Insurgency: Sandstorm News

Given feedback to update 1.4, we’ve decided to make some further changes to the playlist system. We’ve been listening closely to the community’s thoughts and opinions, and we are actively working to iterate on the system in a way that is healthy for the community and its playerbase. Please continue to share with us your feedback, and know that we will be making further changes as necessary as we did with this patch and the hotfixes before it.

It is important for us to understand our playerbase better and learn what experiences our players want the most. Do note that these experimental changes are not set in stone, and we will be closely listening to the community’s feedback. As mentioned earlier, we do welcome constructive feedback to these changes. We just made a new Suggestions/Feedback forum on Steam, and encourage the community to post feedback there. Please read the pinned post to ensure the best results to your feedback and suggestions.

In the interest of remaining open and transparent, here are our motivations behind each change:

To remain committed to the overall health of our game, we have decided to remove Skirmish from official matchmaking to help better populate matchmaking, decrease queue times, and addresses the issue of splitting the playerbase. This mode isn’t getting as much attention as we had hoped it would as its own playlist, and has been historically less popular than our other Versus modes both in Insurgency 2014 and in Sandstorm. As we evaluate different systems and modes, we’re focusing on ones that we have the time, bandwidth, and resources to support fully, and Skirmish is not on that agenda right now. The low player count and overall experience of this mode is not representative of the experience we want for players, especially new ones. We want players to get into games playing on fun game modes quickly. It is important to note that Skirmish will not be entirely removed from the game. It will still be available in community servers for anyone to host.

In addition to removing Skirmish to better support the player queues and overall health of the game, we have also decided to merge Push and Frontline. These two modes are the most popular and similar in flow, so we feel it makes sense to combine them and let players vote in between matches what they want to play next. While Push is the most popular mode, we are hoping that by adding Frontline to this queue, it will give the mode more exposure so we can better evaluate the degree to which the community enjoys it.

To evaluate the health of the Firefight mode, both in Competitive and Casual, we will be adding a perpetual double XP boost. We are hoping this motivates players to play Firefight and helps us better evaluate the interest in the Competitive scene as a whole. We will continue to explore data, and make decisions based on these changes and what we’re discovering there going forward.

Additionally, we have added a Steam group specifically for Competitive Player Feedback. We hope to start a dialogue next week with Competitive players to give updates on what our plans are in supporting and facilitating Competitive going forward, and to invite constructive feedback from the community on how to improve the Competitive scene.

To improve the overall experience of Versus Firefight, we’ve increased the amount of players. This is seen to be better gameplay and makes it more distinct from Competitive Firefight, which was 5 v 5. Our 8 v 8 change did help address player population issues, but given the other changes in this patch we are hoping that 12 v 12 can still provide a healthy playlist population.

As we have been exploring Limited Time Playlists, we have made the decision to reduce their weekly releases to a more gradual cadence in an effort to limit the amount of playlists featured at any one time. We hope that by reducing the frequency at which we introduce new modes, it will make them feel more exclusive and special as well as prevent unnecessary splitting of the playerbase. We still have plenty of new playlists to come, but we feel we need to be more conservative with how many and how often we show them.

We will continue to monitor and evaluate the impact of all these decisions. Thank you for bearing with us through these iterations of the playlist system. We hope that this patch and the hotfixes before it demonstrate our commitment to improving Sandstorm’s first time player experience and adding new game mode content in a way that does not split the playerbase. We cannot thank you, the community, enough for your continued support and positive feedback and suggestions. It is as it has always been since the Insurgency mod: critical to our development and direction we take the game. We will continue to monitor our social channels, forums, Reddit, etc and listen to the community. In addition to these changes above, our team will continue to work on bug fixes, new content, optimization, and other improvements based on community feedback. In this latest patch, we address a collision issue that caused grenades, players, or other large projectiles to properly pass through broken windows, added new first person Melee, Sprint, and Run animations for Mines, and more.

See the full changelist below:

• Fixed a collision issue where it was not possible for players, grenades, or other large projectiles to correctly pass through broken windows.
  
