Community Update - 17th of January 2019

[sincity]

Hi everyone, Jon Higgins here from New World Interactive.

After the successful launch of Insurgency: Sandstorm last month and a busy period over the holiday season, our team would like to give you a brief update on where we are with the game's development and what fans can expect over the coming months.

After the last update on December 21st we gave our team a week off over Christmas and New Year’s to recover and spend some much needed time with family and friends. During this period, however, our community and design teams were spending a huge amount of time reading through hundreds of reviews and comments across Steam, Reddit, YouTube, news sites and more, gathering feedback and prioritising our year ahead.

After reviewing launch and reading your feedback it was clear that our first update needed to focus heavily on quality of life and community features, but also deliver additional content.

We hinted at some future plans in our The Insurgency Legacy Continues[newworldinteractive.com] blog post back in December, and while we are not yet ready to discuss the full line up of changes for the February update, you can view some confirmed content and features below.

• Five new weapons including the MP5A5 and MP5A2, which will be available for Security and Insurgent Breacher classes respectively.
  
• A new Community Testing Environment right in your Steam Library for easier and more open testing of upcoming updates.
  
• Competitive improvements including tiebreaker rounds, leaver penalties, and more.
  
• Vote Kick for community servers and additional anti-harassment / griefing measures.
  
• Clearer indications around restricted areas, game rules and spawn waves.
• New cosmetics including Tropentarn camouflage, new gloves, and new eyewear.
  
• Some other surprises you might not expect.

In addition to the above, performance and optimisation will continue to be a top priority for us. Players systems and setups vary greatly and it's important we gather as much information as possible. We encourage anybody who is having issues to submit information to our team via the performance discussion and support section of the forums to help us identify and resolve any issues.

We also received a lot of feedback about the in-game community and player behaviour. Our team will be working on various design changes, bug fixes, and other game-based solutions to address or mitigate these issues. However, some of these will require time for us to concept, implement and iterate upon. In the meantime, it is vital that the community aid us and our partners in finding and addressing issues.

As such we have published a new guide detailing the steps you should take if you encounter someone cheating, using game exploits, harassing/abusing players or otherwise griefing, as well as additional documentation regarding Easy Anti-Cheat.

Read more: Community Guidelines - Cheating, Exploits and Harassment.
Read more: Community Guidelines - Easy Anit-Cheat.

Two recurring topics regarding in-game player behaviour were vote-kick and in-game reporting options. Our team take player behaviour very seriously and are committed to improving player experience. Some of the changes in the February update should take steps towards this, however, we would like to take this time to clarify our current stance on the above.

In our previous titles, votekicking itself was abused by some players as a means to harass, grief, and troll, so we’ve had some hesitation about adding it to Sandstorm. However, we’ve heard your feedback and we understand that when used responsibly this can be an effective tool in dealing with disruptive players. As such we’ve decided to add it as an option for community servers. We’ll continue to monitor community feedback on this and other systems and make changes accordingly.

We’ve also seen some requests to include an in-game reporting system to deal with these kinds of players. This is something we have discussed, however, creating and managing such a system with investigations and reviews of every reported player would put a great strain on our development and community management resources. Frankly, we’re unable to effectively monitor every single player’s behavior and support such a system. We would rather focus on creating good community tools and automated systems to deal with these kinds of issues and put our resources toward creating content and improving gameplay. That being said, an in-game reporting system is something we might explore in the future, targeted at the most disruptive players. For now, we ask that players follow Community Guidelines - Cheating, Exploits and Harassment.

As we’ve said before, launch is just the beginning for us. We have a huge amount of post-release content planned for Insurgency: Sandstorm, and are excited to bring the game to consoles this year and to explore additional platforms in the future. We will be sharing a lot more news over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the NWI newsletter[newworldinteractive.com], bookmark our blog[newworldinteractive.com] and follow @InsurgencyGame across social media to stay up to date with all our announcements.

New World Interactive

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[Kooki]

I'm glad to hear that more work will be done on sandstorm.  I played alpha and beta one and two.  I like what.s been done mostly.  One thing I wonder about is it seems harder to play the higher rank one achieves.  I don,t know if this is true but it seems that it is impossible for an ai to react  quicker than i can react, seems to fast.  This seems to make it really hard to compete with the Ai s.  Ai accuracy is still very high compared to a live person's  reaction time.

Second thing I was thinking about is some maps seem to  have more than average cashes that are single person destroy rather than group conquer.  I read that NW recommends that since this is a team game, it makes better since to capture the point as opposed to shooting ais.  Ai shot gives you 10 points and capture point significantly more. So if many of the capture points are single player destroy the remainder of the team gets nothing for the point destruction.   I see more and more players rushing ahead of other players already on the point setting charges.. blowing up the point and everyone around it.  Even if someone was there first. Fair play seems to be suffering as it always does in our self centered society.  

I mentioned in my prerelease  suggestions that the ais should be placed differently around a map rather than the customary places to make play better.  I like what you've done with that.  You can never tell where an ai might turn up.

Third thing is i have seen many times that the rank system seems to be faulty.  I have played several levels several times and didnt advance to the next rank.