Welcome or welcome back agents! With the high alert update in the wild and the double XP behind us, we wanted to give you a short update on what we are looking at in the short term. Let's get into it!
High Alert Update Feedback We’ve been monitoring chatter around high alert and held a poll to get the community’s pulse on Heat 2.0. While we are still actively parsing and digesting feedback, we are already seeing some clear take-aways emerge that we will want to take action on.
Heat First of all, the heat poll. While the results show we’ve made some good strides toward reaching a much more impactful heat system, we see that the community still has more appetite for an even more impactful balancing. The biggest piece of feedback on that front has been about heat being too fast to vent once back into cover.
We are rolling out a live update right now that will affect heat in the following way:
Heat will now decay 50% slower.
Downing a VIP will now give additional heat, making it a riskier consideration.
These changes require no patch and will be effective right away. Please note that the nature of live patching means the tutorial won't be affected by these changes without a client update.
Past this, you can expect more tweaks around heat as we continue to iterate on the system to make it even more impactful. Please continue to share your feedback on the system as we roll out more changes soon.
Balance We are also looking at balance talks around the update. We have some short term priorities (for example, Larcin emerging as being quite strong in the current meta) and are looking at longer term reworks (like mechanical changes to the shieldbrella and buffs to under-used gadgets). We are also looking at how agent pick rate and win probabilities evolve around this patch to better target our next round of balancing tweaks. We are looking at how we can expose these stats to the community around new seasons to give you a better idea of what we are looking at/ where the game is currently.
What’s Next? Beyond these short term adjustments, the team is full steam ahead towards shipping Catalog 2 with a new agent for you to play and a slew of improvements and fixes to the game. We are very excited to start lifting the veil on what’s coming as we get closer to the next major content update.
Thank you for your continued feedback and passion for the game and see you all on the field!
The First Deceive Inc. Double XP Event is here: From June 15th until June 19th!
Agents,
Deceive Inc. has decided to grant all agents double XP for a limited time!
HIGH ALERT UPDATE Sound the alarm, the High Alert update is here!
Welcome or welcome back agents for our first “intra-season” content update. As you might have guessed by the title, this update is all about raising the consequences for reckless action and making the playfield far more advantageous for stealth plays. This has been a very clear thread of feedback where the overwhelming majority of the community agrees: You want more reason to hesitate before shooting and greater advantages when getting the drop on someone that did not. This is what this update is about.
Of course, it also comes with a bevy of bug fixes and targeted balances fixes around some of our most high profile issues.
Before we go in, we should specify that this is not a full season update and that Catalog 2 and its content shall be discussed a bit further down the line. This update is a step in giving you more regular content without waiting for a full seasonal update to do so. For now, let’s talk about High Alert and what it means for you on the field. What better place to start than the very often requested “Heat 2.0”?
General Changes Heat 2.0 When we introduced the heat system with Misery Empire, the feedback we received was loud and clear: MORE. Players want more consequences to being loud and we aim to deliver with this rework.
First and foremost Heat 2.0 is a more robust framework for the future. It allows us to tweak many more values around heat in a much faster fashion than we used to be able to with the previous iteration of the system. On top of that, we reworked the entirety of the system to be not only much more present, but also clearer and more readable at a glance in the middle of action. Let’s dive in!
Damage Based Heat:
How you obtain heat is no longer tied to downing an NPC, but directly to damage dealt. You gain heat relative to the damage you dealt to an NPC vs their max health. This means that single tapping NPC to do a spy check will now yield heat and downing an NPC will still offer the full penalty.
Tweaked Values: You now gain more heat than before by fully downing a NPC. It will take two NPCs taken out to gain a single heat level. The VIP is an exception to this rule, giving much more heat if attacked.
Heat from scolding: If you get scolded by non-guard NPCs while out of cover in a restricted room, you will slowly build up Heat over time.
Penalty level changes In the original implementation of heat, you would gain a short penalty right when you downed a NPC with a high enough heat level. This penalty had its own timer, independent of the heat level decrementing.
In Heat 2.0, the heat penalties will stay as long as you are currently within the heat level bracket. That means you need to let Heat vent down to get rid of the penalties. To compensate for this and increased heat from multiple sources, Heat now vents a little bit faster than before while in cover.
The 3 levels now have clearer status effects with the names ``Heat LVL 1-2-3” and a different visual look to the vulnerable effect.
The Guard situation: Guards will now give heat, like any NPC would. The intent is for players to start seeing Heat as a resource. Spending it to get rid of some guard is going to bring risks to a player that they will need to weigh correctly.
The Spy hit Buffer: We added a mechanic to limit accidental heat gains in fights with all the changes to the system: There is a buffer after hitting a spy recently where you won’t gain any heat if you hit a NPC by mistake. This buffer is short and is only intended to prevent random heat gains during real combat
Elite Guards
After repeated catastrophic failures of their security, the VIPs are putting together a new training program to deploy Elite Guards to the field. These new guards have heightened access, capable of entering technician rooms, higher caliber weapons that deal more damage and improved endurance making them capable of taking more damage before going down.
Elite guards will be very few and far between before the vault, but you can no longer depend on the fact that nobody but a spy and the VIP can enter vault terminal locations. You also better watch out inside the vault. Picking a fight in the technician rooms there just got more dangerous.
As always, we’ll be monitoring how Elite Guards affect the game and we hope it will add a new layer of tension to every operation.
Spy Cache Cover Restore To help against the encroaching presence of heat and the danger presented by elite guards, Spy caches have been outfitted with a new cover booster as well as a slick new look.
You will now instantly recover when looting one of these caches, allowing you to disappear and go back into stealth play after a tense fight. This will also help players that just had very close fights and would have difficulty losing guards, potentially resulting in their death by giving them a clear out when looting the cache.
Dossier Menu Added a new menu with top secret information on all NPC characters, including their often requested names to facilitate team communications and call outs. This menu also features a full list of status effects with their effects so you can brush up on your game knowledge at any time!
XP Booster Change We’ve received a lot of feedback after the introduction of the XP booster in the Misery Empire Catalog which we are now acting on with this update. From now on your XP booster will only deplete during matches, not in the main menu and not if you are offline. Your XP booster is also active for the entire match if you start a match with only 1 minute left, so do not worry about not having enough time left for one last match.
We hope you’ll appreciate these tweaks and we look forward to more feedback on the subject!
Cover Change interact time tweak Interacting with a NPC to change cover is now faster than before, not requiring you to hold for as long to take their appearance. This limits situations where you would try to take cover from a walking NPC and have them leave the range before completing.
Crouch Fatigue We are introducing an equivalent to jump fatigue that will affect players repeatedly crouching very fast multiple times in a row. Players will gain a progressively worse speed debuff when crouching more than 3 times within a very short period of time that will gradually go away as they stop crouching.
