Is Dead by Daylight going down the same path as Gwent did in it's beta period...?
Gwent was in beta for a long time and it was great at first, but they began removing complexity from the game to make it more appealing to newer players. They made too many drastic changes, simplified the game for a part of the community. Over time their core base of players started to leave as the game favored simple, straight-forward playstyles. Not long after that the newer players began leaving, too.
Eventually CD Projekt Red realized their mistake and wrote the community a letter explaining that they were going to take the game offline to remake it, entirely. They referred to it as 'homecoming' and promised to focus more on the core base of players when it returned, stating that they had drifted away from their original vision for the game.
Dead by Daylight has been doing a few things similarly. It is a horror game, but it is moving away from that as it continues to keep or make survivors stronger than the killer. Don't get me wrong, making sure the game is fun IS a good thing for new players, so long as you aren't doing so at the expense of a less profitable, albeit integral, population in the community. Past updates and unfixed bugs speak to this, as the devs focus on making the game enjoyable for a specific part of the population, new players. They've been gradually chipping away at the strength of veteran players (killers mostly) in the name of fun or frustration, without considering how it impacts the fun of people who play killer. This Ruin change is no different, except it seems too abrupt; nothing is being done to mitigate the potential imbalance it will create, and will likely be left this way for weeks. Which is what makes it feel so damn familar.
Just to be clear... do I think Ruin is necessary to win? No. I play without it when farming BP because the matches end faster. I go in expecting to lose, but sometimes I win. Over the past few weeks I've played without Ruin, and... it's making me resent Dead by Daylight in the same way I resented Gwent. I'm not saying I or anyone else is going to quit, but in my case, I didn't know I was going to quit Gwent until I realized I had been avoiding it.
It's not the end of the world, and I don't mean to pretend I know that this is what's happening. I mean, I don't have any proof that BHVR is making the same mistakes CD Projekt Red did with Gwent, or even if they did, they'd end up like Gwent did. Really, I'm just saying that it all just looks and feels so familiar, from the sequence of changes and the side those changes are geared towards, to the tone players are taking when talking about them - some people just seem put out, not angry or whiney.
Comments
It wasn't my intention to stress that changing ruin was bad, but more so to speculate on whether or not the game is going in the right direction for all players. Well, while also using another game developer's decisions as a comparison.
Honestly, I agree that Ruin needed to be changed. I hated dealing with it as survivor, and hated using it as killer. But, even though, how they approached that change didn't make sense to me, I see Ruin as only part of the problem.
My concern really, is with the accumulation of changes on either side, how they're distributed, and how they impact the difficulty of playing either side. For instance, consider the change to insta-heals, the change in their functionality is similar to that of Ruin. Except when the devs changed insta-heals they also updated medkits to be more effective, which I assume was to ease the loss of such a powerful tool. They didn't try to accommodate the killer role in any way when changing Ruin. Even though that change dramatically increased the difficulty for half of the killers that have no way to travel quickly. Granted, most players probably use high mobility killers. So, maybe the impact isn't as severe as I'm thinking.
I was also concerned with people's attitudes toward the changes and how they were addressed. Now, I know that when they refer to killer mechanics as annoying they're saying that the mechanic they designed is annoying, like in a relatable way. They aren't saying it to alienate people who primarily play killer, but some people perceived it that way. They could have underlying insecurities, but what I assume, is that they do feel alienated by the number of negative changes made to the killer role as compared to the survivor role.
Everyone agreed Ruin was an inconsistent mess, but as it stands right now it was the only means killers had of ensuring their first chase doesn't put them on a 3 gen handicap.
New ruin is consistent, yes, but it's also bad. In its current state it's not worth of being a Hex perk, and honestly I don't think it's worth of a perk slot even if it wasn't tied to a totem. Baseline regression is laughable, doubling it does not make it any better. There need to be two gens that had been left mid-repair, and the killer needs to somehow keep pressure on 2 survivors, for the perk to even amount to half the progress that the other two survivors are making. In the early game it at best regresses a 10% gen of the unlucky surv you found first, meanwhile the other three are free to pump out their gens.
Personally, I don't think BHVR will now just focus on the enjoyment of survivors, especially newer survivors.Before the last few patches that nerfed two specific killers and now Ruin, they had many patches that improved the gameplay of killer a lot. So I have no reason to believe the devs will now just stop caring about killer players.
Especially now with all the outlash that the Ruin nerf is getting, I'm gonna guess the devs will look into making the experience for killer players better again. This Ruin nerf was because of it's varying effectiveness dependent on the rank of players, so I totally understand why they changed Ruin like this, even though I think it should have happened after BHVR reworked more maps.
Of course I don't know for certain, but I personally doubt this game will abandon the veteran players more and more now.