art Director has now commenced an audit on 4 levels within our game. These 4 maps are Refinery, Outskirts, Summit, and Precinct. These maps were selected because they were our worst-offenders from the standpoint of performance, memory usage and navigation (e.g. collision bugs). This audit will be focused on flow, performance, and usability. Given the size of our team, as well as the size of the tasks that lie before us, we’re approaching it from the angle that we’ll tackle it in increments as opposed to all at once. These levels will be targeted by both the art team (asset review, LOD texture distancing, pop-ins, level-tailoring, lighting optimization) as well as our internal QA team (collision passes, “soft spot” passes, windows/ledges passes, restricted area review, etc) to focus on both quality of life changes as well as usability testing. This audit will be carried out between now and December, 2019.

• Porting Progress

We’ve continued supporting our co-dev partner, Black Tower, with the console version of Insurgency: Sandstorm. Our biggest challenge thus far has been reducing memory consumption, as many of our maps are still running at 6GB of memory; this is presently higher than the standard edition console can handle. We’re experimenting with numerous solutions and approaches, and as meaningful milestones develop, we’ll continue to share them via the State of Production updates. These solutions for console optimization will directly correlate with performance gains on the PC version of the games as well.

• Mod Support

In an effort to branch out beyond a singular platform, we’ve adopted a platform-agnostic toolset for modding, and have been working towards rolling out our mod capabilities. Since our publisher is still in the process of finalizing an agreement with the solution provider, we are unable to announce at this time which toolset we’ve decided to go with. Expect an announcement about this very soon! There are 3 main focuses for our first rendition:

• Integration of our platform-agnostic solution for mod uploading and distribution
  
• An alpha version of the level editor to create and share custom maps
  
• The ability to connect to a server and automatically download any custom map it is running so you don’t always need to obtain the map manually.

It’s important to note, this is not the full extent of the modding capabilities we have planned, but rather a starting point to build off of. We’re hoping to have this released in an early-access capacity by December of this year, with additional contributions throughout the year to refine support for these features.

With our last patch, 1.4.2, a few issues slipped past us which we are working on addressing. In particular, there were a few changes we were testing internally which were not meant to be introduced yet in the form they were released. This includes somewhat intense camera animations when sprinting (which can be removed via settings for those interested in a temporary workaround), work in progress increases to player inertia affecting the feeling of movement, and changes to stamina which have it no longer affect recoil or sway. These changes were not meant to be released, and we sincerely apologize for this slip. Admittedly, things are a bit chaotic right now for us with our new location, onboarding of new team members and our console co-development. This is not reflective of the standards we hold ourselves to, and we will do everything we can to ensure this type of thing doesn’t happen again.

We are presently working on a hotfix which we hope to roll out as soon as possible. It will contain the removal of these sprinting camera animations as well as ‘tuning’ of the player inertia and stamina-based sway changes closer to what we intend. These changes are a work in progress, and we are planning to make further tweaks to these mechanics as needed. One thing we are exploring in internal testing right now which we feel some players might appreciate is introducing a new Lissajous curve pattern for weapon sway. This pattern is fixed and more predictable than the current Perlin noise weapon sway pattern, and we’re hoping it addresses feedback we’ve received that sway feels too random and arbitrary.

We’re releasing a patch today that includes new limited time Halloween content, gameplay improvements, bug fixes, and more. As stated in our last patch earlier this month, we are still planning to make improvements to the playlist system. Stay tuned here for more, as we will be releasing our third State of Production post soon.

• Limited time Co-op playlist: Task Force 666, Oct. 24th - Nov. 4th
  
  • We found an old VHS tape of some Australian indie horror film called “Task Force 666” in the basement of our new Calgary office.
    
  • We watched it. Turns out it was cursed.
    
  • Our team started getting sick and delirious. Lots of blood.
    
  • Everyone came to and suddenly we had a new Co-op playlist scheduled to go live today.
    
