Higher character level than P100
Hello everyone,
TLDR:
Increase the maximum player level beyond P100 (or add incentives for multiple P100 characters) to help aid player retention and ongoing engagement with Dead by Daylight over the next 10 years.
Full post:
This is my first post on the forum (so a warm hello to you all) and it may be a controversial topic depending on your views / time playing the game.
I've been playing DBD for years now and have noticed (especially since the 10th anniversary event) that most players in my lobby are P100 on at least one character, if not two (which is the most that can be shown in the post-game lobby).
For players (like myself) who main one character 95% of the time, it would be great to have a rewards / incentives structure that goes beyond the current P100 limit.
An example of my personal problem: I choose not to obtain cakes on my favourite character during the 10th anniversary event as doing so provides no level progression or reward structure and seems to me to be a waste of bloodpoints. I now play a character that is not my main to use up my cakes. Personally, this lowers my enjoyment playing the game.
The developers have committed to another 10 years of Dead by Daylight which is really great news. It's great to see the ongoing game development. With this all in mind, I think, to increase user engagement, a player progression structure beyond P100 is a great way to bring back the grind for those players (like myself) who have been with the game for a long time.
My suggestions are designed to be light-touch, to respect development time and avoid a complete overhaul:
1 - Allow character progression up to a higher number (P250, P500, PX, etc..) where the level icon remains the same, only the number changes. Bloodwebs act as any normal progression would, from 1 to 50. This feature can be opt-in after a player reaches P100. Players be default stay at P100 with unlimited level 50 bloodwebs.
2 - Same as suggestion 1 but the colour of the prestige icon changes once the player reaches the new maximum level, say an obsidian colour for the top level (for example PX).
3 - If suggestions 1 (and therefore 2) are not possible, provide additional player emblems / banners that reflect the total number of characters they have at the P100 level.
Suggestion 3 is the most light-touch approach. While it does not directly solve my issue with the game, it does provide an incentive structure to progress many characters to P100.
Implementing any of the above suggestions I believe will help with player retention over the coming years and also solve the current bloodpoints and cakes issue (which I will outline below).
Bloodpoints events, anniversary cakes and matchmaking bonuses are more scarce than ever. This is a point of frustration for myself and many in the community voiced by posts to this forum. I assume this is a decision made on purpose to limit the progression speed of many players. Making these events and offerings scarce serves only to add more rungs to a short ladder. This is especially tough for new players that are faced with an enormous amount of characters to progress to P3 in order to expand the perk aspect of the game fully.
Psychologically, I believe it's better to raise the ceiling so players are incentivised to log in. Don't force slow progression, instead welcome faster progression and expand the player potential.
To pre-empt any comments that say I have too much time on my hands. I do enjoy DBD during the occasional evening while working full-time.
Thanks everyone for reading along, stay safe in the fog.
Comments
(Im not the one that downvoted i just call him the downvote bandit, goes around to all posts clicking downvote on anything) I did hear somewhere they are planning to add more prestige rewards officially.
I have currently 9.5 p100s and they certainly have a problem during events as that anniversary cake nerf came in last year. Beforehand we would get 3-5 cakes per lvl 50 bloodweb, which would allow you to quickly build up your cakes on your 100, and move on to other characters so you don't feel like you are spending 10x the points for 1/4 of the cakes. I dunno why they insist on keeping that nerf. As it prevents you from playing your main if other characters were able to gather tons of the best offering but your main could only manage a handful (unless you leveled that main during an anniversary).
Some of this stuff could work for making your main more engaging to use rather than feeling like you've hit a roadblock in progression. But in some ways giving you the chance to level a character much farther feels like somewhat of a waste. Considering at p100 you would alredy have more items/offering than you could use in the next 5 years or more.
Perhaps they could add something exclusive to p100s, like a new offering only they can get and collect, that works slightly better than anniversary cakes.
But yea im looking forword to hearing what the new prestige rewards will be
I wouldn't be against them taking the Devotion system from levels and letting you do that to your prestige on a button. Go back to Prestige 1 and P100 all over again. It's literally just number go up gameplay, but it's something for onetricks to work on.