This is mostly to remove the advantages of mashing crouches in combat to make yourself harder to hit leading to un-interesting combat.
New animated Inks 10 all-new inks that can be earned through loot briefcases or in-game credits have been added to the game. These are our first animated inks, available in a variety of styles. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do!
Better support for different aspect ratios We’ve made a change to the way we handle the camera’s field of view to better support a wide range of aspect ratio on a variety of monitors. This should hopefully make the game much more playable on ultra-wide monitors.
Global Agent Changes We are slightly reducing the time headshot negation lasts after blowing someone’s cover. The current duration was a disadvantage for a few different weapons that would lose more shots than intended before landing a headshot.
Making it a bit shorter will even the playing field a bit more with slow rate of fire/high damage weapons that were not affected by this anyway considering the time it took for them to get a followup shot. Cover Shield headshot negation time
Duration: 1s ⇒0.7s
Agents Balance One of the running themes of the changes you will see below will be adjustments to reload times. We are revisiting most of the cast to make sure the downtime given by reloading fits their overall playstyle and gives an edge to the rival party that can be capitalized on.
We are also making changes to a multitude of stats including headshot modifiers on weapons that perform too strongly currently in the meta.
Ace Weapons Changes to Ace’s weapons are mostly around the theme of the reload time rework. We are also placing both the jack and the king in a lower unified class of headshot modifiers. Base: Queen of Diamond
Reload Time: 2.3 => 2.75s
Mod 1: Jack of Diamond
Reload Time: 1.75 => 2
Damage: 22 => 20
Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Mod 2: King of Diamond
Reload Time: 1.7s => 2.1
Damage: 45 => 46
Crit Multiplier: 1.8 => 1.75
Passive Ace’s passives are currently very difficult to place in a fight and are most of the time only viable as an opening move. While we don’t want them to be TOO easy to pull off in a live fight, we think reducing the charge time slightly will be beneficial to her gameplan.
Base: Diamond’S Bet
Charge Duration: 1.3s => 1.15s
Mod 1: Crippling Shot
Charge Duration: 1.3s => 1.15s
Cavalière Weapons Cavalière is getting a bit more changes around her weapons. Her Dragoons have been underperforming for a little while and we want to make them more competitive overall. We are also adjusting the Hydras to calm down their very powerful headshots a bit and making the wyverns faster to reload at the cost of a bit of headshot power. Base: Dragoons
Reload Time: 2 => 1.7
Damage: 11 => 12
Mod 1: Hydras
Reload Time: 2 => 2.3
Fire Rate: 2.5 => 2.2
Damage: 20 => 18
Mod 2: Wyverns
Reload Time: 2 => 1.8
Crit Multiplier: 1.5 => 1.3
Chavez Weapons The Vigilante has been outshining the Sentinel in most situations previously. As such, we are lowering its damage a bit to really focus into the fast firing alternative niche with some downsides built into that. The duke is getting a reload time revision in-line with the rest of the cast to really focus on its high risk nature if you miss your shots.
Base: Sentinel
Fire Rate: 1.25 => 1.3
Mod 1: Vigilante
Damage: 22 => 20
Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Limb multiplier: 0.9 => 0.75
Mod 2: Duke
Reload Time: 2.8 => 3
Hans While Hans is not getting extensive changes on this patch, we wanted to let the community know we are currently looking at his passive abilities for a future rework. We’ll keep you posted on the progress on this front as we get closer to season 2.
Weapons Overall reload time adjustments to fit the rest of changes to the cast. Base: Hook
Reload Time: 1.9 => 2.2
Mod 1: Jab
Reload Time 1.75 => 1.85
Mod 2: Uppercut
Reload Time: 1.35 => 1.6
Larcin Larcin is doing very well currently. For the time being, we are only adjusting his pickpocket passive to be in-line with Heat 2.0. Passive: Mod 2: Pickpocket
Heat values from hitting a NPC have been tweaked to be in-line with the new value from shooting down NPCs.
Madame Xiu Weapons Reload time adjustments to further differentiate weapon archetypes and fit the rest of the cast. Base: Zhulong
Reload Time: 1.75 => 1.7
Mod 1: Longshen
Reload Time: 1.5 => 1.9
Red Weapons Red’s Jack of heart is still a very high performing weapon and we are tweaking it a bit further to make it less oppressive. Lovebite is not getting any changes for now, but we are looking at spread tweaks to make it better performing in the future. Base: Heartbreaker
Reload Time: 1.55 => 1.7
Mod 1: Jack of Heart
Reload Time 1.55 => 2
Damage: 20 => 18
Limb Multiplier: 0.9 => 0.75
Expertise: Red’s Sweet Embrace has been performing extremely well ever since her debut. The power of giving cover back to your team and a small bit of immediate healing is already quite potent. As such, we are removing the cleansing aspects that this passive had.
Cleansing status effects would lead to frustrating encounters that are hard to understand for rival players and could lead to a variety of non desirable exploits (like cleansing heat related status effects).
On the flipside, Lovebomb has been an underwhelming part of Red’s kit and we hope that making its radius non-visible to rival agents will give it a bit more of a use for trap loving players.
Mod 1: Sweet Embrace
Sweet embrace no longer cleanses negative status effects.
Mod 2: Lovebomb
Lovebomb’s radius is no longer visible to rival spies. The bomb itself is still visible.
Squire Weapons Squire’s getting some pretty big change to his arsenal in this patch. He’s been performing very strongly for a long time and we are mostly targeting the javelin and his base weapon for adjustments. We hope this will make Squire less frustrating to fight and even the playing field for more diverse agent selection. Base: Lance
MagSize 10 => 11
Reload Time: 1.3s => 1.75s
Fire Rate: 3.1 => 3
Damage: 17 => 15
Mod 1: Trident
Reload Time: 1.45s => 2s
Mod 2: Javelin
MagSize: 8 => 7
Reload Time: 1.7 => 2.2
Fire Rate: 2.4 => 2
Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Passive: We’ve been toning down damage reduction across the board recently and Aegis cover escaped most of it since it was not tied to the resistant status effect. We are directly tweaking this passive with this update to once again make squire less of a terror on the field. Mod 2: Aegis Cover
Duration: 1.7 => 1.4
Damage Blocked: 50% => 25%
Yu-Mi Passive: We are continuing our work to make Yu-Mi a more viable agent. We nerfed her base passive pretty hard at launch to counter gadget spamming strategies and while we will not go back anywhere near the amount of passive gadget regen she had back then, we are upping the amount to 65% to allow her to lean on gadgets a bit more.
We are also giving more expertise cooldown refund for energy catalyst to make it a more enticing and gameplay defining choice.
Base: Quick Fix
Cooldown Reduction: 50% => 65%
Mod 1: Booby Trap
Expanded size and duration for bubbles created from booby traps. (This change was listed in the May hotfix but was not part of the update. We apologize for the confusion!)
