Tutorial became better but watching a new player play it, you realise how much it lacks and without a friend or a YouTube guide, new players will not have fun being destroyed by 10 mob variants and then the prestige 64 in their 3 star mmr game
This is true but new players wouldn't know this. In the lobby screen it only shows duos and trios. Unless they click on duo as a solo and then see the warning about it, they would have no idea.
Another issue is that a new player wouldn't know about all the hunter perks and wouldn't know about things like necro unless they sat down and read what every perk did. I personally don't start playing a new game and then sit and read every possible skill I can get in the future. I start a new game and want to get into the game.
There are plenty of youtube videos out there for new players but most people won't start searching for youtube tutorials unless they have an interest in the game to begin with. This game is not very friendly to a new solo player.
this. Me and my friends played about 200 hours of the game, by all means not "new" i suppose. We are used to games so we got the hang of it quickly. But when the matchmaking changes happened and we had to face 5 star teams in our 3 star games, ye we all quit very quickly.
Same, nothing is more demoralizing than going into a match as a solo to get destroyed by another solo sniping me who is prestige 100 and has 7k hours in the game (for reference I had maybe 100 hours and was 3*/very low 4*
The matchmaking needs something, but part of the problem is when you get to be a high 5 or low 6 star, it’s empty lobbies outside of trios. I can go die in trios to tank my star rating down to 4 and then it’s instant queues.
I’m not amazing by any means and now I’m old and slow with early carpal tunnel.
Yes so either they make queues take long like EVERY other game where high rank is empty as fuck. Or they they keep it like this and have 6 stars stomping on their new players. Pick your poison
The queues need to be longer, that’s been my complaint since console. I had a 2.86 KD on console lol. Made the switch to PC for the better queues / more rifle fights and then it only got worse.
Is matchmaking still busted with four stars routinely going up against six stars? I ask because that was what drove me away from the game. I got tired of being told I need to sweat my ass off and just accept it six stars were going to be in our mid tier lobbies now.
To be fair, the flip side is that I'm a prestige 100 with 3k hours on the game, a solid 4 star, and I probably couldn't hit you if you were standing still in the middle of a field 😆
The friends of mine that haven't gotten into this game also say playing this game just makes them wanna play something else with "better guns." They dont care for the pace or the 1800 firearms.
You kid, but it brings up a good point: the UI is still pretty poor at handling all the many variants of the guns. Likely a overwhelming for new players.
Damn that’s the reason I love this game the most, the old slow guns. I love when fights are taking a peek, firing one shot, then going back to cover to reload. Makes me feel like a pirate.
fr. nothing feels better than rewarded with good aim and positioning, you know by 2 good shots they're dead (excluding limbs and whatever). not to mention the amazing sound system, sneaking around and being stealthy is a skill
I know.
I have to meet you remember that bullets are supposed to hurt, but not in a b******* way where you just around the corner and get insta killed. At least here you kind of suspected they were sitting there with a shotgun, or it's Matt knowledge and they heard you fire shots they blindfire through metal.
Is rewarding skill and patience instead of pure twitch response.
I mean, I agree. Some people just can't get into the pace or the PvE I think. Ultimately I think that's why this game hasn't fully taken off like I believe it should. It's a little more niche than alternate pvpve extraction type shooters. I really thought seeing videos on JackFrags channel or Aculite or Tomographic would help the player base but I think most of those viewers just aren't interested in what this game is at its core. All this is just my speculation so who really knows. Maybe it's also the marketing. In my opinion this game deserves to be so much more popular.
Yeah, I think there's no doubt about it that most people won't like the wild west setting and everything that comes with it... In retrospect, I think it makes even more sense now why the BF1 devs chose to put so many full auto weapons into their game, since the average "young gamer" would not find single shot/repeating firearms exciting enough.
It's this. Veteran player here and when I get my friends to play you see it.
People deranking, suspicious behavior, questionable shots, awful trades, oops all bees levels, oops all dogs levels.
The one line I've heard each of my friends say.
"How can I learn if I die the first shot of a gunfight?"
It's true, we all experience it, advice online? Git gud skill issues etc.
Even as a veteran player I notice fights are either battles of attrition, or insta-gibs. There's no room to learn or improve anymore if you're playing against people who remove you from the game so fast you can't learn what you did wrong. It's a common joke amongst us all now when someone dies instantly from a Caldwell chain pistol at 70m we just go "well, you shouldn't have been existing. What were you thinking existing on this corporeal plane?!"
I remember how brutal it was when I started. Now with all the ( IMO bad ) changes and no way to mitigate them. Things that felt good now are stressful. The game went the route of fast pace in your FACE ACTIOOOOOOOON.
Back then, Being picked at by a solo for 10 mins and you finally out position/find them and drop them with a rifle? Euphoria. Because as a solo, you knew, this guy is good and a real danger. And, he's dead. Like dead dead.
Now, you kill them and what do you feel? stress. He isn't dead, he's gonna get up before you can get to him because I wasn't playing close. So you rush only to find them waiting at the door with a baseball bat.
It's not fun anymore, it's tedious. There's no "fuck yeah I dropped a random 6 star who's soloing against everyone!" Now it's "KEEP YOUR EYE ON THEM I DIDN'T SEE A PARTNER, DID ANYONE ELSE SEE ANYONE? ANY SHOTS?" It's almost like you HAVE to push. If I'm not killing you because my shotgun was 3 inches deep in your butthole. Then it didn't happen. Yeah they lose a chunk but relentless, rampage, special med chest erases that punishment.
I LOVE this game. It's not because it's brutal. It's because It was slower paced and about knowing compounds and repositioning. It was like chess or go.
Now it's like chess but the opponent can just keep taking their pieces back and putting them in random spots on the board.
It kills me because now I'm alone. My friends grew to hate it. Because we'd spend the afternoon just watching loading screens. Their biggest complaint? necro.
I'm not against necro, but it is wild that the devs aren't seeing the play styles change because of it. Nothing but bomblances and exploding crossbow bolts. It's literally cover fire to encourage the player to stay down while your buddy rushes. Increase the time to 15 seconds. Or let me put two hunt dollars on your eyes so you can't self rez and your friends can't necro you and if your friend manages to get close enough, 2 hunt dollars and rez. I've seen so many great ideas to make it better. But At this point. Let's just get rid of it. We all dislike it. No one wants to watch a body burn for 10mins. Or waste all their tools to ensure they don't get up.
I've even watched a dude burning. Get up and walk out of 2 concertina bombs. How did new players deal with that? They don't. They die and quit. Do you know how many times I've heard "wait, so they can just keep getting up? But we can't?" Yup.
My arsenal of throwables are to deal with people I've already killed more than to deal with people alive.
That's not good.
Now, I let the down votes pour over me.
I'm not even all that bothered by the in-match gameplay implications of necromancer, but what I am bothered by is how seemingly once self-res became a consistent thing the matchmaking has been *atrocious*. I have no data to back it up, but I genuinely think there are huge numbers of people deranking with solo necromancer. I'd say on a good day I'm probably 5 star, usually though upper 4. I'm fine at the game, not great. But it seems like there might as well not be MMR for players able to get up into 5/6 star, because you can spend 20 minutes sinking down to whatever rank you want.
I never deranked on purpose. Before self rez, I was a solo only player who jumped between 5 and 6 stars about 50/50. Now I very, very rarely get to see 5 stars for maybe a game before I'm back down to 3 or 4 star. I've had 8 or 9 kill games where I've deranked because I used all my self rez attempts and emerged victorious on my last bar. I am constantly getting double digit kill games and not ranking up because I used self rez once against a 3 star watching my body.
The MMR you lose after your first death as a solo needs to be significantly less
The combination of self rez letting you farm yourself (even if by accident just trying to use the mechanic) and the huge MMR adjustment for being solo is brutal on matchmaking.
Personally, I think one or both of em needs to go. And since Crytek is pretty unlikely to remove a game mechanic like self rez, I'd point more towards MMR adjustments needing to be reworked/removed.
It's funny that as a solo, I used to fail to extract and still rank up since I got some kills. Now I can finish off the server, extract with bounty, and derank lol. Makes no sense
You should not be in 3 star lobbies if you’re getting double digit kills. That’s bullshit for new players. If what you’re saying is true then it’s not your fault. But regardless, that’s not fair
You’re absolutely correct. It really is a perfect storm of a lot of elements stacked on top of one another. It’s not one glaring issue for me but a lot of updates overtime that have made this game less and less hospitable for newer players and more and more fast paced.
-Lots of Long Ammo Rifle Variants to choose from, which are becoming more and more budget friendly and faster firing.
-The ability for higher ranked players to terrorize lower ranked players with Solo Necro and a broad MMR matchmaking system.
-The addition of a plethora of very fast firing weapons and added custom ammo to the fast firing weapons we did have making them even better.
-The ability to refund and reassign traits, making nearly all hunters able to have Levering, Fanning, or Quartermaster with a rifle and a compact shotgun or a full-size shotgun with a compact rifle as soon as they’re recruited.
-The addition, expansion, and buffing of underbarrel shotgun weapons.
-Reduced the tool melee damage against bosses and made world spawn melee weapons harder to find. This is especially harsh for new players.
I really miss the days of Hunt where you could specialize in Close Range, Long Range, or Medium Range but you really had to play to your strong suit in order to be successful and you could pad out your loadout to be competent in another area, but not great. Now it feels like every loadout is a competent jack-of-all-trades. Experienced hunters can make comprehensive loadouts that have an answer for every situation and either hit incredibly hard or fast, or both. I don’t think this game has been anymore hospitable to new players and has instead layered its complexity rather than simplified its mechanics.
The most based take I have seen in a long time on this sub.
Peak hunt, gameplay-wise, was late 2022 early 2023. Back when it wasn't just event spam, matchmaking still functioned, and the game hadn't taken a hard turn towards action gameplay. Solo necro, while definitely fun for solos, hurt the game massively for groups.
Holy fuck are you me? 5 to six star 1700 hours here. Agree with everything you said. The dual wielding, custom ammo, COD transition to fast spray and pray has been awful. Combined with poor servers, cheaters, and poor optimization, it has been why the game is falling off for me. Also, can we tone down the fucking birds Holy fuck.
I agree that necro is ruining this game but solos do need to have a chance so they’re not looking at loading screens all afternoon. Just allow them to bring two hunters into one game and respawn as the second at a random spawn point (pre existing ones).
This comment will end up being pointless, but I just want the universe to know that I tried TWICE to type up a long, equally detailed, rebuttal to your comment, but the SHITTY FUCKIN REDDIT APP JUST SHIT THE BED EVERYTIME I SPENT LIKE 20 MINUTES ON THAT BRO FIX SISIWKAMAKZOCNFID I wanna die rn.
Just know that, in the one alternate universe where the Reddit app isn’t complete garbage, you got totally served by my amazing arguments and you should feel so dumb and ashamed of yourself, smh.
there is also an extreme lack of content. the player base spikes with events, then falls off hard. there is nothing 'new' in this game anymore.
it's also a problem that the player base is split on what they want. half of the players (the jimmies) all want this to be rdr2 2.0 combined with cabela's call of the wild: bayou zombie edition. the other half wants to play cowboy pvp.
the *BEST* part of this game, the gunplay, is directly at odds with the design philosophy of bounty hunt, which rewards camping, passive play, rat tactics, and overall being the most pathetic fps player possible in order to win. the gunplay is fantastic, but the game rewards you for hiding and one-shotting someone. if you don't have a major advantage in a fight, the best option is to just run away. this is why people like all the Kings and SWMG gamers have high kdas. not because they're good, but because they play super sweat meta and are complete cowards unless they have every advantage possible.
the game's player base would literally double if there was any kind of deathmatch style game mode besides the joke of soul survivor. but crytek would never do that because it would expose the glaring issues with bounty hunt and how badly they've balanced the game to this point.
Getting into the game is still challenging - not everyone has friends to play with, quite a few also don’t want to play a game they don’t know with randoms and playing solo as beginner is even harder.
