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Food for thought on Asyms (and praise to DBD)
I just saw this video from Choy, which I'll link here:
It discussed the other asyms that have come and gone throughout the years, and the TLDW version is what tends to kill asym horror games is attempting to control and limit the killer role too much.
His bullet points of what these other games shared as a problem that ended up killing them was: -
- Players need to have player agency to stay invested in the game.
- Casual players tend to make up the Survivor role.
- Competative players tend to make up the Killer role.
- Majority of players and the Devs themselves also tend to be more casual.
- Games tend to market/cater towards the largest audience to pull in the most players.
- This ends up resulting in the killer role being hit with nerfs that limits killer agency and an inability to meaningfully work around the limitations posed on them.
- Competative killer players lose interest, and switch sides to Survivor, and combined with Competative survivors abuse the one sided mechanics.
- Casual players trying Killer get trounced... No one plays killer.
- Queue times for survivors balloon
- Game eventually dies.
Now we've had a lot of talk lately about limiting slugging, limiting tunneling and alike, and imposing all these new rules for the health of DBD. However one thing that tends to be common amongst them is they tend to try and make killer strategies completely unusable, even those legitimate instances being conaidered "worthwhile sacrifices" for the "health" of DBD...
I recently found out I'm a soloQ survivor main from my stats (I'm not impressed... gotta get my numbers up), but I like to think I'm pretty fair to most sides... I believe the AFC and anti 3-gen mechanics were good mechanics. The common thing with both cases is it only comes up in the most extreme of circumstances.
With every call for Basekit Unbreakable or Basekit DS, or some other hard stop to killer agency, I think reflecting on this video is worthwhile. The killer isn't an NPC that has to jump through hoops for your entertainment, and the game doesn't function without them.
Comments
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Listening to him say that limiting killer agency will kill the game, whilst he's playing slug only, made me cringe somewhat.
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I think it was also Choy or maybe Coconut who said in a video that streamlining the playing experience to much makes a game dull and boring.
A lot of the unbalaced things in DbD made the game what it is and also the constant anger and rage keeps more players investing than they might realize.
I don´t like some of the simplifying and skillless directions the game takes. I hope they don´t do to much.
But nevertheless DbD is holding up a lot better than all its recent "killers"…
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I do of course disagree with that playstyle, this "slugging is better because bleh mechanic" is more of a protest to the hook timer increase to my mind and a case of kicking toys out of the pram.
There is no instance I can think of that slugging is more viable than hooking. Any killer that is strong enough to full team slug, can also full team hook.
The point is still quite strong when you look at the dev lifetimes of other games, and in a lot of ways if you look at AFC, A3G and such, while I dont think these things are a problem and were good additions, if a pattern starts to form and these things continue, Choy wouldn't be wrong to think DBD is going a similar route.
In that context, his actions make a degree of sense, even if I do disagree with them.
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I watched his stream yesterday and it's so painful to watch.
Like I get it, he wants to "win". Not even he sounds like he's having fun. He's not even a good player either so it makes the whining somewhat funny.
"Oh I have to slug her here otherwise <insert giga OP perk here>", no brother you are playing a generic anti-loop killer on a semi decent level at best.
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It's true that this game keeps going because of how much variety can exist in a single match. But there needs to be limitations on certain things. For people that don't play survivor, it's easy to say that being slugged or camped to death is fine, as there's no time where the killer is unable to play. That's a problem that is exclusive to the role of survivor.
Anti slug needs to be there, as nobody should be in a match, whilst not being able to do anything for minutes at a time. It's awful design. It's also too strong as a griefing tool. But fixing that requires changing things like pallet saves. Which are a core part of how the gameplay loop works.
Tunneling is somewhat easier. Make it harder to tunnel someone out until a couple of gens are done, or until a few minutes have passed since the match began, and then deactivate that system. That way nobody is forced out of the match straight away, and play variety still exists. Then gives killers better tools to find and down new survivors.
The problem for this game, is that it has been out for a very long time. Players know how to exploit the game thoroughly, and there are many massive design flaws that the game has never addressed, and has simply chosen to sell perks to fix. If BHVR wants to make real changes to the game, they will have to rework all that content that has been sold for years now. I just don't see that happening.
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Tunneling is somewhat easier. Make it harder to tunnel someone out until a couple of gens are done, or until a few minutes have passed since the match began, and then deactivate that system.
But do you not see you are literally satisfying the exact point being made... you're imposing limits that remove killer choice, and the more you slice away at that, the less of a player the killer is and the more of a performing chimp that must adhere to the shackles the game becomes.
There are numerous mechanics to combat tunneling in the game already, if you start imposing some arbitrary system that prevents it completely, then survivors can unhook for free without having to think about what the killer might do.
For slugging I do agree that it has more problems. My suggestion has always been to be ablento enter "Desperation" once above 95% recovery:
- Bleedout 75% faster
- Make 50% louder grunts of pain
- Move 50% faster
This doesn't remove slugging, it doesn't remove killer agency, but it adds more agency to survivors, which should be the goal. This would be a change I would welcome. However when people say stuff like "basekit Unbreakable", then we really start to have problems.
