Hi everyone, Jon here from New World Interactive. After the successful launch of Insurgency: Sandstorm last week, our team would like to give you a brief update on some of the things we are working on and what players can expect in the future.
First of all, we would like to thank each and every one of you who believed in our team and helped make Insurgency: Sandstorm the massive success it is today! It means a lot to our small team, coming from a hobbyist background as modders, to becoming a top seller on Steam at launch.
We would also like to extend an extra special thank you to all of our community who pre-ordered and helped our team test during the alpha and beta stages of development. The game had many rough patches during its development cycle, but thanks to your feedback and suggestions we’ve brought it to the place it is today.
That being said, we are aware that even now there are some issues fans are facing and we would like to outline the steps our team are taking to address them.
The first is the subject of cheaters. As the game rises in popularity we are seeing some users starting to develop and sell hacks for the game. This is an unfortunate consequence of all competitive online games. However, our team are taking a firm stance against anyone found to be using cheats in-game. We recently banned many accounts found to be using cheat software and will continue to be vigilant against anyone who tries to ruin the experience for others by cheating. We encourage the community to report anyone they see cheating or offering hacks for sale to both New World and our anti-cheat partner Easy Anti-Cheat so these users can be permanently banned from the game. On a technical level, our team will continue to look at ways to close any potential exploits and loopholes for future updates. There is also the case of people exploiting the game itself to cheat. This might include spawn camping, or other things that feel unfair to the general gameplay. These issues are also very important to us to address.
All rounds played via NWI matchmaking are recorded and stored on our servers, if you encounter a player you suspect of using hacks please grab the replay id of the match from the History section on the main menu and send it to Easy Anti-cheat report system, along with the users SteamID.
How to find a replay ID and Steam ID:
- Mouse over the replay, then click “Copy ID” and paste it in your report.
- Start the replay, go to scoreboard, then click on the suspected player’s name and “Copy Steam ID”. Then paste it in your report.
If you encounter a player who is exploiting game mechanics to do something that feels unfair to the gameplay (ie spawn camping) please take a screenshot or video along with an explanation of what is happening, and send to [email protected] so that our team can recreate and address the issue.
The second is in relation to performance issues some users are experiencing. First of all, we ask that all users read the minimum system requirements explained thread on our Steam forums to fully understand what specs your PC will need to meet to run Insurgency: Sandstorm. However, we are aware of some users having performance issues despite apparently meeting our recommended specs. For people who are having these issues, we recommend checking our performance tips.
If you still encounter issues, we ask that you help our team identify them by posting in the Performance Discussion & Support section of our forums. Please try to be as descriptive as possible and follow the posting guidelines to help our team gather the relevant information.
Our team have also been working on numerous in-game performance improvements and solutions to common issues reported since launch, we hope to include some of these in our upcoming patch toward the end of this week, however, more updates will be coming in the new year. Launch is just the start for our team. We will continue to improve the game's performance based on community feedback as well as more substantial optimisations in the future in order to target consoles in 2019.
Although the holiday period is rapidly approaching, our team is pulling out all the stops to ensure our fans have the best experience possible. We are busy reading all of your comments and suggestions as we plan out the year ahead, and would like to encourage all our players to join in the discussion on the forums with thoughts and feedback.
If you are enjoying the game please consider giving us a recommendation on Steam to help spread the word. It helps with players who are considering buying the game and it helps grow our community.
As always, we will continue to update you as we make progress, and are looking forward to sharing more information about our first content update in February as part of our free post-release content plan.
For all of you celebrating, we wish you all happy holidays!
New World Interactive