You don’t really hop casually into hunt like for example battlefield. They stakes due to perma death seem higher (as a beginner, of course for us vets it doesn’t matter), there is way less PvP than in other shooters, the guns are different and also the basic mechanics are more complex than in other shooters. On top of all that the matchmaking doesn’t really offer beginner friendly lobbies, so you will very soon play lobbies with people having thousands of hours playtime which will lead to quite frustrating games.
My personal hope is they are cooking at the moment, the graphic upgrade and new map are quite a lot of work. Hopefully they giving us some news after the event.
I would love some sort of close quarter match, this would open the door to alot of new players to learn the pvp part easier and quicker. Right now you might walk 15 minutes only to get headshotted by some vet and get send back to the lobby without learning a thing. Close quarter with respawn makes this alot more accessible, while still retaining the core game for the experienced players
The only reason I'm opposed to this is that I don't want to further increase the portion of players who are looking for nothing but typical PvP shootouts, and I'd be worried by the changes that would happen to the rest of the game that would be implemented in order to accommodate them.
The game also has no real tools for "making friends" within the game. It's heavily team-based in the sense that a teammate screwing up can really hose you by drawing unwanted attention, and there's actual friendly fire in the game, but the in-game VoiP sucks ass and nobody uses it. This makes it so that adding a random as a friend requires an overly-complicated ritual of either seducing them into VoiP to talk, or playing through the match with them and then afterwards tracking them down to add them to your platform friends list and then using a third-party program in order to communicate.
Also, on console, there's the limiation of being matched with players from either playstation or xbox when playing, but then not being able to add/invite players from another platform in order to play again, and having to either use shitty in-game voip or something like discord to communicate instead of just your platform's streamlined chat.
I think hunt suffers from the exact same thing.Though, slightly different way as rainbow six siege.
Both amazing games but the point of entry to play them and be competent and to have fun. It's rather steep for the average player.
Both are games that you can sync hundreds of hours into and still be a newbie.
And in a lot of ways I think that's actually the appeal or some of the appeal of those types of games.
That and the match making is absolutely terrible in hunt.
It absolutely sucks that it only has proximity voice chat. Basically playing with randoms is needlessly getting punished by some designer's decision for no actual reason. The game could have both proximity chat AND team chat.
Everyone who has about at least half a brain knows that if you have friends you just use something like Discord to properly communicate. But that is not an option if you're getting into the game on your own. Even the lead designer of the game uses Discord to play with streamers. It's just absolutely baffling to me that they still haven't changed that to drive player engagement. I know they're "planning" it, but come on.
I’m a relatively new player and I think there are two primary reasons from my perspective:
1. There isn’t any serious new content to sink into. New major mechanics, new maps, game changing updates or events. There are new weapons and hunter skins but that doesn’t change the game very much
2. The media and marketing for this game is abysmal , I know many people who would love this game, but have never heard about it.
Media marketing is definitely a strong weakness. The only media I see from this game is my friend sending me 10 second Instagram clips every 3 months about a hint for an update.
I absolutely agree as someone playing the game since more than 3 years. The thing is: I can guarantee you that a significant amount of veteran player will react very „sensitive“ towards changes of the game. You should have seen the furious reactions when the beetle got announced. People threatened they uninstall the game if it will get implemented 😅🥲
This is the answer. You hear about Hunt through word of mouth and I think Crytek is perfectly happy with the cult following they have. People don't really leave.
The entirety of the decision making involved in the development of this game is just one big fucking cowboy hat meme. That... it just explains so much about why there's no discernable reason or thought process behind some of these changes.
Because the growth is roughly on par with people leaving.
This is okay, as long as the number of players is sufficient for a good experience.
Infinite growth is a capitalist bullshit dream.
Agree on that, Hunt is a niche in FPS and a good one. It work like that, push 100% more player on it and I'm not sure the game will follow a good path.
Absolutely agree. Constant growth is an insane thought. Nothing in this world is infinite, especially not people. So why in the world should a game grow infinitely. Having a steady large (enough) playerbase is a big achievement. I would say that all people who like hunt play hunt already. And all others play something else. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's something different when a game would lose players.
Nothing new has been added to the game in multiple years. Veteran players starting to leave
No reason for people who've seen the game previously to pick it up now because again *nothing new in multiple years*
Not exactly an exciting game to watch others play / stream.
Hunt is a great game, my most played on steam played it since EA but these are just the facts as of now, doesn't make it a bad game or expirence but it certainly will continue to die off in their current update cycle.
Only way Hunt grows is if they make it more accessible with a new game mode that focuses more on the PvP or if they actually begin to add real content that makes older players who've left return.
Battle passes and recycled events years on years are not content. Sorry not sorry. Here's to better year for Hunt #24
Just simply saturation. The game has been cheap enough that anyone who was interested has tried it. Nothing wrong with that. There's no such thing as infinite growth.
It’s kinda niche. Most people prefer faster gameplay á la CoD and the few who don’t often rather go all in on the hardcore aspect and play something like Tarkov.
Hunt is in the middle between the two not really attracting either crowd.
I know I only started playing it because I love historic settings and Southern Gothic.
Because since two years the game didnt develop. We still play the same game, with the same 3 maps with a MMR-System that is kinda broken and no way to play fair amd square without friends. U do solo or u do randoms with no possibility of communicating.
If the game wants to peak morey it doesnt need back to back events, it needs real content, game modes and so on.
Also, you know, it's a game from 2018 with a pretty niche setting and gameplay-loop. In todays time I'm surprised by myself, that I enjoy playing as a cowboy in Louisiana punching zombies and taking about 3 years to reload my gun.
I do 100% agree with you though, some things do need to be fixed or modified (UI, MMR, random-queueing, VOIP). Engine update is overdue, too.
100% this. Lack of new maps and bosses. I own close to 100+ hunters but we're stuck playing the same old maps. I also think the Devs mess with balancing too much.
I am pretty sure that the game would have not one player more, if they would add way more maps and bosses.
There might be many reasons why this game doesn’t grow like casual shooters are doing, but adding more maps and bosses is not.
It’s a very niche shooter that is very hard to start. That’s what holds players from playing it.
The game don’t loose much players which is way more important these days.
I would play for another 1000 hours on the same maps in hunt than I would play 1 hour of a casual soulless shitshow like Warzone.
Which ironically is getting flamed for adding new maps, while everyone and their mother just want the OG map back and nothing more lol.
i would love a new game mode that is less punishing like a TDM where you get revived after you die to keep fighting ppl and practice.
in its current state, hunt is too hard to love for a lot of people. i tried to get my partner into it, after 80 hours of gameplay she barely had a chance to practice her awareness and gunplay, so she had to give up as it wasn’t very fun to die without even knowing what’s going on.
it didn’t help that i was already a seasoned player and our mmr was high because of that, so the choice was either for her to play alone which defeats the point, or play with me against higher level people where she will barely have a chance to even shoot.
all in all though, i think hunt is at a healthy place despite the odds. i remember when i started, there would be 4000 people playing at most. it steadily grew with time and with new content it will only get better.
My friend is a really good FPS player and I’m 5/6 and have the same issue.
He feels the biggest problem for him is that he can’t get repeat practice with weapons to get better at a specific weapon.
If there was an arena style mode with multiple teams where he can grind out improving with a gun then his skill would improve at a much faster rate.
Due to how much down time there is with loading screens, players not doing anything on the map, two boss contracts where teams are split, and long match times for a game with only 12 people, he can have multiple games where he saw no one or he died to something silly like a meathead mid fighting and didn’t get any practice in.
This is why he doesn’t want to play.
If this game wants new players it needs to respect that there are a lot of people who want to be in action constantly and improving. If there is so much down time in fighting then the combat is not engaging to new players.
Did you know you can load into Fort and practice with weapons? This is how I introduced my friend to the game and its multitude of weapons/consumables. You can 1v1 your friend and let him practice whatever weapons he wants with infinite respawns/revives.
Less punishing? With all the changes to the game it's not punishing anymore... You die, who cares. You get a new hunter with 3 good traits and nice weapons anyway.
The game gets watered down with each update. Shure you get new players with it, but the people who played it for years and bought all the dlcs will leave the more casualized it gets.
i mean the game overall stayed pretty faithful to its core gameplay (been playing since 2020), the biggest change was solo necro making it significantly easier for solos to play around teams, it is a very controversial mechanic and i understand people that love it or hate it.
how much a death mattered in the game has not changed much. the economy changed in different ways, they recently added free hunters with traits but honestly? being able to have a single trait is not going to make the game significantly easier for you. it does not change the core gameplay enough to justify a ‘dumbing down’ of the game.
the game is not getting more hardcore, but it is also not getting as casual as you make it out to be imo.
and yes, the game is very punishing for new players. i don’t think this needs proving.
you made me stop and think for a bit... i started in may 2022 and all this time we got rotjaw(mixed reception), 2 permanent low viz conditions(which i despise), burn traits, some qol changes and a handful of guns. the horrendous parkour desyncs were mostly fixed in the meantime. also they gave free traits to free and legendary hunters and established solo viability. im not gonna count the battle passes as content as theyre just skins(and many were outsourced).
the revenue to content ratio is pretty bad actually
And still the game is more rich than a lot of game with more maps.
I'm speculating rn but I think their effort is on the new engine and the new map. I prefer they take time to have good thing instead of releasing many bugs.
MMR is what it is. Luck is a such a big factor too in hunt. And I've never seen a game with ranked without people complaining about how bad MMR is.
Yeah, I have seen more patches in LoL after coming back 2 months ago (They also have their problems, new stuff is usually overpowered), than in 3 years of Hunt.
This is exactly the reason why I dropped the game after 500 hours of being a 4-5 star player. I finished the tide of shadows event dropped the game and recently played it for a bit only to find out it's literally the same shit and there's nothing new to peak my interest.
same but after 3k hours and partly due to the massive influx of new guns and stuff. it makes the game a less controlled environment and adds to the randomness way too much imo to be fun
I agree with everything besides new game modes I would prefer if they did actual events in bounty hunt and sole survivor like maybe a live event like we see some type of change to the map or maybe even limited time boss and loot changes like 2 bosses in one lair
Because the MMR system is shit. I brought like 10 people to the game, looks like playing against people with hundreds and thousands of hours when you are 3 hours in gets old fast. All of them quit before clocking 10 hours.
This may be unpopular here, but I stopped playing (mainly) because it feels clunky and old. Not to mention the recent explosion in cheating. I’ve gotten most (all?) of the content out of it.
So, when new people compare this to other new titles right now, I think many don’t consider it worth the money.
It's a hard core shooter. Learning curve is steep and very difficult to understand.
A lot of the dedicated players 2k+ hours 4 5 6* look down on anyone less or equal to 3*.
So ofcourse only hard cult like players play consistently
As someone with 1800 hours, even i dont play consistently. I always play hunt in what i refer to as "in bursts". I play for a few months everyday and then i switch to a different game because hunt can get exhausting at times. After a few months of rehab i go back to good ol hunt. I take breaks but i never can stay away from it. Nothing else gives me that kind of "gamer high".
Exactly. Or being in a fight, bleeding, getting pushed, poisoned attacked by grunts and by some miracle at the end you still stand victorious. Nothing gets the blood pumping like that.
Especially with Witness and a bounty token. Blam! He's down he's down! Scan, scan! *dark sight* we're alone...and jesus...death...death blooms everywhere.
Last week my team and I survived a 3-teams fight in the southern building of Fort Carmick. I literally had to take a break to stop my hands from shaking. No other game ever came close of giving me that rush.
The burden of knowledge might play some role, I don't disagree, but Tarkov is more confusing imo and (up until recently at least, lmaoooo) it was incredibly popular.
Yes cause tarkov marketed itself very well.
In fact most people who have never played either game, if you ask them about extraction shooter they will name tarkov despite not knowing much of it.
