Feedback on Haunted by Daylight
I'm a regular DBD player who was looking to provide feedback on the Haunted by Daylight event. I appreciate the time that was put into developing the event, but unfortunately, I found the event was structured in a frustrating way, particularly for survivors. Event mechanics felt inherently unrewarding (and honestly, punishing) to engage with, and thus, challenges were difficult to complete, as well.
My primary issue is that making crystals on survivor side felt high-investment and high-risk for low payoff. It takes an entire generator’s worth of progress to open a rift and create void crystals (ignoring pumpkins and the floating essence). Survivors only get essence from generators despite having multiple objectives (unhooking, healing, chase), while killers inherently get essence from doing their objective: downing and hooking survivors. If you are first chase and/or tunneled, you also cannot make event challenge progress.
Rifts were difficult to locate, especially on maps with low visibility. Auras did not appear consistently for rifts, and when they did, the range was too short to be helpful. Further, certain killer powers with special items prevent survivors from interacting with the void or holding crystals (Sadako, Krasue, Singularity, etc).
Once you do enter the void, the killer is immediately notified. The new void layout also makes it very unsafe to make crystals. I was interrupted by killers more often than not, despite attempting to only enter the void when killers were occupied (in part, no doubt, because killers had challenges to hook a high number of survivors in the void). I definitely understand the need to have an indicator when a survivor has spent enough time in the void, but I think the immediate notification made going into the void not worth it, especially closer to the event release.
The payoff of the crystals was also, in my opinion, low and situational for survivors. I believe the crystals in chase are strong and enjoyable to use. On a generator, though, the time you spend finding a rift, entering the void, creating a crystal, and returning to the overworld far outweighs the benefit of placing a crystal onto a generator (18 seconds of repair time). Also, being able to use the crystal on a generator is dependent on factors often beyond your control as a survivor: first, the gen must not be blocked (when perks like Dead Man’s Switch and Grim Embrace are very popular); second, a teammate must not be on the generator. I understand it would be harder to make the crystals stronger on gens and keep them balanced; honestly, though, I’d prefer crystals that only have the “smoke bomb” effect and are easier to generate.
Lastly, I found the mechanic for stealing void essence to be unbalanced and unfair to survivors. Killers steal void essence by performing the basic job of a killer, regardless of their power or playstyle: downing a survivor. Survivors steal void essence for being exceptional: by stunning or blinding killers. Many killer’s powers make it so that playing for stuns is not optimal or expected, such as Nurse, Singularity, and Nemesis. Moreover, if survivors get tunneled, they are doubly punished via downs without opportunity to recover void essence. The same problem arises if a survivor gets downed, picked up, then downed again. I feel like it'd feel less frustrating for players to just remove the stealing mechanic (while still giving killers essence for downs).
Overall, it felt like trying to make use of the event mechanics on survivor end and complete event challenges was largely out of my control. Challenges such as “repair ten generators with a void crystal” were especially difficult– I often got one crystal per match, and didn’t always have a chance to use it. I’m usually not a player who gets super upset with DBD, but I started playing the game less and cutting my sessions shorter because of how frustrating I found the event mechanics.
I hope this feedback does not come off as overly critical. I appreciate the time the development team puts into special events. I was just hoping to voice my concerns as someone who regularly enjoys this game, and would like to participate more in the Halloween event in the future.