Patch 0.29.0

Patch 0.29.0 was a major patch, which brought many performance and Quality of Life improvements to the Island, as well as introduced Battle Box Arena.

Overview

This update has made a whole bunch of large changes to the server infrastructure, please let us know if you experience any new issues or instability due to these changes. We’ve also updated our supported versions, 1.21.6 and below can no longer join but 1.21.11 clients can now join!

Multi-queue

With the release of Battle Box Arena we are introducing an entirely rewritten matchmaking system. Our old system had safety issues that were dealbreakers when introducing a proper ranked queue for Battle Box Arena. We’ll touch on the technical benefits of the rewrite below, but it also lets us bring a new feature we’ve wanted to add for a long time: multi-queue!

In the navigator, you can now find a new multi-queue feature in place of the old quickplay button (we know it had zero active users, but we’ll still miss it!). Multi-queue lets all users queue up for a selection of game modes through playlists defined by us. We’ll keep an eye on which queues users like to combine and tweak our offering of playlists over time.

If you have at least the Champ rank you will also be able to customise your multi-queue experience, anyone with at least this rank can freely select which games they’d like to play and queue up for any combination they can think of.

Through multi-queue you no longer need to fish away while waiting to play lower popularity games, you can now continue playing popular games until the lower popularity queues fill up!

General Changes

When servers restart you are now moved to a different instance of the same server type instead of always being sent to the main lobby. This places you on the same fishing island or grotto but on a different server.
You now spawn on the same server type you were previously at in lobbies and fishing islands within the same play session on various occasions:
- When you finish playing a game you now return to the server type you were previously on.
- When you are kicked from a collapsing grotto you are now placed back where you were before teleporting in.
When looking at the current location of other users on the network it will once again show which game lobby a player is in, and now also show which fishing island the player is on.
Reduced the amount of uncommon materials needed when crafting cosmetics, redistributed the cost out to mostly common materials and partially rare materials.
Fixed arcane anomaly cosmetic blueprints not being tradeable.

Game Changes

The matchmaking process has been reworked and made faster on average if all players are present to make room for ranked matchmaking.
- Queues may now take longer to search for a proper match to participate in.
- When a group of players is matchmade, a server starts being prepared for them which should take between 1-5 seconds.
- If a match is at full size the game starts in 3 seconds, otherwise a 20 second wait period happens to find more players. You cannot leave the queue in the last 3 seconds of this phase or after the queue is full.
- Moving between servers now has a quicker loading screen.
- Games now start on a 15 second timer after all players have joined the game server.
- If it takes longer than 20 seconds for all players to join the game server any missing players are removed from the game and the 15 second timer starts.
  - Developer note: Assuming no delay to find a good match, queuing for a game now takes between 65-25 seconds which should be faster on average than the old system which would take 45 seconds minimum even if the game was instantly found.
Rejoining is now automatic and no longer requires running /rejoin.
- If you join the network while in a game you are automatically redirected to your game or plobby server.
Kit selection in Battle Box now only starts when all players are in the server for at least 2 seconds to remove the advantage of picking a kit before other players have loaded in.
Podium times have been shortened, ending after 30s instead of 60s.
Teleporting to game servers should run into issues less often and no longer result in users seeing “Teleported!” without being teleported.
Various unintended methods to bypass the matchmaking system have been removed to ensure competitive integrity for ranked matches. We intend to share more details in the future.
Parkour Warrior: Dojo now has an instance selector.
Parkour Warrior: Dojo servers now share the same chat and TAB list.
Heart textures while blinking now have the correct color and no longer appear to be full despite being at low health.
Increased odds for newly added maps now decrease over time, they will be the highest on the release day and slowly decrease after that.
Reverted 1.21.4 related changes to TGTTOS maps.

Plobby Changes

Plobbies no longer use the matchmaking system and instead directly boot up your server when pressing the Start Game button in the menu. Start-up should take between 2 and 5 seconds during which the process cannot be cancelled.
- Starting plobbies is now rate limited to at most once per second. An error is shown if no servers are available to start a plobby.
Plobby settings are saved as soon as you start the game, these settings are used throughout an entire play session and cannot be changed.
Plobby teams are now no longer modifiable after starting a game.
Plobby games now start as soon as at least two teams are online, but they have a 30s waiting time before the match instead of the 15s of matchmade games to accommodate it not waiting for all players.
Plobbies are now ran on different servers depending on the player count of the plobby when the server is booted up.
- This should address lag issues when playing with 40 players in games that normally don’t support such player counts.
- This may result in lag if you start a server before inviting more players into your plobby.
Improved server performance and fixed crashes when running games of Battle Box or TGTTOS with many rounds and different maps at high player counts.