Zloth wrote:Wow. Ummm, so anyway...
Other mod sources don't push. The player has to go out and pull in the update and you can educate them on 0'ing out the respec timer right then. (Many will ignore it but that's on them.) Steam does push, though, and players will start the game up only to find their soldiers with freaked out skills - possibly soldiers already on missions. Players using the "ironman" mode won't even have an old save to go back to so they will have to make it through their mission(s) with whatever turns up. I would expect some pretty serious {ahem} growing pains if this just shows up one day.
Quite honestly, there are only 4 changes that a player might need to make, the only one with any real time constraint is that some perk trees have been updated with new perks, and and some existing perks have been rearranged. So you'll need to set your "respec" timer to zero and put any soldier you are concerned about in the AWC, the change is instantaneous. You will only need to change a soldier if you had perk that has been moved. Many of your soldiers will not need any changes.
The other three changes are mid/late game buffs that you will need to use the dev console to apply:
1. You will need to cheat/remove the Psi lab and insta-build it to get the extra Scientist tube,
2. For every region you've liberated you need to remove one pip from the Doom click (liberating a region now removes a pip),
3. When you successfully assault the Network tower you receive a free Radio Relay in that region.
I've put about 30 hours over the past two weeks running a 1.2 > 1.3 save, and I'm pretty sure that unless they care deeply about a specific perk/perk tree, many players will be alright re-specing a soldier or two and continuing on.
I'll be posting instructions for these tasks to the Long War 201 forum when 1.3 is released.
As to the questions/comments regarding how the update is applied; the best practice for any overhaul mod is to unsubscribe and resubscribe, this is true for any mod that makes changes to the upk, not just LW2. The very simplest solution is to just backup and delete your
\My documents\my games\xcom2\xcomgame\config
before launching the game post-update.
If you combine these two simple tasks you will ensure a totally smooth transition to 1.3.
Currently the majority of testers are running pretty heavily modded games and we've noticed only a handful of very minor bugs, so there should be very few (if any) mod conflicts introduced with 1.3, and a great many vanilla bugs have been squashed. PI has been working closely with quite a few mod creators to ensure a better experience for everyone, and has incorporated several of their suggestions into LW2 in order to allow even more flexibility for modding in the future. You are going to be pleasantly surprised with a lot of the new stuff that is in the pipeline.
Finally, for those that fear that the mod is somehow balanced based on only Legend players, I'll just say that there are only 3 Legend testers and since they are the only ones making videos (because, let's be honest you don't want to watch me save-scum a Veteran campaign do you?) I can see how it is easy to think that we are all Xavier or JOinRBS. But, rest assured that behind the scenes are far more Veteran and Commander testers and our votes count just as much, and sometimes more, as the Legend players.