Why is it difficult to remove perk tiers?

fogdonkey

During the Q&A they said that it is difficult to remove perk tiers. Why?

Also they mentioned that it would not be a good long term solution, because the grind is increasing exponentially with new DLCs.

I agree that it is not a good long term solution, but it would be a good intermediate solution.

And a sidenote: the grind is increasing quadratically, not exponentially (with DLC releases).

Rougual

Spaghetti code

fogdonkey

@GuyFawx said:

If they ever removed perk tiers i imagine that every perk would have to be adjusted to cost about 12k to 15k bp to compensate

Actually it would make more sense to give perks for free, because they are not like add-ons or offerings. Once you buy a perk you can use it forever. An add-on or offering disappears after the match. So you should earn Bloodpoints to be able to fund your add-ons and offerings.

LeFennecFox

Devs talking about their magical solution to perk tiers that they've been working on for the past century. If it's taking this long to come up with a solution maybe you should just bite the bullet and just get rid of them. The grind in this game is atrocious and is made even worse for killers since most good perks are on paid characters vs starting survivors having the strongest perks in the game.

Smuk

I dont entirely agree with you @Peanits

The (bandaid) solution which are quite common is pretty simple.

Bloodweb = Generates only tier 3.

Existing/purchases = In code of tier 1 and tier 2 replace properties = icon and values of tier 3.

Problem solved. If such simple solution is not plausible, then it seems, that the whole architecture of development is really in poor shape.

I dont use gaming chair, but I sure can printout hello world in many different stacks

JimbusCrimbus

In theory, having used blueprint for a good portion of my unreal development career, it's not hard.

But this is BHVR. If they do this, they'll probably break something, or everything. But instead of telling us the truth, they BHVRsplain it away as "nah that's too hard and wouldn't help" or something of the sort.

Ripley

Honestly if I wanted this much grind I'd play a mobile game. At least you can shortcut the grind by throwing money at it.

JudyIscariot

Personally I think that it'd be interesting to remove perk tiers not because of the blood web, but because of the design space it opens up. Currently, everything has to have some numerical values that can scale, but if you moved away from perk tiers you're no longer bound by that constraint.

PigMainBigBrain

@NOEDENJOYER said:

They're a multi-millionaire company, if they wanted to remove perk tiers, they can definitely achieve it so the excuse of ''well the programming is difficult...'' or whatever is nonsense to me.

They simply will not do it because it lessens the grind in this game, and thus, the amount of money they will make people will play the game less. They do not actually care for our experience in this game, merely for their wallets.

That's why.

While I do agree that "Coding is hard" thing is kind of a meh statement to make, especially considering a lot of other studios and games....don't really...have that issue? I mean having a decent team of coders and scripters is like the first thing you want for a game design team, and 9 times out of 10 they'll try to make their jobs easier not, more difficult when handling code.

Same token though I don't agree with the "Less grind=Less money" because people will play the game less.

No....In fact, I'd argue there are at least 100 better reasons to not play this game than simply "Oh I finally have all the perks unlocked". <---Thats literally never happened. If anything shorting the grind increases peoples desire to play the game because they can experiment with more things, play more characters, switch roles, switch survivors etc.

When a player looks up at available perks for a killer and goes...."Ah, I don't have this perk yet...so I can't run this build" <---Thats 1000 times more off putting and a reason to not play the game, especially when they then realize the amount of time they're going to have to spend unlocking said thing "Welp time to log off ######### that grind"...Compared to "Oh man I unlocked everything!" <---This statement is more likely to be followed by "I'm gonna go crazy on these survivors/killers with these new perks" as in....making people want to play the game more.

Here's hoping their solution is actually fool proof for the long term and the short term. Same time I don't expect miracles overnight, not at their speed. (Side note @Peanits I really hope you guys are focused on making your jobs easier and more streamlined overall to diminish the need for large sweeping course corrections. Cause I know you guys knew this was gonna happen.... somebody 3-4 years ago had to have went "Yo...this....if we keep expanding like this the BP needed is gonna be insane.")

Chadku

Just make perk 1/2/3 be the same and block tier 2/3 from the bloodweb entirely.

Problem bandaid'ed

Edit: Ofc old people keep the purple tier 3 perks.

