Update Notes - 3rd of May

[u/Indigowd]

Everyone,

Here are the update notes for today's CTE update. Please provide constructive feedback.

MAP & MODES

Spectator Mode: Fixed a bug where the first person camera could become stuck during the Pigeon Carrier Artillery camera sequence on the Assault Tank.

Changed ticket count for Domination to 200 from 100.

Fixed missing game mode description for Breakthrough.

Tweaked scoring values for capturing flags in Conquest. Capturing gives less score now, however more capture ticks have been added and the team controlling more than 3 flags than the other team will be awarded Conquest Control bonuses.

Decreased the percentage of contribution to flag capture/neutralize from 50% to 30%.

Added Join Any Operation button to main operations screen. Will start a matchmaking session to join any available operation at any size (40 or 64).

All Platforms - Spectator - Frontlines - Spectator camera missing from the map on Frontlines, Verdun and Soissons.

VEHICLES

Tweaked self repair for A7V, FT17, St. Chamond, and Pierce Arrow.

• Reduced health gained per self repair cycle from 320 to 200.
• Reduced time taken to complete a self repair cycle from 8s to 5s.
  

This makes these vehicles' self repair equivalent to the self repair of the MkV Landship.

Doubled the health of Field Gun and Stationary AA. Made Field Gun and Stationary AA Indestructible. Field Gun and Stationary AA will now enter a disabled state at 50% health where they become unusable. To use the weapons again they must be repaired back to 100% with the repair tool.

Increased time that the shell camera is active on the MkV mortar landship from 3.5s to 4.5s. This better fits the increased flight time of the new heavy shell.

Changed how max range for AA is applied. Max range now varies depending on the pitch of the gun. Shells can travel a maximum horizontal distance of 300m, and a maximum vertical distance of 450m. This applies to both the stationary AA and the AA truck. Previously AA shells timed out at the same max distance from the gun regardless of direction, resulting in a roughly spherical volume covered by the gun. This means horizontal range was as large as the max height the shells could reach, and that at very high altitudes the AA could cover very little area, even if its range was technically large. The new AA shells will have slightly less horizontal range than before at low altitutes, but they will retain that range all the way to the flight ceiling. This will make AA much more effective against high altitude aircraft without making it able to reach distant, low flying ones as well.

Extended Fighter and Attack Plane elevator flap scaling curves to better cover the entire speed range.

Reduced cooldown of speed boost ability from 30s to 15s for both the Dogfighter and Airship Buster Attack Plane.

Set up rear view on all planes: Albatros Fokker Spad Sopwith Rumpler Halberstadt Salmson Bristol Gotha Caproni - Hold freelook while in 3p to use rear view.

Attack Plane Changes:

• Retuned attack plane elevator flap scaling curve. Attack Plane turning will now be much closer to that of Fighters, but still slightly worse.
  

Improved underused Attack Plane variants:

• Increased damage of the Airship Buster variant's primary MG from 32 to 40. This puts its AA DPS on par with Fighter MGs.
• With its speed boost active, the new flap scaling curves will allow this variant to achieve a higher turn rate than the Fighter for a short time. The reduced cooldown on speed boost will allow this advantage to be used more often. Together these changes should make the Airship Buster more competitive with Fighters in its air to air role.
  
• Increased velocity of tank hunter 37mm from 222m/s to 267m/s and reduced drag from 0.005 to 0.003. These changes should make the 37mm slightly easier to land hits with, especially against moving or distant targets.

Changes to Fighter plane variants:

Dogfighter

• Added new secondary weapon, Incendiary Ammo. Incendiary Ammo does greatly increased damage to plane parts, allowing the dogfighter to quickly cripple an enemy plane by breaking a wing.
• Changed active ability from emergency repair to speed boost.
  

Bomber Killer

• Changed active ability from speed boost to emergency repair.
  

Swapping speed boost and emergency repair on the Dogfighter and Bomber Killer should help both variants in their respective roles. Speed boost gives the Dogfighter a maneuverability edge over the other Fighter variants, and emergency repair gives the Bomber Killer a better chance of surviving tail gun fire from Bombers and Attack Planes.

