Increased the range on the Brawler's pull ability from 15km to 25km to match that of its Harpoon.
Fixes
Re-enabled some of the CODA voiceover lines.
Added a fix for the events progression issue not gifting Event Rewards once an event has successfully completed.
Experiment: 2k MMR Cap Removal
Greetings Captains,
We have initiated another experiment for Matchmaking/MMR, which is to completely remove the 2K MMR cap, meaning skilled players will be able to achieve a higher MMR.
It's important to note, we do not expect this to impact matchmaking times for Bracket 2 (neither negatively or positively), however, we do anticipate this helping the game balancer to create a much more balanced match.
To give an example, there are currently players at 2K MMR who are simply better than this rating indicates, which means the game balancer is unable to take their skill fully into account. With no cap, the game balancer can differentiate between the skilled and the highly skilled, to ensure the match is better balanced for everyone. On the flip side, this does mean that higher MMR players are more likely to be split when grouping, however, the split mechanic is a temporary feature until we push for more players.
The previous test is still ongoing, so there are still two Brackets instead of four, with the cap at 1200 MMR to get into the second Bracket.
Hotfix - 3.6.01
Greetings Captains,
We have released a small hot fix to address some of the issues we've seen so far:
Fixed Automatic Point Defence taking you out of cloak if you activated cloak in the time between a missile being fired at you and the point defence being activated.
Fixed an issue where the launcher was able to spawn multiple instances of the client before disappearing.
Fixed comparison screen breaking when selecting compare best stats
We have also added custom key bindings for recalling individual squads (RecallSquad1, RecallSquad2 and RecallSquad3). These are optional bindings which are unbound by default, players can change the bindings within the Options menu.
Update 3.6 - 10th August 2017
Free Rotation
We are introducing a free rotation of ships that will be available for all players to use, regardless of whether they have the ships unlocked. Every two weeks, the two Medium ships will rotate, on the fourth week both the Medium, Heavies and Healers will rotate.
While ships are on free rotation, either their Mercury, Maia or Jupiter skin will be available to buy in the store, depending on the manufacturer (only available for ships currently on rotation). The skin will be available on its own as well as part of a discounted bundle that includes the ship.
Ship Prices
The platinum cost of each ship has been flattened to 990 Platinum, so this means that the Prototype and Production ships are now cheaper, while the Vintage and Classic lines have gone up in price. With this in mind, the credit prices of all ships have been increased across the board to the following:
We have removed the initial 30-60 day reward trees in favour of the 7 Day reward scheme. Players who are already on either of the previous trees will be able to continue their progress until they reach day 30 or 60, they will then transition to the 7 days rewards which have been adjusted to:
Day 1 - 3000 credits
Day 2 - 4200 credits
Day 3 - 5400 credits
Day 4 - 7200 credits
Day 5 - 9000 credits
Day 6 - 30 platinum
Day 7 - 50 platinum
This adjustment to the daily rewards is in preparation for the all new Missions and Campaigns, where players will be able to earn more rewards; due for release within the next update.
New Results Screen
The first pass of our new Results Screen features 4 tabs:
Results – A simplified breakdown of what you just earned. It shows Credit/XP earnings and includes a section at the bottom for “milestones” that shows rewards you received for completed missions or player level-ups. (Medal milestones and Crew level-ups will be added to this section soon).
Scoreboard – A dedicated page for the scoreboard which features new MVP Awards.
Takedown MVP – Highest Takedowns in the game. In the event of a tie Damage Dealt decides the MVP.
Support MVP – Highest Support Points in the game. In the event of a tie Healing Done decides the MVP.
Captures MVP – Highest Captures in the game. In the event of a tie, Mining Freighters Destroyed decides the MVP.
Breakdown – A full breakdown of stats from the game including the ability to compare your stats with other players in the game.
Progress – A screen dedicated to showing any progress you made in the game.
For this release you’ll see the XP you earned for your crew. Mission progress and medal progress will be added to this screen soon.
Loading Screens
Ship specific loading screens have been given a makeover, now featuring animated schematics
Career Stats Page
We have added tracking for a lot of new stats which have enabled us to expand the Career Stats page. Your performance is now tracked in much greater detail.
Stats are now tracked separately per ship, per game mode and per game type. You can choose to display your stats as career totals or average per game. For example: if you want to look up your average stats for the Enforcer in Conquest PVP you can now do that!
You can also directly compare your performance in different ships by selecting a second ship on the right.
