Dead by Design: An Essay On Counterplay And The 'Spirit' Problem (3600+ words)

(this is a repurposed video script that I wanted to share. This is an in-depth essay on counterplay and the spirit issue in Dead by daylight. I expect no traffic but wanted to publish at least this in case I end up not having time to make a legitimate full fledged high quality video. This essay is 6 pages long at over 3600 words. I'm going on vacation soon and the process of doing everything I want just can't be done in time with all of the other real world things I have going on as an adult. So here it is to at least have the discussion. if you read this whole thing thank you, you're pretty freaking awesome. Im sorry for any awkwardness or grammar issues. I literally just wrote this in a few hours.) 

*tap tap tap*

OK

Counterplay

This word gets thrown around a lot, and I mean a lot by the Dead By Daylight community, and for the most part, people don't fully understand what counter play is. By the most basic definition counterplay is simply the ability to react and then act upon what your opponent is doing in a way that is favorable for you. If you're playing Streetfighter and your opponent just won't stop block spamming, throw him. That's the counterplay in a very basic scenario. BUTT *heh butt* That's not all there is to it. 

The game design of Dead By Daylight is often messy, a game that while has not changed on the surface has gone through a metamorphosis through the years with different philosophies behind killer design, killer survivor interaction, tile interaction, map creation, perk creation, and yes the counterplay between survivor and killer. Seriously just look at where we've come from. NOED used to be a hexless perk, to having a timer on it, to being a hex perk. Survivors used to be able to fast vault from any angle, have the ability to run multiple exhaustion perks at the same time, and DS used to just be able to be used with no conditions. 

So the game is pretty different now and with that difference you can see how BHVR approaches design now versus how they use it too. Killers are way more complex with a lot of little things added to their kits to finely tune them to the game. Which finally brings me to counterplay in dbd, 

When talking about counterplay in dbd you have to look at it in its three basic forms which themselves are just mutations of typical counterplay in competitive shooters and fighting games. Is DBD a competitive game? Meh *yes* but it does have these levels of how to interact with the opposing party that allows for this game to be interesting and not stale. In DBD there is what most people seem to talk about in mechanical counterplay. However there is also preemptive counterplay, and conditioning counterplay. Typically people don't talk about counterplay in this way. Other terms that are used could be counter picking, set-up, mindgaming, conditioning, and playing the long game. All of these are just ways to describe the concept of counterplay in its three main forms. To show this lets go over a few mechanics and yes killers. I did promise after all that I'd talk about spirit. 

Let's start with traditional counterplay as known by the dbd community. 

MECHANICAL COUNTERPLAY 

In Dead By Daylight every killer's power has some form of mechanical counterplay, now the level to which they do is to be debated. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that Spirit has the same amount of mechanical in game counterplay as Trapper. Because she doesn't. With Trapper his power is binary, you either step in the trap, or you don't. That's it, that's the counterplay. Survivors have full agency over themselves as to whether they step in the trap. It can be classified as a survivor mistake if they get trapped. Now that is not to say that a good Trapper can't place his traps in key locations and encourage the survivor into those areas, but that's not the effect of his power, that's the effect of him. All killers are like this, except one. Now this is where the community gets real excited and says I told you so. Spirit op BHVR plz nerf. However I will kindly ask you to wait.

So yes In the three pillars of counterplay Spirit fails this one. There are minimal things you can do when a spirit goes into a faze. Since the Spirit can no longer see survivors it becomes imperative to be very chaotic and sneaky with your movement. Using a combination of walking and sprinting at crossroads is a good way to lose a Spirit who's in phase. One problem, this only works while a survivor is healthy. The moment they are injured any sort of counterplay using the sound you create goes out the window due to the injured sounds just vomiting out of your survivors weak fragile body. This is where Spirit is different from the rest of the pack. Even Deathslinger has more mechanical counterplay than her because your ability to dodge and break line of sight, and put structures between you and him is not affected by you getting injured. The Spirit's power completely changes once the survivor is hit. This is where BHVR failed with her. Mechanically there is nothing a survivor can do once they've been injured. However, there are two more versions of counterplay to go over. 