Mod 2: Energy Catalyst
Expertise Cooldown Returned: 33% => 50%
Bug Fixes General
Fixed an issue that allowed players to bunny hop in online matches.
Fixed an issue that caused agent select preview videos to still play during gameplay, negatively impacting performance.
Fixed issue that caused players to be unable to recover under specific circumstances.
Rival spies' bodies no longer disappear when they disconnect.
Fixed an issue where the amped up status effect would stay stuck after the pre-game lobby.
Fixed a crash caused by dying while the drone is active.
Fixed charm overlay staying stuck if player disconnected before the effect ends.
Fixed an issue where spies would be missing in the endscreen if in drone on game end.
Fixed revive UI not appearing if revive started before spectator mode started.
Fixed issue leading to invisible weapons in player hand, mostly with Cavalière.
Changed interact prompt location on Briefcase and Spy cache to prevent instances of them being non-lootable.
Fixed issue leading to charm effect following characters even when immaterial.
Fixed an issue that allowed players to extract at an extraction that was previously called if the briefcase changed hands.
Removed Killcam option from the menu until it’s actually ready!
Level
Fixed areas where players could clip into environments in Fragrant shore.
Agents
Fixed Cavalière “it’s a setup” zone overlapping with floors underneath it.
Fixed Cavalière base passive melee stopping her run.
Fixed an issue where Larcin would have his weapon disappear when using ADS in mid-air out of cover.
Fixed Larcin being able to hack a vault terminal while invisible.
Hans' incapacitator orb visual now fits with the actual collision size.
Fixed an issue that allowed players to heal faster in Yu-Mi’s bubble by leaving and entering repeatedly.
Deceive Inc. Community Q&A Stream with Lead Designer!
We gathered your questions last week and we'll be answering them today on stream!
With "High Alert" update expected later this month, we wanted to read you in on what changes are headed your way. Please keep in mind that this is a Work In Progress changelog and things are subject to change (items may be removed or added) before the final release.
HIGH ALERT UPDATE Sound the alarm, the High Alert update is (almost) here!
Welcome or welcome back agents for our first “intra-season” content update. As you might have guessed by the title, this update is all about raising the consequences for reckless action and making the playfield far more advantageous for stealth plays. This has been a very clear thread of feedback where the overwhelming majority of the community agrees: You want more reason to hesitate before shooting and greater advantages when getting the drop on someone that did not. This is what this update is about.
Of course, it also comes with a bevy of bug fixes and targeted balances fixes around some of our most high profile issues.
Before we go in, we should specify that this is not a full season update and that Catalog 2 and its content shall be discussed a bit further down the line. This update is a step in giving you more regular content without waiting for a full seasonal update to do so. For now, let’s talk about High Alert and what it means for you on the field. What better place to start than the very often requested “Heat 2.0”?
General Changes Heat 2.0 When we introduced the heat system with Misery Empire, the feedback we received was loud and clear: MORE. Players want more consequences to being loud and we aim to deliver with this rework.
First and foremost Heat 2.0 is a more robust framework for the future. It allows us to tweak many more values around heat in a much faster fashion than we used to be able to with the previous iteration of the system. On top of that, we reworked the entirety of the system to be not only much more present, but also clearer and more readable at a glance in the middle of action. Let’s dive in!
Damage Based Heat:
How you obtain heat is no longer tied to downing an NPC, but directly to damage dealt. You gain heat relative to the damage you dealt to an NPC vs their max health. This means that single tapping NPC to do a spy check will now yield heat and downing an NPC will still offer the full penalty.
Tweaked Values: You now gain more heat than before by fully downing a NPC. It will take two NPCs taken out to gain a single heat level. The VIP is an exception to this rule, giving much more heat if attacked.
Heat from scolding: If you get scolded by non-guard NPCs while out of cover in a restricted room, you will slowly build up Heat over time.
Penalty level changes In the original implementation of heat, you would gain a short penalty right when you downed a NPC with a high enough heat level. This penalty had its own timer, independent of the heat level decrementing.
In Heat 2.0, the heat penalties will stay as long as you are currently within the heat level bracket. That means you need to let Heat vent down to get rid of the penalties. To compensate for this and increased heat from multiple sources, Heat now vents a little bit faster than before while in cover.
The 3 levels now have clearer status effects with the names ``Heat LVL 1-2-3” and a different visual look to the vulnerable effect.
The Guard situation: Guards will now give heat, like any NPC would. The intent is for players to start seeing Heat as a resource. Spending it to get rid of some guard is going to bring risks to a player that they will need to weigh correctly.
The Spy hit Buffer: We added a mechanic to limit accidental heat gains in fights with all the changes to the system: There is a buffer after hitting a spy recently where you won’t gain any heat if you hit a NPC by mistake. This buffer is short and is only intended to prevent random heat gains during real combat
Elite Guards
After repeated catastrophic failures of their security, the VIPs are putting together a new training program to deploy Elite Guards to the field. These new guards have heightened access, capable of entering technician rooms, higher caliber weapons that deal more damage and improved endurance making them capable of taking more damage before going down.
Elite guards will be very few and far between before the vault, but you can no longer depend on the fact that nobody but a spy and the VIP can enter vault terminal locations. You also better watch out inside the vault. Picking a fight in the technician rooms there just got more dangerous.
As always, we’ll be monitoring how Elite Guards affect the game and we hope it will add a new layer of tension to every operation.
Spy Cache Cover Restore To help against the encroaching presence of heat and the danger presented by elite guards, Spy caches have been outfitted with a new cover booster as well as a slick new look.
You will now instantly recover when looting one of these caches, allowing you to disappear and go back into stealth play after a tense fight. This will also help players that just had very close fights and would have difficulty losing guards, potentially resulting in their death by giving them a clear out when looting the cache.
Dossier Menu Added a new menu with top secret information on all NPC characters, including their often requested names to facilitate team communications and call outs. This menu also features a full list of status effects with their effects so you can brush up on your game knowledge at any time!
XP Booster Change We’ve received a lot of feedback after the introduction of the XP booster in the Misery Empire Catalog which we are now acting on with this update. From now on your XP booster will only deplete during matches, not in the main menu and not if you are offline. Your XP booster is also active for the entire match if you start a match with only 1 minute left, so do not worry about not having enough time left for one last match.
We hope you’ll appreciate these tweaks and we look forward to more feedback on the subject!
Cover Change interact time tweak Interacting with a NPC to change cover is now faster than before, not requiring you to hold for as long to take their appearance. This limits situations where you would try to take cover from a walking NPC and have them leave the range before completing.
Crouch Fatigue We are introducing an equivalent to jump fatigue that will affect players repeatedly crouching very fast multiple times in a row. Players will gain a progressively worse speed debuff when crouching more than 3 times within a very short period of time that will gradually go away as they stop crouching.
