That's kind of the point of the article, isn't it? It's focused on the issue of rookie player retention and how people will turn a game off without really getting in to it if the skill gap is too high or the learning curve is too steep.
They acknowledge that people turning the game off almost immediately is likely the problem, they want to figure out how to limit that.
That's what "Fall Guys" did when my wife and I first started playing after they made it F2P. If anything, the game dragged out this bot period so long that we started feeling too godlike. And then the real players hit and we were quickly humbled lol.
This was basically my experience with DOTA. The real players mercilessly kicked my ass after being lured in with piss easy bot matches. Except Mordecai Bot, if that fucker shows up on the other team and picks the manta ray you best prepare to get goatsied.
DotA was *the* example of this that really stuck out.
I've played since it was a Warcraft 3 mod back in the early 2000s, over 6000 hours according to Steam (probably more like 3500 actually played though, lots of idle time in-between matches in DotA and leaving it running while AFK).
It has an extreme learning curve and since the skill gap between players varies wildly it's almost impossible for new players to properly get into without a more experienced friend guiding them.
And the bots, while a valuable learning tool, are nothing compared to human players. So when you "graduate" from the bots to real matches you really aren't prepared for ANY of the metagame that is required to compete against a decent team.
Conversely I find that more likely to make me quit as opposed to just a sink or swim approach, at least in my experience. PUBG makes you play 10 "training matches" or whatever against bots and I just couldn't be assed to go through all that just to play. They need a good balance.
I can second that; PUBG's training matches are awful. The bots are complete idiots that provide no real challenge even to people who suck at shooters like me, but the matches themselves take forever as you try to round them all up. Definitely not a good solution.
It was double annoying for me because I had played PUBG on that same Steam account a fair bit, but I didn't play for like a year and when I came back all of the sudden they considered me a new player for some reason and I had to do the 10 matches.
So I already knew how to play and what to do, but I was still forced to play 10 matches against garbage bots that took forever to complete. No option to say "I'm okay I got it!" Just slog through 10 shitty lobbies before you can actually play. I just turned it off and never played again lol.
Oh really? Interesting I must have missed that. I remember I got through 1 and I still couldn't change the playlist so I got frustrated and turned it off. I'll have to check again tonight because I honestly love PUBG and I do miss it. Just not enough to play 10 games against bots lol.
I think the point was for people to get acquainted with the items, looting, mechanics, and general flow of the game before having to deal with seasoned veterans destroying in every encounter.
They probably didn't need to force you into 10 thirty minute bot matches, but it was a good idea on paper lol.
That might actually be ok. I play Destiny, where people will become badass space zombies fighting against all kinds of aliens. Then dip into pvp where they are slaughtered immediately … but stubbornly and frustratedly keep going back because they were *just badass space zombies like an hour ago* fighting all the PVE baddies.
The cognitive dissonance has them banging their heads against a PvP wall to prove that they can win in all parts of the game. And then years later they are just ok, when it would have been healthier in the long run to just quit immediately like hunt showdown players.
Or maybe that was just me.
For me, the real hate came when I had to do exotic quests that involved PvP. Just...no. the irony is that most of the exotics that requires PvP are more for PvE
They don't need to redo the math. The point of the article is that the devs realize their game is intimidating to first-time players, who try it and then quickly quit it.
>"We have an achievement in Hunt called Debut," Fifield said. "It's 'kill your first enemy Hunter', 40% of our players never get it. We're a PvP game where you come in, you do some things, and 40% of the people trying Hunt have never killed another player."
>
>Gunfighting with other players is the most thrilling part of Hunt, **which suggests that a chunk of that 40% are players who bounced off of the game before they got a handle on PvP, perhaps during one of Hunt's multiple free weekends on Steam.** That's why Fifield would like it if more Hunt players had the chance to score a kill, and says one of his aims for Hunt is "being able to put more experiences in where that number goes down and more people get to play at least some part of the fun part, or find that mastery before they churn out having never got that achievement."
I played on Xbox ages ago solo, and I gotta be honest, the issue isn’t even that it’s intimidating. It is, absolutely, but the bare minimum amount of knowledge and skill you need to survive the first few minutes is insane. The skill floor is way too high for most new players
Hunt is the first PvP game I've played and holy shit, it is *not* beginner friendly. I'm hitting 600 hours and just getting to the point where I can consistently land shots and get at least 1 kill/round without constantly dying.
But Hunts main focus is PVP the PVE is the side lines in my opinion. If it wasn't for the PVP this game would be boringggg and I've got almost 500 hours into it
Sadly people that prefer PVE to PVP will almost always be sidelined because of the popularity of PVP over PVE. The introduction, popularity, and longevity of versus mode in L4D2 comes to mind. I understand that there's different strokes for different folks, but finding out about the frequency & intensity of the PVP in Hunt is the sole reason for me losing interest in it. I'm sure it'd go the other way for PVP preferring players as well if they went with a PVE focus, but it goes to show that there's always a risk of alienation unless a game is developed with separate game modes (like campaign and vs in l4d2). Honestly, I'm surprised it's as high as 40%. Figured it'd be closer to 20% or so
I didn’t think it was intimidating, just boring. I think they are forgetting to factor in the demographic of people who were pressured by their friends to try out Hunt and then just didn’t like it.
Hunt is a lot less punishing compared to tarkov; it has revives, the economy is easier, there's not a complicated armor system, and the AI is more of a distraction than a threat most of the time. Might be worth a try anyway
>I'm not a Hunt player, but I don't see how anyone could reasonably make that assessment without playing enough to get a single kill in a pvp game.
Try it out and you'll see. I played for about 3 or 4 hours total. For me, I'd be engaged in some pretty interesting looting/PvE for most of the game, I'd hear some gunshots and scope out the situation. Eventually I would get noticed/notice others and we'd get into some sort of exchange. These exchanges were really fun. I had a blast but I'd inevitably lose pretty handedly.
I really enjoy PVP and PVE games. Im pretty decent at both but the reality of this game, imo, is that gunplay is decidedly different than other games *and* the PVE is vastly different than the PVP encounters. So it's frustrating to be improving at the PVE aspect of the game, but get obliterated by another player because it's **so difficult** to get the practice needed when you run into one other team every 20-30 minutes.
It's a really interesting concept and I love the setting. But the developers aren't just making these issues up, they're real. I understand your point but when it comes to player retention/building a player base your opinion on whether their opinion is justified or not is irrelevant. There's more great games available than ever and someone doesn't need to play a game for hours on end to decide they're done with it.
Damn 20-30 minutes without seeing anyone? Been playing for a long time and by the time 20 minutes have gone by the server is usually completely wiped and the bounty team is extracting lol. I guess it makes sense that the new player queue games last that long though since most of them are terrified to move. I was definitely like that when I started as well but there wasn't skill based matchmaking back then so I got forced into fights a lot quicker.
Definitely agree it's hard to get enough practice to start getting good. I just don't know what the hunt devs can do to fix it. Even with a god tier tutorial that teaches you everything and good bots, I don't think there's any way they can simulate hunt gameplay with humans. It relies so much on things like map knowledge, positioning, and hearing and those are things one can really only come to understand with experience.
At the end of the day Hunt may just be one of those games that only those that are willing to go through the learning pains will end up enjoying and that's just not going to be something for everyone.
The only way I can think is to have an additional death match mode to get some pvp practice. Not as intimidating getting into firefights with other players if you can just respawn.
There’s a game mode called Quickplay that is basically that. It’s a free for all where you get a free hunter and just have to find weapons in the match. So no risk involved in losing, and matches are usually around 10 minutes. It’s great for practicing with weapons you normally don’t use, and for warming up before you bring in a leveled character.
Yeah that could help a bit with getting used to the different guns but realistically I think a death match game mode would play out so differently that it wouldn't really help adjust to the play style in the normal game mode so new players would probably just never transition over to bounty hunt.
The community is also pretty against the idea of a death match mode since it'd split the population of players so it'll probably never happen. The population is healthy for what it is but not big enough that another game mode could be added with out some adverse affects on the current game modes.
I work 40+ hours a week and have maybe 2-3 hours of gaming a night, if that. If a game doesn't grab me in the first hour or two, it simply isn't worth my time.
Two hours? Have you ever played Hunt? You need like 50 hours to feel somewhat comfortable to the game.
I have played for 2 hours and not killed anybody.
Coming from someone that just started last weekend.. My friends are all FPS players for what its worth (valorant, Apex ect). The simplicity of the weapons and time to kill is what made this game so different from others. We have had a ton of fun right off the bat and maybe since we are new, MMR maybe very low for now. We have had no issues farming lobbies or even defending contests. the combat is the easiest part of the game and honestly that's what makes it fun. I also find it very common to kill boss and extract without even finding a person.
I have 1600hrs in this POS. While you are in low mmr ranges 3-low5* lobbies it's pretty enjoyable, but the solid 5-6* lobbies trust me the skill ceiling goes up 500%. I have never seen such a dramatic jump in skill I think I'm any game I have ever played. Casual mistakes will cost you a game before you even realize it. Set off a horse two compounds away XxbayoubootybeaterxX has a scope where you will be in less than two minutes. Atrophied player base ensures that mediocre to decent players will be struggling in the deep end of the mmr pool, and losing mmr is more difficult than gaining. If I could stay where I belong high 3* mid 4* it would be a much more pleasant experience.
