We just deployed a follow-up patch to Tactical Escalation, our first Content Update. It's mainly bug fixes, improvements to PVP maps and PVE (a ton here), combat balancing such as the Plasma Cannon, Grav Gun, Heavy Bolters, Deffgun, Fusion gun, changes to melee on syringe and narthecium to name a few, and a new melee durability system, and of course, pirate hats for Orks.
You will also have noticed a new latency meter. The reason for not pointing it out is that first, it was a fix to the meter because we're spending time investigating our server, database and network latency. You can call it "ping" but that's a misnomer because the new meter was fixed and now shows the result of a service call, not just the network roundtrip client to server.
Many people had a huge change and this gave us incredibly valuable information because if we had pointed it out, everyone would have reported something, no matter how minor the change. This is because we didn't change the network or server setup at all.
Now you see the real processing time of a client-server request. To compare to just your network latency, compare here: http://www.cloudping.info/
We are in Virginia and Ireland respectively. If there is a big difference, you will understand why we started out with not pointing out the changes to the meter. Keep notifying us, keep comparing various cloudpings (there are many like http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest-for-aws) and your in-game meter. Our data warehouse also collects your latency information as part of the end game metrics each player sends from the game servers so we're looking at quite a few data sources, including your report.
Full patch notes will follow shortly for this patch.
Campaigns
I mentioned on Twitch why we didn't want to enable Campaigns last week. Turns out we were quite right not to do that. If you feel your service latency (mentioned above) is high now, it would have blown up in our latest scalability tests. This is entirely fixable as campaign goals are simple creatures but I'm sure you understand that while diagnosing, debugging and improving latency, we shouldn't add to it.
We estimate 2 weeks of work refactoring a part of the Campaigns while we also focus on our continued and never ending work on improving networks, client, server, database latency and performance (ie framerate).
We'll make it up to you with extra nice RTC rewards when they start and we apologize for the delay. We hope however you understand that it's for the greater good of mankind and we would have overloaded a channel we found in our diagnostics of our intrastructure. Fortunately, Amazon allows us to scale most things fast.
December Content Update
Yes! Before we hit December holidays, we have a Content Update for you. Our tentative features and content for the next Update is:
- Veteran Mechanics & Appearance Redesign, make them (and later Elites) far more meaningful in the battle
- Brand new PVP map, you might have seen it already
- Brand new PVE game mode and content, you probably haven't seen that
- Continued melee and combat balancing (Jump packs, Grenades, Ranged vs Melee)
- More Wargear and visual customization
- More improvements to quality of life, bundles in store (yes, discounts, requisition box stuff and sets)
Basically, we're following our top priorities. Fix the game, expand on what we have, add what's missing and get performance and latency in check.
And as a Christmas hint, this December update may or may not coincide with something else I mentioned.
We'd also like to welcome all the newcomers through our Steam Black Friday sale, it certainly confirmed what we all agree on, we should have a lower barrier to entry to the basic version of the game and enable people to work themselves up. After all, more targets is good.
That's it for now, thanks for hanging in there with us and we hope you'll enjoy the changes in this patch as well as the December Content Update.
Nathan Richardsson
Senior Producer