  • It’s Hardcore Checkpoint against Frenzy enemies at night.
    
  • Available on night time version of Farmhouse map with only weapon flashlights to guide you.
    
  • Supply points are increased from 20 to 30.
    
  • Players respawn with Mk 18 CQBR.
    
  • Both you and Frenzied enemies steal health when you deal damage equal to the amount of damage you dealt, with a maximum of 300.
    
  • We are unsure at this point if the playlist is also cursed.
  
  
  
  
  
• Limited time Versus playlist: Vampire Team Deathmatch, Oct. 24th - Nov. 4th
  
  • Kill the enemy more than they kill you with whatever weapons you like.
    
  • Steal health when you deal damage equal to the amount of damage you dealt, with a maximum of 300.
    
  • Available on all maps during the day.

• During an official match, when the map changes, players will be rearranged and assigned to teams based on individual performance. This is to encourage more enjoyable matches where teams feel more evenly matched. The system will not split up players together in a party, and instead will treat them as a unit.

• Fixed a frequent and persistent crash caused by skeletal mesh merging, which is a system that optimizes character cosmetic rendering.

• Reduced default acceleration so players do not reach full speed instantly when moving, instead feeling their weight a bit more.
  
• Reduced acceleration when sprinting slightly, so players feel the inertia of their fast movement when side strafing and turning, thus making it harder to quickly change directions while sprinting.
  
• Reduced friction slightly, so players no longer decelerate instantly.
  
• Reduced speed when ascending or descending steeper surfaces such as hills, stairs, etc.
  
• Increased the recoil for the FAL.
  
• Decreased recoil for machine guns when firing while aiming down sights.
  
• Decreased recoil for the Galil.
  
• Decreased recoil for the Galil SAR.
  
• Reduced the supply cost by 1 supply for the following weapons:
  • M16A2
    
  • M16A4
    
  • G36K
• Added the Greased Bolt weapon upgrade for the Insurgent Commander class in Co-op.
  
• Added the Tracer Ammo weapon upgrade for the Alpha AK in Versus and Co-op.
  
• Increased speed of weapon switch animations to and from underbarrel grenade launchers by 20%
  
• Added new drum magazine speed reload animations for the Galil and Galil SAR.
  
• Added the M82A1 CQ to Insurgent Marksman class in Co-op.
  
• All underbarrel grenade launchers now utilize the correct “muzzle strike” animation when performing a melee attack.

• Updated the pistol sprint animations for first and third person to keep the pistol pointed forward.
  
• Updated the pistol sprint melee animations. They no longer use an open hand, and now start and end in the new sprint position.
  
• Updated the first person M203 underbarrel grenade launcher models to be barrel mounted instead of rail mounted.
  
• Updated the M16A2 third person model with a new barrel mesh.
  
• Updated all AK variants with new third person grenade launcher component animations.
  
• Updated the generic first person walk cycle animation to match the speed of Hardcore default run speed.
  
• Created a new first person ready animation for the VHS-2 when equipped with a grenade launcher.
  
• VHS-2 smoke rounds for the grenade launcher are now blue and white to match the ones used by other weapons.

• Fixed an issue where the laser sight weapon upgrade was not replicating correctly for other players.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s leg would not be visible during the door kicking animation.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Mk 18 CQBR would receive too many magazines.
  
• Fixed an issue where the RPG-7 when dry fired would animate the weapon’s sight instead of the trigger.
  
• Fixed an issue where reloading the M24 or Mosin when prone or crouched would result in the arm not animating correctly.
  
• Fixed a bug with the shell moving slightly during the start of the first person VHS-2 grenade launcher reload animation.
  
• Fixed an issue where if you rebind the lesson pop up key to anything other than the “L” key, it would not show this updated binding in the UI when the player was prompted to press it.
  
• Fixed an issue where the VHS-2 and QBZ-03 weapon icons would not always reliably show in the stats and end of round screens.
  
