PEARS/PEARS 2

ATTENTION! This changelog contains information about a Patreon Early Acesss Rebalancing Session. Not all of these changes will make it into the base game, if any.

PEARS Session 2
Testing Period
18 Mar 2023 to 20 Mar 2023
Session chronology
Previous Session	Next Session
PEARS 1	PEARS 3
External Links
Original changelogs

Patreon Early Access Rebalancing Session Changelog

Session Two - 2023/03/18

This is a Public Document, and may be shared freely outside of Patreon channels. Patreon Early Access Rebalancing Sessions (PEARS) are experimental testing sessions offered to Patreon supporters, on at least a monthly basis. These testing sessions allow our Development teams to experiment with many things — from simple balance changes to more complex overhauls. Not all of these changes will be implemented straight away, if at all. Sometimes, our team simply wants to throw things at a wall and see what sticks. Regardless, these sessions and the feedback gathered from them are essential to the proper balancing of SCP: SL.

If you’d like to participate in upcoming PEARS testing alongside other Patreon Supporters and members of Northwood Studios, you can do so by subscribing to the ‘Major Scientist’ tier (or above) on our Patreon at the link below:

Patreon Link

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For this session, we’ll be testing a massive overhaul to SCP:SL’s respawn system, alongside a variety of changes to playable SCPs and SCP items alike. As well, we’ll be looking at some more minor changes to certain other items, which we’re looking to dramatically expand upon for future sessions. This document contains a full changelog of this month’s PEARS changes. If you have any questions, feel free to ask inside any Patreon Discord channel — don’t be afraid to ping a Patreon Representative or an active Game Design member!

Thanks everyone, and here's to another successful PEARS event!

- The Lord of Baguettes, on behalf of the Patreon Representative team.

The Reinforcement system

The reinforcement system aims to overhaul the mid to late game of SCP: SL by altering the way in which Mobile Task Force (MTF) and Chaos Insurgency (CI) spawns occur. The main focus of this system is to reduce the amount of time players spend in Spectator, whilst further improving the ticket system.

• Mobile Task Force and Chaos Insurgency both use separate, variable respawn timers. This allows both teams to spawn more consistently. The current ‘respawn tokens’ system has been overhauled (see below).
  • Mobile Task Force will respawn between every 180-270 seconds.
  • Chaos Insurgency will respawn between every 210-300 seconds.
  • At the start of a round, a 90 second delay occurs before each teams’ individual timers begin.

This means that both MTF and Chaos Insurgency spawn adjacent to each other. Overall, this will lead to more spawn waves in total, as both teams can spawn at relatively close intervals.

Currently, a respawn wave occurs every five minutes on average. Whichever team spawns is dictated by the current status of the ‘respawn tokens’ — a hidden ‘tug-of-war’ system that rewards civilian and militant teams who perform well. If Scientists and MTF perform well, the ‘tug-of-war’ will shift dramatically in their favour, which ensures their team respawns. This can also be said for Class-D and Chaos Insurgency.

With this change, The ‘tug-of-war’ system has been overhauled by removing the competitive nature of the token system. Now, both teams do not compete to ‘steal’ tokens from each other, but fight to increase their own supply. Each team begins the round with enough tickets to secure their own team’s ability to respawn three times. The amount of tokens given by each action remains unchanged, but a team must accrue 20 tokens to be able to respawn.

Should a team run out of respawn tickets, and no members of its class remain in play, that team will be eliminated from the round, and will not be able to respawn.

• To compensate for the increased amount of respawn waves, the size of respawn waves has been lowered drastically and now scales with server size.

When a team’s timer ticks down to zero and a respawn occurs, the amount of players that will spawn scales with the size of the server. As well, this amount is somewhat variable to add a degree of randomisation to each wave. Two tables displaying this effect are shown below.

(MTF values are on the left and CI values are on the right.)

• Each time a team respawns, more of its higher-ranking officers will spawn than in the previous wave.

This should allow the power of these smaller respawn waves to dramatically increase as a round continues, whilst further making each set of respawn waves feel distinct. This also allows Chaos Insurgency to deploy more of their specialised, heavy arms the longer a round continues.

• SCP: SL will now attempt to respawn players as members of the militant faction they were allied with in their previous life. For instance, a player who died as a Scientist has a significantly increased chance of spawning during the next Mobile Task Force respawn than a Chaos Insurgency respawn.

It’s important to note that this system is chance-based, and is not guaranteed. If you played as a Scientist in a previous round of the same game, this will not prevent you from respawning as a Chaos Insurgent, it just lowers your chances of doing so.

Additionally, the Chaos Insurgency are now valid targets for SCPs.

The Reinforcement System — Stall Prevention

This next set of changes are still part of the reinforcement system, but are not directly tied to the respawn mechanics. Instead, these changes further help to prevent rounds from running for too long.

• SCP-079’s Containment Chamber now holds a Facility Manager keycard

Thanks to Patreon ‘BruhIsaac#5577’ for this suggestion!

Adding a keycard to SCP-079’s Containment Chamber guarantees that human classes will have an avenue to detonate the Alpha Warhead after the Light Containment Zone has decontaminated. This should help to prevent round stalling.

• Respawn waves can no longer occur after the Alpha Warhead detonates. They can, however, still respawn during the Alpha Warhead countdown.

