Competitive going live!
So it’s nearly time! We know a lot of you have been waiting for our competitive game mode to launch officially and now we can announce that Thursday 15/02/18 our War Tide Game mode will go live. It will be at some time during the day.
There will be around 10 mins of outage time whilst we restart and deploy server + matchmaker updates. This means all players will need to update their clients to play. The update is planned to go live on Thursday 15th February 2018.
Players rank 10 and above will be eligible, please bare in mind that a user interface bug has meant that some players haven’t been shown their real rank and therefore don’t believe that they are at the rank 10 and eligible to play Competitive. However we are deploying potential fixes for these issues during this weeks update.
New Competitive Ranks
It is worth noting that we have updated our competitive ranks since we announced them. We have altered them based on community feedback to make them more appealing, eye catching, readable & consistent. Here’s the updated list of ranks we will be having when Competitive launches this Thursday.
Changelog:
Improvements
We have added a new run animation. Previously the third person run animation was very flat/horizontal. You’ll now notice that the character kicks his feet up a lot higher now. This is to help improve visibility of players in fast/high intensity situations. It will also help slightly improve visibility when jumping.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjXRn0Bjyuk&feature=youtu.be
Future Server Plans & Intentions
Over the past two weeks we’ve been learning how to manage our server locations. There has been a huge amount of requests for matchmaking support in South East Asia, as a result of your communication with us. We will be adding servers in the SEA region in March. We made a mistake of separating NA players between 3 regions, our server code does not choose the best location for the players. The server predetermines where to go. As a result, we will be removing Central/East and merging them together to servers in Chicago, again in March. This will also show a boost in player numbers.
Bug Fixes:
- Potential fix for XP displaying correctly on the endgame UI.
- Potential fix for crash on startup.
- Numerous Spectator Improvements.
- Picking up a dead player’s weapon now correctly displays the dropped weapon skin of the dead player and not your own skin.
- General server stability fixes.
Texture Streaming:
To help combat load times on lower end PCs - We’ve set texture streaming to be default ON for players who own graphics cards with less than 3GB vram. If you have a 3GB+ card texture streaming will be set to OFF for a smoother gameplay experience whilst in-game. Our art team are actively optimising their work.
Addressing Players Fears
We wanted to address a recurring post from players. Recently, players have been given the ability to view concurrent players on SteamDB and SteamSpy. We regularly use these websites to get gauges of how other games are doing as well. However, if not used correctly they can be damaging to potential successful games. Players who feel they need to post ‘dead game’ on a game that hasn’t been in early access 2 weeks, are certainly jumping the gun. It is counterproductive and frustrating to see, especially in the face of so many updates from the dev team and when to game developers the concurrent players we do have are actually very high for an Early Access title 2 weeks out.
Comparing day 1 concurrent players to day 14 is not representative of a games future. Battalion has lined up to announce:
- Multiple LAN tournaments with 5 figure prize pools (TBA VERY SOON)
- Free Weekend
- New Maps (Again very soon)
- New Gamemode (Requires this dedicated community to help balance)
- Clanwars (Now backed by a new partner)
- Full Release with more maps & content (2019)
If you’re playing Battalion 1944 now in Early Access you should be playing for the following reasons:
- To practice and get a head start on the Battalion 1944 major competitive events
- To help design and balance Battalion 1944
- To help the developers find and fix bugs or issues
Early Access is a time where developers can release new content to players with a safety net. It is not a finished game. This is the reason we chose to make our game £10.39 at launch. A very modest price for a game with a lot of potential. After Early Access we intend to increase the price to suit that of a finished, fully functioning game with minimal issues.. And we think that's fair.
At this time we'd like to link to one of our more popular comparisons CSGO, which started with 20,000 concurrent players and 10 years of a pre-existing game! With the work from their devs and the community pushing the game. CSGO grew into what it is today; http://steamcharts.com/app/730#All
Battalion's player numbers were always going to go down after the first day, but by relieving the financial pressure from trying to hit targets after we smashed our expectations, we can now solely focus on turning Battalion into a long term success. Please also remember games like PUBG are an anomaly and are not examples of long term sustainable success!
Let us know what you think in the comments! Thanks for your continued to support! We’ve got some huge announcements coming over the next two weeks but for now lets enjoy playing Competitive Battalion 1944 and enjoy the grind!
Hatton's Highlights, check out some great frags from the last week!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKTgCq7leEs&feature=youtu.be&t=8m54s