Elemental Fracture – Mod 3.18.0 and Launcher 3.4.0 – Patch Notes

Relaunch your launcher, let it pull Launcher 3.4.0 and Mod 3.18.0, and play. The balance patch is unchanged at Game 6.4.4.

This is a stability and fairness update. A lot of you have arrived over the past few days, and the extra load found real holes in our core services. This patch closes them, and puts back what they cost you.

Your XP, rank and mastery

If you have been staring at an empty rank bar and 0 XP after a night of matches, here is what actually happened, because two different things went wrong and only one of them lost anything.

Most of it was never lost. Our metrics service was crashing and restarting constantly under the new player load. Your progression is stored as a running record of every match you have played, so it was sitting there safely the whole time, but the menu could not reach the service to read it and quietly showed nothing instead. 980 of the 983 accounts that have ever played still had their full progression. The service is fixed, and your numbers are back where they always were. You do not need to do anything.

Some of it genuinely was. When a match ended at the exact moment the service was restarting, the final scoreboard had nowhere to go, and our game servers only tried once before giving up. The match was still recorded, but with no kills, no damage and no placement on it, which meant it was worth zero XP. That has been quietly happening since mid-August, not just this week.

We have paid every one of those back: 414 matches across 215 players. Each one was credited at the median XP of your own matches in that same mode, so nobody was guessed at generously or stingily, just given what their matches are actually worth. Nobody lost anything in the process. If you gained a level or three overnight, that is why.

Game servers now retry a failed scoreboard and, if that still does not work, keep it on disk and send it later, so a match can no longer fall through a gap.

Matchmaking

Teams were balanced by the wrong number. When the two sides were uneven, the game picked which side the extra player joined by comparing the two teams’ total skill. Checked against our own match history, that turned out to be actively harmful: across 54 uneven matches, the side with the higher total won only 30% of the time, which is the same as just betting on whichever team had more players. The side with the higher average skill per player won 72%. Being outnumbered is not the handicap it looks like in this game, and the old rule kept quietly handing the strongest player the short side and calling it fair. Both the matchmaker and the in-match team picker now balance on average skill per player, and they agree with each other, which they previously did not.

You should stop getting lobbies to yourself. The queue used to wait eight seconds and then hand you a brand new server, even when a full match was thirty seconds from ending and everyone in it was about to come back to the menu. Over one six hour stretch that produced 190 Battle Royale matches with a single player in them. The queue now checks whether a lobby is about to free up and waits for it. You will never wait more than five minutes, and the launcher no longer gives up on you at two and a half minutes with a connection error while the queue is still working.

Team modes gather for longer. Dominion, Team Deathmatch and Clash now spend twenty seconds collecting players before starting a lobby, instead of eight. It costs the first person in the queue a few extra seconds and means the lobby actually gets split into two proper sides rather than assembled one join at a time.

Team lobbies are matched on skill. When more people are queuing than one lobby holds, the lobby now forms around players closest in hidden rating rather than purely in arrival order. Nobody is ever held back for being far from everyone else; a match you can have now beats a better match you cannot.

Custom Match

• More than five players no longer crashes everyone. A Custom Match lobby is treated as one big party, and the squad system was cheerfully putting all ten of you into a single squad. Past five, that took down every client in the match. Squads now respect their size limit and open a second one, which is what the game was always meant to do.
• Custom matches award no quest or chapter progress. They already gave no XP; quests now match. Objectives do not tick during a custom match at all, rather than appearing to count and then not banking at the end.

Friends, parties and menus

• Friends no longer show up under Recent Players. They are already on your friends list; they do not need to be in both.
• Reports from the team mode scoreboard now reach us. In-game reporting only ever worked from Battle Royale. From Dominion and Clash the button did nothing at all. It works now.
• New notifications for friend requests received and accepted, party invites, and players joining or leaving your party.
• A setting to hide in-match quest cards. Settings, Gameplay, “Show quest notifications”.
• Your own name no longer floats over your character anywhere except the main screen.
• The cosmetics screen no longer goes black. The menu panes all share one set of world positions, and the party system was filling in the main screen’s podium over whatever pane you actually had open.

EF Controller

• Multi Rune in Loadouts, the same idea as Multi Offhand. Tick any runes beyond the one you picked, set a shared rarity, and they all spawn when you apply the loadout. Your saved loadouts survive the update rather than being thrown away.
• Host Settings for staff. Staff and dev now get the full Host Settings panel on any Dominion, Team Deathmatch or Custom Match server, host or not, instead of the same controls split across two Staff Menu sections.

Launcher 3.4.0

• Verify game files. A new button on the Mods card. Everything the launcher downloads has always been checked on the way in, but nothing ever looked again at an install that was already on your disk, and the update button only ever rewrites the balance patch and the mods. So if your install lost a file from the base game, for any reason, updating never brought it back. This is what has been behind the “missing .sig file” reports. Verify now compares your install against the release file by file and puts back anything missing or the wrong size, downloading only the broken files rather than the whole 22 GB game.
• A missing pak signature now tells you so. A signed game pak whose signature file has gone will not load, and what you saw was the game dying on its own with no explanation. The launcher now checks before it starts the game, names the exact file, and points you at the button that fixes it. In all ten languages.

Getting started

Already playing? Relaunch the launcher. It will update itself to 3.4.0 and pull Mod 3.18.0.

If the game has been refusing to start, or anything has looked broken since you installed, open Mods and hit Verify game files once. It is quick unless it finds something.

New here? Grab the launcher from elefrac.com, make an account, sign in, and hit Play.

Thanks for the patience over the last few days, and for showing up in these numbers in the first place.

See you in the arena. ⚡