This is mostly to remove the advantages of mashing crouches in combat to make yourself harder to hit leading to un-interesting combat.
New animated Inks 10 all-new inks that can be earned through loot briefcases or in-game credits have been added to the game. These are our first animated inks, available in a variety of styles. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we do!
Better support for different aspect ratios We’ve made a change to the way we handle the camera’s field of view to better support a wide range of aspect ratio on a variety of monitors. This should hopefully make the game much more playable on ultra-wide monitors.
Global Agent Changes We are slightly reducing the time headshot negation lasts after blowing someone’s cover. The current duration was a disadvantage for a few different weapons that would lose more shots than intended before landing a headshot.
Making it a bit shorter will even the playing field a bit more with slow rate of fire/high damage weapons that were not affected by this anyway considering the time it took for them to get a followup shot. Cover Shield headshot negation time
Duration: 1s ⇒0.7s
Agents Balance One of the running themes of the changes you will see below will be adjustments to reload times. We are revisiting most of the cast to make sure the downtime given by reloading fits their overall playstyle and gives an edge to the rival party that can be capitalized on.
We are also making changes to a multitude of stats including headshot modifiers on weapons that perform too strongly currently in the meta.
Ace Weapons Changes to Ace’s weapons are mostly around the theme of the reload time rework. We are also placing both the jack and the king in a lower unified class of headshot modifiers. Base: Queen of Diamond
Reload Time: 2.3 => 2.75s
Mod 1: Jack of Diamond
Reload Time: 1.75 => 2
Damage: 22 => 20
Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Mod 2: King of Diamond
Reload Time: 1.7s => 2.1
Damage: 45 => 46
Crit Multiplier: 1.8 => 1.75
Passive Ace’s passives are currently very difficult to place in a fight and are most of the time only viable as an opening move. While we don’t want them to be TOO easy to pull off in a live fight, we think reducing the charge time slightly will be beneficial to her gameplan.
Base: Diamond’S Bet
Charge Duration: 1.3s => 1.15s
Mod 1: Crippling Shot
Charge Duration: 1.3s => 1.15s
Cavalière Weapons Cavalière is getting a bit more changes around her weapons. Her Dragoons have been underperforming for a little while and we want to make them more competitive overall. We are also adjusting the Hydras to calm down their very powerful headshots a bit and making the wyverns faster to reload at the cost of a bit of headshot power. Base: Dragoons
Reload Time: 2 => 1.7
Damage: 11 => 12
Mod 1: Hydras
Reload Time: 2 => 2.3
Fire Rate: 2.5 => 2.2
Damage: 20 => 18
Mod 2: Wyverns
Reload Time: 2 => 1.8
Crit Multiplier: 1.5 => 1.3
Chavez Weapons The Vigilante has been outshining the Sentinel in most situations previously. As such, we are lowering its damage a bit to really focus into the fast firing alternative niche with some downsides built into that. The duke is getting a reload time revision in-line with the rest of the cast to really focus on its high risk nature if you miss your shots.
Base: Sentinel
Fire Rate: 1.25 => 1.3
Mod 1: Vigilante
Damage: 22 => 20
Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Limb multiplier: 0.9 => 0.75
Mod 2: Duke
Reload Time: 2.8 => 3
Hans While Hans is not getting extensive changes on this patch, we wanted to let the community know we are currently looking at his passive abilities for a future rework. We’ll keep you posted on the progress on this front as we get closer to season 2.
Weapons Overall reload time adjustments to fit the rest of changes to the cast. Base: Hook
Reload Time: 1.9 => 2.2
Mod 1: Jab
Reload Time 1.75 => 1.85
Mod 2: Uppercut
Reload Time: 1.35 => 1.6
Larcin Larcin is doing very well currently. For the time being, we are only adjusting his pickpocket passive to be in-line with Heat 2.0. Passive: Mod 2: Pickpocket
Heat values from hitting a NPC have been tweaked to be in-line with the new value from shooting down NPCs.
Madame Xiu Weapons Reload time adjustments to further differentiate weapon archetypes and fit the rest of the cast. Base: Zhulong
Reload Time: 1.75 => 1.7
Mod 1: Longshen
Reload Time: 1.5 => 1.9
Red Weapons Red’s Jack of heart is still a very high performing weapon and we are tweaking it a bit further to make it less oppressive. Lovebite is not getting any changes for now, but we are looking at spread tweaks to make it better performing in the future. Base: Heartbreaker
Reload Time: 1.55 => 1.7
Mod 1: Jack of Heart
Reload Time 1.55 => 2
Damage: 20 => 18
Limb Multiplier: 0.9 => 0.75
Expertise: Red’s Sweet Embrace has been performing extremely well ever since her debut. The power of giving cover back to your team and a small bit of immediate healing is already quite potent. As such, we are removing the cleansing aspects that this passive had.
Cleansing status effects would lead to frustrating encounters that are hard to understand for rival players and could lead to a variety of non desirable exploits (like cleansing heat related status effects).
On the flipside, Lovebomb has been an underwhelming part of Red’s kit and we hope that making its radius non-visible to rival agents will give it a bit more of a use for trap loving players.
Mod 1: Sweet Embrace
Sweet embrace no longer cleanses negative status effects.
Mod 2: Lovebomb
Lovebomb’s radius is no longer visible to rival spies. The bomb itself is still visible.
Squire Weapons Squire’s getting some pretty big change to his arsenal in this patch. He’s been performing very strongly for a long time and we are mostly targeting the javelin and his base weapon for adjustments. We hope this will make Squire less frustrating to fight and even the playing field for more diverse agent selection. Base: Lance
MagSize 10 => 11
Reload Time: 1.3s => 1.75s
Fire Rate: 3.1 => 3
Damage: 17 => 15
Mod 1: Trident
Reload Time: 1.45s => 2s
Mod 2: Javelin
MagSize: 8 => 7
Reload Time: 1.7 => 2.2
Fire Rate: 2.4 => 2
Crit Multiplier: 2 => 1.75
Passive: We’ve been toning down damage reduction across the board recently and Aegis cover escaped most of it since it was not tied to the resistant status effect. We are directly tweaking this passive with this update to once again make squire less of a terror on the field. Mod 2: Aegis Cover
Duration: 1.7 => 1.4
Damage Blocked: 50% => 25%
Yu-Mi Passive: We are continuing our work to make Yu-Mi a more viable agent. We nerfed her base passive pretty hard at launch to counter gadget spamming strategies and while we will not go back anywhere near the amount of passive gadget regen she had back then, we are upping the amount to 65% to allow her to lean on gadgets a bit more.
We are also giving more expertise cooldown refund for energy catalyst to make it a more enticing and gameplay defining choice.
