Developer QnA Stream Summary | 20th January 2022

this summary wont have as many jokes in because i am not in a good mood at time of writing and really struggling with the comedy lol

very important message

First and foremost, I would like everyone to read this, and to read it carefully.

If anyone thinks I'm doing this to "bootlick" the devs, as I've seen plenty of times today, I'd like to highlight the fact that I lose an entire afternoon and plenty of previous days planning these, and not to get good boy (pun intended) points in with the developer team that most likely won't even see this, but to help the community when they're unable to watch an entire stream in one go. When they have hearing impairments, or a busy schedule, and having a written version allows them to effectively receive the information in alternate ways. It's here for everyone to refer back to when needed, either for yourselves or for others, and it's here to be generally helpful.

I know that a vast majority of people appreciate that- and appreciate the effort that I put into these myself. These used to be done by others, and it would take upwards of a week sometimes (no shade meant- I'm friends with one of them and she's an absolute saint.)- but I manage to get these done in under half a day.

I do all of this to help people out here, because despite my comments of hating everyone there are a good few I respect and like, and who I think deserve this time and effort. But I have had it up to here with these comments, so to set the record straight, I do not do this for myself. I do not do this for brownie points, but I do this for other people.

Anyway that's the serious stuff out the way.

stream summary for 20th january 2022.

May I please request that people do not use the quote feature on this post, nor should they paste it's link to these forums in any form other than a hyperlink, because if you do you'll get a rich post error and nobody wants those. Your comment will be lost to space time and all of your hard work will be yeeted so let me repeat do not use the quote feature on this post nor paste it's link to these forums. Hyperlink if you must.

Hey guys, it's me- GBK, your friendly neighbourhood dickhead- back with another stream summary because the devs gave us another QnA stream.

For anyone who doesn't know, I sit and watch through the dev stream then try to summarise all the information as best as I can, featuring horrible jokes, added context, copy/paste disclaimers, and my opinions nobody asked for.

This Stream is from 18th January. For the most recent stream summary, please follow this hyperlink (October 7th 2021).

This post is split into two parts. Please do not comment until I post the second part in the comments; thank you!

With that out of the way, let's go. And remember, I stopped playing Back 4 Blood for this.

disclaimers

The following contains official information, unofficially worded. Unless it's in quotation marks ("like this") please do not look too far into the wording of a particular anything. That would be my bad in getting something lost in translation, not the bad of the developers. Thanks!

Please note I will try my best to stay as true as possible to all information said on-stream, however, and apply more context where needed, or just add in my own opinion or jokes. The latter 2 will be in italics to make it clear what is my input and what is not.

I am not affiliated with BHVR Interactive, or the Dead By Daylight team, in any way, regardless of what anyone may think. Not yet, anyway.

Remember, this is a summary. For the full experience, please check out the video, which will be edited below as soon as I find it (prepare for a link to the Twitch VOD to be there temorarily until it appears on YouTube).

Twitch VOD (theoretically timestamped):

YouTube Video:

featured

Featured on this stream were:

Peanits (Community Manager), @Peanits

Justin (Product Manager)

Patrick (Lead Game Designer)

opening messages

Right off the bat, let's talk about Circle of Healing.

It's being nerfed! In the next patch!

The plan is to continue to look at how the perk performs with these reduced values, and if it needs further nerfs it will get them.

Also, grade rewards are being increased! At launch, these were a little bit low, so they've bumped them up. Here's the newer grade rewards.

This is per grade- meaning you can earn up to 2 million bloodpoints. Moreover, they are not bound by the cap. Happy grinding!

Finally, there is currently a Bloodrush (1.5x Blood Point event) going on until tomorrow, so- go play some games.

questions

@KissMyMuttonTTV (Twitter) - Will there ever be basekit Borrowed Time/Decisive Strike?

There are no plans to make DS basekit. Are there any plans for BT? There are no plans to make DS basekit.

Note the wording. Please.

@mx_zan (Twitter) - When is Switch cross-progression coming?

