We'll be going into more details on some of the items on the Mid-Season Update in the near future as we clear up the short term goals via hotfixes in the days ahead.
Deceive Inc.
Deceive Inc. Development Roadmap Update
We'll be going into more details on some of the items on the Mid-Season Update in the near future as we clear up the short term goals via hotfixes in the days ahead.
Deceive Inc. Post Free Weekend Brief
Welcome or welcome back agents!
With the free-weekend coming to an end, we wanted to take the time to thank everybody that hopped in to play Deceive Inc. over these last few days. It’s been an amazing experience seeing so many agents on the fields, shattering all our player count records day after day.
Compensation
Along with this increased influx of players also came some issues. We experienced match-making outages that unfortunately took some time to reign in. To compensate everyone affected by the issues, we will be rolling out [U][B]2 EXP boosters[/B][/U] to every account in the next few hours. Stay tuned for more news as to when exactly you can expect those to drop.
As we close the weekend, here are some notes on what we are looking at and a bit of what you can expect in the future.
Matchmaking Issues
We are having an in-depth review of what exactly led to the problems we experienced at peak times during the last few days. While the free weekend is certainly an outlier in terms of volumes, we want a clear picture of how we can avoid such issues in the future.
Spawn Locations
There’s been quite a bit of chatter about spawns that are still too close from each other. While we want the early game to be full of unknown and still bring the tension of someone being possibly close to you, we don’t want direct line of sight on an enemy spy. We will continue iterating on them and tweak the most egregious ones in the very short term. Spawns can be tweaked on the server side without any update, so you can expect them to evolve in the near future to remove locations that are too close for comfort.
Heat System
Let’s be very clear: we are turning up the heat. This has been one of the most requested items across all chatters and this was only amplified during the free weekend. We are actively working on a more robust, more reactive and more long lasting heat system. We will evaluate if we can bring some parts of that rework sooner rather than later, but the overall system tweaks are significant and will require a full patch to rollout. We’ll give you a full run-down of Heat 2.0 in the near future as it reaches a more complete state.
Third Party
A big piece of feedback we’ve been looking into is the presence of quite a bit of third partying, especially in solo. While we don’t want to artificially block third partying, we will be looking at multiple tweaks to make it less viable/more difficult to pull off.
One piece of this we are currently testing is giving a player their cover if they loot the spy cache dropped from a downed spy. This means you can go right back into cover and disappear back into the crowd after a fight instead of sticking out for a while with low health.
There is of course more to it than this, and we will be having a deeper look at other elements like gun shot audio range which plays a big factor in finding fights from afar.
Overall Balance
We’ve been tracking feedback since the launch of misery empire and are preparing a short term balance patch to address some frustrations and give more options to some agents that have a single strong playstyle. This will not be a huge balance patch like misery empire was and more of an “adjustment” patch overall. You can expect multiple balance patches during a season as we turn some knobs to find a better playing field.
Some of the hot topic items you can expect in there: A nerf to the resistant status effect and #buffhans.
Performance
Performance overall is still not where we would want it to be. We are actively working on this to allow more people to not only experience higher frame rates for all platforms. This will be an iterative process with progress continuing from patch to patch.
Bug Fixes
As always, we are parsing through the bug reports we’ve seen crop up during the weekend. We’ll be looking at them by how much they affect the gameplay experience and will prioritize fixing the most disruptive or exploitable ones in the short term.
To be clear: this does not mean we do not know other bugs exist or think they should not be fixed. It means we have to put critical issues before others to get them fixed in a timely manner. Bug fixes will continue in a steady stream over all future patches.
Roadmap
The team has been working hard on the items mentioned in the previously released roadmap which you can see above (those that have been completed now have a check mark). As development continues we’ll be getting a refreshed and updated roadmap out to players in the near future.
And that’s it for today! Once again thank you so much for taking the time to jump into Deceive Inc. Thank you for writing your feedback and thank you for taking part in this amazing community we’ve had the pleasure of working with this past month.
We’ll see you soon, but for now, stay undercover.
Deceive Inc. Q&A with the Lead Designer
Follow along here on Steam or over at: https://www.twitch.tv/tripwireinteractive
Deceive Inc Steam Free Weekend and Sale!
To celebrate the arrival of Catalog 1 and the Misery Empire update, including Red, the game’s first new agent, players can look forward to a Steam Free Weekend for DECEIVE INC. starting Thursday, April 27 at 10AM PT / 1PM ET and ending on Monday, May 1 at 10AM PT / 1PM ET. In addition, the game will be available for a special, limited-time 20% discount during this time for all available platforms. Please check DECEIVE INC. platform-specific store pages for sales details.
Deceive Inc. Hotfix 1.06.01
We’ve been hard at work prioritizing and fixing the biggest issues you’ve surfaced since the launch of Misery Empire last week. We are happy to announce we have a chunky hotfix that will address a large amount of issues for you today. On top of the fixes, we are bringing some XP balancing tweaks to make catalog progression smoother and matches feel more rewarding. We’ll keep looking at the effects this has to see if it warrants further tweaks.
Of course, this is not the entirety of known issues we are currently tracking and you can expect more fixes on the way in the future.
With that said, let’s get to it!
Catalog Token
Lowered XP required to gain a catalog token from 7500 to 6000 for a smoother progression.
Match End XP
Raised base XP reward from simply playing a match from 150 to 250 XP. This also scales with the solo XP multiplier and victory multiplier.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed “Cannot Access Services” message on login
- Fixed multiple issues that could lead to players being kicked out of a match.
- Fixed Disconnected players being revivable in teams, leading to many issues.
- Fixed end result incorrectly showing a catalog token was earned on your first match in the patch.
- Fixed an issue that led to guards having their weapons out at all times before being aggro-ed once.
- Fixed catalog ink icons appearing at a low resolution
- Fixed missing french localisation on multiple abilities.
- Fixed issue causing players sometimes being unable to move on match start.
- Fixed issue causing the collision of the spy to be present even while under cover.