• Fixed an issue where the QBZ-03 would not transition correctly when swapping mid reload between drum and standard magazines, or standard and drum magazines.
  
• Fixed an issue with the third person M16A2 where the barrel mesh would be attached to the magazine.
  
• Fixed an issue where players would not see the correct movement animations if joining a Hardcore Co-op match late or playing on a server running the Slow Movement mutator.
  
• Fixed an issue where the first person AKM magazine would flicker during a speed reload. Y’know because it was so fast.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player would see the rocket disappear then reappear, without reloading it, on the RPG-7.
  
• Fixed an issue where the incorrect animation pose would play when discarding the AT4 in first person.
  
• Fixed an issue where the incorrect animation would play if viewing an Insurgent character rigging a weapon cache objective in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue where the characters arm would become displaced during the third person mine preparation animation.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Flamer enemy in Co-op Frenzy would not always be on fire for some players in the server.
  
• Fixed an issue where the 4x PSO-1 scope could potentially clip with the camera when the weapon it was attached to was fired in full auto.
  
• Fixed an issue where the G3A3 bipod was not animating correctly.
  
• Fixed an issue where the L85A2, VHS-2, and QBZ-03 could not scavenge mags from the Mk 18 CQBR.
  
• Fixed an issue where the drum magazine would not show correctly when resuming a staged reload with the VHS-2.

• Hillside
  • Fixed a collision issue on a snowbank which would allow players to hide inside of it.
  • Fixed an exploitable sight-line to the weapon cache objective on Push Insurgents.
    
  • Added a set of wooden fences to a balcony on Skirmish to prevent the weapon cache objective from being destroyed from a distance. These fences are built to be extra sturdy and can take multiple rocket rounds without buckling in the slightest.
• Ministry
  • Fixed an issue where players were able to exit the playable area.
• Crossing
  • Fixed an issue where the lighting in the Loadout room was over exposed.
    
  • Fixed an issue where certain ground textures were flickering.
    
  • Fixed an issue where a rock could be seen through, allowing players to defend objective A on Push Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where ground textures were clipping with one another near the E objective on Checkpoint Security.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players would be required to jump to get over numerous ground obstacles instead of being able to walk across them.
    
  • Fixed an issue where players were able to access an unintended room on Skirmish.
• Hideout
  • Fixed an issue with a specific door that would become stuck when destroying the hinges in Push Security objective A’s building.
    
  • Fixed a clipping issue with a particular wall hole that players could become stuck in at Security spawn on Firefight East.

Hello everyone!

We are looking to expand our current volunteer moderator team! Our team is looking to add 3-5 active moderators to manage our Steam and Discord platforms. If you are interested in helping out, we'd love to hear from you! Down below is a form that you can fill out. Applications are now open from today (October 18th) till November 1st. After that, we will not be accepting any further applications.

Insurgency Sandstorm Community Moderator Application


Brief Details About This Position

Insurgency Sandstorm Moderators are a major pillar of the community. Mods maintain peace within chatrooms, forums, and elsewhere. They are able to tune out emotions and logically analyse a situation. One key elements of a moderator involves actively checking in with the team, regularly interacting with the community, and monitoring flagged UGC items (User-Generated-Content). Moderators lead by example; they behave professionally on duty and off duty.


If you have any additonal questions about the application, please contact Captain Price#7229 on Discord. Good luck, and we look forward to hearing from you!


- Insurgency Sandstorm Moderator Team

Given feedback to update 1.4, we’ve decided to make some further changes to the playlist system. We’ve been listening closely to the community’s thoughts and opinions, and we are actively working to iterate on the system in a way that is healthy for the community and its playerbase. Please continue to share with us your feedback, and know that we will be making further changes as necessary as we did with this patch and the hotfixes before it.

