SWF is a Problem

What I Need you all to Do

Before I get started with what I am about to suggest and explain in great detail, I need the community to do one thing for me. This is both a feedback post and a social experiment; the experiment itself being to amass enough attention to this post (and one other that I will be posting in the future) that this gets to the eyes of not only just the regular developers of the game, but the higher ups.

What I ask of you all is that you try to upvote this post as much as you can to catch the attention of multiple developers, if not also content creators, or even spread this around. You may not need to agree with what I am about to say, or explain, but let there be awareness to this post. There will be a post in the future that I will be making that will be even more important than this, but without your help, the developers will not listen.

Dead by Daylight could be a fun game. But there are many problems (some I will explain in a future post) that hinder the game's overall quality, one of which being the power dynamic of the game. It's far too survivor-favored and that is a problem, as there are teams out there that decide to just go into a game, finish it as fast as they can, and the Killer, more often than not, cannot do anything about it.

Role: Survivor

Perks

• The amount of Perks that are available to Survivor are reduced to 3.
  • The maximum level to get all Perk slots is reduced to 15.

Reasoning

For the longest time, this game has been far too in favor of the Survivor side.

The Killer is on a very strict time limit to defeat Survivors; this same time limit is not applied to Survivors, as a victory for them is simply the ability to escape, even with one person escaping. The Survivor side has Perks and base game mechanics that can accelerate the speed at which games can end; it is truly and has always been in their favor.

Survivors each have the ability to go to one generator a piece and complete it within 80 seconds; given optimal strategies, that means 4 generators can pop, at best and without any modifiers, around 80 seconds in total. This is not long and this already gives the Killer a huge disadvantage to go against, because multiple Survivors can be on multiple generators at once and finish them within 80 seconds or less, give or take any modifiers like toolboxes or extra Survivors on a generator.

The Survivor also has the benefit of playing in third person perspective and looking around them, giving them very good locational awareness of the Killer and allowing them to make smart plays that can be countered by Killers to a degree. However, the ability to see a Killer and have such a perspective is far more beneficial thanks to the popularity of "Survive With Friends", as well as the infamous "stretched resolution" gameplay.

Most of the maps in the game, including the very infamous Haddonfield, Badham Preschool or Gideon Meat Plant, will often times end up being very Survivor-favored, if not by the maps themselves, by the tiles that make up the maps. There are loops in this game that can be, for lack of a better word, either infinite, or take long enough to distract a Killer's precious time away from the other Survivors. Survivors also have various "god pallets", "shack", and many more things at their disposal to keep the Killer distracted.

Survivors have too many ways to counter most Killers (except Spirit), but Killers typically don't have the luxury of being able to get even a kill or sacrifice against a competent team of players around their level or higher.

What makes this even more frustrating for the side of the Killers is that they don't have the benefit of using "stretched resolution" exploits to see Survivors from angles not meant to be seen, or the benefit of using out-of-game communications to pinpoint where the Survivors are at all times, thus removing the need for any Perk that's meant to be for that specific information.

Survivor players completely dominate the game; this is more prominent in SWFs who will run Perks that are, quite frankly, a little too overpowered and a little too overwhelming for the average or same-skilled Killer to handle.

So I thought of a solution, as you saw above.

The solution is to reduce the amount of Survivor perks by 1.

What does this do?

Well, for the average Survivor player (more so the casual side of the game), this is just one less perk, but should not affect your overall gameplay if you're still just looking to have fun, be chased, try saving others, etc.

And for the casual SWF team that also wants to have fun, this won't affect you all too much aside from having to shuffle around different perks to really try and suit the new playstyle.

What this will do, however, for the Survivors of the game that play in a competitive level or an overall high-to-top level, more likely with a team, is that it balances out the power dynamic of both sides. This removes your ability to utilize the current "meta" builds for Survivors and encourages you to experiment with your build to find a new meta. This also attempts to balance out your ability to overwhelm the Killer and dominate the game by making it so that the Killer typically has the advantage from the start (4 perks vs 3 perks).

As you've likely guessed, this means the total amount of perks that Survivors can use in total is reduced to 12, meaning that teams will definitely need new builds. But that's part of the fun that's supposed to be in Dead by Daylight. You're supposed to experiment; and maybe the competitive Survivor role can find their new meta builds and team builds, but this is meant to overall balance out how powerful Survivor currently is.

Now while this won't fix the issue of Survivors going on a generator a piece and having another Survivor go and distract the Killer, this would at least alleviate some of the power dynamic issues that the game has and would serve to be a gateway into even better changes in the future. The point of this is to give Killers a much more fair and realistic chance to go against Survivors, and to actually make Killer seem like the more powerful role (as they have 4 perks, and Survivors have 3).

It would make the game a lot more fun and potentially a lot more balanced. Yes, you will need to adjust your builds, even if you don't run meta perks, but the experiment is supposed to be part of the fun.

I think that this change would be a net benefit to the overall health of the game and would lead into potentially better game health solutions in the future.

Postscript

Anyway, this is all I have to say about this. I've a lot of work to do and will have a new post releasing either at the beginning of the next month, or the middle of it. The post after my next will definitely require the help of the Dead by Daylight community, whether you're Survivor or Killer, casual or competitive, average player or content creator.