The State of DbD (and How to Fix It)
Bugs aside, newly released content that is imbalanced aside…
DbD has glaring balance issues - the same ones for years on end. We've slowly come a long way since the game's first inception, like fixing hatch standoffs and infinite loops, but there is still much work to be done, and the game mechanics allow others to make the game extremely unfun and unfair for others. Just a quick list of issues (and there's probably more I'm forgetting):
- Generator speeds way too fast
- Camping and tunneling
- MMR
- Offering dodging
- Survivors hiding when they've clearly lost
- Killers slugging and bleeding everyone out
- Other QoL issues
Issue 1, 2, and 3 are all closely related imo.
#1 Generator speed is a common complaint from killers. As their MMR goes up and they start facing more skilled survivors, or at least, survivors who don't crouch in a corner the entire time wetting their pants, suddenly it feels like there's a million pallets and windows on the map, and organized teams will quickly finish 1-3 gens by time you down the first person. Slowdown perks were very popular for a reason, but many of them were gutted, and in compensation, the time to complete a generator was extended by a mere 10 seconds. Far too little, too late my friends. Because generators can be done so quickly, this causes many killers to resort to other less savory tactics in order to "apply pressure". See item 2.
#2 Camping and tunneling are even more common complaints from survivors. It's not fun being tunneled out of the game. It's not fair. The basekit borrowed time everyone gets hardly does anything, as most people from ages four and up know how to count to ten. The anti-camp mechanic we have currently is a terrible joke. Only people who are genuinely bad at playing killer will get this to trigger unintentionally. Many killers have some ability, be it a ranged attack, a form of teleportation or high mobility, or other zone control that makes proxy camping extremely easy. And even if a killer does not have any such power, all they have to do is stay a certain distance from the hook (which isn't much).
We have been told that "camping and tunneling are valid strategies" for years, but this is bullcrap. I interpret this as meaning they are not bannable offenses (which would be insane) but nonetheless these practices are not healthy for the game. It's up to the devs to change the overall feel and mechanics of their game so that these strategies are not so easy and rewarding. Below, after discussing MMR a bit, I have some solutions to these issues.
#3 MMR has always been controversial since its release, and frankly, it isn't implemented very well. In fact, it's been implemented very lazily. Looking ONLY at kills and escapes provides the least information, and can be wildly inaccurate. The old ranking system we had was somewhat more ideal, but even building from that, the emblem system we currently have is great for keeping track of all the things a player has done during the match. Killers get points for preventing the generators from being repaired, for chasing survivors and hitting them, for hooking and killing survivors, and for skillful use of their power. Survivors get points for repairing generators, running from the killer and avoiding being hit, unhooking and healing other survivors, and simply surviving as long as possible, or escaping.
These were pretty simple systems that kept track of all the things players have done in a match, and the overall kills and escapes can certainly weigh in heavily to determine an overall team performance. When we look at MMR, ideally a team of survivors vs a killer of equal MMR should expect to see around 8-10 hooks, or 2 kills. When adjusting MMR, look at the overall team scores, look at each player's contribution and performance, and decide if their MMR goes up, down or stays the same. Research how chess ratings are calculated and do a system like that.
Finally, swinging back to issues 1 and 2, I propose this: Once MMR has been properly sorted out, we'll do the following to balance the game:
-Matches with high survivor MMR take longer to complete generators. Make the additional time up to a whopping +30 or +40 seconds at maximum. Sounds like a lot? It is. But a good team shouldn't have any issue doing this. Remember that even at maximum, this is not +200 seconds to a match. With three survivors each on a different generator, it would ideally be only +80 seconds.
-Matches with high survivor MMR take longer to open exit gates. At highest MMRs, up to +10 additional seconds maximum to open the gate. This should make getting everyone out challenging, and not a guaranteed open gate just because one person was ready at the switch right when the last generator was completed.
-Matches with high killer MMR take longer to sacrifice survivors. It can take up to +30 seconds maximum for a survivor to progress to the next hook stage. Therefore, if the killer is camping, this gives more opportunity for the joke self-unhook timer to fill up more, and more time for the other team to reset, reposition, or even just do gens.
-Matches with high killer MMR have slightly more windows and pallets. This will make the killer's job harder, just as the survivors' objectives have been made harder.
-Matches with high killer MMR grant survivors longer haste and endurance times when unhooked. Up to +20 seconds maximum just based off of MMR alone, which should be plenty of time to get to another loop or tile.
-Matches with high killer MMR have increased anti-camp system ranges. Up to +12 meters at higher MMRs. But of course, other survivors in this increased range also foil the system and will prevent the bar from going up.
