Detailed Feedback on The Tome System and The Behavior it Encourages

Xetoil

Hey there

I am writing to address design flaws I believe are present in the Level III of the current tome, point out their ramifications, as well as speculate on the developers incentives for making these design choices. I am aware that this forum is home to a lot of complaints and aggressive demands for changes to the game, and so in light of this I aim to be as articulate as possible.

My motivation to write this stems from my enjoyment of the first two levels of the current tome. I have been very excited to unlock the lore of my favourite character, Trapper, as well as take part in challenges which forced me to change my playstyle and overall have a much more gratifying and deep experience within the gamespace. I was rather disappointed with the reveal of Level III, as I immediately noted the adverse affect its opening challenge would have on gameplay from the survivors perspective, and also felt my heart sink as I imagined the notably uninteresting grind I would have to go through before being able to read any more of Trappers backstory.

Just to note, this post will focus mainly on the survivor side of the game, as their their side requires players to voluntarily delegate themselves to tasks that they believe the rest of their team are not doing, assumed based on the information present. When you add new motivations for players to engage in tasks on a meta-level, you risk interrupting the natural, contextual, flow of the game.

Part 1 - How it feels to play through the tome.

The tome offered me two sources of enjoyment aside from the main game. The first was that little buzz you get when you see a number correlated with value rise; in this case the rift fragments. And the second was to offer me an incentive to try new ways of playing Survivor.

Prior to the release of the Tome, I was primarily a stealth player. In order to make the tome challenges as streamlined as possible, I was forced to re-think my survivor builds and adapt to the needs of the challenges. I began running perks such as We’ll Make It in order to have better chances of pulling off reliable heals in a trial, and was encouraged to attempt things such as bodyblocking in order to ensure my safe unhooks. This experience caused me to expand my knowledge of the game and its mechanics, which was ultimately very rewarding.

The tome also has what I believe to be an understated impact on the mental health of the killer community. Performing bad as a killer in this game can be downright humiliating at worst, with players engaging in what is essentially playground bullying. The tomes allow an alternate method of victory for killers which allows them to feel a sense of progress at the very least. I know this may come across as very “give a gold medal to everyone”, but this game does not exist within a strict heriarchal meritocracy, despite containing elements of such. It is first and foremost a Game, and I believe the tome has had a positive influence over this aspect.

The key point in this section is that, rift fragments not withstanding, my main motivation for playing through the levels of the tome was that it challenged me to try out new ways of playing, culminating in a rewarding experience.

Part 2 - Incentivizing player behavior.

The design philosophy in tome challenges appears as follows: normal challenges consist of naturally occurring actions, such as healing others, and are created to pad out the length of time it would take to complete the tome. Master Challenges exist to give players interesting alternative objectives and can be considered the main appeal of the tome system.

A quick note on padding: Padding ensures a relative and, in theory, moderately consistent timeframe for which the developers can expect the tome to be completed, and thus manage reward distribution. It also means that dedicated players and casual players will necessarily be working on different challenges a few days post-release, which is crucial when the challenges only focus on a small substrata of the available systems in the game.

So far, all levels of the current tome have begun with objectives which incentivize a small window of available systems. I.e. Safe unhooking or Healing. These objectives can be completed over the course of just a few games. What separates Tome III from the first two, is that choices available at the beginning of the Tome are not able to be completed in an relatively short amount of time. Because the specifications of the presented challenges are mundane, and also act as gateways to more interesting challenges, and also contain a time limit to their completion to award rift fragments, players are encouraged to either get these challenges out of the way as soon as possible, or to ignore them at the expense of the rewards (fragments, lore and access to new challenges) which the tome is offering.

Part 3 New player behavior in the Gamespace

Originally, Dead By Daylight offered survivors who were working on generators a choice upon seeing a hooked teammate. Do they go in for the save, at the expense of the main objective, or do they work on the main objective, potentially botching the save? The contextual nature of this decision and the uncertainty it generates produces good deal of drama in the gamespace. However, with the inclusion of level 3 of the tome, the survivors are being offered two very strong incentives to make one choice over the other. The first being the rift fragments, and the second being essentially locked out of other ways to quickly achieve rift fragments and related rewards until the challenge is complete.

