[PC] OTW Update - Complete patch notes 1.19.6 (yesterday and today)

[MattScott 15242]

Here is a comprehensive list of changes:

Original 7/30/2018:

Improvements to networking:
This is an ongoing effort to help clean up some of the last changes G1 made back in September of 2017. We've made several changes that need to be tested in a larger environment, and we're going to experiment with opening districts back up to 100 players.

Fixes to Friends system:
We found several bad problems with this system that allowed players to grief other players. You will now need to accept friend invites before a friend is added to your account. No other players can see your exact location till you accept the invite - including on the player search feature. Alongside this fix we are opening the ignore list for all players to the max size instead of continuing the practice of charging for expanded slots.
NOTE: Originally we thought we would have to wipe friends lists. We don't think that will be necessary now, but we will still need to wipe non-reciprocal friends to reset the system.

New weapon - Showstopper:
We've introduced an entirely new gun. This is our first piece of new content. It's important that it was small and manageable for us to learn how to get it in properly. We'll be providing more details on this gun shortly. Stats are not final. We'll be adjusting these over the next couple days.

Weapon Balance changes:

• Linking accuracy to damage on the HVR 762 - Reducing the damage of the HVR 762 when it's not perfectly accurate allows us to reduce the ability to fire it at close range / snap shot and still be effective. Sniper Rifles, particularly the HVRs, are particularly hard to balance because they are currently effective at point blank range and also devastating at a distance. G1 tried a few rough balance measures in the past with initial inaccuracy and movement cooldown, but it’s still quite possible to use the HVR in CQC. We feel this change will preserve the HVR 762's place in our matrix of weapons, but make it less desirable outside of actually sniping. 
•  Shotgun Damage Pellet Damage - We're adjusting how shotguns do damage, to allow for more damage for partial hits (the first pellets to hit a single target do more damage than the last ones). This allows them to be more forgiving without buffing their overall damage. Again, Shotguns are hard to balance. Currently we feel they are powerful but very inconsistent, and some of this is because how our servers perform at higher latency.
• AR-97 'Misery' (Apoc Famine) - Improve damage to give it some overkill, and improve the tap fire ability.
• COBR-A - Remove the accuracy curve and improve accuracy recovery rates.
• ISSR-a - Low recovery time for accuracy loss, so you can wait less time after taking a shot to fire again. 
• SWARM - Reduce horizontal recoil amount. We're also investigating increasing the time it takes to recoil to slightly higher than the recoil time, making the recoil smoother.
• SBSR (Rifle) - We want to give this weapon a unique recoil pattern that's significantly less harsh than the sniper variant.
• H-9 'Curse' - We want to give this weapon a new recoil pattern that has heavily reduced horizontal recoil.
• S-247 'Oblivion' - Attempt to make the weapon a lot snappier when using it as a fire and reposition weapon. This would heavily improve snap fire by reducing the time it takes to gain accuracy after moving, and allowing you to switch during re-fire timer.
• NCR - New crosshair (from existing asset). Removing the accuracy recovery curve that the HVR has.

Fixes for today's patch 7/31/2018:

• Fixed a crash when receiving a Friend Request
• Fixed an issue causing the weapon stats to be incorrect
• Changed prototype district display names to 'Weapon Prototype A' and 'Weapon Prototype B' to distinguish between them
• Fixed a crash at shutdown
• Updated chat and HUD text for Weapon Prototype Districts
• Weapon Prototype B now correctly spins up the prototype minigame (simple Kill enemies)
• Added multiple Anubis variants. Now that the exponential recovery gain has been removed (which fixes the jump bug) the reduced accuracy loss on each shot wasn't really having an effect. Adjusting the curves for the accuracy loss to be more noticeable, with the B variant being significantly more so. Also this requires reducing the recovery rate of the weapon to have pretty much any effect, but we've also reduced the cap at which the weapon can bloom to the same as the per shot modifier, so recovery time shouldn't get out of hand. Fire rate is also improved on both variants, to differing degrees.
• Fixed CSG using DOW stats in Weapon Prototype District B.
• Fixed an occasional issue getting stuck loading into a district

Thanks,
Matt

[speee 90]

Great work. Thanks for the updates.