Final anti-camp and anti-tunnel adjustments: When a survivor is on hook, or unhooked, the server checks how many hook states that survivor has compared to other survivors. Example: Dwight has been hooked for the first time, and Meg, Jake, and Claudette haven't been hooked at all. Dwight has one hook state, the others have zero. That's a difference of one hook state compared to each survivor, and therefore, three total. While Dwight is hooked, the anti-camp system actually has a +30% additional range, and the bar fills up +30% faster. When Dwight is unhooked, his endurance and haste effects will last +30% longer, and the haste effect is +30% stronger.
Then, let's say Meg is hooked next. Dwight has 1 hook state, Meg has 1 hook state, the others have zero. So she'll get those same bonuses, but only at +20%. Then, let's suppose Dwight is hooked again. He now has 2 hook states, which is 1 more than Meg, and 2 more than Jake and Claudette. This will therefore further increase the effects of the anti-camp and anti-tunnel system by +50%.
Other changes: The anti-camp system still works during end game. If a survivor is hooked in the basement, the entrance of the basement is used to determine "camping distance" if it is closer.
Lastly: because I also know such tools are used "offensively", the endurance effect granted from unhooking shall be negated if that survivor were to take a protection hit (grace period 5 seconds from being unhooked).
#4 Offering dodging. We have all probably seen this done by streamers, or done it, or at least had many of our own games prematurely end before they even began. I don't think there's any proper way to prevent this, other than keeping all offerings hidden. Let them be revealed after the game map loads (check offerings and perks with ESC), and people who choose to disconnect after the fact will receive proper punishment, as they should.
#5 Survivors hiding/AFK. There have been many topics about this already. When the game is just about over and the survivors have clearly lost, sometimes they all tend to be "rats" and continually hide and stall the game. At this point, they aren't even trying to complete objectives. They're just hiding, doing nothing, hoping the other person gets caught first. Well, we need crows. The current system won't give survivors crows who are continually moving around but doing nothing, nor will it give survivors crows who hop from one locker to the next. Simply put, what we need is a system that keeps track of what the survivors have accomplished recently. In two minutes, they will need to either heal another survivor, cleanse a totem, open a chest, open a gate, repair 20% of a generator, or interact with a select few number of killer items.. or start getting crows.
#6 The 4k slug and bleedout is just toxic and wastes everyone's time. Give survivors the ability to pick themselves up. Or give survivors a surrender option. Or do that thing you had years ago where the match just ends and everyone gets morid. I don't care what you do, just don't make everyone wait 4 minutes for the most boring and anti-climactic end of what I'm sure was a very "fun" match.
#7 Various Quality of Life issues:
- skill checks: Ever notice how like 80% of the time you're about to leave a generator, then a skill check decides to happen and blows it up? This has got to stop. Seriously.
- Hit boxes: Be it wonky ranged attack hit boxes, killers being fat shamed, invisible sky boxes, getting slowed down and caught on literally nothing, and really strange collisions, all our game maps need to be polished to the point where this never happens and isn't a source of immersion breaking and frustration.
- Totem locations: It really isn't good when totems are right next to generators in plain view, you know that? There is supposed to be a risk/reward to totem perks, but the reason most people either don't bother with them, or feel they must also run Undying is because often times totems are way too obvious and found too early in the games. At the very least, they should not be in plain view of generators, not completely out in the open next to a rock, and survivors should not spawn right next to them.
- Chests and killer item locations: This is one of those situations where again, I feel the coding was either very lazy or very poorly thought out. Killers like Onryo and Xenomorph in particular need their items in the best strategic places. Regardless, the placement of chests should not be prioritized over other objects that are far more impactful to the game.
- Colorblind settings: The game has been out for 8 years now, and all we have are some filters that don't actually do anything to help. Scratch marks and auras are the very big issues here. Give us a system in the menus to customize what color the scratch marks are, and also to customize the aura colors of various perks. This will be very helpful in the case that there is overlap.
Comments
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The only skill checks i get in generators is the moment I stop repairing them... That summarizes all
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I am not doing gens for 120-130 seconds. Especially with the amount of regression perks killer have.
I lose most of my games anyway, because of how many bad players I am getting because of MMR. It's issue for SWF aswell, if we are playing on discord servers we don't get 4 good players in a team most of the time, SWF players come in different skill levels too and I want to remind you that 1 bad player in a team is enough to lose a game for all surviviors.
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Just a reminder:
If you are getting a ton of bad players, you are probably in low MMR. If you are in low MMR, you won't be seeing 120-130 second gens. Literally what I suggested was: survivors at higher MMR get longer gen times.
