I have a lot to say about this game

nospimi99

This is going to be long a long post, so I expect most people to click on the post, see the length, and nope out. But I just really need to do something to voice my thoughts about the game because at least then I can feel like I tried to do something in a constructive way instead of just flaming on social media. Because a lot of people do, and when everyone on social media is screaming at the top of their lungs, it's easy to tune it out and go "Oh they're just an angry minority lashing out because they're emotional and that's what happens" because, I mean, are we going to pretend that's not common in dev/player interactions? Especially multiplayer based ones? I'm hoping that by making a post that more clearly explains why I think something's unhealthy for the game, then this post will catch someone's attention and maybe something will change.

First I want to say, devs have it hard. Not just the DBD devs, but devs in general. The average player has no idea how much work is done to make the game they play. How many people need to work together, so many moving parts to somehow get the final product we play. I personally think it's even harder for a game that's entirely online multiplayer because whenever something needs to be changed it's affecting both sides of the coin, both sides of the entire playerbase. So it's really hard to make changes that make both groups happy. I personally am not a game dev, but have a big interest in it and research the process of game design all the time as one of my biggest hobbies. I do not know how the process of coding specifically works or modeling environments, but I can confidently say I have a much stronger appreciation for the people who make these games. It is NOT easy and takes immense teamwork and I am really impressed the team at BeHavior has managed to make a game with 21 killers all with unique powers, 30+ different maps, and 150+ perks.

Halloween? - That being said there are some core issues with the game that I really want to address. The point that made me go from rolling my eyes and just going along with the ride to deciding I needed to make this post is the Halloween event. What about this is a Halloween event? What levels have had some minor updates to have Halloween decorations? Lampkin Lane could have been a street done up on the front yards. The Shed on Coldwind Farms could have been decorated. There is absolutely no changes to the maps at all for Halloween. They didn't even have to be major changes that alter hitboxes for areas, they could have been simple decorations hanging from buildings. There is nothing on the home menu screen that screams Halloween. Yeah we have the blight plant but 1. The plant is an original thing created in DBD, it's not something tied to Halloween 2. It's been there for over a month already as part of the introduction to Blight so nothing's new about it at all. They didn't even change the screen and theme it around the plant. The home screen hasn't been updated since the last content update despite the event having started. As far as objectives, we have the generators and hooks. The generators have a few Jack-O-Lanterns and the hook has a simple blight plant at the base. I'm not saying things need to be garishly overdone but it's implemented in such a boring way the first descriptor that comes to mind is "lazy." Literally the only thing in these maps that says anything Halloween is some gens have 3 Jack-O-Lanterns on them.

Here's the thing, Halloween is one of the big holidays. People like 4th of July, people like Thanksgiving, but Halloween is one of the few holidays that has an actual culture around it. People live for this holiday and look all year to it. Halloween for many is the foundation for their entire style or personality. And this is a "horror" game. One where, according to Mathieu, license holders for major horror movie killers seem to view DBD as a "Hall of Fame." This game should put more effort and take the Halloween events more seriously than their anniversary events in my opinion. Instead, they put out a handful of cosmetics, a flashlight with an orange light, a medkit with some stickers on the side, and call it an event. How on earth does the biggest horror game on the market think this is a great Halloween event?

Cosmetics - I do want to take a brief moment to talk about the cosmetics. I am 110% okay with them charging for cosmetics. As I said, most people do not realize how long it takes to make games or how expensive it is. There is over 600 people working at Behavior. If they work 40 hours a week at minimum wage (I assume they aren't but just for simplicities sake, lets say they are) that's $200k a week. If they're not doing a subscription service, and they sell their game for just $20, they need to fund this game another way. Non-gameplay affecting cosmetics is the best way to fund these games and it's not even close. That being said, it's kinda ######### that previous events let us unlock some of the skins and we can't even do that this event. If they give us 5 skins, let us unlock 2 of our choice. Besides the fact we're in a pandemic and people don't have as much extra income to spend, good consumer practices will lead to consumers further supporting that business. As much as I like some of these skins I have 0% interest on spending any money for a long time because of the practices for this event. There are tons of games out there and lots of them have way more consumer friendly practices I'd much rather spend my money on.

