Some thoughts on DBD's raft of inconvenience
Hi. I'm new to the forums. I'm not new to DBD. I like the game, but I'm not daft enough to ignore the fact that there is some definite Stockholm Syndrome at work. Here are some thoughts on DBD's most pernicious problems.
1) The Bloodweb. I explained this one at length in another thread (https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/69285/bloodweb-rework-not-in-sight). TL;DR is that it takes a ridiculous commitment to get a full collection pf perks for even a single character, let alone a "main" survivor and multiple killers -- all very perk dependent -- that you would like to play and enjoy at a reasonable level without feeling disadvantaged. Rank 1-2 perks need to go; these are a relic of the past, as the game only had 21 teachable perks at launch, and now has 99.
2) The Emblem System. This was definitely designed by an engineer, without a single thought spared about how an end-user will engage with it. A normal person cannot understand this game's ranking system without some sort of lengthy explanation. Also, many of the ways in which it awards and deducts points make no sense for the core goals of the game, as a player should instinctively understand it. For example, a survivor shouldn't be punished for NOT getting chased the entire game. The ranking system should way more simple: If you complete X objectives, save X allies, and/or survive the match, you rank up. If you kill at least X survivors, you rank up. If you don't do these things, you rank down. It doesn't need to be calculus.
3) Disconnects. These are way too rampant, and punish everyone -- even if, say, the killer disconnects at the very end of a game in which you've been doing very well, and used an Escape Cake on top of the double Bloodpoint weekend, and so you only wind up with 6k Bloodpoints. I know dedicated servers are on the way, and man alive, they better fix this.
4) Survive With Friends. This game is not currently balanced around the idea of players being able to communicate with each other, yet it offers a mode that incentivizes players sidestepping this restriction. Now, I now there's nothing to be done about this; players are going to find ways to use voice comms, and there's no way a game developer can control that. The Band-Aid solution (short of a rethink on how to balance around it) is to just add voice chat to the game as a baseline option. Players can opt out if they don't want it, but at least having it in the game would let everyone know where things realistically stand.
5) New Player Experience. New players, whether they're playing survivor or killer, are likely to have a bad time, because they either get killed immediately or they cannot find anyone to kill. This is a broad, miserable, genre-wide issue that is hard to solve. As with many games, tutorialization is something that this game does not do effectively. I also think this problem could be eased -- and provide a better baseline experience overall -- if Bond and Whispers were simply turned into core parts of the survivor and killer kits, respectively.
That's all for now. I just wish this game wasn't so annoying and player-unfriendly in how some of its systems are implemented.
Comments
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I feel ditch swf or add voice comms and balance it into the game already.
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Personally I hate Whispers, and if we talking about baking in Kindred or Bond into basic gameplay then re-balancing is going to need to happen sooner than later, High Rank Killer games are already miserable to play. You eventually cave to the meta and it always ends up in playing characters or using perks that you necessarily don't want to, if you want to do well. I agree with about 90% of your post but baking in perks to normal gameplay is shaky ground (IMO). Maybe after re balancing it could be done. And I agree with you 100% about the game needing better ways to help people learn, I currently wont recommend this game to friends because of that.
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The thing about voice comms is: It probably isn't everyone's favorite solution -- it isn't mine! But what other option is there?
The reality of video games is, people will find a way around these kinds of restrictions. You cannot keep them from using Discord, or Steam chat, or PS4 party chat or whatever. You just can't do it, therefore it becomes an unintended advantage. You know SWF groups are using voice comms, I know it, the devs know it. It may not be part of the game's vision, but it is a toxic thing that has spoiled the original intentions.
What else would you do? You can't just take away SWF, because of course people want to play with their friends. You can't start awarding killer bonuses and survivor penalties, because that screws solo players who wind up in a 3-player SWF. You can't split queues, because then SWF would be a ghost town -- what killer would opt into it? The genie is out of the bottle; the best solution is to just acknowledge the reality of the situation, and try to adapt the game around it.
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Nothing is wrong with SWF, it not even broken. They made it so you can’t see killer’s perks when you die and how much info they really going to tell? I hate when people complain about it. Just learn to play.
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It's not that it's broken, per se, as a mode. It's that the game isn't balanced around the assumption that this is how people will play (otherwise it would have built-in voice comms, or at the very least some text chat for the survivors -- which also might be a good idea).
No one here who has played SWF can claim that they HAVEN'T been in a situation where the voice comms provided useful information that they could have in no way known otherwise, unless they have the keenest observation skills and the most fortuitous luck that a human being can have.
Let me put it another way: What do you think would happen if there were a visual marker in every pre-game lobby that identified which players were grouped up? Do you think it would be a good idea to add this information? Would it result in dodged queues? If you think it would, don't you think this constitutes evidence of a problem?
Voice comms would just allow the developers to admit what everyone already knows, which is that players lean on this for coordination, so you might as well give it to everyone.
