There's no rest for the wicked; Brother Justin has brought us Patch 1.1.10!
Greetings, Brothers and Sisters.. The patches just keep on coming!
We are pleased to announce that Last Year Patch 1.0.10 is now available! If you do not see the prompt to update, you may need to restart your Steam client.
With Patch 1.0.10, we’ve made more improvements to your Last Year experience:
1. Legendary Drop Rates: We’ve increased the drop rates to be Wood = 5%, Silver = 10%, and Gold = 15%. We’ve also changed slot 3 from Wood to Silver. As a reminder, even though getting zero escapes/kills visually looks like “Wood,” it is a different state and has a 0% chance of getting Legendary Skins.
2. Disconnects: Any players who disconnect from now on will be penalized for poor sportsmanship. Multiple disconnects, from either Classmates or Fiends, will result in players not being able to queue for a certain period of time. Even once the period of time has elapsed and games can be joined, the poor sportsmanship score will only reduce once the player fully completes rounds. Right now, it's a "3 strikes and you're out" system, to ensure people aren't penalized for legitimate connection problems.
This value can be altered, so we'll monitor the community to see if there's issues and adjust accordingly. This is part two of our solution to the disconnection problems we’ve seen in the community, and we’ll continue to monitor the situation to see if player behaviour improves. We may pursue additional solutions in the future, such as rewarding good sportsmanship, but this may have to wait for other priorities to be tackled.
3. Optimization: We’ve done another pass of optimization to help improve performance and reduce drops in FPS. We’ll be continuing to see what other improvements can be made without sacrificing quality of experience. We've also done some clean-up of files and reduced the package size of the game by 3GB.
4. NEW WEAPONS!!!: We’ve introduced a few new “findable” weapons in the world, as well as a brand-new execution animation for Afterdark's Star Fiend:
- The Crowbar: the crowbar has 8 durability, and does 10 damage per hit. It’s also got a faster attack speed than the Baseball Bat or Pipe.
- The Cricket Bat: the cricket bat has 3 durability, 10 damage per hit, but has nails attached to it for 15 bleeding damage over 5 seconds (this cannot be stacked with the same cricket bat, so be sure to maximize your use of it by pacing your hits). Its attack speed is slower than the Baseball Bat or Pipe.
- Both new weapons have a fixed spawn point in each map, as well as a randomly spawning one, like the hockey stick. The only exception is The Library map, which has 2 randomly spawning Crowbars.
- We’ve added a new Spider Execution animation, which is triggered by approaching a downed Classmate from their left side.
5. Bug Fixes: We’ve begun to address certain bugs, prioritizing those that have an effect on gameplay and balance. Here is a list of issues we’ve resolved:
- The Spider’s SFX can no longer be heard while in Predator Mode
- Fiends can no longer spam traps as quickly, and cannot place them on top of one another
- Classmates who do not pick a Class before the timer expires will still have their HUD/UI upon spawning into game
- In the Belltower Map, players can no longer get stuck in the boxes near the garbage, near the yellow tripod in the belltower, or in the dumpsters near the Rescue Room
- PTT settings, as well as all settings, will no longer reset to default once set. You may need to reset to defaults manually before this fix takes effect
- Incorrect Card Assets will no longer be displayed for Classmates on the Rewards Screen when a Fiend Disconnects
- Classmates will no longer krump when Strangler presses the Chain Grab input while doing a Claw Attack.
- Players will “push” each other less, resulting in a smoother gameplay experience.
We’re going to keep the patches coming in the following days and weeks. We still have a lot of changes and improvements we’d like to make, and will be focusing on bugs and balance for the upcoming patches. We’ve also taken our first steps in this patch for new player accessibility (better Legendary Drop rates, more weapons in the world, discouraging disconnects), and will be continuing this initiative with more impactful changes in the coming weeks/months.
Once again we'd like to encourage those who may have left a negative review of the title to consider changing it to positive if our fixes and improvements have addressed your concerns. Our review percentage is slowly getting better and better over time, and every positive review helps to support the game and its community. We’ve also noticed that reviews get significantly more positive the more hours played. We see this as validation that we need to improve our on-boarding and new player experience, but we also encourage those who put the game down quickly to give the title another chance with these changes, and promise even more will be coming soon.
As we've said before, it’ll take all of us working together to support this title and make it a success, and a few good reviews from solid players goes a long way. We’re going to continue improving the title, so stay tuned for more updates in the near future.
We thank you all for your continued support and patience. We’ll see you tonight on Twitch for our 1st Live Dev Stream of the year, at 7-9 PM EST. We’ll be answering questions from the community, hosting our first #DreamTeam match-up, and have an EXCLUSIVE SNEAK PEEK of upcoming content!
Heed The Signs, Brothers and Sisters!
Sincerely,
Brother Justin