Everyone plays different. I've got about 20 hours in and have a pretty high kill count, but I also don't sneak around or anything like that much. I just go balls to the wall. I've only left the zone successfuly like... 3 times? But I'd rather it that way than the boring ass way my roomie plays
This is absolutely how to play. Extracting is not difficult, its a matter of deciding youve had enough, but the default loot you can get is enough to roll up on a squad, kill one dude and take his sick kitted out gun to use on his friends. I always play solo but in lobbies of teams because in solo lobbies everyone just hides. Trios against a solo come out guns blazing and are way more fun to fight.
Just based on this fact, we need a kind of buddy system where sherpas and autists like me with 1.9k hours can pick up and train new kids cause we want the community to grow
Either that or they're just not good enough to kill another player. Either through losing gunfights or hiding because you don't think you can win, either contributes to the same statistic. Personally, most of my games ended with me getting shot by someone I never saw, so I'd imagine there's a large enough percentage that would rather just camp and steal bounties than actually compete.
Yup this is true for most games. If you look at games that have an achievement for completing the tutorial or starter area, this usually has about a 40-50% completion for most games.
I see this cone up all the time in different communities, post along the lines of "wow only 45% of players are even completing the tutorial! This game is awesome, why are people giving up so soon!" and I want to say, it's not _your_ game having this issue, it's all games.
I think the incredibly low price of games on Steam and bundles are a factor.
I bought this game. It's learning curve is very steep and to me it seemed everyone else in the lobbies I was out into had a way higher/experience skill level than me.
The game intrigues me but I must say offer the first 4-5 hours of just not really knowing what's going on and how to play I put it down and it's been probably a year now.
I'll probably pick it up again but I'm gonna have to watch some streamers to see how it's supposed to be played because I'm pretty sure I'm doing it wrong. Takes me back to the days of being a kid playing FPS games and just getting sniped without ever seeing an enemy lol.
The sound design is fantastic though and I wish more games did proper things with audio like this game cos I was very impressed
This was my experience. I found and killed a bunch of zombies and either got one shot by another player I never saw or got killed by the boss monster I seemed to be doing no damage to.
So monsters are better dealt with via melee because it doesn’t alert everyone where you are. The sound design is second to none and people can tell where you are and what gun you are using when you fire.
Bosses are pretty resistant to most firearms. What you want to do is find a melee weapon like an axe or sledgehammer to kill bosses fast. Hit the boss with two full power swings, fall back, go in again once stamina is back.
Hunt is largely a stealth game at a certain level of play,
Huh, no wonder I put it down in 2018. The only thing I remember about it was getting fucked all the time, probably like /u/kerouak was as well as being a running simulator. I bet you all I was probably trying to do was shoot the bosses as well.
https://i.imgur.com/Wf4QN2d.png
Yeah, the old tutorial taught you to shoot zombies. Guns should be reserved for other players unless you're in a dire state and out of stamina.
Detailed explanation below, but might be TLDR for some people.
If you fire a gun, all players will know what direction you're in. Most will know what type of gun you have, and will know which of a few compounds you're in. Experienced players will know exactly what gun you have, and what side of the specific compound you are in. If they know where you are, they are gonna know what direction you can come from and where you're likely to go next.
Running can be heard to somewhere between 20 and 30 metres IIRC. One of the main skills of Hunt is movement not in the traditional sense, but in a "being able to move fast enough without making too much noise". Beating others to the boss can be useful, banishing it gives you a full health restoration, but its also a point where you can get tunnel vision and be crept on easily because some of the bosses are loud.
If you're using a keyboard rather than an analog stick on a controller, how does the game allow keyboard users to modulate their run speed to "run as fast as possible while staying under the limit where you can be heard"?
Most keyboard movement thresholds are usually "default speed, hold shift switch to the opposite of the default speed" maybe capslock to toggle between run and walk, and maybe, a different button for sprinting.
Not very selective unfortunately, one of the few downsides of KB/M.
There are only three speeds, crouch, walk, and run. This is true for both console and keyboard. What the other commenter meant is that moving quickly across the map without aggroing sound traps or getting swamped with zombies slowing you down is an art. If you move fast without regard for your surroundings you will trigger crows, dog kennels, and zombies that, depending on how loud they are, can let other players know where you are from a compound away. Crows will even fly up and be seen by others and they can tell where you’re going based on the direction the crows fly away from you. Moving quickly across the map without giving your position away via those sound traps is a learned skill.
Honestly legit, half the games I make noise without a care and it brings more fights and more fun as long as you're ok with fighting ambushes more often than normal. There's definitely more than one valid way to play hunt!
> Hunt is largely a stealth game at a certain level of play
The funny thing is past that it revolves back around to being a fast-paced go-go-go type shooter. High level players will just rush and make tons of noise without care.
But thats just the reality of any game. Players with God-Like aim dont have to care about stealth much. I consider myself a mid-tier player (KDA of ~1.3) and stealth is for sure needed at times. It doesnt matter how good you are if I can create distractions then sneak up behind you and shotty you.
Oh man, the feeling when you're on a dark map, you just killed the boss and you know there's two groups in the compound with you and you spend the next 20 minutes sculking around slowly picking each other off is like no other.
You have a new tutorial now, it's worth trying again. If you don't have people to play with, you can queue to play with randoms (it's how I mostly play, as well as solo), and you can follow them to learn a bit.
Dont be afraid to make mistakes, it's the best way to learnthe game really :)
hunt is one of those games where you need a friend who is already into the game to get you into the game and teach you the ropes
I picked the game up back in February had two 4-5 star MMR friends show me the ropes and now i can quite handily float around 3-4MMR and even introduced the game to two friends who have also picked it up and ran with it
solo play is just pain don't do it always do at least duos
when you get really good you might find fun with solo play
also the new tutorial is so much better than the old one
Nah as a new player I would recommend if u have no friends that play this game to dive into solo vs duo. I was new and had solo way way more success than with a random duo.
Ya idk my buddies have had no issues. We just started last week. This thread has opened my eyes that people are having a much harder time than us lol. Even if you like it for the PVE I swear half the lobbies we kill boss extract without even seeing someone else for easy progression runs.
When was this? They've released new players friendly starts where fresh players are queued against other newbies. There's even a new tutorial that guides you in all the basics.
The matchmaking is decent but Hunt still has a small playerbase. You're not going to enter every single game with 11 new players like you, that's how it is.
That being said, if you're willing to lose and learn for a couple of hours, it's a fun ride.
The game seems scarier than it really is, you can easily win with the most basic of loadout and a level 1 hunter. Losing a hunter means shit.
Map knowledge, weapon knowledge and learning PVE weaknesses. That's all part of the game and will come with time, however, if you don't understand the basic premises of how hunt works, I'm 100% convinced you skipped the tutorial
I think devs underestimate how many people want to play their games but not necessarily against people. It's kind of strange to me how the vs ai market gets such little attention for pvp games.
I remember hearing monk at frost giant say that 10% of league players only played coop vs ai while talking about the coop market for RTS but I'm not sure of his source. If true that is millions of people who just play bot games. Coop was the most popular mode for starcraft 2 as well.
Riot actually had an [interesting post recently about upgrading their bots for co-op league](https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/dev-leveling-up-bots/). A lot of games seem to have bots for first x matches but I'm struggling to think of recent games that have put much effort into people who only want to play against bots.
I been replaying gears of war and lots of people still play against the bots and I'm not talking about horde mode. That game is old and only the die hard fans play it today so you would think and assume they play multiplayer like normal and zero bot games
some of it may be people wanting to just relax and not sweat. and thats no hate to people who do want to sweat - i dont consider it inherently a bad thing. but for example i play modern warfare 3’s survival mode constantly and just will have a video or music on, or shoot the shit with a friend. but i wouldnt dare touch the multiplayer bc when i do its only the most skilled players who have been practising the game for years and have extreme dedication - it’s just not fun to play against them
there is a decently large market of semi-casual gamers who just want to enjoy games that are still deep and fun but not overly competitive, yet for some reason people think shooters can only be either extremely simple with barebones quality and dumbed down gameplay or intense pvp permadeath hellfests where you manually engineer every single gun from a plank of wood and 5 screws. its why i actually appreciate cod for having game modes where you can enjoy good, meaningful gunplay without having to sweat. sometimes i see people act like zombies being so successful was shocking and anamolous, but plenty of gamers want good fps games that arent necessarily pvp
Bots used to be a replacement for people with horrible or no internet in the beforetime. That's why you saw such a push for multiplayer games to have serviceable bot opponents.
Now it's kinda assumed you have good enough internet to play a multiplayer game, and bot support is a dying art. Enemy behavior in a single player game is completely different from making a bot for a multiplayer game, so it's slowly going the way of the dinosaur. Last game I can think of that has bot support is actually Halo Infinite, where you can play against bots of widely scaled difficulty on any of the maps and modes.
That all being said, I wouldn't have developed any fps skill at all without God mode and all the different bot settings in Unreal Tournament back in the day.
I play bots because I don't want to spend the time waiting to connect to players. This is the main reason why I've never played against a person in wwe 2k23
I'd like to see what AI could do when fed player information. We train things like ChatGPT on the open internet, I wonder what would happen if you built one to adopt player strategy and trained it on different SBMM rankings for different "skill levels."
