The Test Server is open between 4:00pm - 9:00pm Pacific
The Test Servers have been updated with the March update, and we could use your help getting some extra testing on it to see how it checks out prior to going to the Live servers. Please pay special attention to these items:
Region Connection Test
In this build you will see the first iteration of our connection quality test we talked about last week. As part of initial login, you’ll have the option to select which region you’d like to play on. However, if your ping exceeds acceptable thresholds to a particular region, you will not be able to select it. This will help keep all players in fair and consistent matches.
While this will not be that testable on our test environment, it is important to stretch it as much as we can. Just a note in terms of the plans to roll this out. Our plan is to implement the limits of ping in several phases, with the goal being down to a 150ms cap by the time we start the next Pre-Season.
New Feature: Team Follow Cam
We have a new version of the Team Follow Cam that not only works out a lot of the kinks, but also makes the overall experience much smoother. In addition, we’ve designed a new Team UI that will be visible during gameplay and as a spectator provides more information about your teammates – what weapon they have equipped, and if they have armor and a helmet. Finally, we’ve also streamlined the teammate colors so that each member of your team will have their own unique outline color which will correspond to their color in the team UI.
Vehicles
Vehicles play a huge role throughout the course of the game and we worked on a number of areas to improve the overall vehicle experience.
The first change you’ll notice is a brand new UI for vehicle drivers and passengers. This includes a speedometer, your life and fuel, as well as an indication of the vehicles parts and overall condition. Condition matters more than ever before, as vehicles will lose performance and functionality as they take damage. If your vehicle is in bad shape, you’ll notice that handling starts to degrade and eventually you’ll even lose your turbo! This will go a long way towards addressing late-game situations where the last few players would drive around in circles with little incentive to engage.
As a related change not mentioned before in the producer letter, the Magnum is a bit too powerful against vehicles right now, especially in team games where an entire team carrying Magnums can take down a vehicle in seconds. We’ve slowed down the Magnum bullets beyond 60 yards and increased the drop rate at 80 yards. So, you can expect Magnums to be just as effective at close range; but it will be a lot more difficult to shoot players and vehicles from long distance.
Another topic we’ve looked into is exiting vehicles at high speeds. We previously mentioned a change to not allow players to exit a vehicle above a certain speed threshold. As we have played it internally, we decided to back out this change as it was not really meeting the goal we had for the change. The goal was to make vehicles a little less desirable in the end game, but this change felt more frustrating and punitive. We are going to investigate just applying damage based on the vehicle’s speed when you exit, but this will not be included in this update and will be worked into a future one. We’ve done some work addressing desync issues that could cause a player to exit a vehicle at an unexpected location – this should be a lot more consistent and predictable.
In addition, there are a few quality of life changes in this build. When you enter a vehicle without keys, you can hold the gas button (default: W) in order to hotwire it. Also, moving vehicle items such as sparkplugs can now be done via drag and drop.
Finally, we’ve smoothed out the collision volumes of many objects in the world that could cause vehicles to unexpectedly explode when coming into contact with them. If this happens to you, please send us a video or screenshot so that we can address any other objects in question. Hit Feedback
As we’ve continued to work on servers to create the best experience possible, we also want to make sure that your actions during combat are effectively messaged to you as a player. We’ve updated the effects, sounds, and UI to make it a lot clearer when you are hitting armor versus flesh, when you’re on or off target, and if you’ve knocked off your targets armor or helmet. These upgrades have also been applied to your character taking damage; so you’ll be a lot more aware of things like losing your helmet and where shots are coming from when under fire.
The Arena
An updated version of The Arena is included in this build with a number of changes and improvements. Our focus for The Arena on this patch has been on optimizing the zone to improve overall performance as well as general cleanup of bugs.
- There should be far fewer floating and clipping objects
- Cleaned up a objects that prevented items on or near them from being looted
- Made optimizations to the residential areas. Some house layouts have been adjusted for better navigation. Some homes were boarded up completely, others had their windows boarded up. You’ll be able to tell which homes are boarded up when parachuting in by looking at whether the yard has been kept up. Green grass means loot!
- Optimizations were made to Ranchito and Pleasant Valley to increase framerate in those cities
- Office building layouts have been improved to make them easier to navigate and move through.
- Ammo boxes were made more unique so that you can easily distinguish different ammo types.
Bug Fixes
- Removed the ability to instantly go to prone by side-stepping
- Fixed the smoke grenades so that they do not render out while in gas
- Aligned the range of the gas grenades visual effect and its damage
- Fixed a rare case that could cause vehicle horns to get stuck on
- Lined up the AK-47 reload animation with the actual reload timing
- Fixed a number of clipping issues with several wearable items
- Fixed an edge-case that would allow players to switch seats in a moving vehicle
- Numpad 0 should no longer act like “enter” when splitting stacks of items
- Fixed an issue where shift dragging items could double the amount requested
Of course, if anything else sticks out, please let us know. Please make use of the community issue tracker - https://dgcissuetracker.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa?selectPageId=11004
You can also head over to Reddit where you will find specific feedback threads dedicated to each of the major changes. Please leave as many details as you can if you encountered an issue to help us track it down.
Test Servers will be open up until the date of the next push to the Live Servers