Because it never feels good to see that you didn’t make as much progress towards your goal as you would have hoped, (a feeling which gets worse in proportion to the perceived difficulty of that goal), you are essentially moving the choice from a strategic one, to a matter of “am I going to risk not making as much progress as I could just so I can win the game and thus delay both the rift shards, AND the ability to attempt new challenges on the tome?” A meta question with an apparently clearer answer provides a lot less tension, a component of enjoyment, than a tactical one which is contextual to the current gamespace.

I can see this leading to three behaviors from the onset of the tome

1. A section of players rush hooks to get their challenge done with as soon as possible in order to move on to the next challenges in which far less survivors will be competing for the same goal.

2. A section of players who put more emphasis on escaping than the aforementioned group will find the challenges too competitive to complete in a short amount of time, and may also see their escape rate suffer as the result of poor teamwork, and will thus will either join group 1, or make the choice to not attempt the challenge at all, which is not a behavior developers want to encourage.

3. A section of players will cut their playtime down significantly as a way of avoiding the problems associated with current tome, and return to it once the behavior of players has normalized somewhat. I imagine this group will emerge from the second group.

Part 4 - Honoring BEHAVIORS position as a Business

The purpose of the rift is a simple one, it is to create a new source of income for the game, and naturally, behavior should want this source of income to provide as much as it possibly can, over as long a period as possible. Furthermore, with the ability to earn back your Auric Cells via the rift, a significant section of the playerbase should earn just enough that they feel satisfied, whilst also having to buy a new set of Auric Cells for the next rift in order to make such a system financially viable.

As I see it, the perceived easiness, and the perceived potential enjoyment from the challenges in the tome are a direct factor in a customers decision to buy into the rift, as their willingness to partake in the challenges is proportional to their perceived ability to make progress in the rift, and thus get their money’s worth. The challenges can still be padded and presented in a way which ensures that the average player investment stays at a reasonable mean for financial reasons, but I don’t believe the current system as presented in Tome III is suitable, as it modifies player behaviour in such a way that players are implicitly encouraged into leaving the game for potentially long periods.

I would like to note that whilst reading through the forum I noticed accusations that the delay between release of the tomes was to encourage early purchases with the later tomes being deliberately lazily made in order to minimize the amount of players who make their money back. I would hesitate to say that this is the truth. From my perspective, looking forward to the new challenges was an exciting part of the experience of the tomes, and being continually disappointed this way will only steer customers away. I do not think anyone running a business would make such an amateur, cash-grab decision with their flagship product, especially when holding excitement in this way ensures higher long-term sales and is not really that momentous a task. It is more likely that there is some in-company mechanism which prevented this issue from being properly vetted prior to its release, similar to the rather glaringly obvious bugs we saw with Ghostface on the PTB.

Part 5 - Possible Solutions

I would like to stress that these are not definitive solutions, but possible solutions, which can be implemented mutually exclusive to one another

Offer challenges which prioritize the main objective:

Challenges which ensure players are encouraged to make it to endgame, or otherwise do not interfere with its progression would make more viable starting points for future tomes.

Offer a more diverse selection of initial challenges:

Starting with 4-5 initial challenges means that if survivors notice the majority of the playerbase focusing on a specific challenge, they can deliberately choose another challenge to reduce the risk of their playstyle interfering with the game

Offer multiple objectives within a single challenge:

A challenge such as “complete 15 generators and perform 15 Safe hook Rescues” would give players more agency during their games. The only problem with this is that if a player rushes one category, they are stuck on the other, but this is far preferable to launching with 100% of players stuck with the same non game-winning objective.

Offer more unique challenges:

I see a definite problem with the long-term health of the tome system, as Dead By Daylight does not have a large amount of arbitrary systems to draw from. This tome has focused heavily on unhooking and healing survivors. Other than protection hits, interactions with the killer, completing generators and “use this perk”, there are not that many systems in the game that can be used across future tomes to incentivize interesting and varied player behaviour. However, systems can be combined into single challenges, and challenges can be presented with interesting restrictions, there is a lot of room for creativity here.