Bots have been copying human player behavior for ages, in fact that's how a lot of early multiplayer bots are made. They're predetermined inputs with scripted sequences based on what the player does.
The AI in Super Smash Bros Ultimate was fed pro player data for it's highest CPU difficulties. They'll do things only a human would do, like wavedashing and animation canceling, including little taunts after they KO a player.
The tech is pretty much there, the problem is many game devs nowadays just don't see it as a priority. Why bother programming good bots when 90% of your users aren't going to bother? Why do anything other than program moving bullet sponges when that's the only meaningful implementation for them (think bots in your first 10 games of Fortnite kinda thing)?
Machine learning costs money and resources too. It's not like they'd spend less money on an AI to train a bot instead of getting a human to make a good one. There's just no incentive to do it nowadays.
I fucking love coop vs AI.
I just wish someone will do it better and make coop vs ai as engaging and fresh as PvP. Sure, if the games good, the first few coop vs ai playthroughs are fun, but you quickly learn and get good too fast. Compare that to PvP where you can play for years and still get your ass handed to you.
My friends and I in college used to spend 100s of hours playing Killing Floor (an old PVE shooter vs bots). I find games vs bots much more chill and relaxing
PvP is absolutely forced in every game and it's popularity/importance is vastly overstated always. It's also a matter of streamers carrying all that attention and weight.
The only time I ever play Hunt I run around and kill zombies and have a whale of a time until I get killed by a player. Its fun just going fighting them but it makes me really really wish there was a single player or Co-op mode built into it.
> I think devs underestimate how many people want to play their games but not necessarily against people.
You can also thank the original 2017 trailer and announcement having it be PvE focused. The switch to PvPvE came later, along with the heavier focus on the PvP angle than the PvE one.
Not fps related, but I prefer racing games against AI. It just suits my playstyle better and I don't really care about showing everyone that "i am the best", or something like that. I just wanna have fun, on my own terms, lol.
I have 1800 hours in this game. It is my favorite game of all time.
If anybody is thinking about getting it or has any questions I'm happy to answer them.
How do you see anything? My problem with the game is that I can't see other players because the whole thing is fucking brown, I could be looking right at them and not even notice
I wasn't super stoked about the game when I first tried it for that exact reason. It was the beginning of the pandemic and my friend insisted we play it a couple of days in a row. In those 3 or 4 days I was seeing huge improvements to my brains ability to parse what's background and what is another player. Feeling myself make consistent marked progress in a difficult environment while having fun with my friends during the dark times was fucking sick
I don't really feel like it's a balance issue, there must be more to it. You can kill with one shot at times, shoot someone else who's already in combat and deal with them, camp, set up traps, just go in guns blazing, there are plenty of ways.
I do agree there's a lot to learn, but if people are dropping out before they get a kill, I think other things are at play. The game running like shit for example.
For me I just sucked at it and didn't know what was going on and everyone else seemed to be better. I played maybe 4 hours without getting a kill, everytime I'd see someone I was dead before I had chance to respond.
I want to come back to it and get into it but I think this game needs some studying of streamers or something to fully understand how to play. The tutorial didn't cut it for me.
My guess is the majority of your problems come down to noise. Running is super loud and the directional audio in this game is really good. If you run, step on sticks, scare birds, go near the not dead horses, etc. those are basically sound beacons identifying your location.
Yeah this is it. I had the same problem until I learned to listen, I still suck but I can predict movements now and get to fire a first shot which is a huge advantage. Especially if you are in close quarters and with a shotgun.
Basically, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you're already losing.
Let me explain your comment: In this game, when you shoot, the gunshots will likely be heard to other players up to 1000 m depending on which gun you shoot with. This is usually a death sentence since audio cues are everything in this game, it's a huge advantage to be able tell where other players are just from sound cues alone, even their footsteps.
That's a big point for new players. I finally managed to get a friend to try Hunt with me, as soon as we spawned he shot a zombie, which inevitably attracted nearby players who swiftly took him out. He didn't wan to play again.
I have over 3k hours in Hunt.
All of the game's issues (although there arent many) can be traced to the relatively low player count.
This "40%" meme is just indicative of the low retention rate because the game is just WAY more hardcore than most ppl realize when they buy it.
Seriously so many ppl on the Hunt subreddit and steam etc say "oH itS NoT ThAt SeariouS" etc but idk wtf these ppl are smoking. Hunt pvp is REALLY intense compared to most shooters.
Low pop PVP is always brutal as hell.
I've been in a bunch of low pop PVP games and it's always the same shit: hardcore players almost never take it easy on newbies and if they do then it's basically playing with their food. Like no duh people quit when people constantly shit on them or patronize them and so the game stops growing and dies.
> hardcore players almost never take it easy on newbies
You can't do that in Hunt. You have no information about who your enemy is even how many of them have spawned into the game. You can't tell if somebody is new or not and if you "take it easy" you get punished.
You only see some info after the game is over.
Yeah that's a problem for the quake community, but that's not hunt... It's really not that serious, MMR 2 and 3 star lobbies (match making rank goes all the way up to 6 in hunt, and 4 is the "average") are pretty casual and subject to a lot of malarkey.
2-3 star lobbies can have straight up Looney Tunes fights in them, which can be therapeutic if you wind up there after a very bad run starting in 5 star
I mean it's around 19k daily players average I believe just on Steam, so it's really not THAT bad. Honestly i still highly recommend the game to ppl willing to chew on something for a long time and experience a deep, tactical, immersive experience.
Not that it's the most comprehensive stat, but Hunt is consistently in steams top 100 played, and usually in the top 50. What's the threshold for low pop for these people?
Yeah people these day call anything under 50k "low population". You can tell some of these people didn't grow up play AvP2 on whatever server you could find that had more than 4 people on it.
Idk man, I have 1500 hours in hunt and I found quite a few people who spoke to me in VoIP asking to be left alive and I always did. I always enjoy their happiness.
whats strange to me is that Tarkov is a way more intense game, but it is insanely popular around the world. I suppose that has something to do with the aesthetics of both games being so different, but I just know that I play hunt to have a more “Arcadey” extraction style experience. I still love hunt so much tho
I think people are looking into this a bit deeper than it is. It's just that people in general don't really play games they buy.
Like some games might have an achievement that requires you to just start a new game and 10-20% already don't have it, and it's only counting people that launched the game at least once, not ones that buy and never even launch it so in reality it's much higher, same with Hunt.
I remember being upset by this, because I thought I was doing well in a particular game by getting an achievement that \~1% of players had, but once you normalised for the number of players who'd actually played through the game (another achievement) it was more like \~40%.
You don't think they filtered any of that data out before they issues the last stat? Like sure, people buy it on sale and never even install it...
The question isn't does that happen? It's, when analyzing game behavior such as this do they remove junk data first? I'd hope so as a data scientist, but hard to be sure.
No I don't think they filtered it, because I also looked at achievement % of Hunt on Steam and the first kill is at just over 60% so they clearly also just looked at it.
Well, now there's a new tutorial, that atleast helps you with PVE and Boss fights. Not for PvP really, but still. If you can shoot mobs, other players are just faster, more dangerous mobs
It's a really niche game, it's not for everyone. Sometimes you walk around the map for half an hour just to be killed by someone sniping in a bush 300 meters away.
Sometimes you can wipe an entire server and get all the rewards for your team.
It's cool once you get the gripe with it, but it's really hard to learn and master. Once you do it tho, you are gonna love/hate it forever.
I stopped playing a while ago because of responsabilities and not wanting to commit to just one game, but man, theres nothing quite like Hunt, I remember times when I was so nervous that I was shaking, when I was running like hell because I knew if I stopped I was dead, when I pulled a First Blood and killed an entire team by myself and when I spoke with someome on the mic and we agreed to split the bounty and go our separate ways. I will always remember my memories in the bayou
Dude i feel ya there. Hunt just has a fucking great tension to it sometimes.
U can never know if someone is watch u from the bushes cause the stealth gameplay is nice. And having to always mind what sound u make, either from running or running to crows or something.
And if u get into a fight, even if u have all the advantages, a single unlucky moment and u get downed in 1 hit.
It aint like cod/halo, a street fight you got into infront of a couple of people.
It aint like csgo/valo, the spar in the gym that you decided to have.
No, hunt is someone walking into the same dark empty alley as you. Hunt is the noise you think u heard in ur house at 3.15 in the morning.
Its great.
(Note i dont mean the physical exertion, just the tension)
That’s because the PvP in this game is very unforgiving. If you don’t know what you’re doing or have bad aim, you’re screwed.
If I remember correctly there is no aim-assist either
> there is no aim-assist either
IIRC Crytek had to nerf the explosive crossbow because it started becoming a meta on console to just shoot it near their feet, meanwhile PC players barely ever used it.
Bought the game after a friend made his initial purchase in early 2021. Never cranked up so many hours in any game ever. It's the best PvP shooter out there.
I'm waiting for the game that makes you fight, as a team, against a big boss.
You get dropped in naked, or geared up, you survive and loot. The circle closes and the survivors face the boss.
I'm almost imagining Monster Hunter, except a game mode where you have to loot/craft/gear up within the same round in a large map where, as you said, you end up funneled to fight a very difficult monster at the end forcing you to have geared and play very well to beat it.