• Fixed an issue where occasionally, on lower end systems, it was possible for the Tutorial Level to become blocked during the Scavenge waypoint and associated Lesson pop up, making it impossible to complete the level.
  
  

• Fixed an issue where, when Steam Cloud was enabled, Loadouts were not being correctly saved after creating them in the Customize menu.
  
• Fixed an issue where Foregrip Bipods or Foregrips were not positioned correctly on certain weapons in first person.
  
• Fixed an issue where the M16A2, M16A4, M4A1, MK18, QBZ-O3, and the VHS were not compatible with other 5.56 weapon magazines when scavenging.
  
• Fixed an issue where RPG-7s dropped on the ground would show the rocket warhead beside the weapon.
  
• Fixed an issue where the left hand would not correctly move to the Bipod or Bipod Foregrip if you deployed it while sprinting in spinting in Hardcore Checkpoint or with the Slow Movement mutator applied.
  
• Fixed an issue where when choosing the Light Carrier and any armor in combination with a female character would cause one of the pouches to slide around the body in third person.
  
• Fixed an issue with audio event timings for the first person VHS-2 speed reloads.
  
• Fixed an issue where the first person Insurgent leather gloves would clip into the hand.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Uzi base reloads were not resetting the arm position properly at the end of the animation.
  
• Fixed some extreme camera rotations during the Uzi empty reload sequence.
  
• Fixed an issue where rounds were visible in the magazine still during the Uzi empty reload sequence.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Headband cosmetic would clip with certain male hairstyle cosmetics.
  
• Fixed a clipping issue with the Watch Cap and Neck Gaiter High cosmetic options.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Neck Gaiter cosmetic would clip with the Beanie cosmetic.
  
• Fixed an issue where both the top rail and side-rail mounts were available for the 2x PK-AS with AKS-74U combination. It now only utilizes the side-rail as designed.

• The Community servers in the Play menu will now sort by most populated servers by default.
  
• Increased the draw speed of mines by 20%.

• Created new first person Melee, Sprint and Run animations for mines.
  
• Mines now have the correct third person jumping animation in third person.

• Hillside
  
  • Fixed an issue allowing players to gain access to a closed off building by vaulting through a window near Push Security D.
    
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to spawn kill the Security team as they left their spawn area on Skirmish.
    
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible for Insurgent team players to exit the map in a certain location.
• Summit
  • Fixed an issue where it was possible to spawn kill the Insurgent team as they left their spawn area on Skirmish.

Be sure to follow us to stay connected! Reddit Discord Insurgency Twitter + New World Twitter Instagram Steam Community Forum Official Forums

Hey everyone, my name is Michael Tsarouhas. I am the lead game designer on Insurgency: Sandstorm. Today we’re gonna talk about update 1.4's new tug-of-war inspired PvP game mode Frontline that was added to the game a couple weeks ago. We’ll cover what it is, how it plays, the challenges we encountered in its implementation, and its history in our previous games. Frontline is available now on the live version of the Sandstorm and can be found under the PvP “Versus” section of the Play menu.

Though we’ve only just added the mode to Sandstorm, Frontline has actually been around for a while. It first started as a game mode called “Battle” way back in the Half-Life 2 mod version of Insurgency, which was called Insurgency: Modern Infantry Combat. It played pretty similar to as it does today, like a two way Push mode, where both teams progress linearly through the map one objective at a time trying to push each other back. There was, however, no weapon cache as there is today in Frontline. The mode had a special flavor to it. It was unpredictable, hectic, and high in intensity, but still had that tactical hardcore Insurgency feel to it.

https://youtu.be/WDbrv1shNgQ
Our WWII shooter Day of Infamy in 2017 saw Battle’s official return, but this time with its new and current name “Frontline”. This version introduced a radio objective that needed to be destroyed as the final defense objective for either team if they were pushed back to the edge of the map. Our aim with Day of Infamy was to create a more “war-like” experience as opposed to the security operation feel of Insurgency, so Frontline was a perfect fit. It was a great big world war after all, and we were excited at the idea of seeing the fire support drop as teams shoved each other back and forth on a map like Bastogne or Foy.

https://youtu.be/wTp5mUjE21c?t=318
Frontline, like Push, saw a lot of popularity. Players took well to the higher speed action, the shifting of tide of combat, the objective trading, and the overall atmosphere. We decided the mode might have a place in Insurgency: Sandstorm, and set it up for internal testing as early as the pre-alpha version. As we went along in Sandstorm’s development however, we determined that we needed to cut down on game modes and focus on the ones we had. Push, Firefight, and Skirmish were felt to be the stronger most popular Insurgency experiences, and if Frontline were ever to be added to the game, it would require more work than we had time for.