It is important for us to understand our playerbase better and learn what experiences our players want the most. Do note that these experimental changes are not set in stone, and we will be closely listening to the community’s feedback. As mentioned earlier, we do welcome constructive feedback to these changes. We just made a new Suggestions/Feedback forum on Steam, and encourage the community to post feedback there. Please read the pinned post to ensure the best results to your feedback and suggestions.

In the interest of remaining open and transparent, here are our motivations behind each change:

To remain committed to the overall health of our game, we have decided to remove Skirmish from official matchmaking to help better populate matchmaking, decrease queue times, and addresses the issue of splitting the playerbase. This mode isn’t getting as much attention as we had hoped it would as its own playlist, and has been historically less popular than our other Versus modes both in Insurgency 2014 and in Sandstorm. As we evaluate different systems and modes, we’re focusing on ones that we have the time, bandwidth, and resources to support fully, and Skirmish is not on that agenda right now. The low player count and overall experience of this mode is not representative of the experience we want for players, especially new ones. We want players to get into games playing on fun game modes quickly. It is important to note that Skirmish will not be entirely removed from the game. It will still be available in community servers for anyone to host.

In addition to removing Skirmish to better support the player queues and overall health of the game, we have also decided to merge Push and Frontline. These two modes are the most popular and similar in flow, so we feel it makes sense to combine them and let players vote in between matches what they want to play next. While Push is the most popular mode, we are hoping that by adding Frontline to this queue, it will give the mode more exposure so we can better evaluate the degree to which the community enjoys it.

To evaluate the health of the Firefight mode, both in Competitive and Casual, we will be adding a perpetual double XP boost. We are hoping this motivates players to play Firefight and helps us better evaluate the interest in the Competitive scene as a whole. We will continue to explore data, and make decisions based on these changes and what we’re discovering there going forward.

Additionally, we have added a Steam group specifically for Competitive Player Feedback. We hope to start a dialogue next week with Competitive players to give updates on what our plans are in supporting and facilitating Competitive going forward, and to invite constructive feedback from the community on how to improve the Competitive scene.

To improve the overall experience of Versus Firefight, we’ve increased the amount of players. This is seen to be better gameplay and makes it more distinct from Competitive Firefight, which was 5 v 5. Our 8 v 8 change did help address player population issues, but given the other changes in this patch we are hoping that 12 v 12 can still provide a healthy playlist population.

As we have been exploring Limited Time Playlists, we have made the decision to reduce their weekly releases to a more gradual cadence in an effort to limit the amount of playlists featured at any one time. We hope that by reducing the frequency at which we introduce new modes, it will make them feel more exclusive and special as well as prevent unnecessary splitting of the playerbase. We still have plenty of new playlists to come, but we feel we need to be more conservative with how many and how often we show them.

We will continue to monitor and evaluate the impact of all these decisions. Thank you for bearing with us through these iterations of the playlist system. We hope that this patch and the hotfixes before it demonstrate our commitment to improving Sandstorm’s first time player experience and adding new game mode content in a way that does not split the playerbase. We cannot thank you, the community, enough for your continued support and positive feedback and suggestions. It is as it has always been since the Insurgency mod: critical to our development and direction we take the game. We will continue to monitor our social channels, forums, Reddit, etc and listen to the community. In addition to these changes above, our team will continue to work on bug fixes, new content, optimization, and other improvements based on community feedback. In this latest patch, we address a collision issue that caused grenades, players, or other large projectiles to properly pass through broken windows, added new first person Melee, Sprint, and Run animations for Mines, and more.

See the full changelist below:

• Fixed a collision issue where it was not possible for players, grenades, or other large projectiles to correctly pass through broken windows.
  
• Fixed an issue where occasionally, on lower end systems, it was possible for the Tutorial Level to become blocked during the Scavenge waypoint and associated Lesson pop up, making it impossible to complete the level.
  

• Fixed an issue where, when Steam Cloud was enabled, Loadouts were not being correctly saved after creating them in the Customize menu.
  
