Version 0.4.6 has officially left the beta branch and is now in the stable branch! We'd like to thank everyone who downloaded the beta and provided feedback and bug reports. If you'd like to join in and talk about the game or provide feedback as well, come and join the community on our discord at https://discord.gg/m9MAfrP !
Our next major update will be Hero Pack #3, introducing 3 new wanderer heroes into the fray.
You do not need to unsubscribe from the beta branch if you are currently using it, as both beta and stable branches have been updated.
Now, on to the details of the major new features from the previous stable version of 0.3.10. We previously outlined these features in a developer update, but we'll go over them again here if you missed it. A changelog specifically for version 0.4.6 is at the bottom of this post.
Hero Quests, XP, and Skill Points
One of the most frequent things we've heard from players is that the game tends to involve too much "grinding" to find the appropriate skill books to level up, and to acquire the relics you most want to use. It would be much more fun to just play the game, using the various heroes available as best you can, and make progress as you go!
To address this, we've removed all the various skill book types except for Encyclopedia (which has a heavily reduced drop rate), and added a new system for leveling up skills. Heroes will instead earn skill points through 3 different methods:
Defeating bosses for the first time to earn a Boss Badge
Earning XP in battles like a traditional RPG
Completing specific Hero Quests
You can then spend the skill points to level up skills, even mid-mission. This system also serves to help us level out the difficulty curve from Act 1 to Act 2, since you'll be steadily earning skill points instead of getting books in small dumps. Several bosses have received updates or overhauls to better match the new difficulty curve; some are now a bit easier, and some a bit harder.
Every hero has 3 unique quests that, when completed, award them skill points and another new feature: an Infinite Relic. Claire also has several quests tailored for her various forms.
Infinite Relics
By completing the relevant quests, hero-specific relics can now become infinite. Infinite relics can be duplicated as many times as you want for free, allowing you more freedom to bind them to any hero you'd like.
Boss relics, shop relics, and relics found only via missions will still need to be either found or crafted, but this also serves to make them a bit more special, and will allow us to add a few more of them as well.
Town Progress Meter and Building Upgrade Overhaul
Another point of feedback has been that the building upgrades aren't as interesting as they could be, they cost too much, and there's too many options presented at once. Now that particles don't need to be spent primarily on acquiring skill books and relics, a larger focus will be on purchasing building upgrades.
We've reduced the cost of the building upgrades in general, and reworked many of them to provide more interesting effects that add more "flavor" to various damage types or situations. In addition, instead of purchasing the buildings, they will be unlocked via a town progress bar that increases as you rescue and level up new heroes. This also further serves to incentivize trying out new heroes and completing their quests.
The Town Progress bar also unlocks other things over time, such as Time Break techs, additional reserve and bundle slots, and Skill Points for Claire.
Endless Mode Overhaul
Endless mode has also received a facelift. It will now work similarly to Singularity mode, in that each level will present a set of specific challenges, instead of simply increasing the levels of the enemies. Defeat the final challenge, and you might even find something special!
Speaking of Singularity mode, heroes in that mode will also now earn XP like they do in Chronicle. This allows for a bit more creativity when choosing your rewards after the battle, since encyclopedias won't be quite as important to take.
Special Missions
With the overhaul to Endless mode, wanderer hero rescues have now been moved to a new Special Missions feature. At certain times, Quinn will present Special Missions aside the main story to earn special rewards. These are short custom-crafted missions with unique encounters, leading to a reward. Right now these are all rescues of a Wanderer hero, but we have some plans for other special missions in the future.
QoL Features
We've also added quite a few quality of life and other requested features, such as an Auto Battle option, a Battle Log, hover info on battle icons, party menu improvements, some improved interface features specifically for mouse users, and various other little things.
Changelog for version 0.4.6
The following is a list of changes from the previous 0.4.5b beta branch version.
