Version 11.1.3 improves stability and balance

Hey, everyone!

Today we're releasing version 11.1.3 of SCP: Secret Laboratory. This update contains a large number of fixes and adjustments, as well as balance changes to some SCPs and a detailed plan for future modding support.

Balance

Like any asymmetric game, Secret Laboratory is constantly evolving. We try to keep an eye on how rounds are influenced by the tuning of each aspect of the game. In this patch, we're making a handful of stat adjustments to three classes.

Hi! In past patches, we've included insights from our Development team to accompany balance changes we've made, in an effort to explain our rationale. We'll be trying this again by including our design clarification after each section of changes. Let us know what you think!

SCP-049

1. Players killed by SCP-049 will be locked into their death camera for as long as they are able to be revived (currently 10 seconds).

Players that have been killed by SCP-049 are able to spectate other players during the revival process. This is often used to gather additional information about the round; giving these players an advantage when they are revived as instances of SCP-049-2. We're trying a new limitation where these players are no longer able to see other players' positions while they're still able to be revived, only being able to switch perspectives once they can no longer be resurrected. This might change depending on how the feature plays out.

SCP-106

1. Health increased from 850 to 1200.
2. Firearm resistance decreased from 90% to 80%.

SCP-106 is currently highly resistant to damage from guns but can be easily shredded by objects such as frag grenades and the MicroHID. We have redistributed some of the Old Man's survivability. The goal was to provide leniency for SCP-106 without changing how much of a tank he is. SCP-106 will find it harder to face wave after wave of gunfire, but will have an easier time facing other hazards.

SCP-173

1. Hume Shield no longer has armour, meaning that firearms will do full damage, no matter the weapon's penetration.
2. Hume Shield out-of-combat recharge rate increased from 15/s to 20/s.
3. Health armour efficacy increased from 60 to 80.

We’re moving a lot of SCP-173's survivability from its Hume Shield to its health pool. This is similar to the problem initially presented by SCP-096, where classes had difficulty doing any chip damage during a confrontation, even if they played well. As a result, in these confrontations, their ammunition and lives were ultimately wasted. We believe that this change will allow Hume Shield to remain strong against individual attackers and occasional damage, while also preventing it from being largely responsible for 173’s ablility to survive the lategame. Increasing the armour efficacy on its health should mitigate the loss of armour on its shield.

Upcoming changes for heavily-modded servers

In Parabellum, we introduced the ability for Remote Admin and plugins to spawn in simple objects, such as cubes, spheres, cylinders, and so on. These primitive objects can be modified dynamically via scripts. This can change their size, colour, appearance, and other aspects, making them extremely versatile.

These objects saw rapid growth amongst the modding community, and some really creative things have come out of their addition! It has, however, presented some problems — primarily, there's not an easy way for a player to distinguish between servers that make heavy use of these objects to change the game experience versus ones that don't.

Currently, the Modded tag is binary; either it exists or it doesn't. This tag is vague, as it makes no differentiation between servers that use mods for administration and those that alter gameplay.

In the near future, we'll be taking steps to distinguish servers that heavily utilize these objects and those that don’t. After a lot of internal debate and discussion, we're currently planning on taking the following steps:

1. We'll be implementing a simple way for servers to distinguish whether they’re using mods to heavily modify the way a round plays out. Currently, we're calling this "heavily modded" and will be using that term for the remainder of this changelog.
2. Heavily modded servers will have a unique identifier on the server browser, similar to the Official servers. These servers will only appear in the specified category, and not on the Internet category of the server browser. This category will likely have a popup to serve as a disclaimer about the community-generated nature of the experience that these servers provide. There are many ways to do this. A check box to show, or hide, heavily modded servers is an example of what we might consider.
3. We will amend the Verified Server Rules to reflect that this tag is mandatory for servers that make use of mods that dramatically alter the gameplay experience. This includes, but is not limited to, primitive objects.
4. Servers that do not use the heavily-modded tag will have hardcoded restrictions on their use of primitive objects.. We're still figuring out how we want to do this, but some ideas we've had thrown around include making them RA-only (as opposed to allowing plugins to spawn them in), imposing limits on the amount that can be spawned at once, or both. Heavily modded servers will have no restrictions on the use of primitives.

None of these solutions have been confirmed and are subject to change. They might see significant alterations depending on continued internal discussion, or they might be implemented as-is.

The main reason for these changes is that players don’t have a way to distinguish between what is, and isn’t, a part of the normal game.

