Phased Plan to Improve the Game.

BenihimeWrath · November 29, 2020

Long-time lurker, first time poster. Just to let anyone know who reads this, please judge the ideas on merit.

In this thread I would like to discuss a phased plan in order to improve the overall health of the game. The items the plan is meant to address are as follows:

Increase the diversity of tactics at the highest levels of play.
Increase the pressure a killer and survivor can healthily apply to the other side. (Healthily is defined in this case by the amount of counter-play the opposing party has in interacting with the pressure.)
Improve long-term engagement by increasing personal skill expression for players.
Reduce the need for "meta" perks, hopefully shifting perks into a more healthy, niche style for more comfortable play style building without feeling compelled to conform to the meta. (Meta in this case being defined by the level of efficiency in a perk, allowing it to outclass other perks easily that perform the same or similar duty.)
Allow developers to have better avenues to tune balance that are more engaging to the playerbase, and less reliant on tuning specific raw numbers.

What is not really being discussed in this thread.

Concrete, in stone specifics, all suggestions are based in theory and theory crafting.
Changes that may need to be made in response to these changes for the overall health of the game, they will be noted as best as I am able to see with my experience in the game and I may include my own suggestions for addressing these identified problems, but primarily this thread is not about those changes.

Phase 1

I believe the best way to approach phase 1 is by increasing the amount of complex tactics that a killer has at their disposal while they are playing. The mentality behind this change is to reduce a killer's reliance on negative behaviors, and reduce resulting survivor behaviors that develop in response. (e.g. slugging, tunneling vs gen rushing, stun bullying.) While simultaneously raising the ceiling for skill expression in both killers, and by extension survivors by implementing changes with healthy levels of counter play.

Something to keep in mind while reading this outline is that players are always going to play the way they want to. This plan is not meant to address the players that come to DBD to play it with very specific things in mind. (e.g. turning the game into a bully simulator.)

-The first step of phase one is to implement a system whereby killer perk add-ons can become permanent. The mentality behind this change is by allowing specifically grouped add-ons to be more reliably available through player choice, addressing a killer's ability to use a greater diversity of tactics across all killers, creating a more engaging method of play. I am by no means advocating, at this point, that all add-ons should be able to become permanent. In addition, please keep in mind while an add-on is permanent, it would still occupy an add-on slot.

-The system would automatically be locked behind prestiging, the mentality behind this suggestion is to allow for a moderately healthy, and mostly organic learning experience and to allow people to come to terms with the burden of knowledge the game requires in a mostly untouched way. Furthermore it would prove, theoretically, that a player, though skillful with said add-ons, does not necessarily need to have access to them every game in order to succeed, reducing the likelihood that the system would be turned into a long-term crutch. In addition I believe an opportunity cost should be paid for the ability to earn permanent add-ons.

-Within this system I believe the best course of action is to have a player buy the permanent add-on with the consumable copies of the add-on in question. Possibly including a token amount of iridescent shards. So with this in mind please consider the cost, for the sake of this thread I will assume that each permanent add-on would need to be purchased with a minimum of 50 of the consumable version. This means that iridescent add-ons that can become permanent would cost, baseline, 350k bloodpoints on top of the implied cost of resetting the bloodweb to the next level. The mentality of this change is to allow the bloodweb to remain a vital and engaging part of developing a killer's play style over time by adding a long-term achievable goal post prestige, and earning perks, while simultaneously making the entity corruption mechanic more interesting at high bloodweb levels, while also not punishing killers who have already spent a great amount of time in the game by implementing a whole new currency specifically for permanent add-ons.

