As promised, on Monday I met with the team to review the community feedback regarding the combat update.
We’re going to be moving away from using the cone of fire system (bloom) while aiming down sights. Instead, we’re implementing a recoil-based system for most weapons in ADS (exception being the shotgun). There is still a valuable place for bloom when you fire from the hip, because you’re choosing speed over accuracy and a high amount of bloom can be very effective in reducing hip-fire.
The first version of this recoil solution will have a vertical and horizontal trend per weapon that you’ll want to learn, but will not have a predictable recoil pattern (I know some of you were going to ask!).
Crouch Spamming –The team is implementing a system akin to CS:GO’s cooldown solution. However, we are planning on only slowing the “up” action, rather than both the up and the down. This is to ensure players can still drop behind cover if the crouch cooldown has been hit.
Both the recoil system and the new crouch spamming system should be on Test by next week and go live by the end of the month so players will have time practice with the new changes before TwitchCon.
Bloom and crouch spam weren’t the only things we’ve been discussing and we’ve heard your feedback on other topics as well.
To address “grenade spam,” we’re going to do a hotfix this week. Players are stacking a huge amount of throwables and deploying them incredibly quickly, which isn’t a good experience. To prevent “hoarding,” we are increasing the bulk of a single grenade (it shouldn’t be the same mass as 5 bullets) so they take up more room in the inventory. Additionally, we’re going to be implementing a short cool down for throwing a grenade (by grenade type). In a later update, we will introduce a new throwing animation that should slow the player down and reinforce the cool down between throws. We’re going to have a special Community Outbreak on Thursday to go into more of the details and specifics of these changes so we can show rather then tell.
Movement Speed – bronstahd and game_dev_carto worked together in order to make sure everyone understood that base movement has stayed the same, and as a reminder here is the breakdown of how movement speed is currently acting on Live vs Pre-Combat Update
https://www.reddit.com/r/kotk/comments/6woat7/movement_insight_live_vs_test_the_differences_and/. TL-DR version is the speed is actually the same but it is the animations that are causing it to appear slower combined with forced passive stance in some instances. We’re working on new animations that should help with this particular issue. We want H1Z1 to be as fast paced and action packed as possible and movement should reflect that. We are also aware that there are some issues with moving into and out of ADS and movement speed that we intend to address (these sometimes appear to be passive stance, but are actually walk vs. run issues).
Bullet Speed/Drop –We are still assessing how bullet speed is impacting the game as a whole on both the casual and competitive levels. We acknowledge the concern about "lazering" and getting pinched, but we’re going to continue to evaluate the current speeds because we’re confident that the new speeds were a significant improvement for hit reg and gameplay responsiveness. However, we are adding more bullet drop in order to make those long range fights more rewarding and skill based. I don’t have numbers for you yet, but that should also appear on Test next week.
Cheating - We take this topic very seriously and recently implemented some additional detection methods that have proven very successful. Over the last week we’ve caught and banned over 25k accounts. It’s a war not a battle , but it’s one we’ll keep fighting every day.
There are always more topics to discuss, so keep posting and we’ll do our best to respond and communicate our reasons for decisions. This doesn’t mean we’re done improving combat. I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on these changes and whether you believe we're heading in the right direction.