Xisuma played HermitGuessr
It's always such a joy to watch anyone play your game, but hermits playing hermitguessr is always very special. I'm relieved it went well, and I'd like to share some thoughts:
It really is a privileged to watch people play things you make, playtesting is so important in the industry and for fun. One thing that interested me is it seems like X determines the season by looking at the panorama and identifying landmarks. Personally, I look at the map to know what season it is before I even look at the panorama. I'm not sure why he thinks Season 6 is flipped, I did check and it's rendered the same way as every other map. It did make me think for a second about randomly rotating the map to add challenge.
Speaking of challenge, another thing playtest seasons gives me the ability to do is understand the different kinds of players and the different locations. I've already decided that a hard/hermit mode probably isn't in the cards. In general my philosophy for locations is someone who didn't watch any content related to the location, should with enough detective skills, be able to get 0 blocks. Indoor locations for example, I generally like to put people near a door threshold, so you can look outside and triangulate your position from top down, like the TCG arenas in Season 9. I could place a location at the end of Doc's tunnelbore but it would be so hard to triangulate down to a block, that it would feel unfair. Another thing I'm cognisant of is the distance. People love to speedrun and race for the leaderboard and if 5/100 locations for a season make you lose 10 seconds while you scroll to it, making you lose a record time that doesn't seem very fun. Which is why I'm still considering what to do with exile. I might bring it closer on the map render or just forgo locations there in general, I'll have to play around with it to tell.
First, only a few bugs yay. The most obvious ones I noticed are:
the zoomed out view of Gem/Pearl/Impulse and maybe some Keralis area in Season 9 is missing, not sure what happened there but I'll reupload the map to the CDN after either re-rendering or verifying the master copy is correct
The hacienda location is wrong (could have sworn I fixed that already)
Season 9 map markers aren't removing themselves when switching maps.
Sometimes, when moving between seasons (might be related to above) it shoots you off thousands of blocks, making it appear like the map is blank, this is a really elusive bug I've been aware of for a while but could never pin down.
The new high score is playing too frequently, I think this has to do with anti-cheat measures, scores are stored in the negative so they don't appear on the leaderboard and then flipped to positive once confirmed.
The dropdown is a little harder to select than I'd like
The play again button could be more prominent.
I've noticed people mention they can't access the site, I can't replicate this and I still see a lot of active players, it seems to be a small portion of players. If this is you, please reach out!
I've deployed a few bug fixes this morning based on what I saw, and I really can't wait for the Season 10 download.
