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Peanits
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I hate to be that guy, but being able to win without even trying is the very definition of a matchmaking system not working. You're not being punished by having to try, you're being matched against people of your skill level. And if you really do want to relax and not take it too seriously, you can do that and your rating will adjust to where you can relax and still do reasonably well after some losses.
And as others have pointed out, a better matchmaking system was a very common request. The old rank system was not as unanimously loved as you might remember.
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@TigerSnake said:
It’s already been stated to not be live for this week cause of the booster rates for Shelter Woods and Red Forest.
This is correct. Map repeat prevention will be enabled next week.
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@BlueHorkew said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3365283#Comment_3365283
Are this issues more common with crossplay?
Sometimes i ask myself if the problems i see are because of the console, the killer's connection or EU servers.
Strictly speaking, no. There are some things that could affect it (e.g. wired vs. wireless connection) that could be more common on some platforms than others, but crossplay alone will not make it more prevalent.
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@egg_ said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3365211#Comment_3365211
Regarding the second paragraph: did you consider, I don't know, to code better your own game? Literally the own game in the entire world where hit validation awards the player with the worst ping
No, never, you're the first person to think of that. I'll let the team know right away that we can pull off a world first feat and instantly transfer information across the world simply by doing code better.
For the second part of your point, Overwatch and Valorant to name just a couple examples.
Overwatch has (or had, I admit I haven't been following it lately to see if this is still the case) a method called "favour the shooter" - basically meaning that if you see yourself shooting your enemy, you did. The game takes your word for it and only intervenes if what you're claiming you did is impossible. This is fairly common practice in many online games, Dead by Daylight included, because it feels a lot better when you're the shooter (or in our case, the person swinging a weapon at someone). Shooting or swinging at someone and arbitrarily whiffing because that's not where the server or the other player thinks your target is feels incredibly bad. But on the flip side, this means that getting shot (or hit, in our case) can feel a little worse. In a shooter, this means getting hit when you think you're behind cover, and in our case, getting hit when you feel like you're too far away.
The alternative is forcing players to predict their opponents' movement and "lead their shot", shooting not where they are, but where you think they'll be half a second from now. This feels way less responsive and takes a lot of skill out of things. You're no longer aiming at them, you're aiming at where they might be. A lot of older shooters work this way and needless to say, it's not ideal.
Obviously there are limits to this. If the server sees that your connection is slow and the Survivor is actually pretty far away or if you've already been stunned by the time you hit the Survivor, it will step in and reject the hit. But again, this is tricky because making this too strict means rejecting fair hits.
There's a video discussing how this works in Overwatch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTH2ZPgYujQ
And as for Valorant, there is an amazing blogpost detailing some of the difficulties they've faced with things like "peekers advantage" (where peeking around a corner gives you an advantage since it will take a while for your opponent to see you peeking). It's a long one, but if you want to see more example of how networking in video games work, check it out: https://technology.riotgames.com/news/peeking-valorants-netcode
Now where this comes back to DBD: We have some unique problems to solve. Shooters have been around for a long time and for the most part they have to deal with the same issues. But whereas in a shooter both sides will be peeking in and out of cover while shooting, that's not how things work in Dead by Daylight. Instead, we have one Survivor running away from a chasing Killer. This means that no matter what, the Killer will always see themselves closer to the Survivor, but the opposite will be true for the Survivor. The truth is what the server sees somewhere in the middle.
If you blanket reject all hits that look strange to Survivors, you will be rejecting a lot of very legitimate hits from the Killer's perspective. Every single time the Killer lunges and juuuust barely hits the Survivor, that hit would be rejected. Your lunge would basically be non-existent if that were the case. Needless to say, not ideal.
We tend to favour the Killer in these scenarios because as long as their connection is decent, there is reasonable doubt that the hit should have connected. Pallet help clear things up a lot because there is a timestamped action showing when the Killer was stunned and when the Survivor is hit, so the server can act as an authority and resolve that dispute. But in the case where there is no stun (or the stun comes after the hit), it can only base its decision on positions.