Base: Quick Fix
Cooldown Reduction: 50% => 65%
Mod 1: Booby Trap
Expanded size and duration for bubbles created from booby traps. (This change was listed in the May hotfix but was not part of the update. We apologize for the confusion!)
Mod 2: Energy Catalyst
Expertise Cooldown Returned: 33% => 50%
Bug Fixes
Various bug fixes
Agent PSA: Backend Server Maintenance
Agents,
We'll be doing some backend updates this week, trying to schedule them for the lowest possible impact to players. However, please note that you may experience some matchmaking issues during the following times and regions:
Monday 5th June Europe North utc 04:00
Wednesday 7th June Europe West @ utc 05:00 US East @ utc 11:00
Thursday 8th June US West @ utc 12:00
Deceive Inc. May 26th Community Brief
Welcome or welcome back agents! As is now tradition, we wanted to give you a deeper look into what the team is looking into in the short term following the release of the hotfix last week. Let’s dive into it!
Tracking Top Issues We are actively looking at new issues that have surfaced after the hotfix. Chief among them is reports of degraded performance on some configurations for PC players. This is something we are actively investigating and we’ll keep you updated on expected improvements as soon as possible. We have also identified some balance elements that were not ready by the latest hotfix and are looking to roll them into the game soon with another backend update (no download required). Speaking of which…
Live Balancing The hotfix was our first live full-scale test of rolling balancing changes through our live balancing system instead of a client patch. While the scale of the operation led to some issues, we are very happy to say that the operation worked quite well overall. What does this mean for you as a player? It means we can update the balancing of the game more often, without a patch to address top community issues. We want to keep expectations in check: We cannot be too fickle with balancing and push these patches every day. We need to calculate the impact of balancing decisions. Still, this means you can expect small balancing tweaks more often instead of waiting for full patches.
On that note, we wanted to let you know that we are currently looking at balancing Squire's Javelin, Cavalière’s Hydra and Chavez weapons overall. These weapons are currently what we are seeing emerge as options that are a bit too strong for the health of the game. We’ll give you detailed patch notes on what we decide to do with them once we are ready for a live balancing push.
What’s Next? As you may know from our roadmap, we are working on two future updates currently. The first one, in June, will include Heat 2.0 as well as a few other quality of life and fun surprises. Beyond that, we are hard at work on the next seasonal update which we will slowly start unveiling more about as we get closer this Summer.
In the meantime, here’s a look at something we discussed a good while ago. One of the big pieces of feedback we received as far back as the Alpha was that players wanted more information about their builds. We rolled out damage numbers in the training range and pre-game with Catalog 1, but this is the next step in giving you detailed stats on your choices. Here’s the weapon menu rework for the agent select!
We look forward to diving deeper into upcoming content with you all soon. In the meanwhile, have a great weekend!
Small Update Adds Balance Changes and Authentication Issue Fix
Agents, the balance changes from the previous hotfix are now live via a backend update. PC agents can also expect a small update to address the authentication issue that was being reported.
Deceive Inc. Hotfix 1.06.02
New patch, new patch notes. Welcome back agents!
The team has been working hard to bring this patch together following the tracking of multiple issues and the analysis of the overall balance since the launch of Misery Empire. This hotfix is full of fixes for top issues and some pretty major rebalancing on a wide selection of characters that we hope you’ll be very happy with.
Once again, thank you for your continued feedback and your diligence in reporting issues back to us. Keep it coming! Without further ado, let's dive into the details.
General Changes
Performance work and stability Continued work on optimization for better performance on a wide variety of hardware. We have more of this coming along in the next patches so this is mostly an iterative step on the goal of better performance on every platform.
Weapon Sound Tweaks Adjustments to weapon sounds have been made all around. Guards' weapons were audible from way too far compared to most spies leading to easy pinpointing of far away enemies. Overall, spies with the loudest weapons have been tuned down slightly to make the difference in audible range less of a huge gap between all spies.
Keycard Visual Changes Changes to the keycard VFX to make them easier to parse for colorblind players and bring the security rank iconography in the VFX itself.
Server Side Changes We’ve been actively making adjustments to player spawns behind the scene since the Steam free weekend. We are still monitoring player start locations that are too close for comfort, but are confident that the situation is getting much better. We will continue to update them live in between patches so please keep the reports coming if you experience an unfair spawn.
Additionally, work has been going into matchmaking to resolve issues with launch queue time and reduce matchmaking time overall. We are making good progress on that front and some of that progress is already in the game right now.
General Balance
Status Effects We are starting this update with changes to two status effects. Let's dive into the details.
Resistant Resistant has long been a subject of discussion in balance talks around Chavez. The arrival of Red only magnified this and it’s clear that this effect is too big of a differential in combat. As such, we are lowering the damage mitigation it offers by 20%.
Damage Reduction: 60% ⇒ 40%
Heartbreak Red’s charm ability is an interesting one. While the charm side of things is acting as intended, the penalty for breaking that charm yourself is currently too low, making shooting almost always the best course of action. On top of this, the 25% value made almost no difference in actual shot to kill calculations for Red’s arsenal, leading it to being an underwhelming ability.
While this might seem like a big jump in theory, in practice this effect requires a lot of setup and voluntary action from the victim, making it much harder to pull off than Ace’s version of the vulnerable status effect. We’ll monitor the effect this has on Red’s gameplan.
Damage Multiplier: 25% ⇒ 35%
Agents Balance
Red Red definitely made some waves with her arrival. Now that the dust has settled we have a clearer picture of where she stands. Our current stance is as follows: Red is extremely strong in a single very specific build and pretty middle of the pack in all others. With this update we are toning down slightly her strongest configuration (Leaning on the resistant status effect with her expertise mod 1) and making headway into making other aspects of her build competitive.
Weapons The Jack of heart is the uncontested champion of Red’s arsenal currently. We are toning down its fire rate extremely slightly, but mostly buffing her base weapon to be more competitive. Base: Heartbreaker
Damage: 8 ⇒ 9
Fire Rate: 5.75⇒ 6
Mod 1: Jack of Heart
Fire Rate: 2 ⇒ 1.9
Mod 2: Lovebite
A previous WIP version of the notes noted a nerf on this weapon. This was a mistake. This weapon will see no change in the hotfix.
Passive This is really the central part of making Red feeling too strong. Reducing the duration of the buff after recovering coupled with the change to resistant itself should make Red less of a tank and stay more like a well timed damage mitigation if someone decides to attack you right after spending your expertise. Base: Makeover
Reduced Resistant Duration: 4s ⇒ 2.5s
Cavalière Our recent nerfs to Cavalière did a great job of tuning down her oppressiveness. Maybe too much. We are tuning some elements back up to her kit and keeping a close watch on how she performs for future tweaks.
