Hello everyone! we are excited to announce some upcoming game engine changes for next season.

These changes were done with the following goals in mind: 

• To have stronger players feel more impactful than weaker ones, making it an obvious decision to go for better and more skilled players.
• To make games feel more consistent, with less jumps in players performance and outcomes.
• To increase the impact of some skills like teamplay and gamesense.
• To increase the impact of each individual skill points, so 5 points feel like a big deal.
• To have stacked players at long distance really be a risky decision, leveraging the importance of teamplay skill and/or spreading players.

We changed the engagement delay to a fixed amount of calculation frames. They are now independent of the skills. This means the following skills have lost their impact in them: quickness, awareness, determination.

Removed/fixed mechanics

As part of the consistency updates we have removed or fixed the following features: 

• Wiggle: this refers to the sidestep movement players sometimes do long distance. We have decided removing this from the game engine as it sometimes may create weird scenarios, losing line of sight, dodging nades, etc. We are however, doing a visual only version, just for the aesthetic flavor.
• Distance limit: there was a limit set to 400 distance, where any player further away than that was not being seen. We think there's no reason to have this now and removing will allow for more opportunities to long distance fights.
• Recoil debuff bug: there was a bug where the debuff from recoil when shooting weapons would linger for the rest of the round, negatively impacting players who got an early kill and then went to another fight.

What to expect from these changes:

• You may see long distance fights take longer than before if you are stacking players, specially when using pistols
• You may see backstabbing or catching off-guard more rewarding
• You may see faster and more consistent reaction times from players
• You may see stronger players perform better but weaker players perform worse

That's the TL;DR; version, keep reading if you want to see a list of technical changes.

The following additional changes have been made: Gamesense

• Have gamesense weigh in decision of first target when player is the first to shoot from the stack, threat level etc
• Have gamesense determine if player shoots same enemy as teammate, with drastic less chances the more teammates doing it

Teamplay

• Move stacking debuff mitigating to individual teamplay rather than average of players
• Mitigates the reduced chances to target same enemy as multiple teammates

Movement

• Increases dodge chance which basically adds up to the miss chance of enemy targeting the player
• Increases dodge chance when moving up to a max of 10 steps

Aim

• Adjusted scaling so each aim skillpoint feels impactful

Quickness

• Removed impact on engage delay, now constant
• Increased max turning speed from 16 degrees to 20 degrees
• Adjusted scaling so each quickness skillpoint feels impactful

Awareness

• Removed impact on delay before turning towards enemies outside vision, now constant
• Awareness now impacts turn speed when enemy outside vision
• Adjusted scaling so each awareness skillpoint feels impactful

Handling

• Increased positive impact on recoil
• Increased mitigation of distance penalty on accuracy
• NEW: Increases chance to shoot chest instead of legs
• Adjusted scaling so each handling skillpoint feels impactful

Determination

• Removed impact on retargeting delay, now constant
  
• NEW: Retargeting to a new enemy after a kill grants up to 5% more accuracy
• Adjusted scaling so each determination skillpoint feels impactful

Additionally we made a few adjustments to accuracy calculation:

• Removed awareness and determination from hit formula
• Keep handling in but only for long distance scenarios
• Stacked players accuracy now heavily decreases long distance

We aim to push this on Day 1 next season.