http://dbd.game/killswitch
The Reason Removing Perk Tiers is NOT a Good Solution to the Grind
The grind growth is not linear. So every time you add a new killer. You have to not only max that killer, but you have to get the content from that killer on all previous killers as well. Let's demonstrate.
If you look at 2016 DBD with just nurse wraith billy trapper, you only have 12 teachables and I think ~10 general perks on all 4 of those characters. Now you have to unlock each one 3 times, so to max out without prestige thats effectively 66 unlocks per character for a total of 264 unlocks.
Lets add one killer to the game. We now have 25 perks and 5 killers. 375 unlocks. Growth of 111 unlocks.
Lets go to before the release of sadako. 90 perks 26 killers. 7020 unlocks.
Lets fast forward to today. 93 perks, 27 killers. 7,533 unlocks.
The most recent expansion increased the number of unlocks by 513. Since those original 4 killers the game was expanded with new killers 23 times and the average rate of growth for unlocks was 327, despite inital additions only adding around ~100 unlocks.
New additions now add over 500 and every addition grows more.
Lets say the devs go through the effort of removing perk tiers. Well our new number of unlocks is 2511.
How many killers will it take to reach 7500 again?
At 48 killers, the number of unlocks will have grown to 7488. 48 killers, 156 perks. 1 unlock each. That is just 5 years of killers from now. And even then 7500 is still FAR too much.
Even 5000 is too much which would occur at 39 killers for a total 5,031 unlocks. That would occur in just 3 years.
Not to mention you'll have to level survivors too although that is significantly less problematic because you don't need to max out EVERY survivor to experience the full game.
So if that isn't a good solution what is? Well your solution would have to address the exponential growth, but what would that look like?
Here is a way I can think of doing this. All characters start with their own teachables at tier 3. Teachable unlocks are now per tier on that character.
At level 5 you get your first teachable at tier 1, at 10 your second at tier 1 at 15 your third at tier 1. At 20 your first at tier 2. That continues until level 45 where you get third teachable at tier 3.
The purpose of unlocking a teachable changes, instead of unlocking the ability for the perk to appear in other character blood webs, it just straight up unlocks that perk on all other characters at the tier you purchased it at.
There are currently 15 generic killer perks and 20 survivor perks, the other 41 levels on your bloodweb that aren't used to unlock a teachable would be used to level these general perks, which takes a total of 45 levels to unlock at 1 perk per bloodweb for a grand total of 54 levels to max a killer. For survivors it will take 69 levels because they have 5 more generic perks. The ability to purchase 2 perks per bloodweb at higher levels is no longer necessary.
Prestige no longer resets perks, only addons/items/offerings.
Comments
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It'll (mostly) only apply to killers, and since majority of players are survivors that might be a reason why they think removing perk tiers will fix problem.
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This is just silly. Just because something doesn't solve the grind forever doesn't make it not a good idea. There doesn't have to be one singular thing that fixes the grind; I know it's revolutionary but you can in fact do more than one thing at a time.
The transition to removing perk tiers should have been started 2 years ago as the first (and not only) step to reduce the grind. Then, two years later, they do something else to reduce the grind.
But this is BHVR, who works at the pace of an ice age glacier. So I'm not surprised that they don't give a damn enough to update the game systems gradually in a way that people actually care about in a timely manner.
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You're operating under the assumption that they can just snap their fingers and remove perk tiers. Removing perk tiers takes work. Why dedicate work to a temporary solution when you could dedicate work to a permanent one? If they just remove perk tiers, 3 years down the line they have to start looking at solutions AGAIN. and spend MORE time working on solving something they could have already solved permanently 3 years prior and now a problem that has eaten work time three times in the past is rearing is ugly head again to hog more time that COULD have been spent doing something else like fixing bugs, adding new content, optimizing the game, or increasing QoL and accessibility.
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Now do the math and tell me what the grind level would be in 5 years if they DO NOT remove perk tiers.
People use the argument of "it'll just grow back to what we have today". Then tell me, what will it grow to if we don't remove perk tiers?
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If they spend time on a permanant solution instead of a temporary one, which is what the devs have stated they are doing, it won't EVER grow back to the monster it is today
In fact with my hypotethical solution the grind instantly be reduced to ~1500. And it would take 5 years for the grind to grow by 1000 unlocks. The grind would take 15-20 years to reach concerning levels at which point the game is probably going to be long dead for newer and better things
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Why not use same time to ACTUALLY fix problems instead of this band-aid?
