SQUAD DEVELOPER DIARY – JULY, 2022
OWI_Wedge
Posts: 40 Admin
Attention Squaddies,
After a series of updates to Squad over the course of 2022 we wanted to touch base with you, our community of players, and update you on a few goings on with the game and behind the scenes here at Offworld!
SQUAD V3.2
The next update to Squad will be v3.2.
At the end of last year we set ourselves the goal of improving not only communication with you, but also delivering on a number of the promises that we have made over the years. We really wanted to start this year on the right foot, and work to demonstrate our commitment to Squad and to our community of players.
In 2022 so far we have released monthly Updates including a significant overhaul of our lighting and shadows systems, two new factions (the Australian Army and the American marine forces), and other improvements to the game. The team has been working incredibly hard to deliver these updates, and address issues with them through quick hotfixes when required. We’re really proud of the progress that has been made.
While it’s still too early to share a date for v3.2, we are currently on track to release at the end of August. This means that July will be the first month in a while that we spend working on Squad without releasing an update. We know that you’ve recently experienced a monthly schedule for updates, so we wanted to let you know before you start wondering where this month’s update is.
Now that we’ve pushed out a ton of great content, V3.2 will feature bug fixes, and various updates meant to improve Squad’s performance. We’ve seen a lot of requests for this focus from our community, and this is another step to ensure we are paying active attention to the feedback you all provide us with. We are already working to test some of these in our Closed Playtest Sessions with select members of the community.
We will have more details about v3.2 as it gets closer to release, and are looking forward to sharing those!
NEW ADDITION TO COMMUNITY TEAM
As many of you know, we have been looking to hire a Community Manager for Squad for the past few months following OWI_Krispy’s move back home to the United Kingdom. We still miss Krispy, but are delighted to announce that we have found Squad’s new Community Manager! They’re working on getting up to speed on the ins and outs of the community, and you’ll be meeting them later this week.
This addition will allow us to further level up the community team and begin to really focus on providing our players, Server Owners, Partners, and other community members with the best possible connection to Offworld Industries. More hands on deck always ups the ante on what we can do!
This also means that OWI_Wedge will slowly be transitioning to a bit more of a behind the scenes role and won’t be quite as visible in the Squad community. You may see other refinements as well over the coming weeks and months.
While we don’t want to talk too much about what we have planned at this point, more regular Development Diaries sharing what’s going on behind the scenes at Offworld Industries, and letting you know what the focus of our next release will be is a goal for our team. We are also looking at our Developer Q&As to see how we can make them more informative and useful to a wider audience.
NEW STUDIO
One of the things that we will be doing in these Development Diaries is to share a bit of a peek behind the scenes here at Offworld. While not directly affecting you as a player, we hope a look at the goings on behind the scenes of the development of the game might be illuminating and add a bit more flavour!
It’s summer time here in New Westminster, British Columbia, a city just outside of Vancouver. The past few weeks the team has been preparing to move into our new offices, and many of the members of our development teams who have been working remotely will be starting back in the office a few days a week.
On days off the past few weeks many of the team came into the studio to help put together furniture, move in computers, and get the studio ready for operation. The OWI IT team had an epic weekend long move to set up our new infrastructure and were able to minimize disruptions to game development, ensuring that both the Squad and Beyond The Wire teams had everything they needed for their first days back in the office!
Offworld will continue to be a mixture of remote and in-studio development teams, but the opening of a new office and the resumption of in-person work is a big step for the studio.
We look forward to bringing you all more Squad updates, more Squad news, and introducing our newest Community Manager to you all very soon!
Comments
Dev's you must add the armour system the guys from Post Scriptum added!!! All the infos and stats are already online available for adding such a system! oh and pls fix the leopard 2's firecontrolle system because the system implement is how the system from the leopard 2a4 would work but since the leopard 2a5 the gunner can set the gun on laserranged target automaticly with just pressing one button (the leopard 2 ingame is the leopard 2a6m which has the newer system already)
Actually balance the game instead of having russia being the punching bag for basically all factions.
Idk I feel like Russia is fairly well-balanced atm, I've seen a pretty good mix of win/loss rates from my own gameplay with Russia, I have noticed a lot of steamrolls recently but it's happened to multiple factions and it's usually down to poor leaders and bad teamwork rather than any disadvantage of the actual faction. That's just my personal feelings tho, maybe the devs have a way of collecting data that may show otherwise
When Bradley can 2-click remove the tank while hitting basically anywhere (while tank needs at least 3 AP to kill it, or 2 missiles that still reload slower than bradley's; and one hit to ammorack will also erase the tank) and M1 can steamroll the rest, not that M1 can't easily beat T-72B3 in all even-skilled matchups due to faster reload and ammorack location/softstats, that's not balance.
Btw AK-74m is statistically the worst; even worse than AKS-74 with1p29 (because that one gets a better magnification on scope, with more clear sight picture).
So there is disadvantage on smallarms and vehicles, parity at best, what else is there? Memes? hardbass?
"devs have a way of collecting data that may show otherwise"
They don't. That's easy to figure out because a certain game called Planetside 2 exists.
Even if you have detailed statistics of every player on every faction(and I doubt OWI has the capability to collect/analyze them), it's still not enough as k/d...etc. are dependent on far more variables(that does not make weapon statistics imbalance irrelevant, just much harder if not impossible to determine if something is actually underpowered). For example you can have US be the faction with lowest winrate simply from having it being involved in more invasion as attacker, pre-defender-nerf. So that's where it got shafted by multiple variables such as map layer and general playerbase "skill" level(and they don't have to scale linearly). Or just the most common "good guy" faction where all the freedumbs switch to every time(meanwhile on insurgents it's 40 active players with 10 unassigned waiting for slot on US team to open up for switching). If I play Heavy AT 24/7 I'll have a middling k/d ratio of about 2:1 as opposed to playing AR/MG; or if I always jump to stacked teams - I'll have a far higher winrate than 60% but it's plausible that my K/D would suffer as a result(teammate being better means there is less target for you to kill).
Player skill/luck do not make weapon stat balancing irrelevant; because if OWI really looks at "big data" then it's in my best interest to intentionally(but in a way they can't prove) sabotage the team, like building superfob at 2nd cap on rollout before stepping onto cap, holding up rest of the team's cap progress.
How you "feel" can easily be skewed by how people remember/forget things - the more outrageous the result, the more likely it is for you to remember(hence you remember the extreme close ticket win/loss and/or steamrolls). Basically if something is supposed to happen and didn't(or vice versa), you remember it better than if it worked as intended.
This was something common in world of tanks where shot dispersion rng appears to favor the Soviets with their typically much less accurate gun(inaccurate gun hits -> remembered; accurate gun misses -> remembered, so some people think RNG is rigged to make soviet tanks more accurate and german tanks less)