More details about Title Update 1.05

Yesterday’s blog post about our Experimental Weekend results sparked quite a bit of debate in the comments and on the PlayStation.com forums. That was not unexpected, especially when we have such a great, vocal multiplayer community. Changing some aspects of gameplay is never an easy consideration for us, nor is it something easy for the players to adapt to. I’m sure once Title Update 1.05 goes up, it will renew the debate. As always – we’ll be reading closely and seeing how the multiplayer matches are playing out. There’s quite a bit more in store for everyone with Title Update 1.05 and it’s all really good stuff. In our very first Title Update we introduced a penalty system to deter players who were spuriously quitting from matches (also to quite a bit of debate).The deterrent actually worked really well – we saw in-match departures drop significantly almost immediately. That didn’t mean that the system we worked out was the best implementation, so we looked at ways to improve it, which will be active when Title Update 1.05 goes live. The cash penalty for leaving a match will now be commensurate to your level at the time the penalty is applied. REMEMBER: You won’t receive a penalty for leaving a match for whatever reason for the first time within a particular span of time. The tiered penalty by level is as follows:

• Levels 1 – 20: -10,000
• Levels 21 – 40 = -20,000
• Levels 41 – 60 = -40,000

We’ve also noticed – and heard your reports – of players who are flagrantly AFK during matches, apparently affecting Plunder matches the most. We’ve put in some hooks to look out for AFK players and remove them from the active matchmaking player pool until they’ve returned. That doesn’t mean you won’t run into AFK players or that some less than honorable players will find a workaround, but this should aid matches stay more balanced between teams. Since Title Update 1.04, we’ve started to hear from you about seeing your individual Level being reset and also seeing your Ranked playlist skill rank reset again during the course of play. Both cases have been some very nasty occurrences that have not been easy to completely eradicate, despite our best efforts. Thanks to some aid from our community, we have been able to get to the bottom of what’s been affecting a small portion of our players. Addressing this as soon as possible was incredibly important to us, which is while you’ll be seeing Title Update 1.05 released very soon. One last, more cosmetic, detail you’ll see in Title Update 1.05 concerns the multiplayer menu screen. Back in Title Update 1.02 we added leaderboards in various categories to the menu screen. To supplement this, we’ve added a crawling ticker to the bottom of the menu screen which displays select stats from the leaderboards.We've posted a couple screenshots of this in action in the Title Update 1.05 Flickr set. It may be hard to believe, but we haven’t covered everything that’s in the upcoming Title Update 1.05 yet. Stay tuned for more!