Dev Update October 2022 (Bots in custom matches & Basement visual update, and more!)
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Like (almost) everything in this update. Not sure how the 0.25 second buffer will feel as a killer but I'll have to try it out and see. It's easy enough to bait out a flashlight save/face an object so I'm not overly concerned, more about how responsive it will feel.
Changes to anti-cheats are great though, and I enjoy testing things so the bots are gonna be a huge help. Also loving the look of that basement.
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I love the look of a lot of this, including the kibosh on locker saves and the cheats they patched out. But I'm concerned about that flashlight blind buffer. Is it making it so that if you get blinded a little early, you still get the save, or is it making it so that you're still vulnerable for part of a second after you finish the pickup and have the ability to look away? I'd be okay with the former but not the latter (and the former is still a bit problematic when it comes to survivors who were already good at the blind anyway.)
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I just read through the Dev update....
I like the changes being talked about... Bots is good for Killer that don't have friends (or have friends online and willing to play)
Preventing cheaters is good but they need to get the subtle cheats gone sooner rather then later
The graphical update is not big enough to be enthusiastic about
So what's everyone's thoughts about this
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I'm liking what I see, for sure. The flashlight changes both seem pretty good and frankly a little overdue, I like the graphical change looks, and I'll absolutely be making use of the bots myself for learning new killers and such.
I have to assume this update won't have much in the way of balance changes in its patch notes, but that's fine, there's plenty in here.
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IMO it is not really needed that KIller Bots exist. I cannot really imagine that someone can improve playing against Nurse when a Bot is controlling her, because either the Bot will be super-strong and just hit every Blink and it will probably impossible to learn against them or they are weak and nobody needs to learn how to play against Baby-Nurses.
Same with other Killers, I cannot really see how some Bot plays Wesker or Blight. I also dont think that "learning by doing" is such a bad thing as Survivor.
As Killer, you will also not play full games with 4 Bots, because they as well dont give that much value compared to actual players. I guess many Killer players just will use 1 Bot to get used to the Power a bit and thats it.
But Killer Bots are really too much work which is not worth it IMO and I hope BHVR does not go that route and allocate their ressources elsewhere.
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I like the dev blog. Sounds absolutely great!
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Haven't they already updated pallets multiple times? Why do they keep spending time on graphic updates on pallets? Who is constantly complaining about how pallets look?
Hopefully we eventually get bots in regular matches.
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Bots
Thats one of the best additions in the upcoming patch.
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Mostly liking it, didn’t expect bots in a chapter but mid-chapter so that’s a nice surprise!
not too fond of the new breakable wall though.. well let’s see in the actual gameplay/map/environment..
as to flashlight saves… gonna guess especially the buffer time will get much negative feedback and will be adjusted for the full release anyways as it’s a significant survivor buff - gotta see how much of a buff it actually will be..
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Very hyped for all these good news !
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Awesome changes. Looking forward to hearing more about matchmaking
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Cool... so I'm not the only one hoping for these changes
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I can't help but giggle everytime matchmaking changes come up. It's like which iteration are we on now? Matchmaking 5.0?
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Subtle cheating is simply much harder to tackle. Things like preventing survivors from hooking themselves or instantly completing a gen are simple to add validation checks for.
Things like survivors auto hitting great skill checks or auto dead hard on killer swing are much harder to validate against.
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1) Pallets and breakable walls should have very bright colors, instead of washed out red and blue, so they are easily noticeable. The one thing RPD did great was label the vaults with a bright yellow.
2) If flashlight saves are going to be easier, does this mean the basekit unbreakable will be even more awful, because killers will feel like they need to leave survivors slugged more often, because more people will be trying flashlight saves?
3) Removing flashlight locker saves is great.
4) For the Team Based MMR, can we also have a rule that if a survivor spends the game just waiting for their teammates to die, that they would get a lower reward for escaping, since they weren't being a team player?
5) Better anti-cheating stuff is always good.
6) I still want the ragequitting penalties to be more strict (leaving the game because of a hacker, or because the game is being taken hostage, doesn't count as ragequitting).
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To give some insight here, the survivor still needs to be at that "middle step" of the pickup animation (before the Killer hoists them onto their shoulder) when you start the blind for the save to work, it just doesn't have to be the exact right frame anymore. Any earlier and it still won't blind, any later and the Killer can still turn away.
As a Killer, it's almost too short to notice. Since the blind VFX fade in, it's hard to tell if the blind was on time or buffered in most cases.
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I'd still like for the questionable flashlight angles to be fixed, where the killer can be blinded even though the survivor isn't in their FoV.
