Hello Bloodhunt Community!
We have some long-desired information for you about the September Update. We have taken steps to improve the game based on requests that you sent to us in the August Update survey.
In this update, we are making improvements to matchmaking as well as our anti-cheat. Multiple ban waves have already been done and will continue. In this we will not yield.
We are also adding more readily available and lucrative deals for vanity items and an improved store. On top of that, you will find 30 new tiers of items to earn in our new Noir Pass!
Additionally, many of you asked for a balance change to the Burst Rifle and for us to further work on fixing bugs.
This update contains all the above, plus more! So, let us start by talking about what we have done to combat cheating.
Tougher anti-cheat measures
You wanted us to take more serious measures against cheaters, something that is progressing well. During the past weeks, we have been swinging our ban-katana several times, ridding you of cheaters in Bloodhunt. This has resulted in a significant decrease in the number of cheaters as we can more easily detect them now.
These ban waves are an additional layer on top of the detection and banning that we were already doing and means more fun for all those of you who play legitimately. The ban waves will continue, unannounced, but with sharp precision.
Improved Match Making Rating system
We are also addressing the issue of skill mismatches with this update. This is a lingering issue that we are now making significant progress on.
Essentially, a rating system uses an algorithm to measure a player’s skill level. This is used as the basis for how we matchmake.
With our past system, we noticed a higher tendency of our algorithm running matches between players of significant practical skill differences.
The previous rating system was based on your placement in matches. This meant that if you regularly placed in the top 10, for example, that would affect who you would face in future matches. Unfortunately, this metric sometimes led to an increased risk of players with significant skill differences ending up in the same matches. A player with zero kills could simply avoid combat for a whole match and rank higher at the end and be considered equal to another player who had similar placement but had several more kills.
For this reason, we have now made changes to the Matchmaking Rating System so that it is based on the amount of player kills, rather than placement in matches. Additionally, we have tweaked the algorithm in a way that will help ensure fairer matchmaking in general.
We think this will help create more evenly challenging matches for everyone, meaning if you are a skilled player this new rating system will help you find similarly skilled players but also, if you are a newer player or a player who struggles against veteran players, the matchmaking will do its best to find players that are more suitable to your skill range.
With the release of this update, we will also reset all the current matchmaking ratings. This means that everyone will initially have the same rating (and will be considered on an equal basis for the matchmaking algorithm). This will, of course, lead to some balancing issues to begin with. However, in the long term, it will lead to much more reliable matchmaking. We therefore ask for your patience, as the first few matches will likely be imbalanced. The idea is that this will improve over time, as your rating – as well as that of your opponents – will become more accurate. The quality of the matchmaking will however be affected by the number of players playing at any given time, so with a low player count there might not be enough players to evenly match you against equally skilled players.
Noir Pass
Get your vampire fashioned for the longer autumn nights! We now introduce our seductive Noir Pass, containing 30 tiers of vanity items at the low price of 500 tokens. If you want to get it all at once, you may now once again skip the tiers by making an additional investment of tokens.
The Noir Pass includes:
- 4 new legendary outfits.
- 11 vanity items.
- 2 new emotes.
New store
We are removing the flash store and will no longer have timers for sold items. We are replacing it with a permanent store instead.
Gone are the days of seeing small selections of eyes and items with different shades of white! Instead, we are accommodating your desires for fashionable bloody violence by giving you access to a much wider selection of vanity content.
The first iteration of a larger store consists of 95 items, including many of the most popular ones and other highlights from the past. We want to expand on this for the future, but we believe this is a significant step forward in meeting your demands for more purchasable customization.
Balancing
When we make balance changes, it is usually based on a combination of our expertise, community feedback, and statistics. In the case of the Burst Rifle boost, we could see that it was underutilized, and we drew the wrong conclusions based on that data. Looking at how the weapon has become the new meta, and after getting feedback from our community, we now understand that the weapon was already at a good spot in terms of balance. For this reason, we have decided to revert the changes.
- Burst Rifle nerf
Burst Rifle accuracy penalty when moving 0.1 -> 0.25.
Max spread increase of Burst Rifle increased from 0.3 to 0.4.
The Crossbow is supposed to be more of a niche weapon but had too weak damage to be a viable choice. We are buffing the gas damage over time to make it more effective at dealing damage to enemies trying to hide, and to be more respected as area denial. We are testing other crossbow tweaks as well that might come out later, depending on how this change affects things.
- Crossbow gas damage buffed
Damage increased from 16/s -> 20/s.
