https://dbd.game/4rHHkF5
Rules For Radical Forumers, By SHAPE Alinsky
The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Devs on how to hold power. Rules For Radical Forumers is written for you on how to take it away.
In this discussion we are concerned with how to create mass balance-changes to seize power and give it to the people; to realise the democratic dream of co-creation, justice, balance, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for survivors and killers, fully worked out and useful ideas, health, and the creation of those circumstances in which man can have the chance to play by the values that give meaning to the game.
The significant changes in history have been made by revolutions.
And I will guide you through its ways.
Book 1
The ideology of Change
Before you are ready to change the game, you need to understand what the developers understand about you. When you stumble upon a problem and pretend that the Devs are oblivious to it where as somehow you uniquely were able to notice it, then ask yourself; Was it really that hard to find out that this was a problem?
If it wasn't, then it might be the case that they already noticed it. But often one committed to a problem a whole lot longer will have a broader scope of considerations, or see 2 side of the coin.
The a-symmetricality of this game allows for 1 sided views of Survivor-Mains or Killer-Mains to shine through, but when you spend your time one writing your monologue, those with a broader scope, see you as nothing more then an earlier version of themselves; someone who's yet to be confronted, and the only appropriate answer is "You'll understand when you grow up".
If you want to bring about change, make sure that you are confronted with all the second considerations that prevent others from solving the problem you believe you have already solved. Only when you have topped them can you bring about change.
Book 2
The ideology of Balance
When you see imbalance you feel outrage. You want a quick solution or you write paragraphs of deeply considered balance weightings, but its not either that I invite you to do.
It may be that you spend hours thinking of solutions and came up with technically complex answers that would've solved the imbalance that rallied you up. But this is not enough.
In order to understand balance in DBD, you need to understand balance as an art; The art of balance.
When features in this game are introduced, they rarely come in the form of purely mechanical change. They come in the form of a concept, trope or meme;
"The exit gates, the hooks, the generators, the lockers, the pallets, the flashlights, the med-kits, the hatch, the key"...
All of them are a concepts that that stand on their own, without the exact technicalities to it.
It makes sense to us that a flashlight can blind a killer and we understand why that gets you off the shoulder.
We understand why someone needs to be rescued off of the hook, and how they occasionally could achieve so themselves at a possible cost of health.
All of this makes sense to us, and the technicalities behind these concepts/tropes even could have some variance and would still make sense, completely apart from the idea whether they would be balanced or not.
It makes sense that a sparking generator after a kick of the killer would regress, but what, for example, if we decided to make regression speed decrease based on how many survivors are alive, to solve the problem of regression targeting low survivor counts disproportionally, then things would stop making sense.
What is the correlation between someone being hooked and a generator regressing 80 meters away? There either has to be a proper theme to justify such a technicality, or we are starting to lose the game at art; we enter the zone of bad game-design.
When you, in rage, start solving the Balance Question, you stop incorporating attractive themes to justify your technicalities. The only 1 thing that comes to mind is: "Make it work, make it work!".
This simultaneously reduced you to a meme.
You are not forbidden from introducing technically complex solutions, but such solutions should be understood along of 1 single summarising line, and if you can't, then your solution is most likely not worth considering.
Use memes, concepts and tropes to justify your balance ideas. Design them along 1 line of thought and if you can't, consider this; if you can't solve this concept, then try to create an over-all balance through the creation of new concepts.
And after a long day you might reached that point of balance; the balance between balance and art, an idea worth implementing.
Book 3
You get the picture wrong
It's not about your idea improving the game.
Time is finite, and resources are scarce.
What you should consider is that if they'd spend time on implementing your suggestion, you would not have that time on working on something else, perhaps, a better idea?
This would only hurt yourself.
So when you suggest Dedicated servers, then you might try to see that such a thing would require them to redo a significant part of their networking scripts.
Would that really be worth it? Both financially and customer-wise?
If the Devs were to actually "Really" listen to the community, then all of their time would be wasted on time consuming insignificant ideas.
You force others not to listen to you, and that's a good thing. Make yourself worth it and consider basic economics of scarcity.
Book 4
You see demons where there aren't
Ridiculing ideas is healthy.
Ridiculing people isn't.
The Devs are not the creators of the colosseum. They did not invent their product of the sole purpose of keeping the commoners occupied with frivolous pursuits while the emperor grows in power.
They are in it for their personality in relation to the working field, for the job opportunity and environment. People attracted to Game-Dev working field already score way higher in openness than what you would see in other occupational fields, such as online marketing, law or formal business.
They aren't ideological maniacs for the survivor/killer side as in so far they care about the general welfare of the player-base.
The same ideology as the founding fathers of America: "For the general welfare". It cannot be more non-partisan than that.
They are listening. Don't make it too hard for them to do so.
The end
Comments
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...1 -
WAT?! I didnt read all of it but very interesting1
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I feel a bit like this after reading just a few words from each paragraph.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ta0Sj05tjc
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I read it all only 5 minutes ago but now cant remember a single thing that it said....how strange...
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It's a list of 4 rules I invite a DBD forum to comply to.
Book 1 Summary:
When you think you solved a problem in DBD but nobody listened to it, it's probably because they already see the problem with the solution you came up to.
You're simply behind in the process.
(Advice: Try to find out why the problem hasn't been solved before posting about your own solution)Book 2 Summary:
"When cancelling mending it should reset, but after you make a salto you get an increase in speed for 15 seconds but not if you unhooked someone when the killer is within a radius of 5-10 meters from the 3rd gen completing".
It doesn't matter that your solution completely solves the the balance issue. If your solution starts sounding like the above, it already stopped making sense Conceptually and your suggestion exist for the pure sake of unattractive balance. At this point your solution is not worth considering.
(Advice: Make sure your balance changes have a concept behind it that suggests exactly the solutions that you came up with)Book 3 Summary:
Just making a post about what you think would positively improve the game is not enough, for basic economic reasons, being it limited available time/resources.
(Advice:) Don't post about things that aren't really feasible.Book 4 Summary:
The Devs are not the devil. The reason why they didn't ban your toxic teammate from yesterday is not because they endorse them or that they don't care.
(Stop it with these hate rants targeted at this fictional picture you have about the devs intentions)0
