What’s up, Ghosts & Hunters!
It has been a bit over a week since we launched into Early Access. We’re overwhelmed with the support and extremely thankful for all the feedback you’ve given us. It’s been fun to play MGH with all of you. If you ever catch any devs in a match, don’t be a stranger!
TAKING A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS
Win rate: Hunters vs. Ghosts
We’ve been digging through the data from the first week of Early Access, and wanted to share some of our findings with you all.
When it comes to the overall win rate over the past week in total, it appears the Hunters have been winning 52.6% of all the matches compared to the Ghosts’ 47.4%. In the first few days, it was much closer to 50/50, but as the days have gone on and people learn the game, the Hunters started shining more.
In our first patch, deployed on Thursday, we made some changes to the Harpoon Bazooka & the Reaper, as well as a slight bump to prop health and Ghost speed. We’re hoping these changes will continue moving us closer to the coveted 50/50 split.
Game balance is a living breathing thing, so we will continue to make adjustments as needed to keep things playing in a way that's fun and fair. Keep the feedback coming!
We’ve already seen some changes to the win rates after deploying the first patch - things are trending towards the Ghosts a little bit now. We’re monitoring data regularly to make sure the balance doesn’t tip too far one way or the other, and we’ll continue to make tweaks if needed.
EARLY ACCESS PATCH #1
As mentioned above, our first patch has been released into the wild! We attempted to go through as many of the feedback and bug reports you all sent in as we could. Thank you for those! They're incredibly helpful. Let's go through some of the main things we fixed or added!
Small changes to Quick Play
By default, Quick Play-created games now end after 2 matches and put everyone back into the queue. This should help mix up the matches a bit and improve our matchmaking pool significantly. Server browser-created games are not affected. If you’re playing with a group of friends or you find yourself in an awesome group while Quick Playing, you can vote for a rematch to continue the rounds with the same group of people.
We’re still looking at how this is affecting actual results.
Granting XP & Shards
Both XP and Shards are now granted as soon as the game is over, rather than waiting until after the MVP screen. This will ideally improve situations where the host quits to deny other players progress.
We’re looking into a way for XP and Shards to be granted as the events take place in a match, but this type of change may still take some time to implement and test properly.
4 new language options
We are happy to tell you that we’ve added French, Spanish, Polish, and Brazilian Portuguese language options to the game. We’re already working on bringing Korean and Italian to MGH, as well, and will add more languages if we have enough demand for them.
Harpoon Bazooka nerf
Harpoon Bazooka now has a reload/cooldown animation to make it less spammable, and the duration of Harpoon attachment has been reduced.
We got quite a bit of feedback from people facing teams stacking two or even three harpoons and this choice led to very frustrating matches. After testing the changes internally, we feel that the Harpoon Bazooka is in a much better place balance-wise.
These were some of the highlights of Patch 1! You can check the full list of patch notes on our Steam Page.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Anti-cheat
We’re currently looking at improvements to our anti-cheat system that will improve the player experience. Naturally, we don’t want to give away too much here. 😉
However, we take all player reports seriously and are taking action to make sure cheaters are banned from MGH.
Prop hit detection / low damage bug
We have gotten some reports regarding the prop damage and hit registration issue, and are in the process of tracking the issue down. Internally we’ve solved a few of these issues already, and we’re hoping to have an update for you by the time the next patch rolls around.
Matchmaking
Matchmaking is a tricky beast! We hope that the changes made to Quick Play in the first patch will result in the matchmaking pool having a larger player base to choose from when creating matches. We’re surely keeping a close eye on this.
Generally, I think we are seeing an issue where some players may be marked in the default region of North America due to localization not coming into effect when initially selecting a region on first game startup. We’re looking at ways we can potentially improve this and have a more accurate region selected.
Performance
As we go throughout early access, we will be continuing to improve overall performance, both on CPU and GPU. We have noticed some reports of performance being a bit worse after Patch #1, and we are investigating this as well. We’ve got some things we’re trying internally that is having some promising results on GPU performance on some of our maps. Stay tuned on that!
POLL
We’re interested to see what type of content you’d like to see us add to Midnight Ghost Hunt next! Let us know by answering this one-question poll!
LET’S CHAT!
If you’d like to give us feedback, report a pesky bug, chat about MGH, or find a group to play with, we have a very active Discord full of lovely folks, where you can do all that.
In addition to our Discord, we also have a fantastic community over on Twitter, and we often post updates and other fun stuff there, as well as share the latest screenshots and teasers. Our Steam page is the right place if you want to find the latest patch notes or chat about the game in our Community Hub.
We look forward to playing more with you all, see you on the hunt! 👻
Tinny
Community Manager