Hunters,

Last year we had several outstanding issues that we planned to address, but that we weren't able roll out when we initially wanted. Today, we want to give an update on some topics that players have been expecting, letting you know where they're at now and potentially when we think you can expect to see the improvements live.

Ping Limits

Ping discrepancies have long been a large topic among players, both within and outside of the dev team. Many of you have pointed out to us that the existing hard limits can be circumvented, leading to games that are frustrating for both parties.

We have been investigating solutions that take ping into account in the matchmaking process. The aim is to create sessions between players on roughly equal footing.

There's a balance to be struck here, because overcorrecting can worsen the experience of people playing during off-hours or in smaller regions by complicating their matchmaking process. Accordingly, we spent time dedicated to collecting data and running simulations.

We now have a solution that will go into a limited, experimental roll-out shortly. We will share more on this over the coming few weeks.

Decentralized Backend

In 2023, we realized that in order to reliably support more players on our system, we would have to decentralize our Backend.

The Backend is the part of Hunt's system that handles your account, progress, matchmaking requests, and so on. The aim was to move these features to be housed in the specific region each player is connecting from—the same way the Session Servers were already distributed closer to where you are.

The Decentralized Backend went live quietly ahead of 2.0 and after a short adjustment period, has been running reliably.

Alongside this, we intended to optimize updates so that the game would require very little downtime during roll out. There was a multi-step development challenge behind this, but we are now pleased to confirm that we successfully served our very first zero-downtime update earlier this week, thanks to tremendous efforts from our technical teams!

Duos Can Queue with a Random Third

This is something we are working on for this year, but it has come into competition with necessary stability and bug fixing work that community feedback has made clear stands at a higher priority overall.

We don't have a set date for when this feature will be scheduled for delivery yet, but keep an eye on future updates where we fill announce finalized roll out date as soon as we can.

Fair Play Task Force

Since our last update on November 22 ^nd, we have banned an additional 2,472 proven cheaters from the game. We will continue to give regular updates about the topic within the next year and look forward to sharing more with you.

More Priorities

Other changes that will be incoming for 2025 include Ping Markers on the map for things like Cash Registers and Envelopes, as well as the return of the DeSalle map and much more.

UI is another topic which is at the forefront of our development efforts. We have made significant changes and introduced some new design ideas which we will be sharing an in-depth look at in a dedicated UI post next week.

We hope this addresses some of the topics that

have been discussed within the community. We look forward to sharing more as

the year unfolds!

- Your Hunt: Showdown 1896 team

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