• Fixed an issue where Foregrip Bipods or Foregrips were not positioned correctly on certain weapons in first person.
  
• Fixed an issue where the M16A2, M16A4, M4A1, MK18, QBZ-O3, and the VHS were not compatible with other 5.56 weapon magazines when scavenging.
  
• Fixed an issue where RPG-7s dropped on the ground would show the rocket warhead beside the weapon.
  
• Fixed an issue where the left hand would not correctly move to the Bipod or Bipod Foregrip if you deployed it while sprinting in spinting in Hardcore Checkpoint or with the Slow Movement mutator applied.
  
• Fixed an issue where when choosing the Light Carrier and any armor in combination with a female character would cause one of the pouches to slide around the body in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue with audio event timings for the first person VHS-2 speed reloads.
  
• Fixed an issue where the first person Insurgent leather gloves would clip into the hand.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Uzi base reloads were not resetting the arm position properly at the end of the animation.
  
• Fixed some extreme camera rotations during the Uzi empty reload sequence.
  
• Fixed an issue where rounds were visible in the magazine still during the Uzi empty reload sequence.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Headband cosmetic would clip with certain male hairstyle cosmetics.
  
• Fixed a clipping issue with the Watch Cap and Neck Gaiter High cosmetic options.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Neck Gaiter cosmetic would clip with the Beanie cosmetic.
  
• Fixed an issue where both the top rail and side-rail mounts were available for the 2x PK-AS with AKS-74U combination. It now only utilizes the side-rail as designed.

• The Community servers in the Play menu will now sort by most populated servers by default.
  
• Increased the draw speed of mines by 20%.

• Created new first person Melee, Sprint and Run animations for mines.
  
• Mines now have the correct third person jumping animation in third person.

• Hillside
  
  • Fixed an issue allowing players to gain access to a closed off building by vaulting through a window near Push Security D.
    
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to spawn kill the Security team as they left their spawn area on Skirmish.
    
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible for Insurgent team players to exit the map in a certain location.
• Summit
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to spawn kill the Insurgent team as they left their spawn area on Skirmish.

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Hey everyone, my name is Michael Tsarouhas. I am the lead game designer on Insurgency: Sandstorm. Today we’re gonna talk about update 1.4's new tug-of-war inspired PvP game mode Frontline that was added to the game a couple weeks ago. We’ll cover what it is, how it plays, the challenges we encountered in its implementation, and its history in our previous games. Frontline is available now on the live version of the Sandstorm and can be found under the PvP “Versus” section of the Play menu.

Though we’ve only just added the mode to Sandstorm, Frontline has actually been around for a while. It first started as a game mode called “Battle” way back in the Half-Life 2 mod version of Insurgency, which was called Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat. It played pretty similar to as it does today, like a two way Push mode, where both teams progress linearly through the map one objective at a time trying to push each other back. There was, however, no weapon cache as there is today in Frontline. The mode had a special flavor to it. It was unpredictable, hectic, and high in intensity, but still had that tactical hardcore Insurgency feel to it.

https://youtu.be/WDbrv1shNgQ
Our WWII shooter Day of Infamy in 2017 saw Battle’s official return, but this time with its new and current name “Frontline”. This version introduced a radio objective that needed to be destroyed as the final defense objective for either team if they were pushed back to the edge of the map. Our aim with Day of Infamy was to create a more “war-like” experience as opposed to the security operation feel of Insurgency, so Frontline was a perfect fit. It was a great big world war after all, and we were excited at the idea of seeing the fire support drop as teams shoved each other back and forth on a map like Bastogne or Foy.

https://youtu.be/wTp5mUjE21c?t=318
Frontline, like Push, saw a lot of popularity. Players took well to the higher speed action, the shifting of tide of combat, the objective trading, and the overall atmosphere. We decided the mode might have a place in Insurgency: Sandstorm, and set it up for internal testing as early as the pre-alpha version. As we went along in Sandstorm’s development however, we determined that we needed to cut down on game modes and focus on the ones we had. Push, Firefight, and Skirmish were felt to be the stronger most popular Insurgency experiences, and if Frontline were ever to be added to the game, it would require more work than we had time for.