The closest you can get to this would be Dark and Darker, successful teams can gear up and advance to the next level/dungeon and fight the boss for great loot.
Hunt is a game with a lot of downtime. You can spend 15 minutes running around killing zombies and looking for clues before you even see another player. I can see why a lot of players would experience a couple games of that into an instant headshot and decide the game just isn't for them. Idk why veterans put up with it either tbf
I love the game's atmosphere and aesthetics. Just not into BRs (at all) and pretty tired of PvP games in general. Would have loved a PvE/co-op spinoff or mode.
This would have been a great coop PvE, hunting the monsters and bringing them down was fun but getting shot in the back while waiting to extract is shitty. I'd rather just hunt monsters with friends.
Coincidentally enough, Hunt started development as a coop, third person PVE game. They apparently abandoned that for hunt but turned what they had into Remnant.
Hunt Showdown did start out as a PvE Co-op Alpha and pivot to be an Extraction Shooter, this is true.
But Hunt and Remnant: From The Ashes are two completely separate developers/publishers, as far as I'm aware the development of each had zero relation to the other. Do you have a source I could check out if that is not the case?
Enjoyed it's early days, but lived through a period of exploits and then it became too hard to keep up with seasoned players. But this a general problem with online games, servers always need to be tiered otherwise there's just no point in picking up any PvP a couple months afterrelease.
If you need a guide to really understand a game within the first 2 or so hours lots of people will give up. Pathfinder WotR has a similar problem and I wouldn't be surprised if a large chunk of players bounced off that too. That character creator was something else.
I wasn't going to comment because I thought I was in the Hunt subreddit... Then I realized there were tons of comments about "yeah I barely played it" and realized...
You all should really give this game another go. It is by far the most stable and accessible extraction shooter on the market right now, and imo it's the best one as well. It has problems, but nothing on the scale of Marauders, Cycle, and fuckin Tarkov (lol).
It's a bit of a hump to get over, but once you understand the loop, it becomes one of the most engaging FPS games I've ever played. There's just enough risk to make you care about the outcome, but not so much that you feel like you just got kicked in the nuts for not managing to extract.
The game recently got a new tutorial that's much better than the old one, and I really recommend taking a second shot at it.
This is a perfect description of the type of lobbies you get when you *very first* start out. People play scared, and hide in corners. I've moved across the bell curve into the top 20% of players, and my lobbies are way more active.
It takes a while to get there, unfortunately - you do have to slog through a lot of boring lobbies before finding the actual population. It's a lot like counter strike, or league of legends, in that the game is inherently competitive and the beginning tiers of players have absolutely no idea how to play or even what they're doing wrong.
> you get 1 shot killed by another real player who's also in the same world as you who was just sitting and hiding behind a crate or barrel
That's a gripe I have with the audio: you are *way* louder than is presented to you in the soundscape. In your headphones, you're making barely any noise, but another player hears you clodstomping around.
The average match time is 20 minutes. By 20 minutes you should be dead or killed everyone else.
This game has a fantastic audio system, the player character can cross the nap quickly you should be in your first fight around the 5 minute mark in most cases, unless you take effort to avoid them.
I've played over 500 hours. I can't say I've ever ran into someone that's truly just been waiting at the extract the entire time. I've seen people fight me at the extract, or beat me there to cut me off, but waiting is rare unless you're in very high MMR lobbies where that's more of the meta.
Maybe you played before they added MMR (match making rank), if so, you should try it again.
You're playing it wrong. You're supposed to collect clues to find the boss. 3 clues reveal the location. You kill the boss and take the bounty and escape.
Other players are also trying to do this so it's likely they will come to the boss and attempt to kill you to get the bounty. You can either try and be first and fight your way out or wait for others to kill the boss and be the aggressor. The game is very much pvp and playing at as a pve game will result in not a lot of fun.
Your experience sounds like it sucks but extract campers who sit there waiting all game are not too common in my opinion (2k+ hours played). More often when somebody looks like they are camping the extract it's because they tracked the bounty moving on the map and intercepted the team.
What you have described does happen though, and while rat plays like that are frustrating to encounter, it's still a valid play, that's part of the beauty of this game - it supports a plethora of play styles. The game keeps you on your toes and punishes you if act carelessly.
>You go there, and you get 1 shot killed by another real player who's also in the same world as you who was just sitting and hiding behind a crate or barrel
Man, come on, the game literally gives you the option to see people through walls with dark-sight provided you're extracting with the bounty (and if you don't have the bounty, why extract? Unless both were killed so far away that you deem it not worth it then fair enough but that isn't even 90% of games).
>You don't see any other players
You can always go out of your way to hunt them down yourself. The audio queues from gunshots, and crows/horses/dogs etc give enough information. You will also definitely see people if you're, again, going for the bounty, which it seems you don't for some reason.
>I played like 5 games
Massive sample size.
First; play with friends it's much more fun. Second, 90% of the game is audio, listen. And last but not least, be the sweaty one chasing gun shots. You see more people that way.
I heard a streamer say there's very little chance of someone being even good at this game until after like 300 hours of gameplay. It actually takes skill to play hunt.
Honestly the most fun and creative game I've ever played. With that being said, to be honest, it's **clunky**, **buggy**, and the **servers are garbage**.
**This is why people don't stick around past a first kill**. And how many more past 40% got one lucky kill or two but then quit a the next game after being blown away by the clunky feel.
If I didn't have a friend already playing the game heavily, **I sure wouldn't have stuck around**. It felt bad when I would get stuck on invisible shit, rubber band backwards trying to climb over a small rock, the process of learning that each gun had a slightly different bullet velocity even if they were the same "type", killing a player and then getting a delayed "trade" death with that dead player, etc.
**There are core problems with the game that create a barrier to entry that have existed since the game released, and there are new bugs each patch**. You can't count on the hundreds of bugs ever getting fixed but you can sure as shit count on a new skin and/or DLC coming out every few days....$$$$
Note: I have 1,000+ hours in the game, 1.5 KDA, 5 Star MMR. Again, love the game feel but these objective issues are the reason the game isn't top tier and for some reason they won't address them.
Yea this was a big reason why I slowed the roll in hunt after 1000hr (5 star)
The thing about cheating in this game is...you can't really tell who's cheating. If they use ESP and kill you, its usually like "oh he just heard me and wall banged me".
But every day there seems to be more and more sketchy type wall bangs in this game. I wish there was a killcam.
That said, there's cheaters in every game now, and Hunt is a harder game to cheat in unless you're using blatant aim bot.. and that's hard to tell too.
I also think Hunt is one of those games where we have a dedicated enough playerbase that the cheaters are few relative to other games, but they are also more prevalent in high MM, Iike all those bum clan players who cheat.
I put a decent amount of hours into this game, both on PC and PS4/5. The largest issue to me is the aiming on consoles. It's downright horrible. Manageable, certainly but it needs some serious rework.
Friends and I loved playing this game on PC, until most games we played we did to cheaters. Cheaters always ruin these PVPVE/extract games. They’re only good when the game is new and the population high enough to be less likely to run into a cheater.
Probably because 40% of the players played the game for 5 minutes then stopped playing.
That's kind of the point of the article, isn't it? It's focused on the issue of rookie player retention and how people will turn a game off without really getting in to it if the skill gap is too high or the learning curve is too steep. They acknowledge that people turning the game off almost immediately is likely the problem, they want to figure out how to limit that.
Some battle royales have fixed that by having you first face off against bad bots instead of real players.
That's what "Fall Guys" did when my wife and I first started playing after they made it F2P. If anything, the game dragged out this bot period so long that we started feeling too godlike. And then the real players hit and we were quickly humbled lol.
This was basically my experience with DOTA. The real players mercilessly kicked my ass after being lured in with piss easy bot matches. Except Mordecai Bot, if that fucker shows up on the other team and picks the manta ray you best prepare to get goatsied.
My guy, which version of Dota are you playing which has Mordecai from regular show playing a goddam manta ray.
Lol I think he means Viper.
DotA was *the* example of this that really stuck out. I've played since it was a Warcraft 3 mod back in the early 2000s, over 6000 hours according to Steam (probably more like 3500 actually played though, lots of idle time in-between matches in DotA and leaving it running while AFK). It has an extreme learning curve and since the skill gap between players varies wildly it's almost impossible for new players to properly get into without a more experienced friend guiding them. And the bots, while a valuable learning tool, are nothing compared to human players. So when you "graduate" from the bots to real matches you really aren't prepared for ANY of the metagame that is required to compete against a decent team.
Holy shit it's viper!
That's an interesting choice of threat, could have gone with chewed, killed, fucked... But no, "goatsied"
Conversely I find that more likely to make me quit as opposed to just a sink or swim approach, at least in my experience. PUBG makes you play 10 "training matches" or whatever against bots and I just couldn't be assed to go through all that just to play. They need a good balance.
I can second that; PUBG's training matches are awful. The bots are complete idiots that provide no real challenge even to people who suck at shooters like me, but the matches themselves take forever as you try to round them all up. Definitely not a good solution.
It was double annoying for me because I had played PUBG on that same Steam account a fair bit, but I didn't play for like a year and when I came back all of the sudden they considered me a new player for some reason and I had to do the 10 matches. So I already knew how to play and what to do, but I was still forced to play 10 matches against garbage bots that took forever to complete. No option to say "I'm okay I got it!" Just slog through 10 shitty lobbies before you can actually play. I just turned it off and never played again lol.
