All the grind reduction rants are missing the point
Hello everyone,
there are so many discussion about the grind reduction going on at the moment, were people are showing off their math skills and how bad things will become under the new system or how players who only main one character get hit hard etc. But to me all this discussions seem to be missing the point of the new system.
All this calculations seem to tackle the problem binary, ie "you got not a single perk unlocked" vs "you got all perks unlocked" and "this used to cost this-and-this-much, now it costs you a whopping this-and-this-much!!11".
But you guys are totally ignoring the middle part, ie the "getting to the end" journey. Under the old system you always had to take the hard choice "do I prestige this character for the bloody cosmetics or do I keep all the 65 perks I got unlocked so far?" and most often it just wasn't worth it. Heck, a lot of characters languished at the P0-Lvl 40 mark just to unlock their teachables.
I remember how I read a guide back in the days, recommending to lvl Claudette up first, as her Self Heal was especially useful to soloQ players and those starting out, but once I got her to lvl 40 I was quite bummed that it only unlocked that perk on everyones bloodweb. I leveled Nancy to lvl 20 and never got it Self Heal and that felt quite unfun.
Now with the new system, yeah, you are still paying a lot of blood points for everything, but you got so much control over the way you want to develop your survivor game. Each time you prestige a character now, you get a meaningful improvement to your survivor/killer roster, with you getting an ever expanding baseline for everyone, letting you actively chose what to improve. The total might be higher, the total might be much less then the 75% grind reduction, how ever you cut it, but it is so much more fun and meaningful to progress any character now, and that is awesome.
Also, don't gloss over the fact that you don't lose anything on prestiging any character now. Before, prestiging was a painful process, only done for the bragging rights, now its just part of leveling up. Yeah, you restart at lvl 1 Bloodwebs, but thats the same with your account level and blood shards resetting, its not cool, but just part of the game. Still, if this system had been there from the start I would have had much more fun leveling up my characters and probably had a plan whom to prestige first etc.
So, don't just look at the complete set, also take the journey along the way into account, leveling up is now (will be soon) much more fun and meaningful then it ever was, and thats a big plus.
Caveat: its still sad that veterans only got the most lazy compensation and thumbs up for their work, but still, I welcome the change wholeheartedly.
Comments
-
It will probably be a nice grind reduction for those of us who have a lot of perks on several characters or who have prestiged a lot. They just need to do something for the newest players. Giving them a certain amount of free shrine unlocks could help out some.
1 -
Agreed. New players aren't even that badly affected, or honestly affected at all. They already don't have all characters and already don't have reason to want all perks, they'll want specific perks- and the control they'll have towards getting those perks has increased, that's a grind reduction.
4 -
New players will have it easier than before, since perks are automatically given to everyone at P1. Once you P1 the people whose perks you want, you have the perks. No grinding levels to "find" the perks you want first in a blood web. You have them, the grind is over.
3 -
Personally I’m getting a big windfall from this update. I already was Prestiging all my characters to level 1 or 2 even before they announced the change so when the patch hits all my characters will instantly get all their missing perks at level 1 or 2. 🙂
I’m weird though in that I was actually Prestiging before this.
1 -
I think you are missing the point on what most people are arguing about though.
It now costs more BP to farm add-ons, Will cost more to farm perks (Unless you already have everyone bumped to p3) and it will cost more, in general, to do most things in the game. And the question is why? let me ask you this what are the pros and cons of giving people more BP or lowering the grind by adjusting the cost of nodes in a blood web?
Pros:
Easier for new players to get into the game.
It feels more rewarding in a match even if it does not go your way (Camped, tunneled, go against a swf that destroys you)
Opens up build diversity by allowing you to more easily farm add-ons and perks.
This one is a bit iffy but could open up players to play other roles. Right now I pretty much never play survivor because I need to horde all my BP into my killers as a newer player to unlock things. however, if it was far easier to unlock those things and I didn't feel like I needed to do that I would be more willing to dump BP into a random survivor to mess around with it.
Ontop of I am sure many more things I am not thinking of.
Cons:
The only can I can think of is BHVR is afraid without the grind they will lose player retention meaning players will go "Well I unlocked everything so guess I'm done with this game" However I would argue a large part of that player base would quit well before finishing said grind or even they never-ending prestige update would then counter that since they have 100 levels to grind through to unlock cosmetics and other rewards.
