Hackers, Agents, A much-expected update that we have delayed several times it's now love. We apologize for this late update, but we have worked very hard in refactoring the game's code, implement, fix and add new features to accommodate the current state of the game. Thanks a lot for your patience and your help in improving the game together with us. We have added a lot of things, and changed some elements in the game, but the most notable are the Automated Banning System, Penalty System and Join in Progress.

Automated Banning System

We are receiving more than 800 reports daily right now, and for us, as a small team it is clear that we cannot curate the game fast enough and well enough without an automated system. We will still ban players permanently manually for extreme cases, but depending on how many reports a player receives he will be banned incrementally from now on. First time 15 minutes, the second time 30 minutes and so on. If you are not reported for a while after a first ban, the incrementation will reset. You can reach a ban of 10 days if you are banned constantly. Everyone can still be permanently banned if someone is getting reported too often by a lot of different players. We will get notified and we can apply a perma-ban manually. A player is banned taking into account different factors such as: how often he is reported and by who. If another player reports players very often, his reports will not have the same value over time. This way we make sure that a player it's not banned because a player that reports others players with no reason. If a player received a report from another player, a second report from the same player will not be taken into account anymore for a while.

Join in Progress

We all get disconnected from time to time or for some unexpected reason our power will turn off our computer. Now, players can rejoin the match in the maximum period of 5 minutes. In order to win a game, you need to be online at the end of the game. If you are not at the end of a game for any reason you will lose the game by default, together with any winning streak. In the Main Menu, we also have now the option of Abandoning a game. By Abandoning a game, a Penalty will be activated.

AFK/Leaving Game Penalty System

When a player abandons a game now consciously he will receive a penalty. The penalty will not allow a player to search for a new game anymore for 30 minutes. This time can change as we are experimenting and we are open to feedback. The penalty will be applied in the following cases: abandoning a game from inside the game and canceling the re-join option in the main menu and for when a player will not rejoin a game in the first 5 minutes. The penalty also resets after a while and it is not permanent. Now - the complete change list for 2.2.0:

NEW FEATURES

• In order to accommodate the difference in skill between new players and more experienced players we are introducing level based matchmaking with 3 level groups - 1-10, 11-20, 21-30
• When pressing the play button, players can now choose between Casual Mode and Custom Games. We are working on the Ranked Mode and this will be added at a later date
• Added a new skin called Mr. Hacker
• Added 4 new emojis - Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, Thinking and a Heart
• Players can now re-join in progress games in case of disconnection
• AFK players will now be kicked out of the game
• A penalty system now it's implemented to punish AFK players and players that abandon a game on purpose
• Players are now automated banned when reported by a lot of players
• Added two new names to the general name list used in Casual Mode that were submitted by two of our fellow patreons - Patrick and Nunya
• Winter Custom Maps were added to Custom Games
• Added an option to select the gender name before searching for a game.
• Added a notification when planned maintenance will be announced before hand
• Added a new splash screen with warning text about conversational gameplay, warning players about the nature of the game
• Added spam protection for both global and in-game chat windows
• The global chat now it's also accessible from a custom game lobby
• Added the emoji selector in the global chat as well
• Added Screensaver mode

CHANGES

• AFK players are now kicked out of a match. A player becomes AFK when not making an action two times in a row (e.g. a player did not propose a team and after that he did not accept the next team proposal)
• We have improved several AI-Player behavior to prevent finding out their role
• Disconnection messages in-game chat shows if a player left manually or by disconnect
• The Find Game button was removed from Custom Games because this encourages meta-gaming and cheating. We are working on a Party System that will only work in Casual Mode in the future, with certain limitations

BUG FIXES

• Fixed an issue where high ping caused FPS drops or freezing of the game
• Fixed an issue when a steam invite was not working after a match was completed
• Fixed an issue when a game lobby that was in progress did not close properly, and it was displayed in the custom game list
• Fixed an issue when sometimes disconnected players were not detected by the game client
• Fixed an issue where ASCII codes were breaking the chat
• Fixed several game glitches when a match would end before a team won 3 missions
• Fixed an issue where players would get disconnected on loading screen and the players would not get marked as being disconnected in-game
• Fixed an issue where clicking on how to play and then pressing ESC would stop all the main menu music
• Fixed an issue where ESC would make a player leave the lobby when a friend invite is open
• Fixed an issue where disconnected players were getting experience and credits
• Fixed an issue where the achievement "Finally, we caught them" was not working anymore
• Fixed an issue where the experience sound was playing after the maximum level was reached
• Fixed an issue where the report button at the end of a game would not be clickable when obscured by other UI elements
• Fixed some typos in all menus

Thank you for your support and help. Let us know if you have any feedback related to this update on our discord, and do not hesitate to join our discord if you want to know more about the plans for the next updates. Cheers, MINDNIGHT TEAM