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Hunt: Showdown
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| 2s | Hello. I'm Dennis Schwartz, design director for Hunt Showdown. Today we're going to talk |
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| 6s | about our key learnings from player surveys, community feedback and data gathered over |
| 10s | the course of our last five events. These lessons continuously shape our thinking for |
| 14s | future events, pacts, traits, weapons, and other mechanics. Thank you for your contributions to them. |
| 22s | Let's start with a brief recap. First, let's talk about Devil's Moon. This event pushed the |
| 27s | boundaries of our game by adding the element of choice between pacts and exclusive traits. |
| 31s | This first round of pact rates were designed to shake up the gameplay experience and experiment with new mechanics. |
| 37s | Devil's moon also brought with it our very first wild card condition, the Inferno, though |
| 42s | it also predated our first wild card contract, which didn't appear until the height of shadows. |
| 47s | Our design goal is to have an even distribution of pick rate for our event pacts, but we missed the |
| 52s | mark with Devil's Moon as the Ground Pact, which featured both Shadow and Death Cheat |
| 57s | made up 85% of our total usage. The Luna Pact made up 10% and the Infernal Pact only had a 5% |
| 64s | pick rate this wasn't a great result in terms of distribution but the experiment and overall player |
| 69s | experience was still judged a win for hunt and good lessons were learned similarly our new wild |
| 74s | card condition The Inferno changed our existing Maps radically which was initially well received |
| 79s | but resulted in some fatigue as the event went on since then we've learned a lot of valuable |
| 84s | lessons about players preferences and excessive Wild Card conditions and received similar feedback |
| 88s | for Thunder Shower the Dark Inferno and Ash Bloom. With each update we will tune and adjust |
| 94s | the frequency of these conditions appearing and their impact on the play space and game mechanics. |
| 102s | Moving into the tight event Trilogy our goal was to better understand your level of |
| 105s | satisfaction with the events and new additions being made. Alongside usage statistics and tons |
| 111s | of great feedback we gathered from social media, we began publishing two public surveys for each event. |
| 116s | Tide of Shadows was the first event we run surveys for and we received well over 20,000 |
| 121s | responses we embrace and rely on your feedback on events, weapons, Wild Card conditions and, |
| 126s | game mechanics, to help us make Hunt: Showdown the best game it can be. Please continue to take part in |
| 130s | surveys and reach out via our official Discord and other social media channels to share your thoughts. |
| 139s | The three event pacts in Tide of Shadows received a healthy distribution of |
| 142s | usage compared to Devil's Moon but still had room for improvement. This time around we made |
| 146s | sure that Death Cheat was available to all pacts. We also experimented with different configurations of |
| 151s | pacts and how to pledge for the Met Supply points in general we kept what worked and dropped what |
| 156s | didn't so every event had something new to offer but we also had some old favorites come back for more. |
| 160s | Eventually some of these experiments turned into full long-lasting additions to the core game. |
| 165s | As the live events progressed data showed that in some cases we matched our own expectations while in |
| 170s | others certain pacts dominated in usage sometimes they started out with a healthy split before one |
| 175s | pact emerged to come out on top like in Tide of Corruption, when The Inferno pact took over the |
| 179s | lead at 49% usage while the Death pact at 27% and the Demented pact at 24%. in other cases like |
| 185s | during Tide of Desolation we saw some normalization between pacts only halfway through the event with |
| 190s | the Grounded pack starting out as the strongest pick with 60% before dropping down to 38% as |
| 196s | far as pack trades go Shadow leap specifically was very successful in providing exciting new |
| 200s | gameplay mechanics without disrupting the core of the game too much we want to experiment more |
| 204s | with new ideas like Shadow Leap moving forward. All in all there is always room for improvement but |
| 209s | we continue to take your feedback seriously and iterate on the power for our unique pack |
| 213s | traits going forward as well as honing in on pact versus pact versus pact balance in general. |
| 221s | Our live events have traditionally been a great way for us to introduce new weapons and |
| 225s | equipment into the game. Some of these have turned out to be great additions out of the box, |
