New Features

Community Health: Cheating Countermeasures

Addition of a Report Button
We have added a Report Button feature in order to empower the community. This will allow players to flag suspicious behaviors. Those reports will feed directly to our cheating counter-measures to increase their effectiveness.

Introduction of Kill Cam to Ranked
We are aware that there is a certain widespread sentiment that high level Ranked matches are often ruined by cheaters. We want to deter ‘witch hunting’ as much as possible. While there were legitimate design reasons to remove the Kill Cam from Ranked, we cannot compromise on the quality of our game experience. For this reason, we are enabling the Kill Cam on Ranked matches to remove this ‘hiding spot’ for cheaters. It will help the community as well as ourselves identify suspicious behaviors with a better level of certainty. Given the nature of our game (destruction, observation tools, high lethality), players are very likely to have doubts about what happened when they get killed. This causes confusion whether they died by a legitimate player or a cheater. This doubt causes a negative atmosphere for everyone regardless of the presence of cheaters in the match. Therefore, activating the Kill Cam in Ranked serves two purposes: make it harder for cheaters to hide and improve players‘ perception by allowing them to witness how they got killed. In the long term, we will also be working on improving the Kill Cam in order to make it more accurate and reliable.

Playlist Changes

New Custom Game setting: Infinite Overtime Rounds is now available for competitive play
It is important for us to provide options to the competitive scene. Therefore, we have added the option to go into infinite overtime in Custom Games. When Overtime Score Difference is set to 2, combined with an infinite Overtime Rounds amount, the game will be resolved only if a team wins by a +2 differential. This ensures the fairest outcome to a match (since our game is asymmetric).

General Tweaks & Improvements

Balance: Spawn Killing Countermeasures

Spawning Location Tweaks
We have altered multiple spawn positions and covers within spawning location areas in order to ensure that players spawning within them are protected from the Defenders. We believe these tweaks should fix the vast majority of those spawn killing occurrences. We will keep monitoring further to ensure that our spawn locations are safe for Attackers on all maps. For the full detailed list of those tweaks as well as pictures illustrating them, see the bottom, please scroll to the bottom of this post.

Ranked Matchmaking Improvements

Better quality matches within Ranked Matchmaking
On the week of February 22nd, we released a hotfix to improve the quality of matchmaking for Ranked. We have changed the relaxation parameters for ‘Skill Rank’ so that you are matched with players closer to your rank.

The situation before this update was that relaxation was occurring too quickly, with big ‘Skill Rank’ relaxation increments, and no maximum differential between teams. This meant that high skill teams could get matched up against much lesser skilled teams.

After the update, we are glad to confirm that we did improve the overall quality of matches in Ranked, with the matches being better balanced and of better quality. The relaxation now occurs quicker, but with smaller increments and with a maximum differential cap between teams. We expected the matchmaking queue times to be lengthened, but are glad to say they did not! The most notable difference is that matches with large Skill Rank difference went from 5-9% to 2-4%. We also had an improvement of about 5% to matches that are considered even or very close in terms of Skill Rank. We believe that we are on the right track and that we can keep improving those parameters further.

We are aware that there are many other improvements that can be done for Ranked, including further adjustments to matchmaking. We are currently working on committing to a clear plan, which we will be sharing with you in our known issues list’s high priority issues section within the upcoming weeks. Thank you for helping us identify them, your feedback is invaluable.

Main Bug Fixes
Please be aware that this is not an exhaustive list, and that we are only highlighting fixes that were done on the most commonly raised bugs.

Gameplay Fixes

• Operators are in T-Pose and do not display any texture. – FIXED
• Hit registration: the player sometimes doesn’t receive damage when shot at while in rappel and using a drone. – FIXED
• Hit registration: Players sometime take no damage when shot in one of their feet. – FIXED
• Hit registration: Defenders have a difficult time damaging a hostage carrier while he or she is in rappel. – FIXED
• Weapons sometime appear through walls. – FIXED
• The drone sometimes flies out of bounds when thrown. – FIXED
• Sometimes drone falls off the maps. – FIXED
• Gadgets placed on the ground cannot be put on top of barricade debris. – FIXED
• The ADS animation sometimes gets corrupted when shield-wielding Operators aim. – FIXED
• Thermite: sometimes, a reinforced trap door will not be destroyed by an Exothermic Charge. – FIXED
• Buck: Pressing the gadget key while holding secondary weapon does not go out of Skeleton key mode. – FIXED
• Glaz: pressing the gadget key while carrying secondary weapon does not switch scope ON and OFF. – FIXED
• Sledge: hammer can be seen floating in the air during end of round camera. – FIXED

Level Design Fixes

• Yacht – exploit: players are able to vault near the roof of the front end of the Yacht, inside the ceiling. – FIXED
• Yacht: the Secure Area objective area doesn’t cover the entire room of the cockpit, preventing the objective to be captured/defended when standing in a specific position. – FIXED
• Yacht: Defenders cannot place barbed wire on any interior stairs of the map. – FIXED
• Yacht: drones have no collision with a block of ice at East Glacier. – FIXED
• Yacht: some red blocking walls not displayed during the Preparation Phase. – FIXED
• Oregon – exploit: Attackers can shoot Defenders through a small gap (near Junkyard Spawn Point, EXT Dining Hall). – FIXED
• Oregon: drones have difficulty navigating through the two ventilation shafts near the abandoned school bus. – FIXED
• Chalet: an invisible collision will prevent characters from shooting at enemies hiding behind it on the 2F near the railing. – FIXED
• House: players can fall through the map when rappelling near the River Docks area. – FIXED
• House: pillows have no collision with the players’ gadgets. – FIXED
• Russian Café: the bottom layer of the destructible wall from the Pillar Dining Room cannot be vaulted after destroying the wall. – FIXED
• Sometimes, there are lighting issues on maps. – FIXED

Spectator Mode Fixes

• The score is not replicated correctly for the spectator during character selection screen. – FIXED
• When spectating, the spectator remains with a white screen if the spectated target is killed while being flashed. – FIXED
• Spectator sees player’s drone from the wrong perspective. – FIXED
• Indication of drone elevation in relation to player does not work correctly when in Spectator Mode – FIXED
• Tactical view focuses on where the Operator dies and does not allow the camera to move freely until the spectator switches to another player’s perspective. – FIXED
• Graphic corruptions can be seen when switching between players in first person view. – FIXED
• Players‘ full usernames no longer displayed under their logo when focused on in Spectator Mode – FIXED
• Controller does not vibrate after exiting from spectate mode and playing in any mode. – FIXED
• PC: The spectator cannot open the Options menu using the F10 key. – FIXED

Miscellaneous Fixes

• The countdown (15/10/5 seconds remaining) announcer voice over still happens after the defuser has been planted when the bomb is planted late in the round. – FIXED
• PS4: PS4 players met feature from the friends tab in the play station dynamic menu has no functionality. – FIXED

Patch size: Approximately 750 MB (may vary per platform)

Status Update on IP Protection

While we did originally announce that we would introduce IP protection in this patch, it has proven to be more complicated tech-wise than anticipated. We do intend on introducing IP protection as soon as possible. The PC version will most likely be ready before the Console version and will be shared as a hotfix patch containing only this feature as soon as it is ready. Due to submission requirements for Console, it will be shared at a later time (earliest possible as well). The IP protection will limit how players’ IPs are displayed, greatly reducing the possibility of DDoS attacks targeting players within a match. This feature is currently a priority for us.

New Spawn Locations here.

Thank you so much for being part of this with us and sharing your feedback. Until next time!