Gameplay - Moving on from the aesthetics, I want to take some time to talk about the actual gameplay changes for the event. In previous events there would be a secondary objective for survivors where instead of gens they would have to harvest nectar from plants scattered on the map for extra BP. There was no secondary objective for killers, they simply had to hook survivors but on specific hooks for their extra BP. Apparently there was a lot of backlash for this (I played but wasn't a big member of the community at the time so I only found this out recently) I can only assume it's because the killers just have to play the game as normal for their bonus BP, while the survivors have to hold off from doing their progressive objectives to get their bonus BP. Well they decided for this event they'd just combine the two together and make it so when survivors get specific gens done they get extra BP, and when killers hook on specific hooks they get bonus BP. While an obvious solution on paper, there's a couple problems with this.

Leading up to the event I stockpiled a ton of points. I was finally about to get all perks, tier 3, on a survivor that was 3rd prestige. I had about 20 perks to buy and level up to tier 3, and learning the event was going to be a Pustula offering event I realized how perfect it was. I'd stockpile 1m BP, complete my 3 dailies and have them ready to claim, complete as many backlogged rift challenges without redeeming the BP reward so when the event dropped I could redeem them all, I could even buy the perks in the shrine for another 300k. All together, when I logged on I had 2m BP to spend on my survivor to get the last perks and more importantly, gather a ton of Pustula petals in the process to make me last for hours or even days. After all of my 2m BP was spent I had 12 Pustula Petals to show for it. 12. For comparison my Dwight is level 40 and I leveled him up during the last Pustula petal event. In that climb up (level 1-40 is about 1m BP) I gathered 31 petals. I know this because once the event is up you can't use petals as an offering and my Dwight has 31 petals to burn. I thought maybe I just had bad luck but other people I've spoken to are having a really hard time getting petals too. The fact that I started playing the event 10 hours after it dropped and I never had a match with more than 3 petal offerings, and half of those games only had 1 other person putting in petal offers, I don't think I'm alone here. The entire event is based around getting these offerings, if you don't have these offerings you basically don't take part in "event." To make a change from 1m BP = ~30 petals to 2m BP =~10-15 is absurd. Why is there such a low drop rate for the item that lets you participate in the event?

I will admit, this next paragraph is anecdotal. But I don't think anyone really disagrees there's a fairly strong divide between killers and survivors. There's obviously plenty of people who don't get too invested or salty towards the other side, plenty of people who play both killer and survivor. But similar to console wars, there are two sides and a large majority of the players pick their team. From the games I've played a lot of killers seem to have taken the event as a opportunity to prevent people from benefitting from the event. I've had a lot of killers tunneling off hook to bring people back to the basement (A hook that can't be an event hook), killers basement camping, a lot of unfun tactics that mainly focus on getting people out of the match quickly instead of actually playing the game. Listen, I'll be honest and tell you I play survivor more with a ratio of about 25%/75%, but this is not one of these rants crying about Killers ruining my experience and buff survivors, etc. But the way this event is shaped, the killer can do their objective and they can't really be targeted by the survivors to prevent them from getting their event bonus points despite the killer being able to do that to the survivors. The only thing survivors can do is sabo hooks but with a short 30 second respawn time and no ability to know what event hooks have had points redeemed from already, survivors can't grief the killer from getting the event points. But killers can very easily do this and from my experience they have. Patrolling only event gens so that survivors can't get their BP, only using Pop on event gens even when there are gens closer to completion but aren't event gens, it's a really unfair balance the way this event is setup.

Future Event - I think the best thing to do in future events is give both survivors and killers their own extra objective to do. Bring back the pustula plant that spawn in greater numbers for each offering burned, but also spawn in altars that the killer has to place a captured survivor on instead of on a hook where the entity takes the survivor for some convoluted reason and replaces them somewhere else on the other side of the map, but don't count it as one of the 3 hooks to kill a survivor. Maybe leave them with the broken status effect for 45 seconds so as to not leave all that time spent on the chase as wasted time. A quick spitball idea that gives both the killers and survivors an objective that neither one can directly impede, but is also SOMETHING extra to do for the event.

