Balance Changes
A note on balance changes–
Our approach to balancing the game has evolved since the first season of THE FINALS! In the beginning, we made a lot of changes because the game was brand new and we suddenly had a constant flow of players to provide feedback, telemetry, and information that we could use to calibrate and experiment with quickly.
As time marches on and we start to see this game reach a more stable state, we want to fall into a more sustainable and reliable rhythm that gives us time to plan larger and more meaningful shifts in balance based on how we see the community engage with the meta.
As such, our intent is to do those larger, meta-altering balance passes at the start of each new season, where we can introduce new strategies and ways to play. Then, as needed, we’ll perform another pass halfway through each season aimed at polishing the current meta and addressing major feedback points from our core without fully resetting the meta and causing confusion.
Between these two major balance passes, we’ll only perform smaller nudges to the balance that aim to smooth out the current experience when absolutely necessary.
We’re hopeful this approach will lead to a smoother and clearer experience for you and help set better expectations regarding the weekly game updates while being kinder to our players and to our team!
Weapons
Model 1887
- Increased inner pellet radius from 0.45 to 0.65, making the weapon less accurate at longer ranges
- Increased outer pellet radius from 1.3 to 1.7, making the weapon less accurate at longer ranges
- Decreased damage falloff multiplier from 65% to 60%, causing the weapon to do less damage at range
Dev Note: One way we investigate the balance of weapons is to look at effectiveness in gameplay (i.e. stats like damage, kill rates, headshot rates, and accuracy), in addition to stats like usage and win rates. Looking at this data alone, the Model 1887 is good but not exceptional when it comes to effectiveness during play. However, we’ve seen a large uptick in usage, mostly in higher-skill tiers which has led to the gun being very prevalent in matches and leading to a somewhat stale meta. This ‘nudge’ to the effective range will hopefully disrupt this trend, without making the weapon weaker than its nearest competitors when it comes to effectiveness (i.e. the AKM, Famas and Pike-556).
XP-54
- Increased damage falloff start distance from 15m to 20m, making the weapon more impactful at range
- Increased damage falloff end distance from 25m to 30m, making the weapon more impactful at range
- Decreased damage falloff multiplier from 65% to 62%
Content and Bug Fixes
Contracts
- Added new Halloween Contracts as part of the Treat Hunt event
- Fixed an issue where the damage values earned on Contracts could be broken, showing large negative scores
Specializations
Cloaking Device
- Fixed an issue introduced in 4.4 that caused refraction effects like cloaking, and parts of the dematerialize effect, to not be visible when the effect quality is set to medium
Dematerializer
- Fixed an issue where environmental kills were not detected when the dematerialized ‘floor’ was an air vent or other small prop
UI
- Fixed an issue where players might not be able to equip an item immediately after purchasing it
- Fixed various issues where player outlines could have the wrong color
- Fixed an occasional issue where new players could become stuck in the account linking flow
- Fixed an issue where the Contract screen would unlock at the wrong time for new players during the first-time user experience
Sponsors
- Increased the number of Fans that can be earned by 50% to 100%, depending on the action type
- Disabled the ability to earn Fans with the Healing Beam Dev Note: We’ve disabled the earning of Fans via the Healing Beam as it was too easy for players to exploit this mechanic to farm Fans, at the cost of good, competitive matches. We only want Fans to be earnable for actions that can be completed regardless of the Contestant setup.
VRs
- Increased the VR cap from 3000 to 5000
Weapons
Alternate Scopes
Fixed an issue where weapons with an attached sight could have a skewed pose when aiming down sights, causing the sight to be misaligned with where the weapon is aimed