http://dbd.game/killswitch
Theoretical patch notes
When the latest PTB's patch notes came out, many people said right away that it would be a disaster, that these changes would be absolutely terrible. But others claimed "well, how can you tell it will be bad, the PTB isnt even out yet", or something along those lines.
So to all those people in the second group, here's some theoretical patch notes
*Windows are now blocked after only a single vault
*Increased The Nurse's movement speed to 115
*Hope reworked; now applies for the whole game and not just after the Generators are powered.
*Removed pallet from killer shack
*Dropped pallets are now blocked by the Entity for the Killer for 30 seconds after they've been dropped, preventing them from being broken right away.
*Sable Ward can now walk through walls.
Since you can't possibly tell how certain changes will affect the game without testing it first, we should make a PTB to test these changes, right? Or can you tell that these would be unhealthy for the game just by reading them, based on your existing experience of how the game is played?
Comments
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To be fair, most of that discourse comes from people reacting to the Dev Update, not the patch notes.
Critical information that heavily affects the proposed changes often isn't present in the Dev Update. For example, when the one for this PTB dropped, people were freaking out about the repair speed bonus for killing someone before six hooks, but others would point out that we can't really decide if that's game breaking or not until we actually see what percentage repair speed buff it is.
After we did see it, the number ended up low enough that the killer's still comfortably ahead after killing someone and it'd still be worth the trade a lot of the time. It was very important context, and claiming the change was terrible or would be a disaster before having that context was just premature.Plus, y'know, obviously most changes are way less clear-cut than those examples you provided. A lot of the changes that actually make it to a PTB do need to be tested before we can be conclusive.
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And honestly your changes wouldn't even effect the game all that much aside from the joke one of sable ward. Nurse would just be stronger and windows weaker but pallets are stronger as they can't be broken.
And everyone would use hope so using a window only once seems fair to me. Lol we of course need to test it in the PTB to see if it all works
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This feels like a straw man argument quite frankly.
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Yes these changes are absurd, that's not the point I'm trying to make.
My point is that even after the details of the PTB were shown, people were still saying that stuff.
Like, no. If you have even just like couple thousand hours into DBD you generally can accuratley predict how a particular change is going to affect gameplay. This doesnt even have to be about this PTB specifically. People have done the same with proposed changes in other PTBs that turned out bad and then were (usually) reversed.
The whole point of this post is that it's stupid when act like it's impossible to predict how a change will affect the game just from the patchnotes. While this might be true in some cases where the changes are small and subtle, major changes like these are very easy to predict, and many people did very accurately predict how they would turn out, despite people saying that it was impossible to predict before testing it.-2 -
My point stands, that back and forth typically happens before the patch notes, not after.
As for everything else, I mean, these changes in particular were pretty far-reaching and the problems they ended up having were much subtler than many immediate critics predicted. There is a lot of value in giving an initial response but waiting to test things before you're too conclusive.
A lot of this particular PTB's content sounded scary on paper but turned out to be fine in practice with only a handful of smaller issues to resolve, and that's often true of a lot of PTBs. You get the occasional one where it really is just obviously a bad idea on paper, but most of the time people who have a knee-jerk reaction are only right accidentally and without a full understanding of why they're right, or they're just wrong completely.
It's always better to give a more informed set of criticisms than immediately dismiss everything out of hand, basically.
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What I'm saying is that the criticisms experienced players are already informed by player's experience with the game; and that some people act like that doesnt matter at all and that any potential changes exist in a opaque bubble that you cannot possibly predict.
Not only that, you're serious underselling how much of a mess this PTB was. Like half those ideas are so bad on paper that they shouldn't have even went to testing; the fact that anyone thought they were a good idea at any point is baffling. Just like how in my original post, stuff like "Sable Ward walks through walls" or "115 Nurse" is so absurd that it's not even worth testing, so was some of the things tested in the PTB, and I'm being a bit hyperbolic, yes, but my core point remains.-1 -
Well, I have two things to say to that.
The first is that you don't know how experienced someone is when they're just airing an immediate complaint on the forums, especially when that complaint is very heated, very presumptuous, and extremely premature. They could have thousands of hours and a really solid grasp on the game… or they could've installed it two months ago.
Experience doesn't make you psychic, it just gives you a better groundwork to start from. Most experienced players I saw were cautious but waited to see the details before commenting.The second is that you're overselling how much of a mess this PTB was. There were definitely some big issues and I'm glad they're delaying it to iterate, but a huge chunk of what's here is completely workable.
Take the anti-slugging. Almost perfect, just needs a small basekit tweak (recover slower while crawling) and some more perk changes to accommodate, it was well designed. The anti-tunnel was broader and had more points of failure, but a lot of it also still just worked and only needed small changes. That is where the bigger issues crop up too, a couple killer-specific issues that need to be ironed out and too much potential for frustrating gameplay, but the broad shape totally worked.Even when you're experienced, immediately giving a very loud response to the first bits of information without getting the whole picture is premature, and people who point out you need to see the changes in action aren't missing something, they're just right. That's my point.
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I remember when experienced players talked about how AFC and 3 genning would completely destroy the game.
This doesn't even get into how every new perk idea is met by some experienced player explaining how broken it will be even when it rarely ends up being true.
We're getting into a broken clock is right twice a day territory. There is always doomsaying about DbD changes. Inevitably some of that doomsaying BHVR will end up agreeing with after things are actually tested. That doesn't mean people aren't silly for making predictions based on limited info, just that if you do it enough times inevitably you'll be correct at least once.
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While I would not be so combative with the point, personally my only real frustration with the "wait for the PTB" argument was it was often used as an easy way of deflecting out of the discussion at hand.
There were numerous points of it that were obviously problematic from the get go, and when these problems rightly got pointed out with clear and logical argumentation, rather than admit these issues were indeed a problem, the pivot was instead to say "well we won't know until we see the numbers in the PTB".
Anyone could see right from the get go that basekit Pop, Barbecue and a Haste boost was never going to help killers like Trapper or Hag, and unless that haste boost was utterly absurd, it wasn't gonna help a good portion for the roster either over the mobile ones. Without looking at the numbers at all you can see that Wraith, Spirit and Wesker were gonna benefit far more than Myers, Deathslinger, or Trickster...
Even if the haste boost was highly substantial, it still raises the point that this is what we want? This autopilot, switch your mind off version of DBD where you get a load of your decisions for both sides made automatically for you by virtue of heavy handed rules? I didn't want these changes from the perspective of either side, just because the guiding principle behind it I don't agree with. I prefer nuance and subtlety in games, not hand holding auras and effects that make the game all mechanics and no thought.
I believe this was a reasonable argument, yet I had my fair share of "wait until the PTB". Funnily enough, my concerns were not only founded... but proved to be even worse than I feared... and ultimately I got quite impolite and curt after that point, cause I often got ratio'd but did not have my arguments challenged one time.
I don't ever mind being wrong, I am more than happy to be proven wrong... if someone has a constructive suggestion to address the issues, even better... but to raise solid points and concerns only for people to basically ignore them and ultimately say "anyone's concerns against this are invalid because stopping tunneling and slugging is more important", got my back up very fast...
I can only apologise to my numerous friends in the forums for getting as combative as I was during that period, but it really did feel like I was being gaslit constantly to just ignore what were very obvious talking points to me.
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Yes, it's possible to make a bad patch. Brilliant observation.
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Sable Ward can now walk through walls
That made me laugh too much
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