Fixed bug where overlapping enemy sprites were sometimes not hidden properly when taking damage
Fixed Samurai's Sword Tech skills being usable at less than 100% charge
Fixed town upgrades based on Boss Badge progress not applying properly to Claire's sub-forms
Fixed Ka being able to use Takedown without level 3 Sabertooth on Caveman
Fixed Paladin's Oaths not being swappable after being rescued in Singularity mode
Fixed enemy Toxic Spores skill not being resistable
Fixed Pursuer's PR3D Missile not resetting charge between battles
Addressed a possible rare soft-lock issue related to taunt skill in the Big Blob boss fight
Reduced the number of enemy kills needed for two of Medbot's quests
Town vendor now has one guaranteed slot for non-hero relics and one for single use bundle items
Fixed Forest Heart boss' animations breaking during later phases
Adjusted Forest Heart boss' lost turn type spore effects to be less punishing and limited in number
Kraken boss can now only summon 2 tentacles at a time instead of 3, and tentacles have a little less HP
We've decided to split the DLC from the update we were working on alongside it, so we're releasing the update immediately, and the DLC early next year. Originally we planned to bundle the two and release them both before christmas, but looking at where we are, we wouldn't be able to get things to a level of quality we are happy with on time. The DLC is 99% done, but that last 1% is always the most important and time consuming one!
This being our first DLC release, we really want to get it right, and do right by everyone who loves and supports Chronicon. We hope you will find it worth the wait!
In the meantime, we've updated the DLC store page with some fresh new screenshots, and we'll have a lot more to share on the DLC and future content in the next year!
There are some significant fixes and tweaks, which is why we decided to release it a bit earlier. In particular, some balancing changes to boss health and damage in Anomalies (we expect to need to tune this further based on your feedback), as well as tweaks and fixes to some weird item and skill interactions. In particular, Crown of Innate Possibilities double dipped on Mastery and item/power-boosted procs, so if you find that this has impacted your build a lot, do let us know, as we suspect the item may need need some tweaks after this fix.
As always, thanks for your reports and suggestions, and please let us know if any issues pop up and we'll get right on that.
Thanks, hope you enjoy!
Full notes:
1.31.0:
Anomalies & Monsters:
Increased damage of all Anomaly bosses to be on par with Lesser Act bosses (ie bosses in Acts before the final boss/Lesser Boss Anomalies).
Regular cave theme no longer roll as Temple Tunnels, and can instead roll as Sand Cave layouts (new thing from DLC, but accessible to everyone).
Reduced damage of Sandworms by 20% across the board.
Updated some randomized champion names.
Drastically reduced the damage of "Surger" Affix enemies.
Lesser Rune drops from Dungeon Anomaly completion are now weighted towards the least obtained runes (as per codex entries), to take out some of the frustration of bad luck and repeated drops.
Interface:
Added Discord join button to the main menu (under "More").
Added UI theme slider to interface settings menu (the DLC adds a whole new UI theme & music).
Made all types of healthbars invisible during cutscenes.
Improved enchant value display by showing stars on natural high rolls (previously stars would only show if they were augmented by the player).
Moved Wardrobe dyes 1 pixel to the left to be centered in their boxes.
Updated Help Index on Companions and CDR interactions.
Updated main menu.
Items & Equipment:
General:
Items now have a (very!) small chance to roll with all enchants att max augment.
Updated description of Aspect of the Ethereal to be more clear and have consistent wording with similar powers.
Runes:
Lethal Mobility: Effect now lasts 7 seconds, up from 3.
Infected Wounds: Augments buffed to [30][[50]], from [25][[30]].
Chilled Blood: Augments buffed to [30][[50]], from [25][[30]].
Burning Lightning: Augments buffed to [30][[50]], from [25][[30]].
QoL & Misc:
Added a dummy that attacks players and companions in Tinka's Domain, so you can test "on hurt" triggers like Thorns, etc. You'll find it in the bottom left and you need to get close for it to attack.
Added Evades to the death log.
Upgrading Gems now upgrades them 5x at a time rather than all, when holding ctrl. (10 was suggested, but 5 made the most sense since you need 5 to go to the next tier).
Swapping gear, resetting skills, or importing a build will now reset debuffs on the Dummies.
You can no longer convert a favorited item into a rune, nor unlock its enchants, without first unfavoriting it, to prevent accidents.
Improved Spanish localization based on community feedback.
Tweaked burn/fire particles a bit.
Skills:
Improved impact visuals of some Archery Base skills for Warden.
Improved impact visuals and sound feedback from several base skills for all classes.
Improved default impact particle effects used for Shadow, Holy, and Physical Storm skills.