But what is Frontline exactly, and how does it play? The quickest way to explain it is that it’s two way Push. In a Frontline match, there are either 5 or 7 objectives depending on the map. Objectives are laid out in a long linear fashion, as opposed to in Firefight or Skirmish modes where they are contained in certain areas of the map. Every objective in Frontline is captured in order and one at a time, much like Push or Checkpoint. At the start of a round, the middle objective is neutral, and the rest of the objectives are split half and half between the two teams, represented below as red and blue.





When a round begins, only the neutral middle objective is active, and so both teams must scramble to capture it. This is the most dense part of a round, with up to 28 players piling into a single building, hill, or whatever other landmark it’s been decided they must vye over. When a team finally captures it, it becomes theirs that they must defend while simultaneously attacking and capturing their enemy’s next adjacent objective. In Frontline, after the neutral middle objective is captured, there are always two active objectives: one to attack and one to defend.



In the image here, you can see that the blue team has captured objective C, and now must capture objective D while also defending C from the red team’s attacks. If red takes C, then blue is forced to fall back and defend B. Both teams are in a constant struggle to move this frontline forward and not get pushed back themselves. It’s expected that a round will involve trading objectives back and forth across the map. Regularly spawning reinforcement waves keep the action flowing, and a wave is added to the wave count every time a team captures an objective.

Each team’s final objective, the blue and red diamonds at each end of the line, is a weapon cache that the other team must destroy to win. If a team gets pushed back to their weapon cache, they’ll lose all their remaining reinforcement waves and be forced into a last stand, just like in Push mode. This last stand has two key differences however. First, in Frontline, vehicles will spawn in, giving a better chance for a comeback and a successful weapon cache defense. Second, unlike in Push, a team can gain ground back by capturing their enemy’s objective, saving their weapon cache and pushing back toward the enemy’s. This is, of course, a tough scenario to come back from, but it’s possible, especially in the later stages of a round when waves on both teams are mostly depleted. An alternate win condition is to simply kill off the enemy and their reinforcement waves. When all of the enemy are dead, regardless of where the line is, your team will win.

In our early stages of testing Frontline for update 1.4, this secondary win condition actually presented a problem. Our vision for Frontline was to have back and forth and objective swapping that took place all across the map. In practice however, it was just a brawl at the center. Both teams would slug it out over the neutral middle objective, and whoever won that objective typically won the match without even capturing anything else. This is because of a few reasons:

• Capturing an objective originally gave you too many reinforcement waves. Once a team had a lead in waves, they could dig in and bleed their enemy of all their waves.
  
• Reinforcement wave respawns would be triggered quickly. This meant there would always be people occupying an objective preventing its capture.
  
• Capturing objectives took too long. Enemy players would make it to the objective too quickly even after you had cleared the objective and thought you secured the area.
  

To address this, we reduced the amount of waves gained from a capture, first to 2 waves and then to just 1. We also made reinforcement waves wait a little longer for more players on your team to be dead until a respawn was triggered, and upped the amount of reinforcement waves a team had at the start so rounds wouldn’t end so quickly. Finally, we made objectives able to be captured faster, so people could more easily move the line.

These changes made it less important who captured the middle objective and more important who was actually playing all the objectives and pushing the line forward throughout the whole round. Simple as those changes may sound, it took a lot of playtesting, iteration, and feedback to identify and address those problems. The Community Test Environment was a huge help in realizing what changes needed to be made to Frontline, and we thank all of you who took part in that testing for sharing your feedback. Even with that though, as with any of our modes, we are always open to feedback on how to improve. If you’re liking Frontline, then please, let us know on the forums or on Reddit. If you aren’t, then let us know it can be improved.

