Ghost/Difficulty Inconsistencies

[Badgerboy2002]

Does anyone else feel like the game isn't anywhere near consistent enough, like potentially behind the scenes broken inconsistent? I keep ending up in games where the ghost acts like a completely different ghost, or acts in a different way entirely than how it's described in the book. it also feels like the difficulties are bugged, because I keep getting games where the ghost is doing absolutely nothing and it feels like it's hiding evidence. I play on professional and while it was pretty solid since the update, one of the patches had to have broken something because I'm getting games where the ghost is only giving 2 or 1 evidence as if I'm playing on a harder difficulty. It's really lame and kinda ruins the experience when the ghost is an Oni acting like a Shade and I'm only getting a single evidence.

[Tracker]

You almost die of boredom at times waiting to get dots or freezing temps. Some times orbs are there instantly and other times they seem to appear out of nowhere later in the game. I feel like there should be more ways to force an evidence type

[Maya-Neko]

I've yet not had a single ghost who behaved out of their limitations. Obviously i had some ghosts who didn't give evidence fast, but that's simply the nature of randomness and pretty much why i love the game to begin with, since you don't know, what your next game will give you and sometimes it's just a challenge, where you really need to fight for evidence, but these games feel especially great to me, since getting it still right.

Also keep in mind, that professional difficulty has low interaction rates, which in fact reduce the chance of getting evidences like EMF, UV or book. Also having less interactions can sometimes make it look like you've found the ghost room due to 1 single interaction, but it might be one room further, which can on top of that make it harder to get Orbs, spirit box, temps and DOTS.

If you feel like it's not doing enough, then consider raising the interaction rates. Using custom difficulties you can even keep all the rest of the settings as how it is in professional.

Originally posted by Tracker:

You almost die of boredom at times waiting to get dots or freezing temps. Some times orbs are there instantly and other times they seem to appear out of nowhere later in the game. I feel like there should be more ways to force an evidence type

Most cursed possessions have ways to force evidence. You can modify your difficulty to contain more than one item or to always contain the same one, if that's what you think would make the game better overall.

[Kaisoku]

I think what can help is knowing a bit more about how the ghost operates behind the scenes, and to what extent the ghost's unique behaviors actually affect the standard operation.

The way it works is the ghost is constantly running a check every second or so (we'll call this an interval). Every interval, the ghost randomly chooses to do something out of a list: do an interaction with something nearby, place a "waypoint" within a specific radius and then move to it, use an ability, do an event, hunt, or do nothing.

- Interactions: This check is where moving objects and opening doors happens. It is also where object evidence items (like ghost books) were interacted with. DOTS has changed though, as it's now a "state" flag that may have it's own separate check outside of the other checks, who knows.. it used to be an "interacted with" item, competing against ghost writing and other objects, but doesn't seem like it anymore.

- Move: In order to move, the ghost will randomly drop a waypoint within a specific radius of it's room (or bounded by current location and room, not 100% on this). This radius does not respect walls, but as the ghost they have to move normally, so what can happen is the waypoint ends up on the other side of a wall, but the ghost has to exit the room, walk down a hallway or two, to finally reach the waypoint.
This is also where the ghost rolls it's chance to change it's ghost room (if any).

- Abilities: Ghosts that have active abilities have a chance to perform them (like Demon's hunt regardless of sanity, Wraith's teleport, Banshee path to their target, Phantom path to a random player and do a check, Mimic changing ghost it's copying, etc).
These definitely confuse the players, at the risk of doing something unique (hunting at 90% = has to be Demon, etc).
Since some of these abilities can force the ghost to physically be near you instead of it's normal location, it will have to walk back to it's room area and may do interactions along the way.

- Event: The ghost will teleport to a room where a player is located to perform the special event, and then path back to somewhere near it's room again. There's travel time though.. meaning temps are skewed, interactions might happen out of place, and the ghost can hunt from a weird position.
This happens with Taro cards: Devil card to make it event and be near you, and then Death card to have it immediately hunt.. killer combo.

- Hunt: The ghost triggers a hunt. It checks for possible preventative effects, such as sanity level, ghost behavior quirks, or items nearby (crucifix, or candles for Onryo/Mimic).
If it's prevented, it doesn't hunt (though that might affect the items nearby).

- Nothing: Between this, failed hunts, and interactions with nothing nearby, there can be a lot of nothing going on. Low roaming, low interaction rate and low event rate can mean a lot of nothing going on. Combine with random chance, and this can easily get confused with a Shade (who specifically doesn't do most things when near a player).

