Upcoming Changes Based on Community Feedback

First of all, thank you to everyone who played during Last Flag’s open beta last month, and a special thanks to those that took the time to send us feedback. This goes doubly for those who have been on this journey with us even longer and have helped shape Last Flag into the game it is today.

Throughout the beta we kept up with your discussions, read through feedback posts and forum threads, watched your videos and live streams, and investigated your bug reports. As you can imagine, our release build will have a lot of updates, tweaks, adjustments, and bug fixes. Many of these changes are a result of everything you shared with us.

Today, we’d like to share a few insights with you about what we’re addressing before showtime on April 14. Some of the improvements mentioned below could still change before launch, and the patch notes at launch will have the finalized list, but we couldn’t wait to highlight a few of them for you ahead of time.

Contestants and Balance

Coming in at number one, and surprising no one, we received a lot of feedback on the contestants, their abilities, and balance in general. We’ve made quite a few adjustments to contestant tuning as a result.

Before we get to that, there are a few general changes that are worth mentioning:

Shared Adjustments

Finishing Moves

• We reworked our finishing moves so that you now get a small amount of healing at the start and then a big dose at the end, instead of receiving the entire heal at the beginning.

This makes doing a finishing move in the middle of a fight a bit trickier, which is how it’s intended to be.

Cashbots and Melee Contestants

• We’ve given our melee characters a damage boost when attacking cashbots.

It was a bit hard for Knives and Lumberjack to deal with our wily mechanical friends, and this evens things out a bit. Despite cries from some voices of the community, we did not arm Cashbots to “make it a fair fight.”

Launchpads

• Players who are down but not out can now use launchpads.

It’s fun and it might save your life!

Radar Tower Reveal Rate

• Radar towers now reveal minimap squares a bit faster.

It takes about 2 seconds less for a square to be revealed, which might not seem like a lot but makes a difference over the course of a match. The intention here is to more rapidly narrow the search area and get to a flag find faster. We felt that a smidge too many games went to overtime during beta. When teams are able to locate one or both flags more quickly, it creates a little more room for back-and-forth flag thefts before overtime kicks in.

Knockback Damage

• We’ve removed several instances of the secondary knockback damage that you received when you were thrown into something.

Did you know that getting knocked into an object or a wall could deal extra damage to you? This added a second layer of damage to certain abilities, which made them a bit tricky to balance. Tango’s mine is a good example: In certain locations, you could take a lot of damage very quickly because you’d been bounced against a wall. We didn’t remove all instances of knockback damage since it feels reasonable to keep for certain abilities, such as Lumberjack’s Grand Slam.

Beyond those general adjustments, here’s some changes more specific to each of the contestants:

Contestant Adjustments

Knives

A lot of people have