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I just think they need to separate them from the add-ons. There are times I choose an add-on over a perk and regret it because it doesn't come back for another 20 tries. Same with perk upgrades.
I really hope that's the direction they are going in.
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It's better than doing nothing for years, I would be extremely surprised if they do reduce grind in 2022.
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Well then why didn't they start talking about a permanent solution years ago instead of just now? Because the grind was still atrocious back then too. But they only only started making fixing it a priority now, instead of the entire time we've needed it. So if they only care about making a permanent solution now, they should have made a temporary one earlier.
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They should have made permanent one earlier.
kekw
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No they should have implemented a permenant solution earlier, implementing temporary band aid fixes was never the way to go about it. I literally never claimed that the devs have been doing a good job of managing the issue in the past, only that the communities go to "solution" to the problem is a poor one.
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Removing two thirds of the grind might not be a solution, but no amount of arguing will prove that it won't AT LEAST be a massive improvement, if not even a necessary stop.
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Yes but why put in the work required to do that if it doesn't solve the problem, when they could put they could put the same resources it took to put a band aid on into stitching the wound closed for good. The bandaid will rip off eventually and eventually you put so many band aids on it that the work of just stitching the wound up would have been less work than constantly slapping band aids on it over and over again.
That's assuming as well that permanant solution is actually more work than a temporary one. In reality, it may be roughly the same amount of work to solve the issue temporarily as it is to permanently in which case there is literally zero reason to use the temporary solution.
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Simple: The first step to healing an injury is to stop the bleeding.
Healing such major issue will take time and trying to forcibly cure it all at once has had historically....Less then ideal results for a lot of developers who tried.
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the proverbial bleed does not need to be stopped if it won't be lethal and can just have the permanent solution applied ASAP.
Even if you believe the proverbial bleed is proverbially lethal, removing perk tiers isn't even a good "band-aid" solution. Removing perk tiers would require a lot of work. If you truly wanted a temporary band-aid that could be implemented quickly the better thing would be to remove the bloodpoint cap and inflate bloodpoint earnings by 2-4x until a better solution can be implemented.
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Removing the perk tiers doesn't solve the grind long-term. But it does solve it in the short-term, and we need it now.
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Removing perk tiers can't just be "done now" the devs have literally said on the Q&A that removing perk tiers is a lot of effort that could be better spent ACTUALLY fixing the problem.
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Remove perk tiers, don't lose new players because of grind, create good time for real solution. But ofcourse BHVR won't do this.
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Once again, another person assuming that it is easier to remove perk tiers as a band aid fix. The devs have publically stated, removing perk tiers is not an easy fix. It would not be a small amount of work to do. If you want a band aid, ask them to inflate bloodpoints earnings. Removing perk tiers is neither a good temporary solution NOR a good permanent one.
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It's really weird how OP is really against removing perk tiers when it'll only benefit the players.
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Where's all this "effort" talk coming from? The devs haven't put effort into their game since its inception. And it probably doesn't take as much effort as you or they are implying to remove the 2 weaker versions of the perks, and keep the best ones. Until they give us an alternative solution and implement, this is still the best choice.
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Oh yeah, now I realized to tell you this. No, it's not this "humongous" amount of work to remove perk tiers.
If you are a multi millionaire company, with one of the most played games out there as your product, you are more than capable of quickly getting rid of perk tiers. With the team they have, I can't imagine it would take more than a day or few more.
The issue is that they don't want to do it, because it's money and time spent on something that won't directly generate profit. Thus, BHVR uses this ######### argument of "it would take too much work".
No, it's not as easy as just pressing delete, but it's not difficult either for the size their team has.
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The devs wasting their time does not benefit players. They work slowly enough as is.
To quote Peanits "It would be a lot more work to remove the perk tiers than just deleting them, and so if we're gonna spend a bunch of time on the solution, we'd rather spend that time on a permanent solution, not something that's only going to be effective for a little while" That heavily implies that the amount of work required to remove perk tiers is not significantly less than a permanent solution.
Source: https://youtu.be/wIocxDbQ-9g?t=1782
29:48 if the link fails to take you there automatically
If you want a stop-gap measure until that occurs, ask for inflated bloodpoint gains.
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So your argument is "no the devs are wrong, they were lying either out of malice or incompetence when they openly told us it wasn't worth the work required to remove perk tiers relative to the amount of work required to implement a permanent solution"
If you think the devs are literally just lying to you or are so completely and udderly incompetent that they cannot possibly understand the amount of work it requires to implement a new design, is there even a point in arguing about whats better in the first place? We literally only have the information they've given us and anything else is complete speculation that's not worth entertaining.
