Hello, soldiers!

Last week we talked a bit about the damage model in our game and you seemed to like the idea of knowing more about the underpinnings of how the game works. We’ll try to produce more in-depth pieces like the last one, but this week – we’re summing up the development for last and the week before.

Live Patches

We’ve had a lot of stability work done in the last two weeks, mainly for the server. We’ve fixed a few bugs related to the new progression system which is being implemented as we speak, fixed a few other, unrelated crashes and improved how ammo counts work. We’ve also fixed a few movement-related issues.

There are still some bugs left, but the amount of crashes and disconnects has gone down vastly and it’s only going to get better from now on.

Steam Lunar Sale

Just last week the Humble Winter Sale that kicked off 2020 with a discount has ended. But just in case you had no idea about it or didn’t have a way to purchase a copy of World War 3 over the course of the sale, you got another chance to do so!

The Steam Lunar Sale has started on Friday to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We’ve dropped the price of our game for this occasion, but the time is running short, the sale ends just a few hours after the publication of this weekly, but if you’re here early, you can still grab a copy of World War 3 with a 33% discount! If you want to do so, please visit our Steam page here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/674020/World_War_3/

Community

We’ve started to implement some changes to how we run the community and how people can interact with us. We’re trying to streamline some of the processes we’re relying on, like reporting badly behaving players and bugs, so temporarily we’ve created some forms that our players can use to speed up the process.

Bug Reporting

For bug reporting, from now on, please use this form (you can find links to them on our Discord and forums as well):

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScz8QAY2nBgEoISCJ1p48XsfQA4ixNxrFT3-rQophqz88jknA/viewform

How this works is that we’re getting all your reports in one place and automatically formatted the way we want. This will in the future change to something more internal (and available from inside the game), but for now we’re testing how this system will work.

In theory it should shorten the time bug reports get to us and make it possible to report back to the community a lot better on which issues were fixed, declined or are still in progress.

Toxic Players

The second part is the player reporting. We’ve seen a few bad apples thinking they’re untouchable lately and we’ve decided to crack down on toxicity in the community. In the similar vein to the bug reporting form, we’ve created a form for reporting toxic behaviour and you can see it here

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeK03asHAK4utAb6Hq5zDyzgZSdiHzSh5-1rZovjCSD-EKlLQ/viewform

WARNING: THIS FORM IS NOT FOR REPORTING CHEATERS!

Since the implementation of this form a few days ago, we’ve already had a few bans, so it seems to work well.

There are a few rules that we follow, regarding the banning procedure to make it fair and consistent. In general, each concurrent count of abusive behaviour will make the ban longer and if it’s a really bad case of someone trying to disrupt the game and intentionally and knowingly make it a worse experience for everyone, we will be applying permanent bans that will show up as VAC ban on the Steam profile.

Now, it all sounds a bit scary to some, but if you’re just having a normal conversation and not behaving intentionally abusive, you’re not going to get in trouble. We’re here to have fun and every player has the same right to have fun as you do, so if you’re going to insult others, just don’t say anything.

We’re also planning on moving this form into the game, like the bug reporting one, so it will be much easier to to both.

Thanks for reporting those bugs and players and see you in the next one!