Patch expected week of April 20th

It has been a rough week in AOM development, with a small number of bugs creating massive rabbit holes of development quicksand. This is sadly the nature of working on legacy products sometimes, and I wish I had better news today, but as Friday draws to a close it's clear we're not comfortable with the stability of our patch to release it in the wild yet.



I've asked skybox to provide some nitty gritty details for the community, and will be writing up a blog covering some of the saga here for Monday as we try to stomp out the last few fires, but I do want to cover a few of the things you can look for as soon as the patch is stable.



First and foremost, I can confirm that the Tartarian Gate infinite resource issue will be no more. One of the side effects of fixing this resulted in a nasty replay loading issue. It's resolved (no thanks to Alfred), but to help reduce versioning causing issues in the future, we made some other changes - which resulted in another series of fixes...you can see how this goes.



Secondarily, some users were reporting file save / load behavior was resulting in poor hard drive performance. Primarily related to massive reads / writes onto disc. I'll have more details to cover in the blog, but that has been identified at long last and will be resolved.



Season ELOs - Our first season was extremely long, something we don't plan on continuing to do. As a result we needed to make some changes to the system to handle the load and process results better. You see some of that already with the season reset, but there's a lot that went on under the hood on our server side. We use leaderboards in ways that not many games do on Steam, and while there are some good things about it, it's also been quite a challenge in some areas too.



Several General improvements. This is minor stuff like visibility tuning of unit hit bars.



And last but not least, I'd like to confirm that when we do release this patch, we'll be adding a number of files that can be modded by the workshop. We were quite conservative with which ones we allowed initially due to potential sync concerns. However that also limited creativity a lot. I'll be pushing out the full list next week, but we've got almost 2 dozen file types that will now be permitted.