http://dbd.game/killswitch
Hot Take. Behaviour should stop listening to the wider community. (please read before judgement)
Now bare with me I will explain.
You see posts on this forum every day with someone saying "nerf this" or "Buff that" and most of the time you see it and think Why…just why does that perk need a nerf or why does that killer need a buff.
The issue is no matter how hard we all try we do have a preferred side and deep down we want that side to be stronger
Now don't get me wrong I'm the same. I'm a killer main thru and thru and as much as I try and stay neutral there will always be a bit of bias in my opinion.
For this reason the wider community shouldn't overly be listened to when it comes to the balance of the game.
Sure there are some instances where its so obviously broken that even a Civ 5 player can tell and these of course need to be seen by the devs but for the most part the posts you see about this or that perk or this or that killer being to strong/to weak come from someone who has just lost to it or doesn't understand the counter play.
Now there is a smaller part of the community that have been playing this game since day dot and have probably a better understanding of what balance is than the devs themselves and these are the players that really need to be listened to and approached for balancing issues.
So i propose this to the Devs. You had your consultants which were real players with real understanding of the game (although not even sure if this still a thing) you should be looking to them for more help. Take the suggestions from the wider community and have them vetted to filter out all the posts that are not needed leaving just real balancing issues left to sort then focus on those issues to improve the game.
And a note to the wider community. I don't mean any insult by this post and i still think you should be posting with genuine balance issues or game issues but I ask that before you take to the forums to post about a a perk that needs nerfing or that survivors need a buff you actually take a moment to test and see if it truly is an issue or if you are just having a gut reaction to a bad game or a couple of bad games.
Comments
-
This content has been removed.
-
I think they need to listen to regualr players, but a better and more organized feedback collection system is needed to filter bias. Feedback collection shouldn't be through unchecked social media accounts that are easy to create and spam with. It should go through your actual game account with a system that can compare what you say with who you are in the game. What we have now is a bunch of random voices (and CCs who make momey off the game) screaming for whatever they think will benefit them. We always have a constant flow of forum users who do nothing but complain about the side they don't like and it's pretty useless for gathering anything meaningful.
17 -
Agreed honestly, you can see from the many many many posts crying over every little thing alot of the constant complainers come here to make demands with very little critical or logical thinking of how it affects the game and have a poor understanding of how the game really plays based on skill issues.
There's not alot of legitimate feedback, just alot of complaining, false narratives and gaslighting to get unneeded buffs or nerfs. Its why open forums are awful for feedback.
4 -
The problem with this is that is all assuming that BHVR even properly listens to their consultants in the first place as they have been on record shown to disregard the opinions or voices of people that are pretty close to them (Case in point the Chandler Riggs disaster) Otz and Chandler were both ignored and BHVR just stubbornly insisted they knew better.
Then there was the more recent stream where a dev was visibly confused why a map like The Game would have more slugging incidents and when the chat said "pallets" he had no clue how to process that.
If they had been talking to consultants at all you would think they would have a faint idea what "pallet saves" are but they don't even have this knowledge of the game let alone any higher forms needed to balance it in a much larger scale beyond that.
And the general direction for balancing overall has been pretty strange.
Fog vials come out die and gets abandoned with the same happening with the Krause.
We have nurfs constantly to gen-regression perks while gen-progression perks are fine despite the massive imbalance between the two, we have an exhaustion meta that has not changed since forever and they add more perks to tack on to them like ghost notes and vigil.
Massively popular perks that are quite common to see but nothing has happened to any of them, meanwhile we have perks like battery included and unbound getting hit with nurfs for no reason makes the balancing feel like its mostly just a guy blindfolded taking shots at a dart board on what gets hit next.
And then that not even to mention when they add nurfs/buffs in and call it "Quality of life". It seems they respond more to shock and vibes than anything else and this approach has made the meta miserable as its always the same.
It is possible to get their act together if they wanted games like Helldivers have show that even after a balance disaster there is a chance to fix it but that all depends if BHVR wants to seriously take time to understand their own game.
1 -
maybe they should just work on core issues like hackers, hit boxes, fast vaults, and anything else this is core to the game.
2 -
They don't listen to the wider community if by 'listen to the wider community' you mean 'listen to general commentary on social media and the forum', since most of that is not really a coherent voice you could or should really listen to. They listen to players in the form of player consultants, aggregated responses from surveys and sometimes if there is a unified, extremely loud expression about something specific from all corners of the community. How much impact these sources have is debatable.
Most of the balancing decisions BHVR makes are down to data they get from the game itself, and very little else. They see a number in a spreadsheet, decide whether or not they like that number, and then adjust other numbers around that number to see if that makes it do what they want. Why the number is that way in a broader context, or changes that go beyond the problem number and those numbers around it, are questions that are very rarely considered. They also have to think about the next 3 chapters or so that are on the way and whether a change will affect those chapters' ability to be released in a somewhat functional state. This is how you get addons that do the same thing as other addons or get tweaked into becoming useless, perks being buffed or nerfed for no discernible reason and Nurse and Blight being the strongest Killers in the game for almost 10 years: because it makes the numbers in the spreadsheet look the way they want them to.
2 -
The consultants who play both sides should be the main source of feedback, but sadly we have seen so many times in the past that feedback has been ignored and changes put into the game despite everyone shouting that’s it’s a bad idea.
-1 -
then how come we never got the anti tunneling or slugging changes?
that goes against your whole statement killer mains especially YouTubers have more power over anyone in the community they got almost every change reverted11 -
Well i think its too late for that.
They probably are already constantly doing 2v8 since thats what most people prefer.
But the casual survivor playing 1v4?, yeah, never happening, they had their chance when fnaf came out.
Fumble'd the tunneling and slugging changes, seriously, no one with a casual mindset would play survivor after getting tunneled and slugged over and over and over.
4 -
Yeah, content creators prioritise their content, not necessarily the health of the game. Case in point was the tightening of matchmaking after Chucky's release. Heaps of the popular cc's released videos arguing against it, and their arguments revolved around their content - for example, that they can't chat with their viewers as much if their opponents are too challenging. It was just 'me, me, me' over a change that positively influenced the game for probably hundreds of thousands of players worldwide. And this was from content creators who played both sides.
9 -
- It's wrong to listen to ONLY a portion of players. Everyone's experiences are important, experts and beginners alike. That said, I agree that Devs shouldn't listen to ALL complaints. The most glaring example was the fog vials, which were DESTROYED within a week. A week of complaints on Twitter was enough to literally DESTROY a game mechanic... that's simply not normal.Should the fog vials have been reworked? Maybe, but that doesn't mean practically eliminating and discouraging an entire game mechanic.
- EDIT: ...and anyone who earns money with DBD through content on social networks should NEVER discuss balancing with BHVR, simply they're not the right person due to an inevitable "conflict of interest." Of course, I can give their opinion, making videos or live broadcasts on the platforms, but their role should stop there.
1 -
True. That why they are so adamant in buffing weaker killers, because in low MMR weaker killers like Sadako and Legion stomp.
They want more a balanced spreadsheet than a balanced game, unfortunately. I would like that they took a deep dive in balancing without caring too much about numbers but trying to get the real feeling of DBD for every segment of players: casual, veterans and those who are close to a middle ground in terms of experience.
0 -
Players are good at knowing when something is wrong. they're not good at identifying the problems and creating solutions
I’ve time-stamped the exact spot that I want to share at 1 hr 17 minutes 50 seconds in that video that demonstrates what in talking about
0
