Hey Armored Warfare players,

First off, let us apologize for not having more formal patch notes for Early Access 2.

While only one week has passed since you had a chance to participate in Early Access 1, several weeks have gone by for us internally between the builds you see as Early Access 1 and Early Access 2. During those weeks, a long list of bug fixes and quality of life adjustments were made to the game and while we do have a record of all these changes, we were still trying to refine our process for tracking the changes that need to make it into patch notes. As such, when it came time to compile the changes into something readable, it was a bigger undertaking than we had anticipated.

Going forward we are continuing to refine our processes and will deliver better patch notes in upcoming versions. We understand the importance of keeping everyone informed about what is going on with Armored Warfare and we have no intention of trying to sneak changes by without including them in the patch notes. We know you're all too observant for things to slip by anyway. :) We also know that when it comes to balance changes, it's important explain not just what changed but why we felt the change was necessary and that is something you will see show up in future patch notes as well.

Another thing I want to explain about this testing cycle is that there is a fairly large delay between the time that we implement changes into the game and you get to see those changes in a patch. We call it our 'stabilization' window where we try to avoid making any unnecessary changes while we focus extensively on critical bug fixes but otherwise don't make a lot of changes to the version. As a result of this process, it might feel like there is a full patch cycle delay between the feedback you provide us and our responses to that feedback showing up in a playable build.

For example, Early Access 2 (EA2) features many quality of life improvements that were suggested to us from the Alpha Test that took place over a month ago. While we have been digesting the pages of solid feedback provided to us by those of you who participated in Early Access 1 (EA1), you will not see very many adjustments made because of that feedback in EA2. This is because EA2 was already well into in its stabilization period when EA 1 began. Likewise, EA 3 has been in stabilization for over a couple weeks now and so feedback from EA 2 is unlikely to make it into the next patch we get out to you.

I hope this helps explain why it might sometimes feel like two or three patches go by without something blatantly obvious being addressed by us. This cycle will continue while we try to deliver updates to you on a short turn around (2 to 3 weeks between update). Once our updates slow down enough that we have time to work on the next update while the current version is live, this cycle will eventually go away.

With the explanation out of the way, I've compiled some notes about various changes you will see in Early Access 2. Again, many of these changes came about as a result of player feedback. I can't emphasize enough how useful your comments have been in improving Armored Warfare. I wish we had time to respond to them all in the forums, but we are processing and tracking them in order to figure out how to address the things you players are bringing up.

Thank you again for being such an amazing collection of players. We really appreciate you participating in our Early Access phase of Armored Warfare.

Rich Taylor Project Director, Obsidian Entertainment

User Interface

Mouse Sensitivity Sliders - There are now pitch/yaw sliders for all three mouse modes: SPG view, 3rd Person view, and 1st Person view. This is not our final solution to the mouse sensitivity issues that have been seen in previous patches but it should help remedy things for most players experiencing issues with hyper sensitivity. In addition, we believe we have resolved the issues with the mouse cursor remaining visible while in a match. If players continue to encounter this bug, we want to hear about it.

Confirmation Box Cleanup - We have gone through the UI and nuked many of the unnecessary confirmation boxes that were coming up all the time. For example, you will no longer be prompted to confirm going back to the garage when exiting from a match after your vehicle has been destroyed. In addition, most of the confirmation boxes that remain include a 'Don't show me this again' checkbox. Enabling that checkbox before clicking through the window will keep that confirmation from showing up again.

Chat Interface Overhaul - We have made some changes to the way Global Chat and Friends Lists work to hopefully make them easier to notice and to be more intuitive. In addition, we made it so that you can 'minimize' chat windows by shrinking them down instead of collapsing them all together, so that you can still see when there's traffic in them to check out if you'd like. A single click on a shrunken chat window will bring it back up to full size.

New Battalion Fields - Battalions can now have a 'Motto' and 'Message of the Day' in addition to their previously available text fields. The Motto isn't public facing yet, but will be as we continue to expand on Battalion functionality. Message of the Day is a message officers can set for their Battalion members to see.

Upgrade Tooltips - We have done a lot of work to improve the various vehicle part tooltips you see, especially ammo. Many unnecessary or redundant fields have been removed to reduce the amount of text where possible. In addition, we changed a lot of the logic for how the ammo comparison tooltips work so that the comparison values you see are compared against a similar type of ammo whenever possible. For example, if your vehicle has two AP shell variants unlocked, the tooltip for the highest tier AP shell for that vehicle will compare that shell against the lower tier AP shell instead of against other different shell types. To help make this clear, the tooltip will also explain which shell it is comparing the current shell to so there shouldn't be any confusion about how the shell you are looking at compares to other ammunition you have.

Damage Text Options - On the 'Gameplay' tab in the Options Screen, there is a section that allows you to select from three different approaches to showing damage text over other vehicles in matches. There is the traditional 'Linear' style where the numbers float up from the other vehicle, with larger numbers float slower than small numbers. There is the batched up method we had in earlier Alpha Tests where damage would accumulate into a single value until the target stopped taking damage for a short while. And there is the Popocorn style, where damage numbers will follow randomized arcs out of the top of the vehicle, similar to what you may find in many Action RPGs. Try them out and settle on your favorite!

