New Player Experience Suggestions

Beano744 · January 7

I just watched this video, and I think it has AMAZING ideas for how we could improve new player retention.

The WORST New Player Experience in Gaming

Here's the ideas the video brings up for those who don't want to watch it:

Reworking bad/niche universal/free perks

It's not a secret that DbD has a lot of really niche and just outright terrible perks, and the universal/free ones that new players start with are not exceptions. Perks like Shattered Hope and Unrelenting, Premonition and This Is Not Happening. Perks like those should be brought up to match the other perks in strength that new players start with, like Hope, Deja Vu, NOED, We'll Make It, Kindred, Sloppy Butcher, etc.

Simplifying/Changing the emblem system

Currently the emblem system is alright, but it could use a few changes. For the survivor ones, the Survival category should be changed to encourage helping your team, not just surviving, and certainly not surviving without having gone down in a chase. All that part does is encourage stealth gameplay, which this game has long abandoned.

For killer, instead of the emblems focussing on kills, make them focus on hooks. The current system does nothing to help prevent tunneling, and if anything it helps it because you get more points for kills, not hooks. I think making this change would help the game as a whole.

Uncap the categories. Do you ever run the killer for an entire match and only get a measly 10k points, while the dude who held left click for 5 minutes got a lot more than you? I think most of us have and it's not a good feeling. You shouldn't be capped on how well you played. Even doubling the cap for these objectives would go a long way. This is one of the more important changes to me, as it's not something that only new players have to deal with.

You can try killers you don't own in custom matches

This one is a big one, you should be able to use killers you don't own in custom/bot lobbies to see if you like them before buying them. I'm not sure why this isn't a thing yet.

Make a more detailed in-game tutorial

I cannot express how important this one is. Currently, all we have for a tutorial is a survivor and killer game that teaches us the most basic controls and mechanics. This is good, but I don't know why BHVR stopped there.

The tutorial should go into more indepth mechanics like:

Looping
Resource management
Zoning
Game sense
etc.

This is a change that I see absolutely no downside to. It would help the game as a whole.

More changes you could do to the tutorial system:

How to play as/against killers guides (with bloodpoint incentives to help new players even more)
Status effect explanations

Again, don't see a downside to adding this to the game.

Improved search function

Primarily by adding tags. For example, a perk like NOED could have tags like 'Hex' 'Endgame' and 'Exposed', so if you want to search for an Endgame perk, you can select the Endgame tag from a dropdown menu and all the perks with the 'Endgame' tag will show up. I think this would help a lot and make what the perks do more obvious for new players.

Communication improvements

This one would be HUGE for the game.

Adding something like a "quick chat" mechanic. For example, you could tell teammates to go for save if you're not going to go for it, or that the killer is near you/chasing you. Or if you're on hook and you have a perk like Deliverance, you get a custom chat to tell your team that. Things like that would drastically improve solo queue, and help close the massive gap between playing with a 4 man in comms and playing by yourself with randoms.

Offerings should be universal

Do you ever put a lot of points into a character, then switch to a new character and not have any bloodpoint offerings on them? I think most of us have, and it's a pain. Make it so that every offering you own is on every character you own. This would make leveling up survivors easier for new players because you don't have to constantly play one character until you run out of offerings because you don't have any on anyone else. This could also extend to items/add-ons for survivors as well.

Fixing collision

This game has very poor collision, and BHVR should take a patch or two to go over all the maps and help improve collisions for killers with a ranged attack. Huntress, Nemesis, Xenomorph, all come to mind. Most maps, if not all the maps, have some kind of broken collision that makes the game more miserable to play these killers.

Shrine of secrets update

There are too many perks in the game to only have 4 perks rotate through the Shrine every week. They should double, if not triple the amount of perks that show up in each Shrine, and remove the starting perks from them. I don't need to see Sprint Burst from Meg on my Shrine, she literally came with the game. I also think that the Shrine should be random. I don't like that BHVR gets to control what goes in the Shrine.

Random loadouts button in loadout menu

This would make the game more entertaining as a whole, make everyone have the ability to use a random loadout for a bloodpoint bonus. Not only would this directly make the game more fun to play, but it would help new players learn what all the perks do. Adding a button to the loadout screen in the lobby to make your perks random for extra bloodpoints would increase the silliness factor of the game and take away from the sweatiness. This wouldn't be like making Chaos Shuffle permanent, because in Chaos Shuffle EVERYONE has random perks, not just one or two people.

After general perk changes that I mentioned in the first point, this would help the game A LOT.

Emeal · January 7

I'm going to say it, I think a lot of suggestions here are taking a lot of ideas they want in the game, and piggybacking them on the narrative to help new players. All of us, except BHVR with their stats, could have opinions of what WOULD help new players, but often you will be hard-pressed to find the connection between the proposed solution and any meaningful way it will become good for new peeps or retain them for longer in the game.

1 Reworking bad/niche universal/free perks
They are already doing this, its an ongoing process, but reworking perks takes time, research and development of solutions.
It will not be done any time soon, but also you mention This Is Not Happening as a bad perk, Do you.. do you even know how busted 30% bigger great skill zones is. Never mind it.

