PATCH 3.9 - Balancing & Christmas

Dear Neighbors,

While we are waiting for the Robots to invade Heartsville early next year, we have decided to treat you with a balance pass, shorter matches and decoration for Christmas instead.

As you may know we are moving Neighbors into a more casual direction. This also goes for Destruction, but this time we have not touched the game mode, but rather done some initiatives on making it more fair to fight between each Neighbor and we have brought down the match length of each session.

Shorter Matches

We want fun, short and quick matches so you go in and have more fun regardless of when you join the game. And if you lose, well you just play again. So we have decided to bring down the match length by decreasing the health of fences, windows and house essentials and decreased the amount of House Essentials to destroy from 4->3. As always you can chose whatever you like from the custom settings.

Full Character Balance Pass

Our logic, so far, has been to "punish" high-mobility Neighbors with low health or strength. We believe we have found a golden middle-ground, nerfing the mobility of especially PA and Kevin to some degree. On the contrary they now have a better chance in fighting all Neighbors.

The focus of this update has furthermore been to give Neighbors like MJ, Gramps and Cookie a better fighting chance against Neighbors like Doreen and Chad. This means that now it might actually be worth taking up a fight if you play a weaker character instead of running away. Kevin, Kim, Louie and PA has also gotten a bit stronger but has been nerfed a bit in mobility. It can be frustrating to have a Kevin or a PA on your roof every 30 seconds. Now this should not happen as often and hopefully it will concentrate some more fights around the front fences and windows. There will be more changes in future updates, going towards a generally more "balanced" experience. We are currently looking at giving melee possibilities to Gramps, Mary Jean and potentially also Louie. Feel free to comment your thoughts on this.

Based on the above and the fact that we try to drive Neighbors into a more casual experience, we have also decided lift the max cap of Neighbors pr. team by default. Now you can pick any character you like and try many weird and crazy combinations of Neighbors. We feel like we are able to do this because the Neighbors are more balanced now. At any time you can set the cap back to whatever you like, in the custom settings if you are looking for a more competitive or "fair" experience which is understandable but not the default intention from our side. If any completely crazy metas arise from this, we will do what we can to alleviate it.

Additionally, a lot of bugs and smaller annoyances has now been fixed, giving a more coherent and smooth experience! check out the full patch notes below!

Full Patch Notes

New Features

• Christmas has come to Heartsville introducing decoration in all maps and houses

• Snowballs introduced to all maps - now giving damage and the real snowball fight can begin, so watch out!

  

Tweaks & Balance pass

P.A.

• PA’s general health slightly increased

• PA’s general strength slightly increased

• PA’s helmet damage increased

• PA’s cannon damage increased

• PA’s cannon hit knockback reduced

• Angle on PA’s cannon capped to shoot straight (meant for player attacks)

• Cannon responsiveness when playing with high latency greatly improved

• Big Bertha responsiveness when playing with high latency greatly improved

• Cooldown on PA’s deploy cannon increased

• PA’s helmet attack speed slightly decreased

• Knockback on PA’s helmet reduced

• Jetpack now needs to charge up fully before being attached to an enemy

Mary Jean

• Mary Jean’s’ general strength increased

• Mary Jean's health slightly increased

• Mary Jean’s Yarn Ball cooldown increased

• Mary Jean’s Yarn Ball entangle-time shortened

• Lifetime of Ascending needles increased

• Added cooldown to a successful lockpick with knitting needles (25 sec)

Kevin

• Kevin's general strength slightly increased

• Kevin's health slightly increased

• Kevin’s Slingshot damage slightly increased

• Kevin’s Slingshot charge-time slightly increased

• Kevin’s triple shot cooldown slightly increased

• Fixed slingshot projectiles sometimes flying in strange directions when being fired

