February 22, 2017

Patch 2.49

Welcome to Patch 2.49! In this patch we’re adding new skins, improving fast fall animations, and making a bunch of changes to Test Features based on your feedback. Enjoy!

New Skins in Malhalla

Ojiisan Koji – Old age and treachery win everytime.
Völsung Brynn – Leader of the fiercest Valkyrie wing in all of Asgard.

Valhallentine Item Extension

Due to an error with Steam this week, purchasing was temporarily unavailable for everyone. To make up for it, we’ve decided to extend the amount of availability for Valhallentine items.

One more week for Valhallentine items!

Test Features

Removed From Test Features

(Please note, removed Test Features may still graduate or return to Test Features in later patches)

In the cases this is intended to punish, where a runaway player immediately turns and uses a power with built in movement to quickly reverse direction, the penalty could be avoided too easily by waiting for a couple frames of friction to get rid of the negative momentum. When the penalty comes into play in unintended cases like positioning for a string followup, those few frames matter a lot more. We didn’t feel like the change impacted negative play well enough to risk the issues it could create in normal play, at least in its current implementation.

Removed: Decreased the travel distance of certain moves when the user has momentum in the opposite direction.

Increased run and fall speeds are two fairly drastic changes, and they come with a number of concerns that make us hesitant to push them live immediately despite all the positive feedback so far. Maps would need to be adjusted to reflect the shorter jump height. There’s been some concerns that the bigger range between speeds could negatively affect low speed characters, or that we’d be buffing passive play by widening the gulf between mobility for evasion and mobility for attacks. There are concerns about whether it hurts accessibility for new players. We’ve heard feedback that some players have started playing exclusively in Experimental Queue and are looking into whether that’s a widespread behavior or a vocal minority. We want to make sure that they’re healthy changes, and that them feeling better doesn’t mask other problems down the line.

Focusing on one of these changes at a time should help isolate where the problems and benefits are, as well as leave room to test smaller related changes that are easier to push live.

Removed: Increased fall speeds by 15%.

Modified Test Features

With this change, we’re looking to see whether part of the positive reaction to the movespeed increase was at the expense of slower legends. This won’t fix all our concerns with a global movespeed increase, but should address possible issues with stat balance.

For the increased move speed change, compressed the range between low and high speed legends to be closer to the amount of variation in ranked.

Graduated from Test Features

When we introduced Landing Recover last year, we started with a low value to avoid making the game feel sticky. Now that players have acclimated, we feel that nudging the Landing Recover slightly higher will help create moments to punish floaty playstyles without noticeably impacting the feel of movement.

Increased Landing Recover from 2 frames to 4 frames.

This is a minor quality of life change. It’s not going to fix wall camping by itself, but it chips away at it, and it’s consistent enough with existing behaviors where attacks and dodges can’t be performed on the wall to be intuitive. It adds some risk to the wall without the glaring downsides of the more severe changes we’ve tried internally like never giving jumps back or making walls increasingly slippery until the player returns to the ground.

Dodges will end when touching a wall.

Since the introduction of Gravity Canceling, Slide Charging has felt comparatively less useful. Slide Charges do stand out by creating a tradeoff between burning some startup frames on route to the target and having an obvious telegraph. This feature pushes that benefit a little further by giving players some control over their momentum while falling.

While Slide Charging a signature in midair, the power can be steered at 40% normal movement speed until the first hitbox or the charge is released.

Added to Test Features

This adds some forgiveness to mistimed fast fall inputs, letting players eventually reach fastfall speeds as long as they’re holding down. This should help make fall speed feel more responsive, especially for novice players.

While holding the down direction when airborne, your max downward speed is the same as when fast falling.

This is most noticeable when trying to perform a down air off of a soft platform. Currently, pressing down a frame before jump and attack will result in an aerial jump instead of a grounded one.

Added a 12 frame forgiveness period after dropping through a soft platform where jumps will snap back to the platform and be treated as a ground jump. This is not applied unless the player was standing on the platform.

Remaining in Test Features

Leaving this in Test Features gives us another two-week sample of data to compare 1v1 winrates against Experimental Queue winrates, as part of a debate whether stacked signatures overperform with the change. We’re also testing some alternatives internally, and may move one of those into Experimental in the future if any show promise.

Invulnerability from Chain Dodges no longer prevents hits from Signatures.
The invulnerability period after a Speed Dodge is canceled into an attack no longer prevents hits from Signatures.