Producer's Letter October 2016

An update from Executive Producer Chris Wynn

Now that the H1Z1 Invitational 2016 has crowned two new winners, I wanted to take a moment to talk about some of the things happening right now in King of the Kill.

H1Z1 Invitational 2016
This year’s invitational was a lot of fun and a huge success. The prize pool of just over $267,000 far exceeded our expectations and made for an exciting event. There were so many notable moments for me throughout the weekend-- first off, ISCO winning the first qualifier on Saturday against a tough field to make it into the tournament on Sunday. ISCO had flown all the way from Korea to represent a very passionate Asian community and impressed a lot of players with his aggressive play. Manpons, a fan favorite, took third in the first match and put the seldom seen explosive arrows to effective use in both games. Using them to flush opponents out of cover, he was able to get into advantageous positions and showed really well. Gassy Mexican was really aggressive in Match 1 racking up six kills. I thought he finally met his match when Ninja dropped off of the bridge he was hiding under, but he got the better of an intense gunfight and knocked out the defending champ.

If you missed out on the action, you can catch some of it here:

Highlights Video

2016 H1Z1 Invitational - Winner's Gameplay – inboxes

2016 H1Z1 Invitational - Winner's Gameplay - Radek

What’s Next
Since September 20th, most of our focus was on server stability and optimizations to improve some game conditions we were seeing play out at scale on the live servers (early game lag as an example). We got the Australian servers stood back up, and fixed and turned the Asia servers back last week. We are going to monitor it all and if everything continues to look good we are going to get the ping restrictions set to proper values in this next patch.

Scrapyard – We had to re-architect the Scrapyard, but are now ready to get it into the build. You can turn any duplicate or unwanted items into Scrap and then obtain new items from the Scrapyard. I know a lot of you have been asking when this is going to come out, but we had to make sure it was properly ready. It’s important to note that you may not have the ability to test most of the Scrapyard features until it goes to the Live build because most players don’t have skins unlocked.

Hoods – Maybe more minor note here but something that has been requested by the players for a long time. If you are wearing a hoodie and equip a helmet, the hoodie will automatically go down so that the helmet is easily visible.

Bugs – A number of bug fixes are going into this patch. This is all stuff that we have been collecting from the community over the past several weeks.

• First Time Event (FTE) popups should only occur in training now
• Bullet icons were redone to make it more obvious which rounds of ammo you have in your inventory
• Reloading will always be interrupted by other game actions, like healing, opening a door, etc.
• Fixed a bug where certain actions could not be bound to a modifier (alt, shift, etc.)
• Setting Flora to “Off” will now actually set it correctly (off was actually setting it to high)
• Shift dropping a partial stack from your inventory will no longer lock the inventory screen
• Left click looting a stack will now loot the entire stack
• Bandages are dropping in loot bags again
• Some users were experiencing frame drops when using the inventory. This was due to high DPI mice and has been fixed
• Some items were being duped in your inventory when skinning in it, that has been fixed
• Some laminated body armor was disappearing from your inventory when you were already equipped with makeshift armor, this has also been fixed
• Muting voice chat in Fort Destiny will no longer incorrectly mute voice chat everywhere
• If you need to switch regions within the UI, you should no longer end up in an unresponsive state
• There was a bug causing player’s crate inventories to change when switching regions, that should be consistent now

Events
You may have noticed the Events tab in the UI with the coming soon graphic in it. Events are scheduled games that may have some sort of prize attached to them. Next week we will begin beta testing the Event system prior to turning it on for everyone. We are going to work with the communities that were participating in whitelist events and tournaments for the testing. As soon as we know that system is working properly, we will launch our public Events.

New Crate
Given that it is October, you can probably take a good guess as to the theme of this crate. Called the Infernal Crate, it contains a lot of items including some famous monster masks, all the way up to the Ultra Rare Demon Mask. The item that I am most excited about though is our first animated weapon skin. Also an ultra-rare, the animated skin is truly unique and something that we will do more of in the future.

Till next time!
Chris Wynn
@The1Wynn