Pirate

@Peanits said:

To go into details on that a little bit, removing them is not as simple as selecting tier 1/2 of each perk and pressing delete. In order to reduce each perk to one tier, you'd have to update the bloodweb to support it (and additionally, add support for any already-generated bloodwebs that contain perks below tier 3). Likewise, the perk tiers would have to be removed from the UI wherever they appear, and any place a tier 1 perk could appear (e.g. In the Shrine), you'd have to update it to show the tier 3 version of the perk instead.

So while it sounds very simple and can be said in a couple words ("Remove perk tiers"), it would actually be a substantial amount of work.

As for why it's not a permanent solution: Each time new content is released, not only does the amount of perks increase, but the number of characters you need to unlock all those perks on increases as well. Since you have two different factors increasing here, the grind is increasing exponentially over time, not linearly. Even if removing perk tiers would make it manageable for now, sooner or later it would catch back up and become a massive grind again. We've made changes in the past to reduce the grind, such as reducing bloodweb cost/size, adding additional perks to bloodwebs, etc. While these worked great in the short term, the grind always caught up eventually.

Would it reduce the grind pretty significantly for now? Yes, absolutely! But if we're going to spend a bunch of time on something to fix the grind, it makes more sense to spend the same amount of time and work on a permanent solution instead. (And for what it's worth, we do have something else planned for it!)

Long story short, it's not to shoot down the idea of removing perk tiers. It would reduce the grind, absolutely. It would just take as much time as a more permanent solution.

Hey Peanits,

you can atleast try this to make atleast a little more compfort to the bloodweb:

@Pirate said:

I want to propose a change to the bloodwebs regarding the entity picks and the general layot!

What this should achieve:

• more perks in shorter time
• shorter bloodwebs
• help for new players

https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/OVEPMNLEWCLZ/bloodweb-rework.png

(don't wonder about the addons in the pic, I just had no energy to give the tree variaty so I copy pasted 2 things!)

Like you can see above the entity picks from the basis/root instead of the end. Each perk tree opens with 6 perks directly at the basis when one is picked the entity blocks a random perk blocking all addons following it. The entity is not targeting the perks itself but the "root" instead which means it would still act this way if there are no perks left anymore.

With this changes the entity will always take exactly 50% of the tree which is more then it does at average now.

Nice to have changes:

• Click on perk/addon/offering instead of holding it for 1 sec.
• faster animations

I hope you like it and I hope BHVR likes it so we can get this instead of what we have now which would a improvement on all fronts.

latigresa

Unlock the perk, boom you got it! You already paid for it in blood points and shards/cells. Why make it cost more?

Rework offerings and keys to be more worthwhile.

Splinterverse

I'll share my idea for rework again here. Remove tiers 2 and 3 from web. Once you unlock tier 1, you can spend BP to upgrade them to 2 and 3 from perk selection menu. This still makes them a BP sink, but a more predictable one.

fogdonkey

Nothing about reducing Grind in the patch notes...

fogdonkey

Still nothing about reducing the Grind in the patch notes. I guess it is coming Soon™...

@Peanits said:

https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/TM87JRKWBOF5/announcement.png

It’s everyone’s favourite time of the month, reading time. We’re back with another developer update, a series of posts where we go into detail on changes coming to Dead by Daylight. This time around, we’ve got a mix of balance changes and quality of life improvements. Without further ado, let’s get this show on the road.

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Patching Optimization: Part 2

At the start of the year, we announced our plan to improve patch times. Coming in two parts, the first (smaller) change launched on Steam in January, compressing the game files and improving the patch times.

We’re about to launch the second part of these changes, which will have a much larger impact than the first and affect all platforms. How does it all work?

To put it simply, the game is broken into small chunks. When something in one of these chunks changes, the whole chunk must be updated. As the game has grown over the years, so have these chunks, causing downloads to get bigger and patch times to get longer.

Starting in this Mid-Chapter, we’ve completely restructured and rebalanced these chunks. This way, you won’t have to download or patch nearly as much unnecessary data when the game updates, making patch speeds up to 200% faster.

Please note that since we’re changing the file structure of the game, you will need to completely redownload the game with the 5.7.0 update. Afterwards, all future updates will be significantly faster than before. Opting in or out of the 5.7.0 Public Test Build (PTB) will also cause a large download.