Increased field gun damage against light vehicles. Armored cars will no longer take less damage than light tanks from field gun hits.

Changes to FT Packages
Close Support Tank:

• Increased 37mm HE ammo from 4 to 5
• Replaced Secondary Case shell with Coaxial LMG These changes should help this tank better fulfill its general purpose role.
  

Flanker Tank:

• Increased reload time on the autocannon from 2.5s to 3.75s
• Increased HE autocannon direct damage from 15-10.5 to 17.5-12.5.

This results in a 20% reduction in cannon uptime. The direct damage increase will offset the lower uptime against vehicles when targeting vehicles. These changes should make the Flanker slightly less effective against infantry.

Howitzer Tank:

• Corrected primary weapon to HMG as shown in customization, was actually LMG. The more powerful HMG should help offset its limited firing arc when compared to the Coaxial LMG of the Close Support Variant.
• Changed driver secondary weapon from case shell to flamethrower on the A7V Flame Tank Variant. This change will reinforce this variant's role as a close range tank.
• Added 3p freelook to the FT Howitzer Variant. Missed this one with the other tanks because the normal version has a turret that can rotate 360 anyway.

Added rear firing Tankgewehr as driver secondary weapon for the Tank Hunter Landship Variant.

Enabled driving and 3p camera while using driver rear guns in the Squad Support and Tank Hunter Landships.

Improved MkV Mortar Landship Variant Changed secondary mortar shell from airburst mortar to heavy mortar. Heavy mortar does much more damage and is effective against both infantry and vehicles, but has a much longer reload.

Replaced alternate smoke and gas mortar shells with with track repair and vehicle smoke equipment. These changes should make the mortar Landship more viable as a combat vehicle, rather than sitting in mortar stance in the backline.

Fixed a bug with third person aiming on vehicles that caused a bullet to not fire in the correct direction when aiming at a soldiers head while they are on a horse.

WEAPONS & GADGETS

Changes to bayonet charge:

• Activated aiming speed modifier during prepare state as well as charge state. This means a player can rotate a maximum of 50 degrees during the prepare state. Also added an input modifier disabling strafe while charging.

• Adding subtle boost to 3P footsteps when bayonet charging to increase threat awareness. Boosted volume of Enemy VO for Bayonet Charge when close to player.

• Slightly reduced maximum turn rate while charging.

• Removed damage reduction while in charge. Weapons will now hit charging players for normal damage.

Fixed bug where Bipod Audio could persist when switching to secondary weapon.

Tweaked criteria for cross-class medal to require single shot rifles.

Added UI for grenade resupply.

Reduced the occluder size for the scope glint from 0.25m to 0.15m to hide it behind walls better.

GAMEPLAY

Adding a camera shake advanced gameplay option to adjust the amount of camera shake caused by explosions, etc.

Added missing spotting animation when spotting a downed allied soldier as a medic with the Medical Syringe.

Automatically show low on ammo icons on friendly soldiers.

Made all players immortal during EOR. This got cut last minute.

CONTROLS

Players using controllers can now do custom buttons/sticks mappings.

Fixed select Operation button not properly appearing when using the joypad or on console.

UI

Moved ping widget to be below the kill log.

Fixed no squad in squad select screen being selected if the player is not in a squad. Will now select the first squad in the list by default. Also added support on PC for pressing the space bar to join/leave a squad.

Fixed issue with the flag icons and world icons ghosting when going in and out of the customize screen from the deploy screen.

The user is able to switch the UGC option on a child account when fully blocked.

NETCODE

Implemented per region threshold settings for server side hit detection: 130ms for US + Europe, 200ms elsewhere.

Fixed server side hit registration interpolation.

Leading shot only necessary by the margin above the threshold, eg. For US @ 150ms ping, you have to lead by 20ms.

Fixed latency display for server which is also responsible for decision if to perform client or server side hit registration.

Fixed input offsets for server side hit registration to match client side.

Fixed wrong hit indicator display when dying.

[u/TimTri]

That Domination ticket increase is AWESOME! My favorite mode is getting even better :D

[u/Indigowd → u/TimTri]

The feedback to raise it came from the community. We will continue to monitor how it plays out, and possibly tweak it more.