- Fixed an issue that led to the charm reticle getting stuck after being charmed by Red
- Added a confirmation before spending a XP booster
- Fixed an issue that made the lovebomb ability detonate in the vicinity of downed spies.
- Fixed the hide player names function not working properly leading to names being visible in the pregame.
- Fixed an issue that would stop sprinting after launching a melee attack.
- Fixed an issue that led to npc being thrown into the air for a short duration when leaving a social interaction.
- Fixed an issue that led to players getting up by themselves when sitting without any player input.
Spies
Cavalière
- Tweaked Cavalière Expertise overlay to be more readable when investigating.
- Fixed bug allowing multiple zones placed by using Cavalière expertises.
- Fixed an issue that made cavalière hands disappear when canceling a melee into her expertise.
- Fixed issue leading to cavalière clues sometimes being active for much longer than intended.
Ace
[LIST]
<*>Fixed bug allowing multiple zones placed by using Ace’s expertises.
Larcin
- Fixed an issue that made Larcin still take fall damage when immaterial.
Levels
Fragrant Shore
- Fixed an issue that led to players being able to clip inside the wheel of the guard truck in Fragrant Shore.
Deceive Inc. State Of The Build (Post Misery Empire)
Welcome Agents!
It’s been quite a wild end of week at the agency with the release of Misery Empire. We are very happy with the overall reception to the update and the amazing amount of love given to Red. Now that the dust has settled a bit on the release, we are already turning our attention to fixes and tweaks to make the experience better! Here’s what we are looking at:
The Catalog
We are keeping track of feedback around catalog progression and are already looking into making changes to the EXP required to get a catalog token. To go hand in hand with this, we are also looking into tweaking the EXP amount from matches played a bit to make EXP progression a bit more consistent, even when losing a match.
We will be tweaking the values in the near future to make the progression more rewarding and less grindy overall.
Top Issues
We are actively tracking top community issues and looking into getting fixes to players ASAP. Here’s some of the top issues we are working on fixing right now:
- Players receive fake feedback telling them they have a catalog token when they don’t.
- Guards having their weapons out at all time if they have never been aggroed.
- Players getting kicked from matches for a variety of different reasons.
- Disconnected players that can still be revived in teams.
- Players on Steam Deck and Linux being kicked from matches. (this may now be fixed, please try playing again and let us know!)
- We are looking into matchmaking rules that no longer appear to be functioning as intended leading to less than ideal match conditions
Additional Note on Matchmaking
For those of you experiencing long matchmaking times or difficulties finding a match, there's an in-game setting that may help.
Under general, go to the 'Matchmaking Server Region' drop-down and change to either best latency or worldwide. Please let us know if changing to either setting helps your issue. Our team continues to monitor for any additional fixes".
Video Instructions on how to change matchmaking settings
Please report back to us if changing these settings improves your situation and the team is continuing to make adjustments on the backend as well to increase the reliability of finding a match.
[B]Balancing[/B]
While it’s still very early to make definitive calls on the various balancing aspects of the patch, we are already discussing tweaks to some underperforming characters (like hans) and keeping a closer look on where Red lands in the overall power balance of the game before making other adjustments.
[B]Heat System[/B]
We are also actively looking at how players interact with the heat system to see where we will go next in iterating on the system. Some of the elements we are looking into is the rate of heat build up, how fast it decays and the penalties themselves to figure out if they are impactful enough, too lenient or in a good spot. Feel free to take a moment to participate in our Heat System Poll on the official forums as part of our attempt to gather more feedback on this.
We expect to make some changes, tweaks and fixes as soon as next week via a hotfix while we continue to work on larger items in the days ahead. Thank you for your feedback and reports and keep it coming!
Deceive Inc. Update 1.06 - Misery Empire Is Out Now
Agents,
With the first catalog update, Misery Empire, coming later this month, Deceive Inc. has compiled this brief to let you know about upcoming changes to mission parameters. Please note: This brief contains Work In Progress information about a future update and items are subject to change or be added.
Major Changes
New agent: Red, the Treacherous Seductress. Red joins the ranks of Deceive Inc. as our first post-release agent. With her killer looks and even deadlier arsenal, Red is a versatile scoundrel capable of charming her rivals and supporting her allies.
Red introduces an all-new status effect: Charmed. Charmed spies are sent back into cover and gain the status effect, making them both slowed and neutralized. If they fire their weapons while charmed, they become heartbroken, removing the slow effect but making them vulnerable instead.
Seasonal Catalog: Misery Empire
This update introduces our first catalog: Misery Empire! A noir-themed issue with plenty of cosmetics to unlock.
You will now earn Catalog tokens by playing the game normally. XP gains will give you access to this new currency. Once you have a token, you can go and spend it in the season tab to unlock the associated reward.
There are 10 pages of content in this catalog and you will need to unlock 3 of the 5 rewards on a page to progress to the next one. Do note that while free catalog users can still unlock 3 items per page to progress, they will not have access to the premium rewards they have selected unless they buy the premium catalog. All unlocked premium rewards will be given retro-actively if you decide to buy the catalog later on.
You will be able to buy the premium Catalog any time in the future: Premium Catalogs will never expire. Free catalog users will only be able to progress the CURRENT seasonal catalog so do note that when catalog 2 releases, the only way to continue progressing Catalog 1 will be to acquire the premium version of it.
One last note on catalog tokens: You can stack up to 10 tokens at a time so be sure to go and spend them in the catalog when you are near the limit. The same tokens will be used for progression in the future so you will be able to gain a head start on Catalog 2 if you choose to!
Heat System and collaterals
Deceive Inc. has been under increased scrutiny from its clients recently. In an effort to raise its operational standards, the company has introduced new rules that will make sure agents do not act too recklessly on the field.
Enter the Heat System!
You will notice this new bar under your health at all times. This bar will be filled when eliminating innocent NPCs. Everytime you reach one of the three thresholds, you will get progressively more severe punishment for taking out innocents.
