Potential Solution to help "free to play" players
The main issue here being access to perks. There is no real downside in not having a killer locked, other than their perks also being locked. It's the only argument of Dead by Daylight being pay to win that somewhat holds up (I dont fully agree, considering even nowadays a "win" is subjective).
However, I do stand by the reason that having to prestige the killer to unlock their perks on other characters is quite an important feature aswell. And I do agree that you shouldnt need to buy a chapter to get access to the perks. The Shrine of Secrets agrees with this idea aswell.
So why not allow players to level up locked characters? They can "waste" bloodpoints on a character they wont play untill they unlock them, but there are multiple benefits to it:
1. You can prestige a locked character, getting their perks on everyone else, completely removing any pay to win aspect you could argue.
2. You can start leveling a locked character you're saving to unlock to already have somewhat of an inventory ready, so you could unlock the character later and play them with an existing inventory, instead of having to spend money to unlock them and then having basically no inventory to work with.
3. From a business standpoint, players have more reason to actually purchase locked characters with money, since they can do more with it. Why save shards to unlock the character when you could play the character tomorrow with a full inventory?
4. From a balancing standpoint, players have less reason to buy something unless its something they actually enjoy playing since if the perks were all that mattered, they can just unlock the perks. Giving BHVR very good reason to invest more in making sure every new chapter is worth purchasing. Not naming any particular chapter, but there are 3 I have in mind that wouldnt sell at all if people could access the perks through this manner.
5. From a development standpoint, this gives more leverage with all stakeholders to move around some planned releases, and more budget to rework existing releases, because consumers want the best possible state of chapters to have diverse gameplay (both in terms of perks and playable characters), investors want record sales, and developers want to see their complete work be appreciated instead of worry about incomplete work hitting the live servers and be unappreciated even if a later patch completes the work.
It's not neccesarily easy to implement, and there are some potential downsides to it that I have not considered. But even then, I do think it's long term healthier to implement than to not implement it.
I would love to not have to purchase a character to enjoy the new perks with the new update.
I'm still gonna purchase every chapter on release (yes, I am one of those people), because I like the game and I happen to have to money to do so. But I want everyone to be able to enjoy the game on equal footing, at least perk-wise.
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