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Ghost Face Update

Starting things off, we have a few changes in store for Ghost Face. First, we are increasing the duration of Ghost Face’s mark to 60 seconds (up from 45). This change gives him a longer window to follow up and get a hit after successfully stalking a Survivor and makes outlasting the Exposed effect harder for Survivors.

Second, marked Survivors are no longer able to reveal Ghost Face. While other Survivors will still be able to reveal him, running off on your own now becomes riskier, as you’ll have no choice but to evade him while he’s Undetectable (unless you manage to get a lucky stun!)

Lastly, we noticed that many of Ghost Face’s add-on have gone largely unused with a few exceptions standing out well above the rest. We always want to see a wider variety of add-ons being used, so we’ve done a pass on the majority of Ghost Face’s add-ons to bring them up to a similar power level. Here’s a few examples of what you can expect:

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Legion Update

All these years later, The Legion remain one of the more frequently used Killers, and it’s easy to see why: Sometimes, you just wanna’ go fast with a knife. That’s why these changes focus on making The Legion faster and knifier than ever before.

In all seriousness, the first of our changes is centered around chaining together hits. Being able to string together multiple hits on different Survivors is something that is core to The Legion’s design, so to help them do that, we’re giving them a stacking 0.2m/s speed boost for each Survivor they hit during Feral Frenzy. This will make it easier to close the gap as you switch targets. Additionally, a fifth hit will end your frenzy and put any Survivor into the dying state, adding a satisfying payoff for chaining together hits.

Next, we’ve lowered the post-Feral Frenzy fatigue duration to 3 seconds (down from 4 seconds). The fatigue is a crucial part of The Legion’s power, preventing them from cancelling their frenzy and immediately following up with a basic attack, circumventing the non-lethal aspect of their power. We found that lowering the duration to 3 seconds felt much better to play with, but also kept it feeling fair from a Survivor’s POV. To ensure that the fatigue doesn’t get out of hand, we’ve reworked any fatigue altering add-ons, since the two strongest ones were added to the base kit. We’ve also changed Feral Frenzy’s recharge to start as soon as it ends rather than after the fatigue, effectively reducing the power’s cooldown.

And last, add-ons: We’ve reviewed each of The Legion’s add-ons. Some will receive number tweaks while others will get entirely new effects. We want to shine a spotlight on the various Mixtape add-ons in particular. True to their name, these add-ons will also augment The Legion’s new music, and can even be mixed and matched to produce interesting results.

https://youtu.be/et310pY0Ux0

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Hemorrhage Rework

Hemorrhage has long been one of the lesser desired Status Effects- for Killers, at least. Currently, Hemorrhage increases the frequency of blood pools, making it easier to track Survivors. This effect ends up not being very useful in most cases, as the Survivor will either be leaving scratch marks while sprinting or the blood pools will already be close together if they’re walking.

With that in mind, we’ve come up with a new version of Hemorrhage. Whenever you are not healing, Hemorrhage will cause your healing progress to regress at the rate of 7% per second. This new version rewards the Killer for interrupting a Survivor healing and has the potential to waste med-kit charges.

This change will affect all perks & add-ons that currently apply it.

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Updated Difficulty Ratings

In the info tab for each Killer & Survivor, you’ll find a difficulty rating that tells you how easy or hard they are to play. These ratings are intended to help newer players decide which Killer to play first, and which they should consider holding for when they’re more comfortable with the game.

To make these ratings more useful, we’ve created new guidelines for how we rank them. We’ve reviewed each Killer and given them a 1-5 score (1 being the easiest) in the following categories:

• Mechanical Skill: How much precise control is required to use the Killer effectively? (Aiming, reaction time, and control)
• Strategic Skill: How much planning and strategy is required to use the Killer effective? (Timing, resource management, decision making)
• Uniqueness: How similar is this Killer to other Killers?

The scores are totaled up to determine the overall difficulty of the Killer. The Nurse, for example, requires a lot of mechanical skill, a good bit of strategy, and plays completely differently than other Killers, landing her safely in the new “Very Hard” difficulty.

To avoid confusion, we’ve removed difficulty ratings from Survivors. This is because all Survivors are functionally identical with only perks setting them apart. Since perks can be shared across Survivors and aren’t factored into difficulty for Killers, we made the decision to remove them entirely.

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Haddonfield Update

It’s become a tradition for each dev update to be followed by “Haddonfield rework when?” Well this tradition is coming to an end, because we saved the best for last (yes, that was a perk pun).

The iconic Lampkin Lane appeared in The Entity’s realm over five years ago. But with all the visual improvements around the rest of the game, that familiar street is starting to show its age. Not for long, though, Haddonfield is next in line to get a visual update.

For those wondering, don’t worry, the map is getting some layout and gameplay changes too. Take a look:

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https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/CXI8NP1HRRBX/haddonfield-02.png

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https://us.v-cdn.net/6030815/uploads/TDYMZ4N1ABZV/haddonfield-03.png

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With that, we’ve reached the end of this month’s developer update. All of the changes mentioned here will be available in the 5.7.0 update. Which change are you most looking forward to? We look forward to hearing what you think!

The Dead by Daylight team

UnknownKiller

@BabyCameron10 said:

Why don’t they cut the price in half of the things in the Bloodweb? Could be easier to do than removing perk tiers.

Becuz it would make everyone to be sweatu bringing iris and purples.Im agree with the choose 3 perks over 6 perls at lvl 50

BubbaDredge

@fogdonkey said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2761578#Comment_2761578

My thoughts:

Possible problem: everything is so cheap that you can buy more items/addons/offerings than you can actually use while playing. It would make lower tier addons/items/offerings useless.

That's why in my opinion having the perks in the same bloodweb as addons/items/offerings is not a good system. But this would mean a larger rework which is not a topic of this thread.

Doesn't the grind kinda make it that way already? I have to clear so many webs to get my perks, I usually have a surplus of addons and offerings. My favorites are often green or yellow, though, so that might explain my experience.

BubbaDredge

@Peanits said:

To go into details on that a little bit, removing them is not as simple as selecting tier 1/2 of each perk and pressing delete. In order to reduce each perk to one tier, you'd have to update the bloodweb to support it (and additionally, add support for any already-generated bloodwebs that contain perks below tier 3). Likewise, the perk tiers would have to be removed from the UI wherever they appear, and any place a tier 1 perk could appear (e.g. In the Shrine), you'd have to update it to show the tier 3 version of the perk instead.

So while it sounds very simple and can be said in a couple words ("Remove perk tiers"), it would actually be a substantial amount of work.

As for why it's not a permanent solution: Each time new content is released, not only does the amount of perks increase, but the number of characters you need to unlock all those perks on increases as well. Since you have two different factors increasing here, the grind is increasing exponentially over time, not linearly. Even if removing perk tiers would make it manageable for now, sooner or later it would catch back up and become a massive grind again. We've made changes in the past to reduce the grind, such as reducing bloodweb cost/size, adding additional perks to bloodwebs, etc. While these worked great in the short term, the grind always caught up eventually.

Would it reduce the grind pretty significantly for now? Yes, absolutely! But if we're going to spend a bunch of time on something to fix the grind, it makes more sense to spend the same amount of time and work on a permanent solution instead. (And for what it's worth, we do have something else planned for it!)

Long story short, it's not to shoot down the idea of removing perk tiers. It would reduce the grind, absolutely. It would just take as much time as a more permanent solution.

Peanits: "Removing Tiers is not as simple as just removing them from the code. There are many working parts that are connected, we can't just take it out that simply."

Players: "But just take it out, remove it from the code. Simply."

Thanks for the details, Peanits. You guys get flak for not sharing info with us enough, this isn't like that, and it's appreciated.

fogdonkey

@BubbaDredge said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2761434#Comment_2761434

Peanits: "Removing Tiers is not as simple as just removing them from the code. There are many working parts that are connected, we can't just take it out that simply."

Players: "But just take it out, remove it from the code. Simply."

Thanks for the details, Peanits. You guys get flak for not sharing info with us enough, this isn't like that, and it's appreciated.

They could give us some info about when will their solution come out. Is it next chapter? Next year? Soon™? Never?

BubbaDredge

@fogdonkey said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2871829#Comment_2871829

They could give us some info about when will their solution come out. Is it next chapter? Next year? Soon™? Never?

I would like to see some relief in the meantime, a constant Bloodrush wouldn't hurt my feelings.