I spent a lot of time this patch on the matchmaking algorithm trying to make it more resilient to errors. There is still a lot left to do but things are being learned and progress is being made. Apart from that I introduced some quality of life features I planned to put in for a while, namely being able to check what gems you and your opponent currently have socketed and to learn about the Gembearer decks from the main menu.
A big balance change is that the highest Student Title is now only achieved at Student Rank 50. I plan on teaching Sokras a few new tricks, making the single player experience more interesting and this is the first step in doing so. Much more is soon to come.
Balance
- The most prestigious Student Titles are only achieved at a much higher Student Rank. This also affects Sokras’ scaling, expanding the single player progression. This system will be developed upon soon.
Quality of Life
- When hovering over a character portrait, a list of the socketed gems is displayed next to the tooltip Gembearer card. Some gems are hard to distinguish from one another especially on Steam Deck or smaller displays. This should remedy that issue and improve accessibility.
- In the title screen, you can now click the question mark symbol next to your selected character to take a look at the Gembearer cards.
- The player’s ratings are displayed under their names in online matches.
Bug Fixes
- Joining an online match while in an offline game works again.
- Playing Sources alternately no longer causes potential desyncs in online multiplayer.
- Playing Lightning Tonic alternately no longer causes potential desyncs in online multiplayer.
- The description for the Steam achievement tied to Intuition is now accurate.
- Student Rank is displayed correctly in the main menu options.
- Sokras no longer duplicates Mnemosyne when skipping card retrieval.
Polish
- Further improved the matchmaking process.
- The fidelity of modification images has been increased substantially.
- To avoid confusing situations, you can no longer hide the Draft Row while your opponent is drafting.
- Student Titles are displayed in color in the leaderboard to make them stand out more and make the entries visually more appealing.