Operation Medic Bag: Update #23 – Mask Mania and Music
Hello Heisters,
PAYDAY 3 had its first in-game event! This is normally where we brag and let you all know how well you did, and you did do well! But the event didn’t quite pan out as we had hoped. So, let’s have a look at where we went wrong and what we learned for the future.
To recap, what the event was
If you want details, go through the Mask Mania blog post on our website. To summarize, we had 4 concept masks that players could unlock by earning cash in specific levels tied to each mask.
Great, right? No, not really. We did do the math, we were calculating how much players could be expected to earn over the event period. In said calculations, we expected you to unlock two of the masks, and reach about 40-50% on the other two, instead; you unlocked 1 mask and got 55-85% on the other three. A predictable result, if you pause a moment to consider things.
What went well?
It’s not all doom and gloom, so let’s start with looking at what went well.
- More players joined the game! Seems like the event was enough of a draw for some to start the game, nice.
- A lot of you got extremely efficient at your chosen heist. Good job, heisters.
- Our analytics did what we had predicted, we had a few accidents, but were able to easily and quickly adjust.
- You unlocked 1 of the masks!
What went wrong?
A few things did go wrong, one, vacations. The people who organized the event were on holiday when the event started, and that caused some issues with communication.
- We don’t have any in-game messaging at the moment, meaning players were largely unaware of the event unless they happened to check our website or socials. This especially affected the console communities.
- We didn’t think out the rules properly. Had we made it a progression bar and put the masks on the bar, it would’ve been fine. Or we could’ve made it a “vote” where the two or three most played heists lead to a mask getting chosen.
- We didn’t show our numbers, meaning the goal felt impossible from the beginning, causing many to give up early. For the record, the cash goal was 100 billion cash for each mask.
- We had a data hiccup, causing some people to accuse us of trying to fib the numbers. We didn’t!
- The spike in contribution you see on Sunday morning was us compensating for loud heists being mistakenly capped in their contribution.
- A few felt like it was pointless since the masks would be available through challenges after the event.
- We didn’t set what heists to play based on earning potential, but by heist themes. Meaning people choose their favorites when they weren’t trying for the event.
What now?
We’re waiting for the masks to be released, the Shakedown Shark will be unlocked automatically to anyone that played during the event, and the remaining three will be made available, but locked behind devilishly difficult challenges.
We’ve had a good long talk about where we went wrong, what we want to improve for the future and what we think went well. Lessons learned.
The masks are still in production, the Shakedown Sharke will be made available to anyone that played during the event in the next content update.
The other masks and their respective challenges are coming in a later update, this also means that those who didn’t participate in the event will need to wait until then to get Shakedown Sharke, so enjoy your temporary exclusivity!
Stats for Chads
We did get some good stats from the event. And since we’re GoodGuys™, we’d like to share some stuff! First up, let’s clear things up regarding the data spikes, in the first graph, you’ll see where the spikes happened and what they were.
First thing is a plateau, it represents server maintenance, followed by a double contribution to compensate for that. At first that double contribution sent way too much data, meaning you see that giant spike, followed by an equally huge drop. We reset it fairly quickly, and you neither gained nor lost anything.
Next is a spike – that was a data error, we fixed it immediately.
Over the weekend, you see a rise in contribution, this is both due to higher player numbers, but also because we announced an event contribution increase that gave a bit of a boost.
And last, was us compensating for not giving you enough for some heists. Basically, we set a maximum possible amount of earnable cash for each heist, this lets us quickly filter out all the players who earned 10 trillion cash every 4 minutes. But, we set that cap too low on some heists where payouts should have been higher; it wasn’t by a lot, so the spike you see is us compensating for that lost cash from the start of the event.
Future Events
Despite just making a whole blog about what didn’t work as we wanted, we are happy with having run an event. We’re already planning more events for the future, bigger, stronger, faster. The community will help us shape the next event to be better, so thank you for sharing your thoughts with us on Reddit, Twitter/X, and the Discord!
Music
For the last part of this post, we want to remind everyone that the PAYDAY soundtrack is now available on most streaming platforms. Click any of the links below (and on our website navigation bars!) to listen to some sweet heisting tunes. Don’t call us if you accidentally rob a bank while jamming though, that’s on you.
