Survarium News

The first season of Survarium clan league organized by [AGW] PanterA on the SCL discord server recently came to an end. And don't forget to join Survarium discord server as well!

The first prize went to [ILS] International Legends, and its members will receive a custom decal as a reward which we will be adding in the upcoming Survarium updates. [Bier] Bier A* took the second place, and [-TLS-] Team Last Shot – the third.

Congratulations to all the participants who made it to the end despite some issues! The organizers consider this season a huge success, and Survarium team couldn't agree more: we hoped that clan battles functionality would be used to have tournaments like this one.

Meanwhile the organizers are preparing for the next season and ask everyone to fill in this questionnaire.

Huge thanks for organizing the tournament to:
@[Bier] ShavedCoconut
@joewillburn @[dNiNa] Hammer2Head
@[BOTS] JarasonTheMLGPro
@[Bier] t0FF @[Bier] Danteska
and also anonymous sponsor.
SCL would not have happened without you!

See you in the next season of clan battles!

Greetings Survivors, we wanted to share a little feedback from our team with some recent responses to your concerns and suggestions in Survarium 0.66. Some of these were selected from our official Discord and the rest are general concerns about current balance. We had omitted the toxic suggestions and the ones about modules (we already have 300+ of them in the game) unless there were specific issues, like with silencers for pistols. Below you can see what we had to say.

Join our official Discord and submit your own suggestions if you'd like to see them answered. The ones with the most upvotes will be passed along to the devs whenever possible!

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1. Playerbase division caused by current branching, ordering, and weighting of passive skills in the skill trees. Speed (movement speed and action speed) and stamina delta (Δ) between low/medium level players with few skill points and veteran players with many skill points is too great. This encourages campy gameplay in low level players and hackusations against high level players.

Meta skills are inaccessible to most players due to being placed in the final branch of the trees, which gives a small group of players the ability to dominate everyone else. Boring for veterans, frustrating for everyone else. Meta skills should be close to the start of the tree, with diminishing returns approaching the last branches of the tree. Like this, players wouldn’t feel that they are wasting skill points on useless skills just to reach the useful ones, especially in the last 2 skill trees due to them requiring 10+10 more points just to unlock the final branches.

ADS (“aim-down-sights”) speed delta can be on the order of 4-5x if the correct gear set, passive skills, weapon modules and modifications are employed. Reload time reduction can be 55 %, or more if you mix the sets. This is a massively unfair advantage. The difference in ADS speed, reload speed, movement speed should be no more than 1.3x between basic and fully minmaxed. This would be more in line with other non-p2w games.

We are actually reworking many skills (and adding new ones), coming in 0.67!

We are also thinking about giving new players some skill points right from the start. One idea is to give 10 points on the first level, but don't give skill points on levels 10, 20, etc (now that the players get decals on those levels). So with this approach nothing changes for veterans, but new players would have more skill points to experiment with. What do you think?

Another option to explore is to make the stacking effect of similar modifiers smaller. Either by diminishing returns or by changing the formula. However, this requires a lot of research, testing and fine-tuning. Don't expect this to come soon, though, as by introducing these changes without much thinking could only make the things worse.

2. Players who don’t leave the base. Maps are designed in such a way that enemies can be killed without leaving your base.This was acknowledged over one year ago in the Duga map interview (available in RU/UA), but progress hasn’t been made to alleviate this and, in fact, the developers have recently said that “working on locations takes a lot of effort, even if the changes seem small”.

If it’s not possible to modify maps like London or Cologne (people just sit at the back of their base on top of the rails, a train or a balcony) by simply obstructing the view, then you need to approach this in a different way. Don’t let them deal damage from inside the base spawn or make them start receiving damage for staying in the base, because they don’t care about the objective.

Nobody likes campers, but punishing the players for staying at the base seems wrong, especially if the enemy team is pushing hard and forces you to stay at respawn. This applies to both dealing damage to them or not letting them attack. There's got to be another solution to that.

Having said that, we'll think about what can be done to make the bases less sniper friendly (regardless of whether that team is winning or losing).

3. Headshot multiplier. Too many deaths are instant because of easy headshots. It has been a controversial topic in the game for the last 2 years. I personally know players who stopped playing because of this.

For example, the lowest damage carbine, can kill the heaviest armor helmet in the game with one shot. And most of the ARs kill it with 2 shots. What’s the point of improving armor if you still get obliterated?

With lower HS multiplier, the lightest masks/helmets could take one hit to the head and they would die to the next bullet. Headgear with medium armor would require 2 shots, which would feel instant... but you could decide to wear heavy armor and it would require 3 shots in the head to kill you. Your skill would have a much greater role in 1v1, and hitting consecutive headshots would be rewarded with a fast kill.