But what is Frontline exactly, and how does it play? The quickest way to explain it is that it’s two way Push. In a Frontline match, there are either 5 or 7 objectives depending on the map. Objectives are laid out in a long linear fashion, as opposed to in Firefight or Skirmish modes where they are contained in certain areas of the map. Every objective in Frontline is captured in order and one at a time, much like Push or Checkpoint. At the start of a round, the middle objective is neutral, and the rest of the objectives are split half and half between the two teams, represented below as red and blue.





When a round begins, only the neutral middle objective is active, and so both teams must scramble to capture it. This is the most dense part of a round, with up to 28 players piling into a single building, hill, or whatever other landmark it’s been decided they must vye over. When a team finally captures it, it becomes theirs that they must defend while simultaneously attacking and capturing their enemy’s next adjacent objective. In Frontline, after the neutral middle objective is captured, there are always two active objectives: one to attack and one to defend.



In the image here, you can see that the blue team has captured objective C, and now must capture objective D while also defending C from the red team’s attacks. If red takes C, then blue is forced to fall back and defend B. Both teams are in a constant struggle to move this frontline forward and not get pushed back themselves. It’s expected that a round will involve trading objectives back and forth across the map. Regularly spawning reinforcement waves keep the action flowing, and a wave is added to the wave count every time a team captures an objective.

Each team’s final objective, the blue and red diamonds at each end of the line, is a weapon cache that the other team must destroy to win. If a team gets pushed back to their weapon cache, they’ll lose all their remaining reinforcement waves and be forced into a last stand, just like in Push mode. This last stand has two key differences however. First, in Frontline, vehicles will spawn in, giving a better chance for a comeback and a successful weapon cache defense. Second, unlike in Push, a team can gain ground back by capturing their enemy’s objective, saving their weapon cache and pushing back toward the enemy’s. This is, of course, a tough scenario to come back from, but it’s possible, especially in the later stages of a round when waves on both teams are mostly depleted. An alternate win condition is to simply kill off the enemy and their reinforcement waves. When all of the enemy are dead, regardless of where the line is, your team will win.

In our early stages of testing Frontline for update 1.4, this secondary win condition actually presented a problem. Our vision for Frontline was to have back and forth and objective swapping that took place all across the map. In practice however, it was just a brawl at the center. Both teams would slug it out over the neutral middle objective, and whoever won that objective typically won the match without even capturing anything else. This is because of a few reasons:

• Capturing an objective originally gave you too many reinforcement waves. Once a team had a lead in waves, they could dig in and bleed their enemy of all their waves.
  
• Reinforcement wave respawns would be triggered quickly. This meant there would always be people occupying an objective preventing its capture.
  
• Capturing objectives took too long. Enemy players would make it to the objective too quickly even after you had cleared the objective and thought you secured the area.

To address this, we reduced the amount of waves gained from a capture, first to 2 waves and then to just 1. We also made reinforcement waves wait a little longer for more players on your team to be dead until a respawn was triggered, and upped the amount of reinforcement waves a team had at the start so rounds wouldn’t end so quickly. Finally, we made objectives able to be captured faster, so people could more easily move the line.

These changes made it less important who captured the middle objective and more important who was actually playing all the objectives and pushing the line forward throughout the whole round. Simple as those changes may sound, it took a lot of playtesting, iteration, and feedback to identify and address those problems. The Community Test Environment was a huge help in realizing what changes needed to be made to Frontline, and we thank all of you who took part in that testing for sharing your feedback. Even with that though, as with any of our modes, we are always open to feedback on how to improve. If you’re liking Frontline, then please, let us know on the forums or on Reddit. If you aren’t, then let us know it can be improved.

Thanks for reading everyone and take care!