Insurgency: Sandstorm - Community update - 17th of January 2019

After the successful launch of Insurgency: Sandstorm last month and a busy period over the holiday season, our team would like to give you a brief update on where we are with the game's development and what fans can expect over the coming months.

After the last update on December 21st we gave our team a week off over Christmas and New Year’s to recover and spend some much needed time with family and friends. During this period, however, our community and design teams were spending a huge amount of time reading through hundreds of reviews and comments across Steam, Reddit, YouTube, news sites and more, gathering feedback and prioritising our year ahead.

After reviewing launch and reading your feedback it was clear that our first update needed to focus heavily on quality of life and community features, but also deliver additional content.

We hinted at some future plans in our The Insurgency Legacy Continues blog post back in December, and while we are not yet ready to discuss the full line up of changes for the February update, you can view some confirmed content and features below.

alt text

0_1547746947459_iss com2.png

  • Five new weapons including the MP5A5 and MP5A2, which will be available for Security and Insurgent Breacher classes respectively.
  • A new Community Testing Environment right in your Steam Library for easier and more open testing of upcoming updates.
  • Competitive improvements including tiebreaker rounds, leaver penalties, and more.
  • Vote Kick for community servers and additional anti-harassment / griefing measures.
  • Clearer indications around restricted areas, game rules and spawn waves.
  • New cosmetics including Tropentarn camouflage, new gloves, and new eyewear.
  • Some other surprises you might not expect.

In addition to the above, performance and optimisation will continue to be a top priority for us. Players systems and setups vary greatly and it's important we gather as much information as possible. We encourage anybody who is having issues to submit information to our team via the performance discussion and support section of the forums to help us identify and resolve any issues.

We also received a lot of feedback about the in-game community and player behaviour. Our team will be working on various design changes, bug fixes, and other game-based solutions to address or mitigate these issues. However, some of these will require time for us to concept, implement and iterate upon. In the meantime, it is vital that the community aid us and our partners in finding and addressing issues.

As such we have published a new guide detailing the steps you should take if you encounter someone cheating, using game exploits, harassing/abusing players or otherwise griefing, as well as additional documentation regarding Easy Anti-Cheat.

Two recurring topics regarding in-game player behaviour were vote-kick and in-game reporting options. Our team take player behaviour very seriously and are committed to improving player experience. Some of the changes in the February update should take steps towards this, however, we would like to take this time to clarify our current stance on the above.

In our previous titles, votekicking itself was abused by some players as a means to harass, grief, and troll, so we’ve had some hesitation about adding it to Sandstorm. However, we’ve heard your feedback and we understand that when used responsibly this can be an effective tool in dealing with disruptive players. As such we’ve decided to add it as an option for community servers. We’ll continue to monitor community feedback on this and other systems and make changes accordingly.

We’ve also seen some requests to include an in-game reporting system to deal with these kinds of players. This is something we have discussed, however, creating and managing such a system with investigations and reviews of every reported player would put a great strain on our development and community management resources. Frankly, we’re unable to effectively monitor every single player’s behavior and support such a system. We would rather focus on creating good community tools and automated systems to deal with these kinds of issues and put our resources toward creating content and improving gameplay. That being said, an in-game reporting system is something we might explore in the future, targeted at the most disruptive players. For now, we ask that players follow Community Guidelines - Cheating, Exploits and Harassment.

As we’ve said before, launch is just the beginning for us. We have a huge amount of post-release content planned for Insurgency: Sandstorm, and are excited to bring the game to consoles this year and to explore additional platforms in the future. We will be sharing a lot more news over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the NWI newsletter, bookmark our blog and follow @InsurgencyGame across social media to stay up to date with all our announcements.

last edited by chaton

Looking forward to playing this when I get home. Keep up the good work NWI.

Cant wait for them updates 😄

@chaton I may bitch and complain a lot which I do but I truly want the game to succeed. Here’s to hoping you guys fix her all up and it runs nice and smooth. Game On!

@chaton One more thing it sure was nice to hear some “when/where/what/who” !!

I really appreciate the headsup. Thx for that.

@chaton said in Insurgency: Sandstorm - Community update - 17th of January 2019:

During this period, however, our community and design teams were spending a huge amount of time reading through hundreds of reviews and comments across Steam, Reddit, YouTube, news sites and more, gathering feedback and prioritising our year ahead.

May I just point out that that bit sounds like you read literally everything just not these forums? I have noticed a lack of NWI comments on the forum especially until the recent increase, which makes me wonder whether this is just put in a misunderstanding way or has actually been like that.

Hey @ryuk47
We definitely read everything on the forums too, don't worry! 🙂

Good stuff NWI! I am looking forward to seeing the performance of that mp5. The UZI, being my favorite go-to weapon for its caliber and rate of fire...I wonder if I will enjoy the mp5 at all actually? I guess its burst may feel right; being a fan of the m16a4. Will the RPK be one of the five? I miss that beast of an LMG!!! I would love to get some good bi-pod action with that soon! Thank you for all your hard work!

CSGO's MP5 release was lackluster, so I'm looking forward to this. I know NWI can do it right.

I'm looking forward to the promised Sinjar and Ministry!

Thanks a lot NWI you guys doing a great job and the game is awesome!

im still in despite the aggro extreme ai that reverts to cheating to win and goes back to to older update behaviors. is the ai code learning.. or reverting for co op? im still in despite you keep taking my gear i spent my cash on after all of that work...and you keep taking me back to bear bones with my weapon sets too. will this continue for the life of the game? im asking for a friend.

@redbowl - You are saying the AI chooses what update behaviors it "wishes" to use? And is actively learning? NWI if this is true CONGRATULATIONS on your discovery!!!

for the rest try -

First, navigate to: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Insurgency\Saved\Config\WindowsClient
Then delete the following file: GameUserSettings.ini
The file will be recreated when you next start the game.

When is the date of the update?

@tucan-sam 😆 One of the greatest mysteries of life...