PREEMPTIVE COUNTERPLAY

DBD is a weird game on this one, as the most traditional sense of preemptive counterplay is what's known as ‘counter picking’. You're bringing a Yamoja? Well, I'm bringing Cerberus. This does not exist in Dead By Daylight except for killer and only it is the weakest form possible. In pre game lobbies the killer can see which survivors there are and what items a survivor is bringing. That's it, neither side gets to know what perk loadout they have or what offerings they are bringing till they're already played. Hell unless there's an offering played we don't even know what map we will be on. So rng can really screw a Huntress and a Deathslinger if they get stuck on an indoor or corn map. But there are a lot of other types of preemptive counterplay in DBD. While not reliable as mentioned before survivors do not know what killer they are facing, there are straight up perks that completely counter certain killers. Iron Will and Spine Chill for example completely decimate a Spirit if they aren't themselves using Stridor, which many Spirit players argue is a wasted perk slot on her, while others swear by it. 

However, let's talk about counterplay. That's something you can do every time. Spirit like a lot of other killers is significantly hurt by pre dropping pallets before you need to avoid a hit. The Spirit can try to mind game that loop with her power. which is her strong suit if the survivors are injured and hacking up a lung. However the situation turns into the survivors favor if they aren't injured. If the survivor is making minimal sound they can play the loop. The things the survivor has to account for is whether or not they know the Spirit is in phase, and what is considered the right play for that loop. Sometimes the best solution is to completely leave the loop. Other forms of preemptive play include putting yourself in complex or strong structures. The more reads the Spirit has to make the harder it is for her to get her first hit on you. Complex structures include houses on haddonfield, most main building structures in all maps, all jungle gym variants, cow loop, cornfields, all indoor maps. Every single one of these has places that make the amount of options for pathing that a survivor can take hard for a spirit to play on. It doesn't matter if the Spirit can hear the survivors breathing sound if the tile is in such a way that the survivor could be right next to her or behind a wall. She now has to guess. 

Let's look at this example here. Take the typical car dumpster loop in the Bedlam maps. The survivor is standing here at the pallet with it down. If I go into or am in phase the survivor has a few moves they can make. One they can slowly crawl over the pallet. Two they can go clockwise around the loop. Three They can go counter clockwise around the loop. Finally, four they can leave the loop entirely. One loop, four options and choices the survivor has to make. This is where the final counterplay type comes into play.

CONDITIONING COUNTERPLAY

Before we can talk about games we have to talk about psychology and specifically about the ideas brought forth by famous psychologists Pavlov, Thorndike, Skinner, and Bandura, and all of their research and experiments.

In psychology there are three different types of conditioning. Classical conditioning which Pavlov pioneered. Operant conditioning which was made famous by Skinner and theorized by Thorndike, and lastly observational conditioning which was made famous by Bandura. 

Pavlov famously did an experiment where he saw if he could make animals physically react to stimuli the same way they would to other stimuli. The experiment would measure the amount of saliva dogs produced when presented with food. Before the food was given pavlov would ring a bell as a way to make the dog associate the bell with food. After enough time passed with the experiments the dogs would salivate just as much when the bell would ring without food as they would with food. They were conditioned to recognise the bell as the source of food. It was food time. This is the most basic style of conditioning and many fellow psychologists panned it because of how simple the experiment truly was. The idea was that it was not something we could really apply to human psychology. 

