Do you think BHVR will fix Chess Merchant?

I'd imagine she's going to get bumped up the priority list due to the number of complaints about her.

They have shown before that a large amount of negative feedback can end up having changes expedited. A lot of people universally hate the Skull Merchant's 3 Gen playstyle, and she is so good at it that it's caused BHVR to evaluate options as to how to prevent these excessively long matches with a base mechanic.

I think the whole fiasco with that one game with Eternal, and the wave of feedback that was sparked because of it, might have put her more on their radar too.

There's no way to say for sure though, none of us work there.

I agree, but I think we probably view the game differently as players than the devs view it. We think of the game differently and focus on different things. Our first thought with a killer power is "what does this power look like and how does it function when it's optimized?". Their first thoughts are most likely about ease of use for a new player, functionality, etc. And there are probably less than a dozen people on the dev team with an MMR at or above the cap. They can't even see that sort of functionality until after the PTB.

I actuallly think they have testers, but their imagination only goes so far as bhvr tell them, so they probably used dull merchant to put trackers on survivors and put drones to scout, they do not think like a dbd player does, so they never even tought of thr posibility of the horrible gameplay that she has.

This can be good with killers like blight or wesker who by the testers playing the simplest way possible they have overlooked issues that make them incredibly fun and raise their skill ceilling.

Or bad in the case of knight and cringe merchant were they overlooked a flawed design, or singularity that showed testers do not know how to play survivor in an efficient way, so they thought EMPs were ok.

However I think unlike popular belief they DO test a lot of technical issues, like people will joke about how suddendly clown doesn't work in an update thats unfelated to him but never stop to realize the amount of debugging and testing that goes into adding new mechanics such as weskers bound or singularitys verticallity in cameras.

Don't get me wrong, I agree with you. I think it's a huge problem that killers like SM make it to live. I just think their playtesting goals are very different than our playtesting goals as players, and that's the problem they're having. It's cynical game design. They alluded to it in a post the other day. The killer is realistically going to have a ~3% pick rate, so even if it's problematic in the hands of some players, they don't care overly much.

I think its fine for her to be able to throw drones on gens. I think the problem stems from if a Survivor takes the time and effort to hack the drone, SM can instantly replace that drone with no effort.

If someone hacks a drone, it should leave a phantom zone where a drone cannot be placed until the original is returned to the SM's inventory. This would force her to chase down the Survivor and hook them, in order to be able to defend that spot again. It still gives SM an advantage against them (haste+exposed potential), but forces the SM to actually play the game instead of turtling.

I would even argue that with the above change, allow Survivors to keep shoulder drones indefinitely, and they can remove it with the DDR minigame again whenever they want (maybe have to do it multiple times if recently shouldered, with each minigame removing the 15s dot until none remain, then it removes the drone proper). The SM in return can recall a shoulder drone after the current 45s, or 0 dots remain. That way both sides have agency in dealing with their problems.

With Behaviours history, give it a few years. However I can see her being fully reworked at some point.

Ask yourself truthfully if current SM is enough to make you quit DBD and stop buying cosmetics until she gets changed.

If the answer is no, then that means she isn’t going to be that high on the priority list for a remake.

If the answer is yes, then the next question is whether the amount of people who share the same sentiment would be statistically significant.

Now imagine the community response if devs announced that one of their Licensed Killers would be delayed till next year because they had to remake SM.

The premise that SM causes so much grief that everything should be dropped to remake her is so silly.

I'm just imagining bhvr throwing shade during a Q&A. "Yeah, we actually got the Jason license this year and we were ALMOST done working on it... but thanks to THIS forum thread right here, we decided the game was going to die if we didn't immediately focus on SM. Once again, if someone didn't see it, it was THIS thread that did it. Real shame too, because Jason was gonna ride around on a Xenomorph, and the survivor for the chapter was gonna be Chuck Norris."

Huntress, Hag and Doctor are all free on Console.

Not sure about PC.

Since full reworks take a lot of time and there are killers which have been longer around, that still require that rework (looking at the Twins). I´d say we can see maybe a rework in 2-3 years.

Remember that the devs want to get away from 3 gens but also released several 3 gen killers in succesion.

We already know they're planning something, though we don't know when it'll be.

I certainly hope it isn't a Freddy-tier rework, though. On top of that not being necessary at all, it's fundamentally a bad idea and they should never do it again.