Era of Combat: Boxing News

More health and damage tweaks (*note that currently switching the weight class of a defeated AI opponent is not being used by the game, will fix that shortly. The AI default weight class is always used right now)
- VOICECHAT (this is the first version of voice chat. You need to enable it in your player settings menu. I've turned off 3D positional voice chat for now so that anyone in the match (observers and fighters) can hear each other. We'll add options down the road to choose positional voice chat instead (ie you need to be close to the fighters to hear them, or mute observers or whatever we'd like to see in game).
- Voice chat is always on, I think using push to talk would be annoying when competing. So it's either on or off. The volume for voice chat is currently adjusted by using the SoundFX volume slider). Note that your default input and output sound devices are used and can't be changed yet in game. In most cases, your headset will switch to being the default when you launch SteamVR and play a VR game etc.

- Some menu tweaks in settings menu
- Added voice chat enable/disable toggle (NOTE that voice chat is not yet implemented, but will be coming soon)
- The referee now looks at boxers and moves around the ring during the fight trying to stay out of the way. There will be more ref tweaks but it's nice to finally get him moving!
- Various reported exploit fixes
- Health and damage tweaks based on player feedback
- Quick blurb on the Early Access menu directing people to the discord for PvP

A vast overhaul of the damage system that includes more emphasis on clean hits:
- A rebalance of health vs damage
- Damage calculation balance
- Guard breaks / glancing blows (a hard hit to a guard that has a trajectory that would otherwise have damaged the head will do some residual damage)
- Hit reactions have been fixed (some hits were causing body parts to move the wrong way on impact, ie arms would move towards not away from the punch)
- A new training option that spawns a sparring bot that won't strike back and shows a detailed damage report when hit
- Chained punches rebalancing
- Audience capacity and some clutter removed from Nodtech Plaza - some capable systems have issues with this venue - it will take time to optimize the venues and right now I'm focusing on game mechanics, hopefully this will help though (my main system takes 3-8 seconds to loads this venue and two test systems with RTX 2060 with Ryzen 5's take about 30-40 seconds, but none of them crash out, so I'll have to spend some time figuring out why this happens with some hardware configurations that certainty have enough spec).
- If connected to the global server the global board now shows your current avatar's pro stats and global ranking
- There are many other tweaks under the hood and remember, this is the first balancing patch, so I'll be listening to feedback and trying to find a happy medium. I suspect there will be at least three significant game balancing patches and each one will change the feel of matches.
- Audience now appears for AI bouts in larger venues (fix)
- Heavy bag auto-adjusts height again when loading in avatar height data (fix)

- Global Leaderboards have been added, please consider them to be alpha features atm. I left them visible for you to check out (instead of hiding them until I know they're working contrary to the in-game change-log), maybe not the best call haha, they're in the global menu on the main board for now
- Note that we're just showing the top 25 avatar rankings and most avatars don't have scores yet, that's because we're still testing the authentication system for matches. I may wipe these at any time during early access so try not to get too attached to them yet 😉 Stats are by avatar, and yes, each steam account can have multiple avatars
- Ranking is generated based on wins vs losses, ties carry no weight. If avatars have no score then it's simply the order in which the avatar was created, those will fly off the ranking pretty fast as authenticated matches get up and running
- BUG fix, big thanks to @RiverStyx for reporting an issue that reset a match after about 20 seconds. This was caused by the guest skipping their ringwalk and should now be resolved.

- New Large venue: Nodtech Plaza
- The ability (in settings) to turn off large audiences in the big venues to gain framerate for fights with older hardware.
- New stylized visuals for the venue loading screens
- Misc fixes and tweaks