And I know SWF does not automatically mean you're gods at the game, but the instant communication you all have is a huge advantage that does warrant a MMR adjustment.
Just think about how incredibly helpful it is to call out that the killer is on you, or left you, or when someone says they are going to save, rather than all three survivors leaving their generator and running at the hook. And calling out what perks and addons you think the killer has. It's like three free perks for everyone.
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Like, what regression perks? They've all been nerfed. Killers could have fifty regression perks but if they don't do anything it does not matter
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One thing i think might help prevent tunneling is if the survicor gets off the hook with basekit off the record that has 2 stacks. If they touch anything or get healing or or even try to body block, the effect is turned off as a conspicuous action and the hit will go through, which would also turn off decisive strike. Anticamp perhaps can get a range buff and causes the bar to fill if the killer is looking at the hook in line of sight. The survivor getting off the hook iant the problem, its the camping. And having a bigger anti tunnel buff that completely shuts down all anti tunnel abilities if u do anything but run away certainly would not be exploitable and would heavily encourage chasing other people. As for gen speeds im not sure what they can do besides make generators take longer to do or some kind of means to prevent them from being done within a certain time. But adding too much time to them will just make them impossible to do even as a coordinated team
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Especially with the amount of regression perks killer have.
All of them nerfed and no good regression perk since Artist. That's a long time ago...
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I mean, you say "most regression was gutted and the only compensation was a mere 10 seconds of gen time"
But the 10 seconds of gen time was added in the same update that killers got basekit burst regression on kicks, faster kicks, and buffed Eruption, Jolt, Gift of Pain, Overcharge, and Thana.
It's only subsequent to those changes that regression has been nerfed. Certainly makes it feel like the regression nerfs were in reaction to realizing the increase in gen times alongside the buffs that happened at that same time were too much.
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And yet, this is exactly what happened. What is inaccurate?
If we're going to be real here, going from 2.5% to 5% regression isn't really much. That's like 2 seconds difference and 4.5 seconds of repair time total. Slightly increased kick times also isn't anything: like 0.1 second. Nitpicking over the exact times when certain regression perks got nerfed doesn't help your case. Some things like Eruption and Thana got buffed. Then later when people incessantly complained about them, they got nerfed. Ever since that 10 second increase in generator time, the strongest and most popular regression perks were nerfed, then bhvr looked at their data and culled the next batch.
So far, on the 6.1 patch or after: Pop got nerfed. Pain resonance got nerfed. Thana got nerfed. Eruption got nerfed. Corrupt Intervention got nerfed. Tinkerer got nerfed. Ruin got nerfed. And yes, perks like gift of pain, overcharge, and jolt were considered very weak at the time. They weren't popular, nor effective perks for slowing down the game, so why are they being brought up?
I don't want to split hairs over the exact times of when X and Y perk and mechanic changed, but my overall point is, there were huge nerfs to the meta gen slowdown perks, and only 10 seconds were added to the generator times. To an efficient survivor team, this only really amounts to extending a match by about 20 seconds.
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If you want to know what is inaccurate about your claims I invite you to reread the post you responded to, the information is all there.
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Keep offerings secret can't prevent players to dodge it regardless…
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No thanks, I'll just use sources that don't pull things from their asses.
https://deadbydaylight.fandom.com/wiki/Patch_Notes_6.1.X#Patch_6.1.0
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But there will be DC penalties if they leave once they know what the offerings are.
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While I agree the current anti-camping sucks, I don't believe your suggestion for the changes to anti-camping would be healthy for the game.
Increasing the camping distance on indoor maps with multiple floors will heavily punish the killer, as they will be "camping" while on the floor below. The current system simply isn't well designed.
I am writing a more in-depth post about how to fix it, but the basics are:
- Change the anti-camping to be based on pathing distance instead of straight line distance
- Slow down hook progress when the anti-camping is progressing
Tying anti tunneling into the anti camping might help, but I don't think letting the person a killer is tunnelling unhook themselves does a lot to stop the killer from rehooking the same person.0 -
hey man i'm super confused, the source you linked reinforces My point ("killers overall got buffs to regression in the same patch that gens got buffed to 90 seconds") and contradicts Yours ("gen times got increased by 10 seconds as compensation for slowdown nerfs"). did you post the wrong source by accident? super weird to accuse me of pulling things out of my ass while posting a source that confirms what I said
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It does not confirm what you claim.