Weapons We are giving back a bit of ammo to Cav's dragoons to allow her to spray away a bit more with her base option before reloading. Base: Dragoons
Mag Size: 14 ⇒16
Expertise We recently fixed a bug that made some Cavalière clues stay active for longer than intended. By fixing this, we discovered that the base duration for Cavalière investigation is a bit too tight for comfort, making it less useful than it should be. Base: Investigation
Valid Clues Time: 30s ⇒ 60s
Chavez Chavez is very strong currently. His base weapon lacks a clear use case against his two mods and the resistant status effect has made him a very tough agent to contend with. We are tweaking his weapon mods to make them less of a direct upgrade to the base and more of side grades to his playstyle.
We’ll keep monitoring Chavez closely to see how he performs in the future.
Weapons Mod 1: Vigilante
Fire Rate: 2.2 ⇒ 1.9
Damage: 22.5 - ⇒ 22
Limb Multiplier: 0.75 ⇒ 0.9
Mod 2: Duke
Fire rate 0.85 ⇒0 .75
Madame Xiu Madame Xiu has been under the radar for a bit. In this update we are giving her a healthy buff to her fighting prowess to give her more of a chance against the rest of the cast. Weapons
Base: Zhulong
Fire Rate: 5.75 ⇒5.5
Damage: 9 ⇒ 10
Mod 1: Longshen
Damage: 10 per shot/30 total ⇒ 12 per shot/36 total
Limb Multiplier: 0.75 ⇒ 0.9
Squire In the spirit of diminishing the overall impact of damage reduction on gameplay, we are slightly lowering the window in which squire is resistant to damage after a cover blow with the Aegis Cover passive.
Passive Mod 2: Aegis Cover
Duration: 2s ⇒ 1.7s
Larcin Larcin is doing extremely well with his recent changes and we won’t be making major changes to his kit overall. Weapons Cadence is currently an underwhelming option in Larcin’s weapon stable and we hope to make it a more appealing choice with these tweaks. Mod 1: Cadence
Delay Between Bursts: 0.4 ⇒ 0.375
Damage: 10 per shot/20 total ⇒ 12 per shot/24 total
Expertise This one might be a bit unpopular. While we really like the creativity of the strategy of jumping to peak out of Larcin’s smoke bomb, we had to come to the conclusion that its widespread use is negatively affecting gameplay. We are looking at a rework of how this ability works in the future to allow this kind of creative strategy in a more balanced manner, but in the meantime we had to make the call to raise the zone’s height. Mod 1: Smoke Bomb
Increased Height to prevent jump peeks.
Hans Did we hear Buff hans? Hans has been doing much better according to our analytics since the release of Misery Empire. We are still making a bit more tweaks to get him in a better place with more variety of weapon choices.
Weapons Currently, Hans base weapon is his worst option. We are buffing it’s fire rate to make it more reliable and less punitive on partial hits. For the Jab, we are toning down the headshot multiplier in ADS as its firing speed could lead to very oppressive melting speeds on out of cover spies. We are also giving the uppercut’s ads more of a “precision weapon” identity with chunkier headshots. Base: Hook
Fire Rate 1.2 ⇒ 1.25
Adjusted spread to be a bit more permissive for hits.
Mod 1: Jab
ADS Crit Multiplier 1.75 ⇒ 1.5
Mod 2: Uppercut
ADS Crit Multiplier 1.75 ⇒ 2
Yu-mi After a long session of lo-fi beat study, Yu-Mi has gathered new-found strength. We are giving her a bit more versatility in close range fights, adjustments to her healing bubble and a sizable buff to the booby trap passive to enable all-new playstyles.
Weapons With her charge speeds a bit longer than before, Yu-mi has been having trouble in frantic fights. We are giving her more damage on uncharged shots but also buffing her charged shot on her base weapon to make it more competitive. Base: Tactical Slingshot
Uncharged Damage 20 ⇒22
Charged Damage: 30 ⇒33
Mod 2: Longshot:
Uncharged 15 ⇒18
Expertise A minor tweak to damage dealt by the EMP bubble on impact makes it a slightly better engagement tool to start a fight. We are also making the delay before healing kicks back in the healing bubble shorter to make it more reliable in a pinch. EMP Blast and EMP Flock
Bubble projectile damage if shot directly at a enemy raised 12.5 ⇒ 15
Healing Bubble:
Reducing time before being able to heal again after taking damage by 30%.
Passive Booby Trap was always an appealing ability in theory, but underwhelming in practice. We are expanding all aspects of the bubbles left by the ability to make it a potent blocker to agents chasing you and a versatile tool to create bubbles by destroying your own gadgets. Booby Trap:
The size of bubbles created when gadgets are destroyed is larger and lasts longer.
Gadget Balance While we are looking for more wide ranging changes to gadgets balances, this hotfix is not the place for it. We are focusing on reigning the umbrella for now.
Umbrella Shield The shield has been quite oppressive when in the hands of highly skilled players and while we want it to remain a strong option, it’s a bit too strong currently. The tweaks we are making here are probably not the full solution to tweaking the shield. We will probably need to make deeper changes to how it works in the future, but we still wanted to make smaller changes in the short term to make it a bit more manageable
Deployed shield pickup time no longer affected by hack speed up powerup.
Deployed shield pickup time raised slightly to make it a bit more of a commitment during a fight.
Bug Fixes
Top Issues
Fixed a bug that allowed the use of the sprint button in mid-air to gain more speed. Your air speed will now be based on your speed on the ground when starting a jump. A running start will keep running speed.
Fixed several achievements that would not unlock when meeting requirements.
Characters
Yu-mi
Yu-mi’s booby trap ability no longer pauses her bubble cooldown when activated.
Yu-mi’s cooldown now starts when her bubble is finished instead of during it to prevent multiple overlapping bubbles.
Fixed an issue leading to Yu-Mi’s slingshot getting stuck in charge animation when chaining multiple quick shots.
Red
Fixed clipping issues on Red’s skins.
Fixed Red and her allies not playing the healing VFX when using her expertise mod 1.
Xiu
Fixed Xiu’s mastery skin having a twisted wrist.
Ace
Adjusted animation transitions on ads to cover idles for Ace.
Levels
Silver Reef
Fixed collision in Silver Reef allowing a peek at a vault terminal.
Fragrant Shores
Fixed collision issue on Fragrant shore small trees that would block players and shots.
Fixed multiple issues allowing players to clip into walls.
Hard Sell
Fixed collision issue in Hard Sell auction hall, allowing to see through the roof with a drone.
Diamond Spire
Fixed windows disappearing in Diamond Spire Vault room at certain settings.
General
Fixed an issue that caused the npc of a player that used a bounce mat in the past to visibly jump in-mid air when appearing in another player’s line of sight.
Fixed interacts that were not supposed to be affected by the increased hack speed powerup leading to instant interacts.
