Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodhunt News

Hello Bloodhunt Community!

Yesterday we had our third community stream where we talked about Act 2 and showed the near future roadmap for Bloodhunt. So, we thought that in case you missed it, you might enjoy getting a small summary of what we talked about!

But of course, if you would like to watch the stream instead you can still do so here:

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1167374086

Alright, let’s get started!



In the stream we shared our near future roadmap with you, which begins with the Act 2 – 0.5 update. We are aiming to release it as soon as we have completed our testing and fixed the last few remaining bugs.

This update includes a new indoor battle area, balance tweaks, a new event quest chain with new free vanity items that players can grind, several quality-of-life improvements, bug fixes and new cosmetics.

Check out our Early Access Act 2 Trailer to get a glimpse of what awaits you!

https://twitter.com/Bloodhunt/status/1445436291621998598?s=20

Next up on the roadmap is the Act 2 – 0.6 update. Its objective is to level up the engagement factor by including additional quests, more quality-of-life improvements such as improvements on who gets the credit for a kill, fixed positions for items in the consumables wheel and of course bug fixes.

This is also when we are looking at the possibility of adding a Duo mode, but we need your input on how/if we should implement it. Please have a read here https://steamcommunity.com/app/760160/discussions/0/2951537622600851880 for more details on how you could make your voice heard on this topic.

After that, we gave you a small sneak peek of the Ventrue by revealing our concept art exploration. Ventrue is our upcoming clan planned to make its entrance in Season 1.



Lastly, we gave you a small update about the PS5 version, re-stating that we are still planning to get this version of the game in your hands in 2021. At this time though, we cannot reveal a specific date as we are still working hard to get it done.

Thank you so much for reading, and as always, see you at dusk!

/Sharkmob

Dear Kindred,

A month has passed since the streets of Prague were first filled with conflicts and blood, and now we invite you to our third community stream live from Sharkmob’s studio in Sweden.
Join us on October 4 at 8 PM CEST / 2 PM ET / 11 AM PT. The stream will be broadcasted on our Twitch Channel.

The focus of the stream will be on how we are approaching optimization issues as well as what ACT 2 is and what you can expect from it.

Shamine King, Senior Concept Artist on Bloodhunt will be returning as our host for this evening. Please give her a warm welcome back!

The topics for this stream are:

Performance and Optimization

Guests: David Sirland (Bloodhunt Producer) and Jaqub Ajmal (Global Community Manager)
Act 2

Guests: David Sirland (Bloodhunt Producer), Gustav Stigenius (Lead Game Designer), and Jaqub Ajmal (Global Community Manager)

Content Creation Plan
Screenshot competition winners

Guest: Samir Arabi-Eter (Live Production Coordinator)

We will end the stream with a Q&A session, so you get to ask a few questions to us directly!

See you soon in the streets of Prague!

/Sharkmob

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

Hello Bloodhunt community!

This is the second week of Bloodhunt Early Access, and we wanted to share some thoughts with you on our strategy around anti-cheat and what we are doing to combat cheating and hacking in our game. Cheating is very frustrating for developers and players alike and sadly widespread among online multiplayer games. Sharkmob is committed to removing hackers and cheaters from our games and we will be unwavering in our efforts to protect our game, and players, from such behavior.

We have already started banning the offenders we have caught so far, but many of the more advanced cheats can often be adjusted to work their way around detection methods. As part of Early Access we are in a form of "learning mode", where our systems and developers are watching and waiting to see what kind of cheats are deployed. Once we have a big enough data set of regular gameplay vs cheating we will be able to auto-detect offenders much easier and hopefully prevent some cheats altogether. People that are caught cheating or hacking will be banned. Until then, if you see any obvious cheaters and would like to report them, please do so here: https://support.sharkmob.com/hc/en-us/requests/new?ticket_form_id=360003045858

We are also looking at additional ways to counter hackers and we look forward to continuing sharpening the ban-katana with you. We greatly appreciate your support on this matter.

On a related note, we have been hard at work on fixing the second bug related to our anti-cheat software. (Information about the first fix can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/760160/discussions/0/3032600513498039678/ ). As a result, we now have a potential fix for the issue where the anti-cheat can in some rare cases keep running even after the game has been shut down. This small update will be installed by simply restarting Steam.
Build id once you have the update is: 7348436
You can see what build of the game you have by right-clicking on Bloodhunt in your game library and selecting properties.

Thank you for your support and as always, see you at dusk!

/Sharkmob Team

Hello Bloodhunt community!

We hope that you are having a good time with the game!
Before we sign off for the weekend, we wanted to take a moment and summarize the most current news and changes that we have done to Bloodhunt since yesterday.

First of all, we have a new trailer! If you would like to check it out, you can watch it here: https://youtu.be/f-bRFp7h8Cw
Let us know what you think!

And then we also released a fix for the issue with some anti-cheat files not uninstalling properly, you can find all the information about it here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/760160/discussions/0/3032600513498039678/

We also did a bigger change to our XP earn rate to make the game more rewarding and fun, a lot of details about it right over here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/760160/discussions/0/3032600513497692996/

On the server-side, we added support for South American servers and we did some tweaks to our matchmaker to reduce wait times, particularly in Australia during nighttime. Have a read about it here:
https://steamcommunity.com/app/760160/discussions/0/3032600513497377495/

And last but not least, we wanted to share our thoughts on how we go about music that is featured in Bloodhunt and how we want to do our best to help make a game that is safe to stream and create content for while reducing the risk of copyright strikes. You can find that article over here: https://bloodhunt.com/en-us/news/make-music-rights-easier-for-content-creators-and-streamers

That is all for now, and as always see you at dusk!

/Sharkmob