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BHVR's recent balancing philosophy is worrying

Uknownenjoyer
Uknownenjoyer Member Posts: 20
edited December 14 in Feedback and Suggestions

With the arguable nerfs to Chucky and hound masters knotted rope add-on, I have grown increasingly worried about how BHVR is balancing forward. We have seen this with the recent skull merchant changes. It appears just because a killer has a rather divisive place in the game, that warrants a massive change (usually a Nerf) for the time being until they change it in the future, leaving players of said killer with a much weaker and clunkier killer to play with.

Although we have only really seen this 2 times with killers like Chucky and SM it is very worrying that this will be how they go about balancing killers that a large minority of the olayerbase complains about. I mean Chucky's recent changes with the 12-sec cooldown Nerf and 1-sec scamper buff were not even in the game for more than 2 weeks before they slapped on such a massive change to him that made him feel so much worse. I don't think he is like F-tier like SM used to be in the PTB but he still feels bad to play with. I don't understand why such a big change was made in a bug-fix patch of all places, we didn't even get to test these changes in a PTB.

I'm not trying to doomsay these 2 changes are hopefully outliers in the grand scheme; I just find it worrying that these 2 killers were seemingly changed due to them being fairly disliked by the people who play against them. this I feel sets a scary precedent that just because people complain that a killer is "unfun" even if they're not super strong, they will still get nerfed. I mean even after the to rat poison and his cooldown we saw a around 5% decrease in kill rate (according to nightlight) so I dont understand why we needed this change to be placed on him so quickly and W/O warning.

Comments

  • TragicSolitude
    TragicSolitude Member, Alpha Surveyor Posts: 7,410
    edited December 15

    Clunky killers on controller are absolutely no fun at all, and BHVR loves to make killers feel clunky. Smooth controls are important. BHVR kind of knee-capped themselves with things like health states instead of health bars and keeping perks standardized across all killers, so to balance they add cooldowns, loud music, clunky controls (recoil on knife throwing, what the hell), power bars, and more cooldowns. In a normal game the balance would be, "Well, he's fast, so we'll have him do less damage," but there's is no damage in DbD; unless you're Trickster, you either put survivors into the next health state or you don't. I'd rather have health bars on survivors than clunky controls on killers. People want to play the game, not fight its controls. Some of us are already fighting performance issues, these things are leaving no room for fighting our actual opponents.

    Players don't want to pay to be guinea pigs. Especially not when you paid to be a guinea pig and your own opinion isn't important. It doesn't matter if you find the thing you purchased fun; if your opponents find it unfun, the thing you purchased is getting changed.

    I think the best thing for all of us to do is to wait three years (I would've said "two," but Skull Merchant has really lengthened the time table) before purchasing any future killers. BHVR will never stop messing with their killers, but hopefully by year three the big changes will be done. Unless it's Freddy. Sorry, Freddy.

    Edit: I should mention, that last part about waiting three years is a joke. It's never safe to buy a killer.

  • Bence
    Bence Member Posts: 43

    It's just outrageous to implement changes to this extent without the players having to say their opinion about it. You know just how serious these changes are when a part of the playerbase who originaly wanted the nerf says it's overdone and too much. What's even more upsetting, that the devs response after seeing the community's opinion was that they won't revert it. I'm a Chucky player, so I mainly focused on him in this comment, but skull merchant's state is just as upsetting. And if you think about it, she wasn't the first (#NerfThePig).

  • frictionless
    frictionless Member Posts: 18

    100% agree that it seems like public opinion alone is causing BHVR to dumpster killers that are doing more or less fine balance-wise and only see complaints due to either relatively low play rate (and the lack of survivor familiarity with their mechanics that that causes) or a history of less well-liked balance states. A good 90% of the alleged issues with skull merchant prior to her being soft-killswitched were things that she either didn't actually do or used to do in previous iterations while still being cited as if they're current issues with her design. As for Chucky, it seems like all that really went into it is personal preference. Some people just don't like and aren't used to playing against him, and that was all it took for some reason. I may not personally like playing against every killer but balancing off of that kind of feedback and hook suicides is setting a really bad precedent and encouraging poor sportsmanship from survivors while just making the issue worse.