First Heat Level
You will become 30% more vulnerable to damage for 12 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Second Heat Level
You will become 50% more vulnerable to damage for 15 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Third Heat Level
You have gone rogue! You will take 100% more damage for 20 seconds AND gain the exposed status effect, making you unable to recover for the duration. This is a SEVERE penalty that will only happen to the most unhinged of agents. Make sure it’s not you.
Heat will naturally start venting off when players get back into cover and stop taking out innocent npc. If you ever find yourself building a bit too much heat, you simply have to lay low for a short while to get back into the thick of it.
A final note: VIPs are a special case for the Heat system. Downing a VIP will build up a full heat level right away. Make sure you are certain that this Jati is not the real Jati, otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening.
Team Intel
After taking a look at overall analytics and getting more playtime in teams mode, it’s obvious that team matches often progress faster than solo matches. There are of course multiple reasons for that, but one obvious one is that intel is effectively tripled in teams vs solo because every team member can hack the same intel piece.
With this update, intel use is now once per team instead of per individual. This changes will have many effects on the gameplay we feel are beneficial:
- It slows down the extremely breakneck speed of unlocking vault terminals in the first phase.
- It adds strategy to team matches in who should take which intel to have the most efficient run.
- It adds incentive to split the team, taking more risks while speeding up the team’s progression.
- It gives a lot of value to finding keycards in teams.
While we expect this change will take some time getting used to, we feel it’s very much to the benefit of team matches and will make things more interesting.
Team Revive Mechanic
We’ve received a lot of feedback around the team's revival mechanic. Being able to revive just once is great to drive the incentive of not getting taken out, but it leads to frustrating matches where you can sometimes be out very early and have to watch your friends play without you for 12 minutes.
We are introducing a change to revive that, we hope, will keep most of the upside of penalties when getting taken out and give more playtime to you and your friends.
Every player will now be revivable 3 times in a match BUT they will take additive penalties to their max health. These penalties are as follow:
- 75 Max Health on first revive
- 50 Max Health on second revive
- 30 Max Health on final revive
This means that getting taken out is absolutely not free. You will be much less effective in any fight even from the first revive BUT you will be able to keep playing and contribute to your team.
We will watch the effects of this change on team matches and keep tweaking the balancing of this over time.
Vault Terminals Room Rebalancing
We are making some changes to the overall economy of vault terminals, field upgrades and keycards. Here’s what you can expect:
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will NEVER have a purple or orange keycard
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will no longer have a purple field upgrade chest.
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a guaranteed keycard (either purple or orange)
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a purple chest.
- Purple rooms in the vault will now have two purple chests per room.
- Green rooms have a buffed spawned pool to make them more useful in the overall flow.
The overall goal of these changes is quite simple: Make finding rooms without a vault terminal much more rewarding, but also to give incentive to find one of these rooms even if you got a vault terminal on your first try. This should make looking for the different vault terminals room a more worthwhile endeavor with a bigger impact on your overall success in a match.
General Changes
Jump Tweaks
One of the sources of frustration we saw popup since launch has been “air-strafing” players using the abundance of air control to jump and change direction mid-air in close range fights. This update, we are reducing air control when jumping to make jumping in a fight more predictable and easier to track.
To go with this change, we upped the air control multiplier when falling from high up (like when falling after a bounce mat jump or jumping from a rooftop) to keep movement precision for players when landing from up high.
Solo Matches XP modifier
From a purely mathematical standpoint, winning in solo is less likely than in teams. Couple that with shared XP sources in teams and you have a solo mode that is overall a less valuable means of getting unlocks.
To remedy this, we are adding a 30% XP bonus to all XP sources in solo. Winning in solo should now be a much more rewarding experience.
Character hit box tweaks
To make fights feel more reliable, we are tweaking hitboxes and hit regions a bit. Hitboxes for all agents have been adjusted to ensure they are all fair with their overall silhouettes and a bit more permissive on smaller characters.
To go along with this, we are removing limb damage from arms. Limb damage will now entirely be lower body damage. Hitting a player from the waist up will result in a body hit. We feel the addition of arm shots would lead to frustrating inconsistencies, especially on some characters that have a prominent arm presence in their silhouettes from up front (looking at you Cavalière). These changes are subtle, but should help to keep a more consistent feel to fights overall.
Recoil Work
A lot of work went into the recoil feel of most weapons in the cast. In general, the direction was to make recoil feel snappier and more immediate. We hope these changes will upgrade the overall weapon feel and make gunplay feel better.
[B]Vertical Audio and weapon sound range[/B]
We have some audio tweaks coming in this patch. First of all, we have added a low-pass filter and tweaked the volume on weapon sounds based on the verticality of where the sound comes from. This should help with identifying that a fight is coming from above or below.
Additionally, we tweaked the overall range of weapon sounds on a per-weapon basis. This means that lower powered weapons won’t be heard from as far as powerful ones. This should help make the soundscape feel more diverse and add interesting wrinkles to pinpointing the location of fights.
NPC Danger Range
The radius in which npc are scared from weapon fire has been tweaked to better account for map verticality. Previously, npc could get scared from fights happening pretty high above them or below. This creates a lot of confusion when you see a scared npc running around because of a fight that is not happening on your floor.
Ink Menu Preview
This one has been asked for a lot since our alpha playtests and we finally had time to go and do it: You can now see your character’s weapon when changing inks in the agent select menu. This also works when inking gadgets so you will always know exactly what your new ink looks like in action right away.
Weapon Ink Preview
Gadget Ink Preview
Result Screen Rework
The mission report screen has seen a rework to make it clearer on what you achieved in a match and tell you exactly what you have progressed in the different progression systems. You will also see the exact amount of credits you earned in that round. No more guessing!
EXP source prompt
To go along with the added clarity in the result screen, you will now be able to see the XP value of your actions during a match. We hope this also serves the purpose of driving players towards actions that progress the flow of a match when they can see the exact amount of XP it gives them right away.
HUD rework
With the introduction of the heat gauge, the HUD overall has received some love. This new layout puts your Expertise with your loadout to better read the remaining cooldown and when it’s available in a pinch.
