Character "Tickets" and helping to solve the daunting decisions facing new players.
So, having had a brother get into DBD semi-recently, I now have second-hand experience of the 2022 DBD New Player experience. And honestly, it's daunting. The grind is rediculous and there's no bot mode at all, meaning that the only way he could reasonably see if he liked a character is for him to use my PC and me to use my Switch so he could give them a try.
We already know the grind has a solution in the works, so here's my suggestion on helping to fix the other new player issue- there's way too many characters, and you have no way of testing them out.
The solution I'd propose for this is a character "ticket", which unlocks a character for you to play as for a set number of matches- let's say 3. While the character is unlocked, you can play with them, level them up, get cosmetics in the store, etc. however the main draw is the first part. This would enable a character to be played to see if someone likes them, or their perks.
However, then comes the problem of people getting tickets and then never purchasing the characters, simply levelling them for perks and then never again. There are different solutions possible to this, from preventing a character from levelling up and just giving them 3 open perk slots, to capping how high they can be levelled (29), however I think the best way of preventing this is to limit the nodes that can appear in the Bloodweb. If a character has been unlocked through a ticket, they can only obtain generic perks or their own unique perks, and can only level these perks up- the teachable variants will not spawn.
So, where would these tickets be? Obviously they could be sold in the Store, firstly. Priced at around 50 cells/900 shards, they would be worth 1/10 of the cost of a new character and available to new players fairly often. Moreover, they could be available in the Rift (the Free track, mostly, though could also be in the Premium track ig) to help fill in some of the blank spaces (or replace some of the awful charms). To people with characters already unlocked, these could have a re-sale value, where they're sold back to The Entity for a return of, say, 450 shards, or stockpiled so that a new character can be played as a test-run before purchasing.
Thoughts?
Comments
Funny thing is, a similiar thing like this existed as an ultra rare offering for killers. It allowed you to play a killer you didn't own without any perks or add-ons. It was removed because of the ability to buy characters with iri shards iirc.
I feel like if there was like a preview of character's power/perk (like a short video) of what the thing does, it would help a tiny bit.
I remember the Splinter offerings, and honestly they were sort-of my inspiration for the idea (as well as other games with characters you can purchase, they normally have a way to trial them for free somewhere). They were retired because they were so, so buggy iirc, not because of shards (although that could also be it lmao).