The groups of add-ons being looked at for permanency are as follows:

Add-ons that completely modify how a power works, add-ons that simply modify the amount of health states a power incurs, or does not incur are not being considered as 'completely modifying' a power. (e.g. Hag's Mint Rag, but not Huntress' Iridescent Axe Head.) The mentality of this group of add-ons is that it allows killers to engage in different, but high levels of skill expression without becoming completely oppressive.
Add-ons, which through their utility, allow a killer to express their personal skill or reduce the amount of time a killer spends on tedious chores, but still allow for healthy counter-play by knowledgeable or skilled survivors. Huntress' infantry belt, but not Cannibal's Award-winning chili as the permanent add-on would not provide any counter play in Bubba's case, whereas the infantry belt has baseline counter play in the hatchet throw and baseline skill expression for both Huntress and survivor through the projectile nature of the power.
Add-ons, which through their utility, allow a killer to increase pressure in healthy ways through a killer's skill or management. (Clown's Redhead's Pinky Finger, which allows for considerable skill expression in the ability to land bottles, and reasonably follow up with a basic attack, thereby rewarding generic game skills "Looping, Map Understanding & Awareness", but allowing for survivor skill expression by dodging the projectile, and/or juking the Clown's chase after being struck.)
Add-ons that allow for a killer to have a more diverse set of "usable" perks because of their unique properties, thereby indirectly buffing the value of lesser used perks. (Legion's Iridescent Button, while not a perfect example it would reasonably interact with Spirit Fury utility, as well as make intelligent Dark Devotion use rewarding.)

The group of add-ons not being looked at for permanency.

Add-ons that are so powerful that they would become oppressively meta on their killer, either on their own or being combined with a still consumable add-on in the other slot. (Huntress' Iridescent Axe Head, Spirit's Mother-Daughter Ring.) Likely the only way to allow a permanent version of these add-ons is by modifying the permanent version and leaving the consumable unchanged, allowing for reasonable player choice.
Add-ons that are too oppressively gimmicky to be reasonably allowed with more consistency than they are now. (The Shape's Judith's Tombstone, The Doctor's Iridescent King, and again as I cannot stress this enough, Huntress' Iridescent Axe head.)

Ultimately the goal of this phase is to increase the healthy ways killers can engage in applying pressure to survivors without tuning any numbers around generators, specifically. In addition for the hope that with the ability to reasonably apply pressure, that certain killer meta perks will become less necessary and more niche for specific killers that struggle with gen regression and pressure.(Hex:Ruin, Hex:Undying.) Reducing the necessity for unpleasant killer tactics, like tunneling and slugging, in order to "win" each trial. In return, reducing the amount of "second chance" perks survivors feel its necessary to run in order to counter said gameplay.(e.g. decisive strike, borrowed time) to increase healthy survivor perk diversity at all levels. While simultaneously increasing the amount of perks and playstyles that survivors deal with at the highest levels of gameplay so that each trial is more engaging over time, increasing game longevity.

Phase 1.5

In this phase I will be addressing bloodlust, generic killer generator pressure and map imbalance. The goals of this phase are as follows:

Increasing the skill expression in generic game mechanics "Looping, Map Awareness & Understanding, Mind-gaming" by improving overall "fairness" of map tiles between the two play styles.
Reduce the space between the outliers for maps that are heavily one sided to increase long-term enjoyment, engagement and reward high skill expression for both sides.
Open avenues for developers to allow for larger maps, for thematic or engaging reasons, without compromising overall game balance as much.
Reduce frustration over intense outliers in the RNG based map creation system.
Reduce dependency on gen control perks without directly changing generator timing.

As part of the beginning of phase 1.5, removing all ranks of bloodlust and imparting bloodlust rank 1 as baseline for, most, killers. Overall I would prefer to avoid talking about any specific tuning numbers, however I feel bloodlust should be removed for the long-term gain of killer players and mains by removing it as a crutch.

Obviously, to compensate, base killer movement speed will be increased except for killers that need to be slow either thematically or to balance their power, powers that affect movement speed would remain the same or similar relative values. (Nurse, Hag, Bubba, Billy). The mentality of this change is to reduce the amount of time a killer spends looking for chases overall, increasing passive generator pressure, reducing the overall feeling of a map being too "large" while allowing chases themselves to remain mostly fair and engaging through the expression of generic mechanical knowledge in "Looping, Map Awareness & Understanding", and making a killer more intimidating passively by being slightly faster than they are now.

In an attempt to make kicking a generator worth anything at all I propose that every kick automatically degrades progress by 5%. (All gen regression perks would likely need to be buffed slightly to stand out more against generic, but intelligent "kick" gameplay so they remain valuable at higher, more efficient tiers of play.) This is to increase counterplay against gen tapping, and reward a killer for their awareness of survivor positioning and psychology. While also allowing a survivor an avenue in skill expression rewarding stealthy gameplay, and reading player psychology to truly make sure a killer has gone elsewhere and doesn't suspect them.

