OF QUEENS AND KINGS UPDATE

Please keep in mind that this is a Work In Progress changelog and things are subject to change (items may also be removed or added) before the final release.

Agents, it’s time to lift the curtain on our biggest content update yet with “Of Queens and Kings”! We are extremely excited to show you what we have in store, so let’s not delay and dive into what’s new right away:

• The long awaited arrival of private lobbies
• A new Operation (map) with Sound Eclipse
• A new Spy: Octo
• A new catalog “Of Queens and Kings”
• Tweaks, bug fixes, and balance changes!

Major Additions

New Spy: Octo, The Boisterous Hacker



Introducing Octo
In the information world, few names attract as much attention as Octo. The self-proclaimed “King of hacking” has earned his reputation through un-rivaled skills and boisterous showmanship. An old acquaintance of Madame Xiu, Octo is as much a rival as an ally, working together countless times and trying to one up each other on every possible occasion. Even though she is annoyed by his extravagant attitude, Xiu herself would have to admit that he is the best when it comes to hacking into something.

The rumor goes that after a security breach in Deceive Inc.’s servers, Octo was immediately hired…

Bringing intel to a gunfight
Octo joins the roster as our newest disruptor character, introducing with him a whole new perspective on intel. Octo is all about Intel. Acquiring it. Spending it. Going all in on a gamble. Octo’s weapons all have a unique trait: their hip fire shots use ammo, but transform into intel-powered weapons when aiming down sight with unique properties.

All of Octo’s expertise are focused on ways to earn intel, from gathering it instantly to stealing it from rivals in a myriad of ways. On the flipside, his passives are all about spending intel to get benefits.

We hope you enjoy the push and pull of intel as you get to know Octo better in the coming weeks!

New Catalog: Of Queens and Kings
For this season, we jump in the cutthroat world of high fashion with the chess-inspired “Of Queens and Kings” collection. You’ll be able to earn new regal costumes, intro poses and calling cards as you make your way through 50 levels of unlocks.

Purchasing the premium catalog will give you instant access to our newest agent, Octo, and exclusive rewards. As a reminder, players can still buy Octo with Credits earned by simply playing.



New Reactive Ink “The entire court”
Catalog 3 comes with a new reactive ink that behaves differently from the one found in Neon Nights. “The entire court” will change appearance depending on your current disguise level as well as changing when outside of cover.

Private Lobbies Release
Following our Beta in September, we are now ready to unleash private lobbies in a definitive manner with Season 3! By far the most requested feature ever since our alphas, private lobbies will allow you to invite friends and play the map of your choice in solo, duos, or trios.

You’ll find private lobbies in the mode select screen where you can get started OR you will automatically be taken to the private lobbies menu if your party size exceeds 3.

A few notes about private lobbies:

• XP gains are 50% of regular matches XP.
• XP booster do not work in private lobbies and won’t deplete during a private lobby match
• Bonds Pile and Credit purses do not spawn in private lobbies
• You cannot start a private lobby with less than 2 players

We look forward to seeing what you will do in private lobbies and will be looking at your feedback to further build up the mode in the future.

To join or host a private lobby session, simply go to the matchmaking type menu and click on private lobby.




New Operation (Map): Sound Eclipse
Hazen, famous singer, artist and writer, is finally ready to unveil their newest performance: AGE OF DARKNESS, an opera that will revolutionize performance art forever.

The venue: The Valkyrie, the world’s first luxury space station for the rich and famous.

The catch? Hazen’s performance is a cover to unleash a powerful EMP device from space. Hazen, a true artist at heart, believes technology has rendered humanity incapable of creativity. The Valkyrie Comet, to them, is the ultimate sign of the decadence that technology has brought. If Hazen is not stopped, the highest note in their show will trigger the device, sending humanity’s technology back to the dark age. A veritable… sound eclipse, if you will.









General Changes
Account level cap raise
New season, new level cap. We are raising the cap to level 500 with the all-new Spinel ink to unlock as a progression reward.


Audio Occlusion Changes
We’ve made changes to how weapon sounds propagate in maps to make obstructions a bigger factor. In this update, walls and other obstructions will have a bigger effect on blocking sound while open areas will keep sounds propagating from far away. We hope this makes picking fights in closed off rooms safer and more of a strategic consideration.

Room Weighting overhaul
A driving factor on how NPC navigate a map is based on “weights” attributed to room. In this update, a major overhaul of restricted areas weight has been made across the entire game.

This now means that all guard rooms have a balanced weight to not skew certain rooms to have much higher guard traffic than others, making some rooms more desirable to sneak into without a costume early on. This is a subtle change on the surface that should result in a better balanced experience overall.

NPC Vision arc tweak
NPC are getting a vision upgrade with this update. What that means is that the side of npc will be less of a deadzone for them to spot you at various angles. We were very careful to tweak this in a way that still allows players to sneak behind npc, but standing right next to one on their side will result in them noticing you now.

