https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/472588/future-of-dead-by-daylight-forums
Five Pieces of Advice for BHVR PR
Things have not been great for BHVR on the PR front recently, however, they do seem like they want to change that. So I took a bit of time and did my best to come up with my recommendations on things they can improve.
This is not a "balance X" or "killer/survivors are overpowered, must nerf" post. This is about the communication and public relations.
Right about now I imagine many people are hitting the back button on their browsers 😀
I also want to say my criticisms very well might involve the forum managers. While I've done customer service a few times in my life, I don't claim its anywhere on the scope you all have to deal with. I get that public relations can be one of the more taxing jobs, you have to deal with a diverse range of complaints, you become the company itself in the eyes of the customers even when you don't have power to make changes, and a video game company has multiple moving parts and its tough to stay in touch with all of them.
So yes, this is criticism, because people are saying they want to do better, but I also understand what is being asked of is very difficult.
1: Message Discipline - The only thing worse than no info is contradictory info.
If I was to trace the PR problems back to a source it would be the May 1st Update to Haste and Hindered post which, despite the title, caused far more issues for what it included about the abandon system.
Survivors abandoning counted as a draw (since updated to be a loss). This was shocking for two reasons
1: It was absurd. No one wanted survivors abandoning to be a draw, it was an incredibly poor choice of phrasing and/or an absolutely absurd implementation of the concept.
2: It was a use of a word BHVR always avoided. BHVR had always taken the stance that win/loss is partially up to the survivors, instead preferring to say escape or kill, and it felt like they tried to backtrack what they said within the thread and I'm not sure we still even know if there is any difference between a survivor being sacrificed and abandoning.
Except the moment anyone from BHVR starts saying things are in fact a "loss" instead of a "death" or "escape", it doesn't make sense to follow that up with 'but play however you want'. It was a loss of message discipline, BHVR had been really strict about keeping to an idea that there was not an official win condition and in one post they undid all of that while causing massive confusion.
We've had other issues since. We were getting a new tile linked to Rick/Michonne, then it wasn't linked, then it was a map, etc. The kill switch issue about getting infinite item charges could have been resolved with 'we are aware of this issue, we recognize it is a massive problem, we will update you as soon as we can." People still would have been angry that the kill switch wasn't being used, but they wouldn't have felt so insulted.
So that's one of the primary things that I think went wrong over the summer. The company used to be very firm on their stance on certain issues and that message discipline seems to have disappeared.
2: More info on why you make changes: In a recent post about the fog vials we (the community) were asked to give our feedback on how fog vials felt after the changes. The problem is that we lacked info on why the change was made.
BHVR made fog vials weaker. That was basically the feedback because that is obviously what happened.
None of us knew if fog vials were overperforming or if this was a change based on feedback. Even people who play the game constantly are going to be limited on their data compared to what BHVR has.
If we got something like 'we've seen a 10% jump in escape rates with fog vials' or 'we are uncomfortable with how much problems fog vials cause for some players' the feedback the community provides could have actually been meaningful.
3: Decide where messages will go: this is going to be short. There needs to be a policy on consolidating messaging. To get BHVR's stance on an issue people shouldn't have to scour reddit, discord, twitter, BHVR's main page, and this forum and then cobble together an answer. This leads to miscommunications when people see different messages in different places.
4: How far ahead you discuss without details: People have been discussing how the anti-tunnel changes are going to kill / save / have no impact on the game since the announcement of the QoL changes. Social media keeps having posts about it and discussions about the game are thrown off by 'what about when anti-tunnel comes'?
It's (along with all of the other changes that are planned) a Sword of Damocles hanging over all discussions.
However, none of us actually know what's going to happen. I don't think there's even been any real hint on what the level of the changes will be.
I get that certain details might still be being fine tuned, that's perfectly normal. Except either the community needs more info on what the changes will be, or changes shouldn't be revealed until BHVR actually has most of the things nailed down. Because its accomplishing the goal of making a lot of players mad right now based on presumed changes, and will make a different group of players mad when the changes are actually announced because they either go too far / not far enough.
5: More info on what you weigh to make changes: So we have the kill rate targets, but what else? If something underperforms at low MMR but overperforms at high MMR, is that okay? If something only gets used by SWFs or certain killers is that factored in? How important is 'this makes the game unfun' as a decision for game changes?
Now I suspect the answer is that there is no firm line and BHVR weighs a wide range of factors when deciding to make a change (I suspect that because I think its the only possible approach that would work). That will, inevitably, upset some players who would like a clearer line to be drawn, but it would be much better if we actually had more of an insight into the process.
To wrap this up: While I wish things like stat posts would come a lot more frequently, I don't think that the PR team has caused issues in the past, usually if there were complaints its been about the game. But since May there have been a lot of unforced errors, things that went wrong that didn't have to, and hopefully those issues can be corrected.
Comments
-
We still have absolutely no idea what BHVR wants the fog vials to do.
We’ve shown screenshots where the fog was super easy to see through. We’ve shown screenshots where the fog was impossible to see through. But BHVR refuses to tell us which screenshots are intended, and which are bugged.
As in, we’ve literally got zero feedback on whether or not the “I can easily see through the fog” screenshots are bugged or intended.
0 -
That's an weird issue that needs to be fixed since it's different depending on the map. Some maps the smoke is very easy to see through it while other maps it's thick enough that can't even see the wall in front on you.
1