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Its so sad to see, changes in visual but, nothing for soloQ.
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If you get blinded a tad early, it will still stun at the end of the animation.
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Hi @Peanits
Is there any plans or ideas to add this buffer to other validations like dead hard or pallet stuns. Something similar along the lines. I don't know if im going insane or not, but recently I have been struggling to hit pallet stuns and dead hard consistently. Other people I have spoken to have mentioned something similar. chur.
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It's the former. If you're late, you're late, no blind for you. It doesn't make a huge difference for folks who already have the timing down- they'll nail the saves anyway. But it does make flashlights easier for a newer player to learn, and it makes up for the inability to adjust your timing since the cooldown was added.
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Okay, I'm glad to hear that. I wasn't sure if that was the case or it was talking about extending the pickup animation; the wording seemed ambiguous.
It always seemed a bit silly to me that blinding a fraction early didn't do anything, so this shouldn't be that much of a problem.
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I know but still... Once they get a hold of blatant cheating then subtle cheating would be next... right???
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Awesome. This should make learning blinds a lot more intuitive.
On further thought, it doesn't change the counterplay either, since if someone could blind you early, they could blind you with the correct timing too. It'll give blinds that wouldn't have happened before, but honestly... when someone manages to surprise me with a blind only to land it early, it always felt like they deserved it even though it failed. Sometimes I'd drop the survivor anyway.
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Not at the moment. The tricky thing with those are that they are all race conditions, meaning the server needs to resolve an issue between two conflicting pieces of info.
To take Dead Hard as an example, the Killer sees themself hitting and downing you, but you see yourself Dead Hard first. Both cannot be true, so the server has to step in and check the timestamps to see which actually happened first. Adding a buffer in this case might make it feel better on your end, but it would make the outcome objectively less fair at the expense of Killers.
Meanwhile for flashlights, there's no conflicting info. Either you blind in time or you don't. This only affects how it feels to use.
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Yeah fair play. Cheers for the answer mate.
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The issue with that is that blatant cheating can be handled on a server level by just doing sanity checks so that completely impossible stuff runs into a wall of code saying "no." Stuns have a hard cap of 5 seconds, max number of killers per match is one, survivors can't be hooked when they're not actually on a hook, that sort of thing.
Subtle cheating works by hiding along those lines of 'this is all possible within the game, but the fact that this survivor is hugging the top percentile of everything they do is kinda sus.' You can't slap up a big "no running at 107% speed" rule because there's plenty of perks and items survivors can use to do that. And teleporting/phasing through the map is tricky as long as survivors are at single variable coordinates they could feasibly be able to access - a height between the basement and the tallest structure on the map, and within the boundaries of the map itself. It's not like they can add a check for every unique xyz on every unique map. That kind of cheat can only be prevented by patching out the cheats themselves, or transitioning pretty much everything server-side.
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For number 4, yes. People who hide and crouch around all match not contributing should receive very little BP and their MMR lowered, even if the killer gave them hatch/gate.
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Why should a teammates mmr be lowered for something out of their control and managing to find hatch? You cant control if your team gets demolished by a good killer and you're the last one standing with 5 gens left. The game is already over and saving that one teammate wont change the outcome.
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They stated in the dev blog that they are working on more anti-cheat countermeasures. I imagine subtle cheating will get looked at, but it is a more difficult problem to deal with when simple validation can't really address it.
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But nipping the blatant cheating should uncover the subtle cheating as well... Or am I being naïve in thinking that way?
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Looks good, some off hand comments going through it
Bots in Custom Matches
Really looking forward to trying this out. 🙂 Not only because it's a chance to try new stuff out at a leisurely pace but also because it's a chance to simply go into a custom match and explore maps for the sake of exploring them and looking at stuff. I'm looking forward to actually just walking around some of the maps without worrying about messing up the match for someone else.
It's too bad the killer bots aren't in the initial release, but I'm not surprised they're taking longer to develop. It might be nice though to actually get a chance to practice survivor play against bots some day since I hardly ever play survivor.
On a side note, I'm hopeful that whatever pathing routines the bots use can be leveraged to help Nemesis' zombies not be so brain dead (no pun intended). Maybe if the new bots don't get stuck on terrain all the time there's hope for the zombies too!
Visual Improvements
Not to much to say, the new wooden features look good I think? (Hard to tell when it's not actually in game but I generally think the art department does a great job.)
Flashlight Adjustments
- Locker Blind Immunity is great, that exploit where a pair of survivors could trade off being in lockers to blind the killer if one was grabbed was a bit annoying. It wasn't an overpowered strategy or anything, but still irritating to deal with when it occasionally cropped up.