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it does, unless you'd like to show exactly where those patch notes show gen slowdown NERFS alongside a 10 second increase in gen times
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It is indeed right what he / she claims.. Gen Regression was buffed (except PgtW) in 6.1.0. along with the raise of repair time to 90s. You yourself posted the link for the Patch Notes.. Have you actually read them?
Furthermore.. You can still shut the game via Task Manager after seeing the offerings without having a penalty except for restarting the game..
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Do literally have to point out everything plain as day to you people?
"Slowdowns" in Patch 6.1:
- Generators take 90 seconds for a single survivor to repair (was 80 seconds)
- Killers kicking a generator now immediately cause a 2.5% loss of progress in addition to starting regression
- Time to kick a generator has been reduced to 1.8 seconds (was 2 seconds)
- Eruption Buff: Increased Generator reduction when a Survivor enters the dying state to 10% (was 6%)
- Eruption buff: Increased duration of Incapacitated status effect to 15/20/25 seconds (was 12/14/16 seconds)
- jolt: removed cooldown
Regression nerfs:
- Corrupt Intervention deactivates when any Survivor enters the dying state.
- Ruin nerf: Added: Once any Survivor is killed by any means, the Hex: Ruin Totem reverts to a Dull Totem.
- Tinkerer: This effect can only be triggered once on each generator.
- Pop Goes the Weasel: Changed regression to be 20% of current progress (was 25% of total)
- Patch 6.6: eruption nerf.
- Patch 6.1.2: Thanatophobia: drastically reduced the Penalty percentages from 4/4.5/5 % to 1/1.5/2 %.
- Pain Resonance: removed the Loud Noise Notification and no longer explodes the Generator, allowing repairing Survivors to continue uninterrupted.
To be fair, pain resonance has gone through many changes but since it's inception and up until now the net change has been: increase to regression percentage, no longer showing the killer your location, and a token system where it can only happen once per survivor. It is much weaker now than when it was first released.
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Also, why would people open their task manager and close the game before they have seen any offerings, or even know if there are offerings at all? My whole suggestion was to make offerings completely hidden until the match actually starts. Seriously, I guess you people just don't read???
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After they see the offering - I wrote after they see them.
Admitted, I forgot about ruin. But calling Corrupt and Tinkerer regression is a far stretch. Slowdown, yes, but not regression
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You're forgetting the Overcharge and Gift of Pain buffs and severely overselling some of the "nerfs" here
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I want to agree with a lot of your points, but there is one that REALLY rubs me the wrong way, and that the one that I will be commenting on ^_-
4) - Offering dodging
There is a better solution then just keeping them hidden, because offering dodging is a symptome, not a cause. Beside the couple of times when a new map releases and people want to experience it and/or get their map achievment done, offerings are used by premades with a plan and to stack the game in an absolute unfair manner against the killer.
Yeah, there is the occasional player who just played one for fun, but I would bet mony on it that about 100% of the times some survivor claimed "What, are you tripping? I only played "the Game offering" because I was tired of seeing the same three maps again. I didn´t know that it was considered survivor sided, never heared of that before", that they were lying.
It has been suggested so many times by now and I see it the same way: map offerings need to be reversed. They should not give one side an unfair advantage by chosing the map of their liking, BUT cause the burned map offerings realm to close up for the upcoming trial. This way a SWF could very well manipulate the map selection in their favor, but only if everyone was burning a different offering, thus skimping on BP or hatch offerings, a somewhat tough choice, for not guranteeing the map they might want for their shennanigans.
And it would FINALLY be an incentive for killers to actally play certain map offerings. You can bet your behind off, that I never played even one single Eiry offering with any of my killers. But Trappers might now play it, just to avoid the map that 100% counters ther power completely and lets them play without a power.
Hiding Map offerings and forcing killers into matches that are stacked against them won't do any good and might lead to games on end where survivors face killers sulking in a corner.
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I do appreciate the feedback!
But I disagree with the map offering stance. The fact is killers can also choose maps that benefit them as well. Onryo benefits from small two story maps very much like The Game and Midwich.. and you know every time you see Lery's glasses, it's going to be some ghost face or scratched mirror myers, right? Once you get really good at certain maps, I'm sure both sides can benefit somewhat at least.
Maybe many maps and offerings ARE survivor sided, but this is an issue that would be remedied simply by fixing the maps, wouldn't it?
The idea to reverse map offerings is interesting, but this is not a reliable way for any team to get a certain map they want. It isn't a terrible idea either in my opinion but then again… isn't this the point of sacrificial wards? Don't want to the others to get an "unfair advantage"? Use the sacrificial ward.
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I hope so much BHVR to listen to this
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Appreciate the positive feedback. Let's just bump this thread one more time, so it can get overlooked again!
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