Cheaters and Hacks

The fight against cheaters has taken us longer than we'd like, but we’ve found our ban waves to be quite effective. We will be rolling out auto-banning with the next release. We expect this to really decrease the number of cheaters in the game and to solve it at the highest levels of play.

"Elo Bombing"

We recently released a change to how players earn and lose trophies in the PvP arena. The original post can be found here.

We agree with some of the community sentiment that the adjustment was too punishing, have since unreleased this feature, and will be making significant changes before it re-enters the game. This paired with the automatic bans, we expect the arena to be much more competitive and fun for all in the near future.

I also want to take a moment to explain why we're making this change. We are trying to make the arena a fair experience for all. However, we realized a flaw in the design that creates a particularly bad experience for all players early in the PvP lifecycle. Players were able to "drop" their MMR by purposefully losing matches to give themselves easier matchups. Their MMR would drop fast enough to where they could retain a high rank but face low opponents. This discrepency between Ranking and MMR is something we hope to lower. 

We want players to get a good experience when they first start playing PvP and eventually encourage them to join squads and become part of the game's larger community. We hope these changes breed the best competition at the highest levels of play and create a fair introduction to PvP for newer players.

Additionally, we’ve also heard some concerns from players that they’ve played tens of thousands of matches (wow!) and that it will take them a long time to regain their “true rating”. This is not the case. Players should be able to attain their true rating in a relatively short number of games with our algorithm. Those that are able to perform well above their competition will quickly be rematched and re-ranked to a level appropriate to their skills.

Premium+ Perks

We’re sorry for the delay here. Sniper is an old game and editing the oldest components of it, like energy, sometimes takes us longer than expected, but the free energy perk promised at the end of last year will be in our next release within a week.

Additionally, we're going to add new perks to the Premium+ subscriptions which will give subscribers access to premium skins of gear, additional rewards in events, and more We want to keep adding more value to this subscription and are excited to show you what's in store.

Arena Challenge & Squad Wars

We’ve heard a lot of player feedback and struggles with these two features which we feel are critical to the end-game experience in Sniper 3D. As some of you may have seen from the Lunar New Year event, we’re now able to support Squad Scores in events. We’ll be moving both Arena Challenge and Squad Wars to the event section of the game, allowing us to make changes to them in-line with players' concerns like more rewards for top performing guilds, locking players into a guild at start of war (no leaving and coming back, no rotating numerous players in and out), better AC matchmaking and rewards, and experimenting with new styles of play for each format.

Live Issues

  • We fixed an issue where energy was displayed as refilling incorrectly.
  • We are fixing the energy loss in the arena when the match does not connect.
  • We are fixing the issue with daily reward timers.
  • Both of these bugs we hope to have fixed by the end of the month.

That's it for now. We’re planning to have a second Developer Blog post soon to give insights into our future releases. We're thankful for everyone’s support as we tackle some of the big issues with the game. We are dedicated to making Sniper a fair experience for everyone and appreciate the patience as we make some of the tough changes that have large impacts in the near term but we hope to make the game better for everyone.

Thanks for reading, make sure to follow all of our social platforms to keep up to date with everything Sniper 3D. See you in the arena!