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Grind issues
It is appropriate for us to be able to express concerns over the grind in this game, on this forum.
Comments
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you will need to grind reputation on the forums first
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Did that already!
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I have over 4k hours and played since release. I can't even keep up unlocking perks on new killers. It's way to much grind.
It's terrible and shouldn't be a thing. I'm not supposed to sit 8hrs per day over 4 years on this game like a streamer just so I can create the builds I want on every killer/survivor
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The grind isn't as severe as it used to be but it's still a pain. i think it's around 4 mil blood points for all perks on a character from level 50. Could be a little off. For survivors you really only need perks on 1 or 2 as each survivor is basically a re-skin. Killers are a bit annoying as to play specific builds on certain killers you need perks on all of them as they do different things and are not simple re-skins.
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The randomness and sheer volume of the grind scares away a lot of new players, because it assails them immediately, and there's no friendly path toward a reasonable character setup, no way to easily target specific perks without committing to a big multi-character grind.
Layer this on top of what is almost universally a stressful and failure-rich initial game experience, and it's easy to see why players give up on DBD fast.
It's easy to say "it's fine" once you're all-in, but you shouldn't have to endure a less fun game experience for many hours just to be able to enjoy the game with some reasonable and diverse build options. It doesn't get good until you've put hours and hours into it, which isn't a great selling point.
It's a huge problem I wish Behaviour would address, but they don't seem to see it as a problem, because they don't solicit much meaningful feedback outside of some high-level players. Some changes have been very positive, like multiple perks per web. But this sort of thing is ultimately a band-aid on a system that is broken at its core.
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It's been such a long time since I had to experience getting the characters with the good perks that I kind of forgot about it. Thinking back, it does take a really long time, especially if you are only buying what characters you can with shards instead of cells.
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It's an easier pill to swallow once it's in the rearview mirror. But yes -- we should always try to remember what the new player experience is like.
Even if you, say, watch PainReliever's recent survivor perk tier list video, and you go "oh, I'll make a list and go get these really good ones," it involves leveling:
- Meg to 40 for Sprint Burst and Adrenaline
- Feng to 35 for Lithe
- Jake to 30 for Iron Will
- David to 35 for Dead Hard
- Bill to 40 for Borrowed Time and Unbreakable
- Dwight to 30 for Bond
- Nea to 30 for Balanced Landing
- Nancy to 40 for Inner Strength
- Claudette to 35 for Empathy and Botany Knowledge
- Adam to 35 for Deliverance
- Laurie to 40 for Decisive Strike
- Kate to 30 for Dance with Me
And that's realistically kind of a lot to bite off straight away, but it immediately lays bare the enormity of the grind, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of new players get scared off right then and there. But even if you want to make a single reasonable build -- say Bond from Dwight (30), Lithe from Feng (35), and then Spine Chill and Kindred, it's still a lot of wind-up time before you can even get a sense of what a "real" character plays like.
Then there's the matter of actually getting your perks on a single character. And the situation is even worse for killers, since they're all very different.
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Expressing concerns is what the forums are for.
If we were only allowed to be happy and positive on here, i'd get kinda sick of it.
The reverse would also make me sick though...
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The grind really isn't that terrible. You don't need to unlock everything to play it. And if you do really want to then it won't take that long. Getting characters to 40 to unlock their teachables is a bad strategy. Buying stuff off the shrine is a lot better investment. If you're leveling up more then 1 survivor then you're choosing to make the grind harder on yourself. Getting 1 survivor to all the perks is all you ever need.
Killers is a lot different. Killers need to grind a lot more for obvious reasons. I only have 1,200 hours in the game and I've almost got all the killers to P3. I have at least 10 of 19 done. And there's someone claiming that they have over 4k hours and can't keep up with all the perks in the game? Seems like you're wasting all your points.
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I posted this in a similar thread today, but since it applies here, I'll just repeat it:
I've had several friends/family people try DbD on free weekends. And they enjoyed the game play, were ready to buy, then realized the grind involved.
They walked away and did not buy. They don't mind grinds. Hell, they've played a lot of MMOs over the decades. But they looked at the DbD grind and basically said: No thanks.
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I made this thread because there was a previous thread about grind concerns that was deleted. I didn't read all of it though, so it may have gotten too mean-spirited or something.
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I have had the same experience with friends. It is, without hyperbole, the single most oppressive grind I have ever seen in a video game.
