Stick Run creator Manuel Otto has died aged 30, the game studio has announced His death was confirmed after an apparent suicide by self-immolation during a Twitch livestream

Nikita, absolutely DO NOT do this. Onepeg is a shill.

I got a key to play DMZ but right now the DMZ is my gd house. I fucking hate cardboard

Coming to the end of the European day on day two of the CB, and I’m really thrilled with how things have gone today. Firstly, incredibly proud of the team for getting a hotfix out so smoothly. Taking the game offline, deploying a fix and getting everything back up without simply kicking everyone out of their raids actually requires a huge amount of coordination across quite a few systems. It’s something we’ve wanted to test properly at scale, so seeing it all work with minimal interruption was a really satisfying moment for us. We’ve also seen a huge ramp-up in the player population today, which has been fantastic. One thing I wanted to talk about a little is matchmaking, as it’s something we’ve been experimenting with quite a bit over the last 24 hours. Effectively, we have a number of matchmaking brackets designed to prevent brand-new players from immediately being thrown into raids with incredibly experienced, high-level players. We don’t particularly want your first experience of Hunger to be getting absolutely dunked on by some fully kitted Chad. The interesting challenge is that these brackets are largely designed around what we’d expect a mature player population to look like. You have an established veteran population at the top, with a reasonably consistent flow of new players entering at the bottom and gradually progressing upwards. Obviously, that’s not really what happens during a closed beta. We’ve seen some returning players progress into those higher brackets incredibly quickly, while brand-new players are naturally spending much longer in the lower ones. Combine that with the rather lumpy and unusual population patterns of a test like this, and you end up with some brackets being much thinner than we’d ideally like. The result is that some players, particularly at the higher end, haven’t been getting the full raids we’d like them to experience. About three or four hours ago we made some adjustments to the matchmaking rules, and we’ve been watching the results very closely since, particularly when it comes to how full raids are across the different brackets and regions. This is actually quite an interesting problem for us to solve ahead of launch, because the optimal matchmaking settings for the first 24-48 hours of a game launching are probably quite different from the optimal settings once the population has settled into a more established distribution. My suspicion is that we’ll end up launching with one set of rules designed to accommodate that initial surge of players, before adjusting them once people have progressed and the different brackets have filled out. The real challenge is finding the right balance across every region worldwide. We want to protect new players from being completely steamrolled, but equally, it’s incredibly important that raids feel populated, dangerous and unpredictable. The threat of encountering other players is obviously a huge part of what makes Hunger work. Anyway, this is exactly the sort of thing these tests are for. Beyond the bugs and issues we’re already tracking, it’s been incredibly useful to see how these systems behave with a real population, particularly one that doesn’t necessarily behave in the way we’d expect at launch. Thank you so much to everyone who’s jumped in over the last couple of days. It’s genuinely so much fun watching you play, hearing your stories and seeing what you’ve been getting up to in the World After the End. Looking forward to tomorrow! Our team members in Australasia and on the West Coast of America will be keeping an eye on everything overnight until those of us in Europe are back tomorrow AM. Although I suspect quite a few of us will struggle to get much sleep anyway. It’s a pretty exciting time for us.

almost there @fragorder #FragmentaryOrder #frago

Good morning Override City! A quick message on "content policy" and "moderation" since we have been getting a lot of emails and threats demanding we drop some of our partners. We don't police thoughts and opinions, that's not our place. An invite gets you into GLYTCH. Merit is what keeps you here. Partners in Override City hold all kinds of views, for all kinds of reasons. They speak for themselves, like in the real world. We will never be used as a tool for personal vendettas in the cancel culture wars, don't try to drag us into it. If you want to flex on someone, do it by distributing 10x more invite codes than them. That's a flex. OVERRIDE EVERYTHING.

We're working hard on the first 0.5 hotfix, addressing issues identified thanks to your feedback during the Supporter Preview. In the meantime, we'd love to invite you to Operation Dead Drop, a special launch stream featuring top creators! 🔸 Oct 22 🔸 11 AM EDT / 5 PM CEST 🔸 twitch.tv/grayzonewarfare Tune in, get your exclusive rewards, and celebrate the release of Rogue Ops with us!

I have no idea how long ago Desmond blocked me but I find it hilarious that him malding on stream started because Ryan shitbliterated him on stream while using my Tarkov voicepack, and I'll take that assist-counts-as-kill :)