This update to comes with several improvements that are designed to make it easier to understand what is going on during a match as well as two new skins, a few bug fixes, and a slew of balancing changes to round out the new version.
Skins
Steam Science Sweet Science is a not-so-gentle gentleman inventor as well as a boxer. Using arcane secrets of invention makes steam power the go-to force for taking down his enemies.
Roly Poly Dive Dive A pressurised hamster ball for exploring the depths of the ocean which also works remarkably well on land as well. Cannons for fending off the mightiest beasts of the sea are equally as effective against Heroes. It’s probably best not to ask what powers the boosters.
Scoreboards – Viewing Squads
You will now be able to see which players are playing together in a squad.
When you bring up the scoreboard by pressing the “Tab” key during a match, or when you finish a game, you may find that there are small icons “I” or “II” in a circle next to some of the players. These little icons display which players were in the first or the second squad on each team.
So, for example, if you were to see “I” next to three players on Team A, “I” next to two players on Team 1, and “II” next to another two players on Team 1 this would show that there was a squad of three people on Team A, and two squads of two people on Team 1.
Viewing Enemy Perks
If your Hero should be taken out by an enemy Hero then you will now see the Perks that Hero had equipped displayed whilst the kill cam is active. This should hopefully start to give people a better idea of why the Hero that got them was moving quicker than expected or seemed to be shooting more accurately.
These will be displayed as icons at the bottom of the screen along with a short bit of information about the player and Hero. Moving the mouse cursor over any of the Perk icons will display more information about the effects of that Perk.
New Reticules
Several Heroes have got some new reticules for their weapons.
O.P. ‘Juan’ Shinobi has a new reticule for his Katana which shows the approximate area of the swing.
Sweet Science has new reticules for his Blitz Stance showing the area of the punches, and for his Graviton Stance showing where its punch and pull will affect.
Kreepy the Klown’s Extendo Gloves now have a reticule which shows the area of his melee attack.
This update introduces significant changes to Vander Graaf's Tesla Coil Hero Block, plus and improved way of communicating with your teammates during a match. Additionally, there have been plenty of balancing changes, which aim to make Heroes and Blocks more useful.
Tesla Coil Rework
Instead of using his Static Gloves to attack via the Tesla Coils, Vander Graaf now uses his Static Gloves to charge the Teslas.
Tesla Coils can still form a network and pass the electrical charge from one to the next (as long as they’re in range of each other). This means if you have four Tesla Coils built in a line, and the first one attacks (using its charge up to do so) the others can their pass their charge forwards to allow it to continue to attack.
This should give Vander a few more opportunities to move around the arena a little more whilst his Tesla Coils can at least launch some attacks whilst he’s not nearby. However, he will need to return to them to recharge them once they’ve fired.
Messaging and Communications
By pressing the Left Alt key you can bring up a list of different messages you can send to your team.
When you send one of these messages it will display a short line of text to let your team know you 'need a Heal Station', or to 'defend your objective'.
If you feel that there’s a message missing that would be useful for communicating with your team, then submit it here and we’ll see which ones we can get added to the game!
The latest version of Block N Load brings changes to the matchmaking system which should help improve the quality of matches plus additional options for Custom Games. Of course, there are also a number of other improvements and fixes to go along with it as well.
Some of the key changes in this version include:
Custom Games
Custom Games have received some new functions to make them more interesting and easier to find players to join matches on player made maps from the Steam Workshop.
It is now possible to allow players to join a Custom Game even after it has been started, once a Custom Game has finished the host of the custom game can choose to take the game from the scoreboard back to the match setup screen, and new options to adjust the size of the Brick Wallet Cap along with the number of Bricks that each Hero starts the match with have been added.
Matchmaking
A number of changes have been made to the matchmaking systems to make them more flexible. We’ve used existing data about the people currently playing Block N Load to set the starting points for these, and hopefully you should see some better matches formed as a result.
XP Boosters
It is now possible to purchase boosters that increase the amount of XP you gain from completing matches in the in-game Shop. Each booster will run for the amount of time specified and during the time it is active will let you earn XP for your Heroes and Player Level faster.
4th of July Arena
Additionally, as this update is coming out on the 4th of July the arena "E Pluribus Unum" is making a return to Casual Mode rotation and Custom Games.