Career Medals
A couple of patches ago we introduced the first of the new Career Medals featuring Credit rewards for hitting milestones. Now that we have expanded the stat tracking you’ll find we’ve added a lot more medals to earn, with more rewards to help you on the way to your next unlock.
Death Screen Revamp
The Death Recap screen has seen some improvements. After your ship is destroyed you will now see a minimal Death Recap which shows the enemy that scored the killing blow and a hint about how to deal with their ship:
Pressing Space will expand to the full Death Recap which shows detailed information about the enemy ship including loadouts and crew that are equipped.
Note: The full Death recap will be receiving mouse functionality which will allow you to get additional information (implants equipped, loadout descriptions) and also switch to show information about any of the ships that assisted in the Takedown. Coming soon.
Simplified Hangar Display
When looking at stats of a particular ship, players will be shown a much more precise bar, rather than the circles we previously had. This makes it much easier to compare between other ships, and understand the ship's main strengths and weaknesses.
New Conquest Tutorial
The new tutorial is a guided playthrough of Conquest. Commander Flynn takes you through the essentials of piloting your ship as well as the important features of the Conquest game mode.
Simplified New Player Flow
When launching Fractured Space for the first time new players will load straight into the new Conquest tutorial.
Completing the tutorial will unlock Conquest to play solo (although players are free to invite friends into their game at this stage).
The first solo game will also feature a Drafting tutorial, explaining how it works.
Finishing that first solo game will advance players to level 3 where Quickplay becomes available.
Implants For New Players
New players will now receive a set of default implants that are automatically equipped in their crew. The default implant set will feature a selection of existing implants – new players will no longer be at a statistical disadvantage when facing players who have unlocked implants.
All players will receive this default implant set when the patch goes live, if you already own the implants in the default set they will burn for 600 DNA as normal with duplicate implants.
Frontline Retired
After receiving some great feedback from players, we have decided to retire Frontline from the Quickplay and PvP queues for now. The game mode is still available in Custom Match, and may return in the future.
A.I Captain Improvements
A.I Captains will no longer jump in on the enemy side of Gamma.
Lower level A.I have been improved and will pose more of a challenge – they will reassess their objective priorities and target priorities more often and will be more aggressive.
Difficulty scales more gradually from the new (slightly harder) level 1 A.I to level 10 A.I
Point Defense Changes
Point Defense has been reworked: Missiles that are damaged by PD but not destroyed will now deal reduced damage.
We have also introduced a new loadout option for all ships - Automated Point Defense. It is a little less flexible than Manual PD, for example it won’t shoot at enemy Capital Ships or missiles targeting your allies. This loadout is selectable from the Drafting screen before a match.
Automatic Point Defense works as follows:
Turns on automatically to fire at incoming missiles and squadrons that are attacking your ship.
Uses zero energy.
Deals a little less damage than Manual PD.
Impact Decals Added
Impact decals is a form of armor feedback when playing in a match. When hitting an enemy's armor plating, you will now see a blue decal on impact until you penetrate the armor. This should help communicate the armor system a little better.
Players will be able to toggle the density of this feature within the Options Menu under "Impact Decals Density".
New Ship Destruction
With the new ship destruction we will no longer see destroyed ships going grey and then dissolving. Instead, the ship will disintegrate after exploding, with some ships parts of the hull will begin to separate too; we will be adding this to more ships in the future.
Re-Worked Leviathan & Raven
Launcher
Starting Fractured Space from Steam will now open a new launcher. The launcher features options for running the game in Desktop Mode/Laptop Mode, general graphics options, and will even offer French Keyboard support.
Balance Changes
Brawler
Fixed the Brawler's pull ability turning off when a ship enters the minimum pull range.
Increased the pull power of the Brawler's pull ability to 900 (up from 750).
Decreased the Brawler's pull energy usage to 250/s (down from 350/s).
Increased the range on the Brawler's pull ability from 15km to 25km to match that of its Harpoon.
Watchman
Turn acceleration increased to 0.77 (up from 0.44) to match that of the Guardian.
Reverse speed also increased to match the Guardian (262.5 m/s, up from 250 m/s).
Charge time on the Watchman's Charge Cannon decreased to 3 seconds (down from 4 seconds).
Guardian
Long Range cannon: reduced the Engine Shutdown effect from 2.5 to 1.75s
Game
Purely offensive drones (such as Syphon Drones, Ion Drones etc) will now seek out the nearest enemy target if their current target dies/cloaks or jumps out rather than going on cooldown. If no valid target is in the sector then they will still have no choice but to go on cooldown.
