FEEDBACK: New player experience (about 160 hrs) + suggestions
I just started playing DBD. I have played now for about 160 hours total. Those are my experiences and my views on the game. I do not think everyone might experience or feel those things as I do. Keep it civil and constructive. Open for discussions and questions.
I will include here parts of my experience, the issues and suggestions on what to improve to give newer players a better experience and hence improve player retention.
First some information about me. I have played now nearly 160 hours and I started playing 2 months ago. I play predominantly killer and a little survivor, about an 80-20 split I think. Right now, I am at rank 3 killer and rank 12 survivor. I expect to reach about rank 8 or 9 with survivor before reset. Survivor games are mostly for completing tomes and dailies. I own all the DLCs. I am rather competitive when playing multiplayer games.
1. The grind:
I have one survivor at level 30 and 3 on about level 15, they were used for tome challenges and the level 30 is my survivor I use for all general challenges or dailies. The rest of the BP went into developing killers.
After 160 hours (I think I used BBQ on about 40% of the killer games, but this is an estimation), I have the following stats:
I have 34 killer teachable perks unlocked and 32 perks are still locked, but 4 of them I bought from the shrine. My natural progression would be 30 unlocked to 36 locked. I did level my mains above level 40 to find certain perks in my web and to get some addons/offerings. So not all my BPs went into unlocking new perks, some went to improve my game experience on my mains.
I estimate that I need another 140 hours to unlock all the teachable killer perks. After that I will need to get a set of playable perks on the killers I don’t play or very rarely play. That will take about 300-400k BP per killer or so. For ten killers it would take roughly: 200k BP / per hour, but I need to develop about 12 killers which takes 12 times 350k BP average which is 4,2 million, which takes about 21 hours. But to get the perks to rank 2 or 3 it will take about 3 times that amount, 63 hours. 200k BP / hours is about what I make at the moment on killer. Considering that I make less on survivor and I still must do sruvivor challenges in the new tome, it will take a bit longer for me to do.
At about 360 hours I will have all the killers playable, but not yet optimally set up. My survivors are basically not developed at all at this point.
So to fully develop survivors and killers it would take me, when specifically going for unlocking everything, about an estimated 1200 hours easily, and that is without prestige. I do not include prestige since it is not required. That is massive for new players and during that time you are at disadvantage to players who play for years and have everything unlocked. When playing 5 hours every day, it takes 240 days to reach the 1200 hours. That is the time needed for me to unlock everything on everyone and technically could be considered disadvantage perk wise until I have everything on everyone.
I work full time, so I play less than 5 hours per day average, more like 2-3. That means it takes me about 480 days to catch up. Compared to other grindy games I played, this is excessive.
This is important for the next point.
2. Asymmetrical matches
I am not talking about killer vs survivors asymmetry, but I will talk about experienced players against new players.
I have had matches against newer players with less than 500 hours, against some long-time casual players at about 1 – 1,5k hours and some hardcore players at 3k+ hours. Especially playing against people that have 1k hours or more shows a big difference between players with experience and players with less experience.
Linking this experience disparity to the grind. I will talk about my experience as a killer.
When facing players with much more experience, one of the things that can tip the balance of powers slightly towards you is perks and addons. The issue is that as new player you have a disadvantage there as well. Being paired with more experienced players and being disadvantaged by your perks (and possible addons/offerings) is a double handicap that is frustrating. Not being able to compensate lack of experience with strong perks and addons feels like you being unable to do anything and it feels especially bad if you feel like you had a chance in the game with better perks. On top of it you pump all the BP into killers you don’t play to get their teachable perk, you are also starved on good addons on the killers you do play.
Here are a few solutions that could help newer players get more easily into the game and enjoy themselves more. For me enjoyment is linked to player retention, especially for newer players.
Suggestions: I do not think all are actually feasible, also I am not saying all of them should be implemented together.
-Make offerings for additional BPs general. When leveling killers just for their teachable perks, you unlock a lot of additional BP offerings that are on killers you don’t play. Being able to unlock them in one blood web, but use them on a killer, that you actually play, could make the grind easier.
-Reduce the cost of leveling killers to level 15 (for the 4th perk slot), or even reduce the cost of leveling killers until they reach level 50. This would not apply to prestige 1 or above.
-Add a new thing in the blood web. It is called teachable perk and when unlock in the web, you can choose which unlockable perk you get. A possibility would be one after every 5 levels with a maximum of 3 per killer.
