Hello, Zoobsters. We are here to share some news about the latest game update (5.18.0), which includes movement speed changes. 

First, we would like to thank everyone for their feedback on this topic, we collected all the inputs and considered them for this iteration. A special thanks to our content creators and beta testers who helped us get to this version. 

 

Hold just one more moment! Before getting into the changes I want to clarify the motivation behind all those changes. Movement speed is a stat that impacts a lot of the gameplay, mainly in MOBAs, Arena Shooters, and Battle Royale in general; it impacts how players can move through the map, run from fights, and hit their enemies. 

 

That being said, Movement Speed was in a very unbalanced state in Zooba; this means that Speed was scaling beyond limits, and it was viable to have a build purely based on this stat. However, this is not fun for everyone; facing an enemy three times faster than you is super frustrating. As a reference, most of the games in the genres listed previously have none or very controlled scaling of movement speed. Therefore, our goal is not to allow players to have a big difference in movement speed, and besides character skills, items are the most impactful factor in this sense. 

 

However, we understand that the previous changes had big problems (1) Jungle shoes and their mechanics are loved by most players, and an important aspect of Zooba (2) Faster gameplay when compared to other Battle Royales is a fun aspect of our game.

And all this led to the changes coming in this patch: 

  • All characters are faster!

Yeah, you read it right. The base speed is something we felt off for a long time, without any movement bonus, every character is too slow, mainly Tanks. 

 

We took the opportunity to improve this and make the game faster as a whole. So every character got a 10 points movement speed bonus. 

  • Jungle shoes buffed 

We increased its speed bonus, which is an absolute bonus (as previously). We also increased its speed bonus on initial levels, so it feels better since you get it!

However, we removed the base speed bonus and reduced its level scaling, aligned with the goals we mentioned before. The new statuses are below: 

  • Wake up, coffee rebalanced

Keep in mind that other statuses on this item remain unchanged (item pickup and duration). We are only adjusting its movement speed bonus, which is also back as an absolute bonus: 

  • Movement Speed soft cap

We implemented a soft cap for speed bonuses after a certain point, as we don’t want stacking these statuses to be a valid strategy. We want to keep high speed for specific character designs, such as Fuzzy and Jade. 

This means that having Jungle Shoes equipped will get you the full movement speed bonus from this item, but other sources of speed bonus beyond that will be diminished. Note: This is valid for any stacking speed bonuses; this is just an example. 

 

With this change, some tweaks had to be made, and we will have more to come. So keep an eye on the next balance patch

That’s it for now! We will closely monitor the metrics and your feedback and make the necessary adjustments to character abilities. 

 

Thanks for being an awesome community. See you in the Zoo!