Increased gadget drop range
The range in which you can drop placeable gadgets has been increased. This should help not goo-ing yourself with the goo-pod and enable cheekier placements of gadgets overall.
Carrier Empowered Navmode Tweaks
Visual changes for much better reading. You now see spies instead of npc while scanning. Mimicked players now show up in empowered navmode view as a crouched spy silhouette. This gives the scanned players a chance to reposition in between scans and still surprise the carrier since they don’t know which npc disguise they have.
In addition, empowered vision now costs intel upfront, which means that quick scan repeatedly will cost 1 intel making less of an ironclad strategy.
Melee reliability work
Improved melee’s reliability in a variety of scenarios, especially when trying to hit someone close to a wall.
Vault Terminal Agent Alert
If two agents of opposite teams are in the same purple room with an active vault terminal inside, the vault terminal’s screen will glow red and play a short alarm sound. This goes both ways: Campers waiting by a vault terminal will alert the person entering and someone looting a purple room and getting a visit will know a rival spy just entered. This alarm is disabled as soon as the vault terminal is turned off.
Raised account level cap
With this update, the new level cap is now 300! Levels 200 to 300 will require more XP than before and a new completionist ink awaits you at level 300 to show off your insane spy skills.
Tweaks to cover regeneration timings
We are making basic cover regeneration a little bit faster, especially when standing still. While blowing your cover should have consequences, the current timing was long enough that even perfectly executed plans could result in you getting third party-ed after the fact.
We’ve found that players that can’t manage to get back into cover because it’s taking too long are often stringed along in a prolonged shooting spree that affects the entire lobby. While this is not a major timing change, we hope its effect is very beneficial to the loop of executing a well planned strike and disappearing back into the crowd.
Levels
Training range and Pre-game Lobby
Introduction of the dps screen. You can now shoot the dummies in both the training range and pre-game lobby to get an accurate representation of how much damage you deal at different ranges.
Silver Reef
Added props to provide cover in the submarine glass corridors to provide more interesting fire fights in the extraction phase.
Diamond Spire
Added visual cover in the main hall ground floor to make it less of a danger zone. Added cover to the ground floor courtyard. Added new exits to some meeting rooms that only had one entrance.
Doors that lead to the vault terminal room are no longer transparent, preventing you from knowing what lies ahead without entering.
Fragrant shore
Fixed doors that could not be opened on the first floor of the hotel. Replaced the purple door on terminal E room balcony by a one-way window openable from the inside. Replaced free windows into purple and blue rooms with one-sided openable windows like in Hard Sell.
Balance Changes and Bug Fixes can be found here in the full patch notes.
Deceive Inc Agent Brief: Cavalière
CODE NAME: Cavalière
LEGAL NAME: Florence Jacques
Age: 28
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: Canada
LANGUAGES: French, English
AGENT ROLE: Tracker
“No mystery unsolved when I’m involved”
PERSONALITY EVALUATION
Truth and justice are more than just words to Cavalière, they are her ‘mode de vie’. This drives her to always question what is happening around her, including the motivations and morals of Deceive Inc.
BACKGROUND
Born on Reunion Island, then raised in Quebec, Cavalière later moved to France to begin her life of justice with the French Police Nationale. Due to the extensive travels during her detective work, this determined globetrotter has studied the art of fighting with masters around the world, giving a bit more ‘kick’ in her justice.
FILE UPDATE: There are suspicions that Agent Cavalière participation in Deceive Inc. is more than her making a career change. While she’s been known to chase Larcin across the globe in order to catch him, we doubt it’s the only thing she’s investigating while working for Deceive Inc.
"Can’t stop what is unstoppable”
WEAPON: The Dragoons
Compact, light and elegant tools in her ruse de guerre, these two Dragoon pistols feel like they were made just for Florence. She deftly dual wields these fast firing pistols at a medium range while using the rest of her skills to close the gap between herself and anyone in her way. At closer ranges, her pistols will quickly dispatch her foes.
AGENT PASSIVE: Tiger Leap
Cavalière’s fierce fighting moves allow her to pounce onto her foes. Rivals beware! With such moves, she can quickly cover distances to plant a critical blow to the face of anyone not prepared.
AGENT EXPERTISE: Investigation
Nothing gets past this detective. Using all her intuition to learn about her competition, Cavalière can trace the tracks of any rivals that may be a threat to her mission. With powers of perception that any spy would be jealous of, she notices in minute details the traces that other agents in her vicinity have left behind.
Deceive Inc. Misery Empire Balance Brief
Agents,
With the launch of the Misery Empire update only days away (there are only so many left in April, agents!) we wanted to brief you on ([B]Work In Progress - subject to change[/B]) upcoming balance changes, and perhaps a sneak peek at the latest fashion trends.
We’ve got a pretty massive list of balancing tweaks we are bringing into this update. Our overall goal with these changes is quite simple: Make more agents and more builds viable. To do so, we are slightly toning down top performers and raising up low performing agents. This means that some middle of the pack characters are not getting as much changes in this update since the top and bottom will move around them.
We’ll keep watching how these changes affect the game and adjust balancing to keep the playing field more diverse and interesting.
We are also introducing a new background system with this patch that allows to update the balancing of the game live, without a client update. This is a huge step forward for us and will enable us to take action with more agility than ever before. With that all said: let's dive in!
Agents
Squire
Squire is doing great in the current meta. With his recent tweak to max ammo on his base weapon, we are now focusing on tweaking his other weapon options a bit to calm him slightly in combat scenarios. These are by no means huge changes, but we feel they will help level the balancing playing field and give space for other agents to be more viable this update.
- Weapons
- Weapon Mod 1: Trident
- Reducing headshot crit damage modifier from 1.5 to 1.3 to reduce the very high dps output of burst headshots at close range.
- Reducing headshot crit damage modifier from 1.5 to 1.3 to reduce the very high dps output of burst headshots at close range.