Better handling of npcs bumping into doors they do not have access to.
Fixed multiple clipping issues on a variety of npcs.
Fixed an issue that caused npc to slide around stuck in a social interaction animation.
Fixed an issue where players names would be replaced by “WWWWW” when leaving a team match
Fixed agent eyes appearing as transparent on player portrait at low setting
Fixed NPC animation stuttering when traced from far away.
Fixed Calling Cards previews appearing at low resolution in catalog.
Fixed Ink preview reflections looking different from in-game in the main menu.
Fixed players being able to open loot briefcases while queuing, leading to missing the opening on match start.
Fixed Larcin’s catalog skin not working properly with items in hand while in-game.
Fixed Hans expertise projectile being visible through walls.
Fixed an issue that led to cover accelerator powerup having additive effect when a player was resurrected.
Fixed umbrella shield not keeping damages from allies when grabbed and redeployed, leading it to be full health.
Fixed stuttering caused by changing cover due to social interactions refreshing.
Fixed issues with goo-pod vfx not replicating correctly in some situations.
Fix for scrambler breaking intel visual.
Fixed Ann Civilian NPC variation having her neck broken in most animations.
Fixed Field Upgrades chest disappearing when opened at a certain distance and FOV.
What’s next? We’ve talked in length about the changes we are working on for the heat system and this is currently our priority for the next update coming down the line. The changes involved are too big to risk bringing into a hotfix for stability reasons so hang tight for those.
We’ll also be shipping other changes with the heat system that we hope you’ll find exciting. We’ll bring you an in-depth dive on these changes and additions as we get a bit closer to that patch.
Work In Progress May Hotfix Changelog
Agents,
We are expecting to release the May hotfix in the coming days as indicated on the updated Development Priorities Roadmap. The following is a Work In Progress (WIP) of that changelog, so please keep in mind that it is subject to change with items being added or removed before its official release in the days ahead.
General Changes
Performance work and stability Continued work on optimization for better performance on a wide variety of hardware. We have more of this coming along in the next patches so this is mostly an iterative step on the goal of better performance on every platform.
Weapon Sound Tweaks Adjustments to weapon sounds have been made all around. Guards' weapons were audible from way too far compared to most spies leading to easy pinpointing of far away enemies. Overall, spies with the loudest weapons have been tuned down slightly to make the difference in audible range less of a huge gap between all spies.
Keycard Visual Changes Changes to the keycard VFX to make them easier to parse for colorblind players and bring the security rank iconography in the VFX itself.
Server Side Changes We’ve been actively making adjustments to player spawns behind the scene since the Steam free weekend. We are still monitoring player start locations that are too close for comfort, but are confident that the situation is getting much better. We will continue to update them live in between patches so please keep the reports coming if you experience an unfair spawn.
Additionally, work has been going into matchmaking to resolve issues with launch queue time and reduce matchmaking time overall. We are making good progress on that front and some of that progress is already in the game right now.
General Balance
Status Effects We are starting this update with changes to two status effects. Let's dive into the details.
Resistant Resistant has long been a subject of discussion in balance talks around Chavez. The arrival of Red only magnified this and it’s clear that this effect is too big of a differential in combat. As such, we are lowering the damage mitigation it offers by 20%.
Damage Reduction: 60% ⇒ 40%
Heartbreak Red’s charm ability is an interesting one. While the charm side of things is acting as intended, the penalty for breaking that charm yourself is currently too low, making shooting almost always the best course of action. On top of this, the 25% value made almost no difference in actual shot to kill calculations for Red’s arsenal, leading it to being an underwhelming ability.
While this might seem like a big jump in theory, in practice this effect requires a lot of setup and voluntary action from the victim, making it much harder to pull off than Ace’s version of the vulnerable status effect. We’ll monitor the effect this has on Red’s gameplan.
Damage Multiplier: 25% ⇒ 35%
Agents Balance
Red Red definitely made some waves with her arrival. Now that the dust has settled we have a clearer picture of where she stands. Our current stance is as follows: Red is extremely strong in a single very specific build and pretty middle of the pack in all others. With this update we are toning down slightly her strongest configuration (Leaning on the resistant status effect with her expertise mod 1) and making headway into making other aspects of her build competitive.
Weapons The Jack of heart is the uncontested champion of Red’s arsenal currently. We are toning down its fire rate extremely slightly, but mostly buffing her base weapon to be more competitive. We are also making a slight adjustment to her shotgun to fit the new Heartbreak effect damage better. Base: Heartbreaker
Damage: 8 ⇒ 9
Fire Rate: 5.75⇒ 6
Mod 1: Jack of Heart
Fire Rate: 2 ⇒ 1.9
Mod 2: Loverbite
Damage: 40 ⇒ 38 (All Pellets Hit)
Fire Rate: 1 ⇒ 0.95
Passive This is really the central part of making Red feeling too strong. Reducing the duration of the buff after recovering coupled with the change to resistant itself should make Red less of a tank and stay more like a well timed damage mitigation if someone decides to attack you right after spending your expertise. Base: Makeover
Reduced Resistant Duration: 4s ⇒ 2.5s
Cavalière Our recent nerfs to Cavalière did a great job of tuning down her oppressiveness. Maybe too much. We are tuning some elements back up to her kit and keeping a close watch on how she performs for future tweaks.
Weapons We are giving back a bit of ammo to Cav's dragoons to allow her to spray away a bit more with her base option before reloading. Base: Dragoons
Mag Size: 14 ⇒16
Expertise We recently fixed a bug that made some Cavalière clues stay active for longer than intended. By fixing this, we discovered that the base duration for Cavalière investigation is a bit too tight for comfort, making it less useful than it should be. Base: Investigation
Valid Clues Time: 30s ⇒ 60s
Chavez Chavez is very strong currently. His base weapon lacks a clear use case against his two mods and the resistant status effect has made him a very tough agent to contend with. We are tweaking his weapon mods to make them less of a direct upgrade to the base and more of side grades to his playstyle.
We’ll keep monitoring Chavez closely to see how he performs in the future.
Weapons Mod 1: Vigilante
Fire Rate: 2.2 ⇒ 1.9
Damage: 22.5 - ⇒ 22
Limb Multiplier: 0.75 ⇒ 0.9
Mod 2: Duke
Fire rate 0.85 ⇒0 .75
Madame Xiu Madame Xiu has been under the radar for a bit. In this update we are giving her a healthy buff to her fighting prowess to give her more of a chance against the rest of the cast. Weapons
Base: Zhulong
Fire Rate: 5.75 ⇒5.5
Damage: 9 ⇒ 10
Mod 1: Longshen
Damage: 10 per shot/30 total ⇒ 12 per shot/36 total
Limb Multiplier: 0.75 ⇒ 0.9
Squire In the spirit of diminishing the overall impact of damage reduction on gameplay, we are slightly lowering the window in which squire is resistant to damage after a cover blow with the Aegis Cover passive.
