Turbo Build Changes

We wanted to drop in and provide some context for the changes to the turbo build timer.

What Changed in v10.20?
We returned the time between subsequent Turbo Build placements from 0.05 seconds to 0.15 seconds in v10.20. This was the value used up to v4.30.

Why Change Turbo Build?
We did so as a first step addressing several problems:

• Rapid Turbo Building favors players with low ping in disproportionate ways. 
  • Taking walls (racing with another player to place a wall before them)
  • Turtling (continually rebuilding a wall that is taking damage)
• Turtling disproportionately favors defender
  • E.g. holding mouse button vs. squad shooting at 1x1
• Building piece placement accuracy
  • Easy to accidentally place multiple pieces “at once”
• Spam building
  • Easy to spam build
  • We want building to be a bit more deliberate

What we don’t want to dramatically impact:

• How responsive building feels
• The ability to perform 90s
  • Rapidly gaining high ground by building up within single tile
• The ability to “waterfall”
  • Building wall pieces as support while falling down

Next Steps
We’re working to implement the following further changes and will update you on social channels once they’re live.

• Replace initial building and turbo building delay with rate of fire logic
  • First placement is instantaneous
  • No way to build faster than a building piece every 0.15 seconds
  • Note: By itself this doesn’t address defensive agency of turtling / low ping benefit
• Enforce rate of fire for contested pieces
  • If a building piece is destroyed:
    • Server waits 0.15 seconds before allowing rebuild
    • Players attempting to rebuild the destroyed piece during that 0.15 seconds are added to a list
    • There are several potential ways to pick the winner we’re exploring:
      • Coin flip between people not currently owning the building piece
      • Coin flip between everyone trying to build
      • Favor person currently owning building piece
    • At end of delay, place building piece
  • Ensures that building piece replacement (“taking walls”) is not ping sensitive
  • Ensures a minimum time between a wall being destroyed and replaced