“Fun” is not a valid talking point for balance
Lately, I have been seeing many posters and streamers talking about various aspects of DBD (spirit, NOED) as not being fun. This usually leads to people asking for nerfs.
The problem is that fun is way too subjective. I, as killer, do not have “fun” getting looped and genrushed etc... but I’m not going to ask for nerfs based on that. Rarely do people have fun when they lose, which means salt should probably be disregarded and not used as feedback. Just a thought.
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Of course you can easily deal with spirit in a 4 man swf if your team is good enough. Just because of the fact that swf teams can do gens insanely fast. I played in 4 man swf teams before and we dominated most spirits quite easily. It is an entirely different story in solo teams however.
Swf makes no sense from a balance standpoint but it shouldn't be removed because it is a fun addition and draws more people to play. What should be done is to make swf more fair against killers, not just remove it. If we ignore fun, let's just remove it for the sake of balance, right?
Devs themselves said that they want killers to be fun to play as and fun to play against. It seems like that was completely ignored when it comes to spirit.
This isn't even close to a competitive game. What's the point of playing the game if it isn't fun? What is the point of playing the game if it comes down to random guessing games and my skill doesn't really matter much? It doesn't really feel like I outplay or get outplayed by spirit. It's just "I guessed right" or "I guessed wrong". That's how I feel at least.
There is skill involved in guessing. You have to read your opponent.
How can I read my opponent then? Please give me some examples (without perks).
You predict them. The standard guessing game against spirit is what side of the pallet you are on. While she is shifting, run to a pallet, put it down, and then wait for a bit. Already, a good chunk of spirits are going to be hit by that pallet because they expect you to wait until you see her (bad idea for the survivor to do). Once that’s established, she will then guess what side you will put it down on. From there you can choose what side or try to sneak away from the loop
That's definitely a strat you can do against spirit but I don't see how that's reading your opponent. It comes down to "I hope she guesses wrong" at the end.
Shouldn’t the game be about the person who is the most in their opponent’s head? Like what is the alternative?
So...guess.
Yea... a standard part of any pvp game. Survivors should just be able to enforce safe loops with no guess? Doesn’t seem fun or skillful to me.
Soo, hows spirit any different from rock paper scissors or any other mindgame?
Guesswork is, as you mightve not guessed, integral part of mindgames.
I'm a survivor main and I actually really like to play against nurse (before she was nerfed) or when someone has NOED. I'm really bad against spirit lol but I don't really mind her, can just be annoying sometimes but that's all. For me escaping because the killer was just really bad isn't fun, that's just boring. I dislike just doing gens, maybe get chased once and then escape. For me the fun is in finding out the perks while doimg gens or getting chased.. and when I can't figure them all out and I suspect it can be oNe oF thOsE killers I just start looking for totems. I do wanna say that I always play swf, with one other person, so I mean totem counting on your own sucks but still.
I get losing isn't fun but I honestly don't think that's a reason to be like "nErF thiS nErF thAt". So yeah I agree with you.
Going against any full build optimal spirit feels like a one sided farming match. That’s the problem.
You can't destroy Spirits power. You can kick a safe pallet. Huge difference
Are you familiar with the term "level of suffering" (btw i am not sure if it is actually the correct term since it is translated from my native language)? It is basicly explaining if people do not use the appropriate counter measures to a problem they simply are not suffering enough due to the problem.
This comes from my line of work, logic would dictate when you suffer from something you actually will try to resolve it with everything possible. So people not even bothering to use perks to deal with their annoyance, well you figure it out.
If the chases are supposed to be actual guesses, then why does she have collision with survivors? That's not a guess, the game tells you if you found someone. How can survivors avoid bumping into something they can't see?
The main problem is that the spirit has lots of feedback on what survivors are doing and can react accordingly but survivors have no clue on what she is doing and are making random guesses most of the time and to me, that isn't really enjoyable.
Honestly,
removing collision will bite more people in the ass than they think. Right now you can actually bodyblock spirit which helps whenever there is a narrow passage, removing that will not result in a nerf to spirit at all.
Thanks for saying! I agree with everything.
Well I know plenty of spirits who look down on purpose. As for the grass, there's no point eve arguing this. Go in a KYF and try it for yourself. It does not move.
Ok that's your choice if you want to let them genrush you and allow them to loop you. Break the pallet.
The difference is that you HAVE to break a safe pallet, and at that point, they can then just run to another safe loop. The process repeats itself. With spirit, you can guess right and still waste a ton of her time, or she can guess right and get a hit. How is her interaction not far more balanced?
