Delays and Disables
Now that we're on the other side of releasing the update after both some extensive delays and day one disables, let's chat about how we got here and what we're doing moving forward.
The initial delay of the update was due to an out-of-date aspect of our connection to one of our partner platform's systems that allow us to certify builds quickly for release. This is an important aspect of our release pipeline as it's what allows us to make changes and improvements after PTS right up till before release. This problem took about a day to solve as we rebuilt the game to update this connection.
While that issue occurred on one platform, we were testing all others to ensure everything was in order. In our playtests, we discovered an issue where another platform was failing to properly enter lobbies & freezing at load in. This issue is what prompted the longer, second delay during which we had programmers dig into the issue to solve it. This build, however, had enough changes that we had to recertify the build with partners again, which is how we ended up delayed to this week.
We try to walk a balance between transparency with you all & focusing on doing our best to solve problems so apologies there was little context prior. We hope this shines a little light on why the update took additional time!
As for the recent disabling of both Capture the Flag & certain Items in Survival, these were unfortunate stopgaps and results of issues we had not seen fully until launch day, In CTF's case, we wish we could've tested it on the PTS however the mode had an issue where it wasn't showing up for public players that we had to solve late into development. In general, we don't love shipping anything we feel is cutting it close, but in Capture the Flag's case we were super passionate and knew we'd likely have to make fixes but wanted it to release. Once the scoring issue was discovered, (players could exploit how we handled flag handoffs) we moved to disable the mode and began work on a fix.
Survival we did test on PTS, however our fix between PTS and Live was proven insufficient. Survival comes from an era where healing was still in its infancy in Paladins and while we were aggressive with how it functions in the mode (90% at all times, the Fog applies Anti-Heal) it was proven still not enough when it came to certain Champion and Item combinations when the public played. We disabled some of the enablers of this combo for now but also have been working on a fix.
This leads us to the resolution to all of these: We plan to release a hotfix tomorrow that will fix these issues with both CTF and Survival, as well as other small fixes we are confident we can make right now. When these are applied, Capture the Flag will return for its original timetable and Survival will leave until its scheduled debut. Despite all the issues we are tracking, the team is really proud of this update and has been enjoying seeing players explore all the changes we've made. Thank you for all your support and feedback!
This Week's Community Creations
Love Exchange
Artist: ☙Vae࿐༅
Spring Break Fireworks
Artist: VoltaicFox
League of Champions
Artist: VitoraVT
LTM: Capture the Flag (for real this time)
Teams compete to be the first to capture 3 flags on the Classic version of Stone Keep. Players carrying the flag have a special Ultimate that allows them to dash while holding it but are revealed to the entire enemy team, take increased damage, and have slower cooldowns.
- EvilMojoKryptek