Long story short, no, it's not the only game that has to fight with latency, and changing a few lines of code is not some magical solution.
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@rankore said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3365211#Comment_3365211
It is understandable that this is very tricky mechanic but in case you encounter killer from far away it looks totally unfair and not counterable. Are there any plans on region / latency issue?
As far as regions go, it's never off the table to expand into more areas. The bigger question is if those regions could support it. Without enough players using that server as their "home" (best connection), wait times and match quality would suffer.
Latency is a much more difficult topic. It will always be there, we cannot get rid of it because it takes time for data to physically travel around the world to everyone else in your match. Servers help a lot with this as they're typically able to receive data and send it back out to other players much faster than a typical PC or console, and we also do some magic to visually reduce the discrepancy both sides see (e.g. projecting players in their predicted position based on how they're moving).
But ultimately, there's no way to remove it entirely. Given the nature of the game where one person is running away from another, the Killer is always going to see themselves closer to the Survivor than the Survivor will on their screen. Given that, the server will step in and reject hits if someone is way too far away, but it needs to be a little generous, otherwise completely ordinary looking hits could be wrongfully rejected.
Long story short: It's possible there will be more improvements made to visually reduce the differences both people see, but realistically it will never be completely gone. Technology's got a long way to go before that's possible.
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@Firellius said:
I was suspicious that we'd silently switched back to killer-sided verification, as opposed to server-sided, and this appears to confirm it.
EDIT: THough, aren't killer games always hosted to killer anyway?
Hits have always been handled on the Killer's side, hit validation only steps in when the Killer has been stunned or when the Survivor is a significant distance away (though the distance is intentionally fairly lenient). In a case like this where the Killer was in fact stunned, the server checks which came first, the hit or the stun. In this case, you can see the Survivor get hit before the Killer is stunned it both perspectives, meaning the stun definitely came second. Since the Killer was not quite far enough away for validation to deny it based on distance either, the hit went through.
It's tricky because while lowering this distance would protect Survivors from more funky looking hits, it would also cause a lot of totally valid hits to be rejected, especially when you introduce things like Coup de Grace into the mix which could make the discrepancy between the server and players even larger.
But to answer your follow up question: No, the match is hosted on a dedicated server, not the Killer's system.
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Map repeat prevention is currently off since the updated maps have an increased chance to appear. It'll be enabled next week.
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They'll appear some time over the next few weeks, but not the same day as the update releases. New outfits tend to appear in the store over multiple weeks. You can expect them sometime between 6.6.0 and 6.7.0.
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@Coffeecrashing said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3363631#Comment_3363631
I get it that things take time, but I still don't understand why we can't be told if dead hard is getting changed. Is BHVR still not sure if dead hard needs to be changed? We got an absolutely huge advanced notice that a survivor HUD might happen, and the eruption change was announced in advance..... but dead hard might be fine as it is, and we should just spend a few more months arguing about it on the forums?
And if we spend a few more months arguing about dead hard, but BHVR ends up deciding that dead hard is fine, then we get to feel like we wasted a whole bunch of time? And then we get a defeatist expectation that arguing about survivor stuff is a complete waste of time, and only pro-survivor complaints are important?
I'd love to spill the beans and share everything way in advance, but there's a lot of reasons to not share everything too far in advance. I'll go through just a few really quick:
- Clear information flow. If we start announcing changes that are two, three, or even four updates away, things get confusing really fast. It's becomes difficult to tell what's in one update or the next. The most hardcore players might be able to keep track, but the vast majority of people will be left wondering, "Wait, is this the update with that perk change? Or is that the next one?" - Keeping things closer to the update they come up in makes this a lot clearer and removes a lot of that ambiguity. You hear about a change and most of the time it'll be in the next update. No confusion.