| 229s | but others struggled to find a place in the arsenal. Among the best received weapons |
| 233s | the Drilling, the Pax Trueshot and the Bornheim silencer, as well as the Baseball Bat and the Katana. |
| 238s | Both the Marathon and Mako have also been solid additions, even if some of the variants are |
| 242s | not in widespread use and the survey scores reinforced to being less popular additions. |
| 246s | Less successful editions were the UpperMat, Derringer Penny Shot, Vetterli Cyclone, the Fire Beetle and the |
| 252s | Dolch variants and custom ammo we have room to improve these additions further and touch most |
| 256s | of them up again for August release. In review, we acknowledge there's an oversaturation of |
| 261s | custom ammo in our Arsenal. Moving forward we'll take steps to address this by first reducing the |
| 265s | amount of new custom ammo types introduced during events, and secondly by rotating more |
| 270s | options in and out with future updates to help shake things up, and encourage players to try |
| 274s | out different combinations. We clearly don't need further Dolch ammo added to the game anytime soon, |
| 278s | and are considering removal of some that are currently there. In terms of things well loved |
| 283s | by players weapon inspection first appeared in Tide of Corruption with overwhelmingly positive scores. |
| 288s | This was expected given how long the request for his feature had been coming in from the community. |
| 297s | Our first wild Target Rotjaw was initially received |
| 300s | is only okay, but data gathered from the second survey showed that by the end of the event she |
| 305s | was more appreciated with a good overall satisfaction rate. Notably the groups who |
| 308s | had the biggest change in sentiment over Roger were the ones that included players who've played |
| 312s | less than 500 hours of hunt. Lessons learned around Rotjaw have led to some improvements for |
| 316s | future wild targets, the potential rewards of side objectives, and the overall difficulty of defeating them. |
| 326s | Desolation's Wake also introduced the concept of pled marks being used to unlock |
| 330s | sealed rewards found in the world. Sealed rewards have been very well received specifically the |
| 335s | full health restoration, master clue, bounty token for pledge marks, and the sealed cash |
| 340s | registers scored high on our last survey. This encouraging result has us looking to expand and |
| 344s | refine the mechanics for seal rewards which, you can hear more about when we come back to |
| 348s | discuss the lead up to our next event which, goes live with the engine upgrade on 15th August. |
| 356s | Our current weekly challenge system has yet to meet player expectations since being introduced |
| 360s | in Devil's Moon. The weekly challenge system suffers from three main problems; first if you're |
| 365s | unable to play for a week during the event then, you miss out on that week of event points which |
| 370s | is quite punishing. Next completing a weekly challenge set requires players to constantly |
| 374s | adjust their load out in play style which, starts to feel like a chore after a handful of challenges. |
| 380s | Lastly certain challenges require specific custom ammo which new players and prestige players might |
| 385s | not have unlocked yet. We want you to know the pain points you have been clearly identified we will |
| 390s | discuss our changes to the weekly challenge system in a future video addressing these primary complaints. |
| 398s | For years our players have asked for more ways to restore their lost chunks of health during a mission. |
| 403s | As a result we've experimented with different ways of restoring health chunks |
| 406s | during most of our events. Overall our community has welcomed the addition of more ways to restore |
| 411s | lost or burnt health chunks but there have been times when we overshot the mark. We want players |
| 415s | to have a chance to come back during a mission, rather than feeling pushed to extract without a bounty |
| 420s | token. Peacekeeper is the best example of where we got the balance wrong on restoring health chunks. |
| 424s | Restoring lost health chunks was too easy and giving the ability to revive red skull teammates |
| 429s | went too far, opening the door for exploits and frustratingly long stale mates especially with |
| 434s | fights away from the boss lairs. Learning from this we will tread far more carefully |
| 438s | whenever a mechanic is considered that reduces the penalty of dying repeatedly to the point of red skull markers. |
| 445s | We hope that you enjoyed some of the insights from this retrospective |
| 448s | and how we try to find the balance between sentiment, surveys and, data which can always align |
| 452s | on the surface we'll be back soon with insights on our August relaunch and what to expect from it. |