Furthermore I would suggest the change that if a generator is not kicked, or touched within a certain amount of time that it would automatically start regressing at the normal rate. However, that this time it takes to start regressing automatically is reduced by the amount of SWF in the lobby.

For example, in a full solo lobby it may take 80 seconds before it starts regressing automatically, but in a full SWF lobby it only takes 30-50 seconds, while maybe 2 teams of 2 SWF friends would be somewhere in the middle at 60-70 seconds. A solo survivor in a 3-man SWF would be unaffected by generator repair penalty, to compensate for a diminished leeway, and reward engaging positively with an SWF group as a solo survivor.(This is merely for speculations sake, actual numbers would need to be dialed in.)

Ideally this will aid in balancing the gap between full solo and full SWF play, while simultaneously rewarding a killer for area control that's not necessarily directly camping. (Trapper, Hag.) I believe re-balancing the mechanics around Hex:Ruin would be much easier than making changes directly to the perk, however some changes that could be made in light of the generic changes are that:

Ruin reduces the safety net amount of time by a percentage, instead of being automatic regression.
Ruin would still increase base regression, slightly reduced to compensate for kick buffs thereby relegating it to a more niche gen control style perk and pushed aside for more intelligent, generic "kick" gameplay at higher killer levels. (Making Ruin more "fire and forget" style of play, which has good results but are not as good as more active regression style perks.)

As far as balancing map tiles, I believe that they should be internally ranked by safety, arranged in 6 specific groups. 5 of the groups existing on a variance within their category to accommodate RNG map elements in the map tiles. e.g. a tile will have a minimum amount of safety and a maximum amount of safety based on the iterations of the tile where the least amount of safety version indicates it is the killer favored iteration, and the higher safety iteration is considered survivor favored. The groups are as follows:

0-10: Tiles that are basically empty of safety, they may have tiny or small loops (trees, rocks), but not palettes. Ideally these tiles would be smaller, transitional tiles that act more as a buffer in between tiles of varying, but higher, levels of safety in order to give survivors an avenue to express skill in understanding "Looping, Map Awareness & Understanding", while also giving a killer an opportunity to punish poor play. e.g. if a survivor is struck "rotating" through one of these tiles its because they poorly pathed to safer tiles. These tiles would also likely signal the border of a 41-50 rating tile to compensate for the strength of safety it provides and be a more visual indicator to all players about how safe the tiles around it have to be for it to be there.
11-20:These tiles are mildly empty, the loops are not very safe. At least one palette based on the size of the tile. These tiles I would deem to be mostly transitional tiles, that is, tiles that are found in between safety tiles, or objectives to allow a survivor to safely or reasonably "rotate" around the map, while still giving a killer a chance to catch and punish them in a fair manner if the survivor makes a mistake during the "rotation".
21-30: These tiles are the ones that include structures where one side is short and the other is long. These structures are largely "balanced" around the idea of a killer or survivor knowing how to properly and intelligently loop, or pressure a loop.
25:Using the exact middle number symbolically to represent tiles that are "perfectly" balanced and are the indicators of the gap of skill between a survivor and killer. Theoretically the loops in these tiles are so balanced that in a 1v1 an equally skilled survivor and killer would be stuck forever in a single chase. (Accounting for survivor camera manipulation skill, and killer mind-gaming skill, all other generic mechanical skills being the same between the two players.) However this means that if a survivor miss plays exiting the loop it gives an equally skilled killer a chance to punish them for it.
31-40: These tiles based on their unique shape, construction, map assets, or theme are very safe for survivors, and impose a higher than average burden on a killer to outplay a survivor in order to punish them for mistakes. These tiles would include the ones that likely need the closest attention to game balance than the others.
41-50:These tiles are exceptionally safe, they have a higher than average density of palettes than other portions of the map. The idea of these tiles is to give survivors a place to retreat to if they can reasonably identify the "safety" of the map tiles, in order to escape negative behavior by killers, like tunneling. While simultaneously allowing killers to have an avenue in skill expression in generic mechanical skills "Tile Safety Recognition, Map Knowledge & Understanding, Intelligent Efficiency Waste Avoidance" and rewarding them for smart play. These tiles would not spawn generators inside of them, ever, and would be less likely to spawn dull or hex totems inside them to compensate for the lack of primary objective that would naturally and healthily otherwise bring a survivor into contact with the totems.

Based on the aggregation and averaging of these map tile variance totals for each map, individually (e.g. no map is ever compared to other maps, it is only compared to its past self.), is given a variable total where the lower killer sided number is the total of all weak iterations of tiles possible in that map and the higher survivor sided number is the total of all strong iterations of tiles possible.

With these numbers assigned it can allow for more intelligent randomization of maps where the algorithm can identify when parts of a map in randomization become too contiguously weak or strong. Ideally mid->strong tiles are surrounded with weaker tiles to compensate for their strength, increasing second by second decision making by always needing to understand which of the weaker tiles are the safest/most necessary to be used in order to "rotate" safely around the map, or in which direction to pressure someone to punish them. Ideally this change will allow the developers to reduce the difference between one sided maps by seeing how large the difference is between the two numbers.

Now I believe trying to erode the maps down to exactly being mathematically balanced would be a detriment to the game as it stands. I believe that a system of "circular imbalance" is necessary to help engage personal skill, and spur on intelligent understanding of the games pieces that are intuitive and can become muscle memory over time.

So the true aim is really a variance of about 10-12 points, in this way it rewards players that can identify just how strong or weak a map's iteration is. Engaging conscious thought about map construction to revitalize "Map Understanding & Awareness" with a new foundation going forward to make generic map construction easier, safer, and healthier for the game more immediately and reasonably for developers and players.

Phase 2

Having worked on improving engagement between sides in phase 1, and improving base game mechanics to increase player skill expression in phase 1.5, in phase 2 the primary focus is establishing a more concrete data gathering system. The mechanism through which this will be obtained is by adding a queue-able "unranked" mode. In this mode all tools and add-ons are unlimited, all perks must still be obtained normally. Likely a penalty to "bonus" bloodpoint generation would need to be added to make it less of a farming pinata, while allowing ranked to provide a higher total amount of bloodpoints for the same opportunity cost for skilled players.

Ideally this mode will allow for the disarming of the psychological need to win, that is to say the mode will primarily be used for casual, more silly or gimmicky play. The goals of this system are as follows:

In this two pronged system, it will allow devs to keep an eye on the health of the game by seeing what perks and add-on combinations are most frequently used. Giving them a black and white way to find cases to investigate if an add-on or perk is too powerful, if its seemingly too necessary to compensate for design oversights elsewhere, or if its just a lot of fun so they can give themselves a pat on the back that something is appropriately engaging.
Help root out add-ons that are deemed "useless" so that they can be buffed, or replaced with more engaging utility add-ons that don't necessarily directly buff numbers, but change a power to be more interesting for killers and survivors to play with/around.
Provide a safe, stable testing ground for the developers to utilize at the community level without impacting ranked balance, reducing the burden on the PTB and allowing it to mostly return to being a bug fixing tool.
Allow developers to see which perks people find to be more fun, engaging, or viable when players do not feel compelled to optimize the fun out of the game in order to "win" a trial.
Gathering metrics by dividing the base by engaging different desires out of players. e.g. ranked is for competitive players, unranked is more for casual players.
Allow players to safely practice, in live games, to increase their skill level either in generic gameplay or play style specific skills. (While unranked would not give you any "pips", your rank still aids in matching players of similar but wider skill levels.)

At this time I would also like to suggest adding the ability to use consumable add-ons as offerings, at least in unranked mode. (e.g. the offering slot could function as a 3rd add-on slot for both sides, the opportunity cost being that add-ons cannot be saved by the white ward, and the killer add-on will always be subject to reveal during the offering screen, increasing avenues of mind-gaming.) I believe diversifying potential offerings will be an essential keystone in increasing player engagement with the trial, and with moment to moment gameplay. For killers this would also mean that for a lot of them they will not feel so much pressure running very specific, very powerful add-ons because they have to squeeze every mathematically correct ounce of player power out of an add-on slot as possible. Instead allowing for builds to be built more for their specific utility that a player enjoys having, while simultaneously adding something that rivals the Ebony Mori Memento in offering power to passively reduce the amount of them a killer feels is necessary, and indirectly buffing perks that provide the function without having to tune them.

This change benefits the primary purpose of phase 2 by allowing for a more proportional voting type system to see what sort of add-ons might be on the horizon for tuning, or developer back patting for it being well designed and enjoyable. While still not overly disrupting game balance, at least in comparison to the benefits it brings in skill expression, and information manipulating components to mind gaming.

Phase 2.5

Largely phase 2.5 deals in taking the data from phase 2 and making more specific balance tuning changes around the game aimed at reducing frustration, increasing interplay between sides, and overall increasing the value of the engagement in each trial no matter what side you play or main. As this data is yet to exist, it is impossible to detail the actions necessary in phase 2.5. Changes would likely include:

Making new, or redesigning old add-ons to more intuitively exist in the atmosphere of the game at that time.
Making new, or redesigning old perks to more intuitively respond to player needs, or make them more engaging with re-balanced interplay.
Tuning exact mathematics around killer powers, survivor tools, and map construction algorithms.

However one element of the game that I would like to bring up that would best fit in phase 2.5 while the developers are under the hood is a secondary objective that can either lead to "escape" on its own that has more opportunity cost associated with it as compared to the escape hatch, to help make keys a more niche tool that's less oppressive overall to killers, or an alternative "win" condition for the survivors that encourage positive behaviors in solo play.

A small idea for a bonus objective would that would be best suited to being inserted here. The new bonus objective would be a substance based mcguffin whereby a survivor trades the opportunity cost of working on a generator to instead gather what we'll call holy honey for speculations sake, which allows a survivor to temporarily "purify" a killer and disable their power. The rate of collection to killer power removal would be the same as generator regression baseline. (e.g. a survivor would spend 4 seconds to disable a killer's power for 1 second.) Possible counterplay includes:

A survivor must hold their aim during the duration of disabling the power. (Flash light physics.)
It is a dodge-able projectile. (Clown power physics.)
It slows the survivor using it and disables the free movement speed when struck for as long as the power is disabled, allowing for more basic attack counterplay for killers that rely more on their powers for 1v1s. (Nurse, Hag.)
It could frenzy killers that are struck by it, causing them to move faster, allowing for the killer to punish a survivor for using it, but rewarding a player for using it safely by not directly punishing them too heavily for its use, dependent on killer skill. (Likely having Obsession interactions.)

The goals of this bonus objective are as follows:

Artificially increase generator time, without actively changing it.
Reward Bold, and Altruistic plays, making these categories more engaging and actively rewarding.
Increase interplay between both sides that has reasonable counterplay, and reward for its use.
Reduce the amount of built in drawback that must be included in a killer's power baseline, allowing powers to remain strong, while introducing counter play to make both sides feel rewarded when playing well.

Phase 3

The final phase I'll be talking about deals directly with survivor tools, and increasing the amount of rewarding bonus objectives in a game to artificially increase the amount of generator work time without directly increasing them, within reason. (See above example in phase 2.5) The goals of this system are as follows:

Allow the generator regression changes in phase 1.5 to become more engaging for survivors, along the avenue of balancing time on generators with fulfilling side objectives.
Make SWF communication more impactful, engaging the level of efficiency while simultaneously not making it oppressive for killers as it currently is with only the primary and relatively unnecessary side objectives.

Now I've left this for last because I believe the system would need less oversight than the more complex to balance killer powers, due to the fact that all tools need to be equally useful to all survivors no matter what, thereby an intense level of generic design needs to take place. Unfortunately, as this would likely be 12-15 months out from the beginning phases I cannot comment on what secondary objectives, or tools might be reasonable in that version of the game. I am certainly open to suggestions, with that said.

BenihimeWrath · December 6, 2020

I'd rather not let this die, it took a long time to write. I would really enjoy getting some constructive criticism on this plan. Cheers.