The Amanda's Letter add-on for The Pig has been Kill Switched due to an issue with incorrect RBT count.
http://dbd.game/killswitch
Proposition: Increase immersion and fix Solo vs SWF Survivor imbalances
Summary
- Add proximity voice chat.
- Restrict 3rd party communication apps.
- Allow longer range communication in game through items and perks.
Why?
- Immersion - stick close enough to communicate a plan or you are on your own for a bit.
- To give a neutral starting ground to improve balance for both types of survivors and the diverse cast of killers.
- Current lack of in game communication causes an insane gap between capabilities of solo and SWF survivors.
- Gap between solo and SWF leads to imbalances for both. Simply put, solo is weak. SWF is op.
- Some killer's powers become very weak vs SWF and have not been fixed to date because it balance tough.
- Killer players become pigeonholed vs SWF to select a top performing killer or suffer which limits diversity.
Solo Survivors
The biggest issue for solo survivors is lack of information and communication with the rest of their team. All they can do is point, wave and click flashlights. This makes the game very hard for solo survivors because you're forced to try to read the minds of random players.
SWF Survivors
The biggest issue with SWF for killers is ultimate knowledge of whatever any given survivor sees. This knowledge can be spread instantly across the entire map through 3rd party applications during any survivor state or position. Hell, they can even spectate when dead and help relay appropriate information while the rest play. The concept of ultimate communication entirely breaks the format and immersion of the game. This is essentially "ghosting" and neutralizes and nerfs many killer powers which is not fun or fair.
Proximity Voice Chat in game
Default communication for survivors needs to be altered. The game needs proximity voice chat for survivors. The killer should not be able to hear it, or it should be like the Sims where he hears a made up foreign sounding language. This will add some interesting teamwork dynamics for all survivors. If you are too far away from other teammates, then you are rogue. The range of proximity voice chat would need to be tested and there could be perks that increase its capability. When you're dead, you cannot talk lol.
Global communication
As covered previously, the global communication amongst survivors from 3rd party apps comes at no expense and dramatically buffs survivors to the point where it makes some killers unplayable in similarly skilled matches because their abilities are not intended to beat 3rd party apps.
I am not against the ability to have global communication in game, but it should not be default. There should be perhaps a perk that unlocks the ability to find a walkie talkie or cell phone in game. Once found, further range for communication is unlocked when using the charges of the walkie talkie. If instead of limited use case, there could be infinite charges with the walkie talkie, then perhaps after using enough charges, a sound or visual notification pings an estimated location to the killer. Global communication through 3rd party apps makes solo survivors weak and SWFs overpowered. Make proxy coms default and make unlockable long range voice communication.
A rough comparison of 3rd party information sharing
Imagine if killers had addons/mods that tracked and communicated information for them. In nearly every game that allows addons to track information, it is OP to use at least a few. In DBD this would translate to keeping track of how many downs/hooks certain survivors had. A timer for how long someone has been slugged. A timer for DS. A tracker that showed rough percentages of generators across the map. A tracker that showed which pallets were used and more... Or alternatively, what if killers had cameras throughout the map that could signal and show survivors positions and what they were doing.
In either a killer situation or survivor situation, acquiring information through 3rd party apps is too OP in this game.
Neutralizing 3rd party apps
So when in game voice is implemented how do we stop people from using 3rd party apps? I'm sure the devs have either knowledge on how to do this or access to resources that do. In my mind though, it is simple. One way to fix this would be whenever DBD is running as a survivor, see which input devices are connected to which applications. Everything that isn't a streaming application should be blocked while DBD is running or when a survivor queues for a game.
Comments
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I feel bad that you put so much effort into this post, but proximity chat is a horrible idea. Not only should it not be hidden from the killer (how tf does that make sense) but it is a ripe ground for both trolling and exploitation. I don't want to have to hear a little kid screaming at his game every time he gets hit at a window or pallet, someone with loud music playing the whole time, people flooding the audio so that you can't hear in game sounds as well, hate speech, or any other kinds of ways it can go wrong.
Of course you could argue some of these issues would be removed by doing as you suggested, and making it survivor only. Now you've given the survivors a huge advantage over the killer for free, without the killer even being able to use it to help with tracking and punish survivors for making excess noise. How does that help immersion? All it does is make it even easier for survivors to coordinate gen rushing and unhooking, which the game is already horribly not balanced for.
