BF: Battlefield Heroes

After a long wait and a LOT of work we are now ready to go into the next Beta phase.
If you're curious what's going to happen then keep reading.

The big picture
Monday, October 20th:
We will close down the Beta and wipe all characters and missions. This means all the missions you completed already will be available again.

Wednesday, October 22nd:
We will introduce the next HUGE game update, after which we will bring back the beta.
We will also give you an overview of what we've updated and fixed in new and shiny Update Notes.

What are we adding exactly?
A real life, functional store that will contain:

* Your Purchase History
* Inventory
* The new “Valor Points” currency

You will have more available Missions, including some easier ones to start with, starting at level 3!
You will now be able to:

* Compare yourself to other players
* Find yourself in the leaderboards
* Search for players and store offers
* Register a new EA Account straight from the Heroes site
* Retrieve a forgotten password for your EA Account from the Heroes site
* View other players' profiles

We will also add two new forums for reporting Store specific issues:

* Store bugs – in game &
* Store bugs - website

And if that was not enough, website performance should be a lot better, faster and smoother.

To help you help us identify new issues, we will add a list of known issues to the Game Update notes next week Wednesday.
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This new Update is all about earning your fire power and a creating your personal heroic look!

The store where you can exchange Valor Points for weapons and customization items is open for business.

Upon entering with your brand new hero you will need to climb the ranks to earn enough Valor Points to unlock new weapons and clothing items. Don’t fear, there are also new missions to help you along in your quest to fashion success.

To facilitate this new system we have once again wiped all the previous soldiers, so you will need to create new Heroes to be able to Play Now.

More HIGHLIGHTS in this new version:

* General stuff: The tutorial currently doesn't work. Trying to run it will likely crash the game.
* Plane Wing camera improved: If you like sitting on Plane wings you should find that it is now much easier to aim at targets while the pilot is rolling, looping and...crashing
* Plane Machine Gun damage has been increased very slightly
* Spawn rape protection time for non-home bases has been increased in an attempt to alleviate current spawn camping problems. this means if you now get killed very quickly after re-spawning you will be air dropped instead of getting killed over and over in the same spot
* Players who are protected when first spawning in will now have the shield effect playing on them until they take control of their character. this means that you should now not be able to be killed before you actually have control of your soldier
* If you get killed and spawn in the air, your parachute might now open by itself (or it might not...)
* Seaside Skirmish: We have added a tank and jeep to the Village capture point and a Jeep to the Lighthouse capture point. Hopefully there will be just a little bit less jogging between points

* Visual stuff: We tweaked the victim effect for burning bullets while in scope view(sniper rifle zoom) so that the scope is now less obscured than before. Note that the effect will still partially block the scope
* We improved the art for various weapon and ability icons
* We improved the art for game fonts
* We improved the art for flag capture bar indicators
* We tweaked the angle limitations on Heroes' vertical view. Heroes can now look much further up and slightly more down than they could previously

* Guns 'n' Abilities: We tuned Pistol damage for the slow firing pistols. The close and medium range damage for this pistol was too high and has been reduced to fit more with the weapons intended purpose of being a longer range tool
* Hero's shield will no longer be shared with nearby team mates. This is a first step to prevent rapid spamming of heroes shield between multiple gunners. We'll be re-tuning this ability as we go along.

* Missions: We added two new missions, which will become available at level 3. Now you will no longer have to level all the way up to 5 to choose your first mission.
* Most non-Hero missions have had their criteria values and their valor point rewards reduced
* The level restrictions of non-Hero missions have been adjusted to better reflect their difficulty

* Fix(es): We fixed a bug with flags being displayed as the wrong team when a player rejoins a server

Known issues:
The stuff that might not work for some people, but we didn't find time to fix yet

* Game Client: The end of round screen will not show updated goals for your active missions yet
* Some store item labels are missing in tooltips (and sometimes on purchases)
* The game client can occasionally crash when you exit the game
* The mouse cursor can sometimes show up outside of the game window during the end of round screen on computers with more than one monitor
* When the other side is winning, the game client will sometimes show a message from "Server Admin" about reinforcements running low
* When you respawn you might still receive a lot of character customizations. We're looking into reducing this
* There are still occasional alt-tab problems for some(mostly Vista) users
* Vehicles might add a sea-sickness debuff to some people, we’re looking into possibly changing this back
* Completed non-repeatable Missions will still show up in your Missions list, but you won't be able to complete them again. Instead you will see "Mission rejected" when you start the game.
* The HUD system can sometimes cause a memory crash.

* Game Client Store: Items that are visible in the store but have no "Shopping Cart" icon are not purchasable yet by the currently selected hero. You can still preview them by dragging them onto your Hero. If you then click the "Buy All" button it will give you an error message about not having sufficient funds even if you do have sufficient funds. You will need to drag all the items that you can't purchase yet off the Hero preview so that you don’t get this error message
* Currently you cannot see why you are not eligible to purchase an item in the client store. To find out you will need to go to the web store and try to buy that item. It will then tell you what requirements it has
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* Bundles are not shown in the client store, only in the web store (if any are available)
* Some items might have a "black" icon. We are aware and will be adding the proper icons soon
* New Offers will appear in the Store as you gain new levels. Come back regularly to check if you have unlocked new items!

* Web Store: To get to your "Inventory" go to your profile page and then click on the inventory icon (it's the brown toolbox that has "Inventory" written on it)
* Some items might have a "black" icon. We are aware and will be adding the proper icons soon.
* New Offers will appear in the Store as you gain new levels. Come back regularly to check if you have unlocked new items!
* Items in "New2U" have no pictures.
* Expanding item details on the main store page makes things go under the privacy policy / PEGI logo.

* Web Site (excluding store): Beta keys are all uppercase and the entry field when activating a new Beta key is case sensitive. Keep this in mind when activating a new Beta key
* Searching for other players with a 1 or 2 character search string gives an "INSUFFICIENT_SEARCH_CRITERIA.displayName" error message.
* Launching the Client: The encrypted login being passed in from the website expires after a certain amount of time causing startup issues.
* Character names need to be a minimum of 5 characters now, we're looking into this
* When starting to create a soldier the Flash application might crash, resulting in a big, black block. Closing all your browser windows is a potential workaround

* Updater: In Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 the Updater sometimes gets into a loop where it says that the BF Heroes plugin will be installed when you restart your browser. However, when you restart your browser and press "Play Now" it will say you need to install the Updater. Installing the Updater it will again say that it will be updated when you restart the browser. You can see the infinite loop here. How to resolve this: clear the cache in Firefox and reinstall the plugin.

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