Please, take a seat while I tell you about all the stuff we’ve been working on since the weekend.
New dropship art! This is made with lovely meshes, and check out those relaxing pilots chilling with their standard issue grog cups. Or is it seed in there? Hm.
Also, they now display a countdown timer, telling when they will go away. For right now, this is only correct for people who were there when the portal spawned — if you show up later it’ll start from the beginning. Fixing _that_ requires a protocol change, which I am hoping we can bundle with some other protocol change later in the week.
Dungeons now have a tier indicator by their name. You might want to rethink flying your L1 plane into that T10 dungeon, just a thought.
Raijin renamed to Suijin. It has new art, of a guy who does not get dizzy very easily.
A few other pieces of new art from Meowza! Tanks have missiles, and while you can’t really see it, the health pickups now use meshes and thus glint in the light of the setting sun.
Fixed medics being able to heal themselves while dying! Get someone else to heal you while you’re dying! That actually sounds super cool so I’m going to try to make that more feasible.
This mechanic is no longer effective.
Closed the time window where you can cheat death by quitting the game. It’s still technically possible, but if you’re that fast, why don’t you just hit Q? Rebind the nexus key to your foot pedal peripheral. Use emotion detection on your webcam to go to the nexus when you make the “oh no” face. Lots of possibilities. Whew. This exploit has been there since forever, and I used it to save my test plane on many occasions. However, I soon realized that cheating death makes the game less fun. It contributes to a sense of lack of consequence that probably makes me less skilled, as well. So, anyway, it’s still probably possible to cheat death, please let me know if there are any big holes there! I want you to be skilled.
When you teleport to someone, you teleport to where they are, rather than behind them. This is a solution to players teleporting through walls. I think it doesn’t solve all possible cases, but maybe 90%. I’m all about these partial solutions, as you can see.
Required damage contributions for loot are up! You know how you have to damage enemies in order for them to drop loot for you? Well, that threshold was supposed to be 3% of the total health, but for debugging we turned it down to 0.1% and never switched it back. So, lesson: never debug anything. Now it’s back to 3%, so you can’t get loot by just tagging a boss. You gotta do some work for it! I’m aware that this might make it harder for medics to get loot — we’ll evaluate based on how things pan out! I expect that this might be too aggressive of a percentage, but we wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think there was some chance that it turns out to be great at this level!
I may have fixed the bug that gave people random guns. Let me know if you see it again! It happens pretty rarely so I’m never sure if I actually fixed it or just failed to reproduce.
Andrew may have fixed some of the bugs that left people stuck in the hangar. There may be more though! It’s quite difficult to leave the hangar, we’ve had our top scientists on this problem for years and they’ve barely cracked it!
Item drops have been subtly adjusted by the Hand of Danc. Some things are dropping more commonly in some places, and in other places, things drop…less commonly! Trying to make the high mountains more fun.
A passel of small enemy unit changes. Non-boss units participate more in elemental weaponry! Look for it.
Cancer has walls! And they should be better about not spawning on walls themselves.
Medics can no longer use shotguns above T8. The armory regrets the error. If you have one equipped, you can keep it until you equip something else. Don’t sell your account with shotgun-medic for $800 on eBay: this is Steambirds, not Flappy Bird.
Heal clouds should be a bit less OP relative to their level.
When you teleport to someone, the invulnerability now lasts for 6 seconds instead of 2. Gives you more time to evaluate the situation and possibly to go somewhere else! You still don’t gain XP and are not able to fire while invulnerable so….you’re just a tourist.
There’s a bunch more little changes, too! Keep an eye out for them. If you see something special in the game, it’s because we love you.
Thanks for the bug reports, in all the various forums, everybody! They are incredibly helpful. Things are going great, and with this slightly slower schedule, it feels like we can tackle slightly bigger issues.