We sent out 300 invites last weekend! We had good intentions, but our servers got very confused about the sudden amount of people trying to connect. This led to some interesting cases where servers would accidentally connect one person to two different games simultaneously, which resulted in one player possessing another like some sort of digital poltergeist. You can guess what we’ll be fixing this week!
Alongside these paranormal activities, our upgrade to Unity 2018.3 disrupted the level-generation pipeline. While we had 16 new maps ready to go, our light-map baking process decided it wanted to throw a fit and refused to bake Killhouse maps well into Friday evening after servers went up. The problem was isolated on Saturday, being misconfigured wall segments, but by the time the baking process finished, Alpha was already over the halfway point. We decided to let testers continue playing on maps used during Alpha 3 and launch Alpha 5 with an expanded map pool.
Statistics
There were 759 games played over the weekend, of which Defenders came out on top with 405 victories. With maps seeing their second week of play, it was interesting to see how knowledge was shared between testers. Players from Alpha 3 taught the 300 new testers tips and tricks on what strategies worked for them, leading to a shift in balance on some maps, while others remained the same. Take one of the levels we featured in the last blogpost as an example:
This was the only level to maintain a perfect Attacker / Defender winrate across both Alpha weekends, making it our most balanced map.
On the other side of the coin, this map started imbalanced, and stayed imbalanced. After being played a total of 80 rounds, Attackers were only able to win 20 times!
Finally, this map was one that flipped as times went on. During Alpha 3, Attackers won on this map 15 times, vs Defenders 8 wins. Fast forward to Alpha 4, where the same map is played again, and it came out to 20 Attacker wins vs 24 Defender wins.
Gif City
Kommissar Lyus takes a few hits, but is not dissuaded.
K3BAB defuses inside a smoke grenade while his team distracts
Nat-5 plays peekaboo with Attackers.
Cyex shows us all how it’s done.
Enigmatic gets an insane 4k while suppressed.
While this video isn’t a full round, it goes to show why communication is vitally important. Hoping to ambush Attackers, several Defenders hide inside of a trailer backed onto a set of loading docks. Things don’t go quite as planned once their position is discovered.
Tech Tier - Automation
Who knew handing out hundreds of Alpha keys could be so tedious? Oh wait, we did, but only now have we managed to get a robot to handle this process. Once activated, this bot should automatically message members of our discord server who have an Alpha key associated with the email/handle they provided on the hardware survey we sent out. This applies to both older, unclaimed keys, and new ones that will go out this Friday. We’ll still be around to hand out keys just in case, so keep an eye on your inbox as the weekend gets closer!