In preparation for our next update, we've updated our Player Test Realm where you can try out some of the changes we'll be releasing soon. Among the features you'll be able to test are:
New Custom Games options such as "Allow Backfilling" and Brick wallet cap and initial Bricks settings
XP Boosters
Fixes to Line of Sight and the way splash damage works
There's plenty more, so head on over to the PTR forum for more information and instructions on how you can help us test out new features.
Ranked Beta Survey
We're still testing out various scenarios for Ranked play and we really want your feedback, so if you have played our Ranked beta weekends and want to provide feedback, please head over to the survey and tell us what you think.
Sarge, Eliza, and Astarella in Rotation
Our Yeti hero leaves the free rotation this week and Sarge Stone comes in to take his place.
Eliza's Lab Rat Run Time Assault
Our Time Assault map has rotated out as well, so get in there and earn that Gold! Can you get to the top of the leaderboard?
Midsummer Madness
Finally, don't forget our Midsummer Madness event runs all summer long. Keep your eyes on our website for schedule updates!
Announcing: Midsummer Madness!
THIS SUMMER IS GOING TO BE BLOCKING AWESOME!
Midsummer Madness will run from June to August and incorporates multiple different activities, promotions, contests, and content releases to keep you busy throughout those hot summer days.
Things will be kicking off from this Friday with ALL HEROES FREE TO TRY and DISCOUNTS ON HERO PRICES. There’s also going to be a chance to dress to impress with the release of 2 new skins in the shop!
There's no time to lose, head on over to our EVENT PAGE to get the full details. Be sure to keep checking back for further event reveals.
There will be plenty of chances for you to get involved, and with the amount going on there's sure to be something for both new and veteran players alike.
EVENT PAGE LAST UPDATED
9th August
Balancing Update -- 2.8.1
The latest balancing update has been made to Block N Load. Based on a range of feedback including the results of our most recent Hero balancing survey, a number of changes have been made to some of the Heroes in Block N Load.
This balancing update includes changes to Sweet Science, Nigel Purdey-Longshott, O.P. 'Juan' Shinobi, Kreepy the Klown, Kira-chan, Astarella, and the "Slow" effect used by several Heroes and Blocks after testing on the Player Test Realm (PTR). If you want to see the latest planned changes before they're released make sure to check out the Player Test Realm section of the Block N Load Steam forums.
Free Rotation Yury the Yeti replaces Cogwheel to join Vander Graaf and Nigel Purdey-Longshott in free rotation. If you’ve not tried Yury this is your chance to find out how he plays.
Ranked Beta The 6th week of the Ranked Beta allowed for any squad size and the requirements to have at least 3 level 10 Heroes available to select.
Week 7 will feature squads of 5 only, however, with the new Squad Finder that was introduced in our latest update it should be far easier to find people to join your squads. Don’t forget to set your Squad Finder preferences in the settings menu if you’re looking to join a squad!
We’ll also be creating a survey about how you found the different settings for the Ranked Beta. However, you can always post your thoughts on the different Ranked Beta weekends in the “Feedback” section of the Steam discussion forum.
Dev Progress Let’s recap this year’s roadmap as it looks this week:
Separating Casual and Ranked - Done
Block Rebalance Pass 1 - Done
Progression Overhaul - Done
Squad Finder - Done
More arena voting options in Casual - Done (with some improvements to be made)
Hero Balance Passes – On-going alongside development work
Performance, Bug and Quality of Life fixes - This is always on-going
Improvements to the Tutorial - On-going
More cosmetic content - In Progress
More sales and short term events
-Bundle Support - In Progress
-Double XP weekends - Scheduled
-Free Hero weekends - Scheduled
-Flash sales - Scheduled
Custom game improvements - In Design
Reticule tweaks and improvements - In Design
In-game communication system improvements - In Design
We’re also working on some improvements to the Squad Finder based on player feedback, some changes to the way matchmaking works, plus some new ways to spend Platinum and help support the game!
We have previously made mention of a few other features in past roadmaps, and while the following are still very much elements that are on our radar and we would like to improve on, we may find other features that could take precedence:
Seasonal (and other criteria) Ranked leaderboards
Ranked promotion/demotion systems
Clan System - Persistent clans or clan identification
The order of individual items on the roadmap can end up changing for a number of reasons, including the feedback that we have received.
UPDATE 2.8 Squad Finder
This update to Block N Load brings with it several new features and improvements to make it easier to find people to play with.
