Hey everyone, following on from my previous updates on Season 14 I wanted to jump back in and share more ahead of our hotfix landing this week on Thursday 31st October.
The team have been continuing to triage bug reports and feedback from the live game following launch, and we've prioritised our efforts on stabilising the core experience. Thursday's hotfix as a result contains a number of fixes to improve the live experience; while the below is not an exhaustive list, the fix includes improvements in the following areas:
- Pirates of Mischief Commendations - Addressing inconsistent unlock criteria for a range of Season 14 Commendations.
- Rowboats - Fixes to washed-up Rowboats, ensuring they can be pushed back into the water easily and should no longer become stuck.
- Wall Banging - Fixes to hit registration where shots fired through the deck of a ship were dealing damage to players on the other side.
- Game Stability - Improvements to both client and server crash rates, reducing game disconnections for all players.
Alongside stabilising the experience, the team have been taking this time to work on Season 14's subsequently disabled features with the goal of getting them into a shippable state and back into your hands. Speaking openly, some areas of the feature set here required a targeted bug fixing and polish approach, while a few areas did require a larger system overhaul behind the scenes.
As we approached this week’s hotfix, it was clear that disguises needed some fairly significant reworking behind the scenes in order to address the various join-in-progress and migration-related issues we saw when this feature launched. While we all want this feature back in the game so you can start unlocking new and amazing stories as soon as possible, with the scale of changes that have been made we cannot confidently relaunch it as part of an interim hotfix. Instead, we’ll be taking it back through Insider testing to gain confidence and prepare this feature for November's update.
So, in addition to the stabilising improvements I've called out above, this Thursday's hotfix also addresses the following areas:
Crouching
The team have worked to address the high-impact issues introduced with crouching, removing the ability to gain air control from cannons and periods of invincibility when using crouching in various scenarios. So crouching will return as part of this hotfix, and along with it access to some of those blocked Commendations, rewards and achievements.
While the reintroduction of quick switching using crouch was a compounding reason for disabling this feature shortly after launch, our attempts to expedite a fix for this haven't been good enough and negatively impacted the fluidity of moving into and out of crouching in normal gameplay scenarios.
As a result, quick switching will remain possible with crouching as part of this update while the team take more time behind the scenes to implement a more fluid resolution for this issue. As we have knowingly made the call to release this feature with this exploit, no enforcement action will be taken against players choosing to use it – however, expect this to be fixed in a coming update, so don't get too attached…
Taking Kegs into Cannons
Following the introduction of the Grapple Gun, we also saw reports shared that players were able to climb into a cannon while holding on to a Gunpowder Keg by using the Grapple Gun during cannon loading. This hotfix addresses this technique and now places any grappled item back onto the deck when climbing into the cannon.
When assessing this fix, however, we made the decision to leave open the small timing window after the player is fired from a cannon, where skilled pirates can potentially grapple items from their ship into their hands while flying through the air. This is a high-skill technique to pull off and puts the crew in danger of having kegs on board in order to try and attempt it. As it stands, this technique feels in keeping with our 'tools not rules' approach. However, we will continue to monitor this technique through the lens of naval combat balancing and address it in future if necessary.
I appreciate everyone's patience here as we work to improve the experience in the live game and at the same time improve the quality of Season 14's features so that we can get them back into players' hands. We've had to make another tough decision here to push disguises back to November's update and give the necessary changes more time in testing, but we know that a quality delivery of this feature is ultimately the right call to make – even though some of you will no doubt be disappointed at the wait.
Drew 'Sonicbob' Stevens