However, if anyone else can think of any real negative impact on the game please by all means feel free to inform me.
1 -
I see a lot of people saying "well it's a big grind reduction for people that have already p3'd everyone. It is not.
I have a spreadsheet and between the 40 + characters I have p3 all perks and the 8 characters I have p3'd and all universal perks (plus plenty of others). I'm already at a 93 percent rate in terms of maxing everyone out anyway.
So wow, they've decreased the grind for me by less than 7 percent. Neat.
In fairness, at least future characters will be pretty much maxed out so that's nice.
1 -
well clearly if you have everything unlocked no amount of grind reduction is gonna benefit you. however, it's pretty much impossible to argue who this grind reduction benefits more.
Is it someone who just starts today or someone who already has a bunch of things leveled up and at p3 because as you stated at that point you now have everything unlocked on that new character as soon as they release and only need to worry about leveling the new character to p3 to unlock their perks on everyone else.
3 -
I'm no math wizard but even if you p3'd everyone and left them at no perks and just stopped there it would not be a 75 percent decrease in the grind.
0 -
What do you mean? You have to put extra 550k bp to get them to prestige 1 instead of level 40. In exchange you get their perks at tier 1. Does not seem worth it especially if you only want those perks to your main since you still have to find those missing tiers with bloodweb RNG.
1 -
What about add-ons, items, and offerings? The new system, far as I can tell, makes the grind for those things WORSE.
6 -
it would reduce the grind for those players because you would not need to cycle blood webs on those p3 characters to buy all the perks. The new system does indeed save BP in those occasions. Much like now when a new killer comes out and you p3 your other 23 killers or whatever it is now all have the t3 perk meaning you don't need to spend tons of BP cycling blood web to get them on all toons.
So yes this new system does "reduce the grind" as I have been saying but only after you are done with the grind, you still need to p3 all your toons in order to gain the full benefit from this.
A new player gets 0 benefits from this new system as you don't start seeing them till you p3 multiple other characters to start spreading around perks so once again until you put 500+ hours into the game this new system is pointless and only makes the grind longer.
0 -
I haven't seen any mention of BP prices changing for the bloodweb items, so I'm curious where the BP cost of items was mentioned to have increased.
0 -
The cost was not raised directly however before if say you wanted to just farm add-ons you could leave your character at 50.
At lvl 50 it cost about 50k bp to cycle the web to a new one. so you could keep dumping 50k bp and get a bunch of add-ons and offerings including purple and iri ones.
With the new system, you are forced to prestige so now you hit 50, spend 50k bp to fill the web, 50k bp the prestige then in order to start seeing purple and iri add ons again you need to spend 200-300k bp to get into the higher levels for them to spawn.
So now you might end up needing to spend 200k bp to get a purple addon when before you could spend 50k
So yes the price of the addons did not go up but the cost to see them was raised by a large amount.
2 -
Even at p3 no perks, it's still not a grind reduction of 75 percent.
0 -
It is for the next killer/survivor that they release.
1 -
Ok. Maybe I misunderstood, but did they specifically say it reduces the grind on new characters or just that it reduces the grind in general? Because there is a huge difference between those two statements.
0 -
I agree with you however I still feel they need to make the initial startup for new players easier. Also bloodwebs need to be more meaningful instead of being full of stuff you likely will never use. What they've done is a great start - With the small exception of paying 50k to reset the bloodweb to prestige without having the option to keep acquiring stuff. I have no idea what their mindset was with that specific change. Everything else is looking great and is good for people who commit to the game long term.
However - Starting out I feel that the best way to address the grind for newer players is making bloodwebs more meaningful. Basically - Change rarities of stuff that's actually used to be what populates the bloodweb and get rid of arbitrary stuff that no one ever uses or can never use.
50% / 75% Bloodpoint offerings for specific categories? Most of the time you won't be able to fully utilize these and in my opinion they should just remove them.
Map offerings? They should only be 1-2 nodes max per bloodweb ideally just on a mystery box thing.
Mystery Boxes in general? There should be a reason to go for these - These should give multiple items at once. Right now these are just filler on bloodwebs and no real reason to go for them most of the time.
Sacrificial Ward Offerings? They should be uncommon at most and if they don't get use should be refunded for starters.
2 -
Part of the reason the grind is so out of control on live servers is because it increases significantly with every new character that's released. When talking about the grind, getting perks from new characters back on every old character is one of the biggest facets of it, so any grind reduction is necessarily going to be focused partially on that.
So, honestly, there isn't a huge difference between those two statements. They are still separate things, but the grind was reduced no matter what way you slice it; the 75% number specifically is probably attributed to how the grind no longer scales uncontrollably with new characters, but the rest of the grind was reduced too. Just not by quite as much.
1 -
If you're a new player the grind has not been. Reduced by 75 percent on the whole.
If you're a player like me that has things almost grinded through anyway, it's nowhere near a reduction of 75 percent on the whole.
If you're somewhere in-between it's also not a reduction of 75 percent.
That's my issue. Be transparent and specific on this grind reduction number, because right now it's not even close to 75 percent.
0 -
If the overall grind was reduced by 75%, and they said the grind was reduced by 75%, that's as accurate and honest as you can expect. I don't see why they'd need to couch everything they say by clarifying needlessly when you can just look at what else they said to determine what specifically they mean.
Bit of a weird thing to get hung up on, in my opinion. The grind was reduced by a moderate amount for everyone (with the exception of people who insist on only playing one survivor, potentially) and reduced by a huge amount when it comes to how much it increases per new chapter, so why does it matter exactly how they phrased the short version when we have all the details anyway?
3 -
It matters because it's inaccurate. At best they're simply wrong and accidentally misleading people. At worst they know they're full of it and are outright lying about it.
Regardless, they should probably explain their math at this point. It's bad business at this point not to.
3 -
Is it, though?
Considering they're referring to the overall grind, I think the burden of proof is on the people who say that it's inaccurate to show why. All I've really seen are people focusing on specific examples to show how the grind hasn't been lessened, like new players (while wildly misrepresenting what the new player experience is like for some reason) or people who only play one character. Heck, some people even start talking about addons instead of the perk grind.
For the record, I'm no good at numbers and haven't looked into it myself, but considering that (almost) everyone got helped a little bit and the ongoing grind was helped massively, I don't have any real reason to question that specific number.
2 -
I dunno about inaccurate I think the biggest issue with it is it being misleading.
It's a 75% reduction in a very specific case, For everyone else, it's non-existent or far less.
When people heard they were removing the BP perks cause they were not needed anymore since they were reducing the grind a lot of people figured they were simply reducing the grind via bumping BP earned baseline by a large amount or even cutting the cost of nodes down in the tree by a large amount.
Either of these things would have gone over far better than what we got, why? Cause these changes benefit literally everyone.
New, old, casual, hardcore. Getting way more BP would not be seen as a bad thing by anyone. What would be seen as a bad thing is being told "hey we understand the grind blows, we get it so what we are gonna do is remove avenues you have to help with this while implementing something that does not really help you at all."
new players get the hardest shaft with this change it does nothing but hinder anyone who is new making the already unbearable grind even worse.
This game requires a player to put in nearly 300 hours just to unlock the ability to earn the base mechanics to play the game.
And this is putting the game heavily in its own favor by doing math involving you earning near max BP and having insanely short match times. an actual new player is going to take far longer.
Think about that name one other game that has its core mechanics locked behind a time wall that is that large? How well do you think things like MMOs and stuff would go over if you had to invest hundreds of hours into it just to unlock the ability to start using the talent tree.
Also what is the wildly misrepresented new player experience?
1 -
But it's not a very specific case, it's overall. As in, involving all cases.
Also, I think you're wildly overstating how important having specific perks are. For killer it's a little more justifiable, but for survivor the generic perk pool and one of the base character's teachables are more than enough to be playing the game, those are the core mechanics. You don't need any specific teachables on the survivor side at all, period, and even on the killer end you'd be mostly okay now that Jolt is a general perk.
I'm not saying I'm against more methods of earning BP or having costs slashed, but what we have is still a pretty significant grind reduction.
1 -
Ok but just because you don't need or want them does not mean other people won't want them. and if the perks are so meh and not needed why are they locked behind a grind? Why don't you just get them when you buy the character.
I see lots of weird arguments about this stuff that just seems to counter themselves. "I don't use them so why does anyone else need or want them." or "they are crap so don't even bother getting them" what if I wanna play a weird build or have a play style that's not the "Meta" what if I just like trying out and messing with everything to see what I do like. maybe my play style fits a perk better than yours.
again I ask why? Why are they locked behind 300+ hours of gameplay grind?
Also, it is a very specific case again the only people this helps is people that have most the stuff unlocked already. if you are someone who has all the killers at p1 well you now have the p1 perk on all killers but you still need to either farm t2 and t3 or grind every killer to t3 to fully benefit from this perk. ya sure its going to alleviate some of the grinds but its a very small amount and that's the issue.
If you were told by an electric company "Hey switch to us and we will save you 75% on your bill" then you swap to them and get your bill see it even higher than before but there is a laundry list of clauses and conditions that must be met in order to see some form of cost reduction not even the full 75% would you shrug your shoulders and go "Oh well I mean I guess this helps some people out and it could help me out to one day."
1 -
To tackle your points separately:
1: At no point did I say there was no reason to want them. You called them core mechanics, and I was reminding you that they are not core mechanics at all, they are expressly optional. You don't need them to start playing, which was another thing you suggested was necessary. The grind for wanting them got shorter anyway; you have far more control over getting tier 1, and if you're prestiging your main, getting tiers 2 and 3 got much easier.
2: As long as my electricity bill was in fact 75% lower, I wouldn't care where those savings were incurred. That's the actual analogy here; it's like your electricity company saying your bill will be 75% lower and then you pointing to a specific use of your electricity that went up slightly instead of focusing on the actual final number. As I said above, it is the overall grind, for everyone, that was reduced.
0 -
So
A) they are a core mechanic to the game. just because you can do things without them does not mean its not a core mechanic to the game. You could do things in a MMO or RPG like lvl up and run things with no equipment on or talent points spent however its hard to argue using those things would make your gameplay far better.
B) my point was you were told you were saving 75% but you ended up spending more and would only save possibly some money if you met very specific conditions. much like a new player is not having their grind reduced at all until they get hundreds of hours put into the game.
I am very confused on why people are so oddly against this stuff or defending it. like, let's be honest here if tomorrow BHVR went
"hey guys we thought about it and we are gonna change the system starting with the next patch if you purchase a killer or survivor all their t3 perks get unlocked across the board. you don't need to level them up or anything like that and leveling/prestige from this point forward will purely be for the add-on, offering, and cosmetic farming. this change is also retroactive so any killers or survivors you own will also be sharing their perks with your roster."
Do you think the community would be up in arms setting fires to buildings yelling how crap of a change this is or why its a terrible choice and quit the game?
Or do you think people would be fine with it and it even helps/encourage new players to try out the game because they can play with all the toys they paid for without grinding for 500 hours.
0 -
Maybe this is a difference in definition but I do not consider literally every aspect of a game to be part of that game's "core mechanics". Perks, in general, are core mechanics, but specific perks are not, and no player has to farm for days to get all the perks available before they can play the game, that's a very silly premise for an argument. If you go into a trial with four generic perks, you are going to experience all of the game's core mechanics, because anything that requires grinding for isn't a core mechanic, it's a progression of the core mechanics.
As for your second point, yes, I understand that was your point. I'm reminding you that the overall grind was reduced, for almost all players. It was reduced moderately for the average player, a lot for veteran players, and yes, a noticeable amount for new players as well. New players aren't going to be gunning for every perk right off the bat, and getting the guarantee of unlocking the perks they want to toy with instead of pouring bloodpoints into a character to then get the chance to unlock that perk an unknown number of bloodwebs down the line is an improvement. They're new, so they won't care as much about getting a huge number of perks all at tier 3, they'll be playing with what they have available, and what they have available has been steadily increasing over the past year and a bit.
As for your last example, honestly, while I wouldn't start ranting and raving, I would consider that a questionable choice. A little bit of grind is good, it gives people something concrete to work towards, so I don't know that it'd be a good idea to just remove the grind entirely. Still, as I've said above, I'm still in favour of giving players more BP/making their BP more valuable by reducing node costs, I just don't think that's required for this to be considered a grind reduction.
0 -
But it's not overall. Overall reduction of 75% would be something like making earining BP 4x faster or cutting bloodweb costs to 1/4. Saying it's 75% reduction is disingenuous if it only applies to one very speific case which hardly anyone is going for.
