Good afternoon Agents,

The teams here at the Sweet Bandits and Tripwire Presents wanted to read you in on all the latest improvements happening with Deceive Inc. as the team's work towards our next set of public facing tests and our expected launch window of quarter 1 next year!

Agent Abilities
Thanks in part to the stats and feedback gathered from the recent technical tests, follow up surveys, and continued internal iteration, the Bandits have been identifying agents that weren’t excelling at their roles and working to improve them. This has focused on tweaks, and even major changes, to agent passive and expertise abilities including:

• Hans now inflicts a slow on his rivals who are impacted by his active ability
  
• Squire now senses all the food around him with his active, making it easier to grab (heal) and go
  
• Larcin has an updated passive mod option that allows him to make rivals drop something whenever he inflicts damage to break their cover, even from far away.
  

Weapons Handling
Combat has had a major rebalancing and continues to be tweaked and changed. The goal here is to make the combat experience feel as exhilarating as the rest of the game flow. Agents will notice:

• Fewer shots needed to down a rival
  
• Many character weapons and variants have had their handling changed
  

Extraction Phase
The team has continued to iterate on the extraction phase, with the intent to make it less punishing to be the briefcase carrier, and give them more gameplay options to set the stage for their hopeful victory. Among the changes agents will see in the next build are:

• Increased time between carrier location pings
  
• Increased time on how fast the location ping fills up when an agent moves at speed
  

Performance and Bugs
Among the hundreds and thousands of other changes, the team has focused on improving performance (which will be an ongoing task) across all platforms and fixing bugs. Many of those bugs were discovered and reported by our alpha technical test players, so thank you!