Hello Gamers™,
February was short, sharp, and shiny - just like this blog will be.
We just had our first free weekend in a while - welcome to any new players that have joined us; we are glad to have you all aboard! Please send us your feedback either here on Steam, on our subreddit, or via a support ticket.
While we have just started development on 1.9.2 we are not ready to share details yet. I can say it will be a highly defined update.
Earlier this month we closed out submissions for our 2020 Mapping Contest.
After 20 weeks of our community working hard and creating and testing their own maps we ended up with over 30 submissions. Following a 10 day period of public voting we finalized our Top 10!
Our panel at NWI will now be taking a look at these finalists and the winners will go on to take home over $17,000 of prizes from us here at New World and our amazing sponsors Intel, Nvidia, and Epic Games.
We covered the finalists in our announcement (available here) but these homies worked incredibly hard on these maps, so I want to show them off again.
Here are your 2020 Insurgency Mapping Contest finalists!
Mintaqah (District) by Jason26
Over the next month we will judge and test these finalists along with our sponsors and will be announcing the winning entries around March 22nd.
Thank you again to all the entrants, there is a lot of incredible work here. Even if you don't win, keep plugging away, take on feedback where you think it's helpful, and some of you definitely have the creativity to break into this industry.
As I said last year our Developer Livestreams will not be happening as often moving forward - I just want to ensure that the streams are full of information and not a waste of your time. The next stream will be coming in early March once we can start sharing some new juicy tidbits.
The last stream we did featured the announcement of our 1.9.1 update. As a lot of you saw, the cosmetics were not well received. We take your feedback very seriously so after a few days of discussion we decided it was in the best interest of Sandstorm to not release the skins.
We understood we missed the mark, and we have updated the visual guidelines that we follow for Sandstorm. This will help us adhere to the aesthetic we are looking for, and the aesthetic that you all want to see in the game.
Something that was created and launched this month was our community Trello board. Available here, this is a page to help us communicate with all of you - we will list our known issues (and attach workarounds when applicable), post important links (like how to submit a bug), and attach all patch notes for our releases.
If you are running into any bugs in the game, head here to see if they’re known. If not, please send us a bug report using the link on the left of the page and we can investigate.
We are hoping this is a better method of communication than having people scroll to the bottom of patch notes every time they want to check something.
Interested in competitive Sandstorm?
DGL will be having a PUG Event on the 6th of March at 2PM EST/8PM CET. The sign ups close on March 4th with the teams being picked after that. Captains will contact their players once picked. Registration is available here.
The Newbloods event will be on the 13th of March and start at 2PM EST/7PM GMT/8PM CET. It is expected to run for 3-4 hours. Hideout West will be played for all of the matches to try and ensure a good base amount of map knowledge. Each team will have a coach showing them the map and will arrange practice and scrims the week before the event. If you're interested, you can sign-up here.
Signups close on the 5th of March at 4PM EST/9PM GMT/10PM CET.
DGL Season 4: Round 4
The DGL season is comprised four team divisions. After each round, the top team of each division is promoted to the next division, and the bottom team moves down a division.
Round 4 will begin on the 14th of March and the signups are open until the 13th. All new teams signing up will begin in the lower divisions.
Each team plays a match each week with two maps played. For more information please go to the event page.
The first clip in this video is one of our partners, MGE Gibs, with some self-fulfilling prophecy *chefs kiss*.
When 1.9.1 launched, the QBZ-97's grenade launcher may have had a velocity issue. Sadly, we fixed it. OK, SO I MAY have lost the source on this. I am very sorry, but I love it. If this was you, please DM me on twitter and I will credit you.
EDIT: We found him! Thanks to @mikeytheasian on Twitter.
Continuing our theme of both 16-bit art and art created with mines, we have this masterpiece created by yeonggille on Reddit.
Some beautiful coordination while playing the amazing ISMC mod, posted by ControlledPairs on Reddit.
F4tTony on Reddit created a stats sheet for all of our weapons. Rejoice fellow numbers nerds! The entire sheet with all weapons available here.
I mean, the mask is free, you should be prepared. Thanks to Piromansor on Reddit.
That's it, that's all for February. Just like the final wave of Outpost, grab your butts - fun stuff is coming.
Stay safe, take care of each other, and I will talk to you all soon.
fatherHank