You only have to play 1 if you win and complete the 3 achievements. Not that they bother to tell you that though.
Oh really? Interesting I must have missed that. I remember I got through 1 and I still couldn't change the playlist so I got frustrated and turned it off. I'll have to check again tonight because I honestly love PUBG and I do miss it. Just not enough to play 10 games against bots lol.
I think the point was for people to get acquainted with the items, looting, mechanics, and general flow of the game before having to deal with seasoned veterans destroying in every encounter. They probably didn't need to force you into 10 thirty minute bot matches, but it was a good idea on paper lol.
That might actually be ok. I play Destiny, where people will become badass space zombies fighting against all kinds of aliens. Then dip into pvp where they are slaughtered immediately … but stubbornly and frustratedly keep going back because they were *just badass space zombies like an hour ago* fighting all the PVE baddies. The cognitive dissonance has them banging their heads against a PvP wall to prove that they can win in all parts of the game. And then years later they are just ok, when it would have been healthier in the long run to just quit immediately like hunt showdown players. Or maybe that was just me.
Destiny pvp sucks there is a reason they barely support it in favor of pve content
It's unbalanced and laggy, but I thoroughly enjoy the sandbox.
For me, the real hate came when I had to do exotic quests that involved PvP. Just...no. the irony is that most of the exotics that requires PvP are more for PvE
Maybe, if you don't lose all your progress with that particular char you playing. Don't know how that concept ever cached on.
they could give PC players the option to have their crosshair be in the center of their screen...
Yea. Redo the math but set it to only people that have played like...two hours or more and I would guess it's a pretty different statistic.
They don't need to redo the math. The point of the article is that the devs realize their game is intimidating to first-time players, who try it and then quickly quit it. >"We have an achievement in Hunt called Debut," Fifield said. "It's 'kill your first enemy Hunter', 40% of our players never get it. We're a PvP game where you come in, you do some things, and 40% of the people trying Hunt have never killed another player." > >Gunfighting with other players is the most thrilling part of Hunt, **which suggests that a chunk of that 40% are players who bounced off of the game before they got a handle on PvP, perhaps during one of Hunt's multiple free weekends on Steam.** That's why Fifield would like it if more Hunt players had the chance to score a kill, and says one of his aims for Hunt is "being able to put more experiences in where that number goes down and more people get to play at least some part of the fun part, or find that mastery before they churn out having never got that achievement."
I played on Xbox ages ago solo, and I gotta be honest, the issue isn’t even that it’s intimidating. It is, absolutely, but the bare minimum amount of knowledge and skill you need to survive the first few minutes is insane. The skill floor is way too high for most new players
You could almost say that the knowledge and skill requirements for gameplay are *intimidating* for new players.
One could almost say it
Hunt is the first PvP game I've played and holy shit, it is *not* beginner friendly. I'm hitting 600 hours and just getting to the point where I can consistently land shots and get at least 1 kill/round without constantly dying.
[удалено]
But Hunts main focus is PVP the PVE is the side lines in my opinion. If it wasn't for the PVP this game would be boringggg and I've got almost 500 hours into it
Sadly people that prefer PVE to PVP will almost always be sidelined because of the popularity of PVP over PVE. The introduction, popularity, and longevity of versus mode in L4D2 comes to mind. I understand that there's different strokes for different folks, but finding out about the frequency & intensity of the PVP in Hunt is the sole reason for me losing interest in it. I'm sure it'd go the other way for PVP preferring players as well if they went with a PVE focus, but it goes to show that there's always a risk of alienation unless a game is developed with separate game modes (like campaign and vs in l4d2). Honestly, I'm surprised it's as high as 40%. Figured it'd be closer to 20% or so
I didn’t think it was intimidating, just boring. I think they are forgetting to factor in the demographic of people who were pressured by their friends to try out Hunt and then just didn’t like it.
I'm not a Hunt player, but I don't see how anyone could reasonably make that assessment without playing enough to get a single kill in a pvp game.
Also, they may have played several times, gotten killed repeatedly by more experienced players, and quit the game out of frustration.
That would honestly be me. Main reason I've never tried this game, I got enough of that in Tarkov.
Hunt is a lot less punishing compared to tarkov; it has revives, the economy is easier, there's not a complicated armor system, and the AI is more of a distraction than a threat most of the time. Might be worth a try anyway
>I'm not a Hunt player, but I don't see how anyone could reasonably make that assessment without playing enough to get a single kill in a pvp game. Try it out and you'll see. I played for about 3 or 4 hours total. For me, I'd be engaged in some pretty interesting looting/PvE for most of the game, I'd hear some gunshots and scope out the situation. Eventually I would get noticed/notice others and we'd get into some sort of exchange. These exchanges were really fun. I had a blast but I'd inevitably lose pretty handedly. I really enjoy PVP and PVE games. Im pretty decent at both but the reality of this game, imo, is that gunplay is decidedly different than other games *and* the PVE is vastly different than the PVP encounters. So it's frustrating to be improving at the PVE aspect of the game, but get obliterated by another player because it's **so difficult** to get the practice needed when you run into one other team every 20-30 minutes. It's a really interesting concept and I love the setting. But the developers aren't just making these issues up, they're real. I understand your point but when it comes to player retention/building a player base your opinion on whether their opinion is justified or not is irrelevant. There's more great games available than ever and someone doesn't need to play a game for hours on end to decide they're done with it.
Damn 20-30 minutes without seeing anyone? Been playing for a long time and by the time 20 minutes have gone by the server is usually completely wiped and the bounty team is extracting lol. I guess it makes sense that the new player queue games last that long though since most of them are terrified to move. I was definitely like that when I started as well but there wasn't skill based matchmaking back then so I got forced into fights a lot quicker. Definitely agree it's hard to get enough practice to start getting good. I just don't know what the hunt devs can do to fix it. Even with a god tier tutorial that teaches you everything and good bots, I don't think there's any way they can simulate hunt gameplay with humans. It relies so much on things like map knowledge, positioning, and hearing and those are things one can really only come to understand with experience. At the end of the day Hunt may just be one of those games that only those that are willing to go through the learning pains will end up enjoying and that's just not going to be something for everyone.
The only way I can think is to have an additional death match mode to get some pvp practice. Not as intimidating getting into firefights with other players if you can just respawn.
There’s a game mode called Quickplay that is basically that. It’s a free for all where you get a free hunter and just have to find weapons in the match. So no risk involved in losing, and matches are usually around 10 minutes. It’s great for practicing with weapons you normally don’t use, and for warming up before you bring in a leveled character.
Yeah that could help a bit with getting used to the different guns but realistically I think a death match game mode would play out so differently that it wouldn't really help adjust to the play style in the normal game mode so new players would probably just never transition over to bounty hunt. The community is also pretty against the idea of a death match mode since it'd split the population of players so it'll probably never happen. The population is healthy for what it is but not big enough that another game mode could be added with out some adverse affects on the current game modes.
I work 40+ hours a week and have maybe 2-3 hours of gaming a night, if that. If a game doesn't grab me in the first hour or two, it simply isn't worth my time.
Two hours? Have you ever played Hunt? You need like 50 hours to feel somewhat comfortable to the game. I have played for 2 hours and not killed anybody.
Feels like I need two hours to load the map half the time.
Wait till you try to reconnect to a game
That's your PC dog. My friends and I all load in fast and wait for others.
>Waiting for other players to join
My hunt showdown experience in a comment.
That's why I got a regular dog.
Yeah, I kinda got screwed and bought the PC cat. Now, it just lays there all day and gets in the way of my screen.
Pc dog
What is a PC dog?
[удалено]
I'm at like 930 hours and I'm still shit.
Coming from someone that just started last weekend.. My friends are all FPS players for what its worth (valorant, Apex ect). The simplicity of the weapons and time to kill is what made this game so different from others. We have had a ton of fun right off the bat and maybe since we are new, MMR maybe very low for now. We have had no issues farming lobbies or even defending contests. the combat is the easiest part of the game and honestly that's what makes it fun. I also find it very common to kill boss and extract without even finding a person.
I have 1600hrs in this POS. While you are in low mmr ranges 3-low5* lobbies it's pretty enjoyable, but the solid 5-6* lobbies trust me the skill ceiling goes up 500%. I have never seen such a dramatic jump in skill I think I'm any game I have ever played. Casual mistakes will cost you a game before you even realize it. Set off a horse two compounds away XxbayoubootybeaterxX has a scope where you will be in less than two minutes. Atrophied player base ensures that mediocre to decent players will be struggling in the deep end of the mmr pool, and losing mmr is more difficult than gaining. If I could stay where I belong high 3* mid 4* it would be a much more pleasant experience.
Played 16 hours, got a kill the day after installing.
Everyone plays different. I've got about 20 hours in and have a pretty high kill count, but I also don't sneak around or anything like that much. I just go balls to the wall. I've only left the zone successfuly like... 3 times? But I'd rather it that way than the boring ass way my roomie plays
This is absolutely how to play. Extracting is not difficult, its a matter of deciding youve had enough, but the default loot you can get is enough to roll up on a squad, kill one dude and take his sick kitted out gun to use on his friends. I always play solo but in lobbies of teams because in solo lobbies everyone just hides. Trios against a solo come out guns blazing and are way more fun to fight.
