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Suggestion: Gamemode for Tournaments

Fropps Fropps
in Feedback and Suggestions

Alright, so a new Scott Jund video dropped today (link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2Hcw6Q1AmU), where they lament the fact that tournament play has no skill expression because of the balance of resources in the game.

In short:

  • Survivors drop pallets immediately because the rest of their team is playing efficiently and they can finish the game before they run out of resources
  • Killers camp and tunnel because killing a survivor deprives them of time and gives the killer a massive edge in actually being able to win.

This ...isn't ideal. I think we all know how much any big multiplayer game benefits from a thriving community of skilled players, and it's a shame that because of these issues, we don't have that here.

So, this got me thinking, and I think I have a solution.

So, what would this tournament specific gamemode involve?

So, we have a few issues we're trying to solve here. In order for this post to be more compelling, I'll take you through my design process, starting with two immediate issues:

  1. Survivors have a finite amount of time that they have to extend chases for. Therefore, they only have to use resources enough to cover that time period
  2. There's no good way to score a tournament. Dbd is a complex game whose metrics for success don't provide any one clear goal, and all these metrics are bounded. Escape is either on or off. Number of gens done are better, but it doesn't measure anything past 5, bloodpoints are not only bounded, but incentivize behavior that wouldn't make sense to a spectator.

We could fix both these issues by having survivors never escape. For example, when one generator is done, maybe another deactivates. In this situation, there is an obvious end to the trial: the killer always kills all survivors, and their success is given by just how tight they can stretch all their resources.

However, this doesn't exactly solve the problem of killers camping does it? In order to fix this, we could make so that survivors aren't removed from the match until a certain amount of hooks has been reached. This means that the killer is always going to try and do things that cause there to be more action in the match.

Unfortunately, this solution has potential for camping, it doesn't allow for perks like devour hope to function, and tracking a disconnected number isn't exactly the most dramatic way for a spectator sport to end.

Instead, maybe survivors are removed from the match after all survivors have "died". The behavior this generates should be fairly similar to how a player might play dbd under the "gentleman's rules" the community has adopted. It makes sense to go after new survivors and to spread who you're hooking throughout the team, and it's dramatic for the game to hinge on killing one specific target. Furthermore, "killing" one survivor allows them to go down again and again to only really benefit the team. We would see a larger diversity of tactics as well. Bodyblocking would become more viable, as would sabotaging and perks like mad grit.

I can see some potential issues with, for example, the last survivor hiding in a deadzone or a locker, so it might be worth it to give the killer some sort of boon upon hooking a dead survivor, or to limit the game by a number of hooks.

Now, to return to the way generators are completed:

If, for example, the trial started with 5 out of the 7 gens that usually spawn unpowered, finishing a gen might unpower a random powered gen, thus creating a functioning cycle that requires survivors to more from gen to gen.

However, one of the more important pieces of macro in a game of dbd is where gens are completed. This can reward a killer who is good at deciding where to apply pressure to a map with a powerful 3-gen or reward risks survivors might take early in the match with a much smoother end-game. It's also satisfying for scope of the map to change and for the intensity of play to increase as generators are done. So, I think it might make more sense for completed generators to de-power after a timer elapses. To make sure there are always generators to do, it might also make sense for completed generators to reduce a portion of the timer on all powered gens. If the original timer is 4 times as long as it takes to complete a generator for example, it might make sense for this reduction to be about 1/6th? The numbers aren't important, since I'm sure this will come out in testing.

The gamemode concept, in summary.

  • Survivors spawn in with 7 uncompleted generators and no exit gates or hatch.
  • Powered generators de-power after ~320 seconds
  • powering a generator reduces this timer on all other generators by some fraction of its max value.


  • Survivors who would have died on hook instead just stay on the hook until they're rescued.
  • Mori'd survivors remain in the dying state.
  • Survivors who would bleed out remain in the dying state.
  • On the survivor portraits, it's indicated who has died and who hasn't.
  • When all survivors have died, they are consumed by the entity in the same manner the end-game collapse does.

The score is the number of generators completed by the survivors. Lower is better for the killers and higher is better for survivors. In an actual tournament format, the teams would probably switch sides after a match is complete, with playtime as a tiebreaker in case both scores are equal.

While I can see problems with this splitting the queue as a permanent thing, I think it could probably exist as a limited event with public matchmaking, and then persisting as an option in kill your friends

And that's just about it! I would love to hear what people think about this idea!

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