The Rapture is Nigh

Dear players,

TL;DR: As is sometimes to be expected during Early Access we have reached a point where we are forced to reset your progression state. This will enable us to bring you new good stuff sooner and faster. Global leaderboard will reset, but Ladder ranks will remain. Your achievement progress will go to zero and some achievements will disappear to be replaced by new ones at a later stage. We expect this to happen this Friday.

We have now been in Early Access for nearly 4 months and during that time we have avoided making changes that would affect current player progression, as we really needed to get a good statistic about how it typically evolved. But this also means that we have had to hold back on any  fundamental refactoring of  subsystems dependent on player progression. During this time there have also been periods where some bugs allowed some progression values to go way beyond their expected range, some of them reflected in high leaderboards score as an example.

For those that like geeky details, we basically maintain two branches of our code at any given time, the release branch and the development branch. The release branch is the one that you are playing and the development branch is the one where most of the coding is going on. We regularly cherry pick a few changes and fixes from the development branch and into the release branch in order to bring you patches with much needed bug fixes and some new features.  But in the course of time, accumulated changes in the development branch become simply too complex to bring in piecewise, without actually merging all the changes in the branches. This typically means that some older game logic will not work alongside newer game logic so it needs to be phased out.

We are now in a position where in order to be able to continue updating the client on a regular basis we are forced to consider a reset of progression for all players. We want to do this in a few steps over some time, as listed below:

Phase 1: Reset of all achievements

• Most of your achievements will be reset and start from zero
• During that period, some older achievements will also be phased out (about 25% of them), which will have the temporary effect that some weapons and modifications that you are familiar with will not unlock.
• We will still keep the Ladder ranking of players during that phase, meaning that Ladder leaderboards should remain unchanged, but the global leaderboard will be reset.
• We expect to do this on Friday the 18th of May

Phase 2: New Scoring System

• Until now we have used Gold collected per run as the scoring value, both for global leaderboards but also to determine the winner of challenges. In this phase we will introduce a new scoring system that takes more parameters and different play styles into account which should give players more freedom in how they reach a higher score. This will not affect your progression except that the global leaderboard will now use the new score instead of gold. Ladder challenges will also use this new score as the winning condition. We will probably keep the current ladder ranking but artificially increase its volatility when we update, which means that players will have more mobility up or down the ladder in the first few challenges with the new scoring system. This should help in reordering it according to new playstyles.

Phase 3: New Achievements

• In this phase we will introduce new achievements, some of the replacements for those taken out in Phase 1 but also brand new ones. This shouldn't affect your progression.

We will not commit on dates for Phase 2 and 3 for now, but we would like to go through Phase 1 as soon as possible as this is currently blocking us from more frequent updates and bugfixes to you guys and is a hard prerequisite for the next phases.

We thank you for your patience and dedication and hope that those that lose their hard-earned progress will see this as an opportunity to come back with a revenge.