2 Simplifying/Changing the emblem system
I agree Emblems could use look at, but simplifying it to focus on certain goals instead of the broad idea of good gameplay is bad.
The whole idea of the Emblem system right now is that it encourages fair gameplay by instructing players to play fair to get the reward, chances are this game would be a hellhole without it. I'd prefer not to lose the pressure it provides.

How does this help new players, they don't have a clue about it or is actively trying to pursue the goal of it, further more I doubt most of them even play enough to warrant any investment into that system, Nah rather the First Match of the Day system works way better for new people.

3 You can try killers you don't own in custom matches.
Now this is a great idea for anyone looking to buy a Killer, someone who has shards or cash on hand. The reason we have the shard system is carefully made so that one might unlock characters at a pace that feels good. I have seen other suggestions that there should be free weeks, where you can try a paid for Killer for free and level them, but will be locked again. This is all nice ideas, because it gives people a chance to try out the product and it incentivizes BHVR to keep all Killers up to peak to encourage sales.

But a new player, is already really bad at the game, trying out the Killer against bots or friends even will make you rip your hair out honestly. New players probably have some shards, but enough to buy a character? But if they are still bad then those games will still be bad, how does that encourage retention?

4 Make a more detailed in-game tutorial
Oh we are gonna disagree hard here, I see the tutorial personally as a bad way to do it, I fear BHVR may have wasted resources here, but it gets you the basic concept sure, but I think people who want to play this game, I'm pretty sure has the basic concept down.

But my reasoning is that this game has so many examples, nuances etc that proper skills that a new player would need would take a colossal amount of tutorials, not to mention the cost to produce the tutorial. Lastly I don't think it would matter, the reason is when I introduced the game to my friends here over Christmas, some of them took the tutorial and they were bored out of their minds and I agree with them, taking a tutorial is incredibly boring when you just want to play with your friends. This is a problem.

I would never study a tutorial closely, I'm trying to game, this isn't school, leave me alone.

So I think those in game tutorials are bad, time consuming and wastful of BHVR's money, the best way I have ever been tutorialized about DBD was watching the 2nd and 3rd Dev Diaries from the DBD YouTube channel. The recent tutorial content on Youtube isnt bad, but I find the lacking setting up player mindset. There is real theme watching a developer who poured their blood sweat and tears into an experience, telling you how to play it and enjoy it, their job is to understand a gamer's brain.

Dev #2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtu153S5y6o

Dev #3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS3DvvOQI04

Furthermore I think a tutorial with videos that was done really well has to be the videos in Savage 2: A Tortured Soul, that also had a dev to do commentary on a skilled player's video file, explaining why, how and what to look for, It was bloody excellent.

My own solution for this problem for BHVR would be to invest more into videos and much more into the Loading screen tips.

But to round up the point, I think these in game tutorial are wasteful, compared to video options.

5 Improved search function
Again, a great idea for the quality of the game, the Search function absolutely needs to be better, not only that we need a system for Copy/paste in builds via a Short Code. it would be great for streamers who take requests, it would be great for people who share builds or for people who want to copy and try something, just #GH734 and boom you can get right into gaming. idd love to see it.

But New Players get so little value out of the perks, they wont have exotic perks or are likely to miss an addon, they benefit a lot less from these suggestions.

6 Communication improvements
I want this so much, I was trying to get a Haddie to follow me today but she was running away. A chat wheel with a range limit and basic commands, follow, stop, run, hide, take this. Would be perfect. And this one is very likely to also help new people. 👍️

If BHVR needs inspiration of how to do a chat-wheel, please do it but do it as open and wide as the hit PS2 game, RE: Outbreak File 1&2 perfect dialogue options, versatile for a game that is repeated many times.

7 Offerings should be universal
Yes, I do want this too. No Argument here.

But how does this help new people, they wont have a large stock of offerings anyway.

8 Fixing collision
If you see a collision that is bad then report it here: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/categories/bugs its the only way we can combat it, BHVR wont go through every object in the game and check it, that would be so much work.

This also does not help or retain new people as new people are often so bad at the game, that they would call any whiff and missed hit a problem on the game's part anyway, I was lagging.

9 Shrine of secrets update
Yeah the Shrine needs a shine over, get it? Personally I have always felt that the shrine should contain 2 to 3 specific for New Survivors in addition to the normal selection, BHVR has gone on record of saying they like to create perks for new people every time they create perks, those perks should have specifically 2 slots to provide a selection for new people. That would be great for them.

10 Random loadouts button in loadout menu.
YAAAAAAS PREACH IT QUEEN, I wanted this for so long, I am personally looking forward to the system that BHVR has promised us that shows what a perk does on the main screen, when you first load in, I think that would be a sick feature to have in the main game and not just chaos shuffle. But I don't think it will help new people understand what effects the Killer does very well.

These were all excellent ideas, but I think you ought to be more critical of your explanations on how it actually addresses the Core New Player Challenges of picking up this game. Like with in-game tutorials, the fact that they are boring and they are eating into the player's game time. But then again this is what this forum is for, to have that discussion, to refine the idea and have BHVR check out our eventual insights. This makes a good start though, loads of stuff to address.