Greetings Bloodhunt Community!
We appreciate the feedback that you sent us in the Summer Update survey and about the TDM (Team Deathmatch) BETA in general!
Since our previous article: https://bloodhunt.com/en-us/news/bloodhunt-launch-learnings, we have improved and added several new things that most of you wanted us to prioritize. Your key concerns were all about us fixing the most important bugs, and the need for more content.
The Summer Update resolved the infamous Hydra bugs, and we added a lot more content in the form of vanity items in the Battle Pass, as well as new (and a few familiar) items for the store. We of course also released the new game mode TDM (BETA), as well as gamepad improvements. Additionally, we also laid the ground for a new workflow for faster cosmetic asset creation and worked on our content release strategy to attempt to get more stuff to you sooner.
For this survey, we have thoroughly examined your 800+ responses. Your feedback will help guide us as we plan the next few upcoming updates and as promised, here are our takeaways from them.
Right now, we are making decisions and prioritizations based on our capacity. However, there will be an overall focus on the game’s health (which means fixing bugs) in the near future to further improve the game’s foundation.
This article will cover the details about the next patch, scheduled for August. So, let us start!
We are incredibly happy to see that the overall approval rate of the game has risen as of the release of the Summer Update. Your rating of the game increased compared to the previous survey. We also saw an increase in the number of you who said that you wanted to continue playing Bloodhunt.
For this survey, we also wanted your viewpoints about our newly added game mode, so let us dig a little deeper into this one first.
Your thoughts on Team Deathmatch (BETA)
We are happy to see that most of you really like the added game mode. Most of you agree that this new game mode is a good addition to the game and that you have fun playing it. Additionally, the majority feel that TDM (BETA) is helpful for learning the game, and that you want to continue playing it.
However, one of the things you wrote in the feedback section was that the game mode still needs some improvement. You have seen issues with players leaving the game early or going away from keyboard, resulting in lopsided matches. We are investigating how we can balance this, but we cannot promise an exact delivery date at this point.
Something else that you have expressed a desire for, in this survey as well as previous ones, is faster delivery. We are currently working on changing our internal processes to accommodate this, to get out smaller but more frequent patches. This also requires that we reconsider what a Battle Pass might look like under these new circumstances.
Future Battle Passes
With the new workflow for vanity items that we created, based on your desire for more outfits, makeup, tattoos, and other types of aesthetics, we can now reconsider what a Battle Pass looks like with us stepping away from seasons as we hope to release smaller but more frequent passes! More details on this in the future!
Another point that historically has been a big concern for you has, of course, been bugs and performance issues. While we have already addressed the biggest ones (the Hydra bugs), we of course want to keep improving the game even further in this regard.
Further polish
We do not rest on our laurels, so we already have an update planned for release in August that will address several of the issues you have reported. The details will be shared with you later in our August Update Patch Notes.
Additionally, based on your survey feedback for this patch, we also have some highly requested changes to the balancing of the game.
Balancing
383 out of the 800+ respondents mentioned balancing in some way or another in the survey. Some of the things that we want to address are not limited to, but include:
- Sanguine being quite powerful (especially for some classes)'
- Melee life steal nerf being too strong
- Shotguns much less viable (and less used)
- Dual pistols rate of fire being too low versus the starter pistol
We are happy to tell you that we will do some balance tweaks to your most requested items. This will be implemented in the next patch, slated for release in August. As always, we will monitor your views on these balance changes both through feedback and statistical analyzes.
Beyond these learnings, we need to address the biggest issue for our game, also shown in our survey results: not enough players playing the game.
The current active player base
The key concern and reason for not wanting to continue playing Bloodhunt deals directly with the number of concurrent active players we have. So let us address the elephant in the room.
It is no secret that our current active player base is not meeting our or your expectations. Our hope was, of course, that the Summer Update would be able to bring in many new players, both as a way to get familiar with the game mechanics and attract players that might not be fans of Battle Royale games.
The outcome of this, unfortunately, is that matchmaking now takes a longer time than we want it to take, particularly in low player population regions. Which is a problem we will need to address.
Between a rock and a hard place
As many of you already know, we have been working on several solutions for this. Among other things, we have tried rotating game modes, experimenting with lobby sizes for certain game modes, as well as enabling and disabling crossplay for certain game modes to get into matches more quickly or create higher player retention. While all these each addressed an issue for some, it also exacerbated other issues. For example, by rotating out game modes, we saw a decrease in average matchmaking times, but we noticed across social media that this decision was not well received by many of our players. This was also visible in the survey results. So, we stopped doing rotations for the launch of the Summer Update, keeping every game mode (except Ranked) enabled for all to give the game a chance to recover and be a complete experience for the many fresh players joining through the summer update.
But having everything enabled at the same time for everyone across the globe means, for example, that our most popular game modes (such as TDM on PS5) also make the matching times for other game modes unbearably long. This leads to an overall less enjoyable experience, as these matches also are placed outside of the region, increasing ping and the potential issues surrounding it.
Conclusion
We are in a situation where the player numbers are a key reason for some of the negative feedback that we are getting, but the reality is that we need to continue making some tough decisions to keep the game running for our players.
What this means in practice is that we are investigating what additional possibilities we have that can mitigate these issues, including rotating out game modes for a smaller portion of our player base, instead of doing it for everyone. For example, a particular game mode might be made unavailable in a particular region based on the lower popularity of that game mode in that region.
All of this while of course also adding more content, bug fixes, and vanity content that we continue to hope will turn the tide and help convince more of your friends into playing Bloodhunt.
Thank you for reading and as always, see you at dusk!
/Sharkmob
