Area Voice Chat and Balancing Around Communication
Hey y'all!
So a recent game of mine (of which I had DS and my team kept blocking the killer from getting me, making it run out right before he picked me up) reminded me of how much DbD is in need of IN GAME communication and balancing around said communication. If I were able to tell my team to let him pick me up, then I could have gotten away.
However, with that in mind, things would have to be balanced around the fact that people can communicate. As odd as a comparison this is, let's compare it to Overwatch competitive Season 1. At the time, Hero select was not locked to one per person, and the main meta was stacking certain heroes, mainly 2 D.Va's, 2 Lucios, and 2 Zenyattas. This was quickly changed because the games would last very lenghty amounts of time.
I refuse to say "Add a Perk limit for each team duhhoy" because that wouldn't work. If 4 people run Left Behind, there would be nonpoint in restricting that to one person. My idea would be to use the full rarity color variations for the perks and balance with that in mind.
SUGGESTIONS
Perks, for both survivor and killer, are colored based on popularity and effectiveness of the perk.
Brown and Yellow would be the lesser used perks, get little to no downgrade when stacked.
Green would recieve slight downgrades when stacked
And Purple-Pink would recieve notable downgrades when stacked.
The perks will change colors based on buffs/nerfs ,community feedback, and usage of the perk.
With this system, it should be easier to see which perks need some love and which perks do a little too well. And with communication in mind, the perks should always be in a dynamic state, balancing out the game naturally.
So I just kinda word vommited all over my screen, but tell me what you guys think!
Comments
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NO i dont want to hear some 14 year old screaming into their microphone absolutely not
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ADD IN:
To alleviate the rairty issue of the perks im the bloodweb (since they can't really be listed by rarity in this) they perks would cost 4k BP Rank 1, 5k BP Rank 2, and 6k BP Rank 3.
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Well there would obviously be a menu to turn off VC if you want to haha
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Even then its a terrible idea honestly it is people have suggested this before you and im sure you wont be the last dbd is not a competitive game it does not need voice chat plus the levels of toxicity are off the charts i couldnt imagine the stuff people would say on voice chat the game is fine where its at let it be.
If you want communication discord and skype are a thing id rather leave it at that im sure others feel the same. The devs suggested it awhile back and got a storm of people begging for it to never become a thing.
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Well I'm sure if proximity chat were implemented, they would include a mute option.
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Yeah but you’re balancing the game around voice chat. So if you don’t want it and mute it, you are now at a disadvantage because of the balance changes. That’s not exactly fair. Personally I would absolutely zero interest in voice chat....I’m not the only one. It would be awful. Not to mention if you are on mute and the other 3 are not, youll probably get shafted by them somehow for being the one guy not talking.
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Opting out of voicechat via a mute button is alot easier than opting INTO voicechat via getting your squad of randoms into a discord channel every game during the pre-game campfire screen. Also, if you willing choose to not communicate with your teammates, than its completely fair if you get shafted for your choice of non-communication. Currently, the game is balanced around communication not being a thing, with mechanics like the Blindness status effect being completely pointless when teammates can simply speak about their locations.
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Im sure there are people who would enjoy a feature like that.
I wouldn’t be opposed to it.
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While I do think it would be fun to be able to hear the survivors get scared. I can see how it would turn bad quick.
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We dont want voice chat, its enough for us killers facing SWF teams talking on discord or teamspeak and saying where is the killer going... if you want to talk then add people who has DbD on steam and play with them, but voice chat is too much, not fair.
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No. SWF communication is already ruining the killer experience.
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And that's why adding in-game voice communications can help balance around this issue and thus solve it.
Besides that, I'll probably fail to play seriously imagening people acting all crazy through their mic like they do in some games :'). Would love it.
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I would rather the devs focused on fixing bugs and reworks/new releases instead of a voice chat system. Honestly after running into one or two toxic ######### I'd be auto muting everyone at the start of every match from then on anyway and I bet it wouldn't take long to run into a couple.
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Who's "We", King Wasabi?
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With SWF already being a thing, claiming that adding voice coms would be unfair to killers is dumb. Voice coms is already a thing, the game just has a convenient way of pretending its not there. With voice coms built in, it would have no actual change of killer gameplay while opening the door up for actual balance. Currently, things like the blindness status effect or the perk knock out is completely voided out by coms. These things can be addressed as soon as the devs stop pretending survivors arnt simply talking to each other.
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The game was, wholeheartedly, not built to be competative, but whether you think so or not, IT IS. The ranking system wouldnt exist if it wasnt.
But the thing is, the game wasnt built with communication in mind, and people are doing so anyway. That's not healthy for a game. Especially if the devs KNOW their game is not being played the way they intended.
Lets be honest, this game is horror themed, but it's not a horror game.
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“ Also, if you willing choose to not communicate with your teammates, than its completely fair if you get shafted for your choice of non-communication”
LOL! Yes, force communication with randoms, very fair. Get used to very long killer queues cause there will be a loss of survivors. This would be the worst thing they could possibly do with the game. Also, the game is slanted in the killers favor against 4 solo players. Most people are aware of this. Let’s not pretend these games are evenly balanced cause they aren’t. So they have taken into account the existence of SWF somewhat.