Thanks for reading everyone and take care!

We are releasing a hotfix today that improves the playlist system, improves movement animations, fixes improper AI loadouts in Co-op, potentially fixes the Hillside Firefight West crash issue, and makes other changes.

We are aware of the current player population issues with Versus playlists Firefight and Skirmish. We are currently working to address this and we welcome your feedback and suggestions on the Steam forums, official forums, and Reddit.

See the full changelist below:

• Fixed a rare case where a player could potentially spawn under the map if they initially idled after joining a Frontline or Push match and spawns were disabled between them joining and accepting their loadout.
  
• Added potential fix for an edge case where players and AI enemies could fall through the map after dying and respawning.
  
• Fixed an issue where suicide bomber AI enemies were not spawning during counter attacks.
  
• Fixed issue where AI enemies were being equipped with RPGs more than intended.

• In response to community feedback and to address player population issues, we are making the following changes to the playlist system. Please be aware we are still strategizing and considering other changes. We welcome your feedback.
  • Normal and Hardcore playlists under Co-op will always start on a Checkpoint Security scenario. Checkpoint Insurgent scenarios are still available in both of these playlists, but they will only be played if the players within an ongoing match choose to vote to switch to one. This change was made because our community demonstrated a preference for the Security Co-op experience over the Insurgent one.
    
  • The Firefight playlist is now set to 8 vs 8 players instead of 14 vs 14. This lower player count target is intended to make it easier to start new matches, improve the mode’s gameplay, and bring a better parity with the 5 vs 5 Competitive Firefight experience.
    
  • Firefight, Skirmish and Competitive Firefight playlists will receive a triple XP bonus for the next 7 days. This is a temporary measure intended to entice players to try out these less populated modes and kickstart their populations. As said above, other changes are being considered, but this is our first step. We will be watching the numbers and listening to your feedback going forward.
    
  • Added new descriptions and images for Firefight, Push, and Skirmish in the playlist menu for better clarity on their experiences.
• Reworked the “Steam Authentication Failed” message to properly communicate the reason why the kick occurred.
  
• Players who join a match but never select a class will now be kicked for being idle.

• Fixed an issue where the first person animation would not play when planting a bomb on a weapon cache.
  
• Fixed an issue where if you didn’t move after switching your weapon, the weapon audio component would not update its position correctly, which resulted in hearing the distant version of the weapon in first person and missing weapon foley audio.
  
• Fixed an issue where the dry fire animation and audio would not play on bolt-action or pump-action weapon.
  
• Fixed a bug that would cause the explosive "pull pin" event to re-play when changing stances with all grenades.
  
• Fixed an issue where the equipment physics would abruptly begin simulating upon first being shown in the Loadout menu, Customize menu, in-game, or after moving the character between spawn points.
  
• Fixed a bug where selecting an empty preset in the Loadout menu would not immediately hide the weapon preview at the center.
  
• Fixed an issue where the Shell Camo in first person would not match the third person version.
  
• Fixed an issue where the player’s weapon could show up attached to their feet when using the DShK.
  
• Fixed an issue where the M99 could be fired before it had fully completed its shouldering animation.
  
• Fixed an issue where chest gear would occasionally clip into other clothing cosmetics and/or the player model on first spawn.
  
• Fixed an issue where the M99 was misaligned on the weapon table in the Range level, which made it difficult to pick up.
  
• Fixed a Level of Detail issue where the Covered cosmetic would look incorrect at various distances
  
• Fixed an issue with the camo materials on the Uniform Camo Torso variations

• Weapon Upgrade Fixes:
  
  • Added the 2x Kobra sight to the Insurgent Competitive Flanker and Assaulter classes.
    
  • Added the 2x Kobra sight to Uzi for the Insurgent Competitive Flanker.
    
  • Added the 3x QBZ-03 scope to the Insurgent Competitive Assaulter class.
    
