http://dbd.game/killswitch
PTB Recall - Was it really Killer outcry or was it actual dev data?
Do you think that the cancelled PTB was actually cancelled due to Killer outrage per the current 'theories,' or do you think that the developers looked at the results they had and saw that the system was a failure and did not align with their current goals?
I see a lot of people complaining about Killer outrage in a lot of topics, but no one ever seems to consider any of the evidence that points towards the system being a failure in its current iteration (ie being reworked by the devs).
What do YOU think?
Comments
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Likely a mix of both but I'd put money on the community's "passionate response" being the main motivator.
22 -
It's certainly possible.
I'm surprised they have not issued a clear statement.
-2 -
both. the data being the main reason.
the best outrage gets is usually just nerfs.
-12 -
I think feedback would result in just adjustments, so data had to be quite bad for them to halt it completely.
-10 -
I personally am of the opinion that there wasn’t enough time to be able to gather the necessary data in order for that decision to be because of stats. There is a buffer that needs to take place of something new being introduced and giving the community time to learn counter play. I do not think that the .. (2?) days the PTB had was giving the community time to learn counter play. In the same way with fog vials as well, which I believe were around for like 9 days. If a new killer was released and they pulled them from the game after 2 days, I would be very concerned and confused because those 2 days are not a good measurement for how strong/weak a killer is. People need some time to learn how to play AS and AGAINST them, and I wouldn’t support a 2 day life span.
I do think a lot of it may have to do with big names and content creators, and just how negatively the PTB was perceived and just how many threatened to quit entirely. If you look at BHVR like a business, if you had a product that enraged your sponsors and they were threatening to leave, you’d probably want to pull that product ASAP. Just my personal opinion
12 -
I don't know how valuable the data from a PTB really is, tbh. We've seen quite a few Killers come to live somewhat overpowered as well as systems like the AFK crows triggering during normal game play (e.g. when totem hunting). I think this is because experienced / dedicated players tend to gravitate towards the PTB, making the new Killers appear to be less powerful than they actually are. That is, until they're unleashed on the public lobbies and they destroy most Survivor teams for a month before BHVR reign them in a bit. I believe the PTB has no MMR, so that probably makes it difficult to gather valuable data as well. This is why I think it's hard to know what the true impact of any changes and new additions to the game will be until they hit live.
I think the vocal backlash from prominent figures in the community had much more of an effect on BHVR's decision. I'd say that content creators do most of the marketing and promotion for the game. So if the majority of those guys kick up a stink about something, then BHVR has to pay attention. Obviously, it was also very poorly received with the wider community, but it's hard to say how much of that was genuine or just a community echoing whatever their favourite streamer / youtuber said about the new systems.
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I mean the pulled it because of public Outcry. To say anything other then that is just cope.
If no outcry existed they would have kept tweaking numbers during the PTB they would have been talking with the community fixed issues as needed or encountered. It's highly possible deciding to send it back to cook longer would have been the end result regardless but none of the previous steps were taken because of the panic happening here and everywhere else.
In fact the ######### storm was so huge even community managers stopped posting on the forums all together until recently as we have seen the fire is mostly just smoldering now but mainly on the survivor side which behavior never have a problem with.
-3 -
I believe it to be a strong mix of the entire community. Survivor and killer alike.
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I think BHVR tends to have a very "my way or the highway" mindset, in my opinion. Anti-go next/AFK crows was a disaster, followed by TWD which was another disaster culminating in yet another PR nightmare to add to the pile. The common denominator between both situations was that very mindset.
I think they were already walking on eggshells by the time they proposed the anti-camp/anti-slug changes. Nobody was expecting them to make any difference to the gameplay at all and when they did, there was naturally a lot of contention. I think BHVR 1) was afraid of turning two big mistakes into three, and 2) worried that they'd upset the queue again by offending Killers.
I do think the choice they ended up making was the right one. Regardless of anyone's feelings, two wrongs don't make a right. But there is also a level of accountability that can't be avoided there, so BHVR has to eat crow one way or the other.
