Hello everyone!
First of all, let us thank you for your support! We really hope you're enjoying the game and look forward to your feedback in the forums and Discord server.
While we usually spend the first day of Early Access on bugfixes and quick changes, this time there hasn't been any report that requires an urgent change, so we've been able to dedicate some time to check on the game's telemetry data, and we wanted to share some of this data with you.
Stage analytics
First of all, here are some graphs showing the mission duration distribution (that is, on which minute do missions tend to end):
At the moment of gathering data, nobody with telemetry enabled had reached Forge 2 or further. Also it doesn't tell if it was a win or a lose, that's something we'll change in future updates.
These graphs shows us really interesting and useful data. For example, we can see that on Graveyard 1 most people finishes the mission at Minute 11, so until we can determine if they won or lost, we can safely say that most people is reaching the boss stage.
However, there's a spike of deaths at minute 2 that bleeds a little into minutes 3 and 4, so maybe there's a surge of enemies at that minute that causes more deaths than intended for the first stage.
Forest 1, on the other side, has really distributed values, which is indicative of a difficult stage: While most people end the level on minute 11, there are also some spikes in minutes 2, 5 and 9, so those waves will need to be looked into.
Forge 1 has an important difficulty spike at minute 3/4, so again we'll need to tune difficulty of it a bit.
You can see data for the other levels too, with nobody being able to get past the 8 minute mark on Forest 2 yet.
Character analytics
Now, here's a table with information on pick rates/win rates of each character.
Note that the amount of people that unlocked Lanyz is still small, so a Win rate of 0% is not as worrying as it could be (yet).
This data shows the strongest (and most popular) character right now is probably Saul (I say probably because it doesn't tell on which stages they were played, which is an important factor). So we'll probably need to improve the others so they feel a bit more powerful.
We'll wait to show weapon/trinket charts until we have a bigger sample size, however most weapons are rather balanced in popularity and effectiveness, with a few outliers, such as Meteorite Blast being the weakest one. On trinkets there's a bit more variance, and we'll need to boost strength of non-damage trinkets to make them more powerful and interesting.
Difficulty discussion
We think this topic needs to be discussed a bit. We wanted Army of Ruin to be an autoshooter that's generally easy to approach and play, but that can offer a challenge at some points to be interesting. This means that you should be able to win stages if your skill distribution is adequate for the mission and your level up choices have a decent synergy between them.
Currently the game is probably a bit on the "too challenging" part of the scale, but we wanted to wait until we have feedback and data before performing the necessary steps to tone down overall difficulty.
We'll prepare a patch next Monday with some quick balance changes, so please keep the feedback coming so we can be sure we're changing the things that you feel are problematic!