Should they have acted sooner? Yes, but I never claimed otherwise.
Do the devs work at a snails pace? Yes, but I never claimed otherwise.
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Yes, the devs are wrong. Stuff like removing perk tiers is not difficult for a company the size of behaviour.
The only issue is that behaviour is VERY lazy. Any other game I play constantly gets changes to numbers and the META is always shifting.
Dbd, on the other hand, barely gets any change ever and we have to wait 10 years for those. If they wanted to remove perk tiers, they would be gone by next Saturday. But they don't want to, because they are too lazy.
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There is absolutely zero evidence for anything you just posted other than DBDs slow rate of change (which is entirely beside the point). Everything else was pure speculation, assumption, or opinion.
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That takes as much time as actually healing an injury.
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It’s not just a solution to the grind though. It’s also the removal of arbitrary limitations when it comes to perk design. Every perk currently has to has some kind of modifier with its tiers, a substantial amount of which are negligible.
They could just make a perk:
Instantly slam a totem into the ground as killer.
And that’s all. No cooldowns, no “takes 3/4/5 seconds to do so”. It just does a thing.
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The bloodweb and perk tiers themselves have been reworked multiple times with some very extensive and substsntial change. And it was done without much fuss and when they were a much smaller company.
All their arguments about how 'much work' it would require to remove tiers are just meant to be non-committal about any changes at all.
But they definitely have the capability to do it.
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That's probably the reason why they are working at actual issue, aka "substantial change to blood web".
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It's really worrying that removing perk tiers might actually be a lot of work. If the game is properly coded, then everything should be compartmentalized and removing perk tiers should be an annoyance rather than a large undertaking. This shouldn't be difficult to do. It shouldn't be time consuming to do. If it is, then the devs need to really put more resources into rewriting their code and getting it optimized.
Coding is as much of an art as design is. BHVR needs to put some love into their code and hire coders, people who can read DbD's spaghetti and weave it into Shakespeare.
And perk tiers should be removed. They're unnecessary bloat. They add nothing to the game. It's not like upgrading weapons or advancing through a skill tree where it can feel rewarding; getting perks to tier 3 is a chore. It does not make the player experience better.
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Excuse me, but how exactly is removing perk tiers this tedious job for behaviour?
Sure, I don't say it's just pressing delete, but it also can't be such a time consuming process. It's not like behaviour has 3 employees and is a small company. If they want to remove perk tiers, they can do it.
And no, the fact that behaviour is slow isn't besides the point. It's exactly the point i'm making: If removing perk tiers is what they wanted, they would be long gone. If they really wanted to fix the grind, they would have it fixed by now.
They are just too comfortable with the lack of competition so they don't go all in to make substantial changes to improve the game.
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Okay but if you don't believe what the devlopers say there is no point in giving them feedback in the first place. Either you believe they do it out of malice in which case they actively go against the community desire in the quest to acquire infinite money, in which case there is no point in requesting it in the first place since they dont care about what you think.
or you believe they are wrong because of incompetence in which case there is no point in telling them that this is better because you do not have the means to prove it.
I may not have the means to prove that you're wrong, but you certainly don't have the means to prove that you are correct either.
Additionally "perk tiers have been reworked multiple times" When? When they changed perks rarities to all be the same or made perks no ultra rare? I doubt those changes have anywhere near the same scope. As for the bloodweb changes. I assume you mean when they increased the number of perks able to be purchased from 1 to 2. We have no idea how long that change took them, or what the scope of the project behind the change was.
I somewhat agree with your sentiment here, I prefer not speculate on something I don't know a lot about, but they certainly do make changes too slowly.
It's entirely possible that the bloodweb and progression system was not built for perks to only have 1 tier, and in order for them to make it work that way they would have to either A) use hacky code or B) rewrite the system from the ground up. I prefer not to speculate though. Unless BHVR came and explained straight from the horses mouth why it is apparently so much work I won't assume the reason.
The reason the speed they work is unimportant is because if we're going to say "if they wanted to get rid of perk tiers they could have done so by now" we could also say "if they wanted to implement a permanant fix they would have done so by now" The "just work faster" argument applies to both scenarios. It's irrelevant. Yes BHVR is slow, everyone knows.
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I absolutely agree that probably the most difficult part of removing perk tiers is adding bloodweb support.