Bloodpoints - So all other things set aside, if you manage to complete one of these event objectives you get a bonus chunk of BP. You get 3000 BP if you burned an offering, and 1000 if you didn't. This is really sad because in the past completing an objective as survivor would net you 4000 BP (and would only take ~30 seconds instead of 80) and as killer would get you 5500 BP. While I did praise the game earlier for it's massive amount of content with over 150 perks, this is also something that really needs to be considered. At ~1m BP being required to make all 3 perks teachable for a killer/survivor, and there being 21 killers & 23 survivors, that means it requires, at best, 44m BP. That's just to make every perk teachable. Then there's actually GETTING all the perks. For survivor it's admittadly much easier because they all play the same. Doing it for multiple survivors is just cosmetic. But for killer? To get every perk tier 3 on every killer, not even including prestiging, god I don't even know what to estimate that would cost. Effectively getting 4725 perks in blood webs, Lets lower the number to say 2500 for the webs that let us get two perks, if we average it takes 40,000 blood web that's 100m BP. Why are there so few BP events?

I like DBD, but I can not in good conscience say "Oh yeah this game is great. You should get it and hop right in" because it is not that easy. There are so many mechanics to learn, there are so many different killers with different speeds and abilities and properties, there's so many perks the killer can use, there's so many perks the survivors can use, perks from each side can also change and affect all the things I've already listed, then there's all the different maps, all their varied layouts, where pallets can spawn, where windows can spawn, where totems can spawn, where gens can spawn, where doors can spawn. Players have to try to learn and take all this info in, in unsafe environments (there is no practice or testing grounds. Unless you get some friends to spend hours teaching you, the way you're "learning" is trying to take in all this info while actually playing the game normally. Either panicking as the killer chases you, or trying your best to focus on not losing the survivor) and to top it all off, you don't have almost any perks to start off. Things that, by definition, make your character better and you start off with none while you're pitted against people who have way better perks than you on top of all the knowledge they have. And because these new players don't have any of these knowledge or resources, they do worse and don't get nearly as many bloodpoints per game, and so their climb to getting new perks is the slowest when they start.

Why. On. Earth. Is there so many roadblocks to get extra BP? Especially during an event? It's the easiest slam dunk in the world. In a game that, as more content is added, the demand for better methods to earn BP goes up with it, why are there so few chances to do so? They don't even have to be big done up event, every month just had a random 5 day stretch where you earn 1.5x BP. It doesn't have to be anything crazy tied to it. But as my girlfriend has seen me playing a lot lately and decided she wanted to try it out, she's really struggling to stay invested when she gets 15k BP from a match every 15 minutes, and that gets her a measly 3 nodes on a bloodweb.

Quality of life Update - I've seen people suggest this idea and I think it's a great idea. Obviously, it won't play out the way people think it would. For people who are on the art team who think of map rework direction, are they supposed to sit on their ass for a month while a QOL update is in the works? So they either don't get paid for a month, or they are paid for a month but aren't actually doing work? Of course not. But there are a lot of core issues with the game that need to be addressed and spending an extended period of time to get all needed hands on deck to fix them would be one of the smartest things to be done. I have friends who watch some streams of the game and see the jankiness that occurs in it and they laugh cause it's fun to watch, but it actually detered them from wanting to buy the game and play themselves because to them "It's hilarious to watch it happen to other people but would be infuriating to to experience it themselves."

As I said before I don't know the process of coding so this might sound stupid but I'm going to assume the game's foundation hasn't really been overhauled in a while. The game started out as 3 killers, 4 survivors, and 3 realms. There were no totems, there were no breakable walls. I imagine with all the new mechanics added to the game, making minor changes to the game to accommodate these changes has equated to duct taping adjudgments to code to make some of these work. There's no way these devs could have foreseen what this game would become and how much would be added and I doubt the foundation for the game really set them up to make the game what it is now. Rebuilding everything would not be an "update" and also not something done quickly, but I think it would be incredibly healthy for the game and worth it long term if it would lead to less frequent bugs, glitches, inconsistencies, lag, hit detection issues, audio problems, and more.

