The problem of the Add-on System as it relates to balance. (LONG READ)
I have played Dead by Daylight for about 222 hours on my own, now. I mostly play killer, but have gotten a few survivors up in levels, as well as watching a lot of different player's streams. Credentialism aside, I would like to start a discussion about how the game balance relates to the add-on system present in the game, specifically the Killer's side. This is not to say that add-ons are not a balance problem on the survivor side- simply that the issue is far more exaggerated on the side of the killer.
- To start, I think that addons have a huge effect on how the game works. Both survivors and killers can drastically alter a match by equipping addons. A killer, running certain addons, can be a whole different animal from a killer who is running base powers. This should be self-evident.
- The power of addons varies dramatically. A survivor with a Styptic Agent or Syringe in their medkit is a huge difference from a survivor with a normal medkit with typical addons, just as a killer with Iridescent addons is different from killer running brown addons. The same can be said of a survivor running a flashlight as opposed to a survivor running a Commodious Toolbox with BNP, or a Spirit running Prayer Beads as opposed to just a Bonsai Tree. Some addons are trash, and others are strong. This, again,is pretty self-evident
- Addons are LIMITED and locked behind a grind. This is what, I believe, ends up becoming a big issue because it affects how killers (and survivor addons) are designed. Once you use an add-on, it's gone. If you don't have an add-on, that facet of gameplay is shut off to you. The only way to get addons is to grind bloodpoints for them, and the chance of you getting any specific addon is generally a matter of chance. This creates an issue where you will accumulate large amounts of "useless" or "sub-par" addons, while running out of "strong" or even "necessary" addons. The power of add-ons is often, but not always, correlated to their rarity.
- The RARITY of addons is CONSIDERED DURING THEIR BALANCING. This is the biggest issueto me, and ends up creating a massive problem when it comes to the balancing of Dead By Daylight as a whole. I'd call it a core balance issue, at this point. From here, I'm going to talk specifically about killers, because that's what I have the most experience on, but a lot of these arguments apply pretty directly to survivor addons as well.
So, to sum up my concern here, one of the core balance issues with KILLERS in Dead by Daylight is that they are developed with this Add-on System in mind, which can create wild variances in power such that a killer can range from quite terrible (Imagine add-onless trapper, add-onless wraith, or add-onless legion) to borderline unbalanced (Prayer Beads Spirit, or Max/Omegablink Nurse).
Killers are often not balanced around their base power, and instead have their base power set at a level which is at best balanced at the highest level of play (Nurse, Spirit, Billy, maybe Huntress) or, more typically, quite anemic (Trapper, Wraith, Clown...etc....etc...) when consider in and of themselves. For most killers, add-ons are the only way to shore up glaring weaknesses in their powers and make them marginally playable (Trapper w/ bag) to almost problematic (Iridescent Huntress). Other killers, such as the Holy Triad, which are already viable at base, become absolutely over-bearing when used with strong add-ons (already mentioned).
This creates an unbearable problem when it comes to consistency. As a survivor, if you're facing a killer, you may be able to easily bully a killer, play as usual, or get completely steamrolled, simply due to the add-ons a killer is running. Facing a Cox-Comb Clapper Wraith is a definite step-up from dealing with base or ######### addons wraith. Dealing with single-trap trapper is quite a bit different from dealing with Trapper with Bag, and that is different from dealing with Trapper with Purple Bag. The differences in power, while often readable, are inconsistent and not apparent from the start. Simply knowing which killer you're up against is not enough - their add-ons can make the match winnable or not. On the Killer side, the same is true. If you queue into a match with sub-optimal addons - given that there is no "unranked" mode - you are forced to play with a handicap. I don't think many people would choose to play brown-addon billy if they had the choice to equip green addons, assuming they're playing in Good Faith - yet many people are forced to because they haven't ground out enough of the addons they prefer or even need. A killer's power should not be an unknown quantity of "No addons - 100% power, Brown addons - 125 % power, Yellow - 150% , Green 175%, Purple/red - Complete game change". A killer's power should be balanced as-is.
