Reflex 1.2.0 - Betamax Edition

Hey lads, So the long-lasting 1.2 is finally upon us! Quite a few changes have occurred! We'll be going in to beta for this one to ensure things are stable as a lot of things have changed under-the-hood. Custom Rulesets: Let's go through a bit of history. Over the years people have given great passionate feedback about their balancing concerns. This has been both exciting to see and also a very fine line to walk as everyone has a different perspective. We started with just one "Reflex" and modified the game accordingly. After a while we split Reflex into two rulesets, "casual" and "competitive". This allowed us to have a "casual" version for new/casual players while keeping the high end play wrapped up in the "competitive" mode. After some time with this setup we wanted to try out different balancing options. We didn't want to just change the "competitive" ruleset around often for two reasons: it was used for competitions, and we wanted a standard known Reflex. So what we added here was an "experimental" ruleset which we could change more quickly without affecting things, and it would allow us to iterate faster with the community. This worked rather well, but it took up a lot of time. We only had a very small team, and it was easy to be spend a full day or more balancing / testing things. And while we were going through this, people wanted quicker turn-arounds, and different groups of people wanted to try different options. We needed another solution. From here, we went to "experimental plus". This idea of "experimental plus" was to allow the community to modify the games "experimental plus" ruleset themselves. We had different feelings about this. Allowing the community to try/test rulesets was fantastic, it was near-instant turn-around, and different groups could try different settings as they pleased. At the same time however, we were concerned people might break the game doing silly things. So we limited the "experimental plus" builds to a small group of players who were giving the most gameplay feedback. We kept it to this group only as the games presentation means a lot to us, we want to be seen & experienced in the best and most consistent way. So this catches us up to recent times. What's happened recently is the experimental plus build was obtained by quite a few people and they started tweaking the game as they desired. On one hand this was great to see and it had more people playing! On the other hand it was dividing the community and complicating the user experience with the requirement of special builds and servers. Ultimately it feels unfair as not everyone gets to play with it. We had some discussions / decisions to make. The last point release disabled the experimental plus build, and we continued our internal discussions. We had a lot of feedback in the discord which was great. We also had a lot of internal discussions about this. To us, modifying rulesets is people wanting "modding". While full modding is out of scope for us, it is an interesting way to look at it. At which point we pivoted and started to consider delivering the system in that fashion. So what did we do? Going with this new thought, we've integrated custom rulesets directly in to the game. You can now create a ruleset_fred.cfg in your game/ folder, and set a whole lot