The devs buffed the hell out of kindred to give you access to most of this information, without even needing to be in proximity, and while being unable to be exploited or trolled through it. Literally all you have to do is give up a perk slot. Technically you don't even need to, you just need to have other survivors who are willing to and you still get the benefit a good chunk of the time.
Everyone knows 3rd party comms are a variable that is not intended in terms of the game's core design. If you want to make that issue even worse by trying to put it in game as a substitute for it being possible outside the game, then you would need to entirely rework the power dynamic and how worthwhile that information can actually be.
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Thanks for your objections. I believe they are easily addressed.
Most issues you pointed out with the downsides of voice chat (downsides that's applicable to hundreds of alternative online games) can be filtered out by talking to the rest of the team pregame. Just leave if you don't like what you're hearing. Obviously, each survivor would have the ability to mute/turn down the volumes of individual players. This would encourage people to make friends with survivors they had a good experience with instead of being subject to potentially annoying randoms. Furthermore there should be a reputation system and reports should be taken more seriously. If enough troll reports are given, then an investigation and action could be taken. TBH this game needs the report system to be more active as is. A visible survivor reputation system/profile could help people more easily dodge others with annoying voice habits/trolling. Besides muting and voice volume per survivor you could queue with "opt out of voice" option.
The main point is you can easily balance the killer for survivors around a default mode instead of balancing in the middle of 2 modes (solo and SWF).
People who play SWF now will not have to deal with the voice chat negatives (that is applicable to every online game with voice).
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The infeasibility of restricting 3rd party VOIP applications isn't really a technical one (even though a lot of the time the technical solutions themselves could easily be circumvented), they're quite simply an extremely well-established part of modern multiplayer gaming and it's practically off the table to interfere with them as a result. Not to mention at least one console (Xbox I'm pretty sure) explicitly forbids game developers from interfering with their Party Chat in any way.
And while that's speculation I honestly wouldn't be surprised if more console/platform owners take a similar stance in the future - the facilitation of social/party play is extremely important in the modern gaming industry.
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Then you don't block them as a developer. Instead, you make an account agreement to not use specific applications. People will know what they aren't supposed to do. If they do and breaking the terms of service is detected, then you get banned. Easy solution.
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The devs will never be able to stop people from using third party apps to communicate. Even if you restricted Discord from running on their PC at the same time as DBD, for example, how would you stop people from just using it on their phones?
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Two major things (among others already mentioned):
Some players dont want to talk to others. You would also need to have Solo Survivors in mind which dont want to talk to other players while playing, who just want to play their game. Yes, you also have to care for those.
Also, regarding 3rd party software - PS4 and XBox have Voice Comms implemented. But even IF it would be possible to ban EVERY 3rd party voice communication, players can use Discord on their phone, for example. There is no reason to use ingame voice comms. In fact, making it more unpleasant or difficult to play together will only drive away casuals, which means that the overall Balance of SWFs will shift to more competitive teams overall. And I doubt that any Killer would like that.
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It is not a requirement to use voice chat, but it is available. Solo survivors who don't want to chat, don't have to.
Yes, I'm sure there would be ways to cheat and a few may be willing to go out of their way to cheat. Nothing is restricting players from hacking the game now. I run into hackers flying around all the time.
Tbh I suspect a replay system will come out at some point. Could easily see who was cheating by whether or not they are talking with proximity and the organization or disorganization of the team.
There also should be a casual play option and a competitive matchmaking option anyways.
There is probably a way to prevent people from using another device too for competitive matchmaking.
Also, with a in game voice implementation, it will be obvious that killers need a small global buff and certain killers will also need their own buffs. This will make playing against the new "cheaters" using 3rd party devices more reasonable than current 4 man SWF vs x killer.
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With a casual queue and a competitive (probably ranked) queue, it will funnel those who don't want to deal with voice into casual and the rest into competitive. Reports and reputation will take care of the rest.
