This past weekend we had the first public playtest! Thanks to all who joined in to try it out :)
Personally I think it was a great success, we had some known players joining and some newer ones too.
Since the latest build I now track (GDPR compliant) some stats during gameplay which will help me identify problems in the game or balancing issues that could be improved. To start I only added some basic tracking such as how many rounds does a player play and how far does the player level up?
Steam already tracks how long you have the game open per session. But that interferes when the server is not always available and it brings the average down as new invitees open the game but find that the server is not online outside of playtest hours. So I had to add my own tracking so I could accurately track how long players play when they're actually playing on a server.
The Numbers
On both Saturday and Sunday we had about ~7 players active during the playtest times when I was online too. (from the 184 accounts who now have access) Often some people would leave and others would join. I think this is a good starting amount for the first tests, so the amount of critical bugs that can affect players is minimal.
Note: the next data is to be taken with a grain of salt due to "low" player numbers. But I still want to post these.
On Saturday the mean amount of rounds played per user was 13.57, which is quite high for some people just checking out a game. On Sunday this was a lower amount: 6.
The mean playtime on Saturday was a whopping 47 minutes and on Sunday 24 minutes. I'd also take this as a good start for a game that does not have a tremendous amount of content yet.
As for levelling, there is some drop-off from rank 2 to 9, but after that every player got to rank 16. After which there's a slow drop till rank 24, which is the highest rank someone got this weekend.
Some other cool facts:
- Most players came from Spain! Followed by Great Britain and Germany. All countries together where good for 39 people checking out the game at any given time.
- A total of 22 in-game errors got automatically reported which affected 8 users.
- Only 2 actual breaking issues where found.
- The test server only sent about 1gb of data throughout this whole month, and received 2.72gb of data. (moving, looking around, shooting etc. all sends out data)
Other feedback and improvements
Some things cannot be measured with data, here are some feedback items and things that could be improved:
- I think the default levelling speed is too slow, but the current 4x multiplier is too much. (The multiplier was added so you could level faster since the playtests were limited in time)
- It is quite hard to survive a full round as a hunter. Apart from some glitch spots I don't think it's achievable at this moment.
- The pacing of getting rewarded felt a bit off personally. Since at this moment you only get something after levelling up you need to play more and more rounds after each level for effectively the same "reward".
- Currently it feels like there is about an hour of content until you have seen it all (personal feeling). The rounds end within 5-8 minutes so you'll blast through maps quickly and all their weather conditions. Although there are more guns to unlock, they are currently unlocked towards the higher ranks.
- The zombie AIs felt a bit dumb when they walked past you towards their intended target, even if you shot them.
- The end of round timer feels too long, you're just sitting there for a minute waiting. Next to this list there obviously are several bugs / glitch spots that need fixing :)
What's Next
First, I've updated the roadmap!
Some features are more important to have earlier, so I shuffled some things around.
I'm going to get all the bugs fixed that were present in the playtest, and then move on onto some of the feedback points which will be improved through the features listed on the roadmap. Having the special equipment and perks will make sure you'll live longer as a Hunter (as a zombie too!). And during Phase 4 having weapon skins and challenges will grant you more rewards for not just levelling up.
Next Playtest
I'd like to check off some things from the roadmap before I can plan a new playtest, because I'm not sure how long they'll take. Ideally the new special equipment called The Sentry should be added, along with the perk system (with some perks) and to top it off the dismemberment and gore update!
I'm estimating 3 weeks to get this done with the fixes from this playtest. I'll write up another post when I'm confident about when it'll be done.
Thanks for reading! If you have any other questions feel free to drop them here or in the Discord server :).
- Rinke
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2179490/Ravenous_Horde/