  • Added the 1.5x PKAS sight to the TOZ and AK74U for the Insurgent Competitive Flanker class.
  • Added the 7x scopes to the Competitive Sharpshooter class.

• Added new first person run, walk, sprint, Hardcore sprint, and Slow Movement mutator sprint animations for all primary, secondary, and launcher weapons, which will now sync visually with their relevant footstep audio events
  
• Improved the visual appearance of pistols, melee weapons, and grenades in the Loadout menu.
  
• Improved the visual appearance of the Molotov rag physics.
  
• Added new slide animations
  
• Added new mine planting and mine priming third person animation sequences.
  
• Fixed a clipping issue involving the combination of the Covered and softshell jacket cosmetics.

• All
  • Updated soundscape overrides for all player spawns so when spawning in any location other than outdoors, you will automatically receive the correct environment sounds and weapon switch.
• Hillside
  • Potential fix for Firefight West not loading correctly and causing server crashes.
    
  • Fixed an issue where you could capture Checkpoint Security objective F from outside of the building.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the Checkpoint Security objective F capture area was not fully including all parts of the room as it should.
    
  • Tweaked exposure to make it less dark when looking straight into a bright light source.
  Summit
  • Fixed an issue where you could capture Frontline objective F by laying prone behind a certain set of sandbags that blocked the window.
    
  • Fixed an issue where crouch jumping and landing on a specific set of walls may have caused the character to land incorrectly.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could get to an exploitable position in the rubble on the market side
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could get stuck between an awning and cliff near objective B on Firefight East.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could reach an exploitable spot near objective A push Insurgents.
    
  • Fixed an overlapping mesh at objective C on Push Insurgents.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the player could reach an exploitable spot by pixel-walking near objective E on Summit Skirmish.
• Precinct
  • Fixed an issue where the player could become stuck on a ledge of a wall after vaulting.
• Hideout
  • Fixed an issue where the restricted area for Security was not fully covering objective A

Greetings!

I hope this post finds all of you well and in good spirits. If you’re new to the State of Production posts, this is the second edition. You can review the first one here.

As I hope you are all aware of and happily experiencing, we recently released Update 1.4, and so far, we’re receiving a lot of positive feedback. Of the negative feedback we received, we were able to be immediately reactive, via a hotfix, and the changes have since been well-received. We are also aware of the playlist population issues, and we are working on ways to improve those populations (feedback is welcome!) Overall, the studio is really pleased with the way things have been going, and we continue to introduce, optimize, and re-evaluate our internal production processes. I have a lot of exciting new developments to share with all of you, so I’m going to dive right into it.


Since my first post, we’ve continued to build the studio; both in terms of infrastructure, as well as in terms of personnel.

Infrastructure:
We’ve now got a dedicated meeting room (the construction was actually completed Tuesday, September 10th, the same day as the update!). Check out the picture; it’s not too fancy yet; we’re still adding carpet, some sound-proofing/echo paneling, getting a bigger and more appropriate-sized table, and preparing to hook up a big-screen television for digital conferencing. Additionally, the rest of the office is starting to come together! We’ve installed dividers, started partitioning off different sections of the building to help compartmentalize teams a bit, and built quite a few more new computers for the team. We’re actively shopping and preparing to get some streaming equipment so that we can re-initialize measures like having the team live-stream with the community. Speaking of which…

Personnel:
I’m super excited to announce all the additions to the team!

Since I last posted, we’ve hired a dedicated Community Manager, /u/NWI_DaraDef! As she acclimates and continues to take over the reins of community development and community outreach, she’ll likely become a more omnipresent force on this sub. We love her, and we’re sure you will too!

We’ve built out our internal Quality Assurance team; we now have dedicated internal manual testing capabilities, and over the next few weeks, the infrastructure to support and utilize automated testing will come online as well. Our QA Engineer started on Monday, September 16th. Along with him, we’ve hired 2 additional QA testers to help refine and sharpen our internal test efforts. Additionally, one of these testers will be bolstering our player-support efforts, as we continue to flesh out an internal support division to help our players troubleshoot technical issues and create documentation and a knowledge base on how to resolve common problems.