-When unlocking teachable perk, make it available to every killer at rank 1. To level the perk to rank 2 or 3 you still need to find it in the blood web. Possibly add that when finishing prestige one all the teachable perks of that killer are available at rank 2 for everyone and when going from prestige 2 to 3, then all the teachable perks are available to all at rank 3 without leveling them in the web. (this would be the best for new players while not impacting players that already have everything. This solution would give the best experience to newer players)
3. Toxicity and frustration
To start off, I do not think the things I list are individually toxic, but they can become toxic when used together or in certain situations. As a small sidenote, the more I play the more I can cope with toxicity, but at the same time it means that the frustration levels are highest when starting out and that can really be off-putting for newer players, especially when it feels like the game is completly out of your hand.
A small note on what I do in games. When facing survivors where it is clear that one or two are very experienced, then I will pressure the weaker players first, especially since then often stronger players try to help the weaker players by unhooking them, healing them or trying to get my attention away from them. That means they might flashlight click me and fast vault to get my attention. They do not do gens when doing this. That is fine and I can ignore it. Those games do not feel just one-sided. In that situation it is fine.
Now here the situation where it felt toxic, despite being the same things as in the example before. This happened in a game to me and made me stop play for a few days:
I had about 40 hours in-game and was at rank 9 killer or so. I was paired against a swf with each member having over 2,5k hours. They had one object. I played trapper. They basically waited for me as a group. When I started chasing one, all 4 teabagged me repeatedly and the 3 with flashlights clicked me all the time. They occasionally stacked on a gen. I did get like 3 downs in the game before the endgame collapse. Every single of those 3 hooks were sabotaged. At the same time, the object guy just went around and disarmed all my traps. It was clear that they did not play to win or have fun, their sole goal of the game was to make it as frustrating and unfun to the killer as possible. I got 1 down in endgame collapse and basically hook camped him to death (just to keep my sanity). In the chat afterwards they complained about that. Basically a 10k+ hours swf bullied me (50 hours playtime) all game long and made it as frustrating and unfun as possible, being the most obnoxious group I have ever encountered in DBD, and in after game chat, they insulted me for camping the hook. Camping is unfun, but they played unfun all game long, so I gave them a bit of their medicine at the end and they were abusive about it.
Suggestions. So, now to a few things that could make such situations easier to cope with:
-Object users shouldn’t be able to bring an item into the game (especially not a flashlight). Object in itself is not the problem, but often they become cocky, especially on experienced players who try to get your attention and waste your time. Flashlight clicking happens much more often on object users. I did track a few games to get some stats. Among them is that about 80% of flashlight clicking was done by object users (this is a small sample size and is not representative of the DBD player population). In the data set collected in my games, Object users are much more likely to teabag often, flashlight click and fast vault. The combination of object plus that behavior is what makes it so obnoxious. In-game wise it is not less impactful than the psychological effect. The taunting is so much more effective to demoralize because object amplifies the feeling of not being able to do anything against it.
-Flashlight clicking is one of the most annoying things to me, especially because there are players who just use it to click and not even try to blind you. I had games where survivors clicked me in my face when picking up someone downed and not even try to blind me to save the other survivor. A solution to this could be changing how flashlights work. When clicking on the flashlight, it instantly removes 20% of the charge, but the first 5 seconds does not drain charges. Alternatively reduce the drain of charges when turned on, but instantly remove 10% of the total charge when turning on. Clicking to get attention would drain the battery fast and you would be more likely to use it to blind and not to click.
-Better matchmaking. (I know MMR is coming back, so this might be obsolete. Also changes here would be very hard to implement.) I kept track of games and have the following breakdown: I played at rank 8 and 9. I encountered the following survivors: 32 red (11 rank 1), 21 purple, 2 yellow, 1 green. To improve matchmaking for newer players a few things to consider: swf amplifies the strength of survivors in general, groups of survivor with stronger and weaker players mixed makes a better game experience than a group of generally strong players. One thing could be to add a new player protection for the first 50 hours or so, where you do not encounter any swf.
-Sabotaging. Sabotaging is annoying, but generally ok. It does become frustrating/borderline toxic for me when 4 hooks are sabotaged in a row while I had 0 hooks so far. This is hard to balance because games where multiple players bring saboteur and toolboxes is different to those when only 1 player can sabotage hooks. One solution would be to give sabotage a general cooldown. The entity prevents survivors from sabotaging more than 1 hook in any 60 seconds period or the entity prevents the 3 closest hooks to a sabotaged hook to be sabotaged as well.
(EDIT) Corrected typos and added some clarifications.