Team Deathmatch Improvements
For the September Update, we are iterating on the beta of our TDM mode by showcasing your personal progress and stats alongside your team contributions. But we are also increasing your survivability, making you feel more powerful.
- Health regeneration in TDM
We added a passive ability to all players in TDM. It will regenerate health on damaged players at a rate of 5 hit points per second up to max hp. This effect is not active while players are taking damage, and there will be a delay of 3 seconds before it starts regenerating again after you were last wounded.
- Kill Score
+100 personal score points for each kill.
+1 score point for the team.
- Kill Assists Points
+50 personal score points for each assist (Note: This does not contribute to team score).
- Kill assist notifications
Whenever a player assists in the killing of an opposing team member, they will now get a visual notification of this fact.
- Damage Points
You will receive 10% personal score points per points of damage (e.g., 100 damage gives you 10 personal score points) (Note: This does not contribute to team score).
Other additions
- Gamepad toggle for crouching
We have added the option to toggle crouch for the gamepad by pressing Circle. This option was always available for keyboard users but is now also present on the gamepad as well.
Additionally, we added a new default behavior for the toggled crouch (which applies to mouse and keyboard as well), where if you were sliding and continue moving afterward, you will now sprint instead of moving crouched. However, if you do not continue to move, you will remain crouched after, still able to sneak about. This allows you to customize your crouch behavior, which was a request from the community.
- All Archetypes max levels Mastery has been increased to 25
Additional Archetype Challenges (and descriptions) have been added.
New icons for the new Archetype max levels have also been added.
- Revive spam mitigation
There now is a 5 second cooldown for team members asking to be revived.
- Removed low ammo magazine warning for Minigun
Since it is a one magazine weapon, it didn’t really make sense.
Bug fixes
TDM
- TDM-matches now start at even numbers of players.
- The 6v6 rules now are properly applied.
Matching
- We fixed a bug that caused long matching times.
- Menus now open properly after returning to the Elysium if the player entered Rest Mode on PS5 during the countdown to Prague.
UI
- We fixed an issue with The Match Summary screen. It is now no longer empty after leaving a session.
- We fixed an issue with Twitch Drop in-game messaging.
- The 'Close' button now works again after switching menus during an emote preview in Elysium.
- An issue with the player sometimes getting stuck at 'Your Coterie' screen after selecting an Archetype and entering Prague was fixed.
- The pre-match countdown is now displayed properly on the map screen.
- Challenges now no longer appear as 0/0 before they start updating in the Match Summary screen.
Sound
- We fixed an issue where a player hears other players’ gunshots as if it were their own after being respawned in Prague.
- The Toggler fire SFX is now replicated correctly for other players.
Other
- The client no longer gets stuck in an infinite loop under some circumstances.
- Earth Shock no longer targets the wrong area when used close in front of or far away from the enemy player.
- Changing weapons between ranged and melee in the Flesh of Marble state no longer causes the camera to change its position.
- We fixed an issue where players were unable to scroll down through the Weekly Challenges tab by using the right stick on the PS5 DualSense controller.
- We sorted an issue with the key or button assigned to 'Buy Item' being unresponsive in the Store.
- The player is now able to equip some particular haircuts on any female body type, which was not possible before.
Known issues
- Quests that have a time limit are disappearing for several of our players. We are hard at work to solve this bug, as it has been reported by you since the Summer Update, but we have not been able to find a fix for it yet.
- All headgears disappear in Archetypes Tab except the active one after restarting the game.
- All hairstyles disappear in Archetypes Tab except the active one after restarting the game.
New Discord Functionality!
Show your Bloodhunt achievements in a quick and easy way using our new and nifty Discord bot. It lets you look up and post your personal achievements in front of everyone (for bragging rights), presented in an undeniable way in the #bloodhunt-stats channel. You can give it a couple of different commands to show several different types of stats (what commands that are possible are shown in the bot itself), so all those of you who like to measure your performance can make good use of this! Join our server to try it out today by clicking this link.
The bot is currently in Beta phase. Therefore, there may be some issues and unexpected behavior. The currently available stats include an overview, top weapons, top Archetypes, and recent matches played. You can also invite the bot to any Discord server by using this link.
Conclusion
It has now been a month since our previous update, which is a faster delivery than our previous seasonal releases when it comes to adding cosmetic content. We are still evaluating the effects of this change based on your feedback, and a survey will as per usual be sent out to capture your feedback, so please keep an eye open for it on our social media! Thank you!
Until next time, see you at dusk!
/Sharkmob