- The Flashlight Save buffer sounds like it could make flashlights slightly more of a threat. I know for sure I've had some instances where I picked someone up and got blinded right afterward but didn't lose the carry. Probably a good thing overall since I've always considered flashlights to be a bit weak on average but be prepared for a ton of survivors trying them out for better or worse when the patch hits!
Matchmaking Improvements
- They mentioned wanting to do team based MMR a while back so that's not a surprise. I'm all for the survivors effectively winning or losing as a group so taking a step in that direction sounds good to me. 🙂 Ultimately I'd love it if the game actually just said "Survivors Win" or "Survivors Lose" at the end rather than all these other ambiguous things about the Entity's mental state and pips and bloodpoints muddying the waters. Having a crystal clear win/loss condition for both sides is something the game could really use, in part because I suspect making these thing ambiguous somewhat increases the amount of ragequitting and sandbagging in the game because of people feeling like they personally are losing even though the survivor group as a whole isn't. Either way, though, matchmaking based on the team as a whole is a good thing in my opinion.
- The extended break adjustment to MMR sounds reasonable to me, not much else to say there.
An Update on Cheating / Temporary Bans
- It sounds like they've made progress on a list of the most absurd things cheaters could do like instantly crashing the game or forcing endgame collapse to never end, etc. So hopefully that trend can continue, cheaters generally suck so I'm all for anything that helps mitigate their impact on the game.
- Likewise I have no problem with people who get banned to inappropriate behavior getting longer temporary bans.
Not mentioned in the update
This update sounds great overall, looking forward to everything above. 🙂 A couple of things that weren't mentioned which I'd be curious about at some point
- I wonder if they're still planning to do the new HUD icons for survivors? The solo/swf balance gap is still as far as I know probably about +3-4% per person in the swf which does make a noticeable difference with 3-4 person swfs. I like the general idea of giving buffs that help solo survivors more than swfs to close that gap a bit so it'll be interesting to see if those HUD changes or something else makes its way back into the 2023 roadmap.
- With everything else that happened in 2022 the balance passes they had been doing on a semi-regular basis got tabled. Sadako for instance never actually got her balance pass that probably would have already happened this summer. (Not that I think Sadako needs drastic changes or anything, but she could probably stand some minor tweaks.)
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Ok... thanks
But progress is progress I guess
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For bots, after you've got them up and running, BHVR, you seriously need to consider adding them to the live game, to replace players that DC or go AFK. Every DC/AFK match could instead of being a total waste of time, be a potentially fun match. Have the bot take over the killer/survivors that do this with their perks, items, and add-ons.
For those of you worrying about blinds, there is a simple solution that is also more OP than you remember, Lightborn. Just because the top streamers or whoever you follow doesn't say it is META, doesn't mean it isn't. It is so much better than you remember, being able to see the aura of a blind attempter tells you exactly where to go after you finish that hooking or breaking that pallet.
I've been the victim of more than one of those cheats in game, and I'm really glad you are getting them fixed, BHVR.
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Really awesome changes, especially bots a huge blessing to new player’s who need to get the hang of things better and can allow veterans to test out some things. I’m a big fan of the visuals so liking them too and I’m really hoping they update Swamp and Forest with the update they definitely need it.
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Above is in an example, and even though this happened with a locker save, it also happens even if a locker isn't involved.
Can someone tell me how this is an acceptable flashlight angle, when the survivor isn't in killer's FoV? Flashlights should be required to be visible in the killer's FoV in order to properly work.
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That new pallet looks suspiciously similar to the one they tried to implement last year that I (and many others) abhorred the look of. I really hope it looks better this time...
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Harsher punishment for griefing!
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Call me weird, but I actually enjoy playing vs AI in many games, so to have that feature in DBD is actually amazing. And now there's no need to practice a new Killer in a public match, or require other people for a custom game! That's huge. Thanks BHVR.
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i don't get why they keep changing the pallet model, the one we have now looks perfectly fine imo. i do like the basement visual changes though, it looked really outdated on the newer maps.
have they ever explained why rpd's basement is different? it's a bit bigger and the stairway is wider, i never understood why it looks how it does.
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I've been wondering the same thing !
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Looks promising at first glance, but I'll keep my judgements reserved. Wouldn't be the first instance of The Monkey's Paw.
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Not gonna lie, these new breakable walls textures look really good. The new pallet texture has more lines (at least that's what's looking different). Basement looks also great, but did they secretly changed the locker layout of the basement?
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