2 -
I don't think there's much good quantative data to get from the PTB. Mainly due to the small playerbase compared to the Live game, and the lack of matchmaking in any form.
I think it was a combination of community sentiment, and the devs seeing the system in action at the hands of proper players, and the ways that they could abuse it.
I don't think it was just "killer outrage", though. I think the feedback from most figures in the community, even the "survivor mains", was that the system was very flawed in its PTB iteration.
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To be fair, a lot of the system didn't actually work as intended.
The basekit BBQ was intended to give the killers a new target to chase, but it very often showed 0 survivors. And sometimes it showed 1 survivor, that was so far away that a low mobility killer wouldn't even get halfway there before the aura reading ran out.
2v8 was able to have a lot of fast paced action, because the reveal mechanic actually reliably worked, so it was often showing killers new targets to chase. This whole concept completely fell apart in this PTB, because the reveal mechanic was absolute garbage.
-2 -
killers cried, it got delayed and now tunneling has sky rocketed. Bhvr should’ve released it as is and adjusted it over time. But nah survivor experience don’t matter. You’d think me saying this that I am a survivor main but I’m not. Just a 12 hook andy who the tunneling changes wouldn’t of affected and would’ve actually buffed. But nah I double lose out because killers can’t help but tunnel.
2 -
It feels like they didn't give the updates a fighting chance. They gave up before we even reached the weekend!
Even if they had already made up their minds, it would have been better PR to wait until Monday morning.
9 -
They announced they were pulling the feature indefinitely after 2 days.
They're still "waiting for results to assess ghoul and clown".
It was 100% the crying.
8 -
I thought this patch had Ghoul and Clown changes…are they no longer coming to live?
0 -
Maybe, I kinda lost track.
The point is that when the devs are looking at data, they take months to collect enough of a sample size to make sure it's being effective. Even if the change is next patch, it's been months for those two characters. Same thing with SM, over a year each time (and so far)
They absolutely didn't look at "the data" for two days worth of a limited (PC only) ptb and make a decision based on matches played.
The only numbers that mattered in this case were the nearly endless supply of brand new accounts with less than 10 posts each screaming at them.
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That's as valid a theory as anyone saying the data/experiences/videos from those two days was so abysmally off putting that scrapping it was the best course of action.
I guess we'll never know unless they explicitly say.
-8 -
Oops.
It seems that this has reached the required number of downvotes to become a buried topic.
Guess I'll abandon ship as it's clearly not worth discussing according to forum metrics.
-6 -
I mean, we have evidence of people spamming most Internet feedback locations. Dozens of brand new accounts flooding the boards.
We have no data.
So you have the actual evidence of people crying, up against speculation of having sufficient data to draw any conclusion (and the further speculation of what that data said).
It was not the data. Period.
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and during this time of slowly adjusting it so it becomes healthy which could take weeks, months or even years…bhvr loses a huge chunk of player base from killers quitting the game. It makes sense to retain the playerbase instead of killing the game. even now i dont see survivors saying they are quitting in mass, the odd few maybe but nowhere near as many as the killers were going to. survivors complain but they still play.
-8 -
I didn't know the downvote system hid posts like reddit. 💀
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i dont see survivors saying they are quitting in mass
Survivors players are largely resigned to feeling ignored. They don't generally come out and threaten to leave, or announce it, because they doesn't change anything for survivors. Survivors just stop playing quietly.
Killers do this all the time, because it works. This ptb is evidence that being loud and threatening to leave works for them.
bhvr loses a huge chunk of player base from killers quitting the game.
Any time in the past 3 years that the game has changed, survivors are told in condescending tones to "git gud" and just "adapt".
Then, when killers might have to actually consider making a change in their gameplay, they scream that they can't adapt.
