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Design Preview | The Skull Merchant
Comments
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Nurse doesn't overperform in public games, which is what people should care about, since those are the games that 99.9999% of the players are playing.
People should care about how well a killer performs IN THE GAMES THEY PLAY, and not how well a killer performs in 7,000+ hour comp games. Yes, there should be multiple tier lists, based on different MMR levels. Skull Merchant was severely overperforming in the majority of games she was playing.
If someone is average MMR, and they asked "which killer should I pick, that gives me the maximum chances to win the game", then the answer was Skull Merchant.
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If they want to salvage this Killer's reputation, then turning her into 5-Victor Twins with a Ph.D in 3-genning, camping, slugging and camping slugs is quite probably the worst possible way of doing it.
Regardless of my personal feelings about the Killer herself, the rework proposed by BHVR is a laughable failure and anyone who's played as much Twins as me, with all the issues that Killer has, will recognise that. Hell, BHVR themselves in the above post acknowledged these would be issues they're trying to address… we'll see if they manage to address those issues though. If removing the ability to camp and slug from a kit was as easy as that post suggests, then they'd have done it to Twins already.
This rework is a complete joke, a waste of development time on a conceptual level, and if they want to save the Killer's reputation long term it'd be a better use of that time to improve what we already have than it would be to unleash the horrors of 5 Victor Slugging Chess Merchant onto the game.
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Don't get me wrong, I am not in love with the proposed rework (as it has been presented thus far) by any means. What I do appreciate is the willingness to make bold, sweeping changes to a killer of the the sort that they have been unwilling to make before. To admit a failure and take it back to the drawing board rather than re-shuffle the deck chairs on a doomed ship. I didn't think they had it in them, and that SM would simply rot on the island of misfit killers.
But as we sit here today, I think two things are almost certainly true:
- Old Skull Merchant is dead. I think the odds of a reversion of any sort are essentially nil.
- For there to be a future for the character at all, the changes made must be wholly transformative (i.e. an essentially new power altogether).
I just think our energies on this subject would best be spent helping shape the "new" killer to come rather than trying to will a refined iteration of the old SM into existence. Fortunately, it seems we're well away from a finished product here and there is time to influence the shape of the changes, if not the general course of the process.
And I also believe that BHVR likely see this as a low risk (and potentially high reward) move. Even if this rework ends up an abject failure, the killer's fate will functionally be the same as if they had left her as she was; hated and/or abandoned.
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Turning her into a projectile/dash focused killer is not the answer.
If they are going to remove her as a trap focused killer and fundamentally change how her power works, then they should focus on two core aspect:
- The ability to place drones around the map to provide location information (they no longer apply debuffs or buffs; are purely information)
- Focus on her concept as a stalking hunter and put emphasis on stealth. Give her the ability to enter Wraith-style invisibility/undetectable under the condition a survivor has been recently scanned and shows up on the radar.
The only decent idea out of the proposal was the Global thing, which could be good with some adjustments. For example, when a Survivor gains three lock-on stacks, Merchant can activate 'None can hide' (name doesn't matter) that consumes the lock-on stacks and reveals all survivors by Killer Instinct for 20 seconds (it needs to be somewhat long because she has no mobility).
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she had a 70% kill rate because crybaby survivors would stop playing as soon as they saw her. What is this absolute dishonest bullshit you are spewing?
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No one should take you or anyone seriously when this is the level of your argument.
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Yeah it says that crybaby survivors like to go next on hook. Can't wait for BHVR to finally punish them for that bullshit. Go next prevention can't come quick enough.
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BHVR addressed that as well.
Obviously, DC's are already excluded from KR stats, but Hook Suicides accounted for just 2% of SM's KR.
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BHVR literally told us it was only like a few % that were ragequitting, so she was still massively over performing regardless.
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I think the direction this rework is heading is all wrong. I believe the problems her kit has can be linked to two things, 1) the counterplay to getting scanned can be unconventional for some players, and 2) the clutter her kit has can make it really overwhelming to face. The problem with her counterplay being a bit unconventional is that getting scanned is the direct prerequisite to her lethality (claw traps), but the solution here, in my opinion, is rather simple. The Skull Merchant should gain charges of a secondary power every time she scans a survivor; and that secondary power should have more conventional forms of counter play. By letting her keep an emphasis on scanning survivors and being rewarded for doing so, she remains recognizable to her player base. However, but giving her a secondary power, where her power budget mostly lies, then her counterplay becomes more conventional and telegraphed. For the sake of the argument lets just imagine that Skull Merchant gains charges of huntress' hatchets. If that were the case, it does not matter if survivors can't dodge a scan line easily because that's not what they have to worry about, it's the more conventional and traditional projectile that they should try to avoid. This would mean that you can keep the claw trap and lock on system as is but remove all status effects tied to it.
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I think the approval is very low given the context for such a change.
- Skull Merchant is the most hated Killer in the game. There will be tons of people who just voted yes, without engaging with the changes, just because they think "anything must be better than what we have now."
- This change will likely make Survivors more happy than Killer, due to Survivors disliking her more than Killers. For the game to work, 4 times as many people need to play Survivor than killer at any given time. If Survivors said yes to something and Killers no, the results are 80/20. These results mean that even sizeable chunck of the Survivor community didn't vote yes, despite how much they dislike current Skull Merchant.