Soul Thief and Hellcaller (Warlock Passives) should now interact with Jon's Book of Souls.
Lich Heart (Warlock Mastery) now affects Lich Ultimate skills as well.
Death Come Near Me (Warlock Mastery) now counts bosses as 15 foes, like other similar skills does.
Standardized the wording on all weaken passives.
Sound:
Added an unlock sound to locked chests.
Added a sound when slotting in a skill.
Added a new sound for when reaching the top rank of a skill.
Added footstep sounds that vary depending on material stepped on; ie sand, gravel, grass, etc no longer all sound like tile.
Added new sounds for the following items: Elixirs, Tarot Card, Champion's Crown, and Runes.
Rebalanced sound volume for all player attack grunts.
Fixes:
Fixed random tooltip being drawn when accessing the Beast panel on the UI when using a controller.
Fixed issue where the last item tooltip would be shown when swapping to the codex panel using a controller.
Fixed some incorrect button prompts on item cards while in shops using a controller.
Fixed Lushlands tileset making weird trees in some Anomaly layouts when close to edges or water.
Fixed an error which caused several difficulty related scaling effects to cap off at Mythic 1, such as enemy DoT damage caps and Boss Health growth.
Fixed issue where some mobs would loudly do their spawn noises when entering a zone.
Fixed issue where Shrine positions were not validated before attempting to place them, resulting in sometimes spawning too few.
Fixed some "island" type areas/anomalies not having ground under walls bordering the water/lava/blood.
Fixed issue causing DLC entries in the Codex to be required for completion Achievements.
Fixed Templar shield "Heatwall" not increasing the damage of the skills listed.
Fixed issue where if a companion died between performing a skill and that skill hitting something, it would not be considered a companion attack and damage numbers would be displayed regardless of settings.
Fixed characters saying the wrong line when entering The Captain's Quarters in Act 1.
Fixed being able to click UI through cutscenes.
Fixed tooltips from UI appearing during cutscenes.
Fixed bug which could cause materials of different types to group together incorrectly when dropped, resulting in only obtaining one of the types.
Fixed crash from having corrupted graveyard data.
Fixed key shortcuts in tooltips prompting to mark gems as Favorite or Drop (this is not possible).
Fixed multiple identical warnings/on-screen prompts playing after each other, such as quest updates in co-op playing for each player.
Fixed Skull of Harlon and several other similar items giving a much stronger boost than intended.
Fixed loot filters not working as intended for consumables.
Fixed Spores/Shrooms spawned through the Poison Trees rune incorrectly triggered player on-hit effect and passives (it's a companion attack!).
Fixed particles being rendered on top of pause screen.
Fixed rare crash that could happen if player was hit by a knockback effect just after dying.
Fixed issue where Contagion (Warlock passive) would sometimes grab the stack numbers of another buff, like the Bloodbinder set debuff, when spreading Infection.
Fixed Crown of Innate Probability calculating proc rates incorrectly when a skill would have multiple sources, such as a Mastery with a proc rate addition.
Anti-Cheat can be a difficult topic to discuss, from its deeply technical nature to the necessity of keeping initiatives secret to protect against dubious folks exploiting them. Even so, it’s something we know you’re keen to better understand.
Below, we’ve put together a primer on the many facets of Anti-Cheat. We want this to stand as a reference into what we do – from the way we talk about cheaters, to statistics behind cheating on Siege, to the actions we focus on each day, all the way through to some plans we have for the future.
It’s quite long, as we want to establish a better understanding of what we do before coming to you with more regular, more focused updates on social in the coming weeks and months – this is something we can improve and we’re committing to. For the abbreviated version of this blog post, check out the thread we’ve just posted on Twitter!
Now, before we dive into a breakdown of what we do daily to combat cheaters in Siege, we wanted to share some background on the cheating ecosystem.
DEFINING KEY ACTORS IN THE CHEATING ECOSYSTEM
Blatant Cheaters Whether they show no regard for gravity (fly, teleport) or spin out of control to get rid of their opponents, these are the obvious cheaters – the ones who have the highest visible impact on the community.
Covert Cheaters These are the cheaters who try to pass their cheats off as their own skill. While they might not cheat all the time and are rarely obvious about it, their goal is to appear better than they really are and create noticeable disruption in the community.
