Greetings, Ghosts and Howdy, Hunters!
With MGH’s latest alpha weekend in the books, we’ve started digging into all sorts of statistics and other data to get a sense of how things went. We’ve also been sorting through all the great player feedback we received in places like our Discord and Twitter.
First off, we want to thank everyone for playing and sharing their thoughts. This has been incredibly helpful for the team to identify the game’s biggest priorities going forward. Thanks for helping us make MGH as good as it can be!
A quick aside - we heard the calls for a proper matchmaking system loud and clear during this test. It became very clear that experienced players were grouping up and making the new player experience frustrating. We are looking into potential solutions and will keep everyone posted.
This week, we thought it would be interesting to deep dive into some interesting stats and data from the most recent test. In the coming weeks we will continue to dig into more data, so keep an eye out for that!
GHOSTS VS. HUNTERS
Let’s start with the biggest stat: overall win-rate between our two teams, Ghosts and Hunters! Hunters definitely had the edge this time around, taking home the W in about 53% of matches all weekend long. We’ve already got a pretty good idea of why that is, and what we will look into changing to get closer to that elusive 50/50 split.
Ghosts vs. Hunters
A common strategy we noticed was for Hunters to camp around the generator after Midnight, utilizing traps and C4 to annihilate the red Ghosts. This allowed the Hunters to utilize the generator for an instant heal, making it very frustrating for the Ghosts to confirm any kills during their period of revenge.
Ghosts essentially needed to one-shot Hunters quickly or they didn’t really stand a chance at breaking that healing cycle if the Hunters were coordinated at all. On the Saturday night patch, as a stop-gap measure we increased the generator cooldown from 5 seconds to 10 seconds. But we recognize this is not a solid long term fix, as a longer cooldown makes changing your loadout feel very clunky if a wrong selection was made.
As for a longer term fix, we are investigating a number of options. Our current thinking is to decouple healing from the generator change loadout functionality. More details to come on that front, but please let us know in our Discord or other channels your thoughts on this topic!
C4 and grenade spam was a fairly common strategy, as well. C4 felt very low-risk to just spam it at your feet and hope for the best. As of our Saturday night patch, we added self-damage to C4 in an attempt to add some risk and strategy to the use of the gadget. We also reduced the maximum amount of C4 to 3, down from 6 on the Friday patch (which was a little absurd). We will see if these changes are enough, or if we need additional tweaking.
Grenades seemed less of a problem since the large timer before it detonates, but we are looking at ways to prevent the endless spam of them near the Generator, as that feels a bit unfair of course.
We will keep trying things out internally and will keep everyone posted. As always, let us know your thoughts on our official channels!
YOUR WEAPON OF CHOICE WAS…
You’re probably all dying (haha, 👻) to find out which weapons were community favorites, right? Or perhaps you already know, because approximately 22% of all of you Hunters selected Salt Shotgun as your weapon of choice. The second favorite was the other new weapon, Frostbite, at 20%. We’re hyped to see you testing out the new weapons! Shotguns and SMGs are FPS favorites, so we’re not too surprised about these results seeing as they’re both basically a means to the same end: deal damage quickly (either via one big, strong boom, or a bunch of little ones).
Hunter Weapon Breakdown
We heard the common feedback that Salt Shotgun’s damage falloff is unclear and perhaps too harsh - doing either high damage or very little at all. We are digging into this and would like to find a nice balance going forward.
Frostbite was thought to be a bit overpowered on our Friday patch - a little too easy to freeze props. We made a slight tweak on the Friday night patch to both the damage and the freeze speed, and that seemed to make it feel more reasonable.
AND THE FAVORITE ABILITY GOES TO...
Ghost abilities are very dependent on your playstyle and we didn’t have as clear favorites as the Hunter weapons. The reworked Poltergeist ability was a slight favorite, with almost 15% of Ghosts using this ability. Corruptor and Phantom were closely behind Poltergeist nearing 13% each.
Ghost Ability Breakdown
Poltergeist being redesigned as a floating haunted object trap seemed to resonate with many players, especially with its combo potential with the Corruptor ability. Flying exploding furniture can be very effective!
Overall, it’s nice to see that there is enough balance among our Ghost abilities to get people testing out a bit of everything. We will continue to monitor these and make some changes (such as the Death Grip + Ghostly Focus combo being a little bit absurd), but overall we are pleased at the state of things here.
That’s it for this week - thanks for reading! Next week we will continue digging into interesting stats and data points. Don’t miss it!
Once more, we humbly thank you for joining our latest alpha test and sending great feedback and bug reports. We truly appreciate it!
Until next week, Ghosts & Ghost Hunters!
Tinny
Community Manager