- Weapon Mod 2: Javelin
- Reducing damage per shot from 22 to 20
- Reload time changed from 1.65 to 1.7 seconds
- Reducing damage per shot from 22 to 20
- Weapon Mod 1: Trident
Ace
Our changes around Ace in this update are focused on two core aspects: Making her weapons feel more different and viable and improving her passives. Cover flush in particular is getting a major buff as we try to make it a more appealing choice to be a real thorn in rival agents’ sides.
- Weapons
- Weapon Mod 1: Jack of Diamonds
- Damage upped from 20 to 23 per shot.
- Fire rate upped from 1.35 bullets per second to 1.4.
- Reload time upped from 1.5 seconds to 1.75 seconds
- Damage upped from 20 to 23 per shot.
- Weapon Mod 2: King of Diamonds
- Damage upped from 40 to 45 per shot.
- Reload time upped from 1.6 seconds to 1.75
- Reduced the zoom on the scope a bit.
- Damage upped from 40 to 45 per shot.
- Weapon Mod 1: Jack of Diamonds
- Passive
- Passive Mod Base Version: Diamond’s Bet
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to 1.30 second.
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to 1.30 second.
- Passive Mod 1: Crippling Shot
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to 1.30 second.
- Slow effect upped from 35% to 40%
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to 1.30 second.
- Passive Mod 2: Cover Flush
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to .9 second.
- Exposed duration increased from 7 seconds to 14 seconds.
- Reduced charge time from 1.35 to .9 second.
- Passive Mod Base Version: Diamond’s Bet
Chavez
We’ve received quite a bit of feedback about chavez. In this update, we are targeting a specific set of aspects that have been identified as overperforming in the current meta. We’ll keep an eye on the effects of these changes, but we hope they make more builds viable for Chavez and reduce his oppressiveness in combat a bit. We still have our eyes on endurance training for more tweaks beyond this update.
- Weapons
- Weapon Mod 1: Vigilante
- Limb damage modifier lowered from .9 to .75.
- Limb damage modifier lowered from .9 to .75.
- Weapon Mod 1: Vigilante
- Expertise
- Expertise Mod 1: Unshakeable Fortress
- Reduced the zone’s size significantly to reduce Chavez and his team’s mobility when using it. This will also make the zone far less efficient in closed off rooms where it used to occupy almost the entirety of the space.
- Reduced the zone’s size significantly to reduce Chavez and his team’s mobility when using it. This will also make the zone far less efficient in closed off rooms where it used to occupy almost the entirety of the space.
- Expertise Mod 1: Unshakeable Fortress
- Passive
- Passive Mod 2: Endurance Training
- Reduced incoming damage turned into gray health to 50% max down from 60%
- Chavez now heals for 25% of the damage he deals down from 40%
- Reduced incoming damage turned into gray health to 50% max down from 60%
- Passive Mod 2: Endurance Training
Larcin
Larcin is getting pretty sizable tweaks with this update. We are tweaking his weapons a bit to make them more distinct and create more diverse playstyles and we are changing the pickpocket ability quite fundamentally with the addition of the heat system.
We hope to see Larcin not only perform better overall, but be simply more interesting to play in varied configurations.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Silence
- Fire Rate raised from 5.5 to 6 bullets per second.
- Changed under the hood base damage to change headshots calculations. Same modifier, but will now deal 15 damage on a headshot instead of 13.
- Thrown weapon now deals 10 damage up from 8.
- Fire Rate raised from 5.5 to 6 bullets per second.
- Weapon Mod 1: Cadence
- Changed damage from 9 per shot to 10.
- Shot delay between bursts raised from .27 seconds to .4.
- Changed damage from 9 per shot to 10.
- Weapon Mod 2: Violence
- Changed damage per shot from 10 to 15.
- Changed fire rate from 4.5 bullets seconds to 3.5.
- Changed headshot modifier from 1.5 to 1.3. (Do not let this fool you: headshots with this weapon hit harder now.)
- Thrown projectile body damage raised from 20 to 30.
- Headshot damage modifier on thrown weapons lowered from 2.5 to 2.0 (Still 60 damage).
- Reduced projectile speed a bit to make it easier to aim and predict a bit.
- Changed damage per shot from 10 to 15.
- Base Weapon: Silence
- Expertise
- Reduced the delay for Larcin’s expertise to trigger on all variants by half. Using the expertise to get away should now feel much more reactive.
- Reduced the delay for Larcin’s expertise to trigger on all variants by half. Using the expertise to get away should now feel much more reactive.
- Passive
- Passive Mod 2: Pickpocket
- Now, meleeing a NPC when in cover won’t blow your cover anymore, but will build up heat everytime. This means you can safely try to pickpocket suspicious NPC without revealing yourself, but you will have to be careful not to build too much heat in the process.
- Now, meleeing a NPC when in cover won’t blow your cover anymore, but will build up heat everytime. This means you can safely try to pickpocket suspicious NPC without revealing yourself, but you will have to be careful not to build too much heat in the process.
- Passive Mod 2: Pickpocket
Following playtime in the alphas before launch, we tweaked larcin’s pickpocket ability to prevent it from being used as a spy check without any risk.
While the changes we made accomplished that goal, it left pickpocket without a clear use case and identity. Its downside largely outweighs its advantages.
With the introduction of the heat system, we are changing pickpockets once again. We feel this tweak will give back the main appeal of pickpocket while negating the aspect of having a 100% free spy check at melee range.
Madame Xiu
Madame Xiu has been doing well since launch and as such we don’t want to move her too much from where she currently stands. We are tweaking some minor elements on her weapons and we’ll keep watch on where she lands in the new reality of this update with all the changes around her.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Zhulong
- Fire rate raised from 5.5 bolts per second to 5.75.
- Fire rate raised from 5.5 bolts per second to 5.75.
- Weapon Mod 1: Longshen
- Reload time lowered from 1.75 seconds to 1.5.
- Reload time lowered from 1.75 seconds to 1.5.
- Base Weapon: Zhulong
Hans
Falloff range tweaks did Hans a lot of good with the hotfix. We are continuing some targeted tweaks to make him a bit more viable at range with his base weapon and give back a clear double barrelled shotgun identity on the Uppercut.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: The Hook
- ADS headshot modifier raised from 1.75 to 2.