0 -
But that's just levelling, though?
Sure, that would affect the grind as you do need to level to get perks, but how would that tackle new chapters increasing the grind exponentially? How would it tackle the retroactive grind after unlocking teachables? All it achieves is resetting the problem for a bit, with a change like that - on its own and without this new system too - the grind gets right back to its current state after a little while.
Like, getting perks unlocked across multiple characters is "the grind". It's the thing that's needed fixing, so I think it's kinda weird to consider wanting to get perks unlocked across multiple characters "one specific case" in this context.
0 -
Again though you cant use your preference as what a new player would want.
If you want an example I am a new player I started playing right around the 6th-anniversary event.
would I enjoy having every perk to use and play with different build variations? Yes I very much would so.
Does knowing I need to grind for 300+ hours put a damper on my fun cause I'm dumping millions of BP into killers and things I do not like and have no intention of playing make things far more annoying then they need to be in the game. Yes very much so.
And yes I know there are probably new players out there who would give two shits about whats a god perk or not and just enjoy running around doing random things and good for them. hows does massively boosting the BP gain or lowering the BP cost across the board harm either of these players?
Does the current change harm players? yes, yes it does. Is it a massive blow that will add thousands of hours to their playtime? no not at all considering they would need to buy bubba dn get him up to 40 then get t3 bbq on the main killer they wanna play before they even seen the benefit. however after that yes this is a large blow to a new player. The grind in this game in general is a large blow to new players.
lets even say by your own logic. Someone new start playing they go online they look up a beginners guide. "Well, I hear this nurse killer is the best I am gonna try her out."
they go on the Googles type in dead by daylight builds to get a website that pops up. They search beginner builds and see something like this.
Ok. so lets see I want this perk, that perk and that perk. they need 3 other killers perk and a random global perk.
In order to play this build, this player will need. and I know you said you are bad at math so I will type it all out.
If we take the best-case scenario.
a player earns 30k BP every match at 1,600,000ish BP to p1 (we are saying the person is being as stingy as possible to lvl and not going for the good stuff)
Let us say their matches are 10 min each and they have 0 q time and 0 load times.
we are giving the game every advantage here. obviously, you won't get 30k each match, your matches might be far longer than 10 min and you will have a q time but we are playing really nice this is also a new player so they don't have stacks of offerings or any events or anything going on when they start.
1,600,000 / 30,000 = about 54 matches they need to play to p1 each killer.
54*10=533 min of game time
533/60=8.8 hours per killer
So in order to try out this build, this player will need to play the game for 36 hours and that's just to earn t1 of all the perks they then need to decide do I do this another 2 times adding another 54 hours to that (They p3 the 3 killers but only need to p1 nurse) so ((9x9)+9)=90. so with the new system, this player would have to play the game for 90 hours just to try this build-out.
Now I am sure you are thinking "But tensu this guy can use whatever perks he wants while earning those perks." And you are absolutely correct however if he has a terrible time and is getting stomped on in matches do you think the average player is gonna go
"Well Its gonna get better when I unlock these perks and improve myself"
Or are they gonna go
"This game's ######### it's not my fault it's cause I need these good perks, I can't do anything vs these groups of players running all these meta perks I hear about." then rage quit.
Cause I'm gonna fill you in, Even as a new player I have spent enough time on this forum and the steam ones to know even veteran players blame perks over their own mistakes. people just tend to stick with things they have invested time into already so even if they think it is they will deal with it.
A new player who has 10 hours in the game however will be far more likely to go "This game just isn't for me uninstall."
and I have played enough games and with enough people in my 30+ years of online gaming to know there are tons of people out there like that. Again not all but there are some.
I also have enjoyed the game these 2 weeks or so and would love to see it grow more popular. however, if we are being honest if I didn't start during the event where I was earning this much BP a match allowing me to get multiple killers to lvl 40 and unlock their perks
I most likely would of dropped it after I noticed how much I would need to grind to try out various builds myself.
0 -
I think my issue with it is that it isnt necessarily a "grind reduction" for newer players.
If I have all my characters P3'd, then Im getting a bunch of perks back for the time I invested into them, which is nice. But newer players dont have that luxury, they still have to go through the leveling process (made further worse by the changes to BBQ and WGLF, those two perks carried my leveling up process, but I dont see why either cant become basekit effects since both are healthy for the game). I think it should be considered a valid concern.