The game is designed around having most ghost abilities, evidence and behaviors being something that is hard to pin down. Barring specific circumstances with abilities used, most are "not doing something", causing you to think:
- Did I just miss it doing what it should have?
- Was it just random chance that it didn't?
- Am I misinterpreting something something (do I have the right room or was that my breath and not DOTS, etc)?
- Did something change or not (room changed, mimic changed ghost type, etc)?

The higher the difficulty, the more the settings make these things ambiguous, to the point that random chance will make ghosts look and feel very similar, a Shade being super active in a different room than you and looking like an Oni, or random luck sitting there doing nothing forever making an Oni look like a Shade.

Forcing situations to get a pin down on behaviors or evidence is the only challenge this game has. And the balancing act they've done is really good, honestly.

[Tracker]

Cursed item isn't going to for sure get you freezing temps though. Or dots, or orbs. Last night four of us spent half an hour in a match and only had one evidence on Professional. It just would not give us anything beyond that first evidence. We ended up just deciding to guess because it wasn't worth wasting anymore time.

"Oh but the hunting speed" yeah well when it moves at normal speed and you only ruled out a handful of ghosts from the one evidence can you really be for certain based on hunting speed? It wasn't a fun match, it wasn't challenging. It was just "For the love of all that is pure in the Universe do something other than hunt."

[Auska Krystie]

My friends and I have noticed the same thing. We've had Shades acting like Demons, a Moroi acting like the Twins, a Poltergeist acting like a Shade, and so on and so forth. The inconsistency of the ghosts is beyond frustrating for us, and we all know exactly how the game works.
And after the most recent update, I agree. The wait for D.O.Ts or freezing temps is horrendous! Thirty minutes waiting for a final piece of evidence, on all three normal difficulties is not a good thing. Hopefully, the devs fix the problems in the future, at some point, maybe.

[Han Daimond]

Originally posted by Badgerboy2002:

Does anyone else feel like the game isn't anywhere near consistent enough, like potentially behind the scenes broken inconsistent? I keep ending up in games where the ghost acts like a completely different ghost, or acts in a different way entirely than how it's described in the book. it also feels like the difficulties are bugged, because I keep getting games where the ghost is doing absolutely nothing and it feels like it's hiding evidence. I play on professional and while it was pretty solid since the update, one of the patches had to have broken something because I'm getting games where the ghost is only giving 2 or 1 evidence as if I'm playing on a harder difficulty. It's really lame and kinda ruins the experience when the ghost is an Oni acting like a Shade and I'm only getting a single evidence.

I honestly can't remember if this occurrence happened before the Ascension update, aside of reading users who were obviously misinformed about ghost's behaviors, I can tell it has been voiced very often lately for a reason.

I've had a very active shade at high sanity levels once. Taking from my own experience, there is definitely something wrong with the ghost behavior behind the scenes since the major update arrived. I personally believe the ghosts have issues, but Kinetic only knows, we can just speculate by sharing our experiences.

[lordcyrex]

As someone that watches streamers and doesn't have the nerve to play it on my own yet, I have - I guess - a unique perspective on the game. I feel as though many of these factors can only be seen or studied while dead. I watch ImpulseSV and his phasmo playthroughs cause they are wildly entertaining. But I find that they miss a lot of the nuance that these ghosts possess because much of what the ghosts do is in fact hidden. You don't see really how the ghost is moving unless you are dead and not in a state of panic. There isn't enough personality within the randomness of the ghosts to really tip off what they might be. I think the lower your sanity goes the more characteristic features of the spirit should become more and more perceptible.

I do very much enjoy how much attention the developers have made to these ghosts with respect to their real world folklore. It shows how much they care in getting it right and representing it the best way they can in a video game. With that said, I feel as though they could make some of these signature abilities and features be slightly more visible while not taking away from the game's spookiness.

For example:
Maybe some lightning sparks can be seen on cameras or crackling could be heard over the parabolic microphone to signal that a Raiju is nearby. But maybe they are only perceptible if your sanity is at 25% or below making it more likely that seeing or hearing it might very well mean you are about to die.

I think hunts that occur before a certain sanity threshold shouldn't be deadly. I think maybe they should be paralyzingly scary and cause intense sanity loss and perhaps even mess with the player's ability to use items, see, and hear. This would give the spirits that can possess the living a better chance of showing off their abilities. Plus, it would give the players a feeling of a "close call" without penalizing them for not being an action hero. Maybe they learn something crucial about the spirit by having such an intimate experience with them. Maybe the spirits cover the player in blood or ectoplasm, scream in their face, sing in their ears, cause them to go blind or deaf, teleport them to their favorite room and leaving the room causes a cursed hunt, etc. This would give the other players some way to interact with the spirit. Make it really feel like a monster.