Louie

• Louie’s health slightly increased

• Louie’s general strength slightly increased

• Knockback on Louie’s fireworks decreased

• Louie’s firework damage slightly increased

• Louie’s Tripwire damage significantly increased

• Rocket Barrage ability now has a 2 second “build up” before releasing rockets

Gramps

• Gramps’ general strength slightly increased

• Gramps’ health slightly increased

• Gramps resurrection ability cooldown decreased

Doreen

• Doreen’s health slightly reduced

• Doreen’s speed slightly increased

• Doreen uppercut damage slightly reduced

• Added cooldown to Doreen’s uppercut

• Knockback on Doreen uppercut reduced

• Doreen springy glove jab hit speed slightly increased

• Doreen springy glove jab damage slightly increased

• Doreen normal jab hit speed slightly decreased

• Doreen’s deflective fists - blocking stamina drains significantly less

• Doreen’s deflective fists lets through 20% damage

• Doreen’s speed using deflective fists significantly increased

Cookie

• Cookie’s general strength slightly increased

• Cookie’s health slightly increased

• Cookie’s Multi-tool damage increased

• Cookie’s Multi-tool speed slightly increased

• Cookies tunnel can now be placed anywhere while playing Brawl

• Tunnels are now indicated to teammates when getting close to them

• UI feedback if Cookie’s tunnel does not have an exit

Kim

• Kim’s general strength slightly increased

• Kim’s Wrench damage slightly increased

• Wrench repair slightly increased

• Wrench throw cooldown decreased

• Kim’s Oil Turret damage slightly increased

• Kim’s homing wrench damage increased

Chad

• Chad’s health slightly decreased

• Charge-up time on Vacuum Swing slightly decreased

• Time between attacks on Vacuum Swing reduced

• Chad’s general strength slightly decreased

• Chad’s speed slightly increased

• Knockback on Chad Vacuum swing reduced

Items

• Sledgehammer damage decreased by 15%

• Baking Roll hit speed slightly decreased

• Hammer’s repair amount increased

• Golf Club durability decreased

• Baseball Bat durability decreased

• Pop Gun second-use damage slightly increased

General

• Neighbor Limitation for each team removed (can be set in custom settings)

• Respawn timer lowered

• Respawn home-multiplier increased

• Pinging items now sends more information to the chat

• General critical chance reduced from 4.5% → 3%

• All fences, windows, and house essentials now have less health

• Nightstalker perk slightly better during day and slightly worse at night

• Increased visibility of indicators when your house is under attack

• Damage numbers now attach to the target to improve visibility

• Improvements made to the tutorial

Bug fixes and Quality of Life

• Fixed scaling of Louie’s explosion VFX in character select

• Fixed tooltips being duplicated when re-joining a match

• Destroyed fences and vents now behave correctly for hot-joining players

• Jackhammer can no longer bounce you off level bounds

• Cookie can now climb ladders just as well as any other Neighbor

• Fixed Tai-Chi perk not applying slow correctly after respawning

• Fixed the jetpack model staying on players after the ability is over

• Fixed several UI sounds not playing correctly when structures were being attacked

• The icon for house being under attack is now visible when Louie uses Fireworks

• Dying in brawl when you are the only player no longer rewards the opposite team with a knockout

• Fixed an issue where the front fence gates would show blueprint outline with the Hammer equipped

• Fixed an issue in Evergreen Residence where the overhang roof at the terrace had a floor clipping through

• The timeframe in which a player’s spot is reserved for re-joining after crashing has been lowered from 150s → 100s

• Louie’s firework is now affected by spawn-camp volumes in brawl mode

• Triggering bear traps with resources no longer plays a large global sound

• Mary Jean’s Ball of Yarn VFX now correctly follows targets being pushed

• Physical items are now less likely to desync for hot-joining players

• You can no longer equip the item you currently have equipped

• The cooldown on switching teams in the lobby can no longer be bypassed by using spacebar

• Performance of damage number UI elements increased by up to 500%

• A destroyed tunnel will now use the correct name in the kill-feed

• Fixed warmup duration custom setting

• Fixed a bug where if someone crashed during loading, the match would never start

• Added critical damage numbers in red with clearer feedback

• Ladders are now destructible, team-based only, and repairable

• Fixed P.A.’s cannon responsiveness when playing with high latency

• UI feedback added if Cookie’s Mole Shots does not have an exit

• Price of Seagull-130 increased to 1800

• Price of Barbed Wire decreased to 600

• Price of Bear Trap decreased to 400

• Price of Rake Trap decreased to 130

• Price of Sledge Hammer reduced to 2000

Known Issues

• When joining a game in the moment that match is traveling from lobby to match, can cause a number of issues such as: Starting at the enemies house, Player camera in the wrong location, missing portraits

• It can happen that you can't see when the delivery van will arrive after having ordered an item

• You can see the enemies' "pings"

• Some audio notifications play after the match has ended

• Tool-tips can show when joining a match in progress

• Stay safe and MERRY CHRISTMAS dear Neighbors. - Invisible Walls