Greetings Commanders, Friendly Fixer here!

It’s been a busy couple of months as we’ve course corrected from our initial release plans. What’s that mean? Well, we entered Q2 with plans to address PVP, which began with a series of discussions with the community to understand what was most important to you in that space. However after some thorough internal discussion we realized we couldn’t adequately make a meaningful impact to PVP without first addressing anti-cheating and fair play. Ultimately while we still have changes to PVP that we want to make, we also need to listen to your feedback and address these issues.

Here is the list of issues you surfaced as most important:

• Scripted Deployment / Scripted Actions

• Missile Spam

• Stealth / Hidden Units Revealed/Mine Build Cheats

• Platoon Repair / Platoon Modification Cheats

• Mercenary Spam

• Building Repair Exploits

• Worldmap Attack Exploits

• Relocate to ‘Friend’ Exploit

We’ll touch on some of these items in follow up posts, but today I’d like to focus on our high level plan. First, we are aware that some players are using external programs to gain an advantage in War Commander. Though many of those actions are technically exploits and not exactly cheats, they are actions the game will allow under certain circumstances and are being exploited to that effect. In some cases these exploits enable actions that were previously unavailable, while in others they make actions easier or quicker to execute than other players. Both are technically valid actions but these exploits make them unfair competition.

We do believe in a fair field of combat and have looked at each of these exploits individually to determine what is the best way to address them. However, we did arrive at one important decision: We will likely not be banning anyone for these exploits. Why not though? 

As mentioned above, many of these exploits are actions you can do already in the game, but often much less conveniently. Others are actions that you really should be able to do, but the game isn’t set up that way. Most importantly, it would be very difficult for us to differentiate who is taking advantage of these exploits versus those who felt they had no choice in order to keep up. 

Instead, we are going to treat this as a great reset. Once these measures are deployed we hope that many of the reasons to use the external programs will no longer be valid. New players and longtime players have all either been affected by or used an exploit of some kind, and starting over with a clean slate is the best way to move forward. We intend to deploy these changes on June 26th. 

We know that cheating has been a major pain point in the community for a long time, and the team has been putting a lot of time and effort into these changes to put a stop to it. Thank you all for sticking with our small team as we’ve worked to not only find ways to combat cheaters, but to also make quality of life gameplay improvements inspired by some of these exploits. Thank you all for your support, we couldn’t make the game better without your continued feedback and information regarding these issues. We can make War Commander better together!

Go forth and smash your opponents… fairly.

FriendlyFixer