Hey everyone!

We whole-heartly welcome all new Players!

Huge Shout-Out to the big Video Artist SsethTzeentach and all new Players from the Daily Deal!

As you might have noticed, we were hard at work, pushing patches nearly every day.

We will keep doing so and focus on Stability, UX and Qol for the moment, but as a small goodie, we added a nice quality pass on the Handguns for you to enjoy:

Update 20.1 brings a quality pass on Handguns. While overall in a pretty balanced state, some had not the most interesting perks or were a bit more ambiguous in role than they should.

Roles of the different options are now more defined and their effects are more unique.
Meanwhile some weaker options have been buffed. Here are the details:

Base mag-size decreased by 4. This means, scaling the power of the perk will increase mag-size.

P33 and P20 have always been the balance baseline, but P33 had been suffering without optimal headshot chains, as such we are increasing the damage. With the new Perk, it will additionally shine as the best ammo efficiency option.

P33 damage 1.15x > 1.35x

This makes it more situationally powerful and helps it's usefulness in the late-game when swapped to.

This overall makes CR-18 more useful and specialized as anti-material weapon.

Damage increased from 1x to 1.1x

Coil Pistol was a bit under-tuned compared to other weapons.

Coil Pistol damage 1.9x > 2.1x

Coil Pistol Attachments now work again

Shooty will have more benefits now as a point-blank gun, offering high DPS at very close range.
A side effect of this is also that other abilities will benefit from the critical chance.

Shooty now also uses correct attachment slots.

Model H is a more special commando sidearm and is now more rewarding to keep around.

This change fortifies the gun as a investment sidearm that is useful to keep around and switch to in times of need. Maybe this is slightly too strong but we'll keep an eye on it.

This gives SK-9 a more unique place as a solid upgrade foundation, which also makes sense given the bigger physical size of the handgun.

X3 Subsonic is now more useful as a mobility option, which also helps with flanking and getting the powerful back-stab benefits of the subsonic ammo.

Snub Revolver damage 2.2x > 2.6x

Patrol Revolver damage 2.25x > 2.6x

Patrol Revolver now also has +10% currency gain

This will make Revolvers more relevant as a high-skill, high power option.

Fixed Handgun upgrade starting with 0 stacks making the first upgrade not give damage.

Smart coil perk now ramps up per second instead of per 2 seconds

Smart coil no longer starts with -10% damage

Smart coil perk damage 4>5% per stack

Tec9 fire-rate 750>700

PXS ammo pickup 112 > 160

Note: Acid Pistol will likely get a rework

• Unidentified Potion acid now is removed when below 450 health

• Warthog no longer has a incorrect underbarrel attachment slot

• Reducer now correctly reduces cooldowns by 100 instead of 1

• Reducer now shows a small notification when triggered

• Vsync setting is more clear about FPS cap

• Shops now instantly react to currency changes while open

• Many Fixes from automatic reporting

• Fixed one Leak that occured from toggling menus.
  This might be the minimap leak or not but definitely a good find.

• Fixed barracks, medical tent .. checking for > instead of >= for unlock cost

• Fixed Survey linking to the wrong form

• Fixed varied minor action issues

• Fixed Save and Load summons issues

• Fixed Game Quit button having strange behavior on cancel

• Many other fixes in the previous hotfixes

Minimap Issue:

Regarding the so called memory leak (minimap interaction causing performance degradation), at this point we can say for sure it is not a memory leak and we don't have a reproduction on any of our machines. We see a bunch of people complaining about so for sure something is going on. The code in this area in general at this point is very old but we suspect a workaround for a unity fog issue causing the screen to go white that plagued multiple games including S2 about two years ago could be causing issues for players so we removed it. Let us know if you have any issues going forward.

TLDR: Might be fixed - let us know

Known issues:

• Certain languages don't instantly show text for some reason

• Polish language has issues in certain fonts

Last week we were quite overloaded with the Player-count and our Lobby server didn't handle it so well, but we did massive improvements to the player load handling now and it's greatly improved.

For Co-op lobbies we've seen that once the game hit around 1k ccu the lobby system started to deliver messages not in the order players sent updates causing all kinds of mayham there including potentially leading to not all players getting the game is starting now message. So we think at least for some players not being able to connect to the P2P session may be due to the lobby system as well. We rolled out changes every day last week and starting Wednesday we are now seeing very healthy behavior so we consider the issue fixed. We had to do a bunch of rewrites so we continue to monitor the lobby situation going forward to ensure stable operations.

• Greatly improved Matchmaking capacity under load

• Fixed issues relating to matchmaking appearing offline.

Note: The game uses the Steam Peer 2 Peer system. How people are connected to each other or if they are disconnected is completely decided by the Steam system.
Connection Issues: If you encounter issues with starting the match, this point usually to a Steam P2P connection issue, which usually leads from a internet provider providing a route to another person - which is usually fixed with a VPN, as the VPN will take a different route on the internet. Make sure to check which player in the Lobby has the issue, often it is just one player blocking the others from starting.

We'll stay on our toes and keep pushing updates!
Our Highest priority is stability, fixes and UX improvements, then continue towards Update 21.

Have Fun! - Team FFG