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100%
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It really is, and really doesn't make sense this far into the game's lifespan. But it is what it is, and BHVR isn't about to risk pissing off their veteran players that spend the $$$ on cosmetics and Rifts and crap.
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You're defending it but expressing a really skewed perspective without realizing it. You say you "only" have 1,200 hours in-game, but that is a LOT of time for any reasonable person to dedicate to one game (not judging -- I have 1,700 hours myself!). The grind IS bad, and it isn't friendly at all to new players. You even point out that the killer grind is crazy "for obvious reasons," but there are no obvious reasons, it's just that way because it's that way. It doesn't have to be, it's just what they decided to do.
I think any game like this needs SOME sort of grind. Last Year: The Nightmare was dead on arrival because it had no player progression system or customization of any sort, and it felt very thin because of that. But DBD exists at the opposite extreme of the spectrum, and it's not healthy for developing any kind of sticky casual audience.
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The grind is pretty crazy in this game but I guess if you love the game that much and you really wanna get everything on everybody then go for it. One idea that I really like though is I would like if they got rid of perk tiers because there are a lot of perks in this game that are just as good when they're maxed out.
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Still it isn't really that much of a grind for a new player to get into. It doesn't take more then 50 hours or so to start getting a playable character on either side. The rest of it is all quality of life. You don't need decisive strike rank 3. It's not like the killer is going to pick you up at 40 seconds because he knows you only have tier 1! It's not like you need balance landing. You can plug in Sprint Burst or Lithe. And within another 50 hours you'll be plenty far in. I doubt it'd take even take a week of playing to get a decent build going.
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Fun fact: One of the best backdoor tools for studying and gauging game analytics and user engagement is Steam's achievement data. Dead by Daylight's page is right here. These numbers tell quite a concerning story about how long the average player sticks with the game:
- 45.5%. Getting the hang of it: Raise your rank for the first time.
- 42.1%. It wakes: Raise a character level to 10.
- 29.4%. Not half bad: Raise a character level to 25.
- 27.9%. Apt Survivor: Start a public match with a full survivor loadout.
- 17.0%. Apt Killer: Start a public match with a full killer loadout.
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50 hours is an insane commitment to ask someone to make in order to develop single character into a reasonably competitive state. You're looking at this from a dedicated hardcore gamer standpoint, not "average person who likes horror movies/games and heard this DBD game might be interesting."
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Your list is pretty generous towards the system lol, there are some more perks someone might wants. And lets not forget that in case you started maining Dwight in the first years and now you want to main someone who came new out. Then you have to unlock aaaaalll the perks against which takes a lot of levels past level 50.
It's absolutly crazy, I feel like playing world of watercraft or some kind of heavy grindy Japanese mmorpg
Post edited by DwightOP on2 -
I guess. But your little statistics above isn't really something to look into either. People are going to download a game to try or they're talked into it by their friends hounding them about it over and over again. They download the game they close it and never play it again. It doesn't mean that 75% of the players don't have a full load out character. Not everyone quits before the grind. Most people don't even have any idea what the grind is all about before they quit. It's just not for them.
I don't know if 50 hours is 'hardcore' in a video game. World of Warcraft adapted this casuals come first mentality years ago and it's gone from the biggest game in the world to mediocre. The only people that play WOW anymore is single mom's that want to find their internet boyfriend of their dreams. Come on now.
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Without bbq or the survivor version bp boost, and assuming 20k per match at 15 minutes per match it would take 12.5 hours to get 1 million bps.
1 million takes 1 character to lvl 35. If you have a specific build in mind for a specific character (well assume none of the perks you want are for the character youre playing)
Thats 50 hours to get 4 characters to level 35. Say another million to get those characters from 35 to 40 and then your chosen character to 15 (4 perk slots). Youre looking around 62.5 hours.
The trouble is, this is at 20k per game. Straight up noobs, especially survivor noobs, are not getting 20k per game. So its probably closer to 100
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The Steam statistics don't tell the whole story obviously, but the numbers up there are low enough that they are pretty damning, with respect to how quickly the first couple of achievements ought to come (especially getting a character to level 10).
Compare to games like Grand Theft Auto V or The Witcher 3, where over half the players have completed each game's most reachable achievements. Dead by Daylight doesn't have a single achievement statistic over 46%. I know it's easy to look at the numbers and say that there's not a big difference or that they don't matter, but the difference between 46% and even something like 53% is staggering.