Not every ghost should be deadly - like at all. Poltergeists, spirits, raijus, jinns, and several other ghost types that the game has are not inherently negative entities. Unless of course the entire game's premise is investigating active and negative spirits. I do believe there could be heartwarming elements to this game by adding in story elements that players can use to interact with the ghost. Just cause it's a horror game does not mean it has to be 100% horror 100% of the time.

Have more trickster elements with the ghosts. Maybe they could set off a string of events to lure the players to their favorite room and then immediately begin a hunt. Maybe lock a random player inside a room and cause a ghost event, but not a hunt. Be only perceptible to one random player at a time with contradicting elements such as singing to one player and screaming at another. Or have the ghost be entirely a harmless trickster with very little chance of performing a hunt unless they do a specific action that makes it flip a 180 and go feral on that player that performed said action.

Add a little humor to the game - ghosts could purposely launch an object at a player knocking them off their feet. Bust up some of their equipment making it useless, like chucking the camera across the room, or drawing a rude picture in the book instead of just scribbles. Maybe the ghost can whisper silly phrases in your ear, or you could pick up silly sounds on the parabolic microphone. Maybe one of the ghost events is having a random door burst open and a hundred arms and hands reach out and scream bloody murder at the first player that walks by it, but it only lasts for like 2 seconds. Just long enough to get a real good startle out of the player and get maybe a good laugh out of the others.

More than one ghost in the larger maps. You could have multiple ghosts in the asylum, high school, and prison. The ghosts could even interact with one another screwing with evidence or providing unique forms of evidence.

I could write a book about this, so I'll end it here for now.

[Crimson Bort]

I personally like this. All the ghosts have their tells that will give it away with no evidence, but the actual behaviour can be unpredictable. If the ghost is moving around a lot freezing can take a long time or not happen at all. I just see it as part of the game. Besides if the ghost just handed you all the evidence when you walked in people would complain that it's too easy. Sometimes You get em all right away, sometimes its stubborn and you might have to make an educated guess. I've got 1000 hours and still get stumped on pro occasionally. If you don't want to waste time waiting for evidence, Don't! There's no penalty for guessing wrong and trying again.

[Tracker]

Just had a Deogen hunt and not go after anyone who was hiding. We swore it was a Moiri because of that. Cant even trust their behavior at this point to tell you what the ghost is. Unless on Nightmare ghosts don't follow their behavior rules and just do whatever they want.

But go on about how great the ghosts not having tells is. What's the point in investigating if you cant even narrow it down? Just tell the homeowner to spin a wheel and that's what the ghost is. Price is Right style.

[sillyslap]

I get the impression RNG overwhelms ghost behavior. Oni are very inconsistent; I've had so many idle or non-manifesting Oni that I misidentified as something else especially on nightmare with a combination of emf 5, temps, and/or dots. There should be some random, but it shouldn't be more random than it is predictable.

Phasmo's problem is the rapid decrease in odds as evidence decreases. Different evidence combinations have different numbers of possibilities so we'll assume the average because we're just approximating. On 1 evidence you should expect to have a base win-rate of around 10%, 2 evidence around 25%, and 3 around 90%. Newer players probably wouldn't ever notice that behavior is inconsistent, and I'd say average players overall just aren't that invested in the game to pay attention either. When you can win 90% of the time just by gathering the 3 evidence why would you ever pay attention to behavior differences?

It's only when you get to Nightmare and above that you start to pay attention, and then realize how bad the RNG can mess things up sometimes and how "samey" all the ghosts feel. Like I once had a Shade that made me think it was a Demon. It started hunting within 30s of getting into the building and just kept doing a hunt every time it got LoS. I didn't bother gathering evidence after the 3rd hunt and went back to the van and checked Demon; and lost. I've had it the other way too, Demons that act like Shades, often those kill me because I start to think all I have to do is find the ghost room and gather proof, and then find myself locked in a bedroom with a pissed off Demon. The point is that if a Demon can be a Shade and a Shade can be a Demon just based on dice rolls, then a Shade is just a Demon that can't hunt in groups, and a Demon is just a Shade that can hunt a lot more often. The RNG values need to be more tightly coupled to the ghost personality. Onis are very unreliable, I've had Banshees that never sing, Poltergeists that interact almost never but love to cause events.

