September's First Mini Patch / Build is Here
The highlights...
- Server improvements (including more!)
- Modest balancing changes
- Bug fixes
Server Improvements:
The biggest piece of feedback we've had is the playtesting servers take too long to load or don't load at all. For this past year we've had the servers starting on-demand to limit our hosting costs, but its clear that its taking too long for Playtesters to join (5 minutes in many cases).
We've also had issues with adjustments on our Developer builds impacting the sessions (this is one of the reasons some weren't able to join last week). In addition when we only had the one server live (even though Player counts weren't displaying properly sometimes) we hit the max supported Colonies.
This is a priority for us to fix and I believe we'll have it done by the end of this month.
What we've rolled out with this build...
- More Servers (Three live now)
- Increased the "Live" time for the Servers so Join Times are <1 Minute during heavier playtimes.
What problems are we fixing next?
- We'll be launching Playtesting Servers in the US where most playtesters are. We'll try to keep up a Europe server as well for European/Asian players too.
- (Important) Servers will be "always" LIVE. This will mean 30-60 second join times in most cases. We could do this now, but we're just making sure this doesn't explode our hosting costs. We'll be able to reach this by the end of the month.
- Increasing daily active players so more people are actually playing concurrently. We've kept player numbers low these last few weeks to help uncover some of these bigger bugs, but its lame in a PvP game if no one else is on. We have a pretty backlog of Playtesting applications so at the end of this month we'll be adding a much larger chunk of testers so that there are many more people actually playing.
What balance adjustments were made?
- We joked about this on Facebook, but we really did buff the aggressive animals
- Colonists resource collection rates have been nerfed slightly to help with pacing in the first Era. There will be further tweaks to Colonist gather rates and movement speeds that will probably slow this down a little more as well, but this is a first step.
What bugs were fixed in this mini-patch?
- Colors of a building preview highlight are inconsistent for multiple buildings
- Research in the first slot is invisible in the research queue
- User gets the 'Token is invalid' error after some time in the Menu which prevents from entering match
- Debug text is visible in recruited units names
What's coming next?
We owe you a development roadmap, game guide, tech tree, and much more. I (Paul) am hammering away at those items and hope to have much of it out this month.
In particular we have a large update to our AI/Pathfinding that will fix the "impassable" forests being passable as well a host of other peculiar behavior by units when moving. We have some pretty large items for next month's builds in the pipeline so trying our best to tackle these more pressing bugs while rolling out more core features.
- Improved screen navigation, minimap, and field of view (major source of frustration)
- Fix selection bugs
- Further balance adjustments.
- PvE Elements
- Server notifications (players joining, era progressions, and so on)
- Bug Fixing