Competitive going live!

So it’s nearly time! We know a lot of you have been waiting for our competitive game mode to launch officially and now we can announce that Thursday 15/02/18 our War Tide Game mode will go live. It will be at some time during the day.

There will be around 10 mins of outage time whilst we restart and deploy server + matchmaker updates. This means all players will need to update their clients to play. The update is planned to go live on Thursday 15th February 2018.

Players rank 10 and above will be eligible, please bare in mind that a user interface bug has meant that some players haven’t been shown their real rank and therefore don’t believe that they are at the rank 10 and eligible to play Competitive. However we are deploying potential fixes for these issues during this weeks update.

New Competitive Ranks

It is worth noting that we have updated our competitive ranks since we announced them. We have altered them based on community feedback to make them more appealing, eye catching, readable & consistent. Here’s the updated list of ranks we will be having when Competitive launches this Thursday.

Changelog:

Improvements
We have added a new run animation. Previously the third person run animation was very flat/horizontal. You’ll now notice that the character kicks his feet up a lot higher now. This is to help improve visibility of players in fast/high intensity situations. It will also help slightly improve visibility when jumping.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjXRn0Bjyuk&feature=youtu.be

Future Server Plans & Intentions
Over the past two weeks we’ve been learning how to manage our server locations. There has been a huge amount of requests for matchmaking support in South East Asia, as a result of your communication with us. We will be adding servers in the SEA region in March. We made a mistake of separating NA players between 3 regions, our server code does not choose the best location for the players. The server predetermines where to go. As a result, we will be removing Central/East and merging them together to servers in Chicago, again in March. This will also show a boost in player numbers.


Bug Fixes:

Potential fix for XP displaying correctly on the endgame UI.
Potential fix for crash on startup.
Numerous Spectator Improvements.
Picking up a dead player’s weapon now correctly displays the dropped weapon skin of the dead player and not your own skin.
General server stability fixes.


Texture Streaming:

To help combat load times on lower end PCs - We’ve set texture streaming to be default ON for players who own graphics cards with less than 3GB vram. If you have a 3GB+ card texture streaming will be set to OFF for a smoother gameplay experience whilst in-game. Our art team are actively optimising their work.