- ADS headshot modifier raised from 1.75 to 2.
- Weapon Mod 2: The Uppercut
- Reload time reduced from 2.2 seconds to 1.35 seconds.
- Fire rate raised from .8 shot second to 1.8 shot second.
- Damage lowered from 50 to 45 per shot (all pellets hit)
- Reload time reduced from 2.2 seconds to 1.35 seconds.
- Base Weapon: The Hook
- Expertise
- The slow amount applied by all Hans' expertise is now 40% up from 30%, helping him close the gap with his victims.
- The slow amount applied by all Hans' expertise is now 40% up from 30%, helping him close the gap with his victims.
Cavalière
We are pretty happy with the changes to the ammo pools on Cavalière from the hotfix, but we still find her base weapons to be slightly over-performing. We are doing some very light tweaks to them that should bring them more in line with the rest of the cast.
The other main factor in Cavalière feeling oppressive is really her tracking ability. To that end, we are tweaking some factors around it to make it less of a homing missile from anywhere on the map.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Dragoons
- Reduced damage per shot from 11 to 10.
- Reduced fire rate from 5.25 bullet seconds to 5.
- Reduced damage per shot from 11 to 10.
- Base Weapon: Dragoons
- Expertise:
- Base version: Investigation
- Reduced duration of investigation stance from 15 to 12 seconds.
- Chase levels changed from 5/10/15 to 5/8/12 seconds
- Reduced duration of investigation stance from 15 to 12 seconds.
- Expertise Mod1 :It’s a setup
- Reduced chase time from 20 seconds to 12.
- Reduced chase time from 20 seconds to 12.
- Expertise Mod 2: Redemption
- Reduced duration of investigation stance from 15 to 12 seconds.
- Reduced chase time from 20 seconds to 12.
- Reduced duration of investigation stance from 15 to 12 seconds.
- Base version: Investigation
- Passive:
- Melee reliability work should help a lot with landing Cavalière’s charge melee in this update.
- Melee reliability work should help a lot with landing Cavalière’s charge melee in this update.
Yu-Mi
Yu-mi is a bit of a special case: While her pick-rate is relatively low, her win probability is quite good. A main aspect that has come out as frustrating when playing against Yu-Mi is the very high melt potential she has when landing headshots in rapid succession. To keep this in check a bit more, we are changing the time it takes to fully charge her slingshots a bit. We want to incentivize more quick shots in close quarter fights and keep fully charged shots as powerful fight starters or well-timed finishing moves.
Another aspect we are watching is Yu-Mi’s medi-field. It’s quite clear to us watching analytics that Yu-Mi win’s probability in teams is a big outlier in no small part thanks to it. We are adding a new wrinkle to this ability to make it less of a face tanking win button and add more strategic layers to its placement.
- Weapons
- Base Weapon: Tactical Slingshot
- Changed full charge time from .9 second to 1.2 second
- Changed full charge time from .9 second to 1.2 second
- Weapon Mod 1: Experimental Split Shot
- Changed full charge time from .9 second to 1.2 second
- Changed full charge time from .9 second to 1.2 second
- Weapon Mod 2: Heavy Longshot
- Changed full charge time from .1.2 second to 1.5 second
- Changed full charge time from .1.2 second to 1.5 second
- Base Weapon: Tactical Slingshot
- Expertise:
- The slow value of Yu-Mi’s EMP bubbles has been raised to 40% from 30% to help land these precious fully charged shots.
- Expertise Mod 1: Medi-Field
- The healing bubble now has a very short delay before starting to heal after taking damages. We want to mitigate popping the bubble to simply facetank any encounter and teams while still keeping its great support utility.
- The healing bubble now has a very short delay before starting to heal after taking damages. We want to mitigate popping the bubble to simply facetank any encounter and teams while still keeping its great support utility.
- The slow value of Yu-Mi’s EMP bubbles has been raised to 40% from 30% to help land these precious fully charged shots.
Field Upgrade Balancing Tweaks
We are making some changes to field upgrade values. Our effort with this one is making less valuable field upgrades a bit more desirable and making purple and gold upgrades more desirable as part of your gameplan.
We are not touching four field upgrades that we think are already either strong enough or have a clear enough role in a field upgrade deck in the current meta. These are: Bulletproof fabric, External harddrive, Exfiltration scanner and overclock chip.
We might revisit them in the future, but let’s focus on the changes in this patch:
Cover Accelerator
While the cover accelerator had a great place in some builds, we wanted to push its transformative nature in your playstyle a bit further. It’s now more useful at low ranks and will make you a true vanishing ghost at higher levels. Since we have a built-in delay before cover starts recharging, we wanted to give this upgrade a very powerful regen factor when you chose it as your top upgrade.
In % Reduction
- Old Values: 20-30-40-50-60
- New Values: 30-35-50-60-75
Extended Ammo Pouch
Extended ammo is a nice pick for some specific agents and weapons, but in the spirit of making it something that changes how you can play the game a bit more profoundly, we are raising values on it significantly. Not only does it open the opportunity to carry a lot of ammo, it gives a secondary utility of being able to remove more ammo from the map by looting much more.
In % bonus
- Old Values:10-20-30-40-50
- New Values:30-40-60-80-100
Nutritional Supplement
This one is lagging behind quite a bit in terms of usefulness. We are making every level more significant in an effort to make this a great pick to recover while on the run and be fight ready faster than your opponents. We are leaning on a more aggressive scaling at the highest level to make it a more attractive pick at the top slots of your loadout.
In HP per snack
- Old Values:10-12-14-16-18
- New Values:12-14-16-20-28
Social Battery
Social Battery is already a great pick, but it’s pretty much useless at lower levels and does not have much room to change at the current balancing. We are making it scale on a larger scale to make it more viable even in lower upgrade slots and a great boost at the gold slot.