We increased headshot damage multiplayer due to community requests in the first place. But due to requests, we'll decrease it to x2.5 down from x3 in the next balancing update, likely with 0.67. In general, there shouldn't be other changes to TTK, so decreasing headshot multiplier would lead to less one shots and increased TTK on average.

4. Shotguns in version 0.66. Update 0.66 increased the number of pellets in each shot from 8 to 12. There’s less randomness, pellets are distributed more evenly. In long-range fights, hits are more common, and although these pellets deal less damage, it’s irrelevant when the rate of fire is faster than on carbines and can kill targets even on mid-range fights (imagine across the School gym distances). There needs to be more overall dispersion (less shot grouping) for maxed-out shotguns, they can’t be the only choice for close quarter maps.

Please also take a look at Vepr-12 reload speed when fully minmaxed. Jackhammer dispersion from the hip also needs to be revised, as there’s no need to aim down sights with that shotgun. As an extra, it’s not possible to buy a pump-action shotgun for Silver, all are behind Treasure Hunt or Gold.

Shotguns, by definition, are the best choice for close quarters. And Jackhammer is the only fully automatic shotgun in the game, and it's tier 5, of course it's a strong option for close to mid distances.

Another point to consider is this: when you think something is too strong or too weak, you are judging by your subjective opinion, and we rely on statistics. And statistics show that on tier 5 Jackhammer is far less popular than assault rifles and SMGs. Not only that, it's also less effective (based on K/D ratio with the weapon). And in general, shotguns are much less used than any other weapon class other than pistols.

So, if someone is good at exploiting a weapon's strengths, you think it warrants a nerf? But maybe we'll make the hipfire less accurate.

Regardless, armor and weapon balancing changes will be coming soon. We just can't promise we will nerf shotguns or any other weapon class, for that matter.

5. Diminishing teammate nicks. It has been suggested in the past to make the nicks hide if they’re far away or behind a wall when the option “always display teammate nicks and health bars” is enabled, but that hasn’t been implemented for unknown reasons. Objective icon opacity (in Research, Batteries, S&D…) is reduced while aiming down sights, so please at least implement the same but for teammate nicks to avoid situations where they are right behind the enemy and you die because you thought it was a friendly.

6. Friendly marker/tag colorization (Discord suggestion). There should be an option to choose friendly marker/tag colors. The small white marker arrow or even full white name text can easily be washed out from the environment lighting for a few moments leading to unintended friendly fire. More tag color variety should help reduce friendly fire overall and make them more noticeable for each individual's needs. If it's not possible to add such a feature, then friendly tags should at least have a black outline around the white text, making it visible in any situation.

So one question is about making teammates' nicknames less visible, and the next one is about making them more visible? We don't know how we should react.

But ok, we will see if we can implement the suggestions: reduce opacity when aiming down sights and add a black border around the white text.

7. Rage inducing spots on London map. There is one place in London that is particularly used when stealing batteries to safely get away from the enemy base. This is the spot in question: https://i.imgur.com/0vrr4TV.jpg The problem here is that the ceiling on the left is too low for the character to jump across, and the first box is too high to jump on it. Normally by using the sprinting mechanic to get on things this wouldn’t be a problem, but it’s not possible when carrying a battery. Put the first box in the same angle as the second one to create a type of ramp and you’ll easily solve this problem.

We'll see what we can do.

8. Spectator mode in custom matches and clan wars (Discord suggestion). Ability to watch the match as a flying camera in private lobbies. This was a very requested feature during the successful Survarium Clan League (SCL, season 1), where it became apparent that there is no way to view the matches live to commentate them like in other competitive games. A player can record or stream the match, but it will only be seen from his point of view.

Survarium was never intended to be a cybersport discipline, so effort was not put into creating a spectator mode. Alas, at this point it's unrealistic. Moreover, this feature can be used to gain an advantage in a match, so we'd have to introduce some kind of delay for spectators. And it's also not easy to do.

9. Killcam duration. Killcam duration in TDM is about 13 seconds because it is the respawn timer. Killcam should be shorter to give instructions better to the teammates. There’s no need to see what the killer was doing before starting to shoot. Play the killcam first and then do the respawn timer, don’t link them to one another.

The idea is that the killcam shows you how your character was killed (which is especially useful to new players), but also does that with a slight delay, so it's harder to exploit that (like you say,
let the teammates know). We think it's fine as it is.