What makes this worse is that I feel like killer's addons are integral to their balancing from a developer perspective. Especially with the new Freddy Krueger rework, with his Dream-Pallet ability being tied to an add-on, the developers are considering unreliable power from addons as part of a killer's overall balancing. Why not let Freddy set both pallets and snares, and balance from there? Why would you base a whole feature of a character's kit on a limited, unreliable add-on?
This ends up being a giant problem when considering the most problematic of addons and their justification for being left as-is. Just because Ebony moriis or Iridescent Heads or Omegablink combinations or combo Instaheals shouldn't be left in the game simply because "you won't encounter them every game" or "because they're rare". It doesn't matter how often you go up against overly strong or problematic setups - playing against these setups is inherently unsatisfying, unbalanced, and ultimately not fun. The balance justification for a killer's addons being problematic should never be "They won't be problematic every game" - just as the balance justification for "This killer will only be viable with certain addons" doesn't stand up. When looking at the highest level of play (the ranking system is a whole different problem), you can end up with someone who has ground out enough ebony moriis and optimal addons to play hundreds of games at an optimal power-level mixed in with people who only sometimes use optimal setups. This is surely not balanceable ground.
Of course, this also affects survivors as well. No one is thrilled to pick up a yellow flashlight, or brown tool-box, or "scraps" in the blood-web - those are about as useful as paperweights.
All of this complaining is useless without a solution. What should addons ultimately be? To me, add-ons should function as "side-grades", avenues to provide a diversity in how power is applied, without being a blatant upgrade to the power. I think looking to Wraith's brown-tier addons is a good start, because they drastically change how his power functions in ways that slot in nicely with certain perk builds or other add-ons. The worst addons are the straight power increases that only upgrade the killer's power, because they often become overbearing if too powerful (adding extra blinks/range) or mandatory (you can't play trapper without bag addons or Legion without certain addons).
So, I'll tell you what I would do - and this is an ambitious proposal :
- Scrap the Bloodweb. The Bloodweb is a terrible, grindy progression system that only works if the add-on system exists as-is. It imposes a huge time investment on any player who wants to play Dead by Daylight seriously and competitively, and in the process, forces players to take addons or perks that they do not want nor need. It's terrible.
- Balance Killers around their base powers - This would eliminate the wild swings in power that arise from add-ons. A nurse should not jump from "I should be afraid" to "This is unwinnable" based on their add-ons, and no killer should be balanced around "They won't always be this powerful, but if they use these addons, they can be really strong!". Consistency is key when designing a competitive game , and add-ons often end up deciding games.
- Make Add-ons into a sort of 'secondary perk-set". Add-ons provide a very important thing to Dead by Daylight : Customization and variation in playstyle based on a player's tastes - much like how perks add flavor and game-changing variation. While the balancing of perks is questionable, I think making uniform "side-grades" for both survivor and killer powers would be far, far healthier than the current add-on system. ADD-ONS BECOME OPTIONS YOU CHOOSE IN THE LOAD-OUT SCREEN LIKE PERKS, AND DON'T RUN OUT.
What if Nurse could blink as far as she liked, but the fatigue increased strongly proportionally to the distance she blinked, meaning she could do a cross-map attack, but be fatigued for 10+ seconds? What if Billy could chainsaw charge at a much, much lower time , but not be able to steer? Trapper can only carry one trap at a time, but insta-downs on trap success? Spirit able to move super-quickly in phase, but doesn't recieve any information on a survivor's location aside from birds and grass rustling?
What if a survivor's flashlight was buffed to be uniformly useful, but could be tweaked to blind faster with worse battery life? What if they could heal 75% as fast on allies, it would destroy their kit on use?
The list goes on. The idea is to bring every survivor tool and killer power to a reasonable level of power at the base level, and then have add-ons function as variations.
Obviously, these side-grades would be accompanied by buffs or nerfs to a killer's kit or a survivor's base tool, but would end up creating a VARIETY OF (((BALANCEABLE))) PLAYSTYLES that are UNIFORMLY POWERFUL with ADEQUATE TRADE-OFFS. I think it would be far healthier that going up against no-addons Clown one game with 2 insta-heals and a key, and the next game having 4 no-addons survivors against an omegablink Nurse.