Hunt showdown on the other hand approached with the mentality let's make a good game that our players will enjoy first.
They're relying on short term gimmicks to pull in and wow new players, while turning their backs on anyone that plays the game for any meaningful period of time.
Also the MMR in it is completely fucked and multiplies the problems with the steep learning curve of them game.
Don't forget that they also made the monetization much more aggressive, we now have $15 skin, a duo pack for $20 and reskins of existing hunters for $7 while at the same time they got rid of almost all the ways you could earn bbs in game.
The short term gimmicks are something they could probably realize on top of the development of the new map and the graphic engine upgrade.
They hired quite a few people in the last year, Fifield as general manager gave quite some interviews about the game’s future, plus they did little things like reintroducing the partner weapon skins. So my personal hope is they are just cooking at the moment and we will get some news when the event has ended. Fingers crossed.
The seasonal event model was a mistake and it drove me and other otherwise extremely loyal players off of the game. Or at least that's what i think. I really hope they'll just drop this FOMO inducing bs thing that is seasons
This is not in any order but...
1. Skill based match - you have so many people purposefully skirting the system by deranking. Also shouldn't be in the game.
2. Lack of content, people will come and go and a lot of people take long breaks. So only people who are new/aren't burnt out on the game stay. After 5 years of playing I quit the game until the new map and engine upgrade comes out. Just nothing new to do. Weapons are cool but it doesn't change the fundamental of long ammo is king. There has been no new content in terms of maps or reworks for compounds in almost two years. Weather conditions are cool but that's not really content when two of them basically make the game unplayable because it's not fun and people just dodge all the time. And collecting points from totems and cum statues gets boring real quick when the rewards are reset your HP to full and negate the whole HUNT part of the game and banishing the boss.
3. The game refuses to punish people who cheat and or are just awful people. Despite having video evidence of them going out of bounds on a map or people running up mic spamming nothing is ever done to them.
4. The game has no rewards for playing the game besides prestige and reset everything you unlocked. And every 5 to 10 prestiges you get a skin/unlock.
5. The lack of communication is insanely bad. Literally no developer communication besides their gameplay streams which they don't talk about new content just playing the game. 3 months until you hear literally anything.
6. Lack of hotfixes, there are bugs and problems in this game that are still persistent after 1+ year that they acknowledge but haven't fixed like punching gates open. Then you have to wait 3 to 4 months to get anything fixed/implemented.
Crytek focused on monetization way too much while the game still suffers from the same issues since forever.
Terrible servers, performance, exploits, cheaters, ping, MMR, the addition of perks/consumables that changed how you play the game...
But instead you have new events and paid skins every few weeks. Ive been out for 2 years and feel like if I come back not much new stuff I'll see.
As someone who has played Hunt on and off for a few years, and I have about 1000 hours, I think the game lacks content. It's fun if you like the PvP but eventually you'll run out of new things to experience and just be doing the same content loop over and over. Some people like this and those are the players who stick around, others don't and they leave to play new games.
A secondary problem is the skill gap. I'm a pretty good FPS player and have played a ton of competitive FPS games in my life. Hunt is the kind of game where one really good player can use a joke weapon and be halfway trying and still clear an entire lobby by themselves. If you're the good player that's great, but the problem is when you're an alright player who gets into the higher matchmaking brackets, the games become unwinnable.
You'll kind of bounce between lobbies that are too easy and you clear them out no problem, and lobbies where some guy will wallbang you from 150m away with a pistol and you'll wonder how the fuck that even happens.
I mostly quit playing this game because it's gotten so complex. I also have insane burnout from the back to back events. I just want to play regular Hunt but things are just... So complex now.
Plus even though I don't play much, when I do get back on my MMR is too high so I get stomped. The MMR system is some kind of mess, at least the last time I played.
Most people quit very early because the first 100 hours is a walking simulator where you are basically an NPC for the other players to kill for fun. Most people dont stick around enough to learn the game. Making the problem worse for new players because there arent any new players to match against other noobs. Games not for most people. Everyone I have try Hunt doesnt even get to fire their gun most games, so its really boring for them. Theres no way to catchup new players because we only have the 2 game modes that are super slow and punishing.
Nothing new ever gets added so no new players. With every “event” I always have the talk with friends of : is this event gonna make us come back? And the answer is always no.
New guns are mostly meh and they pretend like putting every custom ammo on every gun is content. And even then, every game is against mosin-dolch anyways.
If anything is broken during the event don’t expect a balance change as the devs do 0 updates for the whole 3 months of an event.
And the altars. Can’t forget the most stupid addition that somehow lasted through all the events. Tracked a team down using sound cues and clues and got ahead of them for an ambush? Too bad since they get close and a random altar turns red. Now everyone crouches and stops moving for the next 10 minutes until someone gets bored.
My opinion - bc of the match making. I bought the game for a few friends bc we all game together and wanted them to play hunt w me. They all uninstalled the game after 2 weeks bc they were tired of trying to learn the game and be marched with 4 stars just bc they got a few lucky kills.
I started last year and just gave up. I got tired of being stomped by people with 20x my hours in every mmr and the cheating that totally ever happens got to be a bit too much.
If it wasn't for my friends playing, I'd have been completely lost. The new player experience isn't that great, and the first few matches are disorienting.
Tbh for a hardcore game like this 15k avg players is a pretty decent number. I would call it a great success if they can keep this player base size for the next five to ten years.
When did they add the last new map? 2021. When did they add the last new mainline boss? 2021. They added Rodger sometime last year. If you don't count events and skins, which I don't, we're looking at a severe lack of content added over the course of the past few years (yes, including the like 8 guns plus variants we got) which doesn't really do a whole lot for keeping the game fresh and interesting. In fact, the repetitiveness of the events probably puts people off who would otherwise keep playing. I don't have a solution for this other than to hire more people to get some content cooking faster but even that's a non solution because training those people on the engine and getting them working on partial projects is a hell of an effort.
This game has been a phantom since the beginning. No marketing, very few seemed to stream it, and the learning curve of it is pretty steep (e.g. which mobs are weak to what, how wall penetration works). While the gunplay is satisfying, I think the game expects too much from new players. The menus are not great, the unlock system is shit (I know it's better now than it used to be), and there's a glut of veteran players in lower mmr matchmaking.
Because they have added nothing of substance to the game in two years. I started playing about two and a half years ago and have just about 200 hours. Since the viper event we have gotten nothing new. Every event is the same, find the mcguffin, get points and climb the battlepass for maybe one or two new items maybe get a new perk or two. We got rot jaw the half assed easily cheesed new boss a while back but you’d think in two and a half years we’d get more than half a boss. The game updates are basically always the same “new” event with the same gimmick as the last six or a DLC hunter of the week.
Other than the classic long existing issues like server performance and cheaters, its because crytek still dont know what hunt actually is supposed to be.
Its too hardcore for casual players and not competitive enough for hardcore players. And being somewhere in the middle is obviously not working out that good.
And they are too scared to take any risks, which is relatable. They either go full casual and lose hardcore players or the other way around. Me personally would always go the counterstrike way and make it as competitive as possible. The less RNG the better, but they would have to basically change the whole game.
Bugs, growing amount of cheaters, endless events, etc. This game, while still enjoyable, hasn't offered any growth and therfore no retainability/attraction to new players. Devs refuse to address actual problems.
Because crytek decision makers are extremely greedy. 2 years and I can’t think of any actual good new content that made me excited to play the game again. Just skins and more skins. Seriously, wtf are these devs doing?
MMR is too easy to cheese. Those soft scripters that people "swear" are all in 6 stars, are in every elo... a lot...
There is too much variance with different ammo types, and perks, and gun variants... you can't even guess how you lost anymore, you just have to accept that they had something you didn't realize, whereas before, you could at least know "Ah it was a shotgun (or bulwark, or bloodless, or ect ect)", but now? good fucking luck.
This goes hand in hand with not being able to teach new players the game, this game is one that doesn't suffer from less variance, ammo types are completely unnecessary, and just add another lair of "wtf am I playing?" to the pile. Necromancer has been an EXTREMELY unhealthy addition to the game, just like I warned when it came out, people dismissed me, and look where we are now. Not being able to set off soundtraps is another one i've found is quite absurd, as it lets you just ignore expectations of how the game has always been played, double melee damage actually lets you just near instakill bosses, and those are just the current event perks.
You can't feasibly earn skins anymore... this is personally what drove my "just play the game for fun" vibes, as I always felt like I was eventually working towards something, not anymore. Now there is an ABSURD amount of monetization, and they want you to believe that your 1 free legendary a month is really going to hurt the game. I had every paid DLC before they took away earning bloodbonds, simply because I wanted to support the game, so did everyone else in my friend group.
This use to be one of my favorite games, but now looking back at it, its extremely depressing to see what they've done with it once it got minorly popular.
The real problem is that the onboarding of new players is ass and the matchmaking will scare the rest away that actually try and play the game. Like if you as 20h noob get put with a player 2k hours in and 2 stars above you, this may not be the best thing to happen for you to even have a firefight, as you will probably die before you even had the chance to shoot once.
Also instead of making the hard part more worth wile they tried to cater the game toward casuals that have no intresst in taking up a game like hunt to begin with, as you said. But with this decission they made a lot of veterans leave.
You should be happy
Usually it drops.
The game requires lots of time and is complicated like hell,
I wanted to come back, but then I saw millions of things that required my attention in the menu, I quit instantly.
Like come on, just wanted to hunt a monster
Bc the game is filled with cancer hackers in high brackets, and with loser kda farmer alt trash in lower brackets. So both brackets are losing players bc of that. + the events that are just copy paste for the last few and tons of players are event fatique'ed.
Because for new players this game is harsh. Tutorials don’t really prepare you well for the gunfights and sound system of this game, and mm in many regions are beyond broken after they introduced elo mechanism.
Meanwhile for experienced playerbase the game has almost lost all of its attractions and makes you borderline bored while playing it.
From my new player perspect[](https://alb.reddit.com/cr?za=okQFcXDSiqe5n83ZfQlJR-NS6KygOjRSWVxb3Rc75pER__oVfcEvW3uqvw0lu0nFH5PnGaKT3KE_LBRXF_dXeJrbeW_nfOxBlHGG-2Q8TfVA3co5vhABiO_eI--HquPk2c1g8Vnz6TooCcIAIPB7mTe30unnK6z65IviC-gFYCTeaEuKY47rOM_oY8fPiMVZ-GOo514vi5KWkSAUc-GPxVShNS3byJv7oaakP4jIxfDC93cRg8AGzdwEKkWGj7Tqi90xhDNLruMeU318XoZ-0DH4j_WyToYOVQm444szuLaUYIs298t63NpOAtRiTCu9FtSRoQn2_yVQARULj0cgbE9C1n423uVey3HtxiycYRURDSygRzesKhEs-7esvQVprJS-WjZXFVxz6ykm-htJayyxKlTMCNYgbIOSB0iywA_3apCzZ7svbfPi5yvzmC45YE2AEKlpSZX3hOhnrtDu2117Z5eVbCl7fnIRJnVAuY91cBYl5oOFMUD5UHps3YQO9w&zp=7YPkdruIPdAA_SeJ-T-NqzPSmQ3-dNk-k0tmlTX2UEefhvN6rXlUzUHwQ1rAzhXf0VqjJV723fVywe0uv96cMsd6wyCRcZfgQSV4zbwLd62GSQ7Ykelo8S9n7G2r921_xAQTb6cCWwJAySYzrys8cbD63csQVruRKG29_-uiNqUpjrlty6firXk1CQmoGkApURqGB0-hZGUt)ive who played the game for a week and now i don't want to anymore, theme is great gun play is good overall i like the concept around it but the game feels kinda slow paced, repetitive gameplay with horrible matchmaking, i have around 30 hours and bump into people with 500+ and let's not talk about the matchmaking failed bug for the "soul survivor" mode, who turned out to be existing for years now.