Enabled a second jump point when jumping from Gamma to Alpha or Beta.
Group splitting has been turned back on for Bracket 2, splits will occur if the MMR difference between the two teams is above 1000.
Bug Fixes
Centurion Hull Strength in UI corrected - did read 15000, now correctly reads 13500.
Tagged the gun barrel of the Reaper Scythe Turret to not draw in game
Executioner Gauss Cannon has misc (buoys) tagged in it's Small ships warhead meaning it did 10 extra points of damage to buoys than it should. Now corrected.
Improvements to lighting optimization.
Fix for skills display not showing.
Fix for double timer display.
Endeavor turret display is now hidden when the map is visible.
Protaganist Crew Animation is now implemented.
Fixed an issue related to the Options menu removing the values of the user selectable options.
Fix for a soft lock in the Hangar.
Fixed the 'Slow' crew voiceover lines being triggered when Infiltrator's Ion Drones are applied to a target (despite the target not being slowed).
Reduced icon size in HUD tag skill widget to fit inside circle.
Fix for displaying ship name in HUD tag options display.
Fixed an issue where purchasing a loadout item after selecting a bundle purchase from the hangar would break the UI.
Fixed a bug where the checkboxes wouldn't be re-enabled when the player leaves QuickPlay PVP Bracket.
Fixed a bug which would sometimes cause a double purchase to happen.
Fix for display of skills bar in HUD menu options display.
Fixed a material so the gamma planet will not change color any more (the asteroids will still change). This should fix cases of multiple Gamma 3’s causing screen whiteout.
Removed server options from quick play PVP lobby.
AI Captain auto-fill now clears when changing lobby.
Fixed bug where some new users could get stuck in the purchase enforcer step under certain edge case conditions.
Re-implemented vertex painting on homebase, so that it melts slightly (instead of completely) in end matinee.
Added a check in to see if the bundle for a purchasable ship exists.
Fixed an issue where new players were not able to accept invites at the start of first time user flow.
Fixed an issue where swapping A.I Captains in the Custom games lobby wouldn't place one of them on the other team.
Fixed rendering issue when dragging a player over the host.
Fixed issue with level reward not disappearing if you hadn't watched the conquest video.
Fixed issue where daily mission drop pods had missing images.
Fixed an issue where a player would try and quit out of a game with an overlay visible, it would block the quit dialog from showing.
Fixed all Black Widow rocket variants having recoil that the ship would never recover from. All rocket variants no longer have any recoil.
Fixed a crash when going into the game while holding down certain keys.
Removed the Loading Screen Tips from the Options Menu.
Corrected a visual bug with Void Rocket turrets.
When a player is in the Tutorial the 'Owned Ships' tab will only display the Pioneer and any ships on Free Rotation.
Improved styling of update options in game.
Changes to HUD tag display defaults and hiding of skills bar on non-ship targets.
Changed color of enemy names in tab screen ship detail display to enemy color.
Updated tab screen ship detail section.
Increased amount of time before the chat UI is hidden after user input stops - now 20s.
Increased size of skills on target after feedback.
Updated styling on tab screen loadouts.
Fixed the VFX for the Paragon's Detect Buoy detect pulse not matching up with the DETECTED status effect the buoy provides.
Fixed a bug where a disconnected player can get a random ship picked by the Randomizer.
Fixed the Aegis's Blink shift image always facing in the direction you shoot the buoy (it now mimics the ship's orientation properly).
Fix for not being able to alt f4 on the daily reward screen.
The skills bar will no longer disappear when looking away from targeted ship.
Fixed Guardian's Blink Buoy triggering buff/positive VO on enemies rather than debuff/negative VO.
Fixed crash due to missing null check.
Fixed logspam caused by an 'upgrade tree not available' error. This has potential to improve performance for some users.
The implants negative values were displayed using a double negative sign. Now the values are displayed correctly.
Fixed a number of loading screen text issues.
On player disconnect, replacement A.I Captains can no longer pick random ships - they just get the pioneer.
Enforcer boost effects should last the correct duration for the boost.
Fixed bug where if the player quits the Tutorial, they were never returned to the front end.
Captain's Log - 007
Greetings Captains,
We're back with the Captain's log to let you know what we've been up to this week.
