UPDATED MAY 6TH
Explorers,
It’s been an incredible week 1 of Early Access and we want to thank you all for playing.
Our plan is to be as responsive as possible throughout all of Early Access and, with your help, we’ve identified a few high-priority issues to hotfix. We’ll be pushing out this hotfix on Thursday, May 6th around 2:00 AM PT / 10:00 AM BST. There will be no downtime with this hotfix! If you are in the lobby, you will be kicked from the game and will need to restart. You will not be kicked from an active match - you will need to restart Scavengers after completing it.
This is by no means a complete update or fix for all problems, but we hope this resolves some things while we continue to investigate and work on the rest. Midwinter creative director and co-founder Josh Holmes will also have an update later this week on what we’re focused on as a studio.
Research Update
When considering progression, it seems reasonable to think that weapons and items that require higher progression are more powerful. Scavengers is designed differently though, and we didn’t do a very good job communicating that clearly. This has led to some players feeling betrayed in two ways: those who haven’t progressed feel like they’re behind and those who have progressed are disappointed that they don’t see raw power boosts for being ahead.
We have three main goals when it comes to progression:
- Give players the tools you need to compete right away
- Give players a space to experiment with strategy and play-style over time, instead of just advancing power
- Allow players to progress even if they don’t extract
Right now, we’re not hitting our goals. We’ll be making some changes to help us hit our goals, beginning with offering our more generically powerful options at a lower level, and increasing the drop rate on certain research items.
- Moved Warsong, Predator, and Quicksilver to Tier 1 (basic) Research, adjusting the cost to research them
- Adjusted drop rates to smooth out some of the bumpy parts of progression:
- Scourge Biomass now has a chance to grant Collagen or Resin
- Doubled the chance of acquiring Rare or better resources from Industrial Byproducts
- Crystalline Formation grants 35% more resources.
- Crystalline Formation has a chance to grant Petroleum
- Common materials grant more nanites
- Expensive Uncommon materials grant more nanites
Addressing Cheating and Exploits
We’ve closed the loop on a couple of exploits and fixed an issue that allowed player names to visually change midway through a match, making it difficult to submit a player report. Now you can rest assured that if you need to report a player, you are reporting the correct one!
Please continue to report players you see exploiting glitches and abusing the game. Our team is monitoring all your reports, but it helps us best if you can report in-game and via Discord, as that’s where we have the best telemetry. We appreciate all the information you can give us to help investigate and address exploits and cheats.
Adjusted Crafting Costs
We’ve been listening to your feedback around crafting - especially with high-level players taking over matches quickly with high-rarity loadouts. We want there to be meaningful tradeoffs for bringing in higher-rarity loadouts—like having a weaker early game—but many players are rocketing past the early game due to low scrap costs and high rewards. The Scrap cost is now more in-line with the quality of the crafted gear, and we’ve toned down how much Scrap can be acquired from caches (the ones your Keeper has to scan to unlock).
These changes should incentivize more strategic planning for gathering and using Scrap. Here’s the breakdown:
- Rare weapons increased from 400 to 600
- Epic Weapons increased from 500 to 800
- Legendary Weapons increased from 600 to 900
- Rare Shields increased from 400 to 600
- Epic Shields increased from 500 to 800
- Decreased number of crafted Consumables from 2 to 1
- Decreased amount of Scrap received from Caches from 525 to 450
Looting Player Weapons
We hear your feedback in wanting more rewards or incentives for getting player kills, but also want there to be strategic tradeoffs between power-clearing camps (more resources, EXP, and scrap) and hunting other players (more datapoints and stealthy map movement). We’re going to be cautious with our approach because we don’t want to heavily disrupt the match economy (yet), so a straightforward and intuitive benefit for squad wipes feels like a good start.
Upon wiping an enemy squad, they will drop all of their weapons - including signature weapons!
Friends List
Some accounts have gotten into a bad state after linking and unlinking their Improbable and Steam/Epic accounts. This has led to players being unable to add friends, invite friends to a party, or friends appearing offline. Thank you for sticking with us as we worked to fix these issues and get everyone teaming up again. With this hotfix, you will be able to invite your friends and squad up, to defeat the Scourge together!
Bug Fixes
We’ve also fixed some issues, to make your life on the frozen wasteland more enjoyable:
Crashes and Desyncs
- Fixed: many of the most frequent causes of the server crashes
- Fixed: issue where there were large movement desyncs after reviving a downed player
- Fixed: issue where the client closed after being left open for an hour
- Fixed: issue where the server crashed when exiting a vehicle
Collisions
- Fixed: players hiding and shooting from inside the Dropship’s upper ramp
- Fixed: Issue where gun crosshair would lock onto larger trees
Lobby
- Fixed: issue where players were not receiving the in-game Research rewards if they experienced server issues, or were dropped from the game unexpectedly
- Fixed: issue where crafting Kali’s Heartseeker or Jae’s Maverick did not count for the ‘Craft a Signature Weapon’ challenge
- Adjusted: the end of match feedback survey will only appear for the first few matches. After that, we’ll call you at the end of every day to ask how things are going (kidding!).
Pings
- Adjusted: the enemy ping icon will only stay in place a for few seconds to show last known position
Explorer
- Fixed: Letty’s Rosie Vendetta can no longer be activated by hitting teammates
Storms
- Adjusted: shrank the initial storm circle size by reducing the safe radius around the starting locations. This was done to reduce the overall distance of storm collapses in subsequent storm categories
- Adjusted: we’ve made improvements to the collapsing storm to reduce long runs for players who get caught on an unlucky side
Please continue sharing your feedback and thoughts with us - we’re grateful for all the reports we’ve had from everyone so far. They’ve helped us address key issues quickly and effectively at this early stage. This is all an integral part of the Scavengers Early Access journey and we hope you’ll continue to join us along in the months ahead.
If you haven’t already, join our Discord to talk to fellow Explorers and our team, or follow us on Twitter for all the latest updates!