This is the entire point being made in the video and my OP, you can't keep placing arbitrary shackles on the killer role, it is a poison pill that seems to keep killing asym games.
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If this game was better designed, there wouldn't be any need for a bunch of restrictions. Unfortunately, this game allows killers to incapacitate survivors and bleed them out for minutes at a time.
If the devs added a mechanic that disabled the killer's ability to move for four minutes, would you be in favour of that, even if it was balanced somehow? Would you support taking away that freedom from survivors? I'd hope so, as any mechanic that stops people from playing the game is awful.
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Honestly we can even see it with the basekit protections that have been added to survivor. Despite them being added, complaints about the game only get worse. This isn't to say the basekit BT or anti-facecamp systems were bad to add, but I have yet to see people feel like the game has actually improved with them.
DBD isn't likely to die anytime soon as the devs seem very cautious about trying to change the gameplay loop too much, but I don't think people really understand the consequences of limiting killer's ability to kill in an elimination game.
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If only FT13 game didn’t get stuck in lawsuit hell.
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Substitute "agency" for "inconvenience." Killers hate to be inconvenienced more than Survivor.
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I distinctly recall F13 was already on its way down before the lawsuit hit.
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FF13 had it's issues, but IIRC the lawsuit hurt the devs ability to push updates to the game. Without the lawsuit in play, it's possible the devs could have improved the game.
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Maybe, but I still think F13's biggest issues required a large overhaul. One that I don't think they were willing to do.
Being found early as a councillor left you practically defenseless. Early eliminations were unstoppable, and so being found first got very dull, very fast.
The Jason-player being randomly selected could have worked, but not when you're also pushing players to make meta builds for him (in the sense of metagame, not necessarily the best stuff available). You couldn't just go 'I wanna try this build out', you only got a chance at trying that build out every match.
Jason being killable turned the entire premise on its head, once players figured it out. You're supposed to be the big scary, not the one scared of being hit by too many wooden bats.
One thing I've noticed, though I've also got no idea how relevant it is, is that almost all of the games that had a fairly short run, used health bars instead of health states. Health bars immediately kill the immersion for me, since it's blatantly obvious that all I'm doing is wailing on a character model until some number hits 0. DbD is much simpler, and therefore much more elegant here by using health states. Hit = injury. Simple. VHS used this system too, and it had the best run of all the 'DbD killers'. Only TCM stands out here.
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I stopped when he tried using a known lobby bug in TCM as "proof" that killer side is hurting there. TCM has a lobby bug where if someone leaves as killer the lobby won't fill until a survivor leaves. Once a survivor leaves the lobby basically instantly fills both roles. It's a bug that's been there since pretty much release and is complained about a ton on their reddit, discord, and socials. TCM has issues, alot of issues, but the killers being weak or not having agency isn't one of them and definitely isn't what has caused the player count to drop.
As for DBD with slugging and killer agency, what about the slugged survivor's agency? It's not a bot (yet) but it is a person that is prevented from playing the game for up to 4 minutes. No one realistic is asking for a complete removal of slugging because there are circumstances where it is understandable to slug for a short period of time. The issue is the long periods of time where all a survivor can do is lay on the ground collecting crows. They can't participate and can't move on to a new match where hopefully they can actually play the game. Slugging for long periods needs to be addressed.
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If this game was better designed, there wouldn't be any need for a bunch of restrictions.
Urgh, I hate this lazy, generic, ambiguous, buzzword of a line so much. There are reasons why things are the way they are, and so many people throw out this phrase whenever talking about something they don't like to give their point gusto, when in reality there is no tangible assessment of what makes it "bad design".
If the devs added a mechanic that disabled the killer's ability to move for four minutes, would you be in favour of that, even if it was balanced somehow?
No of course not, that's why I have acknowledged the issue of excessive slugging in many threads, including this one. That lack of player agency for survivors when excessively slugging is a problem. However there is a reason why slugging exists, and that is because survivors are meant to scatter when a killer turns up on them, it's to ensure there is an appropriate risk involved when trying for saves. The 4 minute timer is a means of making is LESS efficient to slug the whole team compared to hooking.
The Unbreakable PTB demonstrated this perfectly, where the "risk" of sticking around to save became completely moot by virtue of the fact there was no need to get past the killer to actually pick up a teammate. The risk was drastically reduced because all survivors had to do was stall long enough from safety.
Just because this problem of lack of survivor agency while slugged exists is no reason to nuke the ability to slug completely from orbit. There has to be a risk associated with survivors being caught in pairs and sticking around for saves.
I hear so many people harp on about "bad design", while simultaneously proposing absolutely dire suggestions that keeps putting more and more shackles on the Killer where the "design" is so much much worse.
