Christmas and the New Year are just around the corner, and for this Holiday Season wed like to introduce something unusual to Survarium.
Faction Challenge Holiday Event
Players often point out that Survarium does not offer a lot in terms of competition between different factions. Basically, your faction only determines a list of equipment available for purchase. Hopefully, this event will be a stepping stone to introducing more competitive formats between factions.
In the course of the event which will last for the whole Holiday Season you will earn reputation for your favorite faction (you can also switch sides if you wish). Reputation can be earned as usual by participating in any PvP-matches, but only reputation earned during specific hours will be counted towards event progress. We will publish the schedule of these battles right before the event goes live, which will be soon after Survarium 0.56 goes live.
The faction to receive the most reputation wins. Their reward will be a new weapon which we will add to the faction in one of the upcoming updates (likely version 0.57). Also when the Faction Challenge event is over, traders of the winner will offer a discount on all their wares. To make the loss a little less bitter, traders of the other factions will also have a discount, but it will be smaller.
Most importantly, every faction will offer personal rewards for their supporters! You will be able to get those rewards by gaining a certain amount of reputation with corresponding factions, and there will be weapons with unique camos (kudos to John Rivian for the concepts) among those rewards. So, whether you get each of the personal rewards or not, depends on your own performance during the event. You can even get all the rewards from all the factions, but it wont be an easy task. And then again, there is a general reward based on what faction wins in the event!
Reputation System Rework
But what will players with the maximum level of reputation do since they cannot earn more? No problem! In Survarium 0.56 we are introducing prestige levels which you will earn after reaching level 5 reputation with a faction. Each prestige requires 150.000 reputation and awards you with a skill point. Thanks to this you will be able to get enough skill points to fully unlock all 3 skill trees!
But that is not all! So you can unlock new factions equipment faster, we are reducing the amount of required reputation almost by two times! Now you need 360.000 reputation for the maximum rank, and when Survarium 0.56 goes live this will change to 200.000. Naturally, we will not reset your reputation, so if you have reached the highest rank in any faction, you will automatically receive Prestige 1 in that faction (along with a skill point)!
Team Mission Improvements
After the introduction of single matchmaking tier in Survarium Update 0.55 team missions were left unchanged, and in Survarium 0.56 we are fixing that. Now there will be only 3 difficulty levels in PvE regardless of equipment tier. The higher the difficulty, the higher the reward (there's a chance to get premium equipment on the hardest setting), and you are not longer constrained by equipment tier. Are you bold enough to try the highest difficulty in tier 1 equipment? No problem. But it wont be easy.
Access keys will also work differently. When Survarium 0.56 is live, you can play team missions without an entrance fee (including locking spots when you want to play solo or duo), but all stashes you find will be available to you for free only once per day. On subsequent playthroughs you will receive only 3 stashes, and will be able to unlock the rest by using an access key. The cost of reroll is left as is.
These changes are to ensure you can participate in team missions without having to play in PvP, and also so you can more easily find companions for team missions.
Renderer Improvements and Other Changes
In addition to everything mentioned above, Survarium 0.56 introduces a lot of other smaller changes. We are bringing back the static anomaly to Tarakanovsky fort, fixing flickering campfires and a few other issues of the new graphics renderer. We are also introducing penalties for abandoning matches and improving matchmaking for players with very high Elo rankings: these people will only be matched against players of similar skill. Changes are also affecting game locations: we are fixing exploits allowing to shoot through objects. Additionally, you will receive 20 gold for 7 day login streak.
These are only a part of whats to come. We will publish a full list of changes in Survarium 0.56 before the update is released in the second half of December.