Commanders!
In our recent article, we’ve shown you how the Spotting System works in Update 0.21. Today, we’ll show you its changes that are coming as well as their meaning for you.
Please note:
- The Spotting System Developer Diary about the Spotting System is essential to understanding this article
- The Spotting System is possibly the most complex and sensitive system of Armored Warfare – as such, even tiny changes can have profound impact to the overall game flow
As the first thing, we’ll remove the object tracing limit. In Update 0.20 and 0.21, the spotting rays disappear after colliding with 10 obstacles (objects such as bushes and trees) in the sense of stopping taking any other obstacles in their path into account. That means that if the ray passed 10 bushes and then ran into another one, it wouldn’t take the next one into account – as a result, this “eleventh” bush would provide no camouflage bonus whatsoever.
Originally, this mechanic was implemented as a high-end threshold to make sure spotting in heavily forested areas doesn’t get out of hand, but several Balance 2.0 changes to the spotting system as well as other rebalances made it obsolete or – in worst cases – made it add to the unpredictability of the spotting system.
The reason for that is that in certain situation, the spotting system does not behave as expected because if there are ten or more objects between the spotter and his target and the bush the vehicle is hiding behind is the “eleventh” one or more, this bush does not provide any environmental camouflage because the spotting ray ignores it due to the limit of ten. In some cases, players hiding behind bushes found themselves incorrectly spotted due to this issue since they thought since their cover did not provide environmental camouflage at all. However, it’s worth noting that these cases are statistically quite rare.
Secondly, we’ll change the way the bushes (and the environmental camouflage they provide) interact when firing a gun in their vicinity. As of Update 0.21, all bushes within 15 meters of a player who fires a weapon lose 66 percent of their environmental camouflage bonus for 5 seconds. In Update 0.22, only the bush with the highest camouflage bonus will lose its environmental camouflage this way. This will improve the role of using heavy foliage to your advantage.
Thirdly, we’ll increase the maximum environmental bonus a bit. In Update 0.21, multiple environmental camouflage bonuses (for multiple bushes that are between the spotter and the target) can stack up to the bonus value of 0.45 (45 percent). In Update 0.22, this limit will increase to 50 percent to tweak the environmental camouflage a bit.
And last but not least, we will reduce the amount of spot check points by one – we will remove the one on the tip of the barrel. This change will reduce the odd cases where vehicles that are otherwise hidden behind bushes get spotted because of the gun barrel sticking through.
Making environmental camouflage work requires a lot of careful tweaking. We do not want to introduce obscene levels of environmental camouflage that would allow even truly heavy tanks to blend in like scouts using one or two bushes, but at the same time we do want environmental camouflage to matter.
Overall, these changes are aimed at making the bush gameplay more predictable and comfortable for the players. Our tests of these changes have shown a considerable decrease of incorrect environmental camouflage interactions that ultimately cause confusing situations.
Of course, this is not the end. We will carefully evaluate your feedback on the Update 0.22 spotting system and will take further steps to enhance the gameplay experience.
We’ll see you on the battlefield!
