Re: Nurse dev stream

coppersly · October 2019

I just have some thoughts I need to get out. My goal is not to post a rant or flame the devs, quite the opposite. I want them to hear clearly why we have problems with what they have recently been doing and their design & balance philosophy for this game.

The stream link for anyone: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/501700970

The first thing I want to talk about is at 00:51:17 in the stream, about why the added the cooldown & kept fatigue.

They said they kept fatigue in because it accomplishes LOS breaking for survivors. This is totally understandable and fair, nothing wrong. They added the cooldown on top of that to give them even more time to run and break LOS. This is where the problem starts to come up. I'll quote what I have a HUGE issue with and is a very clear eye-opener that the devs DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME AT ANY SORT OF COMPETITIVE LEVEL AT ALL, or actually play Nurse outside of play-tests.

"You have time to lose sight, gain your orientation, AND THEN blink at them" This is straight up WRONG. Good survivors who actually know how to counter Nurse already went for LOS breaks. All this change does is give bad survivors who don't know how to counterplay her an easier time while also making the people who do know how to effectively play against her so strong she might never catch them without an incredibly lucky PREDICTION blink. The way they said it implies they think part of her regular gameplay should consist of straight up stopping the chase after the first successful hit while you recharge and fatigue so they can get away. And then trying to blink after them to catch them, but the thing is good survivors will never let you get LOS on them after the first hit, leaving you with pretty much only prediction blinks to actually catch them again because there is no way in hell the slowest killer in the game is going to chase them on foot. But with the way the cooldown works if you miss that first prediction you will not be able to find them again without addons/perks specifically designed to find survivors.

It was also said that they wanted to avoid having addons that change muscle memory, and yet again this is wrong as there are still muscle-memory altering addons.

-Pocket Watch still alters ONE OF THE MOST FUNDAMENTAL parts of her muscle memory by changing the blink-chain window. This is a direct contradiction of their goal.

-Torn Bookmark is also an offender due to the mechanic change that is imposes on blinking. This is harder to argue for muscle memory but I'd say not being able to do a basic competent of your power counts for this since you have to change entirely the way you play her.

-(Kavanagh's Last Breath & Heavy Panting) I'm honestly torn on these. The good is they still enable longer blinks for a somewhat fair cost of slower charge on first blink (99% sure it can't affect 2nd blink without Pocket Watch, someone please correct me if I'm wrong here) but this is again a direct contradiction of what they wanted to do by not changing any muscle memory parts of her kit (charging up a blink is most certainly a part of that)

TL;DR

Devs stop saying things and then 5 seconds later doing the exact opposite. First it was just an addon pass with a POSSIBILITY of base-kit changes, then it was just "slight" changes, and now we are post-patch with pretty much zero feedback change. We still have the EXACT same problem that the addon pass was supposed to address; addons that aren't used and addons that effect her muscle memory. And now she is just not fun to play and so extremely punishing and frustrating having to combat not only survivors and the clock but also her own power meter with the ability to not get a 2nd blink because of 0.01 seconds left on the charge.

Sluzzy · October 2019

I'll keep it short: killers are not supposed to be powerful. Survivors are the powerrole in DBD. Spirit, Hillbilly need to cautiously standby for their nerfs, all killers will become "skins". Loopable and easily genrushed by SWF.

They want a 50% killrate against potatoes, not good survivors. Devs don't play their game to understand, they look at raw stats and its misleading.

So nurse was nerfed because experienced nurses perched at rank 1 was noobstomping new players that made their way there for the first time. They are balancing their game so skill and experience does not matter on the killer side. If you are a killer, switch to survivor or uninstall. Your feedback to the devs does not matter.

Financial_Stability · October 2019

Then you have the issue of rank not representing actual skill. The way it is now, if you play enough you'll eventually attain the shiny R1 icon. It's no secret rank doesn't differentiate between actually good players and mediocre players. But letting the mediocre players into the highest rank in the game lets them believe they are good players, which they're not. That also means that they believe that the way they play is what skilled players do, and are less inclined to seek out counterplay out of the traditional loop and pallet play.

This is why I'm still hesitant to take any stats they put out, especially red rank statistics, with any more than a grain of salt. The ranking system doesn't reward you for doing your objective, amd actually PUNISHES you for doing it efficiently. Black pipping and depiping are all to common for people who escape a trial as fast as possible and sacrifice all survivors as fast as possible.

This leads to people thinking they are in the small percentage of players that are skillful, when in truth they are far from it. With that they believe they have an understanding of balance. This is why we get changes that to actual competitive players seem completely ludicrous.

I myself have partaken in more tournaments than I have fingers. Many of them being very high profile such as Space Esports Weekly Ritual (Yeah I know, anniversary sucked, but since marth is making the rules things are better.) Where my team came in first place more than any other team out of the ~10 tournaments they had with 150$ first place prize. We also had won TydeTyme's 750$ stuffed by daylight tourney. My team is Instant Dodge, and were playing this Saturday on Space Esports' twitch for a shot at 300$.

More than likely people had no idea that the competitive scene existed, but it really does show how screwed the game can be. The public doesn't see this, so they don't understand when it collodes with their personal experience. This is the issue that leads to changes this dramatic.