Overperforming Players Overperforming players can be cheaters, but they might also be smurf accounts playing at lower ranks, players who are highly skilled, or mouse and keyboard players on consoles. Even though all of these can create frustration in their own ways, identifying which are truly cheaters is complex and a key part of our job.
Boosted Players These are the players who play with, or take advantage of, overperforming players or cheaters to gain faster access to higher ranks. They can easily be perceived as cheaters themselves as they have an unfair advantage against other players.
Account Stealers While not literal hackers, this is the name we use to talk about those who steal other players’ accounts and resell them. They contribute to cheaters’ ease of access to new accounts and re-entry into the overall Siege ecosystem.
Cheat Makers They create the cheats we see in Siege and can range from one person to a dedicated team. They are the brains behind the cheats. For them, creating cheats and profiting from them is a job. They empower others to negatively impact the game.
Cheat Resellers They package the cheats created by cheat makers, selling cheats, and hiding already-detected cheats behind new securities. They are part of organizations that cater to cheaters and profit from the whole market.
This ecosystem exists because there is money to be made on Siege and will, unfortunately, exist for as long as they can profit from it, which is why disrupting their money flow will always be one of our primary jobs.
WHY DO CHEATERS CHOOSE SIEGE?
It’s likely no secret for anyone who actively plays multiplayer shooters, but cheaters are an unfortunate inevitability. What is it that attracts them to a game like Siege, though?
We are a competitive game with a solid player base. This equates to money in the eyes of cheat makers and resellers.
We are part of the esports scene. And with more attention on the highest level of play comes an increased market for getting players up to that level.
Players are always looking for an edge. As long as there’s incentive for players to perform at a high level, there will be an aftermarket to support easy enhancement.
As you can guess, this ties into one of the biggest problems with cheating – it’s widespread and an industry-wide issue. Wherever there’s money to be made, cheating will continue to exist as a prolonged, resources-based fight.
But it’s one we’re committed to fighting with and for you.
A LOOK AT THE DATA BEHIND CHEATING IN SIEGE
Now that we’ve talked through some of the cheating basics, we wanted to share some raw cheating data. There’s no better way to understand the scale of cheating than to see it in hard numbers. Before we go into detail with our numbers, it’s important to note that we cannot compare our numbers to other games. A one-to-one comparison isn’t possible when different games have different player bases.
What we can do is look at the context of cheating in Siege and use that as a way to talk about the future.
Total Cheating Bans
This graph groups BattlEye’s bans and our own sanctions based on data. Here are some takeaways:
The two visible spikes from 2020 correspond with the initial phase of the pandemic back in April 2020 and the end of that school year respectively.
On average, we ban over 10,000 players for cheating each month.
We’ve banned over 100,000 cheaters since January 2021.
Ban numbers are only one indicator of the actual issue, but they tie into the extremely visual nature cheating, so we think it’s important to see the scale of this up-close.
We keep a close eye on new cheats and plan to focus more time and energy into threat intelligence – working with others in the space to expand our knowledge of emerging cheats so we can deal with them before they reach you in-game.
BattlEye and Data Bans
This graph gives more visibility into how sanctions are split between BattlEye and our data-based sanctions. Here are some things to note:
About 11% of our total cheating bans are bans based on data.
The point of data-based detections is to work in parallel with BattlEye and act as redundancy to ensure together, we catch as many cheaters as possible.
We can see a small increase in sanctions year over year. As our detections have improved, so has our ability to catch more cheaters.
We are currently working on improving our data detection models and will continue our close collaboration with BattlEye to improve our identification of cheaters. More on this a little later.
Knowing what we do about the scale of cheating in multiplayer gaming, how do you go about dealing with this rampant issue? Below, we've broken out the many roles we play in this fight while also outlining the collaborative nature of Anti-Cheat as we work closely with other teams at Ubisoft.
WHAT DOES THE ANTI-CHEAT TEAM DO?
Cheat Detection and Validations Put simply, detection and validation are the act of identifying cheats and making sure the offending players are actually cheating. Since the cheating industry is so large and so many different types of cheats exist, a single Anti-Cheat solution is often not enough. This is where our close third-party partnership with BattlEye comes in. They tap into a robust, ever-evolving cheating knowledge base to detect cheaters at a large scale, casting an incredibly wide net to effectively catch blatant cheaters and many covert cheaters that fit the parameters within their system. Of course, some cheats are more elusive than others. Where possible, we try help BattlEye expand their detections to account for emerging issues. We then act as a second layer of cheat security. Using data we collect from the game and monitoring reports and conversation from the community, we’ve developed our own detection methods to catch cheaters who may not immediately be caught by BattlEye’s net. These range from data bans to the recent detections we put in place to catch idle botters – basically, we strive to catch the outliers who think they can get around the system. This is also one of the most ever-evolving aspects of our job, so keep reading for an update on what we’ve been doing to address your feedback on data detections in Siege.
Sanction Cheaters Once a cheater has been detected and confirmed, it comes time for sanctioning – the ol’ ban hammer. Sanctions are a significant part of what we manage each day. While most of our sanctions are triggered automatically after detection, like BattlEye bans and data bans, we also manually investigate and act on reports and issues. These investigations help us identify outliers and deal with them quickly, often while we figure out how to improve or create detections for these cases. Take the idle botters mentioned above for example. When it was discovered that hardware could be used to circumvent our AFK detections, we had to hustle to find a solution. Our first course of action was to sanction the early offenders while we worked on an automatic detection system which came shortly after. Next, we plan on automating the sanctions for these early next year. Like with detections, there isn’t a simple one-size-fits all solution to sanctioning cheaters, so we try to be as adaptive as possible. Over the past two years in particular, we've added DDOS bans, data bans, and botting bans to this roster of sanction types, and continue to work on more. We then issue ban waves and monitor for mentions of false positives to make sure we keep these detections up to date.
Protect the Game’s Code It’s no secret that Rainbow Six Siege is a mature game that shipped 6 years ago. This means that a lot of our code is just as old. Understanding that the code's age, how it validates data, and the risk of updates introducing new vulnerabilities are all very real hurdles, we’ve worked hard to make our builds even more secure over time. Put simply, a more secure build is harder to develop cheats for, which slows down the progress of cheat makers and providers. Below, we’ve broken out three ways we've increased code-level protections for Siege to help stem the flow of cheaters:
Encryption This is about hiding parts of our code from cheat makers - scrambling the data, if you will. We know they can crack it eventually, but we continue to add a layer of work every time we push a new game update to further slow them down.
Refactoring Refactoring parts of our code (updating it) allows us to remove vulnerabilities, add detections, and improve the overall security of the game. These take time because of the impact refactors can have on devs who are actively working on new content that may interact with this code but continue to be something we hammer away at in the background.
Server-Side Validations This refers to how we validate information we receive from the player’s game client. In the past, multiple player actions were validated only on their own PC. They could “tell” the game that they were supposed to “fly” and the game would allow that. Since then, we’ve added multiple validations that make cheats like this impossible to do, limiting access to this particular vulnerability.
Invest in Threat Intelligence Threat intelligence is all about knowing more. What cheats are out there? How much do they cost? How do cheaters get them and from who? It’s one thing to be able to act on what we already know, but it’s another to look to the future and anticipate what’s coming. We know that the future of Anti-Cheat lies in data and intelligence and are allocating more resources to deal with these subjects as we look into incorporating machine learning and collaborating with others. We’ve already kicked off a close collaboration with another company on this subject and are looking to expand. We believe that the more we know, the better we’ll become at managing and staying on top of the ever-evolving cheating ecosystem, which of course translates to stronger Anti-Cheat actions.
Deal With Live Fires Drawing a little from each of the above topics, we work closely with the Game Operation and Community teams to ensure we’re fully aware of what the players are experiencing in Siege. When a new major cheat is reported, it gets flagged and routed through our team:
We start by discussing the obvious “how are they doing that?” question.
We check if any new update could have introduced a vulnerability or if it is something we might have missed.
Once we know where to look, we see how and if we can fix the issue by adding validation (your game passing a check to say “I’m not cheating”) or protections.
We make sure our fix or validation makes it live as fast as possible to limit disruption!
WHAT DO OTHER UBISOFT TEAMS DO TO SUPPORT ANTI-CHEAT?
