Firefall’s 1.7 is on the public test server and is due for deployment on the live servers tomorrowday. The big news is the arrival of the Devil’s Tusk zone content refresh and multi-phase world event. The Baneclaw boss fight returns as well with signature weapon drops for all archetypes; optimization work likewise continues, and leftover migration issues are still being investigated.
Perhaps the most significant (and most controversial) addition in 1.7 lands in the form of retroactive experience curve adjustments for elite ranks. Red 5 explains,
“The topic of Elite Ranks has been under discussion since their implementation in Update 1.6. The team has been monitoring system behavior as well as player feedback. Making a big change like this does not come quickly, easily, or lightly. There have been many debates internally on the subject and the team feels that implementing a curve where the amount of XP required per Elite Rank will gradually increase as a battleframe gets further into the system.”
“With Elite Ranks in its previous iteration, we noticed that players were getting extremely powerful rather quickly. While we do want the player to have increases in their stats to feel an impact while engaging with the system, the results were very extreme. With the changes incoming, players should still have tangible power increases, even early on in the system, without achieving a point where there is absolutely no challenge in the game whatsoever.”