9 -
you say survivors quietly quit but the player count seems pretty stable. it goes up and down in line with licence releases but generally the numbers are up from what they were a couple years ago. if they are quitting quietly its a drop in the ocean because player count hasnt been effected.
i mean people could adapt or quit if they cant. if i couldnt adapt i would definitely just stop playing as many killers would but survivors as a whole seem to not want to adapt or quit. its very strange.
fact is, the player count is up and the figures show it. my waiting times during peak times are pretty good for survivor and killer, i have no issues getting a match within 30 seconds to 1 win. off peak times can be a bit longer but thats to be expected.
My advice to anyone that isnt enjoying any game is voice your complaints and stop playing. if the company wants to get back the player base they will know what they need to do to get it from the complaints but simply complaining and then continue to play a game you dont enjoy is baffling to me. a week or month of tolerating issues in the hope they will improve is understandable but years of complaining and still playing? blows my mind
-12 -
Yeah - you'll see that I have posted and the topic remains buried.
All you need to do to bury any topic you do not like is get 5+ downvotes on it, as far as I can tell.
-2 -
but… I saw it…
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I see it, now, too…
Seems like some of the downvotes have also vanished O_O0 -
I would suspect it was the outcry.
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This content has been removed.
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Their data would include the more measured feedback people gave, all of which largely indicated at least some problems, so it's fairly obviously a mix of both.
My pet theory though, that I have no real evidence for but does feel plausible, is that it happened so quickly because BHVR already knew about some of the issues ahead of time and either didn't have time to fix them before the PTB went live, or wanted to throw the PTB out to confirm that the things they suspected would be problems actually were.
Then, there turned out to be more problems they weren't aware of, and they thought "yeah this just needs another round of testing".Is that true? Who knows. All we know for sure is that the PTB was flawed in some ways, and giving changes this far-reaching and radical a second round of testing is a good idea anyways.
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what have i said that would imply im toxic in any way? i think tunneling is needed in the games current state? survivors can counter it if they play well? my team mates are often potatoes? i advocate equality across solo and swf? i play by the rules of the game and dont insult anyone? i play seflishly in solo matches? i genuinely dont see a major issue with either side? where have i ever said anything remotly toxic? All i said is if people dont enjoy the game and they continue to play a game they dont enjoy thats on them which it is. no one is being forced to play the game and if your clinging on to the hope things will change then you could have a long wait which you could, but at the end of the day you choose to play the game, you choose to play survivor, you choose to play killer. i know i wouldnt play a game i dont like, if you want to play a game you dont like for whatever reason then your more than welcome to do so and more than welcome to complain about it. just dont expect people to take the complaints seriously because your not doing yourself any favours.
Post edited by BoxGhost on-6 -
complaining about issues within the game does not mean we don’t like it. In fact the opposite it shows we have passion to change those issues to improve the game.
6 -
You can't get any data after only 1 day of PTB, people aren't even playing seriously they're testing new perks and killer, they want to be chased by new killer/ want to see new mori, people can DC freely so doing gens feels pointless
most of the complaints were about anti tunnel yet the devs scrapped everything without even trying, why not keep anti slug and let players actually test it ? No it wasn't about data, they panicked and reversed everything to appease streamers and reddit
6 -
if it was 1 or 2 issues but overall a satisfying fun game then yes i agree. But there are so many complaints about literally every aspect of the game, tunneling, slugging, camping, gen speeds, hook timers, hatch, op killers, meta perks, maps. "tunneling is the most unfun thing in the game its happening every match". Things like this shows they are not having fun in the majority of matches but continue to play match after match year after year knowing its going to happen. its not a new game is nearly a decade old. At what point will people think "this isnt fun, time to play a different game"? Each to their own, i can only speak for myself and i would never intentionally give myself a bad time in the hope things change. i simply say what i think needs changing and if they dont change i stop playing. i spent years on this game because i enjoy it but the moment i stop enjoying it is the moment i up and leave. im not paid to test their game for them and endure weeks, months, years of awful gameplay for the devs to eventually get it right a decade down the line.
If people do still enjoy the game in spite of the issues then the issues cant be THAT bad. Not saying are not bad and the complaints are invalidated but they are not as bad as what some people claim them to be because they are still having fun at the end of the day.