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But killers currently get frustrated with the fact that SWF groups use voice communications. The developers could NEVER tell the SWF players to not use voice communications like TeamSpeak and Discord. So by adding it in-game you can atleast balance around it because it's a feature that exists in the game. If you choose not to use the in-game voice communications then it's up to you for the potential loss of useful information you could have gotten over voice.
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Forcing people (yes, you essentially ARE forcing them) to play with voice chat will absolutely result in the loss of players. I would not play anymore myself. This is completely the wrong way to go about it.
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I will forever fight voice chat in this game to the very end. NO NO NO. We don't need this. If you want voice chat with every person every room if you're out of swf then get on Friday the 13th.....which is horrible. Still. NO
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'Forcing' is a little hyoerbolic dont ya think?
If this IS the wrong way to go about this,please think of an alternative.
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Just going to leave this here! :D
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I see two things going on in this thread.
Thing the first: People against the idea of In-game comms based off both the game not being designed for it AND experiencing the strength of swf groups using 3rd party comms.
The second one: People in favor of in-game comms citing that it will open up balance changes yet not providing examples of how it can be balanced.
In-game comms don't prevent people from using the 3rd party comms. Yet In-game comms can possibly provide an advantage for killers.
With this in mind what will almost certainly happen is either survivors will completely ignore the in-game comms opting to use 3rd party comms to deny the possible killer advantage, OR they just use it to grief the killer. Only a small percentage will use it the way it's intended.
This is also not considering the amount of people that hate the idea so much they quit the game resulting in a loss of player count leading to longer queues leading to griefing having an even larger impact leading to even more people leaving. It's like some sort of snowball. Granted this is only a possibility, not a certainty.
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If the alternative is muting it, playing at an even greater disadvantage in solo queue, what else would you call it? The game would become unplayable. Someone in this thread literally posted that it would be fair if teammates screw you over if you are the one guy who is on mute lol. Do you know how idiotic that is to say?
i do not have an answer, but what I do know is this is horrible and isn’t it.
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If you want to make sure you get use out of DS just fast open a locker
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Fact: if they implement in game voice comms with any limitations like proximity, survivors will still use Discord to get around it, so "balancing around in game voice coms" is wishful thinking.
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@MassiveToggaf A simple balance change could be to alter the blindness status effect in both addons and perks to debuff the survivor in a different way. Current, this effect is made completely pointless if you can simply talk to teammates. Being sluged with knockout is pointless if you can vocaly say "Im slugged by the killer shack". Reworking these perks and addons could be 1 way of balancing.
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I definitely should have remembered to do that, especially since we were at the shack
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While area chat is an idea, I personally think there should be no area limit.
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Okay, no. This whole "literally unplayable" argument you're using doesn't help anything.
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If you want to balance around communication, too much would have to change.
Balance instead around competing interests. Some people(even killers, to my frustration) say that survivors are a team and shouldn't complain about issues caused by poor-teamwork, because it's all on them and their failure to cooperate.
Back in year-one there was even talk by the devs of allowing a survivor on the hook to kick someone if they thought they were being farmed, preventing the unsafe 'rescue' and punishing the farmer for it with a short delay. That's an idea that needs revisiting: SWF have a habit of farming people outside of their group and griefing them.
Other features should force survivors into catch-22 situations where communication can actually be worse for them, because they are listening to the person they are having to betray. It's why hook-camping has been especially successful against SWF, because they have to listen to someone on VOIP saying "C'mon, just try. Someone lead the killer away and another run-in. You don't know he'll hard-camp."
There were plans of course to do just that. The killer after all has to make catch-22 decisions all the time, so it's only fair, which is also probably the reason it never happened.
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One of the appeals of the game for me is that no one (in game or in lore) speak in the trials. VC would ruin this. Even if I turned it off there would be some tryhard survivors who would start to complain to me "WhY dIdN't YoU dO wHaT i ToLd YoU?"
DbD also is not a competitive game, it is a party game that some people take too damn seriously.
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@PolarBear Whats the difference between a competitive game and a party game? You have ppl who get competitive about ANY game, so why should this be any different? Try playing a game of monopoly and see how long it takes before ######### gets heated.
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This may have been a casual game in the past, but now that Tournaments have been introduced along with leaderboard Twitch tournament implementation, this game has evolved past that.
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@LordGlint There is a difference between playing competitively and devs making a game competitive by choice. I'd rather keep DbD more on the casual side. There isn't really that big of a point playing competitively due to the balance problems that exist, the rng on some maps and map layouts and the inconsistencies between players skill levels in the same ranks.
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Unlike you, many (competitive) people might like talking about possible strategies over voice, it can make a team a real team rather than 4 strangers doing their own thing. Nobody forces anybody to use their mic, and there should always be an option to mute people but atleast you'll lose your right to blame your team for anything in the end chat.
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with the addition of Twitch Challenges, devs now refer to it as "casual competitions"
an oxymoron if there ever was one. 🤣
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