- Things change. Even with perk updates, they often go through multiple rounds of testing and fine tuning before they see the light of day. Sometimes entire effects are replaced between when they're first prototyped and announced. This can get really messy. Say we announce a perk update and everyone goes, "Wow, that's awesome! I want that right now!" - but then we do some testing and find out that it has a lot of issues and isn't as fun or useful as we'd hope. If that perk then changes from what we've announced, there's going to be a lot of disappointed people. For reference, this are constantly changing even days before the PTB, so announcing something too soon risks that information being incorrect.
- It's better to get your hands on it yourself. Reading words in a blogpost is fine and all, but it does not match up to actually trying something yourself. If you can read about something and try it just a few days later, the feedback you'll give is a lot more likely to be accurate since you've had the chance to actually see how it plays out in a match. By comparison, if you heard about this change months ago, there would have been plenty of time to theorycraft about how this buff/nerf is going to be amazing or terrible, so you're a lot more likely to go into things with an already skewed opinion. By reducing that window between announcement and trying, your feedback is a lot more authentic.
- Arguments can be genuinely helpful (when they're constructive). A lot of these hot topics start as, "I hate this thing." - There's not much to actually go on here, we can't just crank up the "like" dial. But over time, these discussions grow and some more productive feedback starts to come out. More people get involved and bring their own opinions and experiences in, and those gut reactions suddenly have reasoning and evidence to back them up. Seeing how these discussions progress can help us tell if we're on the right track.
- Most of these things are not planned that far in advance. We can't predict the future so balance changes for hot topic perks aren't in our roadmap. When something really starts to catch on, we take a look at it to see what (if anything) we should do about it. We don't hold these updates for some future update. When they're ready, we try to slot them in as soon as we can. When we share info on it, 9 times out of 10 it was only recently finalized.
With something really big like the Survivor HUD, it makes a lot more sense since to share it way in advance it would require a ton of work, so it's nice to get a feel for how people will react before we sink a bunch of time into it. If people absolutely hated it, we'd know that we'd be better off using that time elsewhere.
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Our offices are just desks and conference rooms and a cafeteria, my friend. It's not an evil lair. We don't have even one excessively tall arm chair with an angry looking cat we cat pet while laughing maniacally.
In reality, nobody who spends 8 hours a day working on a game wants people to be upset about something, but things take time. Game devs aren't the super villains you want them to be.
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Your intentions are good, and I don't think anyone would disagree that making underperforming Killers more competitive is a good idea, but there's a lot more to game development than simply telling someone 'fix everything'. I'll give a quick and simplified example of what this actually entails.
You're told to buff any underperforming Killer. Your first step is to do an analysis on which Killers require your attention. While doing so, you're going to find that most Killers seem more or less where they should be, but if you start to dig into specifics, you might find that some are performing really well in some skill ranges and poorly in others.
And so you'll need to dig deeper and find out why that's the case. Why are some people doing better with them than others? Is there something that more skilled players are taking advantage of that average players aren't? Have good Survivors mastered playing against a certain aspect of their power while average Survivors struggle? This alone is a lot of research, sifting through countless threads, video, streams, and even working with our data team to draw data from thousands of matches.
Once that's done, you'll need to figure out how to change them. What is a change that will make them more competitive in the ranges where they're struggling, but won't make them frustratingly overpowered in the ranges where they're already doing well? The Nemesis is a great example of this. Shortly after he was released, we found that he wasn't doing so hot in high skill lobbies, but he was doing very well in low skill lobbies. Upon further research, we discovered the high skill players were more likely to mutate his Tentacle Strike. And this was the key: We could safely buff the third tier of his power to make him stronger for high skill players without making him too strong for average players (where he was already doing well).
Next, you'll need to find the time to actually slot this update in. This is a very complicated part since every department has only so much bandwidth for each update. If your changes require animation support, for instance, you might not be able to squeeze your rework into an update that already has a bunch of other animation work required (such as a new Chapter).
