Tomorrow, December 1st, sees the release of our next update, cunningly titled Party Matchmaking which improves matchmaking in Robocraft further still. Robocraft Game Director Mark, recently outlined the plans for this update in a recent Dev Jam; you can read all about that here. Alongside the improvements to matchmaking, we’ll be making a number of balance changes to Robocraft in this update and we’re fixing a host of different bugs too! The details for everything in this update are below: As we’re still making some final adjustments and tweaks, the full patch notes (including detailed data tables) will be released after the update goes live tomorrow.

IMPROVEMENTS:

• Players in parties now considered when matchmaking (read more)
• Parties are marked with a “party icon” in loading and pre-battle screens
• Each party has a unique ‘party icon’ colour

• Party players are put before the solo players, on top of team lists

BALANCE CHANGES:

• Friction on all cubes reverted to pre-last friction increase. This means friction on all cube types is much lower, which means less ‘snagging’ and ‘flipping’ when scraping against the environment
• Increased the EMP cooldown time from 25 seconds to 50 seconds
• Decreased the EMP stun time from 5.5 seconds to 5.0 seconds
• Weapon Energy to CPU curve altered. Energy at 0 CPU changed to 20,000 and reduces by 1 for each CPU between 0-750 CPU range. 750+ has more energy available with 2000 CPU remaining at 10,000. Here is a comparison:

• Low and mid-range Lasers have been improved; accuracy, damage, but have slightly increased Energy consumption
• Low and mid-range Plasma have been improved; damage, DPS, and damage per Energy consumed have been increased
• Towers now have 4 ‘spines’ as opposed to 2
• Tower Crystal health has been reduced by 45%
• Neutral Tower Crystal health (i.e. at start of battle) is 50% of the Red and Blue crystals
• Tesla Ripper and Tesla Nova Energy costs have been increased
• Blink Energy cost increased from 5,400 to 6,000
• Cloak Energy cost increased from 900 per second to 1,000
• Defence Damage Bonus (awarded for damaging an enemy whilst near your base), Protection Assist Bonus (awarded for damaging an enemy that is attacking an Ally), Heal Assist Bonus (awarded for healing an Ally to 100% regardless of how much health they had lost), Scout and Spot bonuses have all been removed from the scoring / XP rewards.*

• Overall awards have been increased to compensate for the scores that have been removed, with the aim of giving you the same average XP rewards as before
• Scout, Spot, Protection, Defence also removed from the Overclocker, so Clock Cycles are only earned for things that you gain score from, mainly to keep score and Clock Cycles consistent
• The Tower Protonium Crystal destruction score has been reduced by 30%
• Rolled back the ‘percent of Robot remaining before death’ from 10% to 20%. This was 25% previously and recently changed to 10% but this caused too many undesired results. We will develop a more elegant solution to the problems surrounding this in a future update
• Adjusted top speed of Thrusters - with the smallest Thrusters delivering the same ‘maneuverability’ but a lot less ‘escape velocity’ (If you want to go fast, you need to use the larger Thrusters)
• Top Speed of the largest Thrusters has been increased
• Adjusted the health of the smaller Thrusters
• Adjustments to the health of Chassis Cubes; essentially making the health have a slightly closer relationship to the mass of the cube. This change affects the ‘Corner Slope’ the most, with other cubes only marginally affected

OTHER CHANGES:

• From tomorrow (1st December), the AbleGamers Bundle will no longer be available in Robocraft. For more details on this bundle and the incredible amount of money raised by the Robocraft community (that’s you lot!), please click here.

BUG FIXES:

• Fixed an issue that caused the mirror line to disappear
• Fixed a bug that prevented the intro video from playing on Mac and Linux OS
• Fixed a bug that triggered the party widget hover and click effects when in queue for battle
• Blocking a player whilst in battle no longer triggers an error
• Fixed an issue with the inventory scrollbar not working with a mouse scrollwheel
• Fixed a visual bug that made the party widget disappear if a player opens the loadout (Z) in edit mode
• Removed the level-up animation in battle - now shown on End Of Battle summary screen
• Fixed a bug which prevented Wings/Rudder from working with Mech/Sprinter Legs correctly
• Fixed a visual bug with the ‘LEVEL UP CRATE’ screen - the top bar now spans the width of the screen
• Fixed a bug which made the 'online status' of your friends in the friend list very tiny and almost unreadable
• Removed the ‘?’ from the top-left of the CRF as it served no purpose
• Fixed an issue which led to the 'online status tag' in a player’s friend list being coloured incorrectly when hovered over
• Made the hover status on the ‘Add Friend’ button more visible on the End Of Battle Screen
• Fixed a bug that made the ‘Add Friend button’ appear next to your own name on the End Of Battle screen
• Re-positioned the ‘X has invited you to join their party’ text on the Party Invite notification pop-up
• The ‘Any Cost’ option has been removed from the drop-down in the CRF
• Fixed a bug which rewarded a player with the same loot crate contents if they received multiple level-up crates in a single match
• Fixed the text colour on the wrong username error message pop-up