To each their own about 50 hours being a commitment (you can finish many games in shorter times than that). Your perspective is pretty jaundiced in terms of comparison to World of Warcraft, though. There are a lot of marketplace factors (including a broader lean away from MMOs), and what I would generously describe as brand mismanagement, that led to its decline. If anything, its push toward player-friendliness resulted in its most prosperous years (2009-2011). People want to apply this reductive "casual bad, hardcore good" logic to stuff like this, but believe me, that's just not how the market actually works.
Nothing positive comes from scaring off potential players.
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The devs need to either double our bloodpoint gains or remove perk tiers, the grind for this game is too much.
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I think maybe something should change if they are going to add those new prestige rewards to the game. Going over the characters so many times then get all the perks back takes an insane amount of time.
If I didn't watch streamers for a while before I started the game as well, I would have had less information about what to invest my time into, and the perk process would have taken so much longer. It probably wasn't as bad then, but with how many perks there are now, it would be so hard to know where to go as someone new. But maybe that's just me. :P
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I have long believed that eliminating perk tiers (so that there is just a single version of each perk) would be a huge, huge improvement. But it always gets this "but you would run out of perks too quick on your first few characters" pushback that doesn't make any sense. Maybe combine that with unlockable teachables at 10-15-20, and we'd be having a much different conversation about the perk grind.
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No freaking way. They just did a 3 week event of 1.5 blood point gain and I've been getting mori'd 10 times a day. This isn't the answer either.
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I suspect we're going to be in for another double BP week in June for the anniversary.
I kinda wish double BP were just the "normal" amount. My general advice is just do stuff to really speed up perk acquisition, if the acquisition itself has to stay this way.
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It amazes me how little traction this game's single biggest UX and audience retention problem gets when it's brought up.
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64k maxed out games bbq
1mil to lvl 40 per character
Assuming 20min que and game complete
Played perfectly its only around 8 hours or one night to unlock teachables per character.
Realistically 2 hours a night for one week unlocks new perks
Or if you suck, 2 weeks at 2 hours a night per character or a nice long dug in weekened
You dont need all characters to play and you can't expect to run the top lvl in any online game in under a month
I fully agree that its too much tho
Because you need about 4mil after lvl 50 to max a killer will all perks
After you've spend a mil on each for unlocks
Your looking at honestly a year of grind for just one side and that's a generous offering of 32k every game double if you suck
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I've played Overwatch for four years now, and only have slightly over 800 hours in that game and am near Account Level 1,000.
Anyone expecting normal people to devote 1200 or more hours to a game just for a grind are asinine.
Nowhere near those total hours into DbD (and Steam time also counts all the times I sat in lobby simulator as "play time") and I'm already done worrying about this ######### grind anymore. It's a core reason I went back to playing more of games like Overwatch or Paladins.
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Yeah, that's a big part of my point. People who reflexively go "it's fine the way it is" seem to always be people with hundreds or thousands of hours in the game, who can't step outside of their own experience to understand what this looks like to a normal player who isn't quite so white-knuckle or singularly hyper-committed.
I myself have racked up 1,700 hours since Nov 2018, and I have full perk libraries on 2 survivors and 2 killers (working on #3 now). That's a major time commitment, but I don't think for a second that the grind I endured is conducive to long-term health for DBD, and I wish it could be made much easier/more accessible for players just coming into it.
The thing that kills me is that these big licensed chapter releases are THE time to overhaul this stuff, but Behaviour drops the ball every time. I predict the usual, which is a huge surge of players who are brought in by the Silent Hill DLC chapter, followed by a big drop-off the following month. This is the way it always goes, when you look at Steamcharts' peak numbers. Those are a bunch of players who are excited for the cool thing that they recognize, shell out for the game, and then drop it because the new player experience scares them away. That kind of churn is insane. Look at May-June 2019, it went from 75k peak to 40k peak. That's nearly a 50% drop-off in players!
Maybe Behaviour's bean counters are getting what they want in terms of cash for an upfront purchase, but four years into a game's life cycle, I would be much more concerned about player retention metrics.