But considering they have reworked bloodwebs before, can it REALLY be that difficult to do so?
You see, there is no permanent solution. At some point, the grind will always grow back to what it was. All these solutions do is cut back the current amount if grind and reduce the "maximum" amount of grind by a margin. But then again, the maximum is infinite either way, it's just that the infinite without perk tiers is 3 times smaller.
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No it's not a good change because supposedly the amount of work removing perk tiers would take to implement relative to a functionally permanent solution is not worth it, as the developers have led us to believe. See my earlier reply with a quite from peanits and it's source for more on that. Also I don't think the game living that long is unlikely. Other live service games have done it, see league of legends which is now 13 years old still going strong. I can't remember where I heard this, I think it was on a McLean stream back when he was still a dev, but the devs have over 20 killer concepts drafted (but not necessarily in development) at any give time. Clearly BHVR believes the game will last long enough that a much longer term solution is worth spending time on.
Yes EVENTUALLY the game will grow to a point where it gets bad again but ideally a permanent solution will make that take so long that the game will either A) be dead by then or B) have a problem with excessive content, something that live service games do have to deal with. Look at destiny 2 for an example of this, Bungie introduced sunsetting and the destiny content vault as a way of retiring older content to make sure the game stays maintainable. By the time the grind became a problem again with a solution like the hypothetical one I suggested, the game would have so much content that BHVR would almost certainly have to start considering changes to how they approach maintaining the game.
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If we say that it would take the same amount of characters we now have for the grind to grow back by removing perk tiers, then something like 95 characters may be enough for us to consider that there is too much content.
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What if perks were unlockable via a store which could be purchased by a lot of bloodpoints. Atleaet you can buy the ones you actually want which would smash the grind completely.
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Missed your reply earlier, yes that is a limitation of the current system I can agree with you on that much but they can work around it by having minor arbitrary side effects or mostly irrelevant differences between levels like CoHs whole 10% differnce from tier 1 to tier 3, or undyings oh so meaningful aura read, or the difference in the haste value of devour hope. It is one minor benefit of removing perk tiers though, the question of whether that outweighs the value of reworking the perk system in a more meaningful way, I could not say for sure, but I doubt it.
Maybe, I don't really care how they fix it. I'm just trying to help people understand why the reason behind BHVRs decision might just logically be a smart choice to the best of my ability.
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Totally agree. For the devs to reject this because “it’s not a long-term solution” is ridiculous. Nobody can argue that eliminating perk tiers would not help reduce the grind. I also find it hard to believe that it would be difficult to implement as they are claiming. But I’ll hold off judgment until I see what solutions they’ve come up with for grind reduction - maybe the changes will be even better than removing perk tiers.
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We would be back at the current bad state in 5 years and we would have ~2-3 years with reasonable grind.
They can create a better fix during these 3 years. Or maybe the game won't even exist in 3 years. Or maybe I will not even play this game anymore so I won't care.
Btw: here is my analysis of the same topic:
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They said removing perk tiers is not as simple as selecting them and hitting the delete button. But they didn't say that it is actually difficult.
Simple band-aid fix:
Keep perk tiers internally. Change bloodweb code so that it offers you to buy the tier3 perk immediately (skip tier1 and tier2). Run a query to update the player database so that all the owned perks are on tier3. Fixed!
Now everyone is happy and devs have 3 years to come up with their great long-term solution.
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Right now, it takes 5-6 bloodwebs to add new teachables to an already maxed out character. Removing tiers would be 2 webs. 1st web for 2 perks and 1 more for the remaining.
3 tier: 300k to 350k
1 tier: <100k
With the latest chapter, it takes an estimated 18,190,000 bp to max a previously maxed out roster of killers. If you're someone that max out all survivors, that would be 19,802,000bp for the survivor side. That's 37,992,000bp just for this one chapter. Because of the exponential growth, next chapter will be 18,658,000 (killer) and 20,322,000 (survivor). An increase of 468,000bp and 520,000bp respectively.
If perk tiers were removed this chapter, these numbers would be 13,354,000bp for killer and 14,394,000bp for survivor, 27,748,000bp total. The next chapter would increase this by 312,000bp and 364,000bp respectively.
If perk tiers were remove, in order for us to reach the level of grind of this chapter would be an additional 15 more chapters, assuming 1 killer and 1 survivor per chapter. That's 3.75 years of content with 4 chapters per year model.
Lets take that increase of 15 chapters and see where we'll be if nothing is done now. 42 killers and 45 survivors:
With only 1 tier per perk the grind to max out a previously maxed out roster would be 18,398,000bp killer and 19,490,000bp survivor.
With our current 3 tier system, 25,574,000bp killer and 27,238,000bp survivor. A 7,176,000bp and 7,748,000bp difference between the two models.
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Alright so even if we are willing to give them that removing perk tiers is not feasable. Ok... fine... what about just doubling all BP gains from everything? Or slashing the cost of everything in the bloodweb by half? Those should be easy. Hell, assuming things are structured even remotely sensibly... you could do that second thing with 1 SQL statement.
"UPDATE tBloodWebNodes SET Cost = Cost / 2;"
Hell, even just putting us in a Blood Hunt until they get a permanent solution in place could happen.
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When applying the bandage takes almost as long as a permanent solution then it’s pointless to do the bandage first.
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Your video incorrectly assumes the grind only started recently. In fact people have complained about grind in DbD at least as far back as 2019 if not earlier. So it’s not even obvious that reducing the total number of perks to 1/3 would “reduce the grind to acceptable levels”, it could easily be that the grind is still unacceptable at that level and they’ll have wasted time on that short term “fix” for nothing.
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They very much implied that it is not a fast or easy change. "if we're gonna spend a bunch of time on the solution, we'd rather spend that time on a permanent solution" definitely implies such is the case anyways, and without access to the source code there is no real way to prove whether that's the case or not, so I really have no choice accept to take the devs at face value.
That could be nice as a bit of quick and dirty temporary fix for sure and unlike removing perk tiers is almost certainly very little work (just turn on blood hunt). Definately not the best permanant solution though as it dramatically increases item/addon/offering availability so you'll see more strong stuff like MD rings, alch rings, syringes, styptics, map offerings and the likes.
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As a software engineer, I disagree - just because something is simple on paper doesn't mean the execution of it is. I've had many tasks to do something that on paper seemed simple but ended up taking months. It depends so heavily on a multitude of factors anmd doesn't even matter how optimized your code is - if you have code that is optimized to do things a specific way changing that to be done a different way can be time consuming. Truthfully, the only people who know the code base are the devs - we have no insight really on how things are coded other than rumors of spaghetti code, and I have no reason to believe the devs are lying about effort to take do something as well. Anything anyone other of what a dev says is just speculation.
I hate this argument because DBD is not the only thing BHVR makes. Not all 850 are employees that work on DBD - there is hr, accounting/payroll, executives, project managers, graphic artists, custodians/maintenance, pr, qa - none of which actually do dev work. Do we have actually insight on how big the actual dev team is - meaning - per team on dbd (bug fix team, new content team, whatever teams they may have) - how many are actually developers working on DBD at this very moment? I don't think we actually do.
I've worked at startups, mid size companies and enterprise level teams - The highest amount of people on a team is usually about 3-9. My current team at a 10k employee company only has 5 software engineers, including myself, that work a large project with another team with similar sizes.
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You can blindly accept whatever they tell you. I prefer to have some critical thinking and decide on my own what makes or what doesn't make sense.
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My video disproves the dev's statements:
- exponential grind growth (video: it is just quadratic)
- even without tiers we would reach the current levels of grind very quickly (video: we would reach it in five years)
- it is difficult to remove tiers (video: it should not be)
Yes, maybe even 1/3 grind is too much, but it is a lot better than what we have currently. They should just quickly implement this band aid fix of removing perk tiers and then they can think and work on their awesome rework for a year.
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Fair enough. I'm biased because I play on console and it runs so poorly, it's extremely frustrating. I play Battlefront II, Elden Ring, and a bunch of other games that run beautifully on the same system. DbD's code was originally written using Blueprint, and after the game kept growing and growing they finally started converting it over to an Object-Oriented language (I can't remember if they said C or C++ or something else). BHVR job listings that people have linked to highly suggest BHVR prioritizes creatives and neglects coding, but I may read into it incorrectly simply because I play on console and I see this game in the worst possible light. I can't help but have no faith in BHVR when they put getting more players and more profit ahead of releasing a decently working product. The game had no business being released on PS4, Xbox, and Switch, especially not when they charge money for it.
So, my unhappiness with their product probably clouds my vision sometimes, but removing perk tiers is still something they should put the effort into doing because, like I said, it only detracts from the player experience. Anything they can do to make the game more fun and decrease player frustration would be appreciated by the majority of the playerbase.
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