Along with building up an internal support division to help us better understand how we can best serve our players and customers moving forward, we’ve additionally been scraping feedback and data from across various forums and mediums across the internet. The most common, singular feedback item observed and reported, generally speaking, has been heard loud and clear.

“Fix the game’s performance problems.”
“The game doesn’t run well on my machine.”
“The game needs to be optimized to run better.”

When I first started with New World Interactive, I had a hypothesis that performance was the biggest obstacle faced by the studio. In the 3 months I’ve been here, that talking point has only become louder and more prevalent. I want to be 100% clear on this: We have heard you, and we are making optimization our number one priority over the next 3 months. I’d like to dive into the details to assuage potential concerns or fears, as well as use this SoP post to address the scope of impact that this decision will have on our roadmap, on our prior commitments that we had hoped to achieve in 2019, and on our path forward.

First, I had anticipated the need for this type of initiative. One of the reasons I began with building a support division up was so that we would create and establish better telemetry and reporting mechanisms. By building up our Quality Assurance division, we will now have more bodies and more eyes dedicated to manual testing; this will help us to slowly-yet-steadily re-evaluate pre-existing features and systems within our game, as well as to more thoroughly test future content additions to the game. We will be able to utilize automated testing to help us capture more complex aspects of testing; at night, we’ll be able to run configuration and settings testing 1000’s of times per evening. We’ll be able to automate performance testing captures on dozens of machines with numerous scripted conditions to better understand where we are over-budget in-game, and to identify where we can recover potential performance losses. Effectively, we’ll be able to maximize the amount of testing we can carry out on a day-to-day basis, which should provide us with meaningful data (over time) on where to best focus our efforts for initializing optimization efforts.

Second, with the arrival of our community manager and the additional assistance of our testers to assist with player support inquiries, we’ll be able to start collecting, organizing, and tracking player feedback. This will allow us to cross-reference the data we receive from our analytics and testing division, and to weigh it against the more human and personal side of player feedback we receive from our community. Over time, we’ll be able to analyze this information and create action items for our art, design, and programming teams. We should also see a substantial uptick in our scope of support, such as faster response times to troubleshooting inquiries, more activity and dialogue on our forums across the internet, and more relevant and thorough troubleshooting documentation and techniques to ensure that our players aren’t blocked out from being able to play our game.

Third, as a result of this initiative, we’ve been re-evaluating our roadmap to make sure that, moving forward, when we make a commitment to our playerbase, that we can deliver. If we can’t deliver, at the very least, we’ll be able to message so more accurately, more directly, more quickly so that expectations can be managed accordingly. We’re beginning to ramp up our production team as well, and we recently just put up postings for Game Producers. This will help us to ensure that bugs and tasks are being distributed, messaged, and tracked more accurately and efficiently, as well as to ensure that we are staying on time, within budget, and within scope. Plus, you can work with me! :)

Lastly, we’re working with NVIDIA to help us with performance analysis and evaluation. Given that we’ve seen several references to people having performance challenges with high-end graphics cards, we’re sending off a few builds to evaluate GPU optimization for these top-end cards. While it's too early to determine what the results will be, we'll be able to get a better handle on where in our optimization process specifically we need to focus to improve performance. While we already know we have a lot of drain on the CPU end of things, we're hoping to get more information on that and other factors through this testing. We’re optimistic that we’ll get some great starting points, given that the last time we had this game reviewed by a leading rendering expert was actually right before we initially launched nearly a year ago!


As I mentioned in my original SoP post, the console version is coming. At the time of my previous post, I wasn’t comfortable releasing the details related to our console release. Now, I have all my ducks in order, and I’m ready to present the news to the community.

Insurgency: Sandstorm will officially be coming to consoles in the Spring of 2020.

