Patch Notes June 12 2024

June 12th Patch Notes

Mod Tuning

Before we get started here we wanted to preface these changes: We’re committed to making the game feel fresh and well balanced, but not “change just for the sake of change”. We’re going to make balance updates more regularly, and we’re excited to see how you adapt with and shift the meta. Below you’ll see some dev notes to accompany these changes for added context. We’ll continue to keep a close eye on things, and see what could use some adjustments in the future.

• Ideal Maneuvering
  • New behavior: Decreased deceleration from turning 15/20/25/30/35% when above or at Ideal Turn Speed.

This mod has been underperforming for a long time. The intent was to allow you to sustain high turn-rate turns for longer, but the old behavior accomplished that in a way that was both uninteresting and hard to tune. This new behavior lets you sustain these good turns longer, and lets you choose to keep your airspeed high to dodge that next incoming missile!

• Disruptive Flares
  • Lock Resistance and Cannon Aim Range now have separate timers.
  • Missile lock resistance reduced from 1.5s to 0.5 seconds.
  • Cannon Aim Range Resistance still lasts the entire flare time(1.5s).

This has been the meta-defining mod for a long time now, and we think it has moved to an unhealthy place. We want to maintain these as the active defense against cannons, so they will retain the effect on lead reticle that you know and love. However, how they interact with missile lock is going to change a bit. Flaring early to stop someone from launching a missile at you is a really great effect, but with the current flare and missile tuning values it came with nearly no tradeoff. Reducing the time of the missile lock resistance means that you can still use these to break lock (and shoot first in a joust or interceptor fight!) but they are less of a “get out of jail free” card than they have felt in the current tuning.

• Faster Flares
  • Flare Cooldown Reduction increased from 10/13/15/17/20% to 40/45/50/55/60%.
  • Reduced flare effect time from 1.5s to 1.25 seconds.

So disruptive flares aren’t helping you defend against all the missile spam anymore, what do you do? “Faster Flares” has had a pretty huge makeover. Each individual flare is less effective, but the cooldown reduction has been massively buffed, meaning that while the timing window has shrunk a little bit, you are less likely to get caught with your flares on cooldown.

• Finishing Guns
  • Deceased target health threshold from 50% to 30%.
  • Increased Gun Damage from 15/17/20/22/25% to 20/23/25/28/30%.

Finishing guns is really good, but it is kind of just a general damage buff. The original intent was for this to be more about hunting down low HP targets. This change emphasizes seeking out opportunistic kills by buffing the damage and shortening the window.

• Improved Targeting
  • Lock Angle increased from 10/13/15/17/20% to 15/18/20/23/25%.

This mod is just underperforming. It just gets a straight buff to lock angle, which should hopefully (subtly) let you lead your target more during those tight turn fights.

General Updates

Networking Performance:

• New “Game Performance” toggle can be enabled from the Advanced Settings menu.
  • This is both useful for your own reference, and for our own diagnostic purposes as well. There are fields for things like FPS, Ping, and even Connection Quality. Ex: lcq/rcq at .8 means your connection is experiencing 20% packet loss locally/remotely

Bug Fixes

Gameplay:

• Fixed an issue with hud interactions with stealth vs manually guided missiles.
• Fixed an issue with the F-1 and MiG-21 ability afterburner effects.

Paint:

• Made some adjustments to the F/A-18 Fightin’ Bengals paint.