Thorndike through study eventually came to the conclusion that "responses that produce a satisfying effect in a particular situation become more likely to occur again in that situation, and responses that produce a discomforting effect become less likely to occur again in that situation (Gray, 2011, p. 108–109)." This was known as the Law of Effect. This idea was the basis for psychologist Skinner to start developing the theory of Operant conditioning. Skinner would develop an experiment where he placed rats in a small cage, the only thing in the cage was a lever that would dispense food when pulled down, and a metal floor that would send electrical shocks through the floor. The experiment would prove that through operant conditioning you could teach the rat and subsequently any animal or even human to perform an action when paired with a reward for doing so or a punishment for failing to do so. A human example of this is how you get sent to the principal's office if you're tardy too many times to class as a child. You're being punished for not performing the correct behavior. This in turn makes us predisposed to want to be to class on time. Just as the rat is predisposed to pressing down the lever to avoid getting shocked. 

The final type of conditioning was observational conditioning. Bandura conducted an experiment where at its base core young children would watch adults play with a toy called a ‘bobo doll’. Some children would observe a gentle and calm adult who would be nice to the doll and some would watch an adult be aggressive to the doll, attacking it with punches and kicks, some adults even used a hammer to strike the doll. After observing this the children would then be allowed to play with the same doll. The results from the experiment showed that children who watched the aggressive adult would in turn be aggressive. The children who watched the nice adult would also be nice. This is a super simplification with this very in depth experiment with several groups of children, adults, matching with different aged children, gender, and race. This is just the simplest way to get across what constitutes decades of science and research for the behavioral branch of psychology with all three of these experiments. 

Now. How does this apply to games? How does this apply to Dead By Daylight? While classical conditioning is not important for this discussion, Operant and Observational conditioning is. Operant being the most while Observational being paired with why and how the community forms similar opinions around the same time as one another. This is where we move into video games.

Fighting games are some of the most competitive games out there. An entire genre based around 1v1 fights where you must defeat your opponent. What's funny is that DBD lifts a lot from fighting games, and even the community talks about DBD in very similar ways that fighting game fans talk about their games. We straight up ripped tier lists from the fighting game community. DBD is a 1v4 game yet we mostly subscribe to the power of a killer with their 1v1 potential. Does that killer do good in chase? No , then they are usually low tier. A lot of killers are labeled with what feels like an insult at this point as ‘typical m1 killer’. This is why characters like Wraith have been mocked by the community because their powers aren't chase oriented powers.

Anyway, in the fighting game community there is this big part of the high level play called conditioning. The basis of this is that you train your opponent to take certain actions for either fear of a punishment or hope for a reward. Remember Skinner? Let's translate this into dbd. Let's look at wraith. He's the best boi. My favorite build for Wraith after the buff is this pallet destroying build. It changes wraiths power to a chase oriented power. The basic idea is that I want players to pre-throw pallets. I want that pallet down. The moment it is, I just need them to stay near it and they've already lost that health state that they have. So I get down after down. Punishing them for throwing the pallet. The next time I meet them they are going to be hesitant to throw down the pallet. Like if the rat was instead shocked for pulling the lever instead of shocked for not pulling it. They want me out of cloak so that the pallet throw is now safe for them to do, so that it becomes a reward. So now I have to mindgame them. Am I really going to uncloak? Or am I faking? This is where conditioning sets in. If I as wraith don't get them down in one read they then have a better idea of what I am trying to do. If I uncloak I run the risk of them throwing down the pallet, it is not good for me to uncloak. So I fake the uncloak because that's the stronger play for me. If they throw the pallet down I win, but if they don't then I have to either anticipate that they won't throw the pallet down and risk a lunge attack without getting pallet stunned or reset the chase as they can now loop normally or even straight up leave the loop while I figure out what the best course of action is. 

The counterplay is that all while I'm conditioning them to act a certain way they are inadvertently conditioning me to do the same. We are both rats in cages, my actions if I succeed shock them, and theirs if they succeed shock me. If I do the same trick of faking the uncloak a second time I am now expecting for them to fall for it again because that's what they did last time. This kind of expectation is in every single loop in the game. No matter what killer is playing. After seeing the survivor do something once at a loop they expect them to play it the same way until proven wrong.  This is a little bit of observational conditioning bleeding through into the actual gameplay. So how does this apply to Spirit. Because what's the point of this entire script if I don't answer how spirit has counterplay? 

