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The philosophy of balancing DbD.
Hi everyone,
My name's Bonefish and I've been playing DbD since 2016. I haven't interacted much with the community as a whole and am primarily a killer main. Other than this though, I am a professional fighting game player and thought I would bring some of that perspective into this. Through my time on DbD, I've noticed that BHVR seems to struggle with balance, which is understandable as asymmetric games tend to be more on the difficult side to balance. But here's a suggestion.
Hire people who play DbD alot at a high level to do your play-testing. I'm sure many of them would more than happily do it for free. You also have to weed out people with biased one side or the other mentalities as we're all here to have fun in the end, regardless of what role we play.
I don't think PTB is honestly a good answer (as a solo solution) as the data collected can be skewed when all you look at is hard numbers. You can't account for what happened in the actual games and if people were playing optimally. Numbers are a great compass of course, but should only make up half of the process of determining changes for both survivors and killers alike.
Now here's where the conversation gets controversial, but I think is a pretty objective statement when you look at any game striving for actual balance with competitive players who care.
"Most people's feedback on stuff DOESN'T matter and is actually hurtful to actual balance."
And I think this extends all the way to rank 1 even. You have to value the feedback of a small pool of trusted players who play at an actual high level on both survivor and killer sides. When you take low-rank players into consideration it poisons the perceived reality of what is balanced and what isn't and creates a false reality.
I'm not saying feedback isn't important, it is an important gauge on how everyone feels about everything but when you balance a game, you HAVE to balance it around what people at top performance *can do* and not what they *actually do.* And this is important because bad players in any game far outnumber actual competent players, including people who think they are competent when they are not.
I have more to say but without this becoming an essay, I want to leave on one final note also that feeds into this.
*At no point should the opinions of your own development team or people with power in BHVR be used to make decisions about the balance of this game. The dev team should only be used as tools that mirror the opinions of people who spend hours a day playing this game at a high level.
People's thoughts on this are welcome.
Thank you.
Comments
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oh you like fighting games too? Do you like MK 11?
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Someone get this man an award.
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I think there's a place for both. I agree that the opinions of players who aren't experienced or good at the game should not be weighted at the same level as those of players who are, and you're right that most people's feedback doesn't matter and hurts game balance because they don't know what they're talking about.
However, although top-level players are more likely to know what they're talking about, they're not necessarily excluded from that group. Most people, quite frankly, don't know the first thing about game design or game theory. Many popular streamers, experienced and knowledgeable about the game as they may be, don't know the first thing about game design or game theory.
That's where the devs themselves come in - most of them have been designing games for years professionally, and many went to college or university to study game design. So even though they may not have as much experience as some of their players with the game itself, they do know how games in general work, and that's also valuable, because experience doesn't always equate to understanding.
So basically, while I understand and agree with your point that experienced players have valuable and unique contributions to make when it comes to balancing, I don't think the opinions of the developers themselves should be disregarded altogether. Ideally, they would seek the opinions of high-level players with a lot of experience who also have studied game design/game theory/programming and understand how these things work.
Essentially, I think there's a medium that needs to be struck between experience and knowledge in order to balance the game properly. Not everyone has both, and that's also important to take into account when deciding how heavily to weight individual opinions.
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I don't get how understanding game design (I.E. programming) or game theory (which is an extremely vague catch all term.) equates to understanding variables of balance in a competitive game. It's not that complicated really, even if you do want to just get to hard numbers.
Here's an example. It's pretty common knowledge that Hex Ruin is ran almost constantly (Not always) at all ranks. But why is that? Is it because Hex Ruin actually offers that much of an advantage that tilts gen speed in the killer favor or is it because Killers feel like they need it to slow the game down? Those are two very different things which can only be assessed with experience playing the game.
To answer that question, I've had games end in 5 minutes with all gens done while running Hex Ruin. Does it happen all the time? No. But the fact that it can happen is all that really matters when it comes to balance. They aren't seeming to understand this concept.
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Game design and programming are nowhere near being the same thing. You don't need to know a thing about design to be able to type up a working program, nor do you need to know anything about programming in order to design a game concept. And game theory is broad, but it's not vague, unless you're using it wrong.
Game theory is important because you need to know how people think in order to design a game for human players. Design skills are important because you need to know how different elements interact, what works and what doesn't, in order to balance a game properly. Forgive me, but the fact that you don't even see the relevance of study in those areas makes me think that you might be the one who doesn't understand what really goes into creating and balancing a functional game.
I don't believe that the DBD devs have it all together by any means. I think that they make a lot of fundamental errors when it comes to game balance.
However, I don't think the answer is to put all the power in the hands of players who have spent a lot of time playing this one specific game, but know nothing about design or game theory in general. Could they have something relevant and valuable to contribute? Absolutely. But the opinions of the developers themselves, people who have devoted their lives to understanding and creating games, are far from being as worthless as you're suggesting.
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I'd like to lay down a few definitions because I feel like it would be helpful here:
Game Design is the art of constructing rules which govern play, it's not a videogame exclusive term.
Game Theory is a school of economics which is concerned with decision making in scenarios where decisions made by other people have direct influence over the decision a person might make. This is pretty much the basis of mindgaming in both fighting games and DBD
There's also a third element which is Game Feel. This is basically how does it feel to play a game, and includes things like movement etc, but also more subtle things like how does it feel when certain mechanics come in to play. An example would be gauging the player reaction to discovering the killer is using NOED with an ebony mori, compared to discovering the killer is using Devour Hope. In theory both can potentially be experienced very similarly, but the Game Feel associated with them is very different.
Now to join the discussion. Yes most peoples input is worthless when it comes to balance, but provides valuable feedback when it comes to Game Feel. However, it is often the case on games with high complexity and a high skill cap that dedicated players are able to pinpoint and observe problems in a game which developers aren't able to find themselves, simply due to being better and more experienced players. Look at Super Smash Bros. Melee if you want extreme examples of this.
Moving on, you can imagine that the main hurdle to balancing Dead by Daylight is to properly balance high end play, whilst also maintaining Game Feel all around. This is very difficult when you consider that, to all appearances, it does not seem like DBD was conceived with high-end play in mind and, now that the game has gone in that direction, a lot of existing structures need to be remade around that concept alongside the games important marketing and content release schedule.
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Thank you for providing those definitions. Just wanted to say that, and also that I think that was a very intelligent and well thought-out comment, and I appreciate your input on the discussion.
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Thank you mate, that means a lot to me.
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