In HP per second
- Old Values:0.5-1-2-3.5-5
- New values:1-2-3-5-7
Field Agent Kit
Field agent is a pretty solid pick especially for agents that lean heavily on their expertise in a pinch. We are making it a stronger pick as your top field upgrade to really drive that play style defining role we want from gold field upgrades.
In % reduction
- Old Values:20-25-30-35-40
- New values:20-25-30-40-50
Gadgets Balancing Tweaks
We’ve made some tweaks to gadgets in an effort to make more varied picks viable. This starts with some cooldown changes to make gadget use and picking back up more interesting considerations. We’ve split placeable gadgets in two cooldown categories:
Cooldown Changes:
- Bounce Mat, Umbrella Shield: 45 Seconds
- Drone, Scrambler, Tripwire, Goopod, Turret: 30 Seconds
In addition, we’ve made the following tweaks to specific gadgets:
- Goopod:
- Slow Value has been raised to 40% from 30.
- Slow Value has been raised to 40% from 30.
- Auto-Turret:
- Shooting the turret is no longer considered a limb shot, which will lead to faster destruction time for a lot of characters shooting at it.
- Shooting the turret is no longer considered a limb shot, which will lead to faster destruction time for a lot of characters shooting at it.
- HackTrap:
- Hack Trapping intel is now twice as fast to be able to do it regularly without losing time.
- Hack Trapping intel is now twice as fast to be able to do it regularly without losing time.
- Scrambler:
- No longer affect you or your teammates making it a powerful tool to get the advantage in gadget heavy fights.
- No longer affect you or your teammates making it a powerful tool to get the advantage in gadget heavy fights.
All-new looks are hitting the shop with this upcoming update, with four new rotations added to the current existing four. These rotations will keep cycling on a 24h basis and will not expire, so don’t fret about missing the skin you want as it shall be back very soon!
Here’s a tease at the new looks:
Norfolk Ace
Tournament Arc Cavalière
Elite Forces Hans
Self-Care Xiu
The Misery Empire update also includes fixes for the following issues:
- Fixes for several gameplay exploits
- Fixed the vulnerable status effect being way too loud (sorry for your ears)
- [Xbox Series X/S] Fixed several cases where crossparty invites would behave inconsistently
- [PlayStation 5] Fixed an issue where some players were unable to form a party with PC players.
- Fixed an issue where Madam Xiu’s shift was causing camera issues when used on crouching or sitting civilians/staff.
- And more!
Be sure to let us know what changes (or looks) you are looking most forward to!
Deceive Inc. Catalog 1 Update Brief
With the first catalog update, Misery Empire, coming later this month, Deceive Inc. has compiled this brief to let you know about upcoming changes to mission parameters. Please note: This brief contains Work In Progress information about a future update and items are subject to change or be added.
Major Changes
New agent: [REDACTED]
Seasonal Catalog: Misery Empire
[REDACTED]
Heat System and collaterals
Deceive Inc. has been under increased scrutiny from its clients recently. In an effort to raise its operational standards, the company has introduced new rules that will make sure agents do not act too recklessly on the field.
Enter the Heat System!
You will notice this new bar under your health at all times. This bar will be filled when eliminating innocent NPCs. Everytime you reach one of the three thresholds, you will get progressively more severe punishment for taking out innocents.
First Heat Level
You will become 30% more vulnerable to damage for 12 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Second Heat Level
You will become 50% more vulnerable to damage for 15 seconds. This penalty is renewed on your next npc elimination while on this level.
Third Heat Level
You have gone rogue! You will take 100% more damage for 20 seconds AND gain the exposed status effect, making you unable to recover for the duration. This is a SEVERE penalty that will only happen to the most unhinged of agents. Make sure it’s not you.
Heat will naturally start venting off when players get back into cover and stop taking out innocent npc. If you ever find yourself building a bit too much heat, you simply have to lay low for a short while to get back into the thick of it.
A final note: VIPs are a special case for the Heat system. Downing a VIP will build up a full heat level right away. Make sure you are certain that this Jati is not the real Jati, otherwise you might be in for a rude awakening.
Team Intel
After taking a look at overall analytics and getting more playtime in teams mode, it’s obvious that team matches often progress faster than solo matches. There are of course multiple reasons for that, but one obvious one is that intel is effectively tripled in teams vs solo because every team member can hack the same intel piece.
With this update, intel use is now once per team instead of per individual. This changes will have many effects on the gameplay we feel are beneficial:
- It slows down the extremely breakneck speed of unlocking vault terminals in the first phase.
- It adds strategy to team matches in who should take which intel to have the most efficient run.
- It adds incentive to split the team, taking more risks while speeding up the team’s progression.
- It gives a lot of value to finding keycards in teams.
While we expect this change will take some time getting used to, we feel it’s very much to the benefit of team matches and will make things more interesting.
Team Revive Mechanic
We’ve received a lot of feedback around the team's revival mechanic. Being able to revive just once is great to drive the incentive of not getting taken out, but it leads to frustrating matches where you can sometimes be out very early and have to watch your friends play without you for 12 minutes.
We are introducing a change to revive that, we hope, will keep most of the upside of penalties when getting taken out and give more playtime to you and your friends.
Every player will now be revivable 3 times in a match BUT they will take additive penalties to their max health. These penalties are as follow:
- 75 Max Health on first revive
- 50 Max Health on second revive
- 30 Max Health on final revive
This means that getting taken out is absolutely not free. You will be much less effective in any fight even from the first revive BUT you will be able to keep playing and contribute to your team.
We will watch the effects of this change on team matches and keep tweaking the balancing of this over time.
Vault Terminals Room Rebalancing
We are making some changes to the overall economy of vault terminals, field upgrades and keycards. Here’s what you can expect:
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will NEVER have a purple or orange keycard
- Rooms that contain a vault terminal will no longer have a purple field upgrade chest.
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a guaranteed keycard (either purple or orange)
- Rooms that do not have a vault terminal will have a purple chest.
- Purple rooms in the vault will now have two purple chests per room.
- Green rooms have a buffed spawned pool to make them more useful in the overall flow.