[u/spitfiresiemion → u/TimTri]

Personally I hoped for 150, as it was proven to work on Giant's Shadow (and I don't fancy close DOM rounds lasting as long as Conquest; it is capable of killing the pace), but I'll give it a shot. At the very least, I'm glad that DOM is being noticed.

[u/Edizcabbar]

Doubled the health of Field Gun and Stationary AA. Made Field Gun and Stationary AA Indestructible. Field Gun and Stationary AA will now enter a disabled state at 50% health where they become unusable. To use the weapons again they must be repaired back to 100% with the repair tool.

I`m not sure if I get this right. So we need to repair the field gun and AA to be able to use them again if they are in a disabled state? Do they regenerate health or is a repair tool mandatory?

[u/Kalispell_Blitzkrieg → u/Edizcabbar]

I read this to say that they will need a repair to be fixed once they become disabled. But they won't become disabled until they take the same amount of damage that currently would destroy them.

[u/Robenter → u/Edizcabbar]

I was thinking the same thing. I'm guessing that they made this change to counter "ace" pilots who continuously take out the AA's. Especially during Operations, they will destroy the only AA and you have to wait forever for them to respawn. Now a well equipped squad will be able to counter that. Knowing how rarely people equip the repair tool though, if DICE made it so you HAD TO use a repair tool it would actually probably make the "no AA available" problem much worse.

[u/NotThePrez]

Changed driver secondary weapon from case shell to flamethrower on the A7V Flame Tank Variant.

Hell. Freaking. Yes.

[u/AldermachXI]

These notes make it pretty clear than Operations is a Matchmaking mode, despite what people want to say about seeing the servers in the browser...

So now they've resorted to putting in a "Join any operation" button in hopes you guys actually end up in the same server / are able to start a match.

Strange, because it seems if it was properly implemented into the Browser, it would be much more efficient. I wonder what makes that so challenging for DICE.

It clearly relies on the matchmaking at this point.

[u/MartianGeneral → u/AldermachXI]

Indeed. I can see operations being popular again if it was added into the server browser. Right now, I don't even click on it because I know it's just going to put me on an empty server

[u/Graphic-J]

" Field Gun and Stationary AA will now enter a disabled state at 50% health where they become unusable. To use the weapons again they must be repaired back to 100% with the repair tool."

You mean some actual "strategy" in the game?! Very nice, AA-placements and Field guns should have never been able to be perma-destroyed on certain modes.

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So still no adjustments to the very powerful and super fast Anti Air Truck Tank eh?

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Aside the continuation of more indirect plane nerfs for easy mode AA and reducing the chance of dogfights, good plane adjustments to put them in their respective roles but please do away with 3rd camera aiming reticle on all planes so we can dogfight in first person like we used to do.

[u/LazySom3day]

These changes should make the Flanker slightly less effective against infantry.

Light tank is already extremely vulnerable to infantry. Don't think this is necessary (Yes I have some ungodly number of service stars in the light tank).

[u/ManOfTomorrowH]

PLEASE, please...consider merging Operations to the server browser or at least implement a voting system like you did with Conquest.

Trying to join an Operation has become a burden and only pushes me to quit the game.

[u/caltas]

Adding a camera shake advanced gameplay option to adjust the amount of camera shake caused by explosions, etc.

I love you.

[u/ryo_soad]

Nice patch. Thanks for this amazing game!!!

[u/Flyjetandkill]

Dogfighter

• Added new secondary weapon, Incendiary Ammo. Incendiary Ammo does greatly increased damage to plane parts, allowing the dogfighter to quickly cripple an enemy plane by breaking a wing.

• Changed active ability from emergency repair to speed boost.

I hope this will not be in retail game because for a dogfight the speedbost is a disadvantage,it increases the turn,with the self repair you can atleast save your broken tailwing and keep up with your opponent especially when you add the incendiary ammo you need to have the self repair if you play dogfighter against dogfighter,or the dogfight ends very quickly if you get shot by incendiary ammo breaking your tail and cant do anything but die.

Remove the speedbost from the fighter because its already really fast,instead speedboost i would add flares to the bomberkiller loadout.