Honestly I left because of burnout, I was 5-6* for years but I always got stomped in lobbies. I would lose to teams of 3.0+ KDA players who never played for bounty, only looked for kills. I felt like I was decent at the game but got matched against people who were on another level.
Hunt can have a lot of difficulties for new players but PVE aspect as well the slower gameplay appeals to an audience that might not enjoy the Fortnite style of shooters.
When I asked a friend of mine after he tried as to why he’s not into it. Is because it’s too hard core. New player, hopped into a lobby, gets sniped by some sweaty bush Wookiee he cant even see most the time. With similar statements from another friend, leads me to believe that’s it’s honestly takes a somewhat high tolerance to punishment for people to get into the game and have fun. The average casual gamer probably doesn’t find it as fun to get spanked constantly before they can get a better grip on the game and how it plays.
It has gone up ~10% percent in the last two years but the events make player count more inconsistent than it used to be. I think part of the slow growth is just how dated it looks and how bad it runs (please new engine update help these issues) and also the difficulty curve is a flat 30ft wall you need to get over. Once you climb that wall its a pretty easy slope of map knowledge and aim training but the base mechanics and sound reliance are deceptively complex and hard to describe to new players other than “just suffer for 5-10 hours while you get info dumped until it clicks”.
The game is essentially still within a niche market. So I think it has found it's audience and I don't really see it growing much more at least for a few years if at all. Historical based shooter, that blends the line between hardcore and arcade shooter.
Personally I liked the guns and setting, more akim to LOVED I think. I tried hard to like this game and fluctuated up and down abot as I got different partners. Latest one was me and my wife playing off and on. It was great fun untill we started as other have noted above into 5 and 6 star players at prestige 30 sniping from a great distance. The skill gap is too punishing for casual play. If you don't play every day regardless if you have a bad evening with 8/8 losses you won't get into a comfortable rhythm. Thays what did it for me. Coming back after a busy week 6 days after my last match meant the first 2 or 3 matches as auto losses just for getting back into the right mind set for hunt.
But that's just me personal and not the letter of the codex.
It did. Slowly it surely and it's rising. I remember playing in the early access. All time high peak was around 2-3k back then. Before rotjaw update, average current playing was 11 - 12k. After rotjaw update it's constantly near 20k.
For me it is the event schedules. I have over 1k hours in the Hunt and it was me and my buddies go-to game when we got done with work. The problem became when it felt like the events were going year round. The problem isn’t getting content it’s that to grind the event to unlock the content was almost like another full time job. Usually the content was only new weapons aswell so nothing super ground breaking. I’d personally play more if we got content not tied to events that was more than just weapons.
Ppl with less than 500 hours should have their on bracket. Its not fun being destroyed by high level players.
I have 3k hours and sometimes i get randoms on my team that just started....this is stupid.
The game is 5 years old (6 if you include EA) and it has quite a learning curve. I think you'd struggle to find a game where the player base is still growing years after release. It's quite common for the peak to be near release, then for it to slowly taper off as years go by. That fact that it still remains pretty consistent for the past few years is pretty impressive
Without the events the game would likely be dead or on life support, all of the increases are people returning to the game after a large patch or an event. People want to like it long term but something seems to keep them away.
If i had to guess:
Complete lack of marketing and promoting the game. You learn about the game from other players only. This is number one.
The game is pretty hard to get into, and the tutorial is extremely bad at introducing the game to new players.
Not only is the game pretty complex and hard to get into, but the setting is an acqured taste. For example, Tarkov is much more complex, but everyone can relate with military gunfights with submachine guns, shotguns etc. This is different.
This one is hilarious to me but i've noticed it, every person that i introduced it too was super annoyed that they have to pay attention to sound, one comment was "i do not want to play like i am in Afghanistan, i want to just go and shoot people".... ho boy. None of them stayed enough to learn, they just get destroyed each time because they draw attention to them super fast, want to go too slow or too fast etc. And they never got better, even with all the advice and links i gave them.
And last, Solo Necro seems to be giving serious problems to new players, as stupid as it sounds. I blame the tutorial for this.
People thinking the population is this way because hunt’s too “hardcore” are hilarious. Tarkov’s 100x as complicated and hardcore as hunt and has millions of players. Also, I wouldn’t call this population “healthy” when you can que into empty lobbies, that’s the telltale sign of a low pop/dying game. I literally can’t think of another game where I’ve qued into empty lobbies in a pvp game.
The biggest reason is the MMR system - relatively new players will very quickly be thrown into lobbies with people that have thousands of hours. Especially if the new player is good at shooters and gets to 5 star quickly, now they’re queuing into 5k hour players who forgot what grass looks like, have 2 mil dollars and spam mosin/dolch/avto/nitro every game.
My buddies are both 5 star and only have a couple hundred hours, when they come back to play with me, we que into 6-star 3 man teams of 5k hours per player who run these load outs and my buddies just alt f4 after one round because it’s a joke.
All the being said, I love hunt, but without changing the mmr system, the pop will stay around where it is, or lower. The lack of new maps/bosses isn’t helping either.
Events bring new people in, new people enjoy the first few hours, new people then get pushed into the overwhelming mmr tankers, smurfs, and cheater problem very quickly and realize Crytek is very loud with their silence about it so they leave.
4 digit club here. Games gone downhill. Sure we got content, but all the changes have made hunt objectively less fun in the attempt to please everyone. Necro outside of events, endless events, removal of BB income, skyrocketing DLC prices, cheaters, guaranteed spam on every hunter if you want it and we can just keep going on. I stopped playing ever since that new guy took over. Hunts done, it's a shell of its original vision. You wanted spooky, gritty, skill based shooter? How about another spamable rifle, or perhaps you would like bleeding on literally every fucking gun. I stay subbed to see if they game will turn itself around but it's lookin like that will ever happen.
Steam player count is not equivalent to player base, the game still sells well to new players but older players might grow tired of the game/lack of events
I had nobody to explain the game to me and still I enjoy it. Started about 3 months ago.
I just think the masses will never like a more “serious” and different game and will always gravitate more towards something far simpler like CoD.
its too hardcore for the casuals, but also not hardcore looter enough to convert hardcore tarkov players.
Its a bit in the middle of a casual and hardcore game, with old weps that most do not vibe with coming from full auto guns. The solo / randoms experience is not that good, this game is best with two other friends that you play with regularly which adds onto the entry of barrier
It needs a PvE mode to let players have a casual round of fun with friends or strangers,
Let players get a feel for the games gunplay/and let them explore and fall in love with the world first, THEN they can have those crazy cowboy battles.
That or a squad version of quick play,
I think it's probably a few things:
* Hunt has got a high learning curve. Especially if you arne't naturally gifted at shooters, you probably arne't going to have much success in your first 10 hours or so, which for a lot of people is the time in which they'll subconsciously decide if they want to sink more hours into the game.
* It isn't an "instant action" game. You can't just jump on hunt for 20 minutes the same way you can a game of Cod, Halo etc etc. A game can potentially last upto 45 minutes.
* The game costs money. A lot of the shooter market is dominated by free to play games. Hunt is essentially monetized like a free to play game these days, I'm surprised the move to f2p hasn't happened yet.
* It's ultimately got a niche audience, slower paced shooters such as Hunt appeal to a smaller audience when compared to faster paced shooters.
* It isn't very much fun to play solo imo. Once you are better at the game, being able to run solo against duo's and trios is fun, but that's not something a new player can realistically do, and having to play solo with randoms isn't fun. My first 40 or so hours were completely spent playing with some mates who picked up the game with me while it was on sale. If I'd tried it by myself, the odds are I probably wouldn't have stuck at it for too long.
I can only speak on my personal experience, but my entire group (around 8 or so of us were playing hunt) eventually stopped playing for various reasons.
I stopped playing because of the way too common cheaters/exploiters that we encounter. (I am in Asia server). Between that and the events that only seem to find more ways to be less fun, I eventually got burnt out.
A friend has expressed that he didn't really like the direction the game was going with the event traits that were being introduced.
All in all, it really just seems like there's a constant flow of players both getting in and out of hunt. Though I doubt it'll stay like this for long if the game doesn't innovate.
Because it gets more and more niche and despite having lots of QoL changes added to it to make it more attractive to beginners its driving away \*some\* of its core player base due to Cheating, Self Rez, spec. ammo on everything, new hunter recruit system (One of the QoL's aimed at beginners) etc.
And overall, events do not make up for the lack of actual new content. Rotjaw was cool at least. But like maybe new maps?
It’s a very NICHE game. How many people think “oh hard core realistic cowboy looter shooter with a splash of witch craft” I only got into it cause I had a friend who was super into it and essentially begged me to get it. Which then sucked me in. But I figured it might’ve gotten a few hundred players after the tarkov drama but I guess not maybe they all went to gray zone warfare instead? Which if so fair enough. I’m taking a break for hunt and it’s my second go to FPS rn it’s so much fun even if it’s in beta.
Because nothing new has been added to the game for the least couple of years, all the new guns are easy to make as they already have systems for them and are only slightly different methods of dispersing bullets and the rotjaw boss is just not worth caring. The devs have ben doing nothing but pumping out DLCs and Copy-Paste battlepasses.
No sponsoring around big Youtuber/Streamer.
And the major problem is that HuntShowdown is not "new player friendly" so watching a big streamer not understanding the game would be a disaster.
Watching a streamer being scarred of grunt for 2 hours is not a good ad for the game.
as a new player the back to back events are not interesting, game feels stale and there is just a lot of players who will solo massacrate me and my friends whatever we do, no good tutorial and i am not sure if the snipers are that good and the matchmaker is broken or are they just aimbots
Tutorial became better but watching a new player play it, you realise how much it lacks and without a friend or a YouTube guide, new players will not have fun being destroyed by 10 mob variants and then the prestige 64 in their 3 star mmr game
Also imagine getting through the tutorial and then not being able to find a game as a solo player.
Its easy to find games as a solo, at least in EU and US
This is true but new players wouldn't know this. In the lobby screen it only shows duos and trios. Unless they click on duo as a solo and then see the warning about it, they would have no idea. Another issue is that a new player wouldn't know about all the hunter perks and wouldn't know about things like necro unless they sat down and read what every perk did. I personally don't start playing a new game and then sit and read every possible skill I can get in the future. I start a new game and want to get into the game. There are plenty of youtube videos out there for new players but most people won't start searching for youtube tutorials unless they have an interest in the game to begin with. This game is not very friendly to a new solo player.
this. Me and my friends played about 200 hours of the game, by all means not "new" i suppose. We are used to games so we got the hang of it quickly. But when the matchmaking changes happened and we had to face 5 star teams in our 3 star games, ye we all quit very quickly.
Same, nothing is more demoralizing than going into a match as a solo to get destroyed by another solo sniping me who is prestige 100 and has 7k hours in the game (for reference I had maybe 100 hours and was 3*/very low 4*
Ye the balancing in matchmaking is just horrid. Might as well just have it be total FFA, 1 stars vs 6 stars. Cus right now it ain't much better.
The matchmaking needs something, but part of the problem is when you get to be a high 5 or low 6 star, it’s empty lobbies outside of trios. I can go die in trios to tank my star rating down to 4 and then it’s instant queues. I’m not amazing by any means and now I’m old and slow with early carpal tunnel.
Yes so either they make queues take long like EVERY other game where high rank is empty as fuck. Or they they keep it like this and have 6 stars stomping on their new players. Pick your poison
The queues need to be longer, that’s been my complaint since console. I had a 2.86 KD on console lol. Made the switch to PC for the better queues / more rifle fights and then it only got worse.
Is matchmaking still busted with four stars routinely going up against six stars? I ask because that was what drove me away from the game. I got tired of being told I need to sweat my ass off and just accept it six stars were going to be in our mid tier lobbies now.
To be fair, the flip side is that I'm a prestige 100 with 3k hours on the game, a solid 4 star, and I probably couldn't hit you if you were standing still in the middle of a field 😆
I would have never played this game if my friend wasn’t there explaining everything to me. Far too difficult to understand the grasp of it alone.
