http://dbd.game/killswitch
Time to face the facts, it is not working out as planned.
Hi BHVR, let's face it, it is not working. This update's intentions were not met, and the update was at best, poorly executed.
My understanding of the intentions of the recent game updates is loosely summarized as the following:
- To open up and encourage creative play by:
- reducing the need for second chance perks for survivors due to the killer's tunnelling/camping behaviours
- reducing the reliance on slow-down perks for killers due to survivors' gen rush behaviours
- To balance the game such that statistically, killers get more kills per game.
- To reduce the grind required to get to the end-game by easier progression and matchmaking bonuses.
Let's have it established here that Dead By Daylight is, by all intentions, a skill-based game; that is, players who are more competent with the game will be able to progress further into the upper ranks. If you are bad at the game, killers or survivors alike should stay at the lower ranks - for their mental wellness. Someone capable of improving would eventually scale the ranks, and everyone has a place in the game, skilled or not.
The game is broadly split into two categories before scaling to the difficulty by rank, Solo Queue/ Survivors With Friends, the latter assumed to have the benefits of team communication. While there are two categories of gameplays, there is no distinct difference in game mechanics between the two.
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So let's take a look at how things are going since the update concerning the intentions of the update:
1a. To open up and encourage creative play by: reducing the need for second chance perks for survivors due to killer's tunnelling/camping behaviours
The solution adopted by BHVR is to reduce the efficacy of second chance perks and introduce an endurance base kit to all survivors.
The most common feedback is that nothing changed, poor performing killers are still inclined to tunnelling/camping, and now they know the 5s endurance each survivor has after un-hooking. Some survivors observed that this group of killers would wait for 5s and continue their tunnelling/camping activity.
Changes also allowed low-skill level killers to scale the rank with less difficulty.
1b. To open up and encourage creative play by reducing the reliance on slow-down perks for killers due to survivors' gen rush behaviours
The solution adopted by BHVR is to reduce the efficacy of selected slow-down perks, introduce an overall buff to killer's parameters and increase the repair time of the generators.
The most common feedback here is that repairs are now taking ridiculously long due to a few slow-down perks that not only did not get a nerf but some had also been buffed due to under-utilization. Coupled with a certain killer's unique skill, it can become entirely unplayable in some games.
1a, 1b and 2 together combined with the large number of changes made in this update, you end up with an unintended over-designed buff to killer gameplay. Improving the parameter of killers is alone a major change, yet BHVR implemented the reduction of survivor survivability simultaneously. Not to mention the rationale of this update is also ludicrous. What the hell are the killer's statistics? Are survivors here only to lose?
DBD is a system; you can't change something without studying its impacts on the entire system.
What would happen to SWF where players communicate strategy externally? Minimal impact, but now with lesser tricks up their sleeves due to the lower efficacy of second chance perks. But...
What would happen to SoloQ where players are not able to communicate with others? A new META would form by the sheer necessity for reasonable gameplay, focusing on generator repair, information and illusiveness that again limits the creative play intended by the update.
DBD is not all just about the SWF or killer community; SoloQ has to be taken care of as well. In fact, more so as they are without the advantages of being in group play.
3. To reduce the grind required to get to the end-game by easier progression and matchmaking bonuses.
The solution adopted by BHVR is for perks to be unlocked automatically according to the character prestige tier, P1/2/3 for T1/2/3, claiming a reduction of up to 75% of the grind, justifying the removal of BP boosts from WGLF and BBQ&C and implementing a matchmaking BP% bonus. A catch-up mechanism facilitates the process
75% reduction in the grind; how exactly is that calculated?
Before the update, we needed ~1.2M BP per character to unlock the teachable onto the blood web at L40 and 1.6M per complete blood web. Let's have a premise for calculating 20 characters, 3 teachable perks each, 180+60(20 common perks) perk tier to learn. That is approximately 29.2M BP for a single main character and 128M BP for 20 main characters, and with the 100% BP from WGLF and BBQ&C, that is essentially 14.6M BP for a single main character and 64M BP for 20.
No matter how you look at it now, to enjoy a 75% reduction in grinding would require a large number of characters to first be at prestige 3, which now each required 4.8M BP to achieve. There is no way it is a 75% reduction in the grind unless the player is already at the end game state. And now, players would have to suffer their way until there without the blessing of 100% BP from WGLF and BBQ&C.
This is a low-play and a false claim by BHVR.
Match-making BP% is also recently kill-switched as it is not working as intended. On the contrary, it is working as intended, showing the demographic of the players in DBD right now. Due to the updates, there are simply not enough survivors for the number of killers, and there are little reasons for survivors to play without this bonus. Matchmaking is affected by the fact killers earn more than the average survivor in the same game.
The update also caught many by surprise; some did not have enough time to get prepared with the implementation date undefined. While others didn't even know about the big change and got left behind. BHVR has the catch-up system in place to compensate for players' effort, but they fail to recognize two groups of players, players who left characters at lvl 40 AND players who quit the game, and that would return. Essentially, if players weren't aware of this update, they will be reset to 0 and have to suffer their way up.
This is simply unthoughtful, rushed and of poor execution.
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Here are some suggestions that could make things better:
- Roll back the changes made to survivor and killer perks, and observe the effects of the buff made to killer parameters before further implementations.
- To deal with campers and tunnellers, A negative scoring event, "Sicken" where the entity gets sickened by killers' unsightly conduct, could be introduced to killers. One which penalizes killers who tunnel and camps. Negative scoring should be significant enough to negate the benefit of tunnelling/camping/slugging:
- i.e. killers who stay out of chase within a certain distance of a hooked survivor would accumulate a negative score over time. Negative scoring could start after a delay for the killer to clear off and scale according to distance and time to at the hook. This punishes Campers.