In Conclusion - I look at this, what basically looks like a manifesto now, and worry about a dev actually coming across this post, and it just become the inside joke copypasta email that's passed around the office as they all just laugh at the idiot who has no idea what's going on behind the scenes so none of the points brought up are valid or feasible. But I do love this game and that's why I wrote this, in hopes that the team realizes that through all the frustration and anger at the things they do, there's a reason for it and the reason is that the game has so many elements that can make it great. But by being a developer, it can be hard to look at it from the viewpoint of a player so it can be hard to understand why some players don't like something. And for the average player it is really hard for a lot of them to articulate what they do and don't like and why. Hopefully I did a good job at articulating.

Kind_Lemon

don't we all have a lot of ideas...

...and the devs (as a whole) just prioritize other things than listening to detailed player feedback like this.

I don't think anyone has any criticism about the people coding the game or brainstorming about coding the game. However, for the people (and often there is overlap) who make decisions about design and are in charge of patch releases, there is not one person who doesn't find issue with the results or nature of their actions in some aspect or another, and that statement comes from the knowledge that there is no one who would unironically say that DbD is a game well designed, structured, and is in a good place in the vast majority of its aspects right now.

Halloween

Couldn't agree more. This patch was incredibly disappointing. Minecraft's patches are significantly more exciting, and honestly has a lot more horror going for it in 1.17 than DbD.

Cosmetics

I agree. I have no issue with selling incredibly expensive cosmetics that are optional and have had no precedent for being free in the past, but when a time to celebrate horror and spookiness previously accompanied by celebratory free cosmetics is suddenly bringing cosmetics locked behind what is a paywall with no other option than a ludicrous grind leaves a sour taste in everybody's mouth. Moreover, the way that all of these are continually advertised to prey on people's fomo leaves me disappointed with the devs' interaction with and perspective on the community. Same for the charms.

Gameplay

Survivors can't sabo event hooks. This was made the case after all survivors did was sabo hooks during the Hound event for Chinese New Year. I personally don't like the idea that this event is all based around getting specific offerings from the bloodweb because of the exact issue you bring up with the pustula petals. I would support a different functionality, but I don't know what that would be. I'm honestly not even burning the petals I have because just getting extra bloodpoints isn't fun. It's not worth it.

I personally loved the Moonrise event, and I particularly enjoyed the interaction between killers destroying lanterns and survivors needing to collect them. Of course it could be improved, but I really liked the idea and the feeling of the mechanics behind them, and while the original separation between killer-only and survivor-only points was the wrong choice because there wasn't enough reason to not try and get every last coin, I would like to see the event make a return. This whole 2020 blight mess is not doing it for anyone.

Future Event

I think the Moonrise event should be reviewed for ideas (my opinions about the event are in the paragraph above).

Bloodpoints

I actually have thought about this a lot and am an advocate for a very specific solution. I don't think bloodpoints should be so easy to come by because they directly influence the acquisition of add-ons and allow for players to use ultra rares at frequencies unimaginable when they were first introduced. It's why the devs have made ultra rares so lackluster and unattractive nowadays. The perk grind issue should be separated from the bloodweb to allow for the devs to properly balance add-ons, and with that being done, the acquisition of bloodpoints can be adjusted to prevent common add-ons from piling up infinitely where players will gain more add-ons than they will ever be able to use before the player maxes out on bps again. It's a neverending feedback circle. See below for the suggestion I make:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/185033/bloodweb-and-perk-leveling

QoL Update

It's a thing that needs to happen. The announcement that the dev team made on one of these past Q&A streams about having enough people to work on balance and push out new content missed the point of the question by more than a mile, and that was disappointing, because it meant that the developers were unable to view their game through the eyes of much of the community.

Conclusion

I think you articulated things very well :D