I want to talk about event quality over the years, starting with the Blight events
TL:DR (The original Hallowed Blight had tons of effort put into it, with subsequent blight events heavily degrading in quality. To the point where the community put the devs into damage control mode in the Eternal Blight)
Back in 2018 a new event was teased to us. With only a short video giving us the name "The Hallowed Blight." When the event released, it introduced us to these beautiful monstrosities known as visceral cankers.
For those unfamiliar, you would milk these as a survivor, or hook survivors on a special hook that looked like this
Interacting with these would fill up a meter in the top right of your screen. When full it would grant you an event currency known as putrid serum. Which you would need to earn 30 of to purchase a full outfit with, you could earn two outfits for this event.
Not only did this event bring engaging secondary objectives for the survivors, but it brought us new lore from the perspective of a new character. Who we would later come to know as Talbot Grimes (AKA, The Blight). The Hallowed blight Also added 7 new event outfits themed after the glowing orange liquid.
This Event faced criticism for the fact that the secondary objective took away from the generators too much. Plus people would suicide on hook to efficiently gather blight serum.
In 2019 we were given "The Withering Blight." Which introduced us to the archives, a new source of lore within the game.
This time around you could not earn the event currency by interacting with visceral cankers. Instead you would earn it from progressing in the rift, the battle pass system. But you could still earn two event outfits until the rift expired. 6 outfits were added, one of which was in the rift in the premium track.
The offering spawned event hooks, but also event gens. The Hooks looked different this time around, taking on a more decayed appearance.
While the gens, labeled as "pustula blighted gens," looked like this, except with the older generator model.
In 2020 "The Eternal Blight" reared it's ugly head. The event was mostly the same as last year, but the addition of event addons for survivors, and an addon for killers. The usefulness of them can be called into question.
But, the major difference this time around, was that you were now unable to earn free event cosmetics. The putrid serum wasn't even available in the rift.
This was met with heavy backlash from the community. BHVR, in an attempt to pull damage control. Gave us login rewards, which gave us large amounts of bloodpoints, and 10,000 iridescent shards. On top of a shard and auric cell discount on the new event cosmetics.
Looking back, the Hallowed Blight had a ton of love put into it. With new lore. 7, new outfits, and an engaging event objective.
The Withering blight is an overall downgrade in event quality. The gens labeled as "PUSTULA blighted gens", had no pustula flowers to be seen on them. With only a pumpkin being placed on top to distinguish them from regular generators.
The Hooks which were once glowing, pulsating, and leaking the orange fluid from the flowers. Were now a bland brown color, with a pumpkin placed next to it, with no animations or effort to be seen in their design.
Not only that, but the visceral cankers were taken away, being replaced with the grind of the rift.
The Eternal Blight event is regarded as the worst event in recent DBD history. Taking away our ability to earn free cosmetics, all the while the new outfits were featured in front of our faces within the shop, with their 10$ price tag.
The event which had once had so much effort put into it, and was grotesquely stylish. was now lackluster, drab, and widely regarded as a cash grab by the community.
The eternal blight also introduced a new event theme. Which most of the time could barely be heard. Personally I prefer the original theme.
For all of it's faults, the Hallowed Blight is the most fondly remembered of the three.
Would y'all want me to do posts looking at the other recurring events? Or would you say this pretty much describes all of them?
Comments
-
Pardon this comment, I uploaded this at midnight when hardly anyone is on the forums, and I actually want people to see this post.
4 -
There is no doubt, the events are declining for more monetization.
5 -
They better show us that the extra effort they're putting into the Halloween and anniversary events is worth it.
I couldn't imagine the backlash if the anniversary event was the exact same as last year's. Or if they just did the original hallowed blight with little modification this year.
2 -
I know for sure the community is gonna hold BHVR's word that the Anniversary and Halloween Events will be under higher levels of focus from here on out. As horrible as Eternal Blight was, it was good that the severe criticism helped open their eyes to what must be done for the future. I just hope it really does become reality.
4 -
I'm skeptical with BHVR's ability to pull it off, they can barely manage to do the advent calendar right. Mainly because the rewards suck, only 10,000 bloodpoints a day, and our iridescent shards were halved from last week. The charms are cool, but extremely low effort, especially the survivor stocking.
Unless these rewards start ramping up, this will be an extremely disappointing winter event.
2 -
Well as they said, any event that's not Anniversary or Halloween is considered a "celebration". Safe to say there shouldn't be anything crazy to be expected for said celebrations. Themed assets if I recall will make returns, but that's it. The big stuff is for the main two events.
0 -
I mean, yeah. But still... only 10,000 bloodpoints???
0 -
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, the devs never made an official statement on the Eternal blight. The only thing said about it was from McCote in a QnA, "There should be something coming out for that soon."
Literally the only thing said about the event from the devs.
1 -
Pardon this one as well, I hope more people see this so they can get an understanding of the tanking event quality over the years.
0 -
Basically events started to go to crap once the rifts where introduced. They started okay and then well just look at the blighted event in October lol wasnt any point to it.
4 -
I agree the first blight event was great. But every other event since then was getting worse and worse.
1 -
Yeah, and I'm ok with that as long as they can make events within the Rift and have the challenges follow some type of theme and the rewards have some impact.
0 -
Yep, the trend isn't looking great.
But who knows, maybe the anniversary and next blight event will actually be good. If they don't prove that the so called "extra effort" was actually worth it, then I can only imagine the back lash they'll recieve.
0 -
I disagree, putting events in the rift is lazy. It takes away from the engagement of the event, as well as the pride of having earned the outfits from participating in the secondary objectives.
Using challenges in the archives is also lazy, event offerings are there for a reason. They are supposed to spawn the secondary objective, not just be the gateway for slightly more bloodpoints than usual.
1 -
It was called the withering blight because the quality would wither away over time
2 -
Feels like events are declining sadly and rift is taking the place. I don't like the idea of having to wait till summer to see if they actually deliver on the promise of working on halloween and anniversary events.
1 -
We'll see if they do, imagine if they just used the same anniversary event from this year?
That would be a total cluster[BAD WORD]
0 -
Sounds about right
0 -
General
It's such a great game concept. I really don't know what to think about the team behind it. Recently they're just making bad decisions. These are the two options I can think of about them:
- The developer team has great ideas and good changes for the game but the person(s) responsable to approve them doesn't allow them to implement, maybe because the input money will exceed the output and they will lose money, idk.
- The developers don't care about the experience of the playerbase and thus dont make any changes, only what matter is their money output.
The game went from great events, hotfixes all weeks and priotized fixing bugs from just a game that do all it can to grab the customer money, shaving contents to our throats without even fixing the before chapter bugs. And after all that #########, they are still trying to compensate with this bad calendar event.
The community yells for changes in multiple things in the game, they take 2 years to make these changes(perk changes, killer changes, anything), they just take so much time to make any decision. And sometimes they change things that we event didn't asked.
I will still be playing this game because I have nothing better to play of this genre, but I hope that 2021 will be the year that BHVR will redeem themselves, with great contents and events.
About the calendar event:
I guess the only thing worth is the sweater? That you need to waste time on their social medials to get the stupid codes, instead of just giving to whoever logs in. We get 10k per day of BPs, which is useless since you can only get 2-3 items from the bloodweb with it, and the bloodweb is already expensive.
"Ah but counting all the total days you will get 300.000 of BPS". I can play 5 matches with BBQ to get the same amount. This is ridiculous, this was supposed to be an event. You need to think of all the playerbase of the game, either could made the rewards of shards and bloopoints to scale with player devotion, so veterans can get more rewards for it and new players can still enjoy it.
We're in December, we don't have a Winter event and they said they will not focus on other events anymore, only in important ones. December is a very important month of the year, we should at least receive Bloodhunt for 1-2 weeks again to compensate all this mess.
1 -
That about sums it up, but I will say that BHVRs only excuse can be that they're focusing on graphical reworks.
Which sounds like a fair point, but what's stopping them from reusing the hallowed blights mechanics, or moonrise's?
0 -
On one hand (Current events) on the other they seem fine and able to do nerfs and release buyable skins.So, I guess take It for what you will.
But,then again IDK the inner workings of their studio..So,anything could be up.
0 -
They didn't seem to have a problem releasing 3 good events within months of each other back in 2018.
Those being Scorching summer BBQ, The Hallowed Blight itself, and Moonrise. Though BBQ was a special gen and hook type event, not terribly high maintenance required for that. But the other two still remain fan favorites.
Man... ever since moonrise and hallowed blight, BHVR's event quality has dropped significantly.
1 -
The entire game went to crap when the rifts were introduced. Solo survivor is an absolute nightmare to play when all your teammates try to do is whatever challenge just came out. I quit for months and just came back to see if it's any more tolerable. Spoiler alert, it's not. I will miss this game when I walk away for good.
1 -
Challenges are a bit of a lose-lose situation. Make them too in line with. basic gameplay, and they're considered too easy and boring. Make them out of line with gameplay, then people will complain about how hard it is to pull it off in matches.
It is decently hard to balance the two extremes. But at least there are the challenges we can all agree are complete bull[BAD WORD]
0 -
Maybe it will be too much work to use the same code since the game changed a lot recently? It just shows off how they coded the game in a way that it's not flexible, or they don't want the same event. For me, I would prefer the copypaste of the old event at least.
0 -
Yeah I was so excited to harvest plants again, then you literally only got like 3 opportunities to harvest lol I wasnt happy
0 -
In my opinion and feel free to disagree, nothing tops the scorching summer event, that one was amazing as ######### and I miss it every day
0 -
I'm surprised that people don't seem to remember how the 2018 event actually went down. Saying it was positively received is a bit... well, the rose-tinted glasses are rather thick there.
To begin with, remember that only 2 cankers and 2 hooks spawned baseline in the map, and both were single-use targets. Survivor players would lose any collected nectar that wasn't at a 1/3 marker upon death. This meant that, oftentimes, Survivors were fighting over the nectar and would DC when they had filled a vial or if someone else had already harvested all the nectar. Games were pretty darned bad back then and yeah, lots and lots of DCs. Players could bring Pustula Petals to spawn more of he cankers, but that did not mean they would get to harvest them (they would get more BPs if someone else did, though). Also keep in mind that the Petals were an offering, so if you wanted to try to muscle through the cankers, you weren't running other things, like, say, BPS.
Originally, you could only get 30 vials each on Survivor and Killer to encourage people to play both sides. This was eventually changed (good BHVR) because the queue times for Killer were... just terribad. Like really, really bad.
Complaints were quite constant, not just about "WHY CAN'T I GET A COSMETIC FO X." Gameplay was bad, griefing was horrible, and again, queue times were horrible for Killers and half the Survivors DCed in the first 3 minutes of a game.
2019 was, in general, better-received because you didn't have to necessarily fight over the same objective and didn't lose progress upon death, but it was still "just do the gens/hook Survivors and get the stuff to get what you want," effectively.
Scorching Summer was well-received, as was the last LNY event from what I remember, but the first LNY? Oh man, did people HATE that one.
0 -
The last lunar new year wasn't even an event. It just had special hooks and gens, with some reskins for login rewards. You had to pay for the legion and Jeff outfit.
But as much as people complained about the events with secondary objectives. They are still preferable to events where the objective is just... do the same thing you've been doing for four years now.
There was much that could have been improved from the first event. Like making the visceral cankers a 2 second interaction where you would pull out a needle and get 1/6 of the vial filled. A visceral canker could be interacted with by 4 survivors before it died.
But that's just my thoughts, there could probably be other things that could be done. But I'm sure you get the point.
Plus I might add that the point of the post is to show how much effort was put into the first. As compared to the others. It was not to talk about how good the event itself was.
0 -
As this post and the recent chapter proves, BHVR is sacrificing quality for money. We know this, but what are we gonna do about it?
0 -
We complain, but it hardly did anything to fix the eternal blight.
The best we can do is wait and see how the anniversary and next blight event unfold.
0 -
I'm thinking that they're doing it this way now because the bottom line is that it's more cost-efficient. You call it lazy, I'll call it making do with what ya got. The Rift is here for the life of DBD and I can't see them doing this as well as scheduling events, releasing midchapter patches and DLCS all from working from home because of COVID (at least for now). #########, they hardly have enough time to finish DLCs and get them out without a bunch of bugs. Who knows, maybe they'll change things once the world gets back to normal and bring back some iteration of HB (even tho I was NOT a fan of it). In the meantime, I'll cut them some slack and push for something a little easier to implement but with more impact than what they did with the last event.
0