-4 -
People already tested the bad anti-slugging TWICE before this update.
We had an entire finisher-Mori PTB, with an anti-slugging solution that got massive amounts of negative feedback
We had a chaos shuffle with an anti-slugging solution that was so hated that the entire event got cancelled.
And now we had another PTB with basekit unbreakable, that people STILL didn't like. So yes, people did test this for way longer than a few days. We already know exactly how much we hate the idea of infinite basekit Unbreakable.
-3 -
Killer crying 100%. Streamers saw they might have a little harder time tunneling, slugging and winning 2,000 Blight matches in a row. BHVR saw that might be a little unfair to make it harder for these people and caved into the demands.
6 -
This. It was on the PTB for like 3-4 days before it got pulled. It should have been rolled out to the public build, so that the entire playerbase could have tested and given feedback regarding the changes.
I playtested a lot of matches, both as killer and survivor, and it seemed pretty fair to me. The systems worked as intended, and punished killers for tunneling someone out too early - Tested this myself in a bot match, since you know, bots aren't real players, and doesn't mind the stuff you do, even for testing purposes.
Anyways, my takeaway is that this would ultimately punish those players who RELY on tunneling to win, and doesn't want to change their playstyle to be more fair and fun to go against.
Staggered tunneling (alternating between the same two survivors) is another problem. and why the hook stage limit was set to 6 to begin with. I do agree that this should be lowered to 5 stages.
But for killer players who doesn't rely on tunneling, this change was actually a net buff, since it would free up some perk slots, and also give a nice speed boost to traverse the map faster. I myself found these changes to be very helpful in many scenarios.
And finally, the anti-tunnel would not trigger if the survivors were ignoring their hooked teammate, since it would not be the killer's fault. Only direct killer-interactions would trigger it, and I am sure there could have been made exceptions for killers like Sadako and Pig, with Condemn and RBT's respectively, to not trigger anti-tunnel punishment if they were to kill the survivor before the hook stage limit.
Also, the anti-slug changes was a nice way to help survivors, in that circumstance that all seems lost, there is still hope to bounce back. Still, the basekit Tenacity was a bit much, but the Unbreakable part (permanently active after 90 seconds) was nice to have.
And no, for those who say anything to counter this: You don't need to slug to win. It is just an anti-fun tactic that makes winning too easy. And I am sure there would have been adjustments to killers who actually needed a bit of slugging, like Oni for instance, not losing as much of his power gauge when picking up a survivor.
Killers could still slug survivors who intentionally body-blocked off of the hook, as a 90-second time-out for being "silly", while chasing down the initial target.Anyways, I didn't want to write an entire essay on the new systems, but at least from my testing, I found the systems to be perfectly fair, with some minor adjustments needed, and it could have opened the doors for better balancing of killers.
The main reason why it got pulled was ultimately due to hardcore killer mains who over-rely on tunneling being a bit too vocal here in the forum or on the other social channels. Don't question me on this, you know I am speaking the truth here.5 -
Complaints. I dont think 40 hours or whatever it was before they announced it wasnt happening is enough to get proper data.
12 -
That's a different one there wasn't enough time to test it, 90 seconds on the ground is a long time that's like half your slug timer before you die. Most people seemed to like auto-recover but not basekit tenacity, having to hold M1 is pointless it's more a QoL feature than a buff, again they could have tweaked it without canceling everything
7 -
Killers have always been significantly louder than survivors despite being a smaller group. Content creators who main killer also wield a very disproportionate amount of influence over what happens to the game. Probably because they take everything so seriously. Compare how serious Otzdarva and truetalent are compared to people like Skermz and JRM. Otz will release a 20 hour video talking about why a change shouldn't happen. After this he will go on stream every day for weeks and complain until the change is reverted. There is no one on the survivor side who does anything like this. People like JRM are content to make the killer fall into a hole. They never talk about balance or offer any suggestions about how to change the game for the better. Basically I think that killers mains are louder and this is why they usually end up getting what they want. Survivor mains are content to be punching bags and Behavior doesn't care as long as they keep buying skins.
