Hey Ghosts and Hunters,
We’re back with another helping of interesting stats from our latest alpha! This time, we’re diving deeper into more specifics on win rate and match outcomes. If you didn’t get a chance to check out the latest alpha, be sure to follow along on Discord and Twitter for an opportunity to get in on our next testing rounds!
HUNTERS
Let’s look a little deeper at the Hunter win conditions, and how often they occurred. There are 3 ways Hunters can win a match: destroying all Ghosts before Midnight, destroying all Ghosts after Midnight, and escaping after Midnight has run its course.
Hunter Win Conditions
As you might expect, most Hunter victories occurred before Midnight. This is when the Ghosts are weak and try to hide. During our latest alpha test, 74.8% of all Hunter victories were this type.
After Midnight strikes, things get a little bit trickier for the Hunters - the Ghost’s onslaught can be brutal. The data points to 23% of all Hunter victories occurring via destroying all Ghosts AFTER midnight, which is a little bit higher than anticipated. It should be a pretty rare occurrence to successfully pull that off, with great teamwork and coordination. As we mentioned in our last blog, C4s/traps/grenade camping strategies ended up being a bit too powerful overall, as well as the instant generator heal every 5 seconds. We think in the next test we’ll find a better balance there.
Lastly, Hunters could also win by just surviving the Midnight duration. This was the rarest victory during this test - coming in at 2.2% of all Hunter victories. Even with various Coldblooded and Grappling Hook strategies, it became more consistent to just fight the Ghosts after Midnight than running away. We’ll be looking into this as we continue to balance and tweak the game to find a good medium.
GHOSTS
Ghosts have two win condition types: taking out all Hunters before Midnight, or after Midnight. As you might expect, destroying the Hunters after Midnight is much more common, as that is their attack phase. About 84% of all Ghost victories turned out that way during the last test.
Ghost Win Conditions
Aggressive Ghost play pre-Midnight is possible but can be tricky to pull off. This occurred in about 16% of Ghost victories. It can be punished quite quickly by coordinated Hunter play, and recovered from with timely defibrillators. However, if Ghosts can catch a Hunter out alone by themselves, or the Ghosts wombo combo their abilities together, it makes for a pretty fun and exciting strategy. Lead Developer Kite’s tip: Comboing Death Grip + Poltergeist + Corruption + Miasma coordinated in one room makes for a bit of a meat grinder!
MAPSSACRE
Throughout the alpha weekend, we saw a pretty balanced play rate of each map, which was encouraging to see. Ghost Ship was our most played map at 17.4% of all matches played - which makes sense, it has a very strong theme and was featured in our alpha teaser clip.
Map Play Rates
The rest were fairly evenly split - even School, our other new map, that was mistakenly not included in the quick play rotation on the first day of the alpha.
It seems that we’ve got a fairly solid roster of maps so far - we will continue to incorporate feedback on each map as we continue, and try to make them all equally interesting and balanced going forward. I heard a little birdie mention to me that Factory might be getting another layout/polish pass, but you didn’t hear it from me.
Ghost Ship
According to the data, Ghost Ship was definitely a bit Hunter favored. Hunters took home the win 59.4% of the time on Ghost Ship. The community feedback was fairly clear on this front - too wide open, not enough smaller props, not enough clear good hiding spots. We’re working on this internally.
Ghost Ship Match Outcome
We, of course, want maps to have different identities and strategies, but we want to ensure the balance is within reason, and we’ve got some ideas to get there. For starters, we’re thinking of breaking up the line of sight a bit more on the beach and tweaking the cave to be a better place to hide. Let us know what you think on Discord - what does Ghost Ship need in your opinion?
School
On the other side of the spectrum, the School map was certainly more Ghost favored. 56.4% of matches in the School resulted in Ghost victories. As the community feedback noted, we’ve got a lot of prop clutter in various areas, and some very tight choke points that favor Ghost escapes and abilities.
School Match Outcome
We think this adds some cool unique flavor to the map, but we’re thinking of making some adjustments to prop counts and layouts to make it a little closer to that coveted 50/50 ratio. Let us know on Discord your thoughts on this map, of course!
PRECISION CHANGES
Overall, we want to start with relatively small modifications here to even things up a bit without doing anything too drastic that might radically alter the levels.
We feel like we’re already relatively close, but as they say, the last 10% can take quite some time. We’ll get there, and stay tuned for more updates on that front!
MORE JUICY DATA COMING SOON!
That’s all the analysis we have for you this week! We’ll continue digging through the data and have another blog post for all you curious folks in the coming weeks, so be sure to check back soon.
Let us know if you enjoy this kind of dev blog or if you’d rather see other types of content. We think it’s interesting to dig into data like this and give context and start a discussion, but definitely let us know your thoughts. We appreciate it!
Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!
Tinny 👻
Community Manager