- i.e. killers who hook the same player within a short span of time would accumulate a negative score. This punishes tunnellers.
- i.e. Every survivor after the first within each other's proximity in the dying state would accumulate a negative score over time. This punishes sluggers.
- i.e. while killers stay near a player on the hook, the remaining generators gain repair speed buffs. This would increase the pressure and punish the killer for tunnelling/camping.
- A repair speed/ information/ base kit could be provided to SoloQ players to compensate for communication and encourage creative play by freeing up their perk slots.
- Player disconnections basically handicap the survivors by significant progress and, in most games, would seal their fate:
- Increasing the BP award to remaining survivors when a SoloQ member disconnects from the game, lesser could be considered for SWF to prevent exploitation.
- Grant generator repair speed bonuses or boost/complete generators when someone disconnects from the game to keep the game possible.
- Increase the rates where survivors gain BP during scoring such that each game rewards players fairly for their time, not only their performance. Survivors may die due to strategic cause (left on hook), and they cannot be penalized for it.
- Killers earn BP faster and more consistently than survivor counterparts:
- Ranks should not all reset to 0 at season end. They should be scaled according to the highest rank achieved for the matchmaking system to better match players of the same skill level early in the season.. e.g. Iri 4 resets to gold 4, Iri 3 resets to gold 3 etc. Players who miss a season may fall further down to ease their future return.
- As for the perk system. Too late for remedies as I am sure lots of legacy players will not return after seeing their progress diminished.
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BHVR, please. Your players are not just the SWF, Killers, SoloQ, professionals, skilled and casuals, it is all of them. Your game is a system, look at it as a whole. You could have done better.
Comments
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So are Killers getting anything, or are you just looking to turn their lives into suffering again? Devs have already stated that they don't want to "punish" certain gameplay styles, rather, to incentivize playing differently. Tunneling is like "gen-rushing", it's not fun for either side but it's simply getting your objective done faster.
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I've seen more variety of perks than I've ever seen over the last few days. Rolling back the perk changes would be a dire mistake.
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Update has been great fun and definitely met its objectives. We just need some more baseline anti-tunnel/camp because it remains utterly obnoxious. I'm also very happy that the devs made bold changes instead of boring snails-pace ones, DBD feels so fresh now. Looking forward to future meta shakeups!
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I don't see why the entity would care that much about the conduct of killers.
Tunneling, Camping, and Slugging all have their uses. The only real problem that exists is facecamping, but that's not an easy thing to fix since any solution to fix facecamping tends to affect normal gameplay.
I get it sucks to get killed early on in a game, but being killed is a possibility when playing survivor.
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I agree that survivors definitely did not get enough to reduce the reliance on second-chance perks, and that the grind reduction currently feels like anything but, but dealing with camping and tunneling is a lot more complex than saying "these things bad, punish killers." The fact is that those tactics are often necessary to deal with situations that arise in a trial, and while many players look down on people who tunnel at 5 gens or facecamp the first survivor they find (basically, when these tactics aren't necessary), most would agree that tunneling at 1 gen left is a necessity, as is hard camping someone in endgame.
Scoring events are also not an effective way of disincentivizing 'scummy' play, as those tactics tend to produce less bloodpoints than spreading hooks anyway. When you see people doing stuff like basement Bubba, they're not in it for points, they're in it for the 4k. Any incentive or disincentive has to deal with the effectiveness of the tactic compared to other things the killer could be doing - if you want to reduce camping and tunneling, you have to make going after different survivors give comparable results to removing someone from the game ASAP.
I do like the idea of generator speed increasing on a DC, but only if it happens during the first 100s of the game. Otherwise people would just DC on death hook to give their team a strategic advantage.
Survivors absolutely need to earn more bloodpoints. The Survival category in particular is basically dead unless you escape and needs more/more generous scoring events, but really I'd like to see scoring events inflated. You very rarely got 32k as a survivor, so raising the bar to 40k doesn't accomplish much other than giving you 2 or 4k more points than you would have on a game where you did an excess of one category. Killers can much more readily take advantage of the raised cap, with the exception of the Sacrifice category.
Ranks resetting is perfectly fair when all ranks do is calculate how much bloodpoints you're getting when the 13th rolls around. If you earn 1m bloodpoints for survivor this month, you don't automatically deserve to get 600k bps for the next.
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I'm going to say that there really isn't anything wrong with tunneling at 5 gens. Sure it might feel bad to get killed that early. But it's not like 5 gens left means that there is 5 gens worth of progress that needs to be done. Sometimes you can get into situations where multiple gens are just about to pop so the number of gens left shouldn't discourage a killer from making a tactically beneficial choice to be nice.
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I'm not sure if I agree or disagree, depending on exactly what you mean. It's absolutely a legitimate tactic, and up against stronger survivor squads, not playing hard at the start can earn you the L no matter how much you compensate later. But I also see it get used against teams where the killer 100% did not need that edge, and I can't help but :/ when you watch a Nurse slug or tunnel the snot out of a bunch of clueless solos - at that point, it's overkill, and the killer can recognize that when nothing is getting done and that they have the opportunity to let up and spread hooks. Them actually doing that is about as common as survivors choosing to let the killer catch them at the end. Should they be physically prevented from tunneling, no; should the game reward them for removing one survivor before they even touch the other three, also no. I do agree that 5 gens left doesn't mean anything when you've got 3 about to pop, but generally when I say tunneling at 5 gens, I mean there's still 5 gens before the second or third hook on that survivor.
I think it's not something the game should incentivize, but it does, and changing that would be extremely tricky. I think the only workable solution I ever heard focused on survivor action speed and made it so that unhooked players were more efficient than ones that had been hooked, but that requires an entirely new balance on objective time so that predropping the ######### out of every pallet on the map doesn't become the dominant strategy.
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