A new season starting with clean ranked leaderboards, a couple quality of life features and fixes regarding multiplayer games, and a few balance adjustments come with this patch. You'll also find some news about past/current/upcoming community events at the end of this announcement.

Ladder Reset

We have seen lots of familiar names in Season 5, but also some new players making it to the top of the ladder (in no particular order): NightSlayer, Kipo, Imari, Tatanka, Ploob, QQ, Trumpet, Melvinfro, Snake, The Gentleman, Arilou, mocaccino, Satoros, Tiki Gray, Pile, Big Pimpintosh, R22, Epicosity, James, and Meek have all made it past 1,000 points (hope I didn't miss anyone, you've been rushing past me way too fast). Now we all go back to a fresh start. Have fun climbing the ladder, again, in Season 6, beginning now! (Or simply take a few steps and have a good time anywhere on that ladder.)

Balance Changes

These adjustments are mostly minor tweaks (Mole buff, Toad nerf, better counters against Barbed Wire), and a slightly bigger change to Mines, which are now faster to build, slower to sell, easier to reveal, and less efficient against units of higher tiers: That should shift their use towards offensive play, covering your retreat or protecting your siege and poke attacks.

• Commander: Reveals cloaked enemies after standing still for 1.6s (from 2s)
• Toad: 9 HP (from 8 HP), 1x speed (from 1.3x), 2 single target damage (from 4)
• Mole: warren has 24 HP (from 18) and loses 2 HP (from 3) per Mole spawn; effectively increasing the durability of Mole warrens, and reducing the loss per Mole from 10 to 5 Food
• Barbed Wire: 7 HP (from 14 HP), takes only 50% damage when touched; effectively making Wire more fragile against melee/aoe attacks and during construction
• Mine: 5s build time (from 10s), 2s sell time during which the Mine is revealed/can be attacked; 8 single target damage (from 14), revealing that unit if it is cloaked/can cloak

Improvements and Fixes

• Multiplayer on Mac has not been possible for a while due to some changes on the infrastructure TnT multiplayer is running on. but it's finally fixed!
• Ranked matchmaking goes faster to full search range (14/14, which means any rank in any region) and restarts automatically every 2 minutes (with full search range) to prevent your lobby and search from timing out. (There has been a bug that prevented you from finding a match after searching for too long without restarting the search - should be better now!)
• Hourly leaderboards don't get wiped completely when the next hour starts, only entries older than one hour disappear. (Thanks to pyro for significant help on this!) Also, the style of the "Me" filter changed, showing other players' rank in relation to yours.
• Some players reported crashes in local FFA games due to a divide by zero error. I cannot reproduce that issue, but I changed something that will hopefully prevent this bug from occuring. (In case you've had that issue: please tell me whether it actually got better with this patch!)
• Sometimes players started without a full deck in multiplayer games. This should no longer happen. It was a rare and irregular bug, though, so I cannot verify this is fixed 100% - please tell me if it still occurs!

Community Events

Running

The "Summer Open Lunch" of the (20)21 Duels just started. It's a competitive play-at-your-own-pace series of games against "bosses", each with their own special rules. See all details here: https://21duels.delamarche.com/ The TnT Dual Championship's grand finals will be streamed live, soon. This series of 2v2 matches has been interrupted due to the Mac multiplayer issue mentioned above, but now we are looking forward to see Premish vs MeekSlayer and Heartaru vs Satball in the semi-finals of the upper division, as well as SzenPaw (already qualified for finals) vs GEG (semi-), Gortoros or The Tatankas (quarter-finals) in the lower division - guess yourself who's in there or watch the finals to find out! Tandordraco is now doing a show called TnTTalks on Twitch every other week, discussing various topics like tournaments, balance and meta with changing guests, showing highligths of recent games etc. - You can find it on Twitch or YouTube! Kipo recently started a King of the Hill format: Players can claim a hill by winning a best of 5 match against a King of the Hill. There are four hills for different skill levels, and you can jump in or drop out at any time - just contact Kipo on the Pocketwatch Discord!

Past

The first season of the 2021 TnT Championship ended in March, with these medal-grabbers: Meek (1st), Melvinfro (2nd), and The Gentleman (3rd) in Premier Division; Tatanka (1st), Kerpa (2nd), and Epicosity (3rd) in Intermediate Division; Leon (1st), Tandordraco (2nd), and Cavernus (3rd) in Beginner Division. Congrats to you, and thanks to everyone taking part in the Championship, as player, organizer, caster or viewer on Twitch! The idea of TnT Clan Wars may have started as a joke, but eventually they also became a cool new tournament ending earlier this year, with Lizard Wizard Magic beating the Toad Road Gang for first place, and the Badger Missionaries in third place. Congrats and thanks to everyone involved! Enjoy and have a great feast! EELuminatus

[ 2021-07-14 16:10:22 CET ] [ Original post ]