REASONS WHY THE DEVS MIGHT OPPOSE THIS CHANGE :
- It is too work intensive! This is very true - it's an entire overhaul of the game and would result in a lot of other systems being reworked. Everything is interlinked - I get that! I just think it'd be nice to have a goal to strive for instead of the sort-of aimlessness and band-aid fixes we're dealing with nowadays.
- (Cynical) Players won't play as much if they aren't stuck grinding the blood web! Our numbers will go down! This is true... I suppose it comes down to the tension of creating an enjoyable "Live-service" game and making a profitable one.
- Dead by Daylight isn't balanced as a competitive game! Well, that's already self-evident. The issue I'm seeing is that a lot of people in the community already take the game seriously, or want to take it seriously, but get turned off by the casual balancing. The general attitude I perceive is that the devs are not balancing around the highest levels of play. This results in unaddressed problems wreaking havoc on ranks 1-5, while the rest of the ranks deal with "pub-stomp" or "low-rank" problems. If the devs want to make DBD a party game, they should just tell competitive players to piss off and play a different game!
TL;DR for those who can't read :
- MAKE ADDONS INTO A SECONDARY PERK SYSTEM THAT FUNCTION AS SIDE-GRADES, NOT UPGRADES. ADDONS SHOULD NOT BE SINGLE-USE
- BALANCE ALL SURVIVOR EQUIPMENT AND KILLER POWERS AT A BASELINE LEVEL SO THAT THEY ARE ALL VIABLE AT HIGH RANK, THEN TWEAK ADD-ON SIDEGRADES FROM THERE
- KILL THE BLOODWEB.
- DEVS WHY ARE YOU BALANCING THE GAME AROUND UNRELIABLE POWER ?
I hope you all read my proposal, and please don't flood the replies with "wah wah killer mains wah wah survivor mains" and other sorts of unproductive, salty guff. I understand that this interacts with a slew of other systems withing the game, and am considering how I might try to fix those as well, but for now, I had the Add-ons system in mind. Thank you for reading.
Comments
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Yeah the addon on system really pisses me off sometimes. It's just not fun to play against ebony mori omega blink nurse's or 4x insta heal squads. I don't mind bloodwebs and addons being one use though. To me the biggest thing is addons being side grades rather than upgrades.
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Good post, but I really doubt devs could not care less, they havent fixed lots of dumb stuff yet, hitboxes, getting hit even when you drop the pallet before the attack, etc.
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Interesting proposal. I would be keen to see it.
However, I'm sure that there would be some kind of progression, right? Like play enough games with scratched ruler to unlock the better ruler kind of thing? Because if all addons were unlocked from the get go... it might be a little much.
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There is existing progression that can be fleshed out in things like a player's Devotion level, and them gaining Iridescent Shards per level. Maybe rewards per devotion level, etc.
Ideally, the blood-web would be scrapped because if add-ons are made permanent fixtures in player's inventory like perks were, there would be nothing to grind bloodwebs for. I don't believe locking gameplay behind "grinding bars" helps people understand the game any more quickly, so ideally I wouldn't want a progression system that makes you have to play X amount of games with a low-tier add-on to "unlock" a better one.
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How would that work with items?
Or in otherwords, how do you balance having an item so that it's equivalent to NOT having an item? Just like how you are proposing that addons should be null in terms of balance impact.
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Well, ideally, survivors would have their Item slot be open to choice between Flashlight, Toolbox, Medkit, Map, and Key (Firecrackers for events), and have two add-on slots which modify the function of those items. To sum it up, the items should function much the same as killer powers : They're abilities survivors have that are balanced at the baseline, and can be modified with add-ons which function as side-grades. Keep in mind that none of these items nor add-ons should run out.
For example, a survivor could choose the tool-kit as their Item, and then pick an add-on to the tool-kit that exchanges an amount of charges for increased repair speed, making them able to complete gens in a different manner than if the took a different add-on.
The next game, they could decide that isn't working for them, and simply use the basic "baseline power level" tool-kit with no add-ons for a longer lasting tool-kit that repairs at a slower speed more reliably.
You could CHOOSE to run without an item (survivors seem to function fine without them, to be honest), but the idea is that survivors could specialize around working with their items just as killers work with their powers - there'd be no reason not to equip an item because they all confer SOME benefit with no real downside.
