Elemental Fracture 6.2.15 – Patch Notes

6.2.15 makes Battle Royale feel like Battle Royale again. You no longer have to start your own match or set up bots: jump into a lobby and the game takes it from there. It also brings the Chapter 2 Blessings back to life, and folds in a few Clash fixes that shipped quietly in 6.2.11.

Battle Royale matches start on their own

Until now, a Solo, Duos or Squads lobby sat there until somebody typed Start Match, and new players were never sure whether they were supposed to. That is gone. Matches now start the way they did when Spellbreak was live, using the game’s own pre-match countdown.

• The countdown starts when the first player joins. The lobby shows MATCH STARTING with a live timer for the whole wait, not just the last few seconds.
• Late arrivals get time to load in. If someone joins when the clock is nearly out, it tops back up so they are not dropped into a match mid-load. The total wait is capped, so a steady trickle of joins cannot hold a lobby forever.
• Empty lobbies wait for you. If everyone leaves before the match starts, the countdown pauses, and it restarts fresh when the next player joins. Nobody gets a match full of bots and no humans.
• Bots fill the rest, at your level. When the countdown ends, bots fill the empty slots, and their difficulty now follows the average Mage Rank of the players in the lobby, so a lobby of newer battlemages gets gentler bots than a lobby of veterans.
• No more loading into a match that just dropped. Matchmaking stops sending new players to a lobby in its final seconds and finds you a fresh one instead.

Battle Royale Match Settings retired

With matches starting themselves, the BR Match Settings tab in the EF Controller (F8) has been removed. There is nothing to start and no bots to configure anymore. Dominion’s match settings are unchanged.

Blessings work again

The elemental Blessings around the map (Toxic Blessing and friends) showed their prompt, but pressing F did absolutely nothing. The cause was an ordering problem on the game servers: when a server loads the map, it removes any object that is not allowed in the current game mode, and Blessings check the game mode before they are kept. The server loaded the map a moment before it recorded which mode it was running, so every Blessing failed that check and was removed on the server. Your game loads the map later, after the mode is known, so you still saw them. You were looking at a Blessing the server no longer had.

Servers now know the game mode before the map’s objects are checked. Blessings can be channeled and grant their blessing again, and other mode-specific objects that were lost the same way are back too. Because your game and the server now agree on exactly which objects exist, this also fixes a mismatch that could leave nearby interactable objects out of sync.

Also in this update (from 6.2.11)

• Clash squads hold 3 players. A Clash squad could grow past what the squad HUD can display, which crashed the game. Squads are now capped at 3.
• Dominion’s score bar after Clash. Going from a Clash match straight into Dominion could leave the top score bar invisible for the whole match. It now comes back.
• Clash lobby server crashes. A Clash server could crash and restart while waiting for a match to begin, and squad seats were not always freed when a player left. Both are fixed.

Update: Relaunch your launcher and it will pull 6.2.15 automatically.