*Deep breath* ok

Spirits counterplay lies in conditioning. You can't rely too heavily on preemptive counterplay as the player is not given any information before the match even starts. Mechanically, spirit only has counterplay till you have been injured, after you're injured it's all over unless you got lucky and have some preemptive counter perks. This is why so many people feel like she has no mechanics and its due to the idea that if they can't mechanically counter her they can't counter her. They're right to a point, but you're not playing against spirit, you're playing against the player controlling spirit. Thats where the counterplay is. You have to use your mechanical play to condition the spirit into making wrong reads. This isnt a guessing game, this is proven science that you can condition people into reacting in ways you want. In fighting games people often straight up lose the first round in the fight, then they adapt and use the information they gathered during that first fight to come up with ways to then dominate two rounds in a row for the win on that set. This is counterplay at its highest level. Where the skill gap is no longer in the mechanical skill or game knowledge of the game but instead in who can better figure out the other. If you look at pro streamers in the fighting world every single one of them have the mechanics of the game down to frame by frame. What separates them from high level players is that they can outthink their opponent and are better at adapting on the fly. The two players countering each other back and forth till one wins and one loses. This applies to chase in dbd. There's a reason why even semi competent rank 1 survivors can loop a rank 20 brand new player infinitely, they don't have to mind game, they just have to be better mechanically and use their game knowledge to abuse loops that the new player doesn't know how to play. It's when you get a bit higher where the knowledge and mechanical skill are similar where spirit becomes a beast, because you now don't have to play against the game, but against the player. You have to play mental chess with the other player and it's not based on guessing but understanding how your opponent acts and then using that as a basis for your own actions. You are only guessing in the first chase, you have to feel out your opponent, see how they play. As long as you're able to at least observe them for a little bit in an actual loop before going down you can start building a player profile for this particular player. This is amplified if on comms in a swf. The more time you and your group are allowed to see the habits of the player over the match you can know how to play against them in chase. This is a skill you have to practice. You're not going to click away from here and instantly be able to do what I'm talking about. Just like how players practice their looping paths, and players practice their nurse teleports, or huntress throws. You have to practice your mind gaming and conditioning. This is how you pull nasty habits out of your play and become more and more skilled and efficient at the game. This is how you learn to counter the spirit PLAYER.

Now I mentioned observational conditioning and how it was super important. While not important to the actual gameplay side I think this is important to the community side. The community in large part doesn't all participate on the forums or watch all the streamers but they do talk to other players, and those players talk with other players. Like a plague we all talk to and influence each other in small ways. Unfortunately this means players with a wider reach like streamers can have the most influence over the base and their thoughts and opinions on things besides the devs themselves. This leads to players finding authority in players who maybe don't know what they're talking about, or are tackling the subject in the wrong way with the bluntness of a sledgehammer. Maybe these players bully their point and opinion home by confusing their point with the wrong type of evidence. In the case of Spirit, too many of our big faces in the community confuse mechanical counterplay as the only counterplay. That pulling people into 1v1 lobbies to do only a few chases against players with less mechanical skill is the wrong way to go about showing and proving points.  

With this in mind I would want and wish for the dead by daylight die-hards to start looking at the game more critically. Think about the design intent, and then the design execution. When looking at the counterplay of the killer to look at what mechanical, preemptive, and yes conditioning that killer needs to be beaten. The spirit and deathslinger issues that are pushed by the community is an example of not understanding how to learn and get better at the highest level of play.  The community has been accused of having an issue of what aboutism. I think we have an issue of not correlating facing high tier killers with needing high tier gameplay to face. Why do we make all these tier lists where we place spirit, and nurse as S tier killers and not expect us to have to play at that high of a level in return when we face them? 

ok thats an essay... partially edited.