Hey everyone, Wow, what a week! With the arrival of Update 7 and an awesome Steam Free Weekend the team just wanted to take a moment to say... [h1][b]HELLO NEW PLAYERS AND WELCOME TO HELL LET LOOSE![/b][/h1] Welcome to the frontline, it's great to have you with us! [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//34012997/003fd87c6cdf1a533963675680b8014fb74b8b9b.gif[/img] We've been blown away by how many of you joined us in the free weekend, smashing past our previous peak CCU record. It’s very exciting for us as a team to see the interest and engagement with the title, and it encourages us only to work harder to polish off the rough edges and continue to improve and expand the experience. We’re excited to welcome you to the community and to the development journey. For those of you who are new to Hell Let Loose, Steam is a great place to find your feet with the player-base. However, we'd also like to invite you to join the official Hell Let Loose Discord & Community run sub-reddit pages. [url=https://discord.com/invite/XKj4EBm]Hell Let Loose Discord[/url] [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/HellLetLoose/]Hell Let Loose Reddit[/url] These locations are great for meeting the wider community, finding a unit, joining one of our international clans and getting your meme on. Also, When they get a free minute too you'll see members of the team, including Lead Developer Max popping in for a chat. These channels are welcoming to all players, whether you're a new recruit or a grizzled veteran, so come say hi! You'll also see that each week we have a developer blog post, which we title 'Developer Briefings'. We use these to keep the community up to date with what we're doing, talk about community topics and reveal new content! [h1][b]For the Veterans and Existing Community - THANK YOU![/b][/h1] As a 100 player title, the in-game Hell Let Loose experience is a direct reflection of the community behind it. We’re very thankful for the incredible effort made by veteran players in welcoming newcomers and showing them the ropes during this weekend. We know that while a free weekend is a fantastic way of showing the game to a wider audience, the total experience can become very mixed with so many new players. We really appreciate your patience and generosity during this time and we can directly attribute the enormity of the weekend to the efforts of the community. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//34012997/cb11c99d1b2c3746d06158587f5bedc970eb5271.gif[/img] [h1]What's Next?[/h1] [b]FPS & Crash Reports[/b] The fundamental overhauls within Update 7 left us with significant performance and crash issues on both Carentan and the wider maps. Thanks to quick, timely and constructive feedback and bug reports on these issues the team managed to identify some of the problems and deploy an initial Hotfix. Whilst this addressed some of the issues we are aware of the crashes and remaining performance issues that are present. As soon as the Hotfix went live we started work on the next patch - designed to fix the significant issues remaining after the Hotfix. [b]Content Feedback[/b] As part of our normal post-Update process, we've been collating all feedback from across all our channels. Everything from the meta, to current and legacy issues (FPS dips, tank physics etc.), to roles, weapons and every other aspect of the game. Update 7 represented a significant meta-game change for us, and we’re taking particular care to listen to all feedback before we make any changes. We could see that while games now felt much more tactically and strategically reliable (no more 360 degree defending), there were issues that can be ironed out - both through the implementation of coming features (halftracks, additional Commander abilities and overhauls for both the Engineer and Support roles), as well as small changes to the existing. We’re roadtesting many of these at the moment and have prioritised easier changes for the next patch. [b]This Week's Developer Briefing & Beyond[/b] This week's Dev Brief will be written by Lead Developer Max and include a more in-depth look at the weekend, as well as our plans to address any bugs that cropped up since U7 dropped. We're also gearing up to share our next updated Roadmap, so expect more details on that too. That pretty much wraps things up for today. We'll see you on the frontline!