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Hey, a post that someone actually put some time and thought into. How novel.
1- Bloodweb. Yeah, it is a problem. I don't hate the idea of getting rid of the perk rank system. They have steadily been putting the power of perks into rank 1 so it isn't so hard to get decent perks to play with. For example, if you use NOED rank 1 vs NOED rank 3, there isn't a huge difference in benefit. But the grind to get all your perks unlocked and rank 3 is massive and gets worse with every chapter.
There are some arguments to be made against this idea though. It doesn't really seem fair to the players that put in the time to max out all their perks when a newer player could get there with literally 1/3 of the effort. Also, does every player need all their perks unlocked and at max rank? That tends to lead to even more meta perks being used. At least now there is some variety in perks that players run.
Here are some ideas that I've pitched in the past that I would like to see that would help with the grind problem. I would like to strip the bloodpoint gain ability off of BBQ and WGLF and add them to the base game. I would make it so survivors gain 20% bonus BP per gen completed, killers would keep the same BBQ mechanic (25% bonus per unique survivor hooked). WGLF would just get a new ability altogether. What this would do is increase all players bloodpoints earned and free up players to use more variety of perks.
I would revamp the prestige system so that players get their teachable perks at whatever prestige rank they are at and can keep one perk they've unlocked per prestige rank. IE if I got Hillbilly to prestige 3 I would have Tinkerer, Lightborn, and Enduring at rank 3. I would also get to choose 3 perks I've already unlocked to keep from being reset.
I would also address the issue of the way that survivors gain bloodpoints. Unlike the killer that only has one objective and therefore gains bloodpoints evenly, the survivor has several objectives and methods of earning bloodpoints. If a survivor is constantly being chased by the killer the entire game, they would quickly cap out the 8000 bloodpoints they can potentially earn in the chase category. But since they never had an opportunity to work gens or rescue other survivors they would suffer in the objective or altruism category. What I would like to see happen is for bloodpoints earned past the 8000 category cap go into a general pool of bloodpoints at a 50% earn rate. This general pool would be applied to the other categories, but never allow the survivor to earn more than a total of 32,000 in a match.
I would also like to see rank matter as it applies to earning bloodpoints. The way I would do this is make it so for each pip earned in the red ranks, the player earns 10,000 bonus bloodpoints. This would help with the bloodpoint grind and help motivate players to work hard and stay at a rank they belong. IE discourage de-ranking for easier opponents.
2- The Emblem System. Yeah, this is undoubtedly a problem. I've had so many games that I've gotten 3 or even 4 kills and failed to gain a pip that I want to scream sometimes. I vastly preferred the old victory cube system. It just made more fundamental sense. But I will say this much for the emblem system. It accomplishes its primary mission of making it harder to rank up. When you get to the red ranks now, you know that you are in for challenging opponents. The real question is if that is actually a good thing. I honestly have more fun when survivors aren't constantly doing the optimal thing. Efficient looping and gen rushing gets really old. My personal opinion is that the game is more fun when mistakes are made. But I think good arguments could be made either way.
3- Disconnects. Yeah, this is obviously a problem. It's always been a problem. At the very least they made it so matches are cancelled if someone disconnects during the loading phase. That's at least a step in the right direction.
4- Survive With Friends. Personally, I don't think this is nearly the issue that many on the forums thinks it is. SWF forces killers to be better at their job. Statistically speaking, SWF isn't that big of a deal either. Around 5% of games played are with a full SWF group. Around 10% are 3 man groups. 4 man SWF have their personal survivability increase from approximately 40% to 50%. 2 man SWF survivability is like a 1% increase. That is still well within an acceptable range.
Here is my advice to killers playing against SWF. Assume that the survivors are working with near perfect information. Use that against them. Once you hook someone, you know good and well that as soon as they see you walk away that they are calling for a rescue. Once you get outside terror radius from the hooked survivor turn around and head back. You'll almost always catch them in the process of rescuing. SWF are notoriously altruistic too. If you start bullying one of them, they will almost invariably attempt to save their buddy. It's usually pretty easy to play "musical hooks" with SWF. You can almost always predict what generators they will be working on in the mid to late game too.
5- New Player Experience. This is a point that I will have to disagree about. There are a lot of things to learn about this game. But learning all those things is also the most fun part of the experience IMO. The joy I used to get from hitting survivors... now it's become all so routine.
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"It doesn't really seem fair to the players that put in the time to max out all their perks when a newer player could get there with literally 1/3 of the effort" is a bad excuse to not fix a problem. I put in the effort to for example, exalt every reputation meter in World of Warcraft -- but I am still very aware that the reputation system is kind of broken, and I would not be personally offended if they overhauled it completely. It's just a game. This may be a hard Band-Aid to rip off, but it needs to come off for the long-term benefit of the game.
And, bad onboarding just drives people away, especially if their first impression of the game is aggressively negative -- which tends to be the case with this genre.
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