Slapshot: Rebound News

[h2]NEW[/h2]
- TWO NEW MAPS. Available in public rotation and custom games. You can switch to them in practice using the arena command in the console. (Tilde)
-- A night version of the outdoor map
-- A table hockey map
- Spectators are more alive! They have been completely reworked from scratch for all arenas.

[h2]Matchmaking[/h2]
- Addressed the volatility of the rating algorithm, making the placement matches not last as long and have more consistency.

[h2]Optimization[/h2]
- Improved the performance of all arenas by quite a bit
- Optimized the player and goals, refactored and cleaned up a bunch of game logic
- Moved from Mono to C++ compilation (Note: This breaks current mods. Google 'IL2CPP modding' to find out how to fix them)

[h2]Bots[/h2]
- Bots will now use the brake when getting bumped
- Significant improvements have been made to goalkeeping
- They will now challenge more aggressively in line with feedback
- Bots will no longer stop playing if the puck is on the line but not in yet
- Fixed some jittery movement with bots carrying the puck over longer distances
- Bots will now be more aware of their stick placement when they don't have possession

[h2]Cosmetics[/h2]
- Added white variants of the rebound and Patreon hats (both normal and backwards)
- Added flame stick, techno stick, carbon slinger stick

[h2]Fixes[/h2]
- Fixed goalie practice not spawning you at the net
- Fixed UI scaling with resolution (4K etc should play a lot better now)
- Fixed the 'no' button in the quit menu on keyboard and mouse input overlapping the yes button a bit
- Fixed some shadow issues in the main menu

[h2]Matchmaking improvements[/h2]
- Fixed an issue that caused team balancing to be bad in matchmaking
- Tuned the matchmaking search algorithm to suit our new rating system better

[h2]Bot improvements[/h2]
- Bots now challenge for the puck instead of chasing you

[h2]Arena[/h2]
- Made the goal lights prettier

[h2]Cosmetics[/h2]
- Added tribal set and purple variant of the shell
- Added carbon slinger and techno stick as part of the Patreon vote

[h2]Other[/h2]
- Added the ability to remove the password of a lobby or add one after it has been created (the lock button on the left)
- Fixed some pop-ups waiting until the end of the game when they shouldn't (like after reporting someone)

GLHF

[h2]New rating system[/h2]
We've recreated the rating system from scratch based on feedback on the previous system.
It now does not punish you as much for losing if you have teammates that are rated lower and does not reward you as much for getting carried.
The new Slapshot Rating system is now based on a different algorithm that I have modified to work for team based games. (Glicko2 instead of TrueSkill).

We opted for a full reset because the system will place you in an appropriate skill bracket within the first 5 - 10 matches (much like placement matches).
It will also give us proper insight into the bell curve of the new rating system to assign ranks to them.

[h2]Cosmetics[/h2]
- Made fixes to the sword stick and bone stick
- Added some dumb ass golden grills because Eli's been asking for them for a fucking year
- Added a bunch of new mouths and eyes, a flame stick and stripes jersey

[h2]Other[/h2]
- Controller navigation in menus now produces our super dank navigation sounds

I stayed up all night working on these after launching yesterday's patch lol

[h2]Reworked leave penalties[/h2]
The leave penalties has been turned into a strike system. When you leave a match, you will receive a strike that expires in 5 minutes. If you leave another match while you have a strike against you, you will receive a 5 minute matchmaking ban.

Fixed several bugs with the penalties:
- Match cancelations will no longer incur a penalty
- Leaving custom games will no longer trigger penalties

[h2]More custom game options[/h2]
- Added a gravity setting
- Added a game speed setting
- Added a head bounciness setting

[h2]Increased amount of available presets[/h2]
Premium users can now have up to 10 presets instead of 5.

[h2]Added a volume slider specifically for the new time warning sound[/h2]
Some players didn't like it very much or thought it was too loud. The new slider can be found in audio settings.

[h2]Fixed cosmetic images rendering out of order in appearance and shop[/h2]
Updating our Unity version caused it to shit itself. Fixed it with some performance improvements!

Thank you for your feedback as always

GLHF
Oddshot Games

This is a big one that adds a lot of much needed things and puts down the groundworks for some more awesome things that are to come!

[h2]NEW[/h2]
- Added bots
-- You can now find two new practice modes, one with a goalie bot and a full bot match where you decide the team sizes
-- In the future, you will be able to add bots to your custom matches online too
- Added an animation to the scorebug when a team scores
- Added several extra crowd sounds to improve the ambience relative to the map (you can turn it down in Audio -> Ambience)
-- More crowd cheers during the match
-- Crowd anticipates the end of the match, cheering the players on as the clock ticks down
-- Crowd cheers for goals and the end of the match
-- Added a slight delay to the goal horn to improve realism
- Added an experience tracker at the end of a public match
- Overhauled the game info widget (in queue and in lobby), also made them accessible to controller
- Added a leave penalty of 5 minutes for leaving a public match
-- Some of the matchmaking issues were people's ratings being completely wrong because they left so many matches.
-- Now, it's faster to finish your match rather than to leave. Make the best of it! I've seen some crazy comebacks.
- Added a sound for time warnings
- Added an icon of the item's type to the store items
- Added controller support for the region selector

[h2]Matchmaking[/h2]
Matchmaking has had a bunch of changes between the last update and now. Thank you to everyone that helped us finetune it so far.
There's still a lot of improvements coming to it, we're monitoring and balancing queue times, match quality and other factors.
- Capped the rating for the matchmaker, improving queue times for people on the extreme ends of the ratings without a large match quality penalty
- Made matchmaking in your own skill range faster by setting a default start offset for the rating range search
- Increased the soft cap of the rating search range to compensate for the wider range of ratings in the new system
- Sped up the search for the matchmaking range between your rating and the soft cap
- Slowed down the search for matchmaking range past the soft cap, increasing match quality
- Backfill is now entered into the matchmaker as its own entity, meaning it'll do a search just like players instead of taking anyone in range
-- This means that players that have been in queue for a hot second won't have a disproportionate amount of backfills
- Fixed an issue where backfills would cause everyone's new calculated ratings to be way too high or low

[h2]Fixes[/h2]
- Fixed occasional incorrect container panel rendering of dynamic lists in UI
- Periods toggle and match length options are now greyed out for non-owners of the lobby
- Fixed and improved the net physics interactions and added support for multiple pucks
- Fixed the call puck feature making the puck go to bots
- Fixed FPS cap not applying to main menu

[h2]Cosmetics[/h2]
- Added hat trick and axe hats from the original Slapshot
- Added shark back item

[h2]Other[/h2]
- Updated our Unity LTS version which may provide some performance enhancements (or break everything, who knows!)
- Updated the graphics texture of the goal nettings to make it look a bit more realistic
- Updated the ice scratches texture that fades in over time while you're on the ice to be more visible


As we're finalising the finetuning of the new matchmaking algorithm, we have determined which ratings will get which ranks for ranked which is now closer than ever. We'll continue improving the bot intelligence, add difficulty settings, continue our work on the ambience of the game and provide more custom lobby options.

GLHF
Oddshot Games