Hey everyone, I am Peter but you can call me Pete. I am the Project Lead responsible for the entire Starship Troopers: Extermination team. I get the privilege to lead an exceptionally talented and passionate team of developers on this game. Our team is made up of a group of amazing and diverse people who love and respect the Troopers Universe dearly, and that clearly shows in the game we have made and in every update we add to it.

One of my favorite things to do is read all the community threads while drinking my daily Tim Hortons coffee with 1 Oatmilk. A lot of what I read from you all gets me super excited and my mind gets formulating new features and such, to the point I have to rein myself in. However, I do put it all on my wall of crazy!

As the Project Lead it is important for me to interact with the community regularly on all our channels so you will start seeing me show up on our Steam discussion boards from time to time.  I am already wreaking havoc on our official Discord server.  On top of that we are planning live streams, monthly Q&As (August Q&A is already live), and so much more.  It is our commitment to be more active and engaging with the community whenever possible.  In the instances where we cannot be as active, we will still be around.

We are 3 months into our Early Access journey and we have learned tons on what it means to actively develop and finish our game while still managing a live service. We have deployed two major Updates this summer, both updates allowed us to learn and grow as a development team.  

I wanted to touch base with you all on some of the hot-button conversation pieces we are reading across all our community social channels.

1. Matchmaking Queue Times  – We know there are long queue times for certain regions and difficulties.  This is especially apparent during off-peak times or during times when our concurrent user count is lower.  So we have a few things we have implemented that will help.  Right now we have reduced the matchmaking restrictions when queuing for a specific difficulty tier. How this works is that if the game doesn’t find matches after a long time has passed, it will look for games outside the selected difficulty level. This is a temporary change, while we get more substantial matchmaking improvements in. We are also going to remove the need to unlock difficulties in the next update so that new players can jump directly into Trooper or Veteran if they so wish! And finally, we are planning to improve the matchmaking in the next major update (0.5.0), so that it will automatically search for matches through multiple regions, based on your preferences.
   
   
2. Class Progression – This is definitely a recurring subject on all our social channels and it is something we are excited about.  We all want more things to play with in our classes and well those new things will be coming in our next Major update(0.5.0).  Each class will be getting a new weapon, new utilities and new perks. I am super stoked for what’s coming to all three classes, but one Bastion deployable in particular has me very excited! A future dev diary will explain this in more detail.
   
   
3. New Locations, Maps, Worlds – This is a major piece of feedback we get and one that we have been hard at work addressing.  In regards to worlds we already have a new planet in the works and we should have it ready to share with you all by the end of the year(0.6.0)  This new world is already showing such a beautiful contrast to Valaka and I cannot wait for you to explore it. A future dev diary will explain this in more detail.
   
   One thing we want to do as a team is to maximize every aspect of each of our planets so that we can get more content out on a regular cadence.  The start of this content rollout will come to fruition with our next update(0.5.0) and we cannot wait to show you what we have cooked up.

4. Team killers/bad actors/exploiters/cheaters – We all hate this about online games, people who play outside the rules and try to exploit our game or try to ruin other people’s fun.  We are constantly working on our anti-cheat implementation and continue to plug holes when we find them, but that only helps with one side of the problem.  So please keep reporting this through our support channels, we take every report seriously and want to ensure the game is fun for everyone.
   
   The other part is people who are in the game just to cause problems and lessen the enjoyment of others by using a mechanic in an abusive way like repeated team killers. We have something coming really soon that will deal with these traitors, something that is our own take on this issue. Our goal is to have this system/feature deployed to you this fall. A future dev diary will explain this in more detail.

5. New ways to play – Our next update will also introduce a new way for players to engage in the war.   We want to make sure our players have more options to play the game and offer different modes to match a player’s time commitment and whether they want an epic 60-minute ARC match or a 15-minute new mode match.   I mentioned above that we have a new location, well this new mode will use it exclusively. A future dev diary will explain this in more detail.
   
   
6. UE5 – This is a simple one to answer, yes we will be moving to UE5.2. This is a gigantic effort for our team and we are almost there.  We are in the home stretch, and our goal is to be on the upgraded engine really really soon.
   
   
7. New PC Store Fronts/Console – Well all I can say we are actively looking to go to more platforms with full crossplay.  

Thanks again for playing our game, thanks for supporting and building this amazing community and I will see you in game!

Peter aka OWI_PMO

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