Hunters,
With the end of the year fast approaching, let's look over the results of our latest survey that went over Web of the Empress.
With this survey, we included multiple opportunities for you to write in your more direct feedback, which many of you did. But even with the increase in open-ended questions, we noticed that the completion rate for the survey went up from 77% to 86% this time. We are glad to see many of you completed the survey despite it being slightly longer than usual, so we'd just like to extend our gratitude to you.
While we cannot promise to have as many open-ended questions in our future surveys, we will try to strike a balance to have you write your thoughts on the items we think can have the most impact on production.
But as always, thank you for completing this survey. You and your feedback help us shape what's in store for the future of Hunt: Showdown 1896. Let's dive right in.
Current Status
We started this with Judgement of the Fool as a temperature check, and we will continue to do so for all upcoming Event surveys. As you can see, 80% of players felt the game right now was an enjoyable experience. A sharp increase from 69% after the last Event.
From your comments, we understood there were many factors in this, many of which we will go into further detail about below. We are glad that more of you are enjoying this update, and we hope to see this trend continue.
Web of the Empress Battle Pass and Event
We were happy to see the ratings continue to rise from the last Event. Web of the Empress had the second highest in terms of overall Battle Pass ratings—a sharp contrast to how we started at the beginning of this year. While all cosmetics either remained consistent or increased ratings, Equipment Animations did see a drop from the previous Event. We are currently looking into the reasons behind this sway.
We are also happy to see that the speed of the progression within the Battle Pass was within the right tempo for 58% of you. While 28% of players did report that it was slightly fast, upon further investigation we noticed 75% of those players played Hunt more than 10 hours a week. We will continue to experiment with the duration and progression speed of our Battle Pass into next year. We thank you for giving us the time and space to do so.
Tarot Cards
Tarot Cards had the highest number of satisfied responses across any feature we have released. We are happy that so many of you loved this new feature and had high praise for it. And as previously announced, because of your positive response, we are bringing back Tarot Cards for Update 2.6.
Let's dive into the balance of the Tarot Cards. Interestingly, The Magician and The Devil were the least liked cards, but for very different reasons. The Magician was seen as the weakest card and by a large margin. We understand this was largely due to niche usage in very specific locations, and looking at our data, it is the least used Tarot Card. The Devil, conversely, was seen as the second strongest Tarot Card. We understand the combination of this card with certain weapons made fights feel unfair to play against. However, its usage was in line with most of the other cards.
Compared to those two, The Empress and The World were by and far the most used Tarot Cards of the Event. Another point we are investigating is the Judgement card. While it is in the middle of the pack for rating and perceived balance, it is the 2nd least used Tarot Card by far.
During development, when we first started testing The Chariot, it was without any restriction. As you can imagine, it made extracting from Missions a hellish experience, as Extraction Points were flipped multiple times by multiple parties. So, through much iteration, we brought the power and impact of that Tarot Card to be more in line with the others.
Bileweavers and Bileweaver Nest
We are glad to see that the Bileweavers and Bileweaver Nest contributed to your enjoyment of your game. The AI team spent a lot of time testing their impact on combat.
Your difficulty rating closely mirrors what we saw from our internal playtests, with larger portions of solo players having more difficulty in fighting the Bileweavers, while teams largely had a more balanced experience.
While their damage numbers were perceived as balanced by almost two-thirds of the responses, their number of spawns and inconsistent hitboxes were more emergent problems. Both items are being investigated for the future, if they return. You never know—Bileweaver infestations are hard to stamp out. They are persistent and can come back with a vengeance, and you can only hope you have the proper equipment for it...fiery things, preferably.
The Bileweaver Nest was our first time experimenting with more randomized and dynamic layouts, and we are so happy to see it being received more positively by the community.
"Aesthetics" was a big positive, with a lot of positive feedback about how fresh and horror-centric the compound felt. We also heard some minor complaints about an increase in visual noise due to the nature of the material. This complaint—paired with the randomized layout—did make it harder to find items within the Bileweaver Nest. However, we felt this played more accordingly to design intention.
If you want to learn more about what went on behind the scenes…during development, we were debating about whether Bileweavers should hide when PvP action started at the Bileweaver Nest. Our initial feedback was PvP fights with the Bileweavers were very chaotic. We tried hiding them when PvP fights started, but after unconvincing results, we went back on the change. We understood that while this made fights at the Nest sometimes overwhelming, especially for new players, we did not want to make your experience at the compound too sterile.