Some of these are really just bugs but a lot of it is RNG being overpowered. Like someone might say the RNG keeps things interesting, but it would really be more interesting to me if it were possible to learn to tell a Jinn just by how it walks around, if you were willing to devote that much time to it. There doesn't need to be a lot of randomness, there just needs to be enough barriers to detection of whatever unique thing identifies each ghost. Like, standing in one place is already meant to let you tell a Shade, Jinn, Oni, etc., apart from others. So just make it harder to tell if the ghost is staying in one place all the time. Let ghosts break or turn off motion sensors, stuff like that. If someone manages to locate the ghost, put up 3 separate cameras. and start watching for manifestations, then that should be a valid thing they can do. It's not exploitative behavior because they're still taking a risk that they're misidentifying the ghost, and if the stake-out doesn't pan out then they have to risk getting hunted to move equipment. This is probably within the real of what the devs eventually want to do; right now, they either haven't because of manpower/priorities, or because they want to take it a different direction entirely. But I can't imagine the current situation is what they have planned for long-term.

Also, lordcyrex is right, if we had more classes of interactions:

- Blood running down walls
- Rapidly slamming doors/cabinets (a la Paranormal Activity)
- Causes electronics to burn out
etc

Things would probably be a lot better. There'd be more possible combinations of ghost behaviorial traits, so the devs could make the ghosts unique without making them too easy to guess. It's probably just a matter of adding all this stuff is not simple and would require extensive rebalancing, which is time consuming and expensive. Anyways, this combined with more unique and consistent patterns of behavior would let the game remain challenging while making it more immersive and fun, to me at least.

[Hunzber]

For me the ghosts have been fine, without evidence I would usually guess the ghost right or be in the right track but getting the unlucky wrong guess. In the past I've only had a problem with a Jinn/Demon behaviour and only one of the 3 reasons were my ignorance (the breaker turn-off). I dont tend to wait to discover an evidence either and instead use a hunt to figure it out.

[Noelle]

I keep seeing this with Goryo specifically. The new DOTS mechanics combined with the RNG of ghost location and "DOTS state" means you'll be sitting in the truck for tens of minutes waiting for a fully laser-lit room to show the ghost for 0.25 seconds.

Of course, we can't forget that this is Goryo's ONLY unique confirming tell, meaning it's entirely useless on 0 evidence runs and you'll have to notice that it never changes its favorite room (which any ghost could simply choose to not do, especially in larger maps where corridors are forbidden as "favorite").

[Ninabeana434]

On one match me and my friends were playing, while we were looking for the ghost room, the ghost started hunting almost immediately. Our sanity was at 85 so it had to be a demon. Apparently, it was the twins. I have no clue how this happened. Nobody took any sanity meds, and twins have the normal sanity threshold. My guess is that the game glitched but that would really suck if that was a bug because early hunts help with identifying a lot, and now I can't trust it anymore.

[SabotageTheFool]

Originally posted by Han Daimond:

Originally posted by Badgerboy2002:

Does anyone else feel like the game isn't anywhere near consistent enough, like potentially behind the scenes broken inconsistent? I keep ending up in games where the ghost acts like a completely different ghost, or acts in a different way entirely than how it's described in the book. it also feels like the difficulties are bugged, because I keep getting games where the ghost is doing absolutely nothing and it feels like it's hiding evidence. I play on professional and while it was pretty solid since the update, one of the patches had to have broken something because I'm getting games where the ghost is only giving 2 or 1 evidence as if I'm playing on a harder difficulty. It's really lame and kinda ruins the experience when the ghost is an Oni acting like a Shade and I'm only getting a single evidence.

I honestly can't remember if this occurrence happened before the Ascension update, aside of reading users who were obviously misinformed about ghost's behaviors, I can tell it has been voiced very often lately for a reason.

I've had a very active shade at high sanity levels once. Taking from my own experience, there is definitely something wrong with the ghost behavior behind the scenes since the major update arrived. I personally believe the ghosts have issues, but Kinetic only knows, we can just speculate by sharing our experiences.

And you’ve proved that you don’t know what you’re talking about with your example. Shades can still be active.

Most people complaining about ghosts don’t understand what they’re complaining about. Weird it’s so broken yet so many can consistently do zero evidence etc… it means it’s not broken…

A lot of people also were definitely activating the hunting rabbit during the event and claiming it was a random early hunt; at least that will die down.

No, there isn’t a massive inconsistency with ghost behaviours.

[SabotageTheFool]

Originally posted by Tracker:

Cursed item isn't going to for sure get you freezing temps though. Or dots, or orbs. Last night four of us spent half an hour in a match and only had one evidence on Professional. It just would not give us anything beyond that first evidence. We ended up just deciding to guess because it wasn't worth wasting anymore time.

"Oh but the hunting speed" yeah well when it moves at normal speed and you only ruled out a handful of ghosts from the one evidence can you really be for certain based on hunting speed? It wasn't a fun match, it wasn't challenging. It was just "For the love of all that is pure in the Universe do something other than hunt."

Orbs aren’t “given” they’re always present in the ghost room, if you can’t get ghost orbs that’s entirely user error.