Matchmaking Experiments
Last week we began doing some matchmaking experiments to the live build, the changes we made were the following:
- Reduced the number of Brackets to 2 instead of 4
- Increased the MMR entry level to Bracket 2 to 1300 MMR
This is the first of the experiments we will be trialing over the course of the next couple of months, and we will be looking to get your feedback on how your queue times and match quality has been with the changes. We anticipate with the changes made recently, players in Bracket 1 will have quicker matchmaking times to get them into games quickly, therefore learning the game at a faster, more enjoyable pace; whereas players in Bracket 2 will have higher quality matches with a smaller MMR pool to pick from, without increasing their wait times drastically (although Bracket 2 matchmaking times are a real concern at the moment).
The experiments will last a couple of weeks each, depending on the data we see. For example, we have already changed the Bracket 2 entry level to 1200 MMR after seeing the data on queue times for these players.
We will keep you up to date when we make changes to the current experiment, when it ends, and when a new one begins.
Update
The studio have been hard at work getting the final finishing touches to the next update into a release candidate. QA are currently "testing their socks off", making sure everything is in good working order for a release this week. As always though we cannot guarantee when the update will be out, we'd like to release this week but we can never rule out something going wrong in game development! And we are not prepared to release a half working build.
Don't forget this update will include the store changes, so if you're planning on buying any of the Vintage or Classic ship lines, get them in now before they increase in price. Likewise, if you're thinking of buying a Production or Prototype ship with Platinum, wait until the price change is in effect and you'll save yourself some money.
That's it from us, see you in the fight!
Gold Rush Weekend - Starts 28th July 2017
Reinforce your crew this weekend - open a Gold Daily Drop Pod and get a guaranteed crew template and 3,000 DNA to unlock it. You can even open any Gold Pods you have in your inventory and get even more crew (any duplicates will burn to DNA as usual).
Any Gold pod opened between 5pm UTC on Friday July 28 and 5pm UTC on Monday July 31 will give these rewards.
Silver and Bronze Drop Pods are not affected.
Ship Stats - Last 31 Days, 3v3 and more
Greetings Captains,
It's been quite some time since we looked at the Ship Win Rates. Today I will be detailing the Ship Win Rates from the last 31 days as well as be showing the Ship Win Rates 31 days before the rework of the Watchman, Guardian, and Overseer so we can see what effect, if any, this rework has brought to the table for these ships. This can be found on the full article on our website here
First, We let veteran player and Fractured Space streamer, Xerid have a little look at the 3v3 stats since it rolled out over the last couple of weeks to give a little player insight into the 6 player mode and why some ships are just better in this reduced format. Take it away Xerid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZ_JYTvCBBU
This is the list of Ship Win Rates over the past 31 days:
Did your favorite vessel do better than you expected over the last month? Are there any surprises in there, such as the Gladiator being the dominant Heavy at the moment?
Comment below and let us know
If you'd like to read the full blog post, please head here
The small update we have released should fix issues with 3v3 matches not starting automatically (they previously required everyone to manually ready up).
The next update due out in a couple of weeks will bring with it the first stage of the store overhaul. The store overhaul is going to be a long process which we anticipate will take between 3-4 months, and will include the following (and more):
- Re-work of ship prices
- Free rotation of ships
- Removal of DNA
- Overhaul of Drop pods to make them exciting
- Missions and Campaigns
- Switching Legendary skins to Ultimates
- Overhaul of daily missions
The first stage is a re-work of the ship prices, which will be coming out along with the new Free Rotation system whereby every two weeks, players will have a new selection of ships to play matches in. This will enable players to try out a number of different ships in a more competitive environment for longer periods of time, before deciding whether or not the ship suits their playstyle.
The platinum cost of each ship will be flattened to 990 Platinum, so this means that the Prototype and Production ships will become cheaper, while the Vintage and Classic lines will go up in price. With this in mind, the credit prices of all ships will be increased across the board to the following:
With the credit prices increasing, we will be introducing new ways in which you can earn more credits by way of brand new missions and campaigns, which will aim to challenge players in return of more credits, and all of the current Legendary skins will be upgraded to Ultimate skins, meaning more ships and skins will have the opportunity to earn a 20% credit bonus for every match.
We'll be having an On Deck stream on Thursday 13th July at 17:00 UTC on our Twitch channel to go more in depth about these changes and answer any questions you may have.
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/fracturedspace
3.5.05 - 12th July 2017
-Added a change in the event you are queuing for PvP in a group bigger than half of the current hopper size, you will now be prompted to play in Quickplay.
-Added support for dynamic bundles on promotion.
-Adjusted MMR calculations. Experienced players should see slightly less movement rather than wild swings.