(also re: to @emptyCups post as well)
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Yeah thats a big reason to take breaks and now that you put it like that
Online only games are in fact life consuming. Like I have to quit online only for a while and just focus on stuff I missed for months at a time. Currently took a long break to do spiderman outer worlds God of War and everything else i missed
My point was I guess that most online are consumed with grind, cod P12 is hundreds of hours dark matter took forever. Overwatch starts with everything unlocked but good lord do you need some rainbow six time to unlock everyone and all the skins
If you want to complete in competitive games you need that kinda time... and dbd is set up like competitive with ranks and such but the hangup is it pretends to be causal
The thing about live services is they need to evolve with time. They need to make skillchecks progressively more difficult because I haven't missed a great in years...(new players would suffer so they dont) and the grind at launch was half what it is now but still no BP boost. Thats all wack. ( all players suffer now so they should buff BP)
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Yeah -- games-as-services are pretty complicated beasts, no doubt. I don't have any context for the gameplay implications of Call of Duty's grind, but I assume it starts you off in a fair better position than DBD does. And at least Overwatch's unlockables are just cosmetics with no gameplay benefit.
I wish Behaviour would do any or all of these things with DBD's perks:
- Make all perks single-rank.
- When you unlock a teachable perk, you immediately own at least 1 rank of it on every character of that role.
- Offer a way bigger selection of perks on the Shrine every week -- like 10 per role (and make them like 50% cheaper).
- Just outright ditch the Shrine and let us buy perks a la carte with Iridescent Shards.
- Have "free perk" events where we can just select 2-3 perks to own.
- Make character-specific dailies unlock a teachable perk from that character's exclusives.
- Make teachable spawn in the Bloodweb at much more reasonable levels, like 10-15-20.
- Don't take perks away from the Bloodweb, let us buy all four in one web.
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The problem is economy.
Dbd item and addon aka the powerups
And the perks share the same system and "money" so to increase the ease of one lessens the other and needs a whole system overhaul.
Imagine if every game had full loadouts of pink addons on everyone because there's perks to sink money into... yikes
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I just hit devotion 5. I only have a single P3 character. Two killers and two survivors with all perks.. Mostly all my killers are nearly there though.
The grind is exhausting. I only come back for new tome challenges and new releases now-a-days with big breaks in between.. I have no desire to P3 because of the grind which is too much
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Has anyone ever tagged a dev in one of these grind threads? I dont recall anyone asking about it for QA.
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I have heard from @Peanits in some threads I've made in the past, but the takeaway is always that the devs disagree that this is a major problem.
The most I've ever gotten was a "Removing multiple ranks from perks would make you run out of new perks to buy pretty quickly on your first characters" pushback to that idea. Which is admittedly true, but I also think anything of that sort would need to come with a pretty major rework of the game's whole perk unlocking logic. They answered a question I asked along these lines in one of their video Q&As (I think maybe in the Freddy rework time frame?).
Best case scenario, to me, is that I wish they would engage unambiguously in a discussion about this stuff, and explain what their position is on the randomness of not being able to target specific perks on specific characters, the enormity of this grind (thanks to the ever-growing volume of perks), and why they feel it's not an urgent quality-of-life issue, especially for new players. I'd like to see them discuss churn, player retention, and their opinion on new players who get scared away from engaging deeper with the game because the grind is intimidating. I've never seen them have any sort of real discussion about these things. I really just want to see a developer pin an official studio position to it, and justify it as thoroughly as possible.
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He makes a fair point on that but SOMETHING needs to be done. Even if you just double tge blood points people currently earn. Something. Because it IS a problem for newer players
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It feels to me like it's something they just want to pointedly ignore and wish we'd shut up about, because they won't address it. It is their game and therefore their prerogative, but I see so much potential in terms of the game being friendlier and more accessible to new players, and they just never want to talk about this stuff.
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So, it's ironic that I participated in this thread earlier today. My 20-year-old daughter and her BF stopped by this evening and were talking about the Silent Hill DLC since they both love that game series.
They asked me about DbD.
I fired-up Steam, logged in, and showed them the perks, bloodweb, teachables, et cetera. I had many bloodpoints banked, so started doing some bloodwebs and explaining all the details: such as how teachables work, the RNG involved for getting perks in the web, and so forth.
They decided to no longer worry about DbD. I asked them if they wanted to see some game play, but after learning about the grind-system, they didn't care to see more. 😂
(My 26-year-old son, also a Silent Hill fan, had the exact, same reaction yesterday when I explained the DbD grind to him. Not. A. Chance. In. Hell. Back around the time Stranger Things came out my 32-year-old baby sister did a free weekend. Liked the game play, realized the grind, never bought the game.)