Vary the placement and number of challenges:

Performing 12 unhooks as two separate challenges feels a lot better than performing 25 unhooks in one challenge. You may have to vary the reward distribution if you go down this route. (A simple way to do this would be to increase the amount of shards it takes to get to the next level of the rift as players proceed further through it).

I would also like to address the possible solution that other forum users have brought up, which is to allow players to perform several challenges at once. I do NOT think this is an effective solution, because it allows for a much faster completion time of the tome overall, as well as creates the possibility of player-created challenge combinations allowing the tome to be completed faster than anticipated. This would be antithetic to the developers financial incentive.

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Thank you for reading. I know this was long and verbose (2179 words!), but I hope that I have addressed what I believe is a design choice which is dangerous to the health of the game, and the long term viability of the tome system. I would appreciate feedback from those who took the time to read.

Xetoil

Tl;dr Playing Survivor-side DBD means making contextual choices which are inversely dependant on the choices of your teammates, by encouraging a particular choice arbitrarily on a meta level you interfere with this decision making process, undermining a core aspect of the game.

yermom

Interesting, I've felt the opposite of your sentiments, seeing the tomes as all positives - I'm usually the guy complaining :P Mechanically, the tomes seem to affect balance indirectly by distracting players from their regular objectives, slowing the game down and generating some interesting interactions. The purpose of all of this is substantiated by the lore of the archives. I mean, I'm not sure the intent is to muddy up the progress of survivors in game, but completing challenges does seem to serve as interaction with the guy in the archives, as well as the backstories being focused on.

Like, for the activities required by survivor challenges, is it possible that they're focused on the 'healer' archetype, because Claudette's backstory is the current survivor focus? I see it as such, and I actually like it that way because it immerses me in the lore and backstory. It's a bit cheesy, but I find myself trying to see things from Claudette's perspective, rather than my own. In my mind that's really good story telling. As a killer main, it's made me look at the role of survivor in a slightly different way; no longer are they tbaggers hanging out at the exit gates.

But, the tome is definitely altering people's behavior and how they play. Personally, I I see this as a good and healthy thing as I've already had new experiences that I suspect were a result of someone trying to complete a tome challenge. This allows the game to break away from mundane routines, and encourages people to venture out of their comfort zone.

However, if people are unhappy with the tome, there is the alternative of viewing these challenges as objectives and nothing more. But, I would discourage BHVR from altering tomes for that position's sake, because the changes therein would require removing content, rather than adding it.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the tomes, and challenges, and think BHVR is on the rigth track.

Xetoil

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/872573#Comment_872573

Hey, thanks taking the time to read my post and for replying. (nice name btw)

We're actually in agreement with all of this. I stated above (in the first section before Part 1) how the tomes have inspired me to adopt different playstyles and enriched my experience of the game. And indeed this does lead to more interesting interactions between players as a whole as well.

The focus in my post is to point out that Level III of the current tome was restrictive in its execution, requiring that survivor players meet an arbitrary but time-consuming goal and restricting other challenges until that goal is completed. Because this challenge acts as a gateway to the other challenges, players interested in the archives or rift, which seems to be most players due to how new these systems are, are encouraged to clear this as soon as possible. This would not be a problem if the challenge in question did not, when attempted by multiple survivors at once, jeopardize the completion of the main objective by putting survivors in direct competition with each other.

I do want to stress that I think that the archives are an excellent addition to the game, however this game is complex, and a small change in one area can have massive ramifications in another. I feel like the encouragement that the third level of the current tome specifically, gives to players in the form of its first survivor challenge does not create a healthy game environment in the short term. Obviously after a couple of days when people are past their unhooking obsession the game will go back to being relatively normal, but it is a situation that could easily have been avoided, and came at the expense of having a more exciting & engaging kickstart to the third level, which, it seems to me at least, is something which will carry the joint benefit of leading to more rift pass sales if executed consistently.

TigerKirby215

I agree but don't have much to say. So here are some memes: