SUGGESTION: The Entity - Rebirth
Upon playing DBD my friend and I came to realization that tunneling and camping is a serious issue that very negatively affects survivors’ enjoyment of experience. Decreasing the amount of survivors changes difficulty of the match dramatically and, unfortunately, current system allows most killers to successfully tunnel survivors and not suffer any consequences. By “tunneling” here we mean hooking a survivor, going away, waiting when he gets unhooked, then using killer’s active ability to quickly return to the injured survivor and strike him down again while he is in no ability to affect the chase. Most of the often-played killers’ active abilities allow that to be performed, while there is also a way to do this simply using their advantage with movement speed. The problem with this is that it immensely harms tunneled survivor’s experience and creates early disbalance in the game.
In our opinion, a balanced match is the one that results in half of survivors escaping and other half being sacrificed by the killer – the equality of the outcome is what mostly affects players’ satisfaction with the match. Of course, simple number of escaped players does not dictate the quality of experience – another important component is the time of the match. The length of the match increases an active time of both killer and survivors spend, doing actions that reward bloodpoints and contributing to the completion of both sides’ objectives, resulting in a more meaningful competitive experience. In our opinion, both of these concepts applied together are the key of making the game enjoyable and interesting, so aiming to make most of the matches last longer and result in a balanced amount of escaped survivors is the main goal of this suggestion piece. We strongly believe that changing the game according to the suggested way as a result will allow both sides to derive a lot more satisfaction from participation in the matches and not feel robbed of the time and effort, as it often happens right now, creating unhealthy and hostile relationship between killer and survivor players.
Guided by these the two core principles, my friend and I came up with a list of fixes that we believe will achieve the goal presented in the introduction. The general basis of fixes is aimed to tweak existing mechanics of hooking, chasing and generator repair without having to rework or introduce new ones into the game, while the additional part tackles presenting new ideas and larger scale change, as well as its implementation so that if the new idea would be too much, the original concept could “survive”.
1. Hooking, chasing and generator repair changes:
As per explained principles the idea is to combat the phenomenon of tunneling and camping. The main change is a rework of the survivor health system – from a simple “two hits – down” to a “protective hits” system: after survivor has been unhooked he receives “protective” hits that will prevent him from being downed in a short time after being unhooked as a mean of discouraging killers from tunneling them. The way we see system is such:
- When survivor was never hooked he needs two hits to fall.
- When survivor has been hooked once (or hits second stage of hanging) he needs three hits to fall.
- When survivor will die on the next hook he needs four hits to fall.
Unhooked survivor can have up to 3 or 4 hits, but should they be able to heal their normal health state before or after losing all protective hits is not decided - there are two variations:
1) Survivor has initial health (two hits) and additional protective hits - protective hits spend if hit after one initial health point is taken (survivor has been put in injured state)
2) Survivor first lose protective hits and only then takes damage to health - that way would probably be more balanced as survivors won't be able to abuse the system and move it onto other mechanics.
FOR THE KILLER:
- to balance that change and not overpower survivors the general time to fix generators should increase on a relatively large scale.
- survivors could receive a growing debuff on generator repair upon each time they get hooked – this will encourage killers to quickly switch targets to optimize their effect on generator repair.
Since the idea is to give both survivors and killers more room for mistakes and more active time of play, increasing the time to fix generators and hooked survivors’ health should force killers to focus on those survivors that weren’t on hook and exercise more “fair” approach to the chasing. This will make the skill to be general decider of trials’ outcome rather than the exploiting of mechanics.
OPTIONAL:
- every second of killer being in the range of the hooked survivor (possibly after 5-10 seconds after hooking to let Killer go away) the speed other survivors repair generators should continuously increase in some percentage to make killer suffer map pressure if he decides to camp survivor. This change also could include cases when killer runs away to immediately return to the hook after survivor was unhooked, but it could be not be necessary if original health system fix could cover that (the point of concern are killers that can use their abilities to down multiple survivors after the unhooking, such as Leatherface).
- due to increased time needed to repair a generator Killer could be allowed to hit a generator only once a 30 seconds, or the amount of damage to progress could lower on every hit. (maybe in a certain period of time – if killer hits another generator after 30 seconds he deals full damage, if before 30 seconds the damage could be halved every time).
- another thing is: maybe to make “hex: ruin” a passive ability for all killers that have acquired it in the bloodweb – that would introduce a form of external progression without severely affecting balance since only novice killers won’t have that and experienced will surely do. The reasoning is to again lengthen the trials’ time, also encourage survivors to interact with totems more, which would enrich the experience for survivors by making that layer of gameplay obligatory and for killers it would allow for bigger build variety by opening up the perk slot and relieving them from necessity to increase generator repair time. (which is as I perceive the common complaint of most killers)
THE LORE EXPLANATION:
The name of the suggestion was not selected without a purpose – the idea of the change from setting and narrative standpoints is to represent the growth of the universe in scale and complexity by introducing new Entities that will create conflict with the others.
The reason survivors will receive additional protective hits upon being hooked is that when they have near-death experience, fueled by such close encounter with original Entity, survivors would call for help that would be answered from another Entity that would assist them.
The other Entities origin is such: by the amount of the trials that had happened and amount of time survivors spent fighting the original Entity, their waking ability to interact with ethereal matters like auras would birth a new Entity, formed from the combined struggle of the survivors against the hopelessness and darkness of their situation. That new Entities motivation would be assisting survivors and granting them protection as they get closer to becoming a prey of original Entity. New Entity would be, of course, far from being as powerful as the original one, because of being born just moments ago in a large scale, so its help would be very limited.
2. Introduce a dynamic balancing system:
The actions of original Entity and birth of a new one have gained an attention from the external powers. A new, third Entity arrives to see what original has installed and decides to intervene in order to satisfy its own personal wants – instead of lust for others’ torment, this one is more interested in seeing a fair trial, perceiving the confrontation between killers and survivors as a sport, a spectacle. Therefore, this one wants to see more engaging and dramatic matches, so it intervenes into the ongoing trials to grant buffs and debuffs to the participants in order to level the competition in a more fair way and let participants show themselves.
- If it sees killer being too good and killing survivors too fast or it sees some survivors quitting the trial and leaving their brethren in a disadvantage it would grant the rest of them increased generator repair speed, increased movement and vaulting speed, lower the sounds they make and lessen the scratch marks they leave in some capacities, and other possible changes.
- If it sees survivors repairing the generators too fast, outsmarting killer that has been put in an uneven confrontation, it would increase killer’s speed, increase killer’s grasp strength, increase visibility and time of scratch marks and blood, increase loudness of the sounds that survivors make in some capacities, and other possible changes.
- These buffs and debuffs will only persist until the balance between sides in the trial will be restored.
As could be seen from the description: this change is aimed at affecting the matches with dramatic skill level discrepancy and the cases when survivors quit the match harming the whole team in return. The general idea of the suggestion is to transform the matches that right now are being essentially a time waste for one or the other parties into the matches where both teams can still get something from the experience and not leave frustrated. Less experienced players would receive more space to make mistakes and more time to learn how to play instead of being punished with time loss and unpleasant feelings as it is happening right now. The range of mechanics affected could be very wide and the algorithm that decides when and how to change the game should be calculated very carefully – it must include the timing of events during the match and react accordingly.
3. The RATING SYSTEM.
First of all, our intention is to better the playing experience without introducing to much of structural changes, but we understand that suggested changes will unavoidably demand a rating system rework to accommodate direction’s shift. Therefore, as much as we would want to escape going into the discussion of topics we are not decently qualified, we cannot ignore this important point. So, please, understand that this particular suggestion point is an attempt to ease the possible transition onto explained changes; it comes from intention to help and better the game, not to scold, whine or blame.
Our suggestion to the rating system will include a third principle aside of lengthening the matches and making the outcome equal – to broaden the skill presentation on the rank and create more skill brackets that will allow players to play against more or less same people on the level of experience.
1) The first suggestion, not regarding the changes described earlier is to enlarge the number of ranks – from 50 to 70, I would suggest the bigger the number the more people could find an appropriate rank for themselves and the better it would feel to reach the top. Right now, in our opinion and other players’ the current system allows too much of a skill discrepancy to appear in a same rank brackets. Such system only creates imbalances in matchmaking and harms players that are being put against severely overqualified opponents.
Another useful implementation would be to introduce different requirements for rank growth for different rank brackets. For example, on a closer to 50 (70) ranks players would be more rewarded for simpler yet meaningful achievements while on a higher ranks the system would become harsher and demanding. Also, implementing slight changes to criteria for survivors that play with friends would also be very welcome – if rank growth instead of a separate treatment of players would require for whole team to survive and do well that could possibly help to prevent “boosting”.
2) Tweaking of current PIP gaining system to accommodate changes in the gameplay.
We don’t feel shy to reiterate again: our idea is to lengthen matches and equalize the outcomes, so we think aim must be set on rewarding players for meaningful actions without forcing them to resort to exploiting or other unpleasant behavior. So, our suggestion will be to count hooks and hits (maybe, or to certain amount) on different survivors over deaths on these hooks, to encourage killers to let hooked survivor be saved and chase all of the opponents instead of singling out one. The system shouldn’t be harsh to the killers that receive a balanced outcome, or at least it could be like that on the most of a rank brackets (from 50/70 to 10, for example). But again, these particular propositions do not have our absolute confidence in them, they are more of suggestions to encourage thinking in certain direction than advocacies to implement them blindly.
Thank you very much for reading this suggestion piece. My friend and I like this game. We believe that it is good, but it can be a lot better and these propositions are our means of bringing that perspective into reality as we genuinely want to affect the game and make it better not only for us, but other people, as well as to make the game more welcoming to newcomers. We understand that this suggestion won’t obviously come to life in its complete state and that the whole thing is very naïve action to attempt. But we still strongly believe that core principles of this piece are the changes that are needed in the game and will make game better for everyone, so we hope to at least to affect developer’s perspective of the game in a that direction.
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