10. Map variations in custom matches (Discord suggestion). When creating custom matches or clan matches, you can select spawn sides or a server, but the map variation is random. It may happen that one of the teams, despite a change of sides, still has an advantage over the opponent because the map variation has changed. It can be seen very clearly on Rudnya or London, where Research mode objectives are distributed in different places quite often. Therefore, it should be possible to choose a variation in the lobby.

That's a good point, we'll do that in 0.67.

11. “Tournament rules” for custom matches. Clan wars are played without a killcam and with no hit markers, but it’s not possible to disable them in custom matches. This would be useful when practicing against your own clan members, or for teams who, like it happened during SCL, had more than 2 line-ups for the tournament and were forced to play custom matches against each other with different rules and a “gentlemen” agreement to disable killcam and hit markers.

We'll see if we can add an option to toggle killcam and hitmarkers for custom matches.

12. Option to choose the default color scheme on Premium sets (Discord suggestion). The Premium sets are some kind of crazy survivor's nightmare. Why are they so bright? Are we going to a party? How to hide with a red, orange or blue flashy set with all the greenery around? Some say that even if they had all the money in the world, they would not buy these sets even with 90 % discount. So, just like how with premium weapons you can choose the default skin, the same should be allowed for Premium sets by simply adding the "camouflage" button.

When the sets were first created, it was believed that the players would want something shiny in this post-apoc world, and the artists didn't think about making it possible to easily recolor the textures. So to change the set colors, we'd have to essentially retexture them from scratch. It's a long and expensive process. We already discussed it with the team, and decided that it's not worth the effort.

However, it might be possible to enable models from common (silver) equipment for the identical premium items. We'll see how and if that can be done.

And frankly, with 90% discount the sets would be a great deal simply because of the premium weapon included. But we don't force you to buy them, with discount or now, as there's plenty of other equipment in the game which is free.

13. Chemical plant issues with sniper campers. In old versions of the game there was one anomaly that made this map balanced, but when it was removed, this map became unbalanced. The water spill area near A flag once had a toxic field that made it impossible for people to be there for long periods of time without an oxygen tank or high anomaly protection. This area is now full of sniper rats that usually manage to kill a lot of players before dying, because they have a very good view of the enemy base and are hidden by the grass, and there are very few ways to get close to them to kill them (one of them involves going from behind, through the enemy base, across the whole map). It seems only logical to bring back this type of anomaly to such a strategic spot, to keep the sniper presence limited.

Yes, one of the teams has a 59.3% average win-rate on this map (that's really a lot!), and on all other maps it's much closer to 50%/50% split. We'll see what we can do to balance it better and remove that spot.

14. Recoil value in the shop view of a weapon (Discord suggestion). Right now the current recoil value of a weapon can only be checked in the workshop, please make the standard recoil value also visible in the simplified shop view of a weapon with all the other characteristics. Would make it easier to compare weapons for beginners who don't have millions of Silver to purchase every weapon.

We doubt showing numbers will be useful to beginners. Testing weapons in the shooting range (before buying) seems like a better option, and you already can do that in the game (you can press RMB on any weapon in the shop and there's an option to test it in the shooting range). We'll think about how we can promote that feature better.

15. Pistol suppressor sights (Discord suggestion). Iron sights get obscured by the suppressor when it’s used on any pistol in the game, forcing the player to use collimators or no suppressor, and pistols like Mauser don’t have access to collimators to solve this issue. In real life, a thing called “elevated iron sights” exists to solve this issue. This attachment can apply to all pistols and expand game content. Pictures for reference: https://i.imgur.com/XG9d4NH.png and https://i.imgur.com/UPaHr5I.png

Not sure if something like that can be easily added without tweaking camera and attachment placements. But we'll look into that, as well as into making hip fire more accurate for pistols.

35 years ago, this day was a turning point in the history of human civilization. It was then that a terrible accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant not only changed the lives of many people, but also the course of history. A huge radioactive cloud covered the continents of our planet, our past, present and future changed under it. The notion of "Chernobyl" is now much broader and has gone down in the life of everyone who was there and all others who didn't notice that the great catastrophe, the catastrophe of century would forever influenced their fate.

We must remember Chernobyl, because the past may return if we do not remember and respect it.

Greetings Survivors, we thought we'd share a little feedback from our team with some recent responses to some of your questions and suggestions. Most of these were selected from our official Discord and below you can see what we had to say.

Join our official Discord and submit your own suggestions if you'd like to see them answered. The ones with the most upvotes will be passed along to the devs whenever possible!

