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I've observed over the past week or so that Hunt has lost a fair bit of players, and you're welcome to disagree and state why. I'm not out to bash Crytek or the game, as it was one of my favorite games in recent years, and instead just want to open a discussion here on the direction the game is headed in. If you want to see the player drop for yourself, you can check the Steam charts to notice the changes in the trend. You can also see that Steam reviews have changed dramatically as well, going from Very Positive to Mixed.
If you go to Twitch, regardless of it being prime time or late at night, Hunt never has more than 200-400'ish viewers lately, whereas before the major issues it was pushing 1k+ viewers at most times, and sometimes getting close to 2k. Many of the game's frequent streamers have moved on to other titles such as Escape from Tarkov (new patch), the new Call of Duty, and other games due to overall frustration with some of the recent bugs/issues.
In-game, at least speaking personally for US West since I've moved to the West Coast, you can absolutely feel a change in the player activity with there being an increase in empty Bounty Hunt games, especially for solo players. If a game isn't empty, rarely in my case have recent games been full, and instead have 2 teams at most.
Why did this player drop happened? In my opinion, due to two major issues:
First major issue
1.0's release rendered US East almost (no exaggeration) unplayable from August 27th until late October due to constant disconnects, frequent rubber banding/lag, and overall poor server performance. This means that for nearly two months, US East players were either not playing the game whatsoever, playing on US West or even EU which means their ping was high, or suffering through US East's issues and trying anyway. Server issues in video games happen, especially with major launches, I get it. I've been playing games for years, especially MMO's which get massive content patches, so some server niggles are expected.
What's not expected is the fact that it took Crytek as long as it did to fix, which was the better part of two months. Aside from fixing it, it took Crytek until Sept 13th to officially release a statement saying they've recognized that their servers are genuinely having issues, and it's not just player-related. Out of everything, I feel this issue was what began cracking the foundation of Hunt, if you will.
Second major issue
While were dealing with the first major issue, along came content patch 1.1 which introduced the second major issue: The dreaded no XP on extraction bug, which is what killed off a huge percentage of the game's player base as it unfortunately took Crytek ~8? days to fix.
Misc. minor bugs bundled with above issues
In addition to the major issues outlined above, other misc. bugs such as, but not limited to the following, were also occurring for many players (and myself): black windows, missing textures, client crashes, "Hunter assumed lost" (now even on West and other servers), and a ton of de-sync. These weren't huge headaches, but they definitely contributed to the overall frustration for a lot of players when dealing with the above two major issues already.
Overall, Hunt has definitely been getting kicked while it's down, and saying the game felt more stable in early access is not a joke. What are your thoughts on Hunt as of 1.0's launch, and how do you feel for its future? As said above, if you disagree with anything I've written here, you're more than welcome to state why.
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