So basically there's quite a few technical aspects not controlled by BHVR, so transparency on cross-platform progression has not been entirely possible. They're now no longer able to provide a clear ETA, and as soon as a more concrete date is available it will be shared.

@Daithiee (Twitter) - Is console cross-progression coming?

Not for the time being- it's a wanted feature, however is not something they can promise because it isn't solely their decision.

@TheKingTwitch (Twitter) - Will Boon totems be getting any changes?

Boon Totems, as a general mechanic, are working as intended overall. In general, they are not overpowered; Circle of Healing has already been discussed, but this was the problem child and has been addressed, and will continue to be addressed if it continues to be a problem. On that note, each individual Boon itself is being looked at independently, but as for the mechanic itself there likely won't be any sweeping changes anytime soon.

@MemeDewd (Twitter) - Hen rush

(It was one of the most upvoted things)

@DeadlyCobra - Are there plans to fix Dead Hard validation against certain powers?

This is a slow-going process because it has to be checked on a case-by-case basis, as it involves powers. But it's on the radar- particularly Blight's rush or Nemesis' Tentacle Strike.

@Humperdinker - Hex: Ruin was reworked due to it's overuse; what about Dead Hard?

Yes- they are looking at Dead Hard!

It's a difficult case due to the frustration coming from different places- some the design, some the network, some the validation, etc- but yes it is on the radar. However, due to needing to tackle this from a design and a technological angle both, it will take a while.

This rework will most likely be looking at the dodging aspect and trying to reduce frustration there, particularly through validated hits (there should be an update to this coming to live when the patch hits), however they're also looking at it from a game-design standpoint, particularly Dead Hard for Distance:tm:. There's nothing specific to mention, but they are looking at it.

@Otzdarva - "Can we expect more QOL changes (streamer mode, perk loadouts, etc)?"

Some of these are definitely coming sooner, rather than later. No announcement on when, but a laundry list of these and similar QOL changes were being looked at, and there should be more to reveal in the near-to-mid future.

@chrisrnj (Twitter) - "What happened to the early game mechanic?"

This was talked about on the last stream too (you really should read my summaries more) but here it is repeated:

The short answer is that it got scrapped. The longer answer is that it got scrapped after internal communication and internal prototypes revealed that it added nothing really to the game, and felt very unfun to deal with on both sides. That said, some of those ideas have been recycled into other prototypes.

The sad thing about sharing early news like that, particularly with early internal discissions, is that many don't make the cut, which is one of the reasons why they're not very transparent on things until they're almost ready.

@jessicarevane (Twitter) - "Can we make SBMM more skill based?"

Due to trying to keep this breif, Patrick is simplifying things here, but here is a word for word transcript of what he says:

"There's a common misconception that by just using kills and escapes to adjust MMR, it is "ignoring" your skill in the game. This isn't the truth though, this is false- kills and escapes are proxys for skill, in that skilled play inherently leads to kills and escapes; think about sports, and I'll use hockey as an example, because I'm Canadian- you wouldn't say "They only count wins when playing teams in the standing, but they should also count shots on goal too! A more skilled player takes more shots!"

"And while that's certainly true, it's important to remember that shots lead to goals, which lead to wins, so you can cut the middleman out there. And that's the key- skilled plays lead to wins. If they don't, are they really skilled plays? If your skilled play doesn't get you a win, was it really a skilled play? And that's the same in DBD- killing survivors or survivors escaping alive. That's what MMR predicts- the chance of the killer killing survivors or the survivors escaping alive, and the system is very good at predicting that.

However, we're looking at some improvements to the current system. An example is to take team results into account with survivors, in addition to the personal result. This takes some time, there's a lot of fun math[s] which I could talk about forever, but we need to prove it's working, that's there's value in it, there's correlations, and so on. More details on that- on SBMM in general- are on our most recent dev blog."

And you can find said dev blog right here:

@jefelipe_ - "Why don't hooks count towards your rating?"

