(Suggest for The Developers) The most important but unseen type of balance and how to reach it
Hello! In this topic I want to talk about the type of the balance that almost no one of the players thinks about, though it's even more important than the balance we players used to know.
Because of Dead By Daylight balance is asymetrical PvP-game the developers should keep 2 layers of balance:
- The obvious one - make the game in the way that statistically most of the matches lead to 2 survivor escapes and 2 survivor sacrifices, so in matches with the survivors and the killer with the same rank and level of skill they would have equal chances to win/lose. I would call it the
in-game balance. - The hidden one and the most important - make the game so the 80% of the players prefer to play the survivors and 20% prefer to play the killer. This balance is way more important, because imbalance of this layer leads to literal unplayability - the match searching time becomes WAY MORE longer for one of the sides and the players of this side simply can not play (not in all and I'll talk about it later, but in most situations it's the killer side). I would call it the
community balance.
In-game balance affects on community balance because the players prefer to play for the side it's easier to win and funnier for them. "Fun" is quite subjective, because this is more about playstile, though a big amount of game mechanics would make one of the sides more interesting to play than the other, however "easiness" is not. So we come to the simple sentence: To reach the community balance we must make the in-game balance pleasant preferably for the side that has a lack of the players.
As I mentioned before, usually the killer's side suffers from big waiting time, which means that mostly there is a lack of survivors, which at first means that it's harder to play a survivor, however this is not a situation of all world's servers. For example, as it's said by the developers some time before, Japanese servers have the opposite - survivors wait longer for a killer, than a killer waits for survivors. But how that could be? I guess, the ansewer is outside the game and it's about the game culture. My guess is that Japanese players simply more cooperative and sociable in the game - Japanese survivors mostly teamed up with each and they team up before starting the match search other unlike survivors from other regions and that's why it's easier for them to play for this side. So here we go to another simple sentence: It's harder to play "solo" survivors than play a killer, but it's easier to play teamed up survivors than play a killer.
And now I can finally formulate the problem: "How to make the survivor players always teamed up, so the more players start to prefer survivor play?"
This is the time to talk about the exact ways to solve the problem. Obviously it's hard to improve the game culture of players from other regions, but it's possible to compensate it with the in-game changes. I see there 3 of them:
- The most effective - make VOIP for survivors and only for them - all prepared and teamed up survivors use Discord or other out-game ways for operative contact with each other. So implementing VOIP for survivors which can not be heard by the killer is not game breaking at all, but only will ease a cooperation between random survivors and increase their chances to win.
- Doubtful alternative to the VOIP - make Dwight's "Bond" perk impemented as passive survivor ability. But this would be less effective than VOIP and cause one more problem to solve.
- Increase integrity of group by the following - make it when a player leaves the match by death or escape he is not getting alone instantly, but instead gets to lobby where he has an opportunity to wait for the remaining survivors or leave it and start to find another - this will allow to keep lone survivors together if they like to play with each other.
That's all for now. I would like to read your opinion in the comments below, thanks for reading :D