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Most people that didn't like the PTB, hated the basekit infinite unbreakable way more than they hated basekit tenacity.
It's was absolutely ridiculous being told that it's a major problem if killers want to slug, but 100% acceptable if survivors want to force the killer to slug. BHVR should make up their minds. Is slugging bad, or is it not bad? Because if excessive slugging is bad, then it should be fixed on both sides of the game.
-5 -
fog vials gutting not two weeks into live game :
12 -
"Probably because they take everything so seriously"
Not sure if you've ever watched Hardcore Survivor, but the difference between the killer main content creators and the survivor main content creators was interesting to observe lol Otz and Dowsey spent the whole time trying to get JRM and Ayrun to take it seriously. Then Hens took over from Dowsey later down the line and he was even more on edge, constantly going off at JRM and Ayrun. They were all playing survivor for those games, but it was no surprise to me that the players (Otz, Dowsey, Hens) most drawn to killer were assertive and competitive, while the ones drawn to survivor (JRM and Ayrun) just wanted to have fun lol it made for a very interesting dynamic
9 -
Well there is also a vested interest in the killer player to "win" especially for content creators the dial needs to be tipped in their favor as their lively hoods literally depends on it. The survivor roles due to the nature of team based play, you can easily just get 3 bad teammates causing the most cracked player to lose results in the audience and player not to expect constant wins. They probably need to be chiller and more comedy motivated on stream to keep viewers interested as survivor game play can be very boring if your just left alone the whole match.
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I think whatever data and feedback that was gathered was probably enough for BHVR to do readjustments, after all they said they're going to put the revised changes back into the next PTB and that's fair. I don't think people understand that this upcoming chapter was going to have a new killer/survivor, the Myers rework as well as both the Anti-tunnel and anti-slug measures. Like that's A LOT of stuff you can't account for in a single PTB. Because if we've all learned something it's that rushing everything like with the Walking Dead chapter is just going to leave a gigantic mess that'll take a year to fix. It's much better if they do the revisions and release each feature one at a time.
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Fog vials will always make me think outcry trumps data, because I can't imagine those mediocre things were tipping the balance after a week of already minimal usage.
12 -
This would make any since if they have EVER iterated on a ptb as it was up.
4 -
There wasn't nearly enough time to collect sufficient and sufficiently high quality data to justify such a drastic adjustment. It was 100% the outcry.
And frankly, with how fast it got pulled, I wager that it wasn't even the PTB reaction, but the doomposting ahead of its release.
9 -
Tbh these big changes shouldnt even be happening in a dlc patch. The devs basically shot themselves in the foot the moment they announced the slug and tunneling changes being in a dlc patch then a mid season patch.
Everyone knows they had to extend the ptb for better changes but that would mean delay the dlc aka sales. And then we ignore the chance the changes still get perceived bad with the dlc which means people not buying the dlc and still less sales.
And then that is just focusing on the balance side. There is a 100% chance if these big changes went live there would be game breaking bugs which also means bad reputation and worse sales.
The public outcry would be non existent if they announced these changes for a mid patch then delaying it now.
1 -
I've never even heard of that until now, but it aligns with my own observations that usually seem to go against the grain. Players drawn to Killer play to win, while players drawn to Survivor play for fun. You see it at almost every level of play unless they swap sides.
0 -
Going with outrage.
If it was data you want to run the test for longer to see how players adapt.
Also they've mentioned before they understand the PTB has data issues do to the limited player pool and they are heavily looking at feedback.
Also if we look at what they said:
We have heard you clearly that the current implementation of the Tunneling Reduction and Slugging Reduction Systems players have been testing this week feels too punishing for Killers.We get 'feels too punishing'.
I'm surprised they have not issued a clear statement.I'm not. At this point I'm starting to think BHVR's vagueness and drip approach to announcements is a marketing strategy.
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