This was discussed with the team, and is a good example of the previous comment. This wasn't included due to weird cases when taken to extremes- if you got 8 hooks but 0 kills, which counted towards your rating, you could easily end up in a scenario where that counts as a "win" and moves you up the rating, even if that isn't a "win" since all survivors escaped alive. That also doesn't make sense for the survivors- the killer won, so they lost, even though they all got out. Unless that's then counted as an "everybody wins" which makes the maths so much harder. Kills and escapes, despite being simplistic, solves a lot of the issues with more complex systems.

@Pulsar - "When in 60FPS coming to last gen consoles?"

This is a very fun elephant in the room. That roadmap back then was a little too ambitious, and not everything included has happened. Yet.

They've managed to optimise the game where the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) is hitting the target for 60FPS, so all that's needed now is CPU (Central Processing Unit) optimisations. In 2021, they worked on converting old blueprint code to C++, and stopping the loading of events when they're not needed on-screen. This helped drop the CPU time, and they will continue to do so in 2022. In the upcoming Mid-Chapter, they have improvements for The Nurse and skillchecks, and in the future there will be improvements on distance objects, off-screen objects, and other things such as "async loading into a match". They missed the ETA and would like to continue working on improving it.

One thing that's often suggested is to add graphical settings to consoles- this would change nothing, as that only affects the GPU-side of things, not the CPU-side of things, which is where the problems lie.

@Zozzy, I knew that was also the case but here's some more proof if you couldn't find it during the stream.

Multiple people - "Will there be a change to the progression system this year?"

The grind is a big issue, and they know that. They're working on a way to dramatically improve it, with more details soon. Because everyone loves that answer.

For the record, though, the Grade Rewards are not, and never were, intended to be fixes to the grind.

@Astrian - "Can perk tiers be removed?"

There are no plans to remove perk tiers- it's been discussed internally, but there are no plans. There's something else in mind to help out, instead of just cutting the tiers.

Here's Peanits with some more in-depth discussion on it:

@PixelBush - "Can we have some updated Killer stats?"

Yes. You may.

These stats were taken from December 16th - January 16th for all killers across all games. The white bars are the average kill rates, and the black bars are the average pick rates. Please do not use these stats to form any sort of conclusions, as they are severely lacking in a lot of key details.

@Epicwarhog69 - "Will we ever see a match replay system?"

It's gotta be a nope. As much as they'd love one, it's an extremely technical undertaking- the kind of thing which needs the game to be made from the ground up to support it, and we're coming up 6 years now. It would be a herculean task to recode the game from the ground up to support this, when there are other tasks people want just as much which they can complete without needing that much time and resources.

@Tatariu - "Any news to share on the Ghost Face and Legion updates?"

They're in the pipe and on the way. When they were spoken about on the last stream, the design hadn't been approved nor even completed yet, so the design team were mid-research then. There is still no exact date, but they are still the next killers to receive an update. It will not be in this next update.

lunar new year event

Taking a quick break from the questions, we have the Lunar New Year event coming out soon. It will run from January 25th - February 8th. Here's the banner that was shared on stream:

Also from the teaser we got, we can see a few things:

Jane Romero is receiving a Lunar New Year cosmetic!

The Lunar Hooks are back!

The Red Envelopes float now- wait what?

questions, continued

@Anniehere - "Do you plan to add a practice mode against bots?"

Who knows? It's frequently requested but nothing is planned- but also not off the table. It's an option eventually just not in the near future.

@Fantasy - "When a Survivor disconnects, can a bot replace them?"

The stance on this is that DBD is an inherently multi-player game, and as good of a tool as they are for teaching, they are not good for actually playing. To that end, they are not looking to replace a Survivor that has disconnected with a bot.

@Tiufal - "Will Year 7 focus more on Game Health than new content?"

The short answer is that there are different teams working on content and Game Health, so there's a lot of Game Health + QOL changes in the pipeline they want to share "later this summer". Stay tuned for more broadcasts to learn more as they reveal it.

@FreckledShrike - "Does BHVR plan to release more patches like 5.3.0?"

For clarification, they do not consider 5.3.0 to be a "game health" related update- to them, game health is moreso about optimisation, QOL, and bugfixes, not balance changes. The response to the large amount of changes was positive, and everyone wants more. The giant patches are, however, difficult to make and maintain due to the required amount of work, and also because of playtesting issues internally. Don't expect these to be common- but hopefully, it won't be the last one.