Some of the most notable changes that you will find in this version include:
SQUAD FINDER
Squad finder is available on the “Home” and “Play” Menus. Clicking on the checkbox will set you as looking for a squad. Anyone else who is online can then invite you to their squad from this menu. Preferences to specify the type of match you are looking for, the languages you can understand, and your preferred Heroes can be set in the options menu.
Some of the comments related to things that we were already working on – indeed, a number of the issues highlighted with Roly Poly Fat Fat were addressed by an update that occurred whilst the survey was taking place.
Other responses highlighted additional areas of balancing which were not receiving attention on the forums, but seem to affect a fair number of players.
Heroes, Skill, and Power One of the things that the survey results highlighted was that some Heroes scale far more with skill than others. The Hero may seem on the surface to be about the same power as other Heroes but can feel underpowered the first time someone selects it, while feeling overpowered when used by someone who has had a lot of experience with that same Hero.
It’s always going to be the case that spending more time playing as a particular Hero (or Heroes) is going to give you an edge - for example by providing you with better ideas of advanced tactics to use. This does highlight that there is more we could do with some Heroes to make them a little easier to pick up.
Reticules One area that we’ve identified is the reticules used for various weapons and weapon types, particularly where the main and alternate attack are very different from each other.
As an example, Sweet Science’s Blitz Stance primary has a normal attack which delivers punches in a horizontal arc, but his alternate attack is a dash straight towards the centre of the reticule. At the moment the reticule indicates the alt fire well, but doesn’t do a good job of showing the range or width of the normal attack.
Going through every weapon in Block N Load to identify which reticules need improvements and how they could be changed to make them better isn’t a small task, nor are the code changes to support this, however, this is something that we’re going to start looking at.
We’ll also be looking at other things that might make a learning a new Hero easier, so it would be very useful to hear from you what elements of which Heroes you found hard to understand or get to grips with when you first played.
Tony and his Lil’ Buddy Turrets The power of turrets has been an ongoing talking point, particularly when they are used in large numbers.
Over the last few updates we’ve made various changes to address some of these, notably increasing the escalating costs, reducing their accuracy, and reducing the damage that each shot does to Heroes.
With Tony having only one weapon that can damage enemies he is far more reliant on his Hero Block. This makes adjusting the turrets a far more delicate and complicated process than making changes to most other Hero Blocks. We’ve heard a lot of great suggestions regarding the turrets, and we hope to be able to get some of them implemented as soon as code changes can be made.
O.P. ‘Juan’ Shinobi. Katanas, smoke bombs, and defensive Ninjas This has been another area which has been talked about at length outside of the survey. However, the survey results did bring out some additional information and points of view on what makes O.P. feel OP.
O.P. is definitely a Hero where some element heavily increase his ability to not just escape, but to allow him to leap straight back in to the fight at maximum effectiveness.
Foremost amongst these is O.P.’s “Vanish” Active Ability and there are already some changes to this that are due to go live (indeed, some of them have already been out for testing and feedback on the Player Test Realm). Still, additional changes may be needed (particularly to the bomb that O.P. leaves behind when Vanishing which is currently very difficult to defuse).
The second of these is O.P.’s ability to close very rapidly with enemy Heroes using his teleport. One of the issues seems to be that when you are attacked by him it can be difficult to understand how he got so close so quickly. There are a number of elements to the Katana’s smoke bomb teleport that we can start to tweak, including the time that it takes to reload, the range at which it can be thrown, and the length that the smoke from it lasts. Some of these are easier values to tweak and test, whilst others require code changes, but they are all things we can look at adjusting to make O.P. slightly easier to see coming and understand how he is moving around the arena.
As for the main normal attack of the Katana itself, many have commented that it can be difficult for people to understand the range and area that the Katana will hit. This applies to both playing as and against O.P. Although not as simple a change to make as some other elements, we can investigate whether it would be possible to add a “trail” to the Katana to allow the path the attack takes to be visible.
Vander Graaf and Tesla Coils The single most commented feature of Vander were his Hero Block – the Tesla Coils.
We’ve been kicking around ideas for a number of ways of solving this, and whilst none of them are simple, one idea is to allow the Tesla Coils to be charged up ahead of time. Vander would still need to return to his Tesla Coils to recharge them after they’ve fired, but they wouldn’t have to be watched over all the time.
What do you think? Is this a direction we should be going, or is there a better option for the Tesla Coils?