These changes will create a clear division between what is a heavily modded server and what does not. Mod development is a big part of why Secret Laboratory continues to thrive, and we want to support that, especially because there is a genuine audience for variants of the game that differ very heavily from what the vanilla experience offers. Not only does the differentiation stop further confusion, but it also allows players that want to try these experiences to find them much more quickly.

This is part of an ongoing effort to make modding more approachable. We would still like to do an official API for plugins, tweaks, and other mods, and we've been toying around with different ideas as to how we might approach that in order to let players see the mods a server is running from the browser. For now, we hope that this is a good step forward towards making this aspect of the game clearer and more approachable to everyone who plays it.

Patch Notes

SCP: Secret Laboratory — Version 11.1.3

Balance:

• Players killed by SCP-049 will be locked into their death camera for 10 seconds.
• SCP-106's HP increased from 850 to 1200.
• SCP-106's firearm resistance decreased from 90% to 80%.
• SCP-173's Hume Shield no longer possesses armour.
• SCP-173's Hume Shield now regenerates out of combat at 20 per second; up from 15 per second.
• SCP-173's health now has an armour efficacy of 80; up from 60.

Changes:

• Reduced the timeout period when connecting to an offline server.
• Deaths in the Pocket Dimension are now counted as SCP kills at the end of a round.
• Any doors locked down by SCP-079 will now open upon its death.
• SCP-049 can no longer revive zombies multiple times. (This is technically a bugfix but it may have been thought intentional. As a result, we're putting it higher up in the patch notes so that more people might see it.)

Remote Admin:

• Added a new feature in Remote Admin to copy userid/ip/playerid for one player or multiple players in the Player Specific Info tab.
• The "overwatch" command now properly toggles on and off when entered without being explicitly disabled.
• The "addcandy" command no longer creates "ghost candies" that softlock the inventory.
• The "addcandy" command no longer creates a bag with a random candy when the target player doesn't have a bag in their inventory.
• The "doors list" command now properly displays whether each door requires a card.
• The "tickets" command now properly displays confirmation that it’s been entered.
• The "give" command can now grant ammo to players with a full inventory.
• Fixed improper permission checks for the "RestartNextRound" and "StopNextRound" commands.

API Changes:

• CustomPlayerInfo has been expanded to allow up to 400 characters, including the use of bold, italics, new lines, some special characters, and all server group badge colours (except hex values) along with black and white.
• Added an enum and a Dictionary in the Misc class that provides an easy reference to permitted colours.

Fixes:

• Fixed the status effect applied by sinkholes being permanent when teleported out of it.
• Fixed SCP-173's Tantrum sometimes remaining indefinitely.
• Fixed grenade explosions damaging players or objects through walls.
• Fixed an issue where grenade explosions on the other side of walls could send items flying into SCP-079's recontainment button. (Yes, really.)
• Fixed an issue where clients were not properly disconnected when exiting the loading screen.
• Fixed errors caused by submitting a player report with Cyrillic characters in the report.
• Fixed an adminchat message related to FriendlyFireDetector.
• Fixed lights not being syncrhonized for players that join the server during an active overcharge or blackout.
• Fixed an issue where the profile button appeared when launching the game via Steam without the Steam overlay active.
• Fixed an issue where SCP-096 could not gain new targets when affected by a flashbang.
• Fixed deaths in the pocket dimension not being counted towards the round summary.
• Fixed an issue where all SCPs except SCP-079 could remove zipties from handcuffed players.
• Fixed an issue where SCPs received damage from the Hemorrhage status effect even while not sprinting.
• Fixed several exploits used by SCP-049-2.
• Fixed SCP-049 being able to revive zombies multiple times.
• Fixed several errors in SCP-173's Blink targeting logic.
• Fixed SCP-244 not being removed from the surface-level elevators from Gate A and Gate B after the Alpha Warhead detonates.
• Fixed an untextured wall in SCP-173's room.
• Fixed the Corroding status effect not teleporting players to the Pocket Dimension when godmode was enabled.
• Fixed an exploit that allowed multiple grenades to be thrown at once.
• Fixed the weapon stats summary when sometimes being inaccurate.
• Fixed being able to handcuff players that lacked hands.
• Fixed SCP-2176 opening the doors to the control room in SCP-106’s containment chamber.
• Fixed being able to accidentally move the mouse cursor to another monitor as SCP-079.

Thank you for supporting us, and stay safe!