Patch Cosmic Winter Jubilee pt2 Update

Cosmic Winter Jubilee Pt.2 Update | Open Beta | 21.12.2024

UPDATE: Revival Event Rules and Ascended Armor are extended to Jan. 8

• After reading your feedback and looking at all available data since the patch, we’re seeing positive results (will explain in more detail), so we’re keeping all changes at least until our next patch on Jan 8. This is inclusive of: resurgence rules, ascending armor, audio pulses, and ranked point changes.

CONTEXT: Since the patch note is pretty much ‘keep the things on,’ let’s talk about the why.

First: engagement is obviously the most important thing we’re tracking (are players playing and sticking with the game), and that number has gone up, which is exciting. We also called a shot here in that we feel combat is SUPERVIVE’s best feature, so we spiked a set of changes that would get new and learning players more combat reps, which would theoretically help them see the magic of the game faster. To that point: we are seeing combat stats going up across the board for all teams which, when combined with engagement going up, seems to prove out the hypothesis. Very cool.

Second: we know these changes aren’t perfect, and there are deliberate tradeoffs we’re making to make the game much better for new and solo players (our current priority). We have plans for further iteration based on your feedback, but because we’re so close to the holidays (and candidly: very crispy), in choosing between “leave on to learn more” vs. “turn off,” we choose to leave on!

Third: speaking of, we know there’s a lot of conversation around our audio pulse changes. This is definitely the sharpest tradeoff we’re making, but philosophically we think it’s doing a lot of work for solo and newer players. Specifically: audio pulses give constant, ongoing strategic input to the whole team where before they were hidden behind UAV usage. Also, players are becoming a lot more aware of how their actions show up to enemy teams, which lets them get on that golden path to mastery faster. While we know this information is rather heavy-handed, in the same line of thinking as above, we think it’s better for the game holistically to leave on than turn off. We will iterate in the future!

Fourth and finally: we’ve heard feedback about those ranked point changes leading to stompier games at high level, as organized veteran squads teams are prioritizing team wipes faster. Honestly we’re okay with it because it means the incentives to win the game are… to clean out the lobby. Which it should be. Previously we were seeing/hearing that optimal play was to farm kills to hit the contribution cap (20 kills) before fully wiping teams, thereby creating trapped games until the lead team had farmed up. That’s weird behavior and likely speaks to large skill discrepancies between these teams in the first place.

Also, if games at the very high level are giga-stompy, we do see it as a tradeoff for walking back our team size restrictions at Master+ tier (and even then it didn’t make that much of a difference - we’d likely need to try pure solo at Master+ to make a dent, and that has other tradeoffs). Just to say it again: in a team-based game it gets very hard to find a fair match if the top 0.1% players all queue together in a single squad against a disorganized lobby. It’s why we’re giving custom game access to our top players—so they can at least try to run more balanced, organized games. This is just a larger problem to solve in the future, so for now we choose social play.

Thank you for reading this enormous wall of text - we hope even if you don’t agree with the changes, you at least understand our intent. Happy holidays everyone!