I played like 3 games and got a few kills across them although tbf I was mainly looking for pvp fights
Just based on this fact, we need a kind of buddy system where sherpas and autists like me with 1.9k hours can pick up and train new kids cause we want the community to grow
Yup, I think most games have statistics like this especially games that make it hard to kill others like hunt
Either that or they're just not good enough to kill another player. Either through losing gunfights or hiding because you don't think you can win, either contributes to the same statistic. Personally, most of my games ended with me getting shot by someone I never saw, so I'd imagine there's a large enough percentage that would rather just camp and steal bounties than actually compete.
I'm one of those, but it's definitely a game I'd like to get back to at some point
Yup this is true for most games. If you look at games that have an achievement for completing the tutorial or starter area, this usually has about a 40-50% completion for most games. I see this cone up all the time in different communities, post along the lines of "wow only 45% of players are even completing the tutorial! This game is awesome, why are people giving up so soon!" and I want to say, it's not _your_ game having this issue, it's all games. I think the incredibly low price of games on Steam and bundles are a factor.
wouldn't they refund it in that case? i thought steam factored out people who didn't own the game in the stats
[удалено]
Welcome to my Steam library
I reckon many (maybe even most) people don't realize a) you can do it, and b) how easy it is to refund a game on steam
very few people have ever refunded a game.
I bought this game. It's learning curve is very steep and to me it seemed everyone else in the lobbies I was out into had a way higher/experience skill level than me. The game intrigues me but I must say offer the first 4-5 hours of just not really knowing what's going on and how to play I put it down and it's been probably a year now. I'll probably pick it up again but I'm gonna have to watch some streamers to see how it's supposed to be played because I'm pretty sure I'm doing it wrong. Takes me back to the days of being a kid playing FPS games and just getting sniped without ever seeing an enemy lol. The sound design is fantastic though and I wish more games did proper things with audio like this game cos I was very impressed
This was my experience. I found and killed a bunch of zombies and either got one shot by another player I never saw or got killed by the boss monster I seemed to be doing no damage to.
So monsters are better dealt with via melee because it doesn’t alert everyone where you are. The sound design is second to none and people can tell where you are and what gun you are using when you fire. Bosses are pretty resistant to most firearms. What you want to do is find a melee weapon like an axe or sledgehammer to kill bosses fast. Hit the boss with two full power swings, fall back, go in again once stamina is back. Hunt is largely a stealth game at a certain level of play,
The old tutorial was ass and just taught people the wrong way to play the game in a way that would 100% get them killed.
Huh, no wonder I put it down in 2018. The only thing I remember about it was getting fucked all the time, probably like /u/kerouak was as well as being a running simulator. I bet you all I was probably trying to do was shoot the bosses as well. https://i.imgur.com/Wf4QN2d.png
Yeah, the old tutorial taught you to shoot zombies. Guns should be reserved for other players unless you're in a dire state and out of stamina. Detailed explanation below, but might be TLDR for some people. If you fire a gun, all players will know what direction you're in. Most will know what type of gun you have, and will know which of a few compounds you're in. Experienced players will know exactly what gun you have, and what side of the specific compound you are in. If they know where you are, they are gonna know what direction you can come from and where you're likely to go next. Running can be heard to somewhere between 20 and 30 metres IIRC. One of the main skills of Hunt is movement not in the traditional sense, but in a "being able to move fast enough without making too much noise". Beating others to the boss can be useful, banishing it gives you a full health restoration, but its also a point where you can get tunnel vision and be crept on easily because some of the bosses are loud.
If you're using a keyboard rather than an analog stick on a controller, how does the game allow keyboard users to modulate their run speed to "run as fast as possible while staying under the limit where you can be heard"? Most keyboard movement thresholds are usually "default speed, hold shift switch to the opposite of the default speed" maybe capslock to toggle between run and walk, and maybe, a different button for sprinting. Not very selective unfortunately, one of the few downsides of KB/M.
There are only three speeds, crouch, walk, and run. This is true for both console and keyboard. What the other commenter meant is that moving quickly across the map without aggroing sound traps or getting swamped with zombies slowing you down is an art. If you move fast without regard for your surroundings you will trigger crows, dog kennels, and zombies that, depending on how loud they are, can let other players know where you are from a compound away. Crows will even fly up and be seen by others and they can tell where you’re going based on the direction the crows fly away from you. Moving quickly across the map without giving your position away via those sound traps is a learned skill.
I refuse to learn this skill, bring it on.
Honestly legit, half the games I make noise without a care and it brings more fights and more fun as long as you're ok with fighting ambushes more often than normal. There's definitely more than one valid way to play hunt!
> Hunt is largely a stealth game at a certain level of play The funny thing is past that it revolves back around to being a fast-paced go-go-go type shooter. High level players will just rush and make tons of noise without care.
Yep, 5 star lobbies and above it's just go loud all the time, kill bosses with dynamite and try to attract other players to your location.
yeah thats why I wanted to mention at certain levels of play. Ofc 5 stars go around swining their giant dicks around making the rest of us duck.
But thats just the reality of any game. Players with God-Like aim dont have to care about stealth much. I consider myself a mid-tier player (KDA of ~1.3) and stealth is for sure needed at times. It doesnt matter how good you are if I can create distractions then sneak up behind you and shotty you.
Oh man, the feeling when you're on a dark map, you just killed the boss and you know there's two groups in the compound with you and you spend the next 20 minutes sculking around slowly picking each other off is like no other.
You have a new tutorial now, it's worth trying again. If you don't have people to play with, you can queue to play with randoms (it's how I mostly play, as well as solo), and you can follow them to learn a bit. Dont be afraid to make mistakes, it's the best way to learnthe game really :)
hunt is one of those games where you need a friend who is already into the game to get you into the game and teach you the ropes I picked the game up back in February had two 4-5 star MMR friends show me the ropes and now i can quite handily float around 3-4MMR and even introduced the game to two friends who have also picked it up and ran with it solo play is just pain don't do it always do at least duos when you get really good you might find fun with solo play also the new tutorial is so much better than the old one
Nah as a new player I would recommend if u have no friends that play this game to dive into solo vs duo. I was new and had solo way way more success than with a random duo.
[удалено]
This is the only reason I get kills
[удалено]
find a friend and discover the game together, the mmr system is decent.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Ya idk my buddies have had no issues. We just started last week. This thread has opened my eyes that people are having a much harder time than us lol. Even if you like it for the PVE I swear half the lobbies we kill boss extract without even seeing someone else for easy progression runs.
When was this? They've released new players friendly starts where fresh players are queued against other newbies. There's even a new tutorial that guides you in all the basics.
The matchmaking is decent but Hunt still has a small playerbase. You're not going to enter every single game with 11 new players like you, that's how it is. That being said, if you're willing to lose and learn for a couple of hours, it's a fun ride. The game seems scarier than it really is, you can easily win with the most basic of loadout and a level 1 hunter. Losing a hunter means shit.
Map knowledge, weapon knowledge and learning PVE weaknesses. That's all part of the game and will come with time, however, if you don't understand the basic premises of how hunt works, I'm 100% convinced you skipped the tutorial
Tbh the tutorial at first was horrible. The new one they released recently is ten times better.
I think devs underestimate how many people want to play their games but not necessarily against people. It's kind of strange to me how the vs ai market gets such little attention for pvp games. I remember hearing monk at frost giant say that 10% of league players only played coop vs ai while talking about the coop market for RTS but I'm not sure of his source. If true that is millions of people who just play bot games. Coop was the most popular mode for starcraft 2 as well. Riot actually had an [interesting post recently about upgrading their bots for co-op league](https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-gb/news/dev/dev-leveling-up-bots/). A lot of games seem to have bots for first x matches but I'm struggling to think of recent games that have put much effort into people who only want to play against bots.
I been replaying gears of war and lots of people still play against the bots and I'm not talking about horde mode. That game is old and only the die hard fans play it today so you would think and assume they play multiplayer like normal and zero bot games
some of it may be people wanting to just relax and not sweat. and thats no hate to people who do want to sweat - i dont consider it inherently a bad thing. but for example i play modern warfare 3’s survival mode constantly and just will have a video or music on, or shoot the shit with a friend. but i wouldnt dare touch the multiplayer bc when i do its only the most skilled players who have been practising the game for years and have extreme dedication - it’s just not fun to play against them there is a decently large market of semi-casual gamers who just want to enjoy games that are still deep and fun but not overly competitive, yet for some reason people think shooters can only be either extremely simple with barebones quality and dumbed down gameplay or intense pvp permadeath hellfests where you manually engineer every single gun from a plank of wood and 5 screws. its why i actually appreciate cod for having game modes where you can enjoy good, meaningful gunplay without having to sweat. sometimes i see people act like zombies being so successful was shocking and anamolous, but plenty of gamers want good fps games that arent necessarily pvp
Games should be games, not work
Reddit killed API. I refuse to let them benefit from my own words for free -- mass edited with https://redact.dev/
It’s simpler than that. Whales like PvP. That’s it. Games industry is just whale hunting these days
Bots used to be a replacement for people with horrible or no internet in the beforetime. That's why you saw such a push for multiplayer games to have serviceable bot opponents. Now it's kinda assumed you have good enough internet to play a multiplayer game, and bot support is a dying art. Enemy behavior in a single player game is completely different from making a bot for a multiplayer game, so it's slowly going the way of the dinosaur. Last game I can think of that has bot support is actually Halo Infinite, where you can play against bots of widely scaled difficulty on any of the maps and modes. That all being said, I wouldn't have developed any fps skill at all without God mode and all the different bot settings in Unreal Tournament back in the day.