You can also zone survivors back into an area with no pallets. Walk around to the other side so they're on the side that they just came from or so they're up against the outer wall, then break the pallet. Now they're either forced to run past you to get to the next pallet or run back to an area with no pallet.
The point people are making is that the guessing game isn't skill, it's guessing. Guessing isn't fun for most people. To give a more direct example, the Huntress can throw a hatchet at a survivor before they reach the next pallet. This requires the killer to be in a good position and to aim the hatchet correctly (predicting how the survivor will dodge as well). Both sides can see what the other is doing and react. For the Spirit, they just have to make a guess and hope it works. There's a lot less interaction there.
Thanks, friend
A balanced game will lead go fun.
Assuming that the mechanics themleves are fun.
If the mechanics are fun then balance will make things more fun. But the mechanics here lead itself too much to RNG, ergo both fun and balance are sacrificed for a random system that rewards or punishes you severely.
You can’t zone someone into an area with fewer pallets when there are safe pallets nearby. Farm maps are an especially big offender of this. They are almost guaranteed to reach something like a farmhouse or cow loop, regardless of where you break the pallet.
The example you gave is almost the same as spirit. There is no way to reliably “react” to huntress throwing a hatchet, other than seeing she is about to throw one. Once she lets it go, you do not have time to see where the hatchet is traveling. You have to guess ahead of time or you will almost certainly get hit.
You absolutely can zone someone. Having to run past you means that they get less distance. A straight line to the next pallet is shorter than a line going around the loop they're at to get to the next pallet.
I've whipped up a couple crude examples to illustrate it. Say the killer is the blue dot, the green line is a pallet, and the red line is the path the survivor needs to take to get to the next pallet as soon as possible. To the left is either the edge of the map or a zone with no more pallets.
Which would you rather take? The top one would mean they're half way to the next pallet by the time you finish breaking it, the bottom one means that by the time you finish breaking it, they're just past the end of the wall.
RE: Huntress: It's definitely not the same. You can see her get a hatchet ready and try to break LoS. You can also react once she throws the hatchet if you're good enough. You even get an audio cue to tell when she's charging a hatchet even if you can't see her.
In my book fun only comes into play when it’s no fun for either side, and only thin when it’s less not fun and more unfun.
If it's not competitive then what's wrong with spirit?
I mean it's just a casual game right? I dont understand how its causal so we should take fun into account but disregard killer fun, spirit isnt "easy 4ks" she has the potential to 4k every game she has the best chance no matter the players skill. Any new playet can pick her up and do well and have fun. You want to talk about interaction? Oh they spawned on my ruin and play immersed but can loop be because I'm am m1 killer, oop 3 gens popped in the first 2 minutes wheres my interaction? Oop were on suffocation pit with the long window and the survivors run to it upon being hit every time, where's my interaction?. But spirit can win in those situations against the best survivors, she let's killers have the breathing room survivors have been handed for a long time. As spirit you can make a couple mistakes and not lose a game entirely as some killers are. Survivors can mess up 3 times a piece, with 5 objectives taking 80 seconds,while killers have 12-10 that take about a minute.
My point is, alot of things have little to no interaction, or are fun for one side or the next, but spirits seems to be the focus of it all and it doesn't seem fair for that balance I hear cried for so much.
Have you actually played on 90% of cold wind maps (no offense) but at the center near shack for fractured cowshed for example, theres corn, in front theres shack, usually a jungle gym in front of it, one to the left and the cener building with 2 guaranteed pallets, and some random bale pallets and or another jungle gym, if the survivor loops it against an m1 killer correctly each could easily take 20-30 seconds a piece not even including exhaust perks, or team mates coming in and body blocking to get you off the person and loop the tile again. With 2-3 people on 80 second objectives. Please tell me how that's fun? If your against spirit you pray shes bad, against those survivors on that map and alot of others you have to pray they arent good in the slightest in order to mabye win.
I have played on every map plenty of times, and I gotta' say, I have yet to see a pallet respawn after being broken. It may start safe, but once they use it, it's gone and you can zone them back towards it to make that area unsafe.
They don't respawn, the survivor's dont use them and body block the killer from the other to break chase and bloodlust allowing the new survivor to loop it again especially with all the pallets just around there and not including all the jungle gyms around the map.
I’m not sure which tile the graphic represents, but if it’s something like the hay bale/tractor on cowshed, then the survivor could just run (up on the graphic) to the nearest jungle gym; they don’t have to run across.
Breaking LOS means that Huntress can’t get a reliable shot of any kind, so there isn’t really a guess in that situation. I’m very skeptical of reacting to hatchets, especially a fully charged one- it travels insanely fast. Dedicated servers have also made reacting worse than before, which is why dead hard gets eaten up so often.
In all my three years of playing the game, I have yet to encounter this human pallet playstyle. Usually taking a hit to prevent the killer from hitting someone is counterproductive, unless the gates are open and you're helping them escape.
When I say that spirit needs changes, I want her to be enjoyable for both sides. I don't like the nurse changes because it makes her unenjoyable to play. I don't want the same happening to spirit.
Yes, the game has many other problems as well, most of them are a lot more problematic than spirit, but does that make spirit fine? Not really. I would rather see changes to other things before spirit, but she does need some changes.
I play xbox and it's been happening alot to me recently, against teams that all have 3 times my time a piece, they have someone get off gens to preserve pallets and will block doorways to force me to hit them
My idea was make every skin have a noticeable har animation when she starts phasing as in moving in it, the survivors have to be close and she can still bait.
As for the OP.
Yes and no.
Balance problems require either a buff or a nerf.
Non-balance problems still justify changes. But they don't justify a buff or a nerf. Instead they justify a sidegrade, which is either a change that does not effect somethings overall strength or multiple changes that cancel each other out.
In general non-balance problems take priority over balance problems due to their relative difficulty to solve and how solutions to balance problems are often dependent on the solutions to other non-balance problems.
At the end of the day, we have to acknowledge this is a video game. Some people play casually, and want to have a relaxing time and a little bit of fun. Granted, there are some people who want to learn and master the game, but that's not the majority of the playerbase. Fun should definitely be considered as a factor when balancing a character, considering if a game ain't fun, then people will leave the game. That directly hurts the developers, so they can and will take the fun factor into consideration.
Ah well if you've never seen it...
Everyone needs to play the consoles for a while. The survivors are very different.
Xbox/ps4 players are different than pc. Because of how easy partying up is and how encouraged it is most of the time groups of people move from game to game. Buddies who've been playing together forever will naturally coordinate better, even if they're new to dbd specifically.
Or you survivors can do 5 totems to disable noed if a killer has to work for it and then wait 5 seconds for it to be disabled totems would need a massive buff to fix that issue
Trust me, Im aware.
This was actually the least thought out comeback i have seen the point i made is NOED can reward someone for doing nothing literally nothing you can stand at a hook and get rewarded your argument of just doing totems is situational there are times for example a survivor being camped where its better to do the gens to punish the camping killer but if they have NOED they get rewarded you cant argue that in this situation that doing totems is doing the objective because thats false.
Also again the point i made was NOED does not need a nerf but it needs something to punish those who use it just to be a troll and attempt to ruin others enjoyment just because they think facecamping is funny.
Stop, youre making too much sense. They will attack you lol
omg FINALLY someone gets it. This comment made my day
Fun shouldn't be heavily used for balance BUT it should still be considered. Like if 95% of people hate something because it isn't fun then maybe something should be done about it because the game exists for people to have fun playing it, otherwise what is the point?
There's 4 survivors for 1 killer. I'm pretty sure the overall fun of 4 people trumps the overall fun of 1 persons. That's not what I believe that's just the reality of an overall casual game.
Mozambique here
Go bam-bam-bam- bamb- trick em
@Peanits
"The point people are making is that the guessing game isn't skill, it's guessing. Guessing isn't fun for most people."
I wouldn't say "most people." In fact, I would go even further and say that most people enjoy the "guessing" aspects of games, and that most games in the world have some sort of "guessing" elements in them, whether they are games that are worldly known like Poker (bluffing games) and Blackjack (probability/risk taking games), or popular games like Werewolves/Mafia (social deduction games) or any games with heavy luck element. Whether you refer to them as 'educated guesses' or 'intuition/guts' they are one of the most important aspects of many, many games. Don't disregard it just because some people on here are trying to use it as an excuse to buff/nerf some things to their liking.
But if you are really concerned about "guessing" not being fun for people, how about we start by providing information for solo players so that they are not "guessing" about whether to go save someone on the hook or to remain on the generators, or "guess" how many totems are left or where the lit totems are on the map, especially if other survivors have seen it before being chased away from it. Because not only would it be "not fun" by your standard, it also continues to break the balance of this game. So two for one, you know.
Yea it is.
Its a game.
A game is supposed to be fun, why else would you spend your time on it ?