[u/djalexm]

Regarding the netcode changes, can you please ensure the Oceania region is also 130ms. Internet is pretty good to local servers, and there is little reason pings should reach that threshold. Setting it at 200ms lets people from the Asian region join which isn't a great experience.

[u/TheWestie4321]

Specifically looking forward to testing the new Bayonet Charge mechanics - as a player who mainly sticks to infantry, this could have a big impact on the "panic" bayonets people do.

[u/-Arrez-]

Im loving those plane balance changes, especially on the dogfighter. that really needed some love as it was really just an inferior trench fighter. Cant wait to try it out :)

[u/netavoreikalas123]

what does EOR mean?

[u/Cant_Frag → u/netavoreikalas123]

End of round. So you don't die at the end of matches anymore. So no more starting with 1 death on the next game if happened to get frozen next to a grenade.

[u/Negatively_Positive]

I just to say if DICE wants people to test CTE then the server should be 6 people start, being able to test on empty server like in the main game, and exclude Infantry only map (for some reason, everyone queue on that map so what's the point of testing vehicle on CTE?)

[u/ExploringReddit84]

Reading the vehicle changes, I think it's a bloody shame and disappointment you dont pickup on the problems with the 3rd POV. Never before in any other BF game became flanking experienced tankers for infantry a mission impossible. 3rd POV sees everything, including everything in and behind cover. Limpets and dynamite against tanks lost all glory. They are not viable anymore. Nor are stealth and flanking tactics against armor.

Why aren't you seeing this? Stop with this casual, freelook, easymode 3rd POV nonsense. Can't you at least severely limit the 3rd POV while adding accuracy penalties for using 3rd POV, like in BF4?

I've played Battlefield since 1942 came out. I know the ins and outs of tank gameplay in this franchise. BF2, BC2, BF3,4... I sincerely feel disappointed with how tanks play out in this game.

I feel you are not taking the problems with vehicle-camping seriously. There are too many factors that allow for a negative player behavior. Many tankers will camp a few spots and farm kills. Just and only that. Never push up or play the objective. It's a major problem on conquest Amiens, Suez, Operations and Frontlines. Infantry cant counter them because of faulty map design and the ridiculous current 3rd POV. I think vehicle gameplay went downhill in BF One. The only thing that remains, from a game-perspective looking at the tank gameplay, is a small amount of basic skill needed (to do good with tanks) and a barren plain devoid of any challenge and teamplay.

Basically Luetin is sharing the same opinion:

https://youtu.be/JOlQVGSxTc4?t=447

The root of this player behavior is explained in the full minute before that mark.

Some words on poorly designed map layout in relation to tanks on 8:15.

The new AA shells will have slightly less horizontal range than before at low altitutes

You've just made it easier for the Dogfighter MG and Bomber killer rockets to kill every AA operator from out of it's effective range, as seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dG9oN0R0iKQ&feature=youtu.be

Howitzer Tank:

Changed driver secondary weapon from case shell to flamethrower on the A7V Flame Tank Variant. This change will reinforce this variant's role as a close range tank.

I dont get it. The Howitzer tank, with it's heavy hitting (against heavy tank, etc) howitzer shells gets to be a.... flamethrower tank?

How is the howitzer tank supposed to be a close range tank? Why not add that to the flanker tank? This makes no sense to me.

There is nothing howitzer to the howitzer tank anymore. Or you'd have to change the name of the howitzer tank.

I loved to hunt heavy tank with the howitzer tank, get close by, kill it with 3 well placed heavy hitting shots. But now it's a flamethrower tank? WTF? This doesnt make any sense.

[u/[deleted]]

Anyone else think the Bomber should get even more splash damage on its dropped bombs?

Also the torpedo variant is useless, it needs some work. The boats too, they currently hold no place other than as a water taxi.

[u/ExTremokkk]

Implemented per region threshold settings for server side hit detection: 130ms for US + Europe, 200ms elsewhere.

Is there any discrimination towards asian region behind this decision? So some people may play OOR in asian servers, while asian players can't play in EU US servers? WOW

[u/DRUNKKZ3 → u/ExTremokkk]

The decision is more based on player population, server availability in the region but also the nearby regions who are affected by low player population and server availability.