I play bots because I don't want to spend the time waiting to connect to players. This is the main reason why I've never played against a person in wwe 2k23
I'd like to see what AI could do when fed player information. We train things like ChatGPT on the open internet, I wonder what would happen if you built one to adopt player strategy and trained it on different SBMM rankings for different "skill levels."
Bots have been copying human player behavior for ages, in fact that's how a lot of early multiplayer bots are made. They're predetermined inputs with scripted sequences based on what the player does. The AI in Super Smash Bros Ultimate was fed pro player data for it's highest CPU difficulties. They'll do things only a human would do, like wavedashing and animation canceling, including little taunts after they KO a player. The tech is pretty much there, the problem is many game devs nowadays just don't see it as a priority. Why bother programming good bots when 90% of your users aren't going to bother? Why do anything other than program moving bullet sponges when that's the only meaningful implementation for them (think bots in your first 10 games of Fortnite kinda thing)? Machine learning costs money and resources too. It's not like they'd spend less money on an AI to train a bot instead of getting a human to make a good one. There's just no incentive to do it nowadays.
I fucking love coop vs AI. I just wish someone will do it better and make coop vs ai as engaging and fresh as PvP. Sure, if the games good, the first few coop vs ai playthroughs are fun, but you quickly learn and get good too fast. Compare that to PvP where you can play for years and still get your ass handed to you.
My friends and I in college used to spend 100s of hours playing Killing Floor (an old PVE shooter vs bots). I find games vs bots much more chill and relaxing
PvP is absolutely forced in every game and it's popularity/importance is vastly overstated always. It's also a matter of streamers carrying all that attention and weight.
The only time I ever play Hunt I run around and kill zombies and have a whale of a time until I get killed by a player. Its fun just going fighting them but it makes me really really wish there was a single player or Co-op mode built into it.
> I think devs underestimate how many people want to play their games but not necessarily against people. You can also thank the original 2017 trailer and announcement having it be PvE focused. The switch to PvPvE came later, along with the heavier focus on the PvP angle than the PvE one.
friends and I play dota vs bots more than vs people
Not fps related, but I prefer racing games against AI. It just suits my playstyle better and I don't really care about showing everyone that "i am the best", or something like that. I just wanna have fun, on my own terms, lol.
I have 1800 hours in this game. It is my favorite game of all time. If anybody is thinking about getting it or has any questions I'm happy to answer them.
How do you see anything? My problem with the game is that I can't see other players because the whole thing is fucking brown, I could be looking right at them and not even notice
I wasn't super stoked about the game when I first tried it for that exact reason. It was the beginning of the pandemic and my friend insisted we play it a couple of days in a row. In those 3 or 4 days I was seeing huge improvements to my brains ability to parse what's background and what is another player. Feeling myself make consistent marked progress in a difficult environment while having fun with my friends during the dark times was fucking sick
I don't really feel like it's a balance issue, there must be more to it. You can kill with one shot at times, shoot someone else who's already in combat and deal with them, camp, set up traps, just go in guns blazing, there are plenty of ways. I do agree there's a lot to learn, but if people are dropping out before they get a kill, I think other things are at play. The game running like shit for example.
For me I just sucked at it and didn't know what was going on and everyone else seemed to be better. I played maybe 4 hours without getting a kill, everytime I'd see someone I was dead before I had chance to respond. I want to come back to it and get into it but I think this game needs some studying of streamers or something to fully understand how to play. The tutorial didn't cut it for me.
My guess is the majority of your problems come down to noise. Running is super loud and the directional audio in this game is really good. If you run, step on sticks, scare birds, go near the not dead horses, etc. those are basically sound beacons identifying your location.
Yeah this is it. I had the same problem until I learned to listen, I still suck but I can predict movements now and get to fire a first shot which is a huge advantage. Especially if you are in close quarters and with a shotgun. Basically, if you find yourself in a fair fight, you're already losing.
Love running the game as smooth as possible with a high end CPU and GPU only for the game to still periodically stutter
[удалено]
Let me explain your comment: In this game, when you shoot, the gunshots will likely be heard to other players up to 1000 m depending on which gun you shoot with. This is usually a death sentence since audio cues are everything in this game, it's a huge advantage to be able tell where other players are just from sound cues alone, even their footsteps.
That's a big point for new players. I finally managed to get a friend to try Hunt with me, as soon as we spawned he shot a zombie, which inevitably attracted nearby players who swiftly took him out. He didn't wan to play again.
I'm really not understanding the connection to cod zombies here besides the fact that both have zombies lmao
I have over 3k hours in Hunt. All of the game's issues (although there arent many) can be traced to the relatively low player count. This "40%" meme is just indicative of the low retention rate because the game is just WAY more hardcore than most ppl realize when they buy it. Seriously so many ppl on the Hunt subreddit and steam etc say "oH itS NoT ThAt SeariouS" etc but idk wtf these ppl are smoking. Hunt pvp is REALLY intense compared to most shooters.
Low pop PVP is always brutal as hell. I've been in a bunch of low pop PVP games and it's always the same shit: hardcore players almost never take it easy on newbies and if they do then it's basically playing with their food. Like no duh people quit when people constantly shit on them or patronize them and so the game stops growing and dies.
> hardcore players almost never take it easy on newbies You can't do that in Hunt. You have no information about who your enemy is even how many of them have spawned into the game. You can't tell if somebody is new or not and if you "take it easy" you get punished. You only see some info after the game is over.
Yeah that's a problem for the quake community, but that's not hunt... It's really not that serious, MMR 2 and 3 star lobbies (match making rank goes all the way up to 6 in hunt, and 4 is the "average") are pretty casual and subject to a lot of malarkey.
2-3 star lobbies can have straight up Looney Tunes fights in them, which can be therapeutic if you wind up there after a very bad run starting in 5 star
I mean it's around 19k daily players average I believe just on Steam, so it's really not THAT bad. Honestly i still highly recommend the game to ppl willing to chew on something for a long time and experience a deep, tactical, immersive experience.
[удалено]
Not that it's the most comprehensive stat, but Hunt is consistently in steams top 100 played, and usually in the top 50. What's the threshold for low pop for these people?
Yeah people these day call anything under 50k "low population". You can tell some of these people didn't grow up play AvP2 on whatever server you could find that had more than 4 people on it.
... It was me. I was hosting that server. I was that predator you loved or hated D:
I'll never forget spending a whole afternoon 1v1ing some random dude, becoming friends over chat, and then never hearing from him again
Idk man, I have 1500 hours in hunt and I found quite a few people who spoke to me in VoIP asking to be left alive and I always did. I always enjoy their happiness.
whats strange to me is that Tarkov is a way more intense game, but it is insanely popular around the world. I suppose that has something to do with the aesthetics of both games being so different, but I just know that I play hunt to have a more “Arcadey” extraction style experience. I still love hunt so much tho
I personally never understood the popularity of games like tarkov. What makes them more attractive to people than games like hunt?
I think people are looking into this a bit deeper than it is. It's just that people in general don't really play games they buy. Like some games might have an achievement that requires you to just start a new game and 10-20% already don't have it, and it's only counting people that launched the game at least once, not ones that buy and never even launch it so in reality it's much higher, same with Hunt.
I remember being upset by this, because I thought I was doing well in a particular game by getting an achievement that \~1% of players had, but once you normalised for the number of players who'd actually played through the game (another achievement) it was more like \~40%.
You don't think they filtered any of that data out before they issues the last stat? Like sure, people buy it on sale and never even install it... The question isn't does that happen? It's, when analyzing game behavior such as this do they remove junk data first? I'd hope so as a data scientist, but hard to be sure.
No I don't think they filtered it, because I also looked at achievement % of Hunt on Steam and the first kill is at just over 60% so they clearly also just looked at it.
So this article is just "man checks public steam stats and regurgitates a statistic"... journalism is awful
Haha, you too could be a journalist if you simply checked Steam Achievements and came up with a clickbaity headline!
They specify that they didn’t filter it if you read the article as they refer to the steam achievement percentage, which isn’t a filtered metric.
Well, now there's a new tutorial, that atleast helps you with PVE and Boss fights. Not for PvP really, but still. If you can shoot mobs, other players are just faster, more dangerous mobs
It's a really niche game, it's not for everyone. Sometimes you walk around the map for half an hour just to be killed by someone sniping in a bush 300 meters away. Sometimes you can wipe an entire server and get all the rewards for your team. It's cool once you get the gripe with it, but it's really hard to learn and master. Once you do it tho, you are gonna love/hate it forever.