We can't do it all when it comes to security and Anti-Cheat, and a huge amount of support comes to us from other teams within Ubisoft. We work with various teams to bring up issues that we discover, and work with them to come up with actionable solutions. Below are some key examples of this:
Legal Our legal teams take care of everything when it comes to going after cheat creators and cheat resellers. Cease and desist letters, legal proceedings, and litigation are all part of their help. They did an amazing job on our Mizusoft case last year and are regularly shutting down different cheating providing services, including the ongoing litigation around Ring-1.io cheats!
Account Technology Security and account creation are important subjects for Ubisoft. For that reason, we’re working at the account level to increase the overall protection afforded to our players. This comes in the form of account unicity – the ability to verify that a player is who they say they are. Basically, it’s more important than ever to be able to identify if a repeated cheater is trying to create a new account and stop them in their tracks. We’re currently working with other teams here to add protections against this and better control the number of accounts players create to control abuse of account farming and selling. Specifically, teams are investigating verification that players will need to pass before entering competitive modes, although it’s important to note this has no defined shipping date at the moment and will be iterative, releasing across multiple updates.
Company Security Ubisoft makes sure we get access to outside knowledge and companies that can help us in our fight, investing in threat intelligence and new technologies to help counter negative or illegal behaviors. They also ensure our Terms of Services is enforced and remains relevant and on par with what the games and company stand for, while addressing emergent bad faith actions in the gaming space.
LOOKING TO THE FUTURE
Now that you have a framework of what we work on daily, we wanted to shed light on some future developments. As mentioned before, we can’t always go into detail on all our upcoming plans to limit cheat makers’ ability to react as quickly, but feel the following are particularly relevant to what you may be experiencing in-game:
Data Ban Detections We’ve heard the complaints about our data detections and sanctions, and it’s something we’re actively working on. We have reviewed the reports that have come through and have been tweaking our detection model. So far, the only false positives that have been triggered stemmed from smurf accounts of players playing against less experienced players. Smurfs or not, we want players to be able to trust these detections, so we're continuing to further improve their accuracy. We are working with multiple teams and data scientists at Ubisoft to expand these detections and add more data to our data set. This will ensure we get even more precise scores to sanction based on. This precision will help us identify more cheaters and suspicious behaviors, while continuing to limit its effect on fair players.
Reducing the Amount of Returning Cheaters We know how important this is to you. There’s no way to stop cheating altogether, but the faster we act, the more games we save, the less time cheaters are active. We have multiple teams working on initiatives to improve our time to detection and time to sanction. We aim to ship several different initiatives and updates over the course of the next year and while we are unable to share more about most of these right now, the one we can talk about is the work being done to add verification for players looking to enter competitive modes. We expect this to help slow the re-entry of cheaters into the Siege ecosystem and is expected to help curb the issue of smurfing (a topic for another day, as it's not owned by our team).
Ban Automation The more confidence we can build in our data, the more we’re able to automate our sanctions. And in the end, this means cheaters get dealt with more efficiently and spend less time in your games. We plan to start automatically sanctioning several new behaviors during the next season! While we can’t share what they are now, as it would tip of cheat makers, we plan to share an update on social once they are successfully doing their job in-game.
Bug Bounty Program While not managed directly by our team, we’ll be contributing to Ubisoft’s upcoming Bug Bounty Program - different from the R6Fix reward program you may be aware of. This program will offer recognition and compensation to players who report security exploits and vulnerabilities. This is crucial knowledge for developing Anti-Cheat protections, since these issues can stem from vulnerabilities in the code, and your security is integral to what we do.
HOW CAN YOU HELP?
In-game reporting will always be the best way to help up identify cheaters. This is the quickest way to help us flag potential cheaters. If you’re looking for the most direct route to action, this is it! Below, we've listed some guidelines for useful information you can provide in reports to help us identify and sanction cheaters in the quickest time possible:
Clear video or photo proof of the incident
The offending player’s Username and User ID
Match ID for any relevant matches
Date and time of the incident
MOT DE LA FIN
Our team, focusing on all things Anti-Cheat and Player Behavior, are committed to continuing this fight against cheaters and supporting this giant industry we all love. Rest assured, we’re hard at work in the shadows, trying to make things better for you! While this may be the end of this blog, it’s the beginning of a new commitment. Moving forward, we promise to bring you regular updates every 1.5 months on what we’re doing via our social channels. The first of these updates will be published on February 10, 2022. Interested in seeing how many cheaters we’ve banned in the last month? Want to hear about the latest sanction that’s been automated? Your trust is integral to what we do, so we want to give you more chances to better understand what it is we do and can’t wait to bring you along on the journey!
