H1Z1: King of the Kill Q&A outlines future changes
Cheaters are still a priority
H1Z1: King of the Kill [official site] appears week-in, week-out in both our Steam Charts and in the list of the most played games on Steam, but it's come under increased competition and criticism for its bugs and problems since the release of PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds. Some changes addressing a few of those problems were added to the game's test server last week, and now a Reddit Q&A with the community has outlined more tweaks to come.
The Reddit post was specifically to discuss feedback and future changes to what was added to the test server, so not every desired feature or bug fix was necessarily discussed. There is interesting stuff in there for players of the game however, some of which the developers picked out themselves in a Steam post summarising the conversation.
I thought this bit on cheaters was particularly interesting:
Are you currently working on anything substantial to thwart hackers. I know its an on going effort but there seems to be no real reduction in the last few weeks.
Yes, we are constantly finding known hacks and adding those to our banned list. Thousands of accounts are banned each day. The current build on Test has updated versions of all of our anti-cheat software. We have people dedicated to purchasing hacks from the market and then using those to ban anyone using them. We are also auditing all of our anti-cheat systems and looking to hire an anti-cheat programmer to further add to our arsenal to fight against them.
Thousands each day! I know cheating is rampant in certain online games, but I'm surprised the numbers are so high - and similarly surprised developers Daybreak don't already have an anti-cheat programmer to help address the issue.
Otherwise the discussed changes are mostly tweaks, to everything from spawn rates, to the gas cloud that kills players should they fail to keep moving towards its center, to the newly added shotgun. The latter comes up several times as a thing for removal in an off-topic mega-question list which was upvoted hugely, but also at other points in the subreddit. Speaking about it, Wynn says: "I think it is working much better. We have some further changes going up today to address two things that we saw that we still didn't like. The first is doing a little more damage overall to prevent the cases where you shoot an opponent and they are left with less than 5 health. That should be a kill shot. The other situation is head shots should be more lethal, so we upped the damage multiplier on head shots for the update later today."
If you've not been keeping up, H1Z1: King of the Kill is the mode which spun off from H1Z1 which plays out like the result of a saucy liaison between DayZ and The Hunger Games. As in, it drops players into a huge area of open terrain with guns and vehicles to find and then gradually shrinks the playing space to force everyone into the conflict. The last person or small team of people standing wins. The idea was popularised with a Battle Royale mod for Arma 3 created by someone called PlayerUnknown, who was then hired as consultant on King of the Kill, and who who now is, yeah, working on a third version of the same idea, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds.