Why is there little-to-no consistency in add-on descriptions? Why not just use flat numbers?
The usage of "slighty, moderately, considerably" in add-on descriptions is wildly varied and inconsistent, haphazardly thrown around and provides little to no indication of what they actually do. Some descriptions do not accurately depict their effect, and some flat-out lie or do not function.
Legion's Cold Dirt add-on "considerably" reduces the post-Frenzy cooldown. It actually reduces it by 0.6 seconds, or 15%. This is also strangely worded; many think the cooldown refers to the recharge of the Feral Frenzy power bar.
Plague's Exorcism Amulet add-on "moderately" increases Corrupt Purge duration. It actually increases it by a piddling 4 seconds, or 6%.
Compare The Shape's Hair Bow add-on, which "considerably" increases his Evil Within III duration, which increases it by a whopping 50% in length, from 60 to 90 seconds.
Cannibal's "Chili" and "Award-Winning Chilli" add-ons claim to increase the chainsaw charge acceleration. They literally do nothing at all, as confirmed by a developer.
Why the strange wording and inconsistencies? Why not just be transparent about the functionality, using direct numbers and values? Why keep completely non-functional add-ons in the game for 2.3 years!?
Comments
@Levitika
Not entirely sure why they use those figures over percentages. I think it has something to do with how boring and messy it would look if you have a perk with multiple percentages on it, it's easier to either use that description for it with a percentage of the other part or just have it for the one percentage based part of the perk itself.
Basically, it's most likely to make it not look so cluttered and "boring" I suppose, and maybe it's to make it look more unique than just adding percentages to the perk and/or add-on.
Also, the Chili add-ons do actually do something in-game, it's just so small that it feels like it isn't doing anything at all...
at the end of the day
Nobody knows why this percentage system was used instead of literally using percentages, all we know is that it's there and that's what they use to classify a perk and/or add-ons power over lesser add-ons or Tiers of the same perk.
So, who knows.
Also, the idea of a percentage system would be harder for some newer players to understand, while the concept of "Slightly, Moderately, Considerably, and Tremendously" is a lot easier to understand I suppose.
But that's just speculation, I can @MandyTalk to see if she knows or can share that information with you, otherwise nobody from the Community can really tell you while this system is the primary system they use to determine percentages and power.
I agree. They should publish the data of add-ons somewhere so we can know exactly what we're going to gain
They don't have to, you can get all this information easily by looking up the DBD Wiki on any perk, add-ons, Killer, Survivor, item, and everything in between.
It's a public source of information that anyone can look up by typing in the item, Killer, Survivor, etc name and clicking on the link to the gamepedia site (Aka the DBD Wiki). The site is constantly updated and almost has every piece of information you'd need on percentages, powers, etc, etc, etc.
There's a good amount of information on that site, but plenty is still missing or outright wrong (example: Yew Seed Brew/Concoction for Huntress was listed as slowing survivors 3%) But we should be able to get the information from the game itself, not have to look up sites, dig through game files or wait for people like Int3r4ct to put out the info.
I believe the reason they use words is to make the add-ons easier to compare to one another. Everyone knows what the word "moderate" means, so you can get a rough idea of how effective that add-on is just by reading the description, whereas if it said 10% you would have to do the maths to understand how much difference it really makes in the context of the power.
And the reason that particular words aren't associated with specific percentages - for example, "considerably" could mean 20% on one killer's add-on and 15% on another - is because they are relative terms. Meaning that their purpose is to give you an idea of how effective that add-on will be at enhancing its corresponding killer power. 15% might be a "tremendous" amount in some contexts and only a "moderate" amount in others - a 15% movement speed increase, for example, is huge, but a 15% increase in healing speed only makes about two seconds' difference - so in some ways it's more useful to know the relative effectiveness of an add-on instead of just a number.
Having said all that, and while I do think that using relative terms to describe certain add-ons is actually useful, I think it would also be a good idea to include the actual percentages in the descriptions for those who are interested in exact figures.
I'd disagree. Use Plague's Devotee's Amulet as compared to Myers' Hair Bow: Both "considerably" increase the duration of a part of their power (Corrupt Purge, Evil Within III, both 60 seconds by default), but one increases it by 8 seconds, while the other 30. Percentages were just an example; the obvious alternatives of stating values by time, effectiveness, and other values are viable.
That would take a long time to implement in-game and it's something that isn't really going to happen right now.
The DBD Wiki and various videos like Int3r4ct's is what you'll have to go to for your information, that or you can just ask a question on this sub-forum and we'll do our best to answer said question.
How would that take long? The developers know the numbers, they add the numbers in brackets to the descriptions, and publish the update. Litterally takes only 5 minutes. Massive quality of life change for absolutely no effort at all.
They have more important things to do at this time like the matchmaking rework and various other bug and hotfixes to apply in-game.
Of course it's not a 100% priority thing to keep them from doing that at the moment, but applying add-on stats, perk stats, character stats, etc, would take awhile to implement in-game. Neither of us know how easy it would be or how hard it would be either, but given that it's a lot of information to implement it's safe to say it would take a bit of time.
If it really took 5 minutes (which I assume you're exaggerating there) than they would've done it by now... Right?
As I said, I think those words are meant to indicate how much of a difference said add-on makes in comparison to others for the same killer, not necessarily to those of other killers.
But yes, that's the problem when you use relative descriptors like that, because it's subjective to a certain extent. I was mainly trying to explain the theory behind the idea, not claiming that it works perfectly in practice. Although one could argue that Corrupt Purge is more powerful than EWIII, hence the distinction, it's more likely that the devs' perception of the balance in their game simply changed in the two years or so between Michael's release and the Plague's.
There are currently 18 killers with a combined total of 398 add-on items for their powers, a total of 23 items for Survivors with a combined total 55 add-ons, and 134 perks. Not all of them would need to be looked at, but even if you literally had one person doing this, with all the information on-hand, you could have this done in less than a week.
Which is why there should be the actual numbers displayed as well. So players can make up their own mind about what is strong and what is not.
I agree, I think the ideal solution would be to have both the words and the numbers included in the description so that players can easily find whatever information is most meaningful to them.
Still, it would take time and wouldn't be implemented right away. Also, it doesn't really take a week for someone to compile all that data since they obviously wouldn't be doing that one thing every single day, they'd be tasked with other things that their company wants them to do, it's not as simple as one might think.
And who's to say the BHVR WANTS to even add this in the first place? In the useful links section you can find the DBD Wiki as a useful link, implying that they at least know that people want figures and site a source that's somewhat reputable. The people on DBD Wiki are not always going to get 100% accurate information, that's a given, but at least people have and option and it doesn't even take that long to loop up exactly what you're trying to get the stats on...
You can even get map sizes, random information on hooks and loops, etc. The option is there and I don't personally see any issues with what we're already given from the Devs and from the community as well.
I'm speaking theoretically, ie someone explicitly assigned to ONLY that task, could do it in a week. And what disadvantage would there be to having it in the game, versus hoping it's on a website?
There is none, the only benefits you'd get is getting the information a few seconds faster than you would tabbing out and looking it up on google and it would be the official data... Which if the data is accurate than that doesn't really matter right?
They'd have to make room for it, make sure all the information is correct, proof read it, find someone who will be able to do it in a week (which its unknown how long that would take), and they'd have to update it regularly and have people assigned to their own team to do exactly that.
Many different reasons. In the end though, BHVR does see that we're interested in accurate data and percentages, so who knows.
In League of Legends, when you're going to change your runes, the game have an option for "advanced explication" of the rune, saying in numbers what it does, if this option is disabled, there's just simple texts saying what it does. So they could implement in the config an option to allow us to enable "advanced explications" to show the actually numbers of the add-ons, by default this would be disable and only people interested to know will enable it.
I know the wiki has a lot of information, but most of them are missing or outdated. I didn't even mentioned the Wiki because I wanted the devs to publish it since it's gonna be more accurate than the wiki.
Devs certainly have more important things to do like fixing the game that in the actual state has so many bugs, so I guess they'll never implement this. But you know, little details is what makes some games so good.
The numbers aren't missing, but most of them require you to hover your mouse over the word slightly/moderately/considerably/tremendously to see the percentage.
I didn't know about this lol.
It's easy to miss, so I don't blame you, but it's handy to know 😊
I wouldn't give up hope on the implementation, so if you really want to suggest it than you can try bringing it up to the "Feedback & Suggestions" sub-forum with a decent or long post on why it should be added and what benefits we gain from this addition.
Also, it's good you were informed about the percentages and where they're, it's easy to miss and even I missed it... and I've used the DBD Wiki since I first started playing lol.
[Here's the link to the Feedback & Suggestions sub-forum]:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/categories/feedback
Also a distinct lack of consistency with regards to what stacks in said descriptions.
Usually if it says it doesn't stack, than it doesn't stack, if it doesn't say that in the perk, item, etc description than it's usually a 50/50 on if it stacks or not in some cases.
Exactly; it needs to always say it doesn't stack if it doesn't, or say every time whether or not it does. Right now its 50/50 on most add-ons and for some, many mains of different killers aren't even sure if add-ons stack, because they can't tell.
It's not really most add-ons, its just some tbh.
But yeah, i'd prefer if more items, perks, etc had this description change for what's stack-able and what's not.