Happy Friday everyone, the Americans and semi-automatic weapons are going into the campaign today. This week in production we’re getting the last inclusions to our upcoming patch (1.34.11). We’ll also talk about upcoming BETA plans, the HC Tools coming back in action, our Indiegogo Campaign deliverables, some game balance changes we’ve made and the new “Tuesday Community Report” inbound.
We’ve had a lot of great feedback with our Friday updates over the last several weeks and I want to send a personal thank you to all of you who are sharing your thoughts and enthusiasm. I’ve been in the game and watching the forums and I see a lot of, “Gimme MOAR!” - We love it!
PREPARING FOR PATCH DAY (1.34.11)
So we’ve mentioned a few times that we’ve spent a lot of time getting our patch manager back online. We currently have it ready to go and functioning for all of our PC users, but the MAC is giving us a little bit of a battle. That said MAC users WILL receive the 1.34.11 game update (which does include the Joystick key mapper fix), you will likely be downloading a full install, but we have a few more things to try before that becomes an absolute.
BETA SERVER & TESTING
The last game update we released was risky in a sense because it was not tested thoroughly in an environment where changes could be made without affecting things in a live setting. That said we’ve made a strong commitment (with your backing) to return to a proper game development environment and we’ll have our BETA server online for testing - YES!
All Builders (Platinum, Gold, Silver and Hero) and Indiegogo contributors will be invited to partake in closed BETA testing. More testing and reporting = a smoother roll out, so stay tuned and get ready for participation!
HC TOOLS ARE BACK!
Thanks to the great work of, “PILOTMC,” our High Command tools are back online in a virtual machine running smoothly. Our HC & Community team has since been getting all active officers placed properly into the OrBat (order of battle / structure), and we’re pretty sure the HC leadership has taken a deep sigh in what was thought to be forever lost. This is a big victory for all of our much appreciated HC officers, S! to you all.
INDIEGOGO CAMPAIGN DELIVERABLES
Yesterday I sent a message out to our Indiegogo contributors with a status update on progress being made on delivering on our commitments. Here is that message below:
We'll be preparing for our BETA phase of 1.34.11 very shortly, and ALL of you who have contributed this campaign will be getting a first look at the NEW Active Battles tab and many other, currently un-announced to the public additions.
We are currently working with 4WING and AEF on their squad decals, Blitzkader and the Lancers are next.
The first Stretch Goal is 100% completed. The second Stretch Goal is about 57% completed. The primary hardware goal is in motion still and we've been getting things set up nicely, more pics to follow upon installation of some new powerful virtual machine’s.
GAME BALANCE CHANGES MADE
For sometime now I’ve been working with our Community Management team to analyze what has been a pretty large outcry of concern regarding in-game balance and specifically with the roll out of the Americans.
First, as you know the American spawn list is very incomplete, and we have some big changes on the way that will help resolve the most of the Army branch. However there was a recent audit conducted that showed a pretty large gap in regards to fairness and number of tanks which has since been corrected.
This is something we have to take seriously for a variety of reasons, and while we’re hesitant to make any major changes in existing supply, this one was a bit obvious for us to correct. That being said the Americans and Germans at Tier 3 now have a more balanced number of equivalent tanks rolling out of the factories.
TUESDAY COMMUNITY REPORT
OHM and I have been communicating about how we can get your questions answered more effectively from the forums and in-game. Each week OHM and the community management team will be scouting for the latest trends in communications and putting them into a weekly report which will be broadcasted to the whole community.
In closing...
Cornered Rat Software is doing its damnedest to make sure we are beefing up communications and visible commitment to you all to take this wonderful game and make sure it stands the test of time. All of your support is immensely appreciated, and your words of encouragement are fuel for all of us here putting in a titanic effort, every day.
It’s a pretty amazing thing to see the full picture of what’s going on, we’re actually accomplishing what many critics have considered to be the impossible. That is no short of a heroic effort jointly between you all fueling us in the community, and now this great team we have developed. The guys (and gals) I work with love building this game, most of them were former community members, and that speaks volumes to their resolve to do so much more.