1. New maps for Search and Destroy mode.
There's many players who almost always play only Search and Destroy game mode. There's also many players voicing concerns about the already not so new Duga map. Add a part of Duga map or some other map to S&D mode and pump some fresh air for the part of the community that likes playing this mode. There's only 3 maps + 1 variation for this mode. Plus, players are forced to play it in Ranked.

Answer: S&D has always been the least popular game mode in Survarium after Battery Retrieval: both by percentage of total matches and the number of people playing in the mode. You might argue that's because there are not many maps, but actually S&D was not that popular from the start. So we won't spend effort by adding content for something that less than 10% of the player base enjoys.

In fact, we were thinking of disabling both S&D and Battery Retrieval because they are so unpopular just to speed up the matchmaking for other modes. But eventually decided that variety is more important, and you can choose other game modes when queuing to improve the matchmaking.

By the way, 25% of all S&D matches in the last month were played in Ranked mode. Also, 35% of all ranked matches are S&D. But it's only because it's easier to gather a 5v5 match. From this standpoint, perhaps it makes sense to add another map, but we'd rather buff the rewards for the mode. Still, would you guys play the mode outside of Ranked?

2. Menu tutorial for new players.
Huge majority of new players are very confused by the UI, the game does a poor job at explaining what can be done through the UI and where. For example, a lot of new players don’t know where to customize the weapon, how to change the faction, how to add more medkits… There needs to be an interactive tutorial for new players that highlights sections of the UI asking the player to take a look at it and explaining what can be done there via text box. This is pretty important as confusion very quickly turns into frustration and a bad first impression of the game. Everyone I ever told this game about has complained about this to me.

Many other games do this, and many players expect to either have a very self explanatory UI where nothing is hidden under subsections, or they at least expect the game to show them how to use it and where to find everything that is useful.

Answer: Unfortunately, the UI has never been a strong part of the game. And veteran players know that it's been reworked twice already. In fact, a few years ago we were going to tweak major parts of it again, but after estimating the amount of work that would require, we realized that the team simply doesn't have resources to do that.

Another huge issue is that the game is using Scaleform for the UI - a technology that was fine when the development started, but is outdated at the moment and is really hard to support. This is why it's so hard fixing some old bugs with the UI or changing even small parts of it.

And switching for another technology for the UI at this stage would take months, if not years, to recreate the UI we already have, so it's not an option.

3. Improving painkillers.
Right now they're meant to boost bleeding immunity. No one is really using them, so maybe it's time to buff them. The idea is to buff the bleeding immunity effect and add stopping power immunity. It has to be done with the corresponding skill in Survival Tree. Buff painkillers so much that with maxed skill they would provide 100 % stopping power immunity (player characters would not lose their speed and stamina after getting hit) and 75 % bleeding immunity. The effects would work for eg. 7 seconds. Base stats for it would be 50 % bleeding immunity and 75 % stopping power immunity. To achieve this, you would need to change the passive skill from multiplying to simple addictions, eg. 50 % + 5 % = 55 %.

Answer: We've been just thinking about buffing or changing rarely used character skills in all the trees. We can't tell anything specific at the moment (including release dates), but you can expect some skill rework in the future.

4. Improving the way fractures work with high explosive damage reduction.
In the current version of the game grenades are easily breaking legs, but the damage drop-off is just too significant to deal any damage. The players often find themselves crippled with less than 20 damage dealt. The same issue exists with C4 damage over distance. The idea is for grenades and C4 to deal much higher damage from up close but without causing fractures. Damage mechanics for mines are good so far, but hand grenades are extremely underpowered. To kill anyone, the grenade must explode under their butt and only if they have no explosive immunity, or you’d need to throw a second grenade.

Answer: The explosive damage was nerfed because many people complained that grenades were too powerful. If we remove fractures and increase damage again, the game will turn into grenade spam, especially on smaller locations (all Slaughter maps at the very least). We really doubt that's what the community wants.

One possible solution would be to decrease the number of grenades you can carry to one, maybe two. But the idea is that grenades and explosives in general are meant for crowd control, not making easy frags on smaller maps. So lower damage plus debuffs from explosives seems like a good solution to us.

5. Seeker and Executioner sets nerfs.
The Seeker set has the movement of a medium set while aiming and it’s basically a heavy set. Nerf “movement speed while aiming” from 2 % to 1 %. This is an issue because it makes you harder to hit in 1v1 fights no matter the range, by allowing you to move quicker to the sides.
Executioner set basically has the best bonuses and all of them together makes it overpowered. Time to activate medkit should be reduced from 20 % to 10 %.

Answer: These suggestions make sense, we will look into that.

