As we stated before, the Early Access release of the alpha version of H1Z1, Sony's take on the open world zombie apocalypse survival, has not been devoid of controversies. In particular, the Airdrop System has been the target of players' discontent. The crates dropped by the airplanes (that you can purchase with real world money), are very likely to contain fire weapons, giving the players that manage to obtain them a great advantage. This created many accusations towards SEO, blaming them of making the game a Pay to Win. Today, arclegger posted the changes they are going to implement to the Airdrop System to make it more fair as long with a personal apology to the community.
In a past stream, arclegger talked about the ways you can obtain a gun in H1Z1 and totally disregarded the chance of buying it via real money. After the outrage that came from the Airdrop System, he wrote on H1Z1's subreddit:
When you are on a stream, and you are talking about your game, you tend to talk a million miles an hour both to keep the information flowing and to keep it entertaining. But sometimes things get said without completely thinking about what you are saying 100% through. H1Z1 is a massive game with a lot of systems, some of which we were tuning every day and finishing last minute. When I said you can't buy any guns or ammo, I completely disregarded the possibility of airdrops and meant that you can't buy a gun or ammo and have it go into your starting loadout, or your loadout immediately like you were buying a gun from the gun store.That means that when he said that you can't buy guns for money, he didn't count airdrops since after you buy one, you have to fight zombies and other players for the content. Problem is, time ago both John Smedley and Arclegger stated on H1Z1's subreddit that the airdrops would not contain guns. As we know, that's not the case in the current state of affairs.All that being said, I totally understand how what I said was at the time lying to you guys and I apologize.
Truth to be told, these comments are now 8 months old. The game has been definitely subjected to many changes since then so it would not be surprising a change of mind on that regard. Still, such change of mind was never communicated.
The Airdrop System will be subjected to a great revamp in the next update that should be live soon. These changes include:
1) Make the plane move slowly (53% of current) This increases the ability for other players to react to the plane coming in.These changes should make the contest for the drop way more fierce, giving time to players to get to the drop zone and get ready for the fight.2) Make the drop fall more slowly (80% of current) This increases the ability for other players to react to the plane coming in.
3) Less accurate maximum drop radius (was 250m now 700m, so with these settings it would drop up to 700m from the calling player)
4) New minimum distance of 250m for airdrops to appear from a player. This is a little less than ½ the player density of 700m distance with 120 players on a server. Therefore more players are likely to be near the airdrop when deployed.
5) Increase the minimum number of required players to 120 (a little higher after more discussion about player density being important to keeping airdrops contested)
In a following reddit thread, SOE posted the other contents of the update that will go along the ones foretold by Arclegger. These are mostly technical improvements for the game and the servers.
We'll see if the changes to the Airdrop System will be enough to please the players that, as of now, stormed the Steam's page of the game with negative reviews and convinced SOE to offer no questio asked full refunds to those who purchased the game in the first 24 hours.
- Made adjustments to servers to better balance load
- Fixes for some server disconnections
- Improvements to overall connections (G29 and G99 errors)
- Adjustments to game exit-to-desktop when disconnected (still tracking down more)
- Improvements to server selection screen
- Adjustments to loot spawning in both regular and Battle Royale maps
- Adjustments and performance adjustments to weather system
- Fixed a few servers that were set to the wrong modes
- You should no longer be able to cause bleeding on other players in the PvE servers
- Reduced some timers for crafting
- Performance adjustments for weather effects
- Also, see /u/arclegger[1] post
- Various other super-secret stability mojo
Did you purchase H1Z1's early access version? How is your experience so far? Do you think that the Airdrop System as it was before this update impacted your enjoyment? Tell us in the comments
