BHVR needs it's community now more than ever. My thoughts on the PTB notes and a message to dev team

RacTF

the calm before the storm

Didn't know if I should make a post that might not get any traction or comment on a dev post and my review get swallowed into the abyss of others posts, but either way lets kick it off. I would like to say I would be honored if a dev took the time to read this, and if you do, I want you to know I absolutely love this game and will continue to play and give my honest feedback because I want this game to return to it's glory and become a main stay in all of our hears, I'm a TF2 player and I'm tired of being depressed about games I love going through hardships.

player satisfaction, engagement, and interactions

To start, I have about 1k hours, Probably 700 of them are on killer, but survivors hear me out I'm arguing in both of our favors here because we all know this will make people on both sides be so much more toxic in the end if this goes live, and I want to prevent that. These are my thoughts on the changes when it comes to players interacting and the enjoyment of an aspect that doesn't relate to the games overall balance but a person attachment I have to a part of most of my games in order to really have fun.

Not being able to give hatch really ruins a MASSIVE part of the game for me, they should just give you the buffs from this to make end game more engaging and fun but without touching anything else, having the normal Mori interaction prompt on the last survivor to then teleport you to the cinematic location.

Like, do that and then give the killer a bonus mercy score for giving the survivor hatch by making it to where if they recently drop a survivor and when they go into hatch it gives you the bonus, signaling that you earned the 4k but you decided to be nice. Thematically it's not even uncharacteristic for some killers in media to have mercy on certain characters and then go back to whatever they were doing and hunt their primary target. With this change you won't get as much BP as a sacrifice but you would get something for being merciful since it's a big thing killers do all the time as killer and it makes for fun chat after the game.

I know I haven't played with these changes yet but based on what I've read all gameplay balance aside, when I want to give hatch I'll have to just walk up to the last survivor after the last chase and when I catch them I'll have to basically play invisible tag with them, and then awkwardly look at each other until they realize I'm going to give them hatch. It's just frustrating to think about really, and on top of that, in custom games when people experiment or 1v1 in the custom lobby how are they suppose to pick up and wiggle out to go again instead of going back to lobby constantly, like why.

Gameplay

Game balance wise from reading this, I play mostly killer but I have a great amount of hours in survivor playing with friends a lot, and I genuinely think comeback moments for killers when all the survivors are grouped up too much, get rolled, and then slugged is completely valid reason for this not to be a thing unless it's the last survivor and all the others are dead. It's gg at that point and you just have to accept it unless a new gamemode gets added to where these changes wouldn't just ruin the lower tier killers ability to keep that pressure when they played the game perfectly and capitalized on survivor mistakes, for it all to amount to nothing after 45 seconds if the hooks are too spread to hook all survivors in time, it's unnecessary stress. Killers like trickster and huntress will have a hard time getting several people to hooks in time in a 4 man slugging that they completely earned, and I don't even want to think about how bad these changes will be for Oni, he's just going to immediately go out of his power after one down now in order to keep up his momentum, they'll have to change his passive and power absorption rates in order to really keep up if these slugging changes go into effect. For survivors I really don't think this is a healthy change to the skill ceiling required for them to go against lower capability killers on cowshed for example.

Something else I noticed on this is the fact that they are increasing the FOV mid game. This really really really hurts because that lets me know that their fundamental thoughts on the zero desire to both help players that experience motion sickness like myself having to use Shadowborn tier 2 or 3 to even play the game for more than one match, and fundamentally help the game out because nobody wants to play a game where you feel so limited for genuinely no reason, in a game where you have limited visibility and A MOUNTAIN OF DIFFERENT AURA PERKS, you think that if the killer sees you, it's because you had poor positioning, awareness and/or are just unlucky in that situation and the FOV has nothing to do with it.

other issues at large

Do I think the game is dying? Not dying but struggling. Do I think the dev team is really passionate and cares about the game and want to make it better? Absolutely, but I think it's a lot rougher behind the scenes and their public image could really use some work by just being more open by taking advice from other live service game studio's new model and approach to their community. In todays market it's very competitive when it comes to keeping player satisfaction as high as you can because there are a growing amount of people that nit pick and voice their opinions a bit too much, sometimes resulting in a sea of people screaming about something that is objectively terrible for the game, but there are a lot of great people who take the time to break everything down methodically and ration out great advice for the devs and I think they're on the right track but not quite there yet. It breaks my heart to see this game do something so good with the perk and gameplay changes, just to then turn around and ignore all of the hackers running around PULLING PLAYERS IP and ruining almost every big streamers experience for them and viewers, and it's happening literally multiple times, daily. BHVR not giving direct feedback to us on several issues in a timely manner is so unhealthy for the games live service model, the community has been asking for this for some time now and just when the gates were opening with the perk rehaul in terms of community engagement, it feels like they're slowly shutting again, which I really don't want to see. I know it's a bigger company with a lot more resources but damn look at OW2, it's developers have a full paragraph on every single change they add and let people know of changes they want to add long before their test servers will go live now, because they learned from their mistakes and knew what had to be done. To give some insight into topics I've heard discussion of I'll give you all a list and I may miss some but these are easy to fix and easily addressable in a single tweet about their thoughts and concerns, and they're ones that I personally agree are priorities more or less:

• - Publicly address hacking problem both subtle and obvious, state the current plan to fix it, how long it may take to properly put an end to it, and add any thoughts they have on the subject, in order to give people a sense of hope that they aren't wasting their time in a game they fear in a year tops will turn into TF2, pre-prime matchmaking CSGO, or even.
• - An FOV slider, for at least killers since we already have Shadowborn and maybe Monitor could still lower it for a gimmickier but fun style of play, killers need a good meme like No Mither in their life (besides Coup don't you dare touch it BHVR, you already took Blast Mine from me. Even though I'm a killer, nothing made my day more than getting Blast Mined).
• - 144 FPS without going into the config files.
• - Maps being way too big, making the game harder and more boring, some with too much RNG resulting in too many or too little pallets, so it feels like it's never a happy middle ground and I dread loading into over half of the maps in the game currently, and I hate them equally on both sides because if the map is absolutely busted when I'm playing survivor I just feel bad for the poor M1 killer I'm facing along with the fact that it's just boring gameplay, like going against a Deathslinger or Trickster that has to walk from one side of the map to the other after they get a tinkerer proc with a whopping 4.4m/s, I mean come on, Trickster has so many knives he can't run that fast and Deathslinger has a busted up leg, I mean come on, The Entity can at least give them a break with the map situation.
• - Unjustifiable bundled cosmetics, I have done a lot of 3D modeling and I understand head and body being locked together on some skins but other cosmetics clearly have clipping issues when interchanged already and people love it because of that, and what about ones that link a killer weapon to the skin so you can't use your prestige weapon on a cool skin that has a mediocre weapon like Weskers S.T.A.R.S. outfit for example.
• - This goes along a bit with the above complaint. So on many skins for both sides, you'll have to pay the standard price for the given rarity of that skin, but it doesn't actually give you a complete change to all parts of the cosmetic, Jill's Impervious Agent cosmetic comes to mind as an example. In the skin her head is exactly the same as her base model, and the price is still a full 1080 Cells, because why not because it clearly says you're getting a 10% discount, Pepega.
• - This one I haven't heard from anyone but my personal thoughts on this are, the killer hit cooldown and overall gameplay speedup buffs they got feel really good and I think they should stay but I feel like they really are a Band-Aid fix to a bigger issue that lower tier killers have and I am just curious on the follow up plans that the devs have when it comes to making every killer fun without addons at least, even if they aren't viable at the least give them diverse addons that really change how the killer is played if it's impossible to really change the core mechanics of the killer, sort of like a mix of what they did for Legion but more transformative like Freddy's even though half of Legion's addons are still kinda garbo, and Freddy is, well, Freddy... Anyways, killers like trapper could be so fun to go against if they have that mystery of what addons they might have life if they slightly tweet or even don't touch his base kit, and gave him an addon overhaul that changes the way he interacts and uses with his power, to allow the player to change his normal power for different styles of traps with it's own drawbacks and benefits so you can mix addons together. Hopefully if a change like that happens it doesn't end up like Freddy's meme pallets or Meyers Addons which are designed to have no creativity and you just have to run their specific intentionally designed combo, *cough cough* Scratched Mirror Boyfriend's Memo, or the singular time you run it just to try it but literally never again because it's terrible, Vanity Mirror Dead Rabbit. Honestly let's not even talk about Meyers, I don't want to be the guy in charge of that, because I don't even know where to start so don't look at me.

That's about all I have the energy to type and I might come back and respond to this after I play the PTB when it does go live, and if they devs put out a response or Tweet regarding the communities interests. I really hope I made good statements because I only half revised it so Godspeed to anyone who reads it if some of it I missed when correcting it turned into absolute word bile. I have zero experience in the field but I swear BHVR fly me out to be a temp community manager I promise I'll make things right. ;p

Thank you so much for reading, my name is Markiplier, and as always, I will see you, in the next DBD forum therapy session, BUHBYE.

RacTF

Didn't know the bullet points on the list would show up and since they didn't when editing so I added the - on all of them so now it kinda looks goofy lmao

RacTF

I missed it originally when I read it, but I watched the Otz video on the original post, and found out the next update won't be what the PTB is testing out. My statement stands if if/when it gets added, it's the exact same as what they are proposing in the PTB notes.