New Player Observations and Recommended Improvements

This post will be directly addressing the issue of new player experience and hurtles faced when attempting to play the game. Also I will attempt to provide suggested ways to help new players become more knowledgable about the game and incentivize certain aspects of play.

I'm new to playing DBD but I've been watching high rank killer/survivor gameplay for over a year now. I have pretty good knowledge about how to play but in practice I'm pretty garbage. I understand to be better I need to learn and I've been tea bagged by enough good survivors to know that I need to improve.

As far as I have seen though I think that the biggest issues boil down to knowledge/mentality for new players.

When it comes to knowledge I think it would be a massive help if survivors/killers had an in-game tab when selecting their loadouts to see all possible perks/add-ons of the opposing side ranked by how popular/common they are. (I understand people on the forums/YouTube make tier lists but this would just make it easier for newer players.)

It could really help new survivors be more wary about BBQ and Chili or Ruin or help new killers look out for Borrowed Time or DS.

I don't know at what point the game figures out what map will be played but if it is sometime around the offerings being shown the following loading screen could provide the map name, shape, and location of the defining building/structure of the map. Like literally just a top down blueprint with the map shape and an outline of the building shape, such as the Thompson House or Coal Tower. Nothing about gens, loops, jungle gyms, or pallets. This would help new players learn the maps without giving information to experienced players.

Dealing with mentality though seems to be incredibly difficult though. While of course you should be rewarded for escaping I feel there should be an emphasis on helping your team. I always bring We'll Make It to help people off hook and things like Kindred to give my team the best chance of surviving and give them as much info as possible. I think it should be stressed in tutorials that helping advance the game and save your friends will help you rank up, and that living isn't the only way to win.

I get that dying feels bad, as I die almost every game. But I also pip pretty much every game, and I think I've only de-pipped one time. I also think hatch feels nice when your team has completely failed but it incentivizes people to just hide in corners and let their team die so they can get the points. Maybe by adding a required amount of BP before you can enter hatch would solve this. Providing an on screen bar that is required to be filled by a cumulative sum of the 4 categories BP would mean that no matter if you were looping, doing gens, healing, or saving from hook as long as you contributed to the team you could escape through hatch.

Also no one seems to like doing gens. I know it can be boring to sit and hold m1 but someone needs to progress the game. I pretty much always bring a toolbox every game. A lot of the games I play are 10 min of me looping a terrible killer while my 3 teammates hide in the opposite corner of the map doing nothing. I've even run by a gen or been on hook and seen people hiding behind a gen (not doing it) when there is no heartbeat or someone else is clearly being chased.

I don't exactly know how to fix this problem but maybe by giving more BP for the Objective category or just increasing the rate at which you earn BP while doing them so less time gets you more would help.

Or maybe by splitting the progress bar on a gen into quarters and every time you finish a quarter you get bonus BP. These bonus BPs would give less if multiple people were on the same gen like 50/50 the usual rate if 2 were on the gen when it reached that mark. This would incentivize survivors to split up and cover more gens at one time so they could get more BP. You could also make Leader give full BP to each survivor on one gen so the perk doesn't get completely neglected. And once a BP threshold has been met it goes away on that gen so people cant farm by having the killer break it and constantly repair to that mark.

Also it seems many new players don't fully understand what actions alert the killer. I just recently realized fast vaults show up to the killer. Idk if there is a tutorial that explains this but that would be very helpful.

Lastly while I know there is a tutorial thing that explains all the keywords it would be incredibly helpful to make it a tab like the proposed perk tab earlier in this post. Each keyword could be explained with a short explanation that pops up when hovered over. This would allow players to refresh on what each means while waiting in lobbies for ease of access and to promote quicker queues.

I honestly saw that list in the tutorials and just said f-it that's to much to read right now I'll learn as I go, and I keep queuing up game after game while forgetting to go back and check on things I have questions about. I've got like forty hours on the game now and I've seen the keyword Blindness so many times and I still don't know ######### it means.

Hopefully this helps and isn't just a useless rant but thanks for reading this post if you made it this far. (: