Welcome to Update 4.2!
This update comes jam-packed with changes, from a brand new event in the World Tour, ranked rewards, a brand new community event and balance changes!
First, let’s check out this week’s store update:
[previewyoutube=NK9z8BSEb4Y;full][/previewyoutube]
World Tour Event - Primetime Buff
Let’s jump into this week’s changes and start it off with a brand new event in the World Tour; “Primetime Buff”! Primetime Buff triggers when you or a teammate inserts a cash box into a cashout station, and it affects your whole team! When affected by Primetime Buff, you and your teammates receive +100 health over your typical max health (e.g. a Light player would go from a max of 150 to 250 health). Some notes about Primetime Buff;
- If taking damage, the extra health does not replenish.[/*]
- When the cashout is finished, the buff will disappear.[/*]
- The buff cannot be stacked, but it can be replenished if your team deposits another cash box.[/*]
- The buff does not apply to teammates that are eliminated when the cash box is inserted.[/*]
ENGIMO are truly treating us well on their last stop of the World Tour, which includes the following maps;
- Fortune Stadium[/*]
- Monaco[/*]
- Kyoto[/*]
- SYS$HORIZON[/*]
Season 3 Ranked Rewards
We said we'd deliver the post-Season 3 rewards with update 4.2, and we still intend to do that. However, given how important it is that this is handled correctly, we still want to do further testing before handing them out.
We are actively working on dotting the last i’s and crossing the final t’s before we can push the button to hand out the rewards, and our ambition is that this will still happen during update 4.2.
Make sure to stay tuned on our Discord server https://www.discord.gg/thefinals and on our website for more information about when the rewards are paid out.
Community Event!
Lastly we’re introducing the first Community Event of Season 4!
For this event we’re challenging all of you to eliminate 10.000.000 (TEN MILLION!) enemy contestants using the brand new weapons introduced in Season 4, before the time runs out. If you succeed, you’ll all be rewarded with the ENGIMO community-compliant .50 Akimbo’s! We’ll be monitoring your progress closely, best of luck contestants!
Now, let’s get into the Balance Changes and Fixes of this update:
Balance Changes
Gadgets
Data Reshaper
- li>Added Glitch Barrels to the rotation of reshaped items the Data Reshaper can create[/*]
Smoke Grenade
- li>Increased ‘smoke entity duration’ from 15s to 17.5s. This means enemy health bars and outlines will not show through the smoke until the effect properly begins to disappear[/*]
Game Modes
Ranked Tournaments
- Updated the spawn point selection logic in the final round of the tournament, for teams who get wiped. This should reduce the number of long-distance spawns that occur[/*]
- Increased the variety of Cashout spawn locations when spawning the next objectives[/*]
World Tour
- Updated the spawn point selection logic in the final round of the tournament, for teams who get wiped. This should reduce the number of long-distance spawns that occur[/*]
- Increased the variety of Cashout spawn locations when spawning the next objectives[/*]
Specializations
Mesh Shield
- Decreased Mesh Shield cooldown from 12s to 8s if the shield is damaged when closed[/*]
- Decreased Mesh Shield cooldown from 8s to 4s if the shield is undamaged when closed[/*]
Dev Note: We’re still keen to avoid Mesh Shield ‘juggling’ in combat as that is not an intended playstyle for this Specialization, but we feel our changes made in 4.0 have been overly severe. These changes hopefully make the Mesh Shield more usable in 4.2
Weapons
CL-40
- Decreased damage from 117 to 100[/*]
- Increased ammo from 4 to 5[/*]
- Increased self-damage multiplier from 0.75 to 1.6[/*]
- Updated damage fall-off curve so that damage drops to 90% at the edge of the 30cm inner radius, with damage falling off linearly from that point to 0 at the outer edge of the blast radius[/*]
Dev Note: We felt our buff of the CL-40 in 4.0 was too much and made the weapon very oppressive in certain combos or when stacked. We’ve now dialed the damage back to a level closer to what we had before 4.0, while retaining the increased size of the max damage inner radius. To prevent the weapon from returning to a time where it took 100% accuracy to take down a Heavy, we’ve given it one additional ammo. As always, we’ll continue to monitor the impacts of this change and adjust further if needed
Pike-556
- li>Decreased damage from 59 to 52[/*]
Dev Note: On reviewing data it’s become apparent that the Pike was fairly overturned in our 4.0 release and this adjustment is intended to move it to a more reasonable place. We suspect it may still be too effective in too many different use cases, so we’ll continue to review the impact of this change and adjust in later patches if we feel more balancing is needed.