Passive Mod 2: Aegis Cover
Duration: 2s ⇒ 1.7s
Larcin Larcin is doing extremely well with his recent changes and we won’t be making major changes to his kit overall. Weapons Cadence is currently an underwhelming option in Larcin’s weapon stable and we hope to make it a more appealing choice with these tweaks. Mod 1: Cadence
Delay Between Bursts: 0.4 ⇒ 0.375
Damage: 10 per shot/20 total ⇒ 12 per shot/24 total
Expertise This one might be a bit unpopular. While we really like the creativity of the strategy of jumping to peak out of Larcin’s smoke bomb, we had to come to the conclusion that its widespread use is negatively affecting gameplay. We are looking at a rework of how this ability works in the future to allow this kind of creative strategy in a more balanced manner, but in the meantime we had to make the call to raise the zone’s height. Mod 1: Smoke Bomb
Increased Height to prevent jump peeks.
Hans Did we hear Buff hans? Hans has been doing much better according to our analytics since the release of Misery Empire. We are still making a bit more tweaks to get him in a better place with more variety of weapon choices.
Weapons Currently, Hans base weapon is his worst option. We are buffing it’s fire rate to make it more reliable and less punitive on partial hits. For the Jab, we are toning down the headshot multiplier in ADS as its firing speed could lead to very oppressive melting speeds on out of cover spies. We are also giving the uppercut’s ads more of a “precision weapon” identity with chunkier headshots. Base: Hook
Fire Rate 1.2 ⇒ 1.25
Adjusted spread to be a bit more permissive for hits.
Mod 1: Jab
ADS Crit Multiplier 1.75 ⇒ 1.5
Mod 2: Uppercut
ADS Crit Multiplier 1.75 ⇒ 2
Yu-mi After a long session of lo-fi beat study, Yu-Mi has gathered new-found strength. We are giving her a bit more versatility in close range fights, adjustments to her healing bubble and a sizable buff to the booby trap passive to enable all-new playstyles.
Weapons With her charge speeds a bit longer than before, Yu-mi has been having trouble in frantic fights. We are giving her more damage on uncharged shots but also buffing her charged shot on her base weapon to make it more competitive. Base: Tactical Slingshot
Uncharged Damage 20 ⇒22
Charged Damage: 30 ⇒33
Mod 2: Longshot:
Uncharged 15 ⇒18
Expertise A minor tweak to damage dealt by the EMP bubble on impact makes it a slightly better engagement tool to start a fight. We are also making the delay before healing kicks back in the healing bubble shorter to make it more reliable in a pinch. EMP Blast and EMP Flock
Bubble projectile damage if shot directly at a enemy raised 12.5 ⇒ 15
Healing Bubble:
Reducing time before being able to heal again after taking damage by 30%.
Passive Booby Trap was always an appealing ability in theory, but underwhelming in practice. We are expanding all aspects of the bubbles left by the ability to make it a potent blocker to agents chasing you and a versatile tool to create bubbles by destroying your own gadgets. Booby Trap:
The size of bubbles created when gadgets are destroyed is larger and lasts longer.
Gadget Balance While we are looking for more wide ranging changes to gadgets balances, this hotfix is not the place for it. We are focusing on reigning the umbrella for now.
Umbrella Shield The shield has been quite oppressive when in the hands of highly skilled players and while we want it to remain a strong option, it’s a bit too strong currently. The tweaks we are making here are probably not the full solution to tweaking the shield. We will probably need to make deeper changes to how it works in the future, but we still wanted to make smaller changes in the short term to make it a bit more manageable
Deployed shield pickup time no longer affected by hack speed up powerup.
Deployed shield pickup time raised slightly to make it a bit more of a commitment during a fight.
Bug Fixes
Top Issues
Fixed a bug that allowed the use of the sprint button in mid-air to gain more speed. Your air speed will now be based on your speed on the ground when starting a jump. A running start will keep running speed.
Fixed several achievements that would not unlock when meeting requirements.
Characters
Yu-mi
Yu-mi’s booby trap ability no longer pauses her bubble cooldown when activated.
Yu-mi’s cooldown now starts when her bubble is finished instead of during it to prevent multiple overlapping bubbles.
Fixed an issue leading to Yu-Mi’s slingshot getting stuck in charge animation when chaining multiple quick shots.
Red
Fixed clipping issues on Red’s skins.
Fixed Red and her allies not playing the healing VFX when using her expertise mod 1.
Xiu
Fixed Xiu’s mastery skin having a twisted wrist.
Ace
Adjusted animation transitions on ads to cover idles for Ace.
Levels
Silver Reef
Fixed collision in Silver Reef allowing a peek at a vault terminal.
Fragrant Shores
Fixed collision issue on Fragrant shore small trees that would block players and shots.
Fixed multiple issues allowing players to clip into walls.
Hard Sell
Fixed collision issue in Hard Sell auction hall, allowing to see through the roof with a drone.
Diamond Spire
Fixed windows disappearing in Diamond Spire Vault room at certain settings.
General
Fixed an issue that caused the npc of a player that used a bounce mat in the past to visibly jump in-mid air when appearing in another player’s line of sight.
Fixed interacts that were not supposed to be affected by the increased hack speed powerup leading to instant interacts.
Better handling of npcs bumping into doors they do not have access to.
Fixed multiple clipping issues on a variety of npcs.
Fixed an issue that caused npc to slide around stuck in a social interaction animation.
Fixed an issue where players names would be replaced by “WWWWW” when leaving a team match
Fixed agent eyes appearing as transparent on player portrait at low setting
Fixed NPC animation stuttering when traced from far away.
Fixed Calling Cards previews appearing at low resolution in catalog.
Fixed Ink preview reflections looking different from in-game in the main menu.
Fixed players being able to open loot briefcases while queuing, leading to missing the opening on match start.
Fixed Larcin’s catalog skin not working properly with items in hand while in-game.
Fixed Hans expertise projectile being visible through walls.
Fixed an issue that led to cover accelerator powerup having additive effect when a player was resurrected.
Fixed umbrella shield not keeping damages from allies when grabbed and redeployed, leading it to be full health.
Fixed stuttering caused by changing cover due to social interactions refreshing.
Fixed issues with goo-pod vfx not replicating correctly in some situations.
Fix for scrambler breaking intel visual.
Fixed Ann Civilian NPC variation having her neck broken in most animations.
Fixed Field Upgrades chest disappearing when opened at a certain distance and FOV.
Once this hotfix reaches Agents in the wild, we'll be talking more about what to expect in the Mid-Season Update, such as details on the changing Heat System and more. We'll kick this off with another developer Q&A stream shortly after this update is released.