NPC Scolding behavior overhaul
Previously, when a npc spotted a player with the wrong disguise from far away, they would walk slowly to them to scold them. This meant that players could easily run through large restricted areas with very little risk of npc catching up to them. Now, aggro-ed npc that are far away will run toward the player to scold them.

We also think this behavior makes more sense for a player trying to emulate a npc and spotting someone with the wrong disguise from afar which should help blur the line more.

Duo Stats Tracking
Duo mode is losing its experimental tag and gaining full-fledged stat tracking in the stats menu. We’ve been tracking Duo wins for a little while now in the back-end and are finally making it official in the profile menu.


Terminal Revive Cover
When revived at an extraction terminal in duo or trio, you will now respawn with a random civilian disguise instead of your last disguise before getting eliminated.

New Store Items
We have a new selection of legendary skins, inks and intro poses hitting the store with Season 3. Here’s a preview of Midnight Protect Yu-mi, Luchador Chavez, Marquis Larcin and Under-Convent Red!
]





Balance
General Balance

Lower Body damage Modifier removal
Since the Misery Empire update, the game has been operating with 3 types of hits: Headshots, body hits and lower body hits. This had multiple effects on the game that we now feel are undesirable.

The main reason we are removing lower body hits modifiers has to do with consistency. With the pace of the fights in Deceive Inc. you often do not notice that the hit you just landed was not a body hit and the change in damage could lead to fights feeling inconsistent or taking more shots than they should.

Lower body hits are also an indirect buff to the strategy of jumping in fights as it increases the likelihood of enemies shooting you in the legs.

We hope this will make combat feel more reliable and consistent by removing some of the noise in the damage between players.

Expertise charging on match start
With this update, you will notice that your expertise at the start of a match starts uncharged instead of being ready to use right away. This is a change we are trying for many different reasons:

• It’s a balancing mechanism against expertises that are very strong in combat in early gameplay. This means combat focused expertise will need some time to come into play and will encourage lower profile play in the early game.
• It gives quick-charging expertise an added appeal in early game vs long charging ones.
• It gives more leeway for cooldown reduction powerups to be appealing in low level slots to get an edge on the competition early on.

While we think this change will be beneficial to the overall gameflow, please give us feedback on how it affects your gameplay!

Agents Balance
For Season 3, we are bringing a mix of balance changes and reworks to some under-used tools in agents toolsets. We have also put an increased emphasis on bug fixing on our buggiest agents to get them in a better spot. Our focus was mostly on Madame Xiu and Red, but a lot of agents benefitted from the bug fix focus in some ways.

Ace
We gave quite a bit of attention to Ace for the Upper Echelon update and as such she won’t be getting any gameplay changes this update.

Cavalière
We are adjusting Cavalière’s redemptions timers to make it a more competitive choice and give it a stronger fantasy.

Expertise
Mod 2: Redemption

• Downed spies and npcs will no longer expire as an interactable clue (unless the person that eliminated them is no longer alive).

Chavez
Chavez used to have an extremely strong presence a few updates ago, but the compounding effect of nerfs has brought him down significantly. While we need to be careful not to bring him back to a too oppressive status, we are going back on nerfs to his ammo pools to give him a bit more leeway in matches overall.

Weapons
Mod 1:Vigilante

• Starting Ammo 12 => 15

Mod 2: Duke

• Ammo per box 2 => 3
• Max ammo 12 => 18
• Starting ammo 6 => 9

Hans
This update we have reworked hit detection on both of Hans projectile based expertise to solve issues where players would sometimes not get an effect applied when they should. We hope this will make using them more efficient, especially in situations with multiple targets in close proximity.

Expertise
Base: Incapacitor Orb

• Increased reliability of hits

Mod 2: Shock Ray

• Increased reliability of hits

Larcin
We know Larcin is currently a force to be reckoned with and as such we are tweaking quite a bit on his kit to make his window of opportunity tighter on his expertise and reduce Cadence’s lethality while keeping its longer range identity intact.
Weapons
Mod 1: Cadence

• Burst Fire rate: 10 bullets per second => 9 bullets per second
• Headshot Modifier 1.5 => 1.3

Expertise
Base: Au Revoir

• Duration reduced 6s => 5s

Mod 1: Grande Finale

• Duration reduced 15s => 10s

Madame Xiu
We’ve spent a good amount of time on this update to fix some long-standing Xiu bugs (detailed in the bugfix list below) and took the occasion to update her less interesting passives.

Weapons
Base: Zhulong

• Reload time 1.7s s => 1.9s

Passive
Mod 1: Krait’s Instinct

• Can see out of cover low health enemies even through walls in a 35m radius around her.