Kreepy the Klown Kreepy is another Hero that, whilst seemingly pretty balanced overall, had a lot of feedback about individual elements of his kit being over or underpowered.
Kreepy’s Extendo-Gloves take some of the blame when it comes to being overpowered, particularly for players who have had more experience with the Klown, as when they are used correctly the knockback can be used to “juggle” someone and keep them in the air. This certainly seems to fit with the theme of our diabolical clown, but is seen as somewhat overpowered by those on the receiving end.
We don’t want to remove what is at its core a tactic which fits so well with Kreepy’s theme, but there are a number of things we can do to make it less impactful. We can reduce the accuracy on the Gloves (making it more likely that the Hero will be dropped), we can reduce the number of shots in the clip (so it is not possible to juggle for as long), or we can reduce the damage that each hit does. All of these would help to address this, although reducing the number of gloves in his ‘clip’ seems to be the best solution at present.
Asia-Pacific Server
The relatively low number of players on the Asia and Oceania servers makes it harder to find matches, and this can cause some confusion as to why a match hasn’t quickly formed.
Rather than shut both servers down we are going to “merge” them to bring the player bases from both servers together to try and reduce the time spent waiting for matches, and increase the quality of the matches that are found. There are no regional datacentres geographically located that are good for both Asia and Oceania, but by calling the region server “Asia-Pacific” we hope to encourage players from that side of the globe to play together. With many players already choosing the North American region as an alternative, we believe the experience won't be any worse at least.
From 19:00 BST (21:00 MSK / 04:00 AEST) on the 24th of May only the Asia-Pacific server will be available in the eastern hemisphere.
Hero Rotation
Nigel Purdy-Longshott replaces Kreepy the Klown in our weekly hero rotation. Get in there and get shootin’!
Cog in Rotation, Balance Survey Results and More Ranked Beta News!
Cogwheel joins the free rotation this week, playing alongside Tony and Kreepy. With Cogwheel top of the balance charts, he’s a great hero to get to grips with.
Balance Survey Results
Many thanks to everyone who replied to our Balance Survey. Besides some great data to hold up next to our in-game statistics, there were also lots of really good ideas submitted. As we act on what we’ve learned from the survey, we’ll be paying close attention to your thoughts. You can see the results of the survey here and we’ll keep you updated as to what our conclusions and actions will be.
Ranked Beta Weekend 3
It’s fair to say that there were strong opinions about Solo Ranked play. We are always gratified to see how passionate our players are! However, we’d like to point out that posting multiple identical threads emphasising the point doesn’t help us. To make it easier for us, it would be great to see one thread in Feedback with discussions for and against a feature, rather than spread it out amongst several threads that can drift off-topic. Our hope is that you give each experiment a fair chance and try not to let your preconceptions colour your opinions. Approach it with curiosity and an open mind, try to enjoy the experience and we’ll all have a better game in the end.
Considering the strong feelings, however, we’re going to bring 5 Man Squads in Ranked up a week and see how people get on with it. This doesn’t mean we won’t revisit Solo - we might.
Or we might not.
Join us this weekend for Week 4 of Ranked Beta! Now with added Draft Pick!
Cheaty Cheating Cheaters and Anti-Cheat
Reports and discussions about cheating in Block N Load has jumped a notch this last week and we wanted to let you know that we are reading your reports and posts and taking action when appropriate. We also note your questions about our Anti-Cheat solutions and what we are doing to improve them. We want to avoid giving cheaters information that they can use to circumvent our systems, so we really can’t go into any detail, but please be aware that all anti-cheat solutions have to change over time to address new cheats that pop up and our anti-cheat is no different.
We’ve also seen calls for Player moderators and while we appreciate that this is used by some games, there is a great deal of infrastructure that would be needed for something like this to work for Block. New software tools, network and security integration, testing and new processes all would have to be put in place, and of course, the moderators themselves need to be managed which is time-consuming in itself. Player moderation is not something we’d be able to implement at this point, but we deeply appreciate all the offers of help. For those of you who do want to make a difference, you can do so by being vigilant and reporting any bad behaviour in game. If you have evidence you can share, please do so via private links to videos or screenshots and send them to us using our contact form: http://www.blocknload.com/contact
We are dedicated to getting rid of as many cheaters as we can and put a lot of our time into our tools and in reviewing individual cases to ensure that our bans are fair. We won’t get them all, but we’re aggressively pursuing them!