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RIGHT? This is intimidating as [BIG BAD F-WORD]. There's no way to even explain it in a way that seems accessible, and as soon as you start leveling up and doing the mental math in your head, you realize how nuts it is.
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Yeah, I went through a little over 600k BP when showing them the web. They saw where that got me, looked at how many survivors and killers have wanted Teachable perks, considered the bloodweb RNG on top of that, and basically said: Are they effing nuts? We already work for a living.
Grinding for cosmetics and stuff, they get. Grinding on top of RNG just to get character builds to be able to play with variety is asinine.
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If the aim is solely to help new players, then I think what they can do is to unlock by default all teachable perks from free/base game survivors and killers. If that's not enough, they can make all said perks available at rank 1 straight away for every character. This should help new players without changing the overall BP economy, by providing a good pool of perks that they can use immediately, at least as survivors (few of the free killers' perks are good, but new players should start as survivor anyway).
Edit: this also frees up precious Shrine space from free characters' perks, which I think veterans can appreciate.
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Which is why reducing the grind or simply being able to have say a higher chance than normal to get one perk you want per blood web, would help alot. If you want to go for a certain build, without hoping rng is on your side and doesn't screw you over, just so you could maybe get pop. Since the rng can be rather bad at times. Prestige 3 ghostface, been ten plus blood webs since i last seen a chewed pen.
Which there have been alot of good ideas of how to reduce the grind or make it less rng. Some ideas in this thread, of every survivor/killer has level one of the perk you unlock as a teachable. Which i forgot who brought that idea up but i like it alot. It would allow someone to use the build they like, when say they prestige a character while also cutting down the grind by one/third in general.
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Yeah, I wish there were some just straight-up freebies. I know there are a lot of "How about EARNING YOUR FUN" gatekeepers who like to shut these ideas down, but this is a video game and there should not be a bunch of easily avoidable roadblocks to some basic enjoyment.
It would make a world of difference if, after I introduce a friend to the game, and they play a couple of matches and go OMG HOW DO YOU SUCCEED THIS SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE AND FRUSTRATING, I can go "OK, so there's a bunch of stuff you can play to unlock to improve your chances BUTTTTTTTTTTT right this minute as a newbie you should go into your inventory and look through these 50 perks you have right now, and equip Bond, Kindred, Sprint Burst, and Alert, and these will help you see what's going on and get some immediate understanding of the game dynamic, it should be enough to help you out in the beginning."
(Also, those are just some newbie-friendly "see what's going on" perks that I threw in off the top of my head, not trying to turn this into a perk choice discussion lol)
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Like how great would it be to just have the first teachable perk from every survivor immediately available and equippable (even at just rank 1) to everyone, instead of hidden behind a leveling wall? It would incentivize purchase of DLC just to get immediate access to perks. This would get you:
- Survivors: Empathy, We're Gonna Live Forever, Bond, Technician, Iron Will, Dance with Me, Quick & Quiet, Balanced Landing, Lucky Break
- Killers: Bamboozle, Surge, I'm All Ears, Enduring, Discordance, Stridor, Corrupt Intervention, Save the Best for Last, Spirit Fury, Unnerving Presence, Predator
Those would all be incredibly helpful for new players! They could even take the opportunity to rejigger the perk order so that stuff like Alert, Distortion, Windows of Opportunity, Sprint Burst, Barbecue & Chili, Surveillance, and Shadowborn come first. Imagine how this would impact the early game experience, and not make it feel like quite as insane of an uphill climb.
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Oh please let there be a double BP haha. But this whole post has been interesting to see people's ideas but also the calculations some have made.
I think because they made the change of two perks per web, we are probably going to be waiting a while to see something change.
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More perks per web certainly helps players who have invested into the grind already, but I still don't think it's enough (and it's not valuable for new players).
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The funny thing about having to earn your fun point of view is. Well if you unlock a perk as a teachable, you already did earn it. By having to spend a fair few blood points as well. Depending on which perk you unlock as a teachable. You might of already spend at least a million or more blood points to unlock it. Which would be a fair few games, even if you always play with bbq or we're gonna live forever. So simply letting each character you own, have level one of a perk you unlocked as a teachable. Would simply allow one to try out different builds easier, like on a brand new character they just unlock or brought.
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