When you find a spot for it, you need to playtest it and see how everything feels with a wide variety of players. Is it too strong in some cases, or too weak? Does this solve the problems you've set out to solve? Is it intuitive? Are there any control or feedback issues that need to be resolved? Depending on the complexity of the changes you've made, this can be a back and forth process that requires a lot of iteration.
And finally once all that is done, it needs to go through polishing and QA before it can finally hit the PTB, where you may have to iterate on it some more depending on how people feel about it.
All of this is for one Killer. There are soon to be 31 in the game. Meanwhile, you also have problematic perks, maps, mechanics- you name it- that people are giving feedback on which also require your attention.
Thinking, "Hey, let's buff weaker Killers" is only step 1 of the process, and it's a thought that everyone has had. If it were as easy as that, I promise you we would have done that already. Balance changes like these can take anywhere from weeks to months of work depending on their scope, and while we would love to be able to snap our fingers and do this for the next update, we're talking about literal years of work for this alone, let alone Killers who may be too strong or perks.
So yes, the intention is very good! But the TLDR is that it's not as easy as you think.
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I'm not going to try and convince you that one system is better than the other. That's ultimately up to you to decide, nobody can tell you how you feel.
HOWEVER, I will fact check those key points.
- The softcap is not easy to hit. We've stated many times that the distribution of players across MMR looks like a bell curve. There's very few people on the extreme low end, a lot near and around the middle, and then very few people on the extreme high end. There aren't many people at or above the softcap. Many people will claim to be there, but this is almost always incorrect. By comparison, it was much easier for people of all skill levels to hit rank 1 under the old system so long as they played enough each month.
- This isn't really the case. The matchmaker starts off very specific and gradually broadens its range the longer you wait for a match. The overwhelming majority of the time you'll be paired against people within a few points of your own rating. Folks who are at one of the extreme ends of the spectrum and playing during off-peak times for their region may have more variance between matches, but there's only so much a matchmaker can do (it can only work with what its got).
- Even if this is the case, the old system did not have any separation between Killers, your rank was shared between all Killers. I would hesitate to say that having some separation is worse than none at all.
- The system exists in a void. You never see it. You aren't rewarded for increasing it. You aren't punished for losing it. It is solely a hidden number to help find you opponents that are similarly skilled. If you decide to play more competitively to increase a number that you'll never see, that's totally fine and you can do so, but the system certainly is not encouraging it anymore than the old system which was actually shown to your before and after every match.
Again, not going to convince you that you should like one more than the other. Everyone wants something different out of matchmaking and nobody's really wrong.
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@Trollinmon said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3359976#Comment_3359976
By the end of a month, pretty much anyone who played enough would find themselves in the higher ranks because on average they were pipping more than they were depipping.
Isn't this an issue with the safety pip system though? The problem with the old system was that you really couldn't lose pips. Thus even if you weren't very skilled you would slowly climb. What this did was make the early reset of going back to green ranks and quickly getting to red ranks result in fairly solid games but as time went on in the month the quality of games quicky fell. Isn't removing the safety pips and making it harder and harder to pip the best solution to matchmaking in this game? Focusing on the smaller things like chase and doing gens instead of letting your team die while you hide in the corner waiting for hatch. I feel that working on the grade system would be overall better for the games health than a kill/escape system.
The safety pips certainly wouldn't have helped, but the bigger issue is that it's not possible to 'balance' that system in a way that also makes it roughly even for matchmaking. A Survivor can do things that earns them emblem points without the Killer losing any and vice versa, meaning the end result of the match could still be considered a win for both. Even if safety pips were removed and the system was perfectly rebalanced so that both sides cannot win simultaneously, the bar for pipping would have to be frustratingly high in order for it to even remotely work.
But even if that were the case, you would still have situations like the OP described. You may have been chased all match and done really well, but because you didn't fix generators or unhook anyone, the emblem system might spit out an unsatisfying result.
And in the process you'd lose one of the bigger advantages to the current system: Your result wouldn't be affected by your opponent's rank. Whereas the current system can look at a match and say, "This one might be tough for you, so we won't lower your rating by much if you do end up losing", the emblem system is completely independent. It solely focuses on your performance and your performance alone, it doesn't factor in how good your opponent may be.
