"Northern Lights" Season: Change Log
New Content
Content Changes
Ranked Matches
Improved League Progression
Progressing through the RM leagues is now a little easier with bonus "victories" for the first-time play through the series of matches between the leagues. To advance through a league for the first time, you'd need to score all the necessary wins, but next time you get one match for free!
Match Cancel
We continue working on the improvement of match cancellations and penalties (or lack thereof) for the incomplete teams. Now, if a team loads into a match and one of the players disconnects and doesn't return before the allotted time, the team receives an option to leave within a certain timeframe for the match to cancel. Let's look at the different scenarios here:
- You find a ranked match, one of the players leaves during the loading or at the very start of the match. Your team will be given an option to cancel the match within a certain time frame. Cancelling the match in this situation will not result in a penalty, nor will the match count as a loss.
- If a leaver reconnects within the time frame, after which a reduced loss penalty is applicable, you can play normally, and the match will be scored as a regular match.
- If a leaver reconnects too late or doesn't connect at all, and you lose, your team gets a reduced penalty, and the leaver gets a full penalty. If you win, the team receives points normally.
PvE and SpecOps
Cumulative Rewards for "Hard" Missions
Previously, to get everything out of a special operation, the player needed to play every difficulty level separately. Now, successfully finishing a level on Hard will grant the player not only the rewards for that level, but for the previous ones as well.
Dev comment: "From the game design point of view, it's not fair to ask a player who can tackle a special operation on Hard, to replay it on Normal and Easy."
Say, you played a special operation on Hard, got a silver medal for your time and gold medal for your points. In that case, you get corresponding medals for the Normal and Easy modes too, as well as Crowns for the mode you completed and the ones below it. In the achievements display, the medals you got automatically for the lower difficulty levels will be displayed without your mission results.
Reworked PvE
More special operations and PvE missions are now available in the reworked PvE system, with their difficulties updated:
- Icebreaker (every difficulty)
- Hydra (every difficulty)
- Swarm (every difficulty)
Weapons and Gear
-
Kalashnikov USA Komrad:
- Reduced minimal damage per pellet from 26 to 20.
- Increased damage reduction by distance from 8 to 11.
Dev comment: "The Kalashnikov is an excellent weapon that performs well at basically any range. Together with its high fire rate, we get a gun that doesn't really have cons and allows too much leeway for mistakes. We want to keep its reign at close range, but nerf it on mid and far distances, where pump and lever-action shotguns prove to be its worthy opponents."
PvP
- RM: added demotion protection for the higher leagues. Now, similar to lower leagues, if you qualify for any of the leagues from Diamond to Grandmaster, after losing a match and rolling back to the previous league, you will be given a couple of "safe" matches, in which you won't be demoted no matter the outcome.
Other
- Damage Indication: we've improved the damage indication within the game interface. The red overlay gets progressively more opaque the less health the player has, and specific damage sounds have been added as well. Now, it'll be more clear as to from what side the damage is being dealt.
- Added sound effects for headshotting an enemy, as well as for receiving an achievement for a series of head-shots.
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In-game Store:
- Added a possibility to look through device skins and to check out whole gear sets (instead of just the player skins).
- Improvements to the search algorithm.
- Improved indicators for weapon comparison.
- Pop-ups: we've updated and improved some in-game pop-up windows (confirmations, loading screens, message boxes, etc.).
- Player Profile: you can now click on another player's selected weapons and achievements to see information about them.
- Contracts: added information about the types of contracts in the contract interface.
- Mods: added mod stats to the mastery interface.
- Added the ability to buy mastery levels one at a time.
- Added a notification that warns players that they can only install one unique mod at a time.
- Added an indication about the availability of a username.
- The visual quality of smoke now adapts to the game's performance.
- Updated in-game icons.
Bug Fixes
Important
- Fixed some issues that caused the client to crash.
Weapons and Gear
- SVCh-54: fixed a bug, due to which visual artefacts could sometimes appear when switching the aiming mode.
- Taurus Raging Hunter: fixed a visual bug, due to which the gun's drum would sometimes get stuck in an opened position.
- Taurus CT9 G2: fixed a bug, due to which the visual effects of some charms would disappear when switching to the under-barrel grenade launcher.
- GForce Huckleberry: fixed a bug, due to which it was impossible to use the weapon while reloading.
- Gas Grenade: fixed a bug, due to which the device wouldn't deal damage to allies even with friendly fire on.
- Fixed a bug, due to which the reloading animation of some guns would get stuck in a loop from the third person view.
Other
- Player profile: fixed a visual bug, due to which the empty achievement cells were sometimes displayed incorrectly.
- Fixed a bug, due to which the PvP match searching window would sometimes not disappear when switching tabs.
- Fixed a bug, due to which the pop-up window with the details about the new rank reward worked incorrectly.
- Fixed a bug, due to which the match search timer would sometimes be displayed incorrectly for the player, who accepted the match invitation.
- Fixed a bug, due to which expired weapons counted as having them in the inventory when purchasing skins.
- Updated localisation: added missing localisations, fixed inconsistencies.
Known issues
- Claymores are displayed like they can be used in RM while they are restricted.