My posts regarding grind reduction (for BP, as well as Iridescent Shards, which I feel like is a very under-looked area), are all focused around the "new player perspective", since things that may not affect me does very much affect newer players, I just simply want the best experience for them, as well as anyone else for that matter.
1 -
I prestiged my survivors and i feel burned that people will get to keep all of their items when they prestige now, while I lost all of miy stuff 3 times over on all the survivors I max prestiged. I'm not on PTB so that's my main gripe, as of now. It would be cool if they gave lvl 3 prestige characters something, at lesst some bloodpoints to balance out all of the items we've thrown away. I always used all of my event cakes so I didn't waste them. If I wouldn't have had to lose all of my items to prestige, i would have a nice collection of event items and offerings right now that I do not have. Ive lost thousands of event items prestiging.
1 -
so what happens to all the perks I had purple on Feng they all go down to yellow since everyone's prestige 1 if so that was a big waste of my time grinding to get all her perks purple.
0 -
No, don't worry. When prestiging now with the new system, you don't lose neither items nor perks and perk levels when prestiging, but if you will unlock all the killers/survivors perks automatically for everyone else.
0 -
I think the system change is fantastic and that it is an overall good thing, I'm very much looking forward to all-perking everyone with this new system, but I want to point out that there isn't a need for a sort of either-or thing here.
The thing about the old system is that before, you had a choice. Once you unlocked teachables, you could decide if you wanted to invest in levelling up a specific character to get that perk on them, i.e. if you cared about having that perk on that character. In the new system, that choice is functionally made for you - in order to unlock the teachables, you Must invest to unlock it on everyone.
This is great for me, because it is a grind reduction to get the perks on everyone, which is what I wanted to do anyways. In the long run, it is going to save me a lot of time and a lot of bloodpoints.
But there are people who Don't care about that and they don't deserve to be shafted for no reason either! However you slice it, people playing the exact same way they always have and only caring about getting teachables on one character now have to spend 500k more bloodpoints per new character to do so.
This isn't some apocalyptic flaw or a condemnation of the whole system. Because all they have to do is reduce the prestige cap to 40 instead of 50 and the cost will be completely identical for that group to the old system.
It is not antithetical to the point of the new system to point this out, it's just pointing out a flaw in their design decisions. The way it is currently laid out, it effectively punishes people who Aren't interested in all-perking everyone. Both can coexist. Leveling can be fun, more engaging, and less grindy for completionists without throwing out concern for people who Aren't completionists.
0 -
The only issue I see with bumping down the max level would be they would need to bump up the rate purple and iri addons pop up in the earlier levels and lower the number of nodes that spawn or players would be even more screwed than they are going to be with the forced prestige on farming them.
0 -
I doubt anyone cares about bloody cosmetics, addons are more important.
0 -
Prestigeing was never really a problem because nobody really cared for it. People would rather wear other cosmetics than the base-but-bloody and since it had zero impact on gameplay, which is what really matters. Now you're actually forced to prestige so you're screwed up on farming purple+ addons and items because every time you get to level 50 you're forced back to level 1 and have to waddle through several levels again in order to have purple+ stuff offered to you. In the end the grind got far worse for no reason. Like why force people to do something they don't want to? If I want to keep my character level 50 indefinitely and not prestige I shouldn't be forced to do it at all.
0 -
See, I don't know if this is as much of a concern because... Iri and purple addons are SUPPOSED to be rare. The fact that people could grind them before so they could run the same purple addon every single match was kind of a design problem. You Shouldn't be able to have a permanent flowing supply of Alchemist Ring Blight or whatever. They want to encourage players to use a variety of addons and this is a way to do it, reinforcing the rarity of the strongest stuff.
Admittedly, I don't run addons At All so I'm pretty biased in that I don't care. But I would much prefer the level grinding get reduced and then they worry about addon stuff later. In my dream world they buff basekit killer powers and make them slightly less addon dependent and then rework all addons into fun weird stuff (like Huntress' wooden fox or Doctor's hallucination pallets) instead of base numbers buffs so that addons created a fun variety, but weren't something killers felt like they HAD to grind so they could be epic shoe hag every game or whatever.
But that's an argument for a different thread.
2 -
Sorry OP, but it is YOU who is missing the point.
1