In the end, this also has it own pitfalls. It would also feel very frustrating to finish a match after killing three Survivors only for the game to say, "Yeeeeah, but you didn't do it fast enough so I'm giving the win to the Survivors." - no system is perfect, and a very strict emblem system would likely be just as frustrating if not more.
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@AmpersandUnderscore said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3359976#Comment_3359976
This might be asking for more information under the hood, but I think there are still some misconceptions about how the system works. Specifically, the 'there are problems if both sides can be considered winning simultaneously' part. (I don't disagree, I just think I misunderstand something here).
The system seems to assume there are only two parties. In a 'team of survivors' vs killer scenario, there is only one winning side (or a draw), so assigning a winner is just one team or the other.
But the way I understand it, survivor matchmaking is based only on your individual escape, not as a team. The game isn't considering win/loss in 4v1, rather 1v1v1v1v1.
Take, for example, a match where 3 survivors are sacrificed and the last survivor escapes via the exit gate. In this example, 3 survivors 'lost', the killer 'won', but we also have the survivor who escaped 'won' as well.
Does this not fall into the troublesome category you described? Both the killer and a survivor won the match, despite being opposing teams.
Or is likely I'm misunderstanding something here. Any clarification is appreciated.
Happy to clarify!
In this scenario, it's treated as if the Killer 'won' 3 separate 1-on-1 matches and 'lost' a fourth. Overall, they would gain rating.
We actually have team based ratings as well, but this only affects things on the Survivor side. If you were to die and the other three Survivors escaped, you would lose less rating (it is assumed that your actions helped them escape). The same goes if you escape, you will gain more rating for each Survivor that also escapes. On the flipside, if more Survivors die, you will lose more rating if you also die and gain less if you happen to escape.
The key is that these each offset each other. There's an equal positive effect for every possible negative effect, so it ends up being more or less neutral in the end. The only difference is that it can feel less punishing when you get chased all match, die, but your teammates escape.
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Will try to keep this short, but matchmaking is incredibly complex so apologies if this ends up being long.
There's a couple big misconceptions with MMR, and probably the most common one is how it estimates where you should be. No matchmaking system in any game- even games like chess which pioneered these ranking formulas over many years- is able to take a single match and accurately assess your abilities. There will always be too many factors at play for that to be accurate. Even if you use a different metric or a bunch of metrics, like chase time, hooks, pallets used, generators completed, healing, etc., there are still outside factors that need to be considered. Was your opponent (the Killer in this case) playing well, or were you only doing well because they were making a lot of mistakes? Likewise, did you do poorly because they're amazing at the game? Did your teammates do their part to help ensure your good plays worked, or did they let you down?
Even if you had a human sit there and watch your match, it would still be impossible for them to stick an accurate number on you after watching just one match. The best they could do is a ballpark estimate. They don't know you, they haven't seen you play against higher caliber/lower caliber opponents before. They only have this one match to go off of.
The matchmaking system is no different. It cannot tell how amazing you are from a single match because that is an impossible task, so it doesn't even try. Instead, the system is designed to look at your performance over the course of many matches. This way, due to the law of averages, you will gradually move towards the place where you should be. You might lose two matches and win the next four. You're up overall from where you started.
And because there's no way to accurate take every factor into consideration, it does this by using a proxy condition. Yes, kills or escapes are not the only thing that makes a good player good! But if you're amazing in a chase and can last for several minutes, more often than not, that will lead to a win. If you play well, your chances of escaping will rise. Or if a Killer plays well, their chances of killing the Survivors will rise. This isn't something that's exclusive to Dead by Daylight either, just about every game will use a similar metric for matchmaking (even if it doesn't show it). You'd be hard pressed to find a game that successfully factors in dozens of things rather than using the outcome of a match.
This is also important because the matchmaker's sole job is to find you matches where you have a roughly equal chance of winning or losing. It doesn't care how you do it, whether you played super well or you used every crutch in the book. It's a cold, emotionless machine that's solely trying to put you up against opponents where your strategy- whatever that may be- works about half of the time. It is not trying to pass judgement on you as a player, not trying to make you feel bad for losing or claim you're amazing for winning. It's simply looking at the facts: If you won, rating goes up, if you lost, rating goes down. And over the course of several matches, you'll almost always end up moving in the right direction.
This is a big part of the reason why your rating is not shown. It's not meant to be something you obsess over or focus on. It's sole purpose is to find you fair matches. It will go down sometimes when you don't feel like it should, but it will also go up more often than not if you are truly below where you should be.
It's crucial for a matchmaking system to have a clear win condition. The winners rating needs to go up, and the losers' ratings need to go down. If it's a draw, they stay the same (although this isn't common). If this is not the case and both people can win simultaneously, you end up in situations where people can endlessly climb in rating rendering the entire matchmaking system useless. It would quickly become a reflection of someone's playtime more than their actual abilities.
The emblem system is actually a perfect example of this. Since emblems are independent of the other side's performance, it's possible for both the person who 'won' and the person who 'lost' to pip. The result was exactly what was expected: By the end of a month, pretty much anyone who played enough would find themselves in the higher ranks because on average they were pipping more than they were depipping. This meant: A) By the end of a month, a large number of people with a wide variety of skill levels were being matched together, making matchmaking feel random, and B) By the end of a month, the lower ranks (people who had not played much) would suffer from excessively long queue times since the majority of people had already ranked up past them. If the matchmaking system is producing long wait times for some and horribly uneven matches for others, it's failing to do its job.
In short, don't sweat it if you "lose" by the matchmaker's standard. It expects you to lose some matches, and it knows that you will win matches to offset those losses. If you think you did well, you did well. Don't let an invisible number that you can't see take that away from you.
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For what it's worth, you already do get a unique cosmetic reward in the prestige 100 icon. But I'd be hesitant to add something more meaningful to prestige 100. Prestiging that far is meant to be something completely optional for folks who already have everything unlocked and want a new goal to work towards. Sticking an amazing reward behind it might push it from "optional if you want to" to "optional, but you're really missing out if you don't".
With 67 characters in the game (soon), keep in mind we're already talking about 603 prestiges just to unlock the existing cosmetic rewards as is. For the vast majority of people, dedicated a sixth of that time to prestiging just one character to 100 would be out of the question.
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The cosmetics in the Rift will be exclusive to the Rift for a minimum of 6 months. After that, they may (but are not guaranteed to) appear in the store at any point. They are not designed to stay exclusive forever, it's an early window where you can get more bang for your buck. If you don't feel it's worth it without the cosmetics being exclusive, we completely understand, but there are no plans to change it.
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@Emeal said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3359089#Comment_3359089
Is the idea true that Pro Killer suggestions are fewer because there are more Survivor players in the Community?
I heard that idea a lot lately relating to this, but I'm pretty confident in the work of the Community Managers to sift through it all.
No, absolutely not. Sometimes patches will lean in favour of one side or the other, but it would be silly to solely focus on Survivors just because there's more of them in a match. The game does not exist without both sides.
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To echo what others have said, we typically hold perk updates for Mid-Chapters, not Chapter releases. Eruption was originally planned for the following Mid-Chapter but was bumped up due to the amount of feedback it was getting. We found just enough time to squeeze it in to an earlier update. Dead Hard, by comparison, has become a hot topic somewhat more recently. Keep in mind our updates are planned and worked on months in advance, so it can take some time before things that are 'hot topics' see changes.
That said, I cannot confirm whether or not Dead Hard will be changed, but by no means are we ignoring the discussions about it. Keep 'em coming.