@Fantasy (again) - "Can Surivor and Hex spawn locations be improved?"

Spawn locations are, actually, quite hard to test. Given the nature of the system, something breaking but only happening one out of every five hundred games is pretty difficult to pick up on and reproduce, so updates towards this system are likely to be very slow (the joys of RNG). Hopefully better hidden Totems will come soon, though.

And for the record, just because they say something is tricky doesn't mean it isn't being worked on, all it means is that it will take some time.

@Cabbage - "Could we receive a new roadmap?"

These are normally dropped around the Anniversary, so keep an eye out around then because that's when new content is revealed.

@Brokenbones - "Can we get an acknowledgement on the cheater issue?"

Cheaters suck! Everyone hates cheaters, but the nature of cheats puts the devs in a bind. Whenever information is provided to the community at large, it goes to the cheaters. If you say you fixed cheating around a certain mechanic, the cheating community will hyperfocus on that one "fixed" thing to break it as soon as possible again.

It's an arms race, so please understand that when they remain silent on cheating, it's often happening to try and mute the information given to the cheaters.

@Epicwarhog69 - "Any chance for a new Anti-Cheat system?"

EAC will eventually get updated to support Steam Deck, as it does not currently support any Linux-based OSs (Operating Systems). There are no plans to add in a new anti-cheat. Side note- it's not just the anti-cheat, but work needs to be done in the game as well to fix existing vulnerabilities.

@ChuckLit - "Any plans to slow down gens, especially in the early game?"

A lot of prototypes were tested internally, and were pretty resoundingly rejected. They weren't fun.

That said, gen speeds and the general slowdown meta are currently in internal conversations and there may be more news in the future.

And no, this doesn't mean that only killers are being looked at- they're investigating the meta on both sides.

@Alex_Segrob - "Will we ever see a visual rework for older mori's?"

This is in the backlog and the OG3 could definitely use an update, but it's not all too high on the priority list.

@Dwight_Fairfield - "Is there anything planned for The Shape?"

At the moment, nothing. There may be smaller changes coming but nothing major at the moment, like with Ghost Face and Legion.

@CakeDuty - "Can you tell us more about the possible changes to facecamping?"

They're still working on it. An internal prototype was recently finished and is being playtested now-ish, but it's still very early and nothing more can really be said. When more concrete information is available, we'll get it.

@hikarun (Japanese) - "Why do you nerf some add-ons for unpopular or weak killers?"

Players at different skill rates perform very differently using different killers. Twins are a great example of this- at low and mid MMR, they're terrible, while at high MMR they're absolute monsters. Some of the highest kill rates in the game come from Twins, so further buffing them doesn't make too much sense, since while it bolsters their performance at low to mid MMR, at high MMR it would make them even stronger, which then wouldn't make sense. Nerfing them may seem cruel, but the add-ons were influencing their ability more than they were comfortable with.

Also it's worth noting they did buff some add-ons this patch, too.

Also, all add-on changes this patch took no programmer bandwith- they were number changes that could be done by the designers themselves, instead of needing to recode something. Things like Alchemist's Ring get brought up a lot, and the reason this wasn't included was because it would need a programming change, which the programmers didn't have the bandwith to deal with. Things are still on the radar.

@setseetat - "Are you planning on implementing any new gamemodes?"

They're currently working on fixing matchmaking, but they're also investigating the impact of splitting the queue. It's uncertain if this would be a permanent or temporary gamemode, and they want to support their players so they can play whatever role they want without having to wait a substantial amount of time. If current matchmaking would be found to brick those who play the regular mode, then no it's not an option. All aspects of the game should be supported.

But yes, there's a chance. "There's always a chance- wink."

@Shroompy - "Can we get a little more info on those solo queue improvements?"

There isn't much to reveal on this, due to internal conversations going on. However, Patrick requests we keep making forum posts about what we'd like to see and why in terms of solo improvements as, contrary to popular belief, they are actually read. So please do, they're super useful, and can help shape the ideas.

Peanits would like to shout out Reddit user u/99thcloud for this potential mockup of what it could look like:

And here's the link to the actual post:

@PoorlyPython9 - "Will Iridescent Shards ever be easier to earn?"

They're giving out Shards as part of login bonuses during events, but as for making them easier to earn through gameplay there are no plans.

@jamillasky - "Can you let us know which maps have the most escapes and kills?"

Maybe.

Once more, please do not use these stats to form any sort of conclusions, as they are severely lacking in a lot of key details.

@Madjura - "What is the Killer/Survivor distribution?"

Internally, this is known as the "Role Ratio"- the ratio between killers and survivors. In a perfect world, this should be 4:1, but the truth is that this fluctuates throughout the day quite often. Time of day, reigon, platform, day of the week, and seasonally all are important factors. So no specific ratio can be given, because by the time Patrick has finished talking (and I've finished writing, and you've read it) it will be wrong.

@theTARNavsky - "Will SBMM ratings be visible?"

Not anytime soon. Having visible MMR ratings will lead to a lot of "toxic elitism", which is not what they want. What they do want is to give more competitively-minded players feedback on their standing within the game more meaningful than the Grade system. But this isn't a high priority right now.

@MikaleaWantsYourBoon - "Are you planning on wrapping up the Realm Beyond before the 6th Anniversary?"

Nope. There's a few maps remaining which need a lot of work to finish off, so there's no plans to have it finished before the anniversary.

Side note: Peanits loves your name.

bloodpoint code

For 100k BP, enter code LIGHTSCAMERABP. What a lovely interruption.

the questions, continued... again

@Mooks - "Are you planning on running more experimental weekends?"

Right now, no- there's nothing that needs to be tested. However, if they do need this to happen, it's likely it'll happen through the Beta tab and not to everyone if it doesn't affect everyone. There just isn't one right now.

@maximo99ac - "Any plans to rework the perks system in the future?"

There are no plans to rework the perk system outside of progression, including choice-restriction or a "points-based system".

@kr1ptos - "Will we ever be able to change the lobby background?"

Short answer: no. Long answer: no, they tie lobbies into events and what's going on to make the game look better and feel more involved even while queuing, so while everyone has their favourite lobbies there's no plans to allow lobby customisation.

@NOCTURN_05 - "Are you looking into doing sole QOL changes for The Twins?"

DISCLAIMER: NOT IN THE NEXT UPDATE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

There was a big flashy banner along the top of the Stream so I hope I emulated that.

Twins come up regualrly in discussion, and they are likely to be changed after the Ghost Face and Legion reworks. Please refer to the banner, this will take a long time, it will not happen soon. It will be done, not anytime soon. Do not get too excited.

@tanner_1230/@jamillasky - "How do you consider what to change/update?"

Specifically in regards to balance, they look at both quantitative (raw numbers) and qualitative (personal experience) data. For quantitative data, they use the stats they track across the games and combine them all together with MMR values. For qualitative data, they interact with (technically) the community for their feedback- like the Forums, for instance. Take the Object of Obsession change- according to the quantitative data, it was deserving of a buff, but according to the qualitative data everyone hated it and wanted it gone. So they take a mixture of both, sometimes prioritising one over the other, until they come to the conclusion.

In terms of what's needed to be tweaked, they generally keep a "hitlist" of what needs to be hit, however this hitlist is constantly changing based on the current state of the game.

@xenomorphfordbd5 - "Have you ever considered revisiting a Chapter?"

A lot of people would like to see a map for the All-Kill chapter. Not a super definitive answer, but it's the usual 'not been ruled out, not confirmed- depends on what we can do in the future'. If they have the bandwith for it, absolutely.

Also if anything was done about this, it'd most likely be a surprise.

@BigChapAlien21 - "Can we get a search bar for perks?"

There's a few changes for the general flow of equipping perks coming out soon- like sooner than the usual soon:tm:- but there are no dates on hand. It should make it easier for all players- PC and console- to equip perks effectively. Hopefully there'll be more to show in the near future.