Welcome back dear Champions to another week in Paladins!
The holiday season is happening all month and we have some fun planned for you this weekend in relation to it!
In addition, we are aware of a bug that began to happen after our last hotfix went live where some players are experiencing an infinite loading screen occasionally. Our QA team is still investigating this and we encourage anyone with information on how they got this issue to submit a report to our Bug Report Form.
Here’s what’s going on this week!
Festive Avatar Weekend
Starting on Friday we will be giving everyone a chance (in case you didn’t get them last year) to get our Grover holiday avatars.
Each player can unlock these after they go live by playing 2 (non-bot) games of the same mode in a row!
This event will end at 4AM EST on Monday, December 20th.
Hanukkah Grover
Live: Friday, December 17th at 4AM EST
Kwanzaa Grover
Live: Friday, December 18th at 4AM EST
Christmas Grover
Live: Friday, December 19th at 4AM EST
We’ll see you in the Realm!
LIMITED TIME MODE – Dwarf Fortress
This match will determine once and for all which is superior: Dwarven Engineering or Goblin Ingenuity.
As the end of 2021 approaches we have another update to enhance your zombie slaying experience. Thank you for your continued support this past year and for providing us with valuable feedback on your favourite zombie killing methods throughout Season 3.
To thank the community for their ongoing support and to ensure our players are able to master all weapons successfully, we’ve granted all players Level 50 and above 4 x Weapon Upgrade Kits to spend as they wish. For those looking to challenge themselves over the Christmas period, from this point onwards this reward will be available to all players once they’ve reached Level 50.
We’ve got an exciting year ahead of us with plenty of undead content to come, so stay tuned via our social channels for more in the New Year.
A very Merry Christmas slayer Community, here’s to another year of Zombie brutality!
FULL PATCH NOTES:
Cumulative playtime counter now works as intended
Cutscene SFX error in the Dead Zeppelin level has now been rectified
Dead Ahead - Shooting Range - Zombies no longer misaligned with the cage present inside the Safe Room
Crossplay (PlayStation/PC Only) - Death Canal - Interact prompt for the workbench is no longer unavailable for players while the game is hosted on PS4
The Strange Brigade Headgear Pack - The Seteki Headdress Headgear no longer clips through Secondary Weapons on all Hector character skins
Crossplay (PlayStation/PC Only) – Resolved issue where the Speaker icon didn’t display correctly when the player mutes themselves
Return to Hell - The Karl zombie characters that appear throughout the mission no longer wear the Occult Karl Outfit skin
Blowtorch Weapon Bundle - Mismatched texture is no longer observed for the Blowtorch's Platinum skin
Blowtorch Weapon Bundle – Visual error for the second and third Fuel Pump Regulator upgrades has been rectified
Hell's Cauldron - Walkway A1 - Overly dark texture is no longer observed on the metal platform after exiting the Start Room
Crossplay (PlayStation/PC Only) – Voice chat toggle description has been adjusted for clarity
M3 Grease Gun – The issue causing charms to be incorrectly attached to the weapon have now been resolved
Flare Gun - The issue causing charms to be incorrectly attached to the weapon have now been resolved
Crossplay (PlayStation/PC Only) – Resolved issue where Speaker icon would remain on players screens after releasing the 'Push to talk' button during the gameplay
Resolved error where the collectible section would display an incorrect preview image for all DLCs selected after Damnation Valley.
Horde Mode – The Blowtorch weapon has been added into weapon caches
The Progress Block affecting some players in Hell's Cauldron has now been rectified
Resolved issue where the player mute icon would stay on the screen despite being unmuted
Rectified error where chapters would display incorrect challenge in the mission select screen
Images can now be shared by the DM and viewed by players. This is useful for showing off clues the players come across, or showing off a high resolution picture of an NPC.
Fixes
Drawings are now drawn on a 2D flat plane and no longer rotate to face the camera.
Refreshing available skins no longer doubles entries in the filter dropdown.