In any case, we will keep innovating, iterating, and executing our ideas with your player experience in mind.
UI Changes
The lobby rework, matchmaking for a 3rd random player, and the addition of Traits in the gear screen saw some of our highest positive receptions. These features have been requested for a long time, and we are glad to see an overall trend towards more satisfying experiences with our UI. We hope that with further improvements planned for next year, we can continue to see more positive reception. However, for our next update, we are focusing on some of the beats mentioned in our roadmap recently.
Our lobby rework was teased back when Scorched Earth first launched, and we are happy to see that your gameplay loop outside of the Missions has been a smoother experience. This, along with adding our Traits to the gear screen, were directly aimed at reducing the number of screens players had to navigate between Missions. We apologize for all the frustration caused by the bugs of these new features. These should be fixed within our next update.
Just a note before we start wrapping up—let's talk about matchmaking for a 3rd player. This was a much-requested feature by the community. For most of this year, the number of Duos and Trio teams on PC has been at a similar number. But as we launched the update in late September, Trios have now created a gap above Duos. It is important to note that this is mainly for PC players. It is a completely different story for consoles, where Duos is by far the most popular type of team.
We have a lot more improvements in store for you, such as reducing redundant screens for the Hunter Roster, Legendary Skin paginations for the gear screen, a post-Mission summary redesign, and removing the “carousel-like" navigation from our Career and Store screens. We will try to get you these updates over the course of next year. You can check out the new features that are coming with Update 2.6 in our video here
Anti-Cheat and Cross-Play Perceptions
Now let's focus on the Anti-Cheat perceptions. 30% of you feel that you encounter a cheater once in every 10 or less Missions. Like our roadmap said, we banned 14,000 cheaters this year already. However, we did not want to bias your views prior to this survey, and it is clear that both items are much higher than we want them to be. Taking a look at the data, PC and console players have similar perceptions of the problem. We missed an opportunity to ask about your MMR and the game modes you play. Mainly to see if there was a difference in perception based on your skill level and which games modes you play. Regardless, Anti-Cheat measures are our top priority for 2026, as we want to ensure a fair playing field for all.
Now for the hotly debated topic of cross-play. We floated the idea of opt-in/out cross-play existing within our game. Like we said in our survey, we wanted to get a temperature check to see where the larger community was with this. While we predicted a polarizing response, we did not expect this to be so evenly matched. For the majority of the survey deployment, there were an equivalent number of responses that strongly liked and disliked this idea.
We have heard your feedback and know that you are divided by this idea. While it would pool more players together, it would fracture the pools more as some would opt in and some out. And those opting out could feel they are being punished more. A more favorable method of cross-play some of you suggested would be input-based matchmaking.
So what does this mean for our game? We will continue to investigate. In the future, we will make sure to check in with solutions to the problems you have commented on. We will prioritize finding a solution that satisfies all types of players in our community. Thank you all for your feedback on this matter. This is a feature that not everyone agrees on, and we want to make sure we are on the right page with your thoughts and opinions, every step of the way.
Other Miscellaneous Findings
When we asked about ranking our Times of Day, we wanted to confirm what we already suspected from the hard data. As expected, there is a stronger preference for conditions that provide more balanced competitive environments. And our more atmospheric conditions that impact audio/visuals were rated towards the latter half. This is also in-line with our telemetry data of leavers, as Fog is considered to have the most of them. In the graph below, the leftmost condition was the highest rank, and the rightmost was the lowest.
For our last and final point, we want to thank you all for your suggestions regarding our merchandise. You will be happy to know that most of the suggestions you provided are or have already been looked into. Keep an eye out on our shop and socials for info on when new merch will drop!
Conclusion
That is all for this dev blog, and as always, thank you for playing Hunt and always providing us with these invaluable insights. Some of you might be wondering where the results of the Cosmetics survey are—while we do not share the results of those surveys, please be assured that all your feedback is going directly to our art team. We also hope to see you in the bayou for Update 2.6. All surveys for that will happen next year. Until then, enjoy your winter, get ready for the horrors awaiting under the big top in Update 2.6, and have a happy new year.
Your Hunt: Showdown 1896 Team