Note: Our Community Manager is out of the office with the flu, we'll return to the established Status Report format next week - appreciate
everyones patience!
Greetings Survivors!
I hope all of you that we had the privilege to meet up with at PAX Prime have recovered, and are ready for some more Chernarus Survival, because we certainly are!
While in Seattle for the Penny Arcade Expo I spent a good amount of time live casting from both the Twitch, and Astro stages. We discussed everything from the newly launched .58 update, to upcoming Community Combat Scrums, the Anti-Cheat Bounty initiative, and even the Survivor GameZ joining the Bohemia Interactive portfolio.
For those interested in a recap, DayZ Content Creator "Septic Falcon" was kind enough to put together a quick recap over at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUwNhw3vwp0 - Head over, check it out, and maybe drop him a sub!
Now that 0.58 has hit stable, we've been keeping an eye on the Official Forums and Feedback Tracker. Huge thanks to all of you who were exemplary testers and filed outstanding tickets giving us strong repros on the critical issues not caught on experimental. In addition to the known issues, the community helped us identify issues with the cleanup of certain items (eg: some firearms, etc).
Internally, while development on 0.59 is ongoing - a small portion of the team has forked off to work on a potential hotfix for 0.58 Stable addressing:
- Session Lost / Connection Issues when around large/medium player camps
- Certain items not being cleaned up by Lifetime (Age) cleanup
Once we have a build we feel is ready for larger testing, it will be pushed to the Experimental Branch. The build will have to check out after a minimum of 2 days testing - and then will be eligible for a push to Stable. (Cross your fingers!)
As 0.58 Stable continues, we've closely monitored loot saturation and dispersal. The average operating range for item quantity as of the time of the launch of 0.58 was approximately 21,000 items. With the initial release, iteration and configuration was still needed on a good deal of items within the central economy control. Below, you'll see the dispersion of items three days after the launch of 0.58 to stable. (Public server, High population)
Several days ago, we completed a gradual configuration and increase of loot quantity. Tools, clothing, survival resources, and such were increased incrementally - bringing the average resting quantity of loot across Chernarus to 26,000 items. Weapons, non perishable food, and military gear retained their configured numbers from Experimental Branch. We'll continue to iterate this as 0.58 is ongoing, and the pending hotfix addressing the cleanup of specific items will continue to make the survival experience in Chernarus engaging.
With TwitchCon coming up at the end of this month in San Francisco, we're looking forward to talking about Aerial Transport, Contaminated Terrain, and more - so be on the lookout for specific information on when/where to watch that!
Lastly, this weekend we will be trying out our first Community Combat Scrum. We've extended invitations to the first evangelists we'll be trialing the program with. The following community members will be joining us this weekend:
Break71
xSmak
Deadly Slob
Respawnonme
M1NDR
IwinUloseLOL
The results of the scrum will be included in next weeks Status Report, and assuming the program results are positive we'll start looking into expanding it to evangelists of the Survivalist type gameplay as well.
- Brian Hicks / Lead Producer