V9S
- Decreased fire rate from 430 RPM to 360 RPM[/*]
- Increased damage from 37 to 40[/*]
Dev Note: These changes have been made to prevent various methods where players could ensure they got the effective maximum fire rate from the weapon through use of specific binds, causing it to be highly effective compared to its intended baseline. The damage increase has been applied to offset some of the ‘effective DPS’ the weapon lost with the decreased fire rate. Overall, the effectiveness of the weapon for regular players should not be massively different
Content and Bug Fixes
Animation
- Fixed an issue where the Dagger’s charged up secondary attack would not play the correct animation in third-person[/*]
- Fixed an animation issue caused when inspecting liftable objects while certain weapon inspect animations were equipped[/*]
- Fixed a bug that could cause third-person run animations to play at high speeds[/*]
Audio
- li>Fixed an issue that could cause sound from emotes to not play in the game[/*]
Characters
- li>Made it possible to polish the Grit & Glory skin when using weapon inspect[/*]
Contracts
- li>Fixed some issues where gameplay events that give progress on various Contracts could either add extra scoring events or miss some, due to categorizing them as the wrong event, for example back-stabs with the Dagger counting as headshots [/*]
Controller
- Fixed an issue where controller aim assistance could sometimes lock on to the location where a player had previously died[/*]
- Fixed aim assistance regression due to unsupported third-party software[/*]
Crashes & Errors
- Fixed a crash bug that could be caused by a problem with texture arrays [/*]
- Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause players to get the TFGE0000 connection error[/*]
Gadgets
Healing Beam
- li>Added some physics-based ‘wiggle’ to the Healing Beam’s hose[/*]
Stun Gun
- li>Players hit by the Stun Gun will now see directional hit arrows, showing the direction of the incoming shot[/*]
Game Modes
Ranked Tournament
- li>Team colors will now be consistent throughout a tournament for teams you have seen in previous rounds. For example, if you progress with the purple team, they will be purple in the next round[/*]
Tutorial
- li>Fixed an issue where bullet dispersion could occasionally become broken during the tutorial[/*]
World Tour
- Team colors will now be consistent throughout a tournament for teams you have seen in previous rounds. For example, if you progress with the purple team, they will be purple in the next round [/*]
Private Matches
- li>Added a second Spectator slot.[/*]
Liftables
- li>Fixed a bug where liftables would sometimes be immediately dropped after picking them up[/*]
Maps
Fortune Stadium
- Fixed some missing collision on one of the ISEULT buildings[/*]
- Made various improvements and fixes to destruction on Fortune Stadium[/*]
- Various lighting tweaks made to billboards in Fortune Stadium[/*]
- Added ‘ad jingles’ for HOLTOW in HOLTOW’s areas of Fortune Stadium [/*]
Seoul, Monaco, Skyway Stadium & SYS$HORIZON
- li>Night settings have been reworked for better visibility in certain areas[/*]
Performance
- li>Fixed a bug that could cause the client to stutter whenever they took damage from an enemy[/*]
Security and Anti-cheat
- Added new detection rules[/*]
- Tweaked some of the current heuristics for higher accuracy[/*]
Specializations
Winch Claw
- Fixed an issue where Winch Claw activation would not be blocked when the player was under the Glitch effect[/*]
- Fixed an issue where activating the Winch Claw wouldn’t disable the Vanishing Bomb’s cloaking effect [/*]
UI
- Fixed an issue where the Cashout Station symbol turned white when the player picks up the Cashbox[/*]
- Fixed an issue where the Sponsor progression reward tile could show the wrong progress on the progress bar[/*]
- Fixed an issue in the post-match reward screens where the wrong amount of Fans earned could be shown[/*]
- Adjusted the post-match reward screen buttons to make sure players don’t accidentally miss reward, XP and Fan updates by returning to the main menu by mistake[/*]
- Updated the ordering of tracked Contracts in the scoreboard, to make it easier to read[/*]
- Fixed bug where the game mode name wasn't shown in the matchmaking widget[/*]
- Fixed an issue that could sometimes cause a player to see ‘kill’ hit indicators on the crosshair when they were actually only getting an assist[/*]
- Fixed an issue where the party widget on the HUD would not show when a teammate was talking[/*]
- Fixed bug where the squad respawn timer in the scoreboard could be shown on the wrong team[/*]
- Fixed rounded corners on various game mode tiles on the main menu[/*]
Weapons
MGL32
- li>Fixed an issue where the MGL32’s reload time was incorrect in the UI[/*]
R.357
- li>Fixed an issue where, when using the Sticky Situation skin and a sight, the sight picture could become broken and the player would look into their hands[/*]
Recurve Bow
- li>Fixed an issue that could cause the Recurve Bow to do a min damage of 68 rather than 60[/*]
SH1900
- Fixed an issue where the SH1900 stats where shown incorrectly in the UI[/*]
