Salutations dearest Bloodhunt Community!
As we detailed in a previous article we were rotating our game modes to reduce the time you had to spend in matchmaking. This is the first article in a series where we will detail what’s going on and what to expect for the near future, expect future articles with more information!
We had to accept that having all our game modes active at the time with current player base led to much longer waiting times, so the rotations were an effort to resolve this. We also ran the weekend event to determine what events we could hold that will have the biggest positive impact on your playing experience. Particularly in terms of ensuring that “nobody” (more on this later) needs to wait longer than 2 minutes and 30 seconds getting into a match. We have more on this for you later in this article, but first let us talk a little bit about what you told us in the feedback you provided:
What we saw was that most of you enjoyed playing with cross play off during the weekends, and that those of you who played ranked solo on PS5 appreciated being matched with fellow console players and that you spent less time matchmaking during the peak hours. We also observed that you were happy to see the trio bloodhunt return, and that the majority want to see more weekend events like the one we held last weekend.
However, you also responded that you would like to keep cross play enabled during the weekdays at least until the player count increases, so that you spend less time in matchmaking. We are taking all of this on board in our decision making.
The truth is in the numbers
Unfortunately, the data shows us that our hourly concurrent players is going down, and that weekends are the moment where we have slightly more people playing, which is the reason we have to make some tough calls while we are getting the next update done. Your sentiment, as positive it was about disabling cross play during the weekend, did not lead to players returning in the scale we were hoping for. Especially not in regions outside of Europe and North America, which means that we simply have to accept that unless players return in these regions, longer matchmaking will have to be a reality for now until the player count increases. Also, we are hearing your criticism of the frequent rotations interfering with your favorite play mode being rotated out. This is something we must address, though we must accept some concessions.
We also hear you that we are too infrequent with our game updates, so we have adjusted our priorities and improved our internal processes to be able to release updates more often, which means more stuff to you, our players.
Ok, so what are we doing about it?
First, instead of doing rotations, we will be disabling duos up until the next update. We will also keep solo bloodhunt and trio bloodhunt enabled. These modes will stay (and not be rotated out). As for solo ranked, and duos, one of them will be returning as a weekend event for the next four weeks up until the next big update. At this point we have concluded that we must focus on NA and EU in terms of matchmaking time for now, since the other regions simply do not have the player base to support shorter matchmaking currently. We are mitigating this issue by making sure our region expansion in the matchmaker takes this into account, meaning you might get slightly higher ping but you will get into a game sooner.
The focus in the next update is resolving issues that you, our community, have been vocal about. So that is what we have been working on and continue to work on up until the summer update in the middle of July. This update comes with a lot of improvements that are important to you, including addressing the reload bug, implementing controller improvements for those of you that aren’t using mouse and keyboard, performance improvements, further balancing of the enforcer, plus more interesting items for the item store (we will detail more of our work on these in future articles), but also we are working with improving the general gameplay experience, which includes less jitters in movement and other important things that will improve the overall impression of the movement while traversing in the game.
Furthermore, we are going to change how we are releasing updates. We need to release game updates faster. Work has already started on this. We will keep you updated on the progress of this.
What else is coming up in the next update?
For this article we want to go a bit more in-depth about one of the above-mentioned improvements and expand further on the rest in coming articles. Beginning with our controller improvements.
We understood that we could not just alter some of the settings for the controller system in Bloodhunt, since one of the many things we have learned from your feedback is that there are a lot of you who use the controller in different ways. Some are fast-flick players, others require more precision, others less. So instead of trying to create the perfect in-between; control system (that would essentially disappoint everyone) we have instead implemented new settings with multiple options you can personalize, so you can customize your own best settings for your Bloodhunt experience.
This includes removing acceleration and replacing it with a dampen and boost system, which is fully customized based on your personal preference, and every setting now will have an accompanying description to help you setting it up the way you want it. This includes (but is not limited to) horizontal & vertical look, aim and scope sensitivity, as well as being able to configure the input curve of the right stick, so you can set it to exponential, linear, plus additional settings. On top of this you will be able to set a deadzone for the stick, meaning that you can configure exactly how far you can move the stick before it registers as actually moving.
Furthermore, we have added a configuration for dampening, which is a setting that when enabled allows you to achieve a dampening of your turn speed, which means that you can make small adjustments when tapping the stick on the controller. This will also be fully customized by you for your personal preference, meaning you will be able to set the horizontal, vertical dampen multipliers for look, aim and scope separately, as well as configure the dampening zone and time settings, respectively.
Additionally, we have added a setting for boost, which configures the boost of your turning speed, allowing for bigger adjustments while boosting and smaller when not boosting. Again, you will be able to configure this option down to the detail for horizontal and vertical look, aim and scope, as well as set the boost zone, delay, and ramp time.
The creation of these controller improvements has taken quite a bit of development time, but since you felt strongly about our system this had to be a priority for us. However there still are a few things we want to add for you, such as the ability for you to customize which button does what, which is also something we’re working on; we will inform you when you can expect this as soon as we’ve completed that functionality.
Furthermore, V-Sync is now available as an option on PlayStation 5 as a measure to prevent screen tearing. There’s a caveat to this however, if it is used in conjunction with VRR, it might still show some tearing with framerates above 60Hz.
Closing words
The serious situation with our current player numbers is our top priority, and we are looking at various ways to fix it based on your feedback and the data we have. We want to make different adjustments and get potential fixes out as soon as possible. See you soon for part two of this series where we will showcase more of the exciting things we are working on!
