Early Access Learnings
Hello Bloodhunt Community!
Bloodhunt Early Access has now been running for almost a month, so we wanted to share our latest learnings with you.
This is not only to be transparent with our thoughts on how things are going, but also to give you an idea of where we are heading in the not-too-distant future.
During the Closed Alpha, we heard from many of you that the game mechanics, server stability, and overall quality of the experience were in a promising state and that you felt that Bloodhunt was ready for release in those respects. Fortunately, the game and the server have held up quite well when it comes to the basics. However, we can also see that we still have a lot of work to do.
This is of course something we were aware of and had predicted, but it's reassuring to see that our general player base is in alignment with us on the things that we want to fix. This will ensure that Bloodhunt has a great future.
All right, let’s dive into various topics:
SECURITY AND CHEATING
Cheating is a problem in any PC game, but we had some very blatant cheats cropping up shortly after launch. As we take cheating extremely seriously, we worked as fast as we could to identify and address security holes that allowed these exploits. So far, all the major problems we’ve found have been due to bugs that we’ve since fixed. We will continue to tackle new ones as they arise.
Simultaneously, our anti-cheat system required some time to analyze "normal" gameplay, and has therefore gotten better at detecting and automatically banning cheaters. We have also banned hundreds of cheaters that you’ve reported on our website manually, and we are extremely grateful for your assistance in reporting these individuals.
We know that in-game reporting is a highly requested feature and it’s high on our to-do list, but in the meantime, please continue to use our web-based reporting system with video footage whenever possible.
You can find the player reporting form on our webpage over here: https://support.sharkmob.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405429395729-How-can-I-report-another-player-
We are also working on measures that make it harder (and more annoying) for cheaters to simply create new accounts when banned. We won’t go into the details of this, as we don’t want to arm cheaters with information that helps them. However, we will try to keep you updated on our progress.
PERFORMANCE AND OPTIMIZATIONS
This is another very hot topic!
We have quite a few players running into performance issues that are causing framerate to fluctuate even if their system specs meet our recommendations. We also have players who are experiencing generally poor performance regardless of their quality settings.
We are actively investigating to try to find root causes, but we could really use your help in this effort.
With that in mind, we are taking the following measures:
We are starting our PTE (Player Test Environment) early. This is an alternative branch of the game with players that wish to help us improve the game will get access to. Here we will be able to push builds to you, giving us the capability to capture more data of how the game is behaving when these issues occur. We hope that this will enable us to identify and resolve issues more quickly and efficiently. More information will be coming in the very near future!
We are investing in broadening our compatibility testing on PC, both internally and with our external QA partners.
As a short-term solution, we have created a dedicated channel on our Discord server where players can share their best tips and tricks for improving performance. The channel is called #performance-tips-and-tricks and you will be able to access it by confirming that you have read and agreed to our Discord code of conduct.
Optimizing a game tends to be a gradual process of incremental but cumulative gains, meaning that it may take some time to see drastic improvements, but we are dedicated to improving performance and are grateful for your patience and support.
RETENTION
We hear you that you want more things to keep you coming back to play the game, and we already have lots of plans in the works.
We can see that battle pass progress is still too slow for many players and is probably too fast for highly skilled or very engaged players. It’s important to us that everyone can complete the battle pass and earn all the rewards, so we have made additional adjustments that put more emphasis on match accomplishments and deemphasize match placement. We hope that this will accelerate progress for players with less time to invest in the game without negatively impacting players who win a lot. We also hope you will feel that your performance in a session is rewarded more. These changes have already gone live, so please let us know what you think so that we can continue to fine-tune the balance.
Next, we have the Act 2 patch coming out in the very near future which has some nice Quality Of Life improvements, bug fixes, game balance tweaks, new free cosmetic items that can be earned by completing a special event quest, additional items in the store, and another area opening up in Prague.
This is an update that we have been working on for quite some time, and we are just finishing up our final testing on it before we are ready to release it to you.
We are also focusing on adding statistics that players can view, so you can track your accomplishments in Bloodhunt as well as learn where your strengths are and where you have an opportunity to improve. We hope to have this ready before the end of the year.
We will continue work to add both content and challenges to keep you engaged in Bloodhunt.
Your feedback is essential for the development of the game so come talk to us on Discord at https://discord.gg/bloodhunt
Thank you all for being part of our journey to make Bloodhunt the best game it can be!
Sharkmob