The overall goal of these changes is quite simple: Make finding rooms without a vault terminal much more rewarding, but also to give incentive to find one of these rooms even if you got a vault terminal on your first try. This should make looking for the different vault terminals room a more worthwhile endeavor with a bigger impact on your overall success in a match.
General Changes
Jump Tweaks
One of the sources of frustration we saw popup since launch has been “air-strafing” players using the abundance of air control to jump and change direction mid-air in close range fights. This update, we are reducing air control when jumping to make jumping in a fight more predictable and easier to track.
To go with this change, we upped the air control multiplier when falling from high up (like when falling after a bounce mat jump or jumping from a rooftop) to keep movement precision for players when landing from up high.
Solo Matches XP modifier
From a purely mathematical standpoint, winning in solo is less likely than in teams. Couple that with shared XP sources in teams and you have a solo mode that is overall a less valuable means of getting unlocks.
To remedy this, we are adding a 30% XP bonus to all XP sources in solo. Winning in solo should now be a much more rewarding experience.
Character hit box tweaks
To make fights feel more reliable, we are tweaking hitboxes and hit regions a bit. Hitboxes for all agents have been adjusted to ensure they are all fair with their overall silhouettes and a bit more permissive on smaller characters.
To go along with this, we are removing limb damage from arms. Limb damage will now entirely be lower body damage. Hitting a player from the waist up will result in a body hit. We feel the addition of arm shots would lead to frustrating inconsistencies, especially on some characters that have a prominent arm presence in their silhouettes from up front (looking at you Cavalière). These changes are subtle, but should help to keep a more consistent feel to fights overall.
Recoil Work
A lot of work went into the recoil feel of most weapons in the cast. In general, the direction was to make recoil feel snappier and more immediate. We hope these changes will upgrade the overall weapon feel and make gunplay feel better.
[B]Vertical Audio and weapon sound range[/B]
We have some audio tweaks coming in this patch. First of all, we have added a low-pass filter and tweaked the volume on weapon sounds based on the verticality of where the sound comes from. This should help with identifying that a fight is coming from above or below.
Additionally, we tweaked the overall range of weapon sounds on a per-weapon basis. This means that lower powered weapons won’t be heard from as far as powerful ones. This should help make the soundscape feel more diverse and add interesting wrinkles to pinpointing the location of fights.
NPC Danger Range
The radius in which npc are scared from weapon fire has been tweaked to better account for map verticality. Previously, npc could get scared from fights happening pretty high above them or below. This creates a lot of confusion when you see a scared npc running around because of a fight that is not happening on your floor.
Ink Menu Preview
This one has been asked for a lot since our alpha playtests and we finally had time to go and do it: You can now see your character’s weapon when changing inks in the agent select menu. This also works when inking gadgets so you will always know exactly what your new ink looks like in action right away.
Weapon Ink Preview
Gadget Ink Preview
Result Screen Rework
The mission report screen has seen a rework to make it clearer on what you achieved in a match and tell you exactly what you have progressed in the different progression systems. You will also see the exact amount of credits you earned in that round. No more guessing!
EXP source prompt
To go along with the added clarity in the result screen, you will now be able to see the XP value of your actions during a match. We hope this also serves the purpose of driving players towards actions that progress the flow of a match when they can see the exact amount of XP it gives them right away.
HUD rework
With the introduction of the heat gauge, the HUD overall has received some love. This new layout puts your Expertise with your loadout to better read the remaining cooldown and when it’s available in a pinch.
Increased gadget drop range
The range in which you can drop placeable gadgets has been increased. This should help not goo-ing yourself with the goo-pod and enable cheekier placements of gadgets overall.
Carrier Empowered Navmode Tweaks
Visual changes for much better reading. You now see spies instead of npc while scanning. Mimicked players now show up in empowered navmode view as a crouched spy silhouette. This gives the scanned players a chance to reposition in between scans and still surprise the carrier since they don’t know which npc disguise they have.
In addition, empowered vision now costs intel upfront, which means that quick scan repeatedly will cost 1 intel making less of an ironclad strategy.
Melee reliability work
Improved melee’s reliability in a variety of scenarios, especially when trying to hit someone close to a wall.
Vault Terminal Agent Alert
If two agents of opposite teams are in the same purple room with an active vault terminal inside, the vault terminal’s screen will glow red and play a short alarm sound. This goes both ways: Campers waiting by a vault terminal will alert the person entering and someone looting a purple room and getting a visit will know a rival spy just entered. This alarm is disabled as soon as the vault terminal is turned off.
Raised account level cap
With this update, the new level cap is now 300! Levels 200 to 300 will require more XP than before and a new completionist ink awaits you at level 300 to show off your insane spy skills.
Tweaks to cover regeneration timings
We are making basic cover regeneration a little bit faster, especially when standing still. While blowing your cover should have consequences, the current timing was long enough that even perfectly executed plans could result in you getting third party-ed after the fact.
We’ve found that players that can’t manage to get back into cover because it’s taking too long are often stringed along in a prolonged shooting spree that affects the entire lobby. While this is not a major timing change, we hope its effect is very beneficial to the loop of executing a well planned strike and disappearing back into the crowd.
Levels
Training range and Pre-game Lobby
Introduction of the dps screen. You can now shoot the dummies in both the training range and pre-game lobby to get an accurate representation of how much damage you deal at different ranges.
Silver Reef
Added props to provide cover in the submarine glass corridors to provide more interesting fire fights in the extraction phase.
Diamond Spire
Added visual cover in the main hall ground floor to make it less of a danger zone. Added cover to the ground floor courtyard. Added new exits to some meeting rooms that only had one entrance.
Doors that lead to the vault terminal room are no longer transparent, preventing you from knowing what lies ahead without entering.
Fragrant shore
Fixed doors that could not be opened on the first floor of the hotel. Replaced the purple door on terminal E room balcony by a one-way window openable from the inside. Replaced free windows into purple and blue rooms with one-sided openable windows like in Hard Sell.
Keep an eye out agents, as more intel will be dropping in the coming days.