Obviously, it'd require rebalancing the game nd such, but I think it's better than some days having that Purple flashlight with Incandescent bulb in your inventory, and other days having a measly Yellow Flashlight no add-ons at all. It'd encourage experimentation with different add-ons and playstyles because you wouldn't be afraid of losing that ultra-rare whatsit in a bad game. Consistent power is key here, and I feel like if the game was built from the ground-up around consistent, reliable power as opposed to unreliable,chance-based power, it'd be healthier and more easy to balance in the future. It'd also get rid of the terrible bloodweb grind for add-ons that everyone hates so much.
Keys, now that I think about it, throw a bit of a wrench into the spanner because they function like an ebony morii does - it deletes gameplay and ends the round prematurely. Perhaps keys should be restricted to only aura-reading, or some other, more versatile benefit aside from hatch-opening. Currently, they're balanced around "You won't see them every game, so even if they are extremely powerful, they're not crashing the party all the time", which, as I said, DOES NOT WORK if the game is to be balanced competitively.
So, to answer your question, items and their add-ons would work like killer's powers and their add-ons. Side-grades based on personal choice. Switching your item as a survivor would be like switching to a different killer with a different power, and the add-ons go from there.
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What about chests? And perks like pharmacy would be practically useless with that change
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My suspicion is the devs balance a killer by first designing it as if the killer has equipped either yellow or green "vanilla" addons (ones that don't really modify the power other than numerical changes), and then nerf the killer and turn the nerfed values into the lower tier addons. That way, killers are indeed, forced to play with addons just to reach the initial balanced state they started in.
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If anything, chests could be a way for survivors to "reroll" their power mid-game if it isn't working or isn't as optimal as another could be. That, however, creates a reliability problem yet again, where the reroll might be meaningful or might not be depending on chance. Chests could be absolutely excised from the game and it would be a net benefit - the only reason the exist is for survivors to either gamble for keys (which I mentioned before, are terrible for gameplay) or to circumvent the bloodweb grind for good items/addons (which wouldn't exist in my proposed system).
Chests, as they are currently implemented, don't exactly please me, to be honest. They feel almost like a hindrance to survivors, because they mix meta-game objectives (players wanting to accumulate rare items) with in-game objectives (Distracting from completing gens, which the game is balanced around), and are terribly unreliable. A survivor can hinder their team by wasting a ton of time searching through chests, and end up being caught by the killer because those things are noisy and have predictable spawns. Speaking from personal experience, I never burn cut-coin addons when I play killer, because I don't see why I would pass up on the chance that a survivor will stop doing gens to search a chest, giving me ~20 seconds of them doing potentially nothing with no effort on my part.
You are right, Chests most likely would need to go completely [I doubt most people would miss them] or sustain a massive re-work, and perks surrounding chests would need to be re-worked following whichever course was taken. I don't think Chests are particularly positive towards the game balance anyways, as they exist currently. Thank you for bringing this up, it's a good thing to consider.
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Exactly. I suspect the same thing. The issue with this is that a killer is forced to cope with objective increases or decreases in their power level simply based on their add-on availability, and thus sometimes have the "luxury" of an easy game with purples and reds, or to be "stuck" swinging browns or yellows that are just plain worse than greens or purples.
This is equally unpleasant for survivors, because they sometimes have games against the same killer which are either extremely easy or terribly hard just because a killer happened to be lucky, unlucky, or willing/unwilling to bite the bullet with their add-ons.
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I mean, I do find it frustrating to have one item left on the bloodweb being just too expensive.
But then, I don't mind it, since that's the only way to get the addons.
One thing though, if the bloodweb were to be scrapped, how would you get perks that are not the survivor teachables? How would that work?
Would leveling perks be like how I proposed addons being like?
Still, I'd be interested in seeing it.
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Perks are a different thing from what I'm focusing on, but the way to get perks should change if the bloodweb goes, along with get rid of those stupid perk ranks. If you unlock a perk, you should be able to use it across all killers, in my opinion. Having to unlock them across the span of characters doesn't add any "progression", it just adds grind.
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I agree with balance philosophy, but I disagree about grind philosophy. I will edit this post when I have more time.
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