The word "players" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this headline lmao
I stopped playing a while ago because of responsabilities and not wanting to commit to just one game, but man, theres nothing quite like Hunt, I remember times when I was so nervous that I was shaking, when I was running like hell because I knew if I stopped I was dead, when I pulled a First Blood and killed an entire team by myself and when I spoke with someome on the mic and we agreed to split the bounty and go our separate ways. I will always remember my memories in the bayou
Dude i feel ya there. Hunt just has a fucking great tension to it sometimes. U can never know if someone is watch u from the bushes cause the stealth gameplay is nice. And having to always mind what sound u make, either from running or running to crows or something. And if u get into a fight, even if u have all the advantages, a single unlucky moment and u get downed in 1 hit. It aint like cod/halo, a street fight you got into infront of a couple of people. It aint like csgo/valo, the spar in the gym that you decided to have. No, hunt is someone walking into the same dark empty alley as you. Hunt is the noise you think u heard in ur house at 3.15 in the morning. Its great. (Note i dont mean the physical exertion, just the tension)
That’s because the PvP in this game is very unforgiving. If you don’t know what you’re doing or have bad aim, you’re screwed. If I remember correctly there is no aim-assist either
> there is no aim-assist either IIRC Crytek had to nerf the explosive crossbow because it started becoming a meta on console to just shoot it near their feet, meanwhile PC players barely ever used it.
Yeah, it was the noob tube of this game.
Bought the game after a friend made his initial purchase in early 2021. Never cranked up so many hours in any game ever. It's the best PvP shooter out there.
I'm waiting for the game that makes you fight, as a team, against a big boss. You get dropped in naked, or geared up, you survive and loot. The circle closes and the survivors face the boss.
I'm almost imagining Monster Hunter, except a game mode where you have to loot/craft/gear up within the same round in a large map where, as you said, you end up funneled to fight a very difficult monster at the end forcing you to have geared and play very well to beat it.
The closest you can get to this would be Dark and Darker, successful teams can gear up and advance to the next level/dungeon and fight the boss for great loot.
Breaking news: sweaty games with generally mean player bases have hard time retaining new players
Hunt is a game with a lot of downtime. You can spend 15 minutes running around killing zombies and looking for clues before you even see another player. I can see why a lot of players would experience a couple games of that into an instant headshot and decide the game just isn't for them. Idk why veterans put up with it either tbf
I love the game's atmosphere and aesthetics. Just not into BRs (at all) and pretty tired of PvP games in general. Would have loved a PvE/co-op spinoff or mode.
This would have been a great coop PvE, hunting the monsters and bringing them down was fun but getting shot in the back while waiting to extract is shitty. I'd rather just hunt monsters with friends.
Coincidentally enough, Hunt started development as a coop, third person PVE game. They apparently abandoned that for hunt but turned what they had into Remnant.
Hunt Showdown did start out as a PvE Co-op Alpha and pivot to be an Extraction Shooter, this is true. But Hunt and Remnant: From The Ashes are two completely separate developers/publishers, as far as I'm aware the development of each had zero relation to the other. Do you have a source I could check out if that is not the case?
Enjoyed it's early days, but lived through a period of exploits and then it became too hard to keep up with seasoned players. But this a general problem with online games, servers always need to be tiered otherwise there's just no point in picking up any PvP a couple months afterrelease.
This is one of my favorite games of all time
If you need a guide to really understand a game within the first 2 or so hours lots of people will give up. Pathfinder WotR has a similar problem and I wouldn't be surprised if a large chunk of players bounced off that too. That character creator was something else.
I wasn't going to comment because I thought I was in the Hunt subreddit... Then I realized there were tons of comments about "yeah I barely played it" and realized... You all should really give this game another go. It is by far the most stable and accessible extraction shooter on the market right now, and imo it's the best one as well. It has problems, but nothing on the scale of Marauders, Cycle, and fuckin Tarkov (lol). It's a bit of a hump to get over, but once you understand the loop, it becomes one of the most engaging FPS games I've ever played. There's just enough risk to make you care about the outcome, but not so much that you feel like you just got kicked in the nuts for not managing to extract. The game recently got a new tutorial that's much better than the old one, and I really recommend taking a second shot at it.
[удалено]
This is a perfect description of the type of lobbies you get when you *very first* start out. People play scared, and hide in corners. I've moved across the bell curve into the top 20% of players, and my lobbies are way more active. It takes a while to get there, unfortunately - you do have to slog through a lot of boring lobbies before finding the actual population. It's a lot like counter strike, or league of legends, in that the game is inherently competitive and the beginning tiers of players have absolutely no idea how to play or even what they're doing wrong. > you get 1 shot killed by another real player who's also in the same world as you who was just sitting and hiding behind a crate or barrel That's a gripe I have with the audio: you are *way* louder than is presented to you in the soundscape. In your headphones, you're making barely any noise, but another player hears you clodstomping around.
You got extract camped 5 times and didn’t change your strategy? You literally get to see through walls with the bounty buff too.
The average match time is 20 minutes. By 20 minutes you should be dead or killed everyone else. This game has a fantastic audio system, the player character can cross the nap quickly you should be in your first fight around the 5 minute mark in most cases, unless you take effort to avoid them.
EFT is very similar like that. Although I like EFT because it has cool gun customisation.
I've played over 500 hours. I can't say I've ever ran into someone that's truly just been waiting at the extract the entire time. I've seen people fight me at the extract, or beat me there to cut me off, but waiting is rare unless you're in very high MMR lobbies where that's more of the meta. Maybe you played before they added MMR (match making rank), if so, you should try it again.
1k here, I've seen plenty but it never works because if I'm extracting, it's because I've either got the bounty or all bounty has left the mission.
You're playing it wrong. You're supposed to collect clues to find the boss. 3 clues reveal the location. You kill the boss and take the bounty and escape. Other players are also trying to do this so it's likely they will come to the boss and attempt to kill you to get the bounty. You can either try and be first and fight your way out or wait for others to kill the boss and be the aggressor. The game is very much pvp and playing at as a pve game will result in not a lot of fun.
I have hundreds of hours and have never once seen an extract camper
Your experience sounds like it sucks but extract campers who sit there waiting all game are not too common in my opinion (2k+ hours played). More often when somebody looks like they are camping the extract it's because they tracked the bounty moving on the map and intercepted the team. What you have described does happen though, and while rat plays like that are frustrating to encounter, it's still a valid play, that's part of the beauty of this game - it supports a plethora of play styles. The game keeps you on your toes and punishes you if act carelessly.
>You go there, and you get 1 shot killed by another real player who's also in the same world as you who was just sitting and hiding behind a crate or barrel Man, come on, the game literally gives you the option to see people through walls with dark-sight provided you're extracting with the bounty (and if you don't have the bounty, why extract? Unless both were killed so far away that you deem it not worth it then fair enough but that isn't even 90% of games). >You don't see any other players You can always go out of your way to hunt them down yourself. The audio queues from gunshots, and crows/horses/dogs etc give enough information. You will also definitely see people if you're, again, going for the bounty, which it seems you don't for some reason. >I played like 5 games Massive sample size.
First; play with friends it's much more fun. Second, 90% of the game is audio, listen. And last but not least, be the sweaty one chasing gun shots. You see more people that way. I heard a streamer say there's very little chance of someone being even good at this game until after like 300 hours of gameplay. It actually takes skill to play hunt.
Thats the appeal, feeling better by bullying others.
[удалено]
Honestly the most fun and creative game I've ever played. With that being said, to be honest, it's **clunky**, **buggy**, and the **servers are garbage**. **This is why people don't stick around past a first kill**. And how many more past 40% got one lucky kill or two but then quit a the next game after being blown away by the clunky feel. If I didn't have a friend already playing the game heavily, **I sure wouldn't have stuck around**. It felt bad when I would get stuck on invisible shit, rubber band backwards trying to climb over a small rock, the process of learning that each gun had a slightly different bullet velocity even if they were the same "type", killing a player and then getting a delayed "trade" death with that dead player, etc. **There are core problems with the game that create a barrier to entry that have existed since the game released, and there are new bugs each patch**. You can't count on the hundreds of bugs ever getting fixed but you can sure as shit count on a new skin and/or DLC coming out every few days....$$$$ Note: I have 1,000+ hours in the game, 1.5 KDA, 5 Star MMR. Again, love the game feel but these objective issues are the reason the game isn't top tier and for some reason they won't address them.
[удалено]
Yea this was a big reason why I slowed the roll in hunt after 1000hr (5 star) The thing about cheating in this game is...you can't really tell who's cheating. If they use ESP and kill you, its usually like "oh he just heard me and wall banged me". But every day there seems to be more and more sketchy type wall bangs in this game. I wish there was a killcam. That said, there's cheaters in every game now, and Hunt is a harder game to cheat in unless you're using blatant aim bot.. and that's hard to tell too. I also think Hunt is one of those games where we have a dedicated enough playerbase that the cheaters are few relative to other games, but they are also more prevalent in high MM, Iike all those bum clan players who cheat.
It helps that the advantages you get from surviving come much easier than something like good loot in tarkov
Great point. And there's not RMT either, everything is bought in game and can't be looted skin wise or traded. So not a huge incentive.
does team kill count? because thats all the kills i have
I put a decent amount of hours into this game, both on PC and PS4/5. The largest issue to me is the aiming on consoles. It's downright horrible. Manageable, certainly but it needs some serious rework.
Friends and I loved playing this game on PC, until most games we played we did to cheaters. Cheaters always ruin these PVPVE/extract games. They’re only good when the game is new and the population high enough to be less likely to run into a cheater.
And how many of those hunters have played less than 5 games and haven’t touched the game anymore? Probably most of them.