- 1 and 2 and my interaction with the community generally paint a picture. People who said yes generally, like the changes and think its a nice thing. People who said no, generally absolutely despise the changes and think this might be one of the worst things ever to come to dbd. I am not nearly as confident that people who voted "yes" will actually like the changes, as I am that people who voted "no" will hate the changes.
- Yes, 51% of the community said "Yes", but 25% of the community said "No". This means half as many people are unhappy with the changes as happy. If this was an "implement A or implement B" choice, then yeah going with A would make sense. But it is an "implement A or keep B" choice, this would be the biggest rework in dbd history, so you are using immense resources on a change you know a large part of the community will be upset by, meanwhile the people who said "yes" said they would like the change, but you can't know for sure until they actually tried it. It is just a big gamble.
In addition to that, while I didn't play Skull Merchant that much I always appreciated how unique she was. She was only the third or fourth killer (depending if you count demo) to place her power as an interactible object, and the spinning feature was completely unique. She was not the best designed the killer in the game, but she was the most interesting and weird, and now losing the that uniqueness for "look at Survivor, press power button, launch something/yourself at Survivor", which is like half the Killers in the game by now, just doesn't sit right with me.
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I hear a lot of people claiming that Merchant in her current state is unsalvageable. I severely disagree, but I'd like to hear from the designers behind this new iteration and get their take on it to see where they stand because regardless of whether or not SM 2.0 is salvageable, the designers seem to have no desire to try.
Other Killers have had wildly successful reworks where their existing playstyle and mechanics have been kept, but have had the fat trimmed and pain points worn down so the Killer's strengths can shine without causing grating points for the Survivors. Knight is the perfect example: dropping guards in tiles was his most hated playstyle, so the devs toned that down and buffed him in other areas. Knight became more skill expressive, more fun to play and play against and became overall stronger after this rework.
So the question I'm asking is… what's with the designer's aversion to doing the same thing for Skull Merchant? She has TONS of mechanical and strategic depth in her scan-and-stack state; I have made two gigantic guides to showcase that depth. So far there's been no acknowledgement of that depth or any desire to preserve it with the rework: everything that made scan-and-stack Merchant fun and interesting has been nuked and judging by everything that's been said, restoring that is not a priority.
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Yep, that's probably how the numbers came to be.
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I just made a meta-analysis of the survey, looking at the 51% number in relation to the questions that were asked, how they were asked and the wider context of design previews in other games. It's on Unlisted right now but it'll be incorporated into a larger video when the second round of design preview feedback comes.
Let me know what you think of the video: in my opinion, the survey's figures are WAY more damning than it first seemed, even assuming the unconscious bias I noticed in the questions wasn't a factor at all. Here's hoping a CM sees this, or one of the designers behind the rework, so the next survey that's done for this design preview doesn't have the same issues.
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This video really sums up everything I have issues with the survey and the preview
The survey just came off as bias and gave no room to opinion, didn't add a text box which bhvr usually adds in past surveys, really didn't acknowledge about current merchant to see what people liked about her and could find a way to incorporate in her new rework
Saying they're on the right track despite being clear as day that they're not if this rework goes through, 51% approval rating shouldn't be something that's worth going for
When the next survey and preview comes in the next couple of weeks, I sincerely hope we get our say in this
Though to be quite honest I'm not optimistic about this preview either
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There is zero way they can account for people giving up. Also giving up can be more than just hook suiciding. It is when you stop trying to play the game. Which also happens a lot.
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As long as BHVR chooses to listen to people who hate the character over the people who have actually played as her, this rework is doomed to failure and the game itself likely doomed to be dumbed down to sameness on all sides.
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Since when is the burden of proof on the person who rejects a claim? BHVR claims they can filter out games where survivors give up. I am not gonna believe them until they prove it. And hook suicides are only a small percentage of the way people give up.
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You are contradicting the facts of the matter.
Either give us some proof or admit that it's conjecture and doesn't really mean anything.
You could say that for literally anything in this game and the awesome part of it is, you don't ever need to provide any proof to back up your statements!
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With so many changes made to the core game of DBD such as 8 kick limit on gens and the haste and hinder stacking being removed and more telegraphed with a % number showing and few other changes made. May add well just revert her back to her 2.0 state with a few tweaks so she's at least in a playable state.
Just really don't want another failed rework like Twins. Made players wait for years for a rework and only for it to be a disaster with overwhelming backlash that made them even worse and had no choice but to throw it all out revert everything and toss in a few number changes.
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This is kind a weirdly confused way of approaching this.
BHVR specifically said they looked for games where a survivor died on their first hook. So I could see some reasonable discussion about "this method had too many false positives or false negatives to be accurate", or "this doesn't account for everything" (which you kind of try to say at one point).
But you're going full bore into "I don't believe they can even track this at all" which seems unreasonable. It's fully within a computer's capability to record stats like this, and we know BHVR looks at game stats regularly.
And, as a thought experiment for you: I personally don't believe your claim that this is impossible for them to do. Which of us has the burden of proof? were both denying a claim at that point, and we both can't be right
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Its on BHVR to explain how they determined whether a match had someone give up or not. They did not do so and until they do I call bullshit. Simple as.
Edit: they also just don't have a good track record at actually having done the things they claim to do. They claimed to have fixed flashbangs twice in a row and they were still broken. I don't think it is unfair to want an in depth explanation of what they did.Post edited by Marzipan210 on-1