After evaluating the scope of concerns regarding optimizations, back in July, we began a dialogue internally and with our publisher, Focus Home Interactive (FHI), about how to best proceed forward with releasing on console. Given the studio’s history, we didn’t have a lot of pre-existing experience internally relating to console porting, optimization, navigating console TRC (Technical Requirement Checklists), etc. Our CEO, Jeremy Blum, began exploring co-development partnerships earlier in the summer with FHI. The hope was that we could work alongside some talented developers who could help us navigate these challenges and the process itself, while simultaneously freeing up some bandwidth internally to continue generating new content + optimizing the game further for our PC audience. Effectively, by finding a partner to assist with console development, we can substantially expedite our own efforts at optimization while also getting some fresh eyes/additional perspective on recommended adjustments and changes.

We recently finalized our agreement with a console co-development partner. We’ve chosen to move forward with Black Tower Studios, and we are super excited to announce the partnership! We’re also pretty excited to announce a few select things regarding the console release. We’ll be releasing a time-sensitive, console-exclusive map for approximately 2 weeks when we launch. After 2 weeks, we’ll release this map on PC as well, but we thought this would be a fun way to give console players something to “own” and get excited about when paired with the release. We will reveal more information about this map in the near future :) Furthermore, as we close in on the release date, we’ll be doing all sorts of contests and giveaways within our community, ranging from things like an Insurgency Console, signed copies of the game, and merchandise! We’re hopeful that the community is as excited as we are to finally be able to talk about this. I fully anticipate a load of questions, and I’ll be fielding those questions on this topic specifically.



The short answer? In the best way possible! As we make a huge push towards optimization, some of our creative content has been pushed back and delayed to be released later down the road. As a result, we’ll be steadily releasing all sorts of new content to the community, and in a better state, that should keep everyone excited. If you look at how much content we’ve released since the game first launched, we hope it will become clear that we stand by our titles beyond a release date. For example, we’ve introduced over half a dozen new weapons, 3 maps, 4 new game modes, and a large quantity of new cosmetic items and camouflages... and we have many more additions yet to come!

As we don’t believe in annualizing editions of our game from a philosophical standpoint, all the changes and adjustments we make over time are done so with the belief that we’re going to expand and improve upon our pre-existing product. We’re super committed to our players, and we want to reinforce our continuous support to our fans. As more and more production guidelines are rolled out, we should have tighter, cleaner production cycles pertaining to future sprints.


This wraps up the second SOP blog. It’s not as wide-scale or as robust as the first one, but a lot of my next month is simply going to entail the creation of new processes, the refinement of old processes, training, and working on some more under-the-hood initiatives. We’re all pretty excited with the way things are shaping up.

Comments. Concerns, or questions? Leave them here and I’ll address them as best as I am able. We’ll also be hosting an AMA tomorrow, Thursday, September 19 at 1pm MST, to discuss this blog in more detail with all of you :D Here is a link to the AMA thread!

P.S: Wanted to share some pictures of the team as well. This is roughly ¼ of the team as we still have many re-positioning to join the core group, but I thought it’d be cool to share with the community to remind everyone that we’re a super small team! :D Check it out here.

Although we are posting this announcement on Steam for visibility, we would like to direct all users to our post on Reddit if you would like to comment or be involved in the discussion. Our team will be actively monitoring that thread, and we will also be hosting a live Q&A tomorrow, so go subscribe to reddit.com/r/Insurgency

Hello all. Today we are releasing a hotfix ahead of the weekend to address some undesired results we’ve seen with the new PvP queues that have been rolled out with the new playlist system. In particular, we’ve noticed that the Point Capture playlist has not been well received, and as a result those who like Firefight or Skirmish modes have been unable to play on official servers supporting these modes. Because of this, we’ve decided to update the playlists to be game mode specific rather than going with the previous ‘playstyle grouping’ approach. This should allow people to more clearly identify the mode they want to play, and hopefully result in a better distribution of players throughout all of the different modes. One of the strengths of the new system is our ability to modify the playlist queues relatively on-the-fly based on results and community feedback like we’re doing today. We will continue to monitor results and feedback, refining the playlists over time accordingly.

• “Ground Battle” & “Point Capture” combined playlists found under Versus in the Play menu have now been replaced with the following individual PvP mode playlists based on community feedback:
  
  • Push
    
  • Firefight
    
  • Frontline
    
  • Skirmish