Hey Ghosts and Hunters,
Another Friday, another Dev Blog coming your way!
This week, we’re conducting an in-depth analysis on the usage of various Hunter and Ghost loadout options during our most recent alpha test!
This data helps us understand how people are playing, and for insight on what adjustments need to be made. Let us know which loadout was your favorite and why on Discord and Twitter!
HUNTER GADGETS
Hunter Gadgets
In Alpha Learnings Vol. 1 we discussed which Hunter weapons were most popular during our most recent alpha. This time, we’re taking a peek at the most popular gadgets.
First place goes to Radar, with 29.5% of players selecting it as their gadget of choice. Being the default gadget, it doesn’t surprise us to see Radar at the top of the list, but it is good to know that everyone still feels Radar is a useful gadget!
Second place goes to Vacuum with 20.9%. The feedback showed that splitting Vacuum away from Spectral Cannon was a good decision! The vast majority of the feedback we saw showed that this change helped add more teamwork to the matches, which is great news! As always, we are super thankful for all the feedback, it helps us make important decisions like this.
Pathfinder earned itself a bronze medal with 17.7% of the players searching for ghostly footsteps through the monitor. We did hear some concerns about the monitor being difficult to look at for extended periods of time - maybe even a bit nauseating - we’re looking into ways to improve this!
Our new Spectrophone gadget came in fourth, being picked 10% of the time! The feedback showed that having a fully directional gadget was very effective at finding ghosts. We were thrilled to find out that the Spectrophone found its place alongside Radar and Pathfinder, and that they could be combined to make finding ghosts even easier!
As seen in the chart above, the rest of the gadgets were selected pretty evenly. Many of them were fairly niche use cases, but there were situations where they came in handy. Of course, your playstyle really determines the gadgets you choose. Grappling hook is great for chasing ghosts once they are found, but you have to find them first!
HUNTER PERKS
Hunter Perks
Lightweight took a landslide victory as the most popular Hunter perk with a whopping 40.1%. Like Radar, Lightweight is the default - so this isn’t entirely surprising. Sprinting after ghosts or running away from danger is always useful!
A pleasant surprise to see that Healing Aura, a brand new perk, was chosen 18.3% of the time! Being able to heal from chip damage, such as Miasma, makes a lot of sense as a Hunter. Healing Aura fills that need nicely!
GHOST PERKS
Ghost Perks
The race for the number one perk slot was close, but Ghostly Reach came out on top with 29.5% of players choosing it. It is our default, of course, and is useful in most situations.
Coming in as a close second was Perception, which was selected 28.7% of the time. We may be looking at ways to make perception feel a little more fair - like adding a range limit, past a certain distance the Hunters visibility would fade off. Let us know what you think of this!
Overall, we’re pleasantly surprised to see more and more players stray from the default loadout and try out different combinations of abilities and perks!
The rest of the Ghost perks were much more evenly split. Ecto-slow and Ghostly Focus were both selected by over 10% of Ghost players, clocking in at 12.3% and 10.4% respectively. Do you swear by one of the lesser-used Ghost perks? We’d love to hear why!
GHOST HAUNTS
Ghost Haunts
All of the haunts were quite evenly split, with the default haunt Chill having a tiny edge at 17.9%. Push Object and Shove Hunter were right around the corner garnering 16.9% and 15.6% respectively.
Side note, have you considered using Shove Hunter to push a hunter off the top of Ghost Ship into the salty depths? It is very fun, ask me how I know 👀
False Trail was among the most popular haunts at 14.3%, and comes in handy if the Hunters are using Pathfinder. Lead the Hunters away from your teammates, and save the day!
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Thanks for reading through all of the analysis, folks! We have at least one more Dev Blog in this series coming your way, where we’ll go through even more interesting data and put on our analyst caps once more. Remember to keep an eye on this space, because we want to keep serving up all the juicy bits of data we can get our hands on!
One final reminder that our Alpha Survey is closing in a few days, so if you haven’t answered it yet, make sure to do it HERE! 💭
Thanks for joining us once again for an exciting deep dive into alpha stats, and have a wonderful weekend!
Tinny 👻
Community Manager