Large Minimap in Mouse Mode - When pressing CTRL to go into Mouse Mode while playing Artillery, a large, semi-transparent version of the minimap will appear in the center of your screen. You can use this minimap to move your aim around the map or ping just like the standard minimap in the corner. There is an option in the UI settings to disable this behavior if you prefer to keep the minimap in the corner. Or if you would like to have this feature even when not playing SPGs for convenient pinging or just getting a chance to quickly zoom up the minimap to get a closer look at enemy positions, you can also enable that preference in the UI settings as well.

Economy Changes

Reputation and Credit Scale shift - In order to give us improved granularity to work with, we have changed the scale for Reputation and Credits throughout the game. All Reputation and Credit gains and costs throughout the game have been increased, with Reputation seeing a 3x increase and Credits seeing a 8x increase.

Post-Match Rewards Formulas - We have been working on some changes to the way we calculate the amount of Reputation and Credits received from in-match performance. One mechanic is that kills now provide very little reward in and of themselves but will instead mostly provide a bonus to the Reputation and Credits earned from damage you have dished out. This means that if you focus on damage you will see the most consistent rewards, but if you manage to dish out a lot of damage and get a lot of kills, you will see even more rewards due to your deceive contributions to the match. We will be making similar changes to the way Spotting and Spotting Damage is rewarded, as well as Assists and Assist Damage (damage done to vehicles you have immobilized), but those changes are not in EA2. We will be posting a Developer Diary very soon that goes into greater detail on our Post Match mathematics, including our reasoning behind it and a lot about how it works. As I've said before, we intend to be very transparent about our mechanics and will be sharing the mathematical details of more systems as we have time to write them up for you.

Locked Reptuation/Global Reputation Changes - We have changed the way Global Reputation accumulates in this version. Now when a vehicle has reached Renown status (100% progress on its Reputation bar), any additional Reputation earned on that vehicle will accumulate in two pools. The vehicle itself will continue to accumulate Reputation, the intent of which will become clear when the Retrofit System is introduced. In addition, an equal amount of Reputation will be added to a 'Locked Reputation' pool which is global across all your vehicles. Instead of converting Vehicle Reputation into Global Reputation, you will convert Locked Reputation into Global Reputation. Global Reputation can then be spent on accelerating any vehicle progress. When spending Global Reputation to advance a vehicle's Reputation Bar, you will also be given an equivalent amount of additional Vehicle Reputation to spend on upgrades. When spending Global Reputation directly on upgrades, the vehicle's Reputation Progress bar will be advanced accordingly. This means there is no wrong way to spend your Global Reputation to speed up progress on a vehicle.

Vehicle Balance Changes

HE Damage Math - Some changes were made to adjust the amount of guaranteed damage caused by HE shells for all cannons. We are continuing to monitor the guaranteed damage mechanics of HE to evaluate their place in the game and will likely continue making adjustments to it with each new batch of data we have to review.

Shell Penetration Reductions - We reduced a lot of the Penetration factors of the shells across the game with the goal of improving armor relevance. There is still a lot of fine tuning to be done in this area as we made mostly broad sweeping changes in this pass, but the end result should have MBTs feeling tougher, especially in the front. You'll still need to watch those sides though.

MBT Armor Adjustments - We made a patch to the cannon bases of many of the MBTs to remove the glaring weak spot in their turrets at those locations. As this was a last minute change, we had to apply this change rather than focusing extensively on historical accuracy of this adjustment, so expect to see additional changes to the cannon base armor of MBTs as we continue to research them.

Sheridan Tuning - The vehicle that got targeted with the most power reductions in EA2 is the Sheridan. We will continue to evaluate the data on how this vehicle is performing with the changes so far. We're trying not to overdo it to the point where the unique experience afforded by this unusual vehicle is lost, but we also knew it needed to be toned down from the version in EA1. The vehicle also lost its unhistorical APFSDS round in this patch. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to refund any credits spent on this ammo but we will work to make sure that we can compensate players for changes like this in the future.

Artillery Tuning - In the preliminary patch notes, it was stated that we made wide sweeping nerfs to the SPGs. Those patch notes were actually old notes that applied to EA1. There were no SPG nerfs done in EA2 compared to EA1 and we apologize for those inaccurate notes making it in. This doesn't mean there won't be any additional tuning for Arty going forward, but we didn't make any at this time.

New Content

Tier 7 Vehicles - With EA2, enjoy a new tier of vehicles to check out. There's some real famous vehicles in that lineup. We're looking forward to collecting match data on them all!

New Map - Introducing Roughneck! We look forward to joining everyone on this new wintery battlefield.

Performance

Optimizations - We hope most of you experience performance improvements in this version. We have made very wide sweeping improvements to the game's performance in terms of map specific optimizations as well as general game-wide adjustments. We also adjusted some of the parameters that get adjusted when choosing between the different graphics levels which we feel will help support a wide variety of machines than EA1. This doesn't mean we are done with optimizations - we have several engineers focused exclusively on this area and expect to see even more improvement in Early Access 3.

Future Optimizations - We have seen reports where even high end machines were experiencing issues with framerate that seemed very strange given the hardware specs. As we begin wrapping up our more global optimizations, we may need to reach out to players on high end machines that are still finding unacceptable framerates across all settings so that we can begin diagnosing specific hardware configurations. We are committed to delivering a great experience across as many machines as possible.

We hope you like the Early Access 2 so far! Please continue giving us feedback, we are reading it very carefully!