Our Game Design team wants to allow for endgame high-intensity Surface Zone duels to occur after the Alpha Warhead has detonated. We are aware that this is somewhat contradictory to our goal of ‘reducing stalling’, so we’ve created a new mechanic to force these last-second fights to occur.

• After the Alpha Warhead has detonated, every remaining player on the Surface Zone will take ‘Radiation’ damage, which increases in intensity every minute.

Radiation damage reduces the health of all players affected. Radiation damage is designed to force players to play aggressively, specifically SCPs. For a permanent implementation, or future tests, our team plans to alter this mechanic to remove “maximum health”. For now though, we’re interested in seeing how this anti-camping mechanic will alter the dynamic of rounds.

SCPs, because of their large health pools, take five times more Radiation damage compared to human classes.

Intensity Level One: Players lose one percent maximum health per second. Intensity Level Two: Two percent of a player’s maximum health per second. Intensity Level Three: Four percent of a player’s maximum health per second. Intensity Level Four: Seven percent of a player’s maximum health per second.

SCPs restore a significant amount of lost health upon killing another player, encouraging them to play aggressively to outlast any remaining survivors.

SCP-1853 Rework

SCP-1853

• SCP-1853 is no longer stackable, instead receiving scaling increases to its effects based on a new system called ‘Danger’.
• For every point of Danger accrued, SCP-1853’s effects are increased by 50%. This effect is capped at 3.5x the base value.

Danger is a new system that multiplies the effects of SCP-1853 when specific events occur. SCP-1853 has a list of ‘scalable effects,’ which are all subjected to this process. A table demonstrating how Danger is attained can be seen below.

Event	Danger Increase
Non-status effect related damage	+ 0.25 Danger for every ten health lost
Encountered SCP(s)	+ One Danger for first SCP, then +0.5 for every one afterwards. SCP-049-2 adds 0.25 Danger when encountered.
Alpha warhead is engaged	+ One Danger
Active target of SCP-096	+ Two Danger
Cardiac arrest	+ Two Danger

For every item on this table, except ‘Non-status effect related damage’, once the event occurs, Danger will persist for 20 seconds.

SCP-1853’s scalable effects:

• 50% increase in item pickup speed.
• 20% decrease in weapon recoil.
• 20% reduction in reload/unload time.
• 20% reduction in weapon manual operation time (shotgun pump, revolver cock, revolver

double-action time).

• 20% reduction in ‘Aim Down Sights’ (ADS) enter/exit time.
• 20% decrease in weapon inaccuracy (ADS and hip firing).
• 20% reduction in use times of medical items, grenades, SCP items, and candy.

To determine the maximum values of each effect, multiply it by 3.5.

SCP-1853’s non-scalable effects:

• All stamina penalties removed.
• Background ambience is significantly quieter.
• Semi-automatic weapons can now be fired automatically by holding down the ‘fire’ button.

Developer Commentary: These changes are designed to buff SCP-1853, bringing it up to par with its counterpart, SCP-207. Whilst these numbers may look daunting at first, it’s important to consider that the comparison is to an SCP item that offers a significant increase in movement speed, which is one of the most powerful tools in SCP: SL. We’ll be interested to hear your feedback on these changes.

Other Changes

SCP-079

• Removed SCP-079’s ability to manually lock doors. The Lockdown ability (for locking entire rooms) is unaffected.

Thanks to Patreon ‘OnionMan#9919’ for this suggestion!

Developer Commentary: Despite the scope and complexity of the reinforcement overhaul, we predict this change to be the most controversial, which is why we’re incredibly excited to hear your feedback on it. SCP-079 has received a plethora of new tools in previous updates, to the point where his toolkit feels more overbearing than ever before. This should remove some of the more frustrating aspects of the civilian classes, whilst hopefully tuning back SCP-079’s ability to control the match later in the game.

SCP-173

• Now spawns in the Heavy Containment Zone (HCZ), Alpha Warhead Silo.
• Can ‘hold’ a Blink charge when unobserved for one second less.

Developer Commentary: Our reasoning here is the same as it was for the last PEARS test. We’d like to get a little bit more feedback and playtesting with the pacing a HCZ SCP-173 offers. Please note, the movement speed changes from the last session are not retained.

SCP-049

• Base Hume Shield increased to 300 (from 200); maximum Hume Shield is now 600 (from 500).
• SCP-049 can now revive corpses that have been dead for as long as 15 seconds (from ten).
• Base movement speed increased to 4.2m/s (from 3.9m/s).
• The cooldown for failing to activate Good Sense of the Doctor has been reduced to 2.5 seconds (from five seconds).

Developer Commentary: SCP-049’s soft-rework in 12.0 has left him more fun, with a higher skill ceiling, but ultimately somewhat weaker than beforehand. These changes aim to make him slightly more resilient, with his increased movement speed allowing for kills on sprint-deprived targets to be executed more consistently. As well, we’ve found SCP-049’s ‘corpse revive timer’ to be too restricting, so we’ve experimented with an increase for this test. Let us know how it all feels after the session!

Radio

• Now has 200% of its current battery life.

Developer Commentary: Since the Quality of Life changes introduced in 12.0, Radios have seen increased usage from players. We’ve noticed an increase in radio usage for their intended purpose, instead of for mic-spamming and other such practices. We want to expand upon this somewhat by allowing players to continue to broadcast essential information at high distance for longer periods of time.