Mod 2: Mamba’s Hunch

• Now triggers every time a vault terminal is disabled in the first phase.
• Now triggers every time extraction arrives

Sasori
Sasori is getting some buffs to his overall reliability in combat with faster charge time, easier to land projectiles and some tweaks to his damage scaling on mod 2.

Weapons
Base: Ame and Kage

• Increased projectile travel speed

Mod 1: Hyõ and Hanei

• Kunai Charge time .375s => .3s per kunai (1.5s total => 1.2s total)
• Increased projectile travel speed

Mod 2: Yuki and Hikari

• Damage scaling per status effect 50% => 75%
• Increased projectile travel speed

Squire
With Squire, we’ve been looking at under pressure as a good candidate for a buff. A lot of characters in the cast can get amped up without spending their expertise, so we felt it should do a bit more. With this buff Squire got the longest amped up duration in the entire cast and gets a substantial buff to his reload speed to help in tight combat situations.

Expertise
Mod 1: Under Pressure

• Duration 6s =>10s
• Reload speed buff 25% faster =>35% faster

Red
For Red, we are toning down her base weapon a bit to make it less deadly in longer range engagement and give more space for the jack of heart to take that role. We are also overhauling lovebomb to try and make it a much more appealing proposition as a trap.
Weapons
Base: Heartbreaker

• Damage 9 => 8
• Fire rate 6 => 5.7 bullet per second
• Reload time 1.7s s => 1.9s
• Tweaked recoil to give a bit more kick especially in hipfire

Mod 1: Jack of heart

• Damage 18 => 20
• Reload time 2.1s s => 1.9s

Mod 2: Lovebite

• Fire Rate 1.15 => 1.30 shot per second

Expertise
Mod 2: Lovebomb

• Lovebomb now gives heartbreak to out of cover enemies in its range instead of charming them back into cover.
• Out of cover allies within the range of the blast regain cover.

Yu-Mi
For Yu-Mi, she settled in a better place with the recent nerfs to her kits. While we are aware that the healing bubble is still a top pick for her, we are mostly looking at future tweaks to make her other options appealing in comparison. Expect to see some changes to her expertise options in the future.

For now, we are adding some utility to one of her passives to make it a more interesting (and chaotic) choice.

Passive
Mod 2: Booby Traps

• Now creates a bubble when destroying rival gadgets too

Gadgets
One of our major areas of focus around gadgets is to diminish the presence of effects that lead to the “Team Deathmatch” impressions on the overall gameflow. We feel Tripwire and Hacktrap are major culprits of this and as such we are reworking their capabilities in this update.

We hope these changes keep these gadgets useful but reduce the pinpoint accuracy of finding rival players and the hopelessness it instills in victims.

Bounce Mat

We are making the cooldown to get your bounce mat higher to make the “drop and forget” strategy less efficient and drive more plays where you go back to pick it up after use.

• Cooldown to regen 45s => 60s

Hacktrap
With Season 2, we gave the hacktrap a massive power boost by making it trap players even when they had the keycard to a door. While this gave the hacktrap a lot of reliability (which it desperately needed), it made it a gadget that has very few counter plays as a victim. With this tweak, we are giving victims more lee-way to disappear into the night after getting hacktrapped while still keeping the gadget’s DNA as an alarm that you can set up anywhere.

• No longer traces but leaves a snapshot of the player that triggered it at the location it was triggered.
• The silhouette stays in place and does not follow the victim, giving them a chance to escape the scene.
• Silhouette shows which spy they are playing as

Tripwire
After a lot of observation, we came to the conclusion that broadcast is a very problematic effect to put into the player's hands. We are keeping the Tripwire almost identical to before but substituting broadcast with a trace. This way, the whole lobby won’t hop into a room as soon as you walk into a tripwire, making it less of a deathmatch summoning machine.

• Replaced broadcast with trace status effect

Turret
We are tweaking the turret a bit to make it more reliable in the time a fight normally takes place. We are not upping its damage, but making it more reactive so that players can see their traps setup bear fruit.

• Deploy Delay 2s=>1s
• Rev Up Time 1s => .5s
• Hit frequency .5s => .4s

Scrambler
We added a distinctive VFX on everything affected by a scrambler to make it easier to read and give a better idea of what it’s currently doing for the user.

• Added a visual effect to everything affected by Scrambler

Umbrella Shield
Like the bounce mat, the umbrella shield gets a higher cooldown to prevent it from being present multiple times in a single prolonged fight.

• Cooldown to regen 45s => 60s

Field Upgrades
Overclock Chip

• Gold 75%=>60%
• Purple 60% => 50%
• No longer affects healing stations and Ammo dispensers

Side note: We have made the ammo dispenser interact faster by default to compensate for this change and make using them more convenient for everyone.

Bug Fixes

• Stay tuned for the final changelog agents