5. Painkiller and antitoxine duration display in the UI.
Things like oxygen level in gas tanks and active artifact effect duration have a timer that displays how much their effect lasts, it’s located at the bottom near the medkits. But painkillers and antitoxins do not display any kind of info in regards to their duration, and their use is very much situational so it’s important to know when will the effect wear off.

Answer: Yes, we will consider displaying those in the UI. Hopefully this will be done in the next major update.

6. Clan wars system expansion
Survarium finally has clan wars again and soon, the first season of the Survarium Clan League will start. But are there plans to expand the clan system in the game? Will there ever be a clan ladder with perhaps exclusive prizes? Having to organize a tournament manually is very hard to do, as you have to individually manage between players and teams. There should exist a system with a built-in league where teams can click and sign up with their clan. Something similar to the Faction Challenge.

Answer: Yes, there are plans, but probably not a ladder. The whole idea behind Clan battles is to provide a tool allowing you to find out who is the best. So manual matchmaking was the idea right from the beginning to give you flexibility in choosing time and date of the battles. We think that no matter how VG tries to automate it, you will be unhappy - just the way you were when we had a Faction Wars event with a fixed schedule.

7. 2021 plans for Survarium
It’s no secret that the team always draws up an approximate plan of each update for the next 6 or 12 months and adjusts it along the way if needed. How did the COVID situation affect you with all of this? What plans did you have for 2020 that you were not able to implement in time and will we be able to see this in 2021? I.e., this question is asking for a small sneak peek of what we can expect and what’s not achievable with your current resources. Seasonal events with new camouflages are a given, but do you have something else up in the chamber?

Answer: Yes, we have, and some of it we already implemented this year, like the Paintball game mode, a bunch of new decals, and changes to the rules of Slaughter and TD modes.

One thing we've been discussing for a long time now is introducing a new anomaly with a new artifact, and also reworking existing anomalies and artifacts to make them more relevant. But we can't give you any dates, it's done when it's done.

Another thing is new rewards for Ranked tokens. And probably a new weapon. Also, more customization options (decals, camos) in general. And rework of the skill trees, as already mentioned above.

Covid affected us the same as the rest of gamedev: we mostly work from home, so some of the work processes have changed. But as you can see, the game gets updates all the same: Survarium received 5 major updates since Covid came to Europe a year ago, and we basically had the same update frequency as before (25 major updates in 5 years since 0.40).

9. Max level players.
Have you thought about new activities or things to do for those players who have been level 100 and Prestige level 10 in all factions for a very long time? Some kind of bonus, harder or unique missions, some kind of extra.

Answer: There are 274 people at the moment who have achieved all that, and the majority of them are still playing. We are grateful for long term support, but you have to understand we can't spend the team's resources to do something big for such a small part of the community. Maximum we could do is probably more prestige levels with some rewards. Perhaps some new achievements and decals. What do you think those rewards could be? What a player that achieved everything in the game could possibly want?

Survarium Patch 0.66c with St. Patrick Day event (with Famas among other rewards) and fixes to many locations is now live!

Please find the complete list of changes of the Patch below. Have a good time playing the game!

Not playing Survarium yet?
Download the latest version of the game here!



The List of Changes in Survarium 0.66c General Changes

- Fixed spots where it was possible to get an unfair advantage (looking through objects, leaving the location boundaries, etc) on the following locations: Rudnya, School, Vostok Radar Station, Chemical Plant, Tarakanovsky Fort, Vector Laboratory, Cologne Bridge, Duga Radar Station.

St. Patrick's Day Event in Survarium

- The event starts on March 12 (3 PM GMT) and ends on March 22!
- Play in PvP matches (including ranked and Paintball), receive special event currency (mugs of ale, clover leaves, and pots of gold) and exchange it for the unique decal and weapons with St. Patrick Day camos!
- The higher you place in a match, the more event currency you get!
- Exchange the event currency for "Horseshoe" and "Clover оrnament" decals, and FAMAS "St. Patrick 2021" assault rifle with an unique camouflage and three random modifiers. Huge thanks to John Rivian and ODESSAmamaUA for the rewards design.
- The "Horsheshoe" decal provides +10% to experience and +10% to silver. The "Clover оrnament" decal provides +10% to reputation. Set of both decals additionally provides +5% to experience and +10% to spare parts.
- You will also get the Green Hat 2021 for the first PvP win during the event.
- The Green Hat provides a +1 bonus to the amount of the event currency.
- Premium account provides +25% bonus to the amount of the event currency.
- You can also purchase the event currency in the Survarium web shop or in the game shop.



Download Survarium 0.66c and check it out! Hopefully you'll like the changes.

See you on the battlefield!