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You underestimate the length people go to in order to ruin games for others. Unfortunately naivety makes for bad policy, and considering how bad people act in postgame chat (where the devs can actually get chat logs) having a voice communication system that people would need to be recording their game 24/7 to be able to report any form of abuse is a bad idea. People can be completely quiet and peaceful until they decide to flip the switch, including mid game. Even if you can mute them individually, are you going to ask the killer to stop chasing you for a second to do so? And on a technical level, the game has had attenuation problems and sound sources just flat out not working as a reoccurring issue for over a year now. Adding even more complexity to the audio of the game isn't going to fix those problems, and will introduce its own complications on top of that. Just go to a basement gen in Haddonfield and stand at the top of the stairs, walk slowly down them until you hear the gen's volume go from 0 to 100 at a specific spot halfway down. Sound attenuation (volume over distance, basically) is something that is clearly not well accounted for as it is.
As far as splitting queues/blacklists/etc, that will make the search queue pools even smaller by fragmenting them, which impacts solo survivors and small group swfs (2-3) even more, while having zero effect on full 4 man groups (the ones with the biggest advantage.) The entire reason why SWF and Solo aren't separate queues is for that exact reason: They don't want to split the queues more than they have to, as doing so makes matchmaking both take longer and be less accurate.
Lastly killer being able to be rebalanced as an afterthought is not how a change like this can go through. Part of the reason the ruin change was so poorly received and the meta became "use any and every gen slowdown you can" since is because the change was made without addressing why people felt the need to run ruin so much to begin with. Gen speeds need to be addressed, but they were put on the backburner while a bandaid fix was removed, and now all these months later it STILL hasn't been addressed aside from a new bandaid that has been applied on top of the other bandaids they tried to apply after the fact.
Major changes need major planning. Again, the Kindred change they made is one of the best bandaid fixes the game has seen for either side, and it only requires one perk slot to be used by a non-teachable perk.
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I'm not going to say there are no downsides or tradeoffs to implementing changes to the game like this, but it will create the possibility of more realistic game state balance and a more immersive/intense game experience that is well worth the potential hassles.
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As others have mentioned, console has build in party chat which would be impossible to block. Steam also has a group chat function so I don't think it is possible to block voice communication outside of the game. And even if it is: You can still play in the same room, no voice programm needed.
My probleme with build in voice chat is that I don't think it's going to be super helpful even if people aren't trolling. I live in Europe so I get matched with many people that speak different languages and not everybody is willing or able to speak english. Especially in a case of an SWF I would expect them to keep taking in their mother language for convience.
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In terms of gen speeds, I think the biggest issue is spread out across the map doing gens individually. It makes the pressure too great for the travel distance. There is no disadvantage to spreading out with global voice chat via 3rd party.
I am very aware of the toxicity that can occur with voice in online games. This is why there needs to be a reputation system and the report system needs to be taken way, way more seriously. It could be well managed, if the dev team advocated more resources to managing this online community in terms of reports and quality of life. If people were getting temp bans and perma bans left and right for repeated toxicity then it would clean up the community and people would think twice before going nuts on others.
Dead by daylight has 40k concurrent users average, every hour, every day according to steamcharts.com alone. With console xrealm, this number is much higher. The pool splitting = longer queue times seems like a nonissue with casual vs competitive queue atm when referencing these population numbers.
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Different languages could be addressed with "prefer no voice comm" queue for survivors and by choosing a drop down with your language or all languages when queueing up. Casual queue could be the go to place for no coms or mixed language choices in general.
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You're not considering the logistics of what you're suggesting. How would the devs take reports more seriously when they have less ability to gather evidence? Not only can they not record everything thats said at all times in every single game, they certainly can't sit there and go through all of that audio for every single report. Thats a big part of why they rely on recorded evidence for a lot of reports as it is, especially in terms of hacking or other forms of cheats/exploits. So now every single player needs to record every single match in the event they might need to report it? Or is your alternative to issue warnings and bans with no evidence (which in itself, is arguably even more exploitable?)
lets break down that 40k number real quick. Per game there are 4 survivors and 1 killer, so that ratio will always need to be met. There are 20 ranks in the game, and in order for matchmaking to have any sense of "fairness" to it, that number should be as close as possible across the board. There are also multiple regions and timezones in the world, so the most popular region is going to change over the course of a day, so less populated regions will need higher latency to be able to be pooled with those in other parts of the world.