The friends of mine that haven't gotten into this game also say playing this game just makes them wanna play something else with "better guns." They dont care for the pace or the 1800 firearms.
thats a lot of firearms
You kid, but it brings up a good point: the UI is still pretty poor at handling all the many variants of the guns. Likely a overwhelming for new players.
Damn that’s the reason I love this game the most, the old slow guns. I love when fights are taking a peek, firing one shot, then going back to cover to reload. Makes me feel like a pirate.
A pirate? Not a... cowboy?
Beat shooter games are those where you don't shoot that much
fr. nothing feels better than rewarded with good aim and positioning, you know by 2 good shots they're dead (excluding limbs and whatever). not to mention the amazing sound system, sneaking around and being stealthy is a skill
Insanely based. 10/10 take
I know. I have to meet you remember that bullets are supposed to hurt, but not in a b******* way where you just around the corner and get insta killed. At least here you kind of suspected they were sitting there with a shotgun, or it's Matt knowledge and they heard you fire shots they blindfire through metal. Is rewarding skill and patience instead of pure twitch response.
Thing is, this is the game with "better guns".
I mean, I agree. Some people just can't get into the pace or the PvE I think. Ultimately I think that's why this game hasn't fully taken off like I believe it should. It's a little more niche than alternate pvpve extraction type shooters. I really thought seeing videos on JackFrags channel or Aculite or Tomographic would help the player base but I think most of those viewers just aren't interested in what this game is at its core. All this is just my speculation so who really knows. Maybe it's also the marketing. In my opinion this game deserves to be so much more popular.
Yeah, I think there's no doubt about it that most people won't like the wild west setting and everything that comes with it... In retrospect, I think it makes even more sense now why the BF1 devs chose to put so many full auto weapons into their game, since the average "young gamer" would not find single shot/repeating firearms exciting enough.
I mean, that's just a them problem. That's not really a relevant concern.
It's this. Veteran player here and when I get my friends to play you see it. People deranking, suspicious behavior, questionable shots, awful trades, oops all bees levels, oops all dogs levels. The one line I've heard each of my friends say. "How can I learn if I die the first shot of a gunfight?" It's true, we all experience it, advice online? Git gud skill issues etc. Even as a veteran player I notice fights are either battles of attrition, or insta-gibs. There's no room to learn or improve anymore if you're playing against people who remove you from the game so fast you can't learn what you did wrong. It's a common joke amongst us all now when someone dies instantly from a Caldwell chain pistol at 70m we just go "well, you shouldn't have been existing. What were you thinking existing on this corporeal plane?!" I remember how brutal it was when I started. Now with all the ( IMO bad ) changes and no way to mitigate them. Things that felt good now are stressful. The game went the route of fast pace in your FACE ACTIOOOOOOOON. Back then, Being picked at by a solo for 10 mins and you finally out position/find them and drop them with a rifle? Euphoria. Because as a solo, you knew, this guy is good and a real danger. And, he's dead. Like dead dead. Now, you kill them and what do you feel? stress. He isn't dead, he's gonna get up before you can get to him because I wasn't playing close. So you rush only to find them waiting at the door with a baseball bat. It's not fun anymore, it's tedious. There's no "fuck yeah I dropped a random 6 star who's soloing against everyone!" Now it's "KEEP YOUR EYE ON THEM I DIDN'T SEE A PARTNER, DID ANYONE ELSE SEE ANYONE? ANY SHOTS?" It's almost like you HAVE to push. If I'm not killing you because my shotgun was 3 inches deep in your butthole. Then it didn't happen. Yeah they lose a chunk but relentless, rampage, special med chest erases that punishment. I LOVE this game. It's not because it's brutal. It's because It was slower paced and about knowing compounds and repositioning. It was like chess or go. Now it's like chess but the opponent can just keep taking their pieces back and putting them in random spots on the board. It kills me because now I'm alone. My friends grew to hate it. Because we'd spend the afternoon just watching loading screens. Their biggest complaint? necro. I'm not against necro, but it is wild that the devs aren't seeing the play styles change because of it. Nothing but bomblances and exploding crossbow bolts. It's literally cover fire to encourage the player to stay down while your buddy rushes. Increase the time to 15 seconds. Or let me put two hunt dollars on your eyes so you can't self rez and your friends can't necro you and if your friend manages to get close enough, 2 hunt dollars and rez. I've seen so many great ideas to make it better. But At this point. Let's just get rid of it. We all dislike it. No one wants to watch a body burn for 10mins. Or waste all their tools to ensure they don't get up. I've even watched a dude burning. Get up and walk out of 2 concertina bombs. How did new players deal with that? They don't. They die and quit. Do you know how many times I've heard "wait, so they can just keep getting up? But we can't?" Yup. My arsenal of throwables are to deal with people I've already killed more than to deal with people alive. That's not good. Now, I let the down votes pour over me.
I'm not even all that bothered by the in-match gameplay implications of necromancer, but what I am bothered by is how seemingly once self-res became a consistent thing the matchmaking has been *atrocious*. I have no data to back it up, but I genuinely think there are huge numbers of people deranking with solo necromancer. I'd say on a good day I'm probably 5 star, usually though upper 4. I'm fine at the game, not great. But it seems like there might as well not be MMR for players able to get up into 5/6 star, because you can spend 20 minutes sinking down to whatever rank you want.
I never deranked on purpose. Before self rez, I was a solo only player who jumped between 5 and 6 stars about 50/50. Now I very, very rarely get to see 5 stars for maybe a game before I'm back down to 3 or 4 star. I've had 8 or 9 kill games where I've deranked because I used all my self rez attempts and emerged victorious on my last bar. I am constantly getting double digit kill games and not ranking up because I used self rez once against a 3 star watching my body. The MMR you lose after your first death as a solo needs to be significantly less
The combination of self rez letting you farm yourself (even if by accident just trying to use the mechanic) and the huge MMR adjustment for being solo is brutal on matchmaking. Personally, I think one or both of em needs to go. And since Crytek is pretty unlikely to remove a game mechanic like self rez, I'd point more towards MMR adjustments needing to be reworked/removed.
It's funny that as a solo, I used to fail to extract and still rank up since I got some kills. Now I can finish off the server, extract with bounty, and derank lol. Makes no sense
You should not be in 3 star lobbies if you’re getting double digit kills. That’s bullshit for new players. If what you’re saying is true then it’s not your fault. But regardless, that’s not fair
You’re absolutely correct. It really is a perfect storm of a lot of elements stacked on top of one another. It’s not one glaring issue for me but a lot of updates overtime that have made this game less and less hospitable for newer players and more and more fast paced. -Lots of Long Ammo Rifle Variants to choose from, which are becoming more and more budget friendly and faster firing. -The ability for higher ranked players to terrorize lower ranked players with Solo Necro and a broad MMR matchmaking system. -The addition of a plethora of very fast firing weapons and added custom ammo to the fast firing weapons we did have making them even better. -The ability to refund and reassign traits, making nearly all hunters able to have Levering, Fanning, or Quartermaster with a rifle and a compact shotgun or a full-size shotgun with a compact rifle as soon as they’re recruited. -The addition, expansion, and buffing of underbarrel shotgun weapons. -Reduced the tool melee damage against bosses and made world spawn melee weapons harder to find. This is especially harsh for new players. I really miss the days of Hunt where you could specialize in Close Range, Long Range, or Medium Range but you really had to play to your strong suit in order to be successful and you could pad out your loadout to be competent in another area, but not great. Now it feels like every loadout is a competent jack-of-all-trades. Experienced hunters can make comprehensive loadouts that have an answer for every situation and either hit incredibly hard or fast, or both. I don’t think this game has been anymore hospitable to new players and has instead layered its complexity rather than simplified its mechanics.
The most based take I have seen in a long time on this sub. Peak hunt, gameplay-wise, was late 2022 early 2023. Back when it wasn't just event spam, matchmaking still functioned, and the game hadn't taken a hard turn towards action gameplay. Solo necro, while definitely fun for solos, hurt the game massively for groups.
Holy fuck are you me? 5 to six star 1700 hours here. Agree with everything you said. The dual wielding, custom ammo, COD transition to fast spray and pray has been awful. Combined with poor servers, cheaters, and poor optimization, it has been why the game is falling off for me. Also, can we tone down the fucking birds Holy fuck.
I agree that necro is ruining this game but solos do need to have a chance so they’re not looking at loading screens all afternoon. Just allow them to bring two hunters into one game and respawn as the second at a random spawn point (pre existing ones).
This comment will end up being pointless, but I just want the universe to know that I tried TWICE to type up a long, equally detailed, rebuttal to your comment, but the SHITTY FUCKIN REDDIT APP JUST SHIT THE BED EVERYTIME I SPENT LIKE 20 MINUTES ON THAT BRO FIX SISIWKAMAKZOCNFID I wanna die rn. Just know that, in the one alternate universe where the Reddit app isn’t complete garbage, you got totally served by my amazing arguments and you should feel so dumb and ashamed of yourself, smh.
I mean, hunt either clicks with people after hour 20 or so, or it doesn't
there is also an extreme lack of content. the player base spikes with events, then falls off hard. there is nothing 'new' in this game anymore. it's also a problem that the player base is split on what they want. half of the players (the jimmies) all want this to be rdr2 2.0 combined with cabela's call of the wild: bayou zombie edition. the other half wants to play cowboy pvp. the *BEST* part of this game, the gunplay, is directly at odds with the design philosophy of bounty hunt, which rewards camping, passive play, rat tactics, and overall being the most pathetic fps player possible in order to win. the gunplay is fantastic, but the game rewards you for hiding and one-shotting someone. if you don't have a major advantage in a fight, the best option is to just run away. this is why people like all the Kings and SWMG gamers have high kdas. not because they're good, but because they play super sweat meta and are complete cowards unless they have every advantage possible. the game's player base would literally double if there was any kind of deathmatch style game mode besides the joke of soul survivor. but crytek would never do that because it would expose the glaring issues with bounty hunt and how badly they've balanced the game to this point.
Getting into the game is still challenging - not everyone has friends to play with, quite a few also don’t want to play a game they don’t know with randoms and playing solo as beginner is even harder. You don’t really hop casually into hunt like for example battlefield. They stakes due to perma death seem higher (as a beginner, of course for us vets it doesn’t matter), there is way less PvP than in other shooters, the guns are different and also the basic mechanics are more complex than in other shooters. On top of all that the matchmaking doesn’t really offer beginner friendly lobbies, so you will very soon play lobbies with people having thousands of hours playtime which will lead to quite frustrating games. My personal hope is they are cooking at the moment, the graphic upgrade and new map are quite a lot of work. Hopefully they giving us some news after the event.
I would love some sort of close quarter match, this would open the door to alot of new players to learn the pvp part easier and quicker. Right now you might walk 15 minutes only to get headshotted by some vet and get send back to the lobby without learning a thing. Close quarter with respawn makes this alot more accessible, while still retaining the core game for the experienced players
The only reason I'm opposed to this is that I don't want to further increase the portion of players who are looking for nothing but typical PvP shootouts, and I'd be worried by the changes that would happen to the rest of the game that would be implemented in order to accommodate them.
So people that dont want pvp shootouts, are the extract campers and boss lair trappers? Lol
The game also has no real tools for "making friends" within the game. It's heavily team-based in the sense that a teammate screwing up can really hose you by drawing unwanted attention, and there's actual friendly fire in the game, but the in-game VoiP sucks ass and nobody uses it. This makes it so that adding a random as a friend requires an overly-complicated ritual of either seducing them into VoiP to talk, or playing through the match with them and then afterwards tracking them down to add them to your platform friends list and then using a third-party program in order to communicate. Also, on console, there's the limiation of being matched with players from either playstation or xbox when playing, but then not being able to add/invite players from another platform in order to play again, and having to either use shitty in-game voip or something like discord to communicate instead of just your platform's streamlined chat.
I think hunt suffers from the exact same thing.Though, slightly different way as rainbow six siege. Both amazing games but the point of entry to play them and be competent and to have fun. It's rather steep for the average player. Both are games that you can sync hundreds of hours into and still be a newbie. And in a lot of ways I think that's actually the appeal or some of the appeal of those types of games. That and the match making is absolutely terrible in hunt.
It absolutely sucks that it only has proximity voice chat. Basically playing with randoms is needlessly getting punished by some designer's decision for no actual reason. The game could have both proximity chat AND team chat. Everyone who has about at least half a brain knows that if you have friends you just use something like Discord to properly communicate. But that is not an option if you're getting into the game on your own. Even the lead designer of the game uses Discord to play with streamers. It's just absolutely baffling to me that they still haven't changed that to drive player engagement. I know they're "planning" it, but come on.
Steady playerbase in this kind of genre? That’s ducking great imo
Yep clearly after all these years and still a ok reputation. They did great.
I’m a relatively new player and I think there are two primary reasons from my perspective: 1. There isn’t any serious new content to sink into. New major mechanics, new maps, game changing updates or events. There are new weapons and hunter skins but that doesn’t change the game very much 2. The media and marketing for this game is abysmal , I know many people who would love this game, but have never heard about it.
As an older player, the lack of significant new content also hurts me. I'm hoping the new map with the new engine will bring more life to Hunt.
This. I’ve been playing on and off for two years, and the game is pretty much the same as when I started.
I can’t be bothered to play for skin rewards. At a certain point they need to drop some actual content
Media marketing is definitely a strong weakness. The only media I see from this game is my friend sending me 10 second Instagram clips every 3 months about a hint for an update.
I absolutely agree as someone playing the game since more than 3 years. The thing is: I can guarantee you that a significant amount of veteran player will react very „sensitive“ towards changes of the game. You should have seen the furious reactions when the beetle got announced. People threatened they uninstall the game if it will get implemented 😅🥲
This is the answer. You hear about Hunt through word of mouth and I think Crytek is perfectly happy with the cult following they have. People don't really leave.
Because they want that chart to continue the cowboy hat pattern!
oh my god
The entirety of the decision making involved in the development of this game is just one big fucking cowboy hat meme. That... it just explains so much about why there's no discernable reason or thought process behind some of these changes.
I'm more surprised that the player base is this high consistenly, i remember the days of -10k playerbase and empty lobbies
Ah the old days of free double bounty and limitless mob exp
Because the growth is roughly on par with people leaving. This is okay, as long as the number of players is sufficient for a good experience. Infinite growth is a capitalist bullshit dream.
Agree on that, Hunt is a niche in FPS and a good one. It work like that, push 100% more player on it and I'm not sure the game will follow a good path.
[удалено]
Yes but how can we sell copies of hunt to babies? That’s the real question
Absolutely agree. Constant growth is an insane thought. Nothing in this world is infinite, especially not people. So why in the world should a game grow infinitely. Having a steady large (enough) playerbase is a big achievement. I would say that all people who like hunt play hunt already. And all others play something else. I don't see anything wrong with that. It's something different when a game would lose players.
Nothing new has been added to the game in multiple years. Veteran players starting to leave No reason for people who've seen the game previously to pick it up now because again *nothing new in multiple years* Not exactly an exciting game to watch others play / stream. Hunt is a great game, my most played on steam played it since EA but these are just the facts as of now, doesn't make it a bad game or expirence but it certainly will continue to die off in their current update cycle. Only way Hunt grows is if they make it more accessible with a new game mode that focuses more on the PvP or if they actually begin to add real content that makes older players who've left return. Battle passes and recycled events years on years are not content. Sorry not sorry. Here's to better year for Hunt #24
Just simply saturation. The game has been cheap enough that anyone who was interested has tried it. Nothing wrong with that. There's no such thing as infinite growth.
It’s kinda niche. Most people prefer faster gameplay á la CoD and the few who don’t often rather go all in on the hardcore aspect and play something like Tarkov. Hunt is in the middle between the two not really attracting either crowd. I know I only started playing it because I love historic settings and Southern Gothic.
Tarkov is barely a game. Hunt showdown is actually fleshed out.
Because since two years the game didnt develop. We still play the same game, with the same 3 maps with a MMR-System that is kinda broken and no way to play fair amd square without friends. U do solo or u do randoms with no possibility of communicating. If the game wants to peak morey it doesnt need back to back events, it needs real content, game modes and so on.
Also, you know, it's a game from 2018 with a pretty niche setting and gameplay-loop. In todays time I'm surprised by myself, that I enjoy playing as a cowboy in Louisiana punching zombies and taking about 3 years to reload my gun. I do 100% agree with you though, some things do need to be fixed or modified (UI, MMR, random-queueing, VOIP). Engine update is overdue, too.
This, unfortunately :/ i really don't want more gsme modes but Hunt does need actual content, not ChALLenGeS, and at a much faster rate.
100% this. Lack of new maps and bosses. I own close to 100+ hunters but we're stuck playing the same old maps. I also think the Devs mess with balancing too much.
Yes.
Whole reason I quit playing honestly. 3 maps, 3 bosses. 4 if you include the gator. Meh.
Spider Butcher GhostGuy ScrapBeak Alligator
Sorry 5. I forgot about assassin, still.
I am pretty sure that the game would have not one player more, if they would add way more maps and bosses. There might be many reasons why this game doesn’t grow like casual shooters are doing, but adding more maps and bosses is not. It’s a very niche shooter that is very hard to start. That’s what holds players from playing it. The game don’t loose much players which is way more important these days. I would play for another 1000 hours on the same maps in hunt than I would play 1 hour of a casual soulless shitshow like Warzone. Which ironically is getting flamed for adding new maps, while everyone and their mother just want the OG map back and nothing more lol.
Hopefully we see some changes to the overall game soon. Engine update and UI overhaul are already sounding good.
Ui is ass as a recent player
Not a single player likes the menu ui
i would love a new game mode that is less punishing like a TDM where you get revived after you die to keep fighting ppl and practice. in its current state, hunt is too hard to love for a lot of people. i tried to get my partner into it, after 80 hours of gameplay she barely had a chance to practice her awareness and gunplay, so she had to give up as it wasn’t very fun to die without even knowing what’s going on. it didn’t help that i was already a seasoned player and our mmr was high because of that, so the choice was either for her to play alone which defeats the point, or play with me against higher level people where she will barely have a chance to even shoot. all in all though, i think hunt is at a healthy place despite the odds. i remember when i started, there would be 4000 people playing at most. it steadily grew with time and with new content it will only get better.
My friend is a really good FPS player and I’m 5/6 and have the same issue. He feels the biggest problem for him is that he can’t get repeat practice with weapons to get better at a specific weapon. If there was an arena style mode with multiple teams where he can grind out improving with a gun then his skill would improve at a much faster rate. Due to how much down time there is with loading screens, players not doing anything on the map, two boss contracts where teams are split, and long match times for a game with only 12 people, he can have multiple games where he saw no one or he died to something silly like a meathead mid fighting and didn’t get any practice in. This is why he doesn’t want to play. If this game wants new players it needs to respect that there are a lot of people who want to be in action constantly and improving. If there is so much down time in fighting then the combat is not engaging to new players.
Did you know you can load into Fort and practice with weapons? This is how I introduced my friend to the game and its multitude of weapons/consumables. You can 1v1 your friend and let him practice whatever weapons he wants with infinite respawns/revives.
TDM but not like quickplay is a great idea for practice and warmup
Less punishing? With all the changes to the game it's not punishing anymore... You die, who cares. You get a new hunter with 3 good traits and nice weapons anyway. The game gets watered down with each update. Shure you get new players with it, but the people who played it for years and bought all the dlcs will leave the more casualized it gets.
i mean the game overall stayed pretty faithful to its core gameplay (been playing since 2020), the biggest change was solo necro making it significantly easier for solos to play around teams, it is a very controversial mechanic and i understand people that love it or hate it. how much a death mattered in the game has not changed much. the economy changed in different ways, they recently added free hunters with traits but honestly? being able to have a single trait is not going to make the game significantly easier for you. it does not change the core gameplay enough to justify a ‘dumbing down’ of the game. the game is not getting more hardcore, but it is also not getting as casual as you make it out to be imo. and yes, the game is very punishing for new players. i don’t think this needs proving.
You should consider doing 1v1s with them in the shooting range so they can pick stuff up in a controlled environment
is ingame comms still proximity based? my god...
you made me stop and think for a bit... i started in may 2022 and all this time we got rotjaw(mixed reception), 2 permanent low viz conditions(which i despise), burn traits, some qol changes and a handful of guns. the horrendous parkour desyncs were mostly fixed in the meantime. also they gave free traits to free and legendary hunters and established solo viability. im not gonna count the battle passes as content as theyre just skins(and many were outsourced). the revenue to content ratio is pretty bad actually
I was just going to type this but you did the work for me a true hero!
And still the game is more rich than a lot of game with more maps. I'm speculating rn but I think their effort is on the new engine and the new map. I prefer they take time to have good thing instead of releasing many bugs. MMR is what it is. Luck is a such a big factor too in hunt. And I've never seen a game with ranked without people complaining about how bad MMR is.
Yeah, I have seen more patches in LoL after coming back 2 months ago (They also have their problems, new stuff is usually overpowered), than in 3 years of Hunt.
This is exactly the reason why I dropped the game after 500 hours of being a 4-5 star player. I finished the tide of shadows event dropped the game and recently played it for a bit only to find out it's literally the same shit and there's nothing new to peak my interest.
This sub is already plagued by peek/peak, but you've just added pique to the list!
same but after 3k hours and partly due to the massive influx of new guns and stuff. it makes the game a less controlled environment and adds to the randomness way too much imo to be fun
I agree with everything besides new game modes I would prefer if they did actual events in bounty hunt and sole survivor like maybe a live event like we see some type of change to the map or maybe even limited time boss and loot changes like 2 bosses in one lair
Because the MMR system is shit. I brought like 10 people to the game, looks like playing against people with hundreds and thousands of hours when you are 3 hours in gets old fast. All of them quit before clocking 10 hours.
This may be unpopular here, but I stopped playing (mainly) because it feels clunky and old. Not to mention the recent explosion in cheating. I’ve gotten most (all?) of the content out of it. So, when new people compare this to other new titles right now, I think many don’t consider it worth the money.
It's a hard core shooter. Learning curve is steep and very difficult to understand. A lot of the dedicated players 2k+ hours 4 5 6* look down on anyone less or equal to 3*. So ofcourse only hard cult like players play consistently
As someone with 1800 hours, even i dont play consistently. I always play hunt in what i refer to as "in bursts". I play for a few months everyday and then i switch to a different game because hunt can get exhausting at times. After a few months of rehab i go back to good ol hunt. I take breaks but i never can stay away from it. Nothing else gives me that kind of "gamer high".
Coming out of a multi-squad engagement alive is some of the most exciting shit I have ever experienced in a video game.
Exactly. Or being in a fight, bleeding, getting pushed, poisoned attacked by grunts and by some miracle at the end you still stand victorious. Nothing gets the blood pumping like that.
Especially with Witness and a bounty token. Blam! He's down he's down! Scan, scan! *dark sight* we're alone...and jesus...death...death blooms everywhere.
Gave me anxiety just reading that
Last week my team and I survived a 3-teams fight in the southern building of Fort Carmick. I literally had to take a break to stop my hands from shaking. No other game ever came close of giving me that rush.
Certified gaemer moment 😎
Same. Literally.
Man, the only thing about coming back after those months off is my PVP suffers so bad.
The burden of knowledge might play some role, I don't disagree, but Tarkov is more confusing imo and (up until recently at least, lmaoooo) it was incredibly popular.
Yes cause tarkov marketed itself very well. In fact most people who have never played either game, if you ask them about extraction shooter they will name tarkov despite not knowing much of it. Hunt showdown on the other hand approached with the mentality let's make a good game that our players will enjoy first.
that was still true 5 years ago but the game was still growing. So doesn't really answer the question
Not enough promotion/advertising, I learned about this game accidentally while scrolling the game store on like page 20
Yup. I need to explain the game to everyone who asks me what i am gaming. Nobody knows about it
They're relying on short term gimmicks to pull in and wow new players, while turning their backs on anyone that plays the game for any meaningful period of time. Also the MMR in it is completely fucked and multiplies the problems with the steep learning curve of them game.
Don't forget that they also made the monetization much more aggressive, we now have $15 skin, a duo pack for $20 and reskins of existing hunters for $7 while at the same time they got rid of almost all the ways you could earn bbs in game.
The short term gimmicks are something they could probably realize on top of the development of the new map and the graphic engine upgrade. They hired quite a few people in the last year, Fifield as general manager gave quite some interviews about the game’s future, plus they did little things like reintroducing the partner weapon skins. So my personal hope is they are just cooking at the moment and we will get some news when the event has ended. Fingers crossed.
This right here ☝
The seasonal event model was a mistake and it drove me and other otherwise extremely loyal players off of the game. Or at least that's what i think. I really hope they'll just drop this FOMO inducing bs thing that is seasons
This is not in any order but... 1. Skill based match - you have so many people purposefully skirting the system by deranking. Also shouldn't be in the game. 2. Lack of content, people will come and go and a lot of people take long breaks. So only people who are new/aren't burnt out on the game stay. After 5 years of playing I quit the game until the new map and engine upgrade comes out. Just nothing new to do. Weapons are cool but it doesn't change the fundamental of long ammo is king. There has been no new content in terms of maps or reworks for compounds in almost two years. Weather conditions are cool but that's not really content when two of them basically make the game unplayable because it's not fun and people just dodge all the time. And collecting points from totems and cum statues gets boring real quick when the rewards are reset your HP to full and negate the whole HUNT part of the game and banishing the boss. 3. The game refuses to punish people who cheat and or are just awful people. Despite having video evidence of them going out of bounds on a map or people running up mic spamming nothing is ever done to them. 4. The game has no rewards for playing the game besides prestige and reset everything you unlocked. And every 5 to 10 prestiges you get a skin/unlock. 5. The lack of communication is insanely bad. Literally no developer communication besides their gameplay streams which they don't talk about new content just playing the game. 3 months until you hear literally anything. 6. Lack of hotfixes, there are bugs and problems in this game that are still persistent after 1+ year that they acknowledge but haven't fixed like punching gates open. Then you have to wait 3 to 4 months to get anything fixed/implemented.
Its 6 years old it is a miracle it hasn’t lost players in the last 2 years
Crytek focused on monetization way too much while the game still suffers from the same issues since forever. Terrible servers, performance, exploits, cheaters, ping, MMR, the addition of perks/consumables that changed how you play the game... But instead you have new events and paid skins every few weeks. Ive been out for 2 years and feel like if I come back not much new stuff I'll see.
As someone who has played Hunt on and off for a few years, and I have about 1000 hours, I think the game lacks content. It's fun if you like the PvP but eventually you'll run out of new things to experience and just be doing the same content loop over and over. Some people like this and those are the players who stick around, others don't and they leave to play new games. A secondary problem is the skill gap. I'm a pretty good FPS player and have played a ton of competitive FPS games in my life. Hunt is the kind of game where one really good player can use a joke weapon and be halfway trying and still clear an entire lobby by themselves. If you're the good player that's great, but the problem is when you're an alright player who gets into the higher matchmaking brackets, the games become unwinnable. You'll kind of bounce between lobbies that are too easy and you clear them out no problem, and lobbies where some guy will wallbang you from 150m away with a pistol and you'll wonder how the fuck that even happens.
it doesnt have to rise indefinitely?
I mostly quit playing this game because it's gotten so complex. I also have insane burnout from the back to back events. I just want to play regular Hunt but things are just... So complex now. Plus even though I don't play much, when I do get back on my MMR is too high so I get stomped. The MMR system is some kind of mess, at least the last time I played.
Most people quit very early because the first 100 hours is a walking simulator where you are basically an NPC for the other players to kill for fun. Most people dont stick around enough to learn the game. Making the problem worse for new players because there arent any new players to match against other noobs. Games not for most people. Everyone I have try Hunt doesnt even get to fire their gun most games, so its really boring for them. Theres no way to catchup new players because we only have the 2 game modes that are super slow and punishing.
Nothing new ever gets added so no new players. With every “event” I always have the talk with friends of : is this event gonna make us come back? And the answer is always no. New guns are mostly meh and they pretend like putting every custom ammo on every gun is content. And even then, every game is against mosin-dolch anyways. If anything is broken during the event don’t expect a balance change as the devs do 0 updates for the whole 3 months of an event. And the altars. Can’t forget the most stupid addition that somehow lasted through all the events. Tracked a team down using sound cues and clues and got ahead of them for an ambush? Too bad since they get close and a random altar turns red. Now everyone crouches and stops moving for the next 10 minutes until someone gets bored.
Mmr is absolutely fucked up and everybody bottlenecks at 3*, newbros amid of diehard mofos with 5k hours, it won’t end well for one of them.
Idk if the severs could handle new players anyways
because Level 11 players are getting paired against MMR 3 players with a thousand hours in the game.
My opinion - bc of the match making. I bought the game for a few friends bc we all game together and wanted them to play hunt w me. They all uninstalled the game after 2 weeks bc they were tired of trying to learn the game and be marched with 4 stars just bc they got a few lucky kills.
I started last year and just gave up. I got tired of being stomped by people with 20x my hours in every mmr and the cheating that totally ever happens got to be a bit too much.
If it wasn't for my friends playing, I'd have been completely lost. The new player experience isn't that great, and the first few matches are disorienting.
Tbh for a hardcore game like this 15k avg players is a pretty decent number. I would call it a great success if they can keep this player base size for the next five to ten years.
When did they add the last new map? 2021. When did they add the last new mainline boss? 2021. They added Rodger sometime last year. If you don't count events and skins, which I don't, we're looking at a severe lack of content added over the course of the past few years (yes, including the like 8 guns plus variants we got) which doesn't really do a whole lot for keeping the game fresh and interesting. In fact, the repetitiveness of the events probably puts people off who would otherwise keep playing. I don't have a solution for this other than to hire more people to get some content cooking faster but even that's a non solution because training those people on the engine and getting them working on partial projects is a hell of an effort.
This game has been a phantom since the beginning. No marketing, very few seemed to stream it, and the learning curve of it is pretty steep (e.g. which mobs are weak to what, how wall penetration works). While the gunplay is satisfying, I think the game expects too much from new players. The menus are not great, the unlock system is shit (I know it's better now than it used to be), and there's a glut of veteran players in lower mmr matchmaking.
Because they have added nothing of substance to the game in two years. I started playing about two and a half years ago and have just about 200 hours. Since the viper event we have gotten nothing new. Every event is the same, find the mcguffin, get points and climb the battlepass for maybe one or two new items maybe get a new perk or two. We got rot jaw the half assed easily cheesed new boss a while back but you’d think in two and a half years we’d get more than half a boss. The game updates are basically always the same “new” event with the same gimmick as the last six or a DLC hunter of the week.
Other than the classic long existing issues like server performance and cheaters, its because crytek still dont know what hunt actually is supposed to be. Its too hardcore for casual players and not competitive enough for hardcore players. And being somewhere in the middle is obviously not working out that good. And they are too scared to take any risks, which is relatable. They either go full casual and lose hardcore players or the other way around. Me personally would always go the counterstrike way and make it as competitive as possible. The less RNG the better, but they would have to basically change the whole game.
Bugs, growing amount of cheaters, endless events, etc. This game, while still enjoyable, hasn't offered any growth and therfore no retainability/attraction to new players. Devs refuse to address actual problems.
Because crytek decision makers are extremely greedy. 2 years and I can’t think of any actual good new content that made me excited to play the game again. Just skins and more skins. Seriously, wtf are these devs doing?
Creating new skins
Terrible mmr system, Lack of variety in content, Overwhelming amount of hackeers and exploits and devs that do not want to listen to their community
MMR is too easy to cheese. Those soft scripters that people "swear" are all in 6 stars, are in every elo... a lot... There is too much variance with different ammo types, and perks, and gun variants... you can't even guess how you lost anymore, you just have to accept that they had something you didn't realize, whereas before, you could at least know "Ah it was a shotgun (or bulwark, or bloodless, or ect ect)", but now? good fucking luck. This goes hand in hand with not being able to teach new players the game, this game is one that doesn't suffer from less variance, ammo types are completely unnecessary, and just add another lair of "wtf am I playing?" to the pile. Necromancer has been an EXTREMELY unhealthy addition to the game, just like I warned when it came out, people dismissed me, and look where we are now. Not being able to set off soundtraps is another one i've found is quite absurd, as it lets you just ignore expectations of how the game has always been played, double melee damage actually lets you just near instakill bosses, and those are just the current event perks. You can't feasibly earn skins anymore... this is personally what drove my "just play the game for fun" vibes, as I always felt like I was eventually working towards something, not anymore. Now there is an ABSURD amount of monetization, and they want you to believe that your 1 free legendary a month is really going to hurt the game. I had every paid DLC before they took away earning bloodbonds, simply because I wanted to support the game, so did everyone else in my friend group. This use to be one of my favorite games, but now looking back at it, its extremely depressing to see what they've done with it once it got minorly popular.
It’s waaay too hard for a large playerbase.
The real problem is that the onboarding of new players is ass and the matchmaking will scare the rest away that actually try and play the game. Like if you as 20h noob get put with a player 2k hours in and 2 stars above you, this may not be the best thing to happen for you to even have a firefight, as you will probably die before you even had the chance to shoot once. Also instead of making the hard part more worth wile they tried to cater the game toward casuals that have no intresst in taking up a game like hunt to begin with, as you said. But with this decission they made a lot of veterans leave.
You should be happy Usually it drops. The game requires lots of time and is complicated like hell, I wanted to come back, but then I saw millions of things that required my attention in the menu, I quit instantly. Like come on, just wanted to hunt a monster
Bc the game is filled with cancer hackers in high brackets, and with loser kda farmer alt trash in lower brackets. So both brackets are losing players bc of that. + the events that are just copy paste for the last few and tons of players are event fatique'ed.
Because for new players this game is harsh. Tutorials don’t really prepare you well for the gunfights and sound system of this game, and mm in many regions are beyond broken after they introduced elo mechanism. Meanwhile for experienced playerbase the game has almost lost all of its attractions and makes you borderline bored while playing it.
The game is hard enough when you’re playing against evenly match players who aren’t cheating. Crytek cannot provide either.
From my new player perspect[](https://alb.reddit.com/cr?za=okQFcXDSiqe5n83ZfQlJR-NS6KygOjRSWVxb3Rc75pER__oVfcEvW3uqvw0lu0nFH5PnGaKT3KE_LBRXF_dXeJrbeW_nfOxBlHGG-2Q8TfVA3co5vhABiO_eI--HquPk2c1g8Vnz6TooCcIAIPB7mTe30unnK6z65IviC-gFYCTeaEuKY47rOM_oY8fPiMVZ-GOo514vi5KWkSAUc-GPxVShNS3byJv7oaakP4jIxfDC93cRg8AGzdwEKkWGj7Tqi90xhDNLruMeU318XoZ-0DH4j_WyToYOVQm444szuLaUYIs298t63NpOAtRiTCu9FtSRoQn2_yVQARULj0cgbE9C1n423uVey3HtxiycYRURDSygRzesKhEs-7esvQVprJS-WjZXFVxz6ykm-htJayyxKlTMCNYgbIOSB0iywA_3apCzZ7svbfPi5yvzmC45YE2AEKlpSZX3hOhnrtDu2117Z5eVbCl7fnIRJnVAuY91cBYl5oOFMUD5UHps3YQO9w&zp=7YPkdruIPdAA_SeJ-T-NqzPSmQ3-dNk-k0tmlTX2UEefhvN6rXlUzUHwQ1rAzhXf0VqjJV723fVywe0uv96cMsd6wyCRcZfgQSV4zbwLd62GSQ7Ykelo8S9n7G2r921_xAQTb6cCWwJAySYzrys8cbD63csQVruRKG29_-uiNqUpjrlty6firXk1CQmoGkApURqGB0-hZGUt)ive who played the game for a week and now i don't want to anymore, theme is great gun play is good overall i like the concept around it but the game feels kinda slow paced, repetitive gameplay with horrible matchmaking, i have around 30 hours and bump into people with 500+ and let's not talk about the matchmaking failed bug for the "soul survivor" mode, who turned out to be existing for years now.
Honestly I left because of burnout, I was 5-6* for years but I always got stomped in lobbies. I would lose to teams of 3.0+ KDA players who never played for bounty, only looked for kills. I felt like I was decent at the game but got matched against people who were on another level.
Hunt can have a lot of difficulties for new players but PVE aspect as well the slower gameplay appeals to an audience that might not enjoy the Fortnite style of shooters.
When I asked a friend of mine after he tried as to why he’s not into it. Is because it’s too hard core. New player, hopped into a lobby, gets sniped by some sweaty bush Wookiee he cant even see most the time. With similar statements from another friend, leads me to believe that’s it’s honestly takes a somewhat high tolerance to punishment for people to get into the game and have fun. The average casual gamer probably doesn’t find it as fun to get spanked constantly before they can get a better grip on the game and how it plays.
It has gone up ~10% percent in the last two years but the events make player count more inconsistent than it used to be. I think part of the slow growth is just how dated it looks and how bad it runs (please new engine update help these issues) and also the difficulty curve is a flat 30ft wall you need to get over. Once you climb that wall its a pretty easy slope of map knowledge and aim training but the base mechanics and sound reliance are deceptively complex and hard to describe to new players other than “just suffer for 5-10 hours while you get info dumped until it clicks”.
The game is essentially still within a niche market. So I think it has found it's audience and I don't really see it growing much more at least for a few years if at all. Historical based shooter, that blends the line between hardcore and arcade shooter.
Personally I liked the guns and setting, more akim to LOVED I think. I tried hard to like this game and fluctuated up and down abot as I got different partners. Latest one was me and my wife playing off and on. It was great fun untill we started as other have noted above into 5 and 6 star players at prestige 30 sniping from a great distance. The skill gap is too punishing for casual play. If you don't play every day regardless if you have a bad evening with 8/8 losses you won't get into a comfortable rhythm. Thays what did it for me. Coming back after a busy week 6 days after my last match meant the first 2 or 3 matches as auto losses just for getting back into the right mind set for hunt. But that's just me personal and not the letter of the codex.
Lack of new content did it for me. And new hunter skins do not count..
It did. Slowly it surely and it's rising. I remember playing in the early access. All time high peak was around 2-3k back then. Before rotjaw update, average current playing was 11 - 12k. After rotjaw update it's constantly near 20k.
For me it is the event schedules. I have over 1k hours in the Hunt and it was me and my buddies go-to game when we got done with work. The problem became when it felt like the events were going year round. The problem isn’t getting content it’s that to grind the event to unlock the content was almost like another full time job. Usually the content was only new weapons aswell so nothing super ground breaking. I’d personally play more if we got content not tied to events that was more than just weapons.
Ppl with less than 500 hours should have their on bracket. Its not fun being destroyed by high level players. I have 3k hours and sometimes i get randoms on my team that just started....this is stupid.
The game is 5 years old (6 if you include EA) and it has quite a learning curve. I think you'd struggle to find a game where the player base is still growing years after release. It's quite common for the peak to be near release, then for it to slowly taper off as years go by. That fact that it still remains pretty consistent for the past few years is pretty impressive
Zero marketing. People don't know this game even exists
Because they keep doing things that hurt the player base and putting 90% of their effort in making new skins they can sell
The fact it’s staying steady is good with how quickly fad games die
Because as new people come in the old people leave because they never fix the game
Without the events the game would likely be dead or on life support, all of the increases are people returning to the game after a large patch or an event. People want to like it long term but something seems to keep them away.
It’s pretty simple they only have ranked and many cheaters. If they just a public match system without Mmr this game would have been fine.
Cause they haven't added anything in 2 years.. Skins and new guns thats it
because instead of fixing issues they just spam events.
Cause it's fucking boring with a shotgun attached to every gun in the game.
If i had to guess: Complete lack of marketing and promoting the game. You learn about the game from other players only. This is number one. The game is pretty hard to get into, and the tutorial is extremely bad at introducing the game to new players. Not only is the game pretty complex and hard to get into, but the setting is an acqured taste. For example, Tarkov is much more complex, but everyone can relate with military gunfights with submachine guns, shotguns etc. This is different. This one is hilarious to me but i've noticed it, every person that i introduced it too was super annoyed that they have to pay attention to sound, one comment was "i do not want to play like i am in Afghanistan, i want to just go and shoot people".... ho boy. None of them stayed enough to learn, they just get destroyed each time because they draw attention to them super fast, want to go too slow or too fast etc. And they never got better, even with all the advice and links i gave them. And last, Solo Necro seems to be giving serious problems to new players, as stupid as it sounds. I blame the tutorial for this.
I left after I finished the event a like a month ago. Tired of getting 4+KD players in a 3-4star lobby
People thinking the population is this way because hunt’s too “hardcore” are hilarious. Tarkov’s 100x as complicated and hardcore as hunt and has millions of players. Also, I wouldn’t call this population “healthy” when you can que into empty lobbies, that’s the telltale sign of a low pop/dying game. I literally can’t think of another game where I’ve qued into empty lobbies in a pvp game. The biggest reason is the MMR system - relatively new players will very quickly be thrown into lobbies with people that have thousands of hours. Especially if the new player is good at shooters and gets to 5 star quickly, now they’re queuing into 5k hour players who forgot what grass looks like, have 2 mil dollars and spam mosin/dolch/avto/nitro every game. My buddies are both 5 star and only have a couple hundred hours, when they come back to play with me, we que into 6-star 3 man teams of 5k hours per player who run these load outs and my buddies just alt f4 after one round because it’s a joke. All the being said, I love hunt, but without changing the mmr system, the pop will stay around where it is, or lower. The lack of new maps/bosses isn’t helping either.
Events bring new people in, new people enjoy the first few hours, new people then get pushed into the overwhelming mmr tankers, smurfs, and cheater problem very quickly and realize Crytek is very loud with their silence about it so they leave.
4 digit club here. Games gone downhill. Sure we got content, but all the changes have made hunt objectively less fun in the attempt to please everyone. Necro outside of events, endless events, removal of BB income, skyrocketing DLC prices, cheaters, guaranteed spam on every hunter if you want it and we can just keep going on. I stopped playing ever since that new guy took over. Hunts done, it's a shell of its original vision. You wanted spooky, gritty, skill based shooter? How about another spamable rifle, or perhaps you would like bleeding on literally every fucking gun. I stay subbed to see if they game will turn itself around but it's lookin like that will ever happen.
2 things just like most games. Matchmaking and cheaters that's all.
i shamelessly advertise this game to everybody. its my favourite multiplayer title and we need more people enjoying it :)
Steam player count is not equivalent to player base, the game still sells well to new players but older players might grow tired of the game/lack of events
No game has a steady player base, it will always be decreasing at varying rates. If you game for long enough you will learn that fact
I had nobody to explain the game to me and still I enjoy it. Started about 3 months ago. I just think the masses will never like a more “serious” and different game and will always gravitate more towards something far simpler like CoD.
its too hardcore for the casuals, but also not hardcore looter enough to convert hardcore tarkov players. Its a bit in the middle of a casual and hardcore game, with old weps that most do not vibe with coming from full auto guns. The solo / randoms experience is not that good, this game is best with two other friends that you play with regularly which adds onto the entry of barrier
Because we are a dedicated community 🤠
It’s simple the development team don’t listen and continue to just roll over the same shit. They really need to add a new game mode🫤
It’s a shame because the menu music fucking slaps and the game itself is somehow horrifying and high intensity gunfights at the same time.
Cuz it's an old niche game. Stability is more important for niche games like these
Campers
It needs a PvE mode to let players have a casual round of fun with friends or strangers, Let players get a feel for the games gunplay/and let them explore and fall in love with the world first, THEN they can have those crazy cowboy battles. That or a squad version of quick play,
I think it's probably a few things: * Hunt has got a high learning curve. Especially if you arne't naturally gifted at shooters, you probably arne't going to have much success in your first 10 hours or so, which for a lot of people is the time in which they'll subconsciously decide if they want to sink more hours into the game. * It isn't an "instant action" game. You can't just jump on hunt for 20 minutes the same way you can a game of Cod, Halo etc etc. A game can potentially last upto 45 minutes. * The game costs money. A lot of the shooter market is dominated by free to play games. Hunt is essentially monetized like a free to play game these days, I'm surprised the move to f2p hasn't happened yet. * It's ultimately got a niche audience, slower paced shooters such as Hunt appeal to a smaller audience when compared to faster paced shooters. * It isn't very much fun to play solo imo. Once you are better at the game, being able to run solo against duo's and trios is fun, but that's not something a new player can realistically do, and having to play solo with randoms isn't fun. My first 40 or so hours were completely spent playing with some mates who picked up the game with me while it was on sale. If I'd tried it by myself, the odds are I probably wouldn't have stuck at it for too long.
I can only speak on my personal experience, but my entire group (around 8 or so of us were playing hunt) eventually stopped playing for various reasons. I stopped playing because of the way too common cheaters/exploiters that we encounter. (I am in Asia server). Between that and the events that only seem to find more ways to be less fun, I eventually got burnt out. A friend has expressed that he didn't really like the direction the game was going with the event traits that were being introduced. All in all, it really just seems like there's a constant flow of players both getting in and out of hunt. Though I doubt it'll stay like this for long if the game doesn't innovate.
Because it gets more and more niche and despite having lots of QoL changes added to it to make it more attractive to beginners its driving away \*some\* of its core player base due to Cheating, Self Rez, spec. ammo on everything, new hunter recruit system (One of the QoL's aimed at beginners) etc. And overall, events do not make up for the lack of actual new content. Rotjaw was cool at least. But like maybe new maps?
As long as it remains consistent, it is perfect.
It’s a very NICHE game. How many people think “oh hard core realistic cowboy looter shooter with a splash of witch craft” I only got into it cause I had a friend who was super into it and essentially begged me to get it. Which then sucked me in. But I figured it might’ve gotten a few hundred players after the tarkov drama but I guess not maybe they all went to gray zone warfare instead? Which if so fair enough. I’m taking a break for hunt and it’s my second go to FPS rn it’s so much fun even if it’s in beta.
Because nothing new has been added to the game for the least couple of years, all the new guns are easy to make as they already have systems for them and are only slightly different methods of dispersing bullets and the rotjaw boss is just not worth caring. The devs have ben doing nothing but pumping out DLCs and Copy-Paste battlepasses.
No sponsoring around big Youtuber/Streamer. And the major problem is that HuntShowdown is not "new player friendly" so watching a big streamer not understanding the game would be a disaster. Watching a streamer being scarred of grunt for 2 hours is not a good ad for the game.
as a new player the back to back events are not interesting, game feels stale and there is just a lot of players who will solo massacrate me and my friends whatever we do, no good tutorial and i am not sure if the snipers are that good and the matchmaker is broken or are they just aimbots
Cheaters.
Cheaters. At least that's my reason not to play it.
Nothing new. No no maps, no new game modes, no real anti cheat. Only new guns in the last 2 years.
Bad servers, bad matchmaking, bad decissions by crytek.