I made a suggestion to address the lack of player agency for Survivor, while not nuking the Killers agency either, thisi s the point I'm striving for, being careful not to put in aggressive solutions to things that tie the killers hands behind their back.
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Survivors pretty much have the same agency when they are slugged or hooked, except for the fact that slugging doesn’t allow players by bypass DC penalties.
If survivors are slugged, then teleport them to 2v8 cages after 60 seconds. That would end the game earlier, without giving survivors yet another way to bypass DC penalties.
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As far as lazy goes, there's only so much time I want to spend on each discussion here. I appreciate that you are happy to offer deep explanations of your perspective, but after I've typed more than two paragraphs, I start regretting my life choices. For you, I will try to briefly lay out what I mean by badly designed.
The game was designed to be a casual experience. But that included being downed and camped to death for many players. A brief moment of gameplay, followed by doing nothing until death. That kind of gameplay loop is fine for highly competitive games, where you have coordiinated squads, who only care about getting the win, but not for casual play.
For survivors, being on hook, or being slugged is terrible gameplay. You can do almost nothing. If the game had been built with survivors having three lives, and hooks didn't exist, that would have likely been much better for the game. But that's not the game we have.
Now, I'm heading back to Pokemon Go.
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I’ve heard this name a couple times now so I just checked one of his Twitch vods to see how he plays.
The first match I skip to he sees two Survivors, chases one off and then goes for a pick up on a pallet and to nobody’s surprise they get the pallet save. And then complains that’s why you should slug? Who would even pick that up knowing you saw another survivor seconds ago?
Genuinely curious why you listen to the opinions of people who don’t even have Killer basics down? Is he someone you would consider a “competitive Killer”?
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If someone has what seems to be a well constructed argument that lines up with your own observations in other games, it is a debate worth exploring is it not?
From.points others have expressed as part of this discussion, this individual does seem to have a rather poor reputation that leads the validity of their point into question...
However the point he's making is not automatically wrong because of it, and I do agree with him that a common thread of a lot of failing asym games is the killer side tends to become very unrewarding to play and subject to bullying, drastically reducing their power in the supposed power role.
I do feel his point is relevant when we keep getting threads flooding the forums demanding basekit Unbreakable, despite how God awful a suggestion that is.
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When it came to TCM, I was under the impression that the lack of content is what is slowly is Killing the game, plus being limited to a single universe.
The devs don't really add much to the game, and when they do, it's nothing really worthwhile. The skins are extremely bland and generic, and even when they add new characters, you can still be denied playing that character if someone chooses it first, or vice versa you're denying someone playing that character. Someone can go several matches without even being able to the touch the character they paid for.
The new game mode they added certainly breathed life back into things, but that only last for so long. The devs just seem painfully limited, which is a shame when they've obviously built a good foundation when TCM has lasted this long, yet it's dwindling hard.
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Why do people think that whatever solution BHVR comes up with to address slugging, it will "remove player agency"? I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone here but:
- You can still tunnel someone out, despite basekit BT existing.
- While you can't face camp so easily anymore (unless you are Bubba or Tombstone Myers), you can of course still very effectively proxy camp.
- You can still defend a 3 gen, you just can't defend one indefinitely and stall the game until the server times out.
I've been able to do all of these things to start making kills whenever I've felt them to be necessary. These mechanics being in the game haven't affected my agency when playing Killer at all. They've just made them more counterable for Survivors and less free of risk to Killers when they use such strategies. I swear there are some Killer players out there that won't be happy until they can 4K in every single trial.
Why don't we wait and see what solution BHVR has for the 4 man slugging strategy that has emerged before worrying about the threat it might pose to player agency?
If I have an idea as to why other asyms are not so popular, it would be because they don't already have 8 years of licensed and original content for players to delve into and play around with. They also tend to be tied to using content from one exclusive franchise and that can get pretty stale after a while. DBD's simple gameplay mechanics, cheaper price and ability to run (mostly OK) on something as low tech as a Nintendo Switch are also things that work very well in its favour.
*Edits for spelling mistakes.
Post edited by tjt85 on7 -
People dropped TCM because of 2 things:
- The devs actually tried to balance the game, and people were mostly playing the game because it had lots of unbalanced stuff.
- The devs started introducing a lot of high priced DLC content.
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Taking away agency is just a fancy way of saying my control is being taken away. For whatever reason Survivor balance is being dictated by the control freaks.
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I do agree asyms die when one role feels like it exists to be bullied.
I also agree there is valid concern to be had about a basekit UB for survivors and how it could cause the Killer role to be miserable.I don’t think this video is well constructed tbh and at worst actively discredits the opinion. I understand not wanting to make a giant text wall but I think you alone could have made a better argument than him and have brought up much better discussion points in the comments.
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To address the possible changes to slugging, I firmly believe they intend to go after early trial no gens done all four survs down slugging for the four minutes. I think that narrow kind of slugging is the target, just as the AFC feature was only added to deal with a specific situation.
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people really take dbd for granted
I love tcm the game but even I admit some stuff is overpriced in that game
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