Even THEN, now we have SWFs which can be in groups of 2, 3, and 4. You can theoretically have 2 groups of 2 in the same game, so their impact isn't as bad on the pool. However a group of 3 will demand a solo survivor to fill the number out, which means it will exclude any other SWF from being able to pair with it. likewise, a group of 4 will demand a killer to match with it directly, making it one less killer that can pair with other survivors.
When you add all these factors up, the pool of suitable matches gets smaller and smaller. While not exactly being a barren wasteland, its very easy for a quite large sample set to be shrunken tremendously. It takes an absurd number of players to be able to withstand that degree of splintering while still maintaining a good quality of matchmaking.
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The point of this entire forum post and proposal is, if survivors use this new chat system as intended, would it create a better game and better balance? Absolutely, the immersion would be so much fun and the balance issues would be made more visible with a baseline type of voice comm which could be addressed and tweaked over time. The accuracy of intended future changes by the devs would be superior than the feedback and data they are getting now.
The objections I am hearing is:
Some people may not want to use voice chat. - They don't have to.
Some people might not be able to use voice chat. - They don't have to and options are there for them.
Console party voice chat and steam chat are more easily accessible by default. - I guarantee there is a way for devs to address this implementation without violating console systems.
There may be problematic parties that join voice chat. - For sure and is anticipated. We are in need of better regulation of the community as is. More bans = more revenue + more respectful community.
Some people might find a way to cheat the new system. - For sure this can eventually be addressed and it will only be a minority of players who choose to cheat if the voice chat in game feels fun and fair.
The game balance has other default underlying problems - Yes, and it will become more easy to see when there isn't too large of a separation between solo and SWF capability.
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TBH the current ranks aren't very indicative of skill as is. So they aren't really fair matches to begin with. They are addressing this with a new MMR system in the future.
Only the devs and those responsible for current matchmaking have the details regarding the logistics and the matchmaking algorithm, as well as the true data being fed into it.
Report systems are complex, but the current one can be improved for sure.
I think the issue with the current report system is the manpower behind it. I don't think there are enough GMs responsible for it. Once someone accrues enough from various different matches in a certain time period, you slap them with a temp ban. If they repeatedly keep getting issues, then it becomes glaringly obvious something is up. The details of the back end of report systems is also something we don't have any knowledge of across this game and others. The point is, it needs to be more readily maintained.
A reputation system (which is complex and has many details/can be abused as well) seems more genuine and requires less moderation from GMs. If you run into people with poor voice chat reputations, you simply leave that lobby.
Other games have big databases with a huge number of replays or at least recordings of summarized data from that game. I mean, I'm surprised we don't have profiles, our own lot of replays and stats as is... let alone a backend database for the game. There are 3rd party solutions even for games that have their own game profiles, replays and statistics. Overtrack for overwatch, apex legends, valorant and I guarantee fortnite has many options in this regard.
Besides lack of balance, I think the biggest issue from this game is poor moderation of the entire community as a whole. It is probably costly, but I have seen few communities as toxic as this community in game. Even league (known for toxicity) or overwatch which has deliberate throwers nearly every 3 games isn't as bad. They also have way larger populations to oversee.
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I think if the player base was managed better, it would grow the game more rapidly. A stark contrast is some lower pop mmo/rpg games is where some experienced players will actually gt of their way to help others. When I was new to this game, I think I received 1 helpful non trolling comment post game for every 20-30 disses or taunts. Currently not very noob friendly.
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immersion is boring for both sides smh
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It's impossible to restrict apps which don't interact with the game itself in a lot of countries due to privacy rules.
There are countries with these privacy rules which means apps can't look at anything else that are not interacting with the game itself.
EU is one example which has made many companies change things due to privacy.
You are also effectively saying people can't run a program and chat to others who may not even be in the game itself or playing another game.
Also how would one disable steam voice chat? That would take input from valve themselves which I don't think they would do for only one game.
Then like others have stated people will use phones or another device to chat.
In game voice would be a huge mistake. Just look at the issue other games have faced by implementing this. Complaints about abusive people and just general noise spam. It doesn't add immersion but actually removes it.
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Yeah judging by the way ppl play this game and how salty things get... I don't think this will work. I think you're more likely to get more trolling when ppl decide to ignore/ mute some1 making obnoxious demands (or what they call "helpful callouts").
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