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What purpose would this actually serve other than encouraging elitism? One person's opinion is no more valid than someone else's just because their MMR is higher. Both of you are people playing a video game, we should be doing what we can to ensure that both of you have a good time. To say that only someone who's among the best in the world should have a say would imply that the opinions of the vast majority of people playing in the middle of the pack don't matter, which is incredibly selfish.
I really can't begin to stress how rare it is for someone to be near or above the matchmaking softcap for MMR. Far more people claim to be 'max MMR' when in reality, there's nowhere near that many people up there.
That said, that's what the community team is here for; to take feedback from everyone, including the people who are up there.
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On average, you'll pip up more than you'll lose a pip. And more importantly, both you AND your opponent can pip up at the same time. This is totally fine for a reward system like emblems/grades, but it's very bad when it comes to matchmaking. It makes it so over the course of a month, pretty much anybody who plays enough with end up in or near the highest bracket, more or less pairing anyone against anyone. This was pretty much exactly what happened under the old ranking system: Just before rank reset, matchmaking was all over the place since everyone was so close together.
The emblem system also isn't a good indicator of how skilled you are since it doesn't take your opponents skill into consideration. For instance, if you are a low MMR player playing against other low MMR players, you can still have a match where you pip or even double pip. But that doesn't suddenly make you as good as a high MMR player who does that same. You did well in that match with other similarly low MMR people, but you wouldn't do as well in a match with amazing players.
That's why we keep these systems separate. Emblems are purely a monthly ladder that you can climb for rewards (whether you're brand new to the game or an absolutely legend), and MMR is there purely to make sure you'll win about half of your matches. Mixing the two would either make it difficult to get your rewards- unless you're absolutely amazing at the game- or have a seriously negative effect on matchmaking.
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Killer Instinct is solely use in Killer powers (and their add-ons) at the moment. We try not to make perks or items that counter a specific Killer. Legion, for example, would be hit hard by this.
Perks countering perks, a-ok, that's fair game, every Killer has access to the same perks. But severely limited some Killers' powers but not others, that's where things get rocky. Some Killers may have aspects of their power that can be countered with perks , such as The Doctor & Calm Spirit, but whereas Killer Instinct is exclusive to Killer powers, there are many sources of screams (perks, actions, etc.) that that make it non-exclusive.
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@Chocolate_Cosmos said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3354070#Comment_3354070
Thank you! If I can have just one question about Skull Merchant... I didn't understand 100% the part where the blog talks about the cooldown. Does it mean she doesn't have a cooldown to place drones anymore at all? (Only there is that area limit before you can deploy another one).
Correct. You can't place them too close to each other, but otherwise as soon as you're far enough, you can place one. The cooldown only applies to reactivating existing drones now.
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We've released a blogpost today with a bunch of changes we've made since the PTB:
It’s been about a week since the Tools of Torment Public Test Build (PTB) went live, and we’ve been busy combing through your feedback in the days since. Today, we’d like to share a large package of polish and balance adjustments which we’ve prepared for the Chapter’s release on March 7th. As always, we want to give our…While the PTB is live, we tend not to say an awful lot since we don't want to influence feedback. Whether people love the new content or hate it, we're hear to take that feedback to the team. Over the next few days, the team is busy deciding on which changes need to be made and budgeting the time we have before the build needs to be submitted. Once everything's locked in, we'll always try our best to share those changes (like this) as soon as we can.
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I can confirm that as others have said, the stun time from the pallet is shorter than the time it takes to reset the pallet. Since the Killer can interrupt the pickup, there's nothing stopping them from breaking it.
Alternatively, they can sit there and wait for you to pick it up and then hit you before you can possibly drop it again. You might get a second stun, but you're guaranteed to get hit in the process.
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@Coffeecrashing said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3332961#Comment_3332961
That’s not what the OP was complaining about. We aren’t complaining about the difference between making an attack or searching a locker. We’re complaining about the difference between picking up a survivor and opening a locker.
I had a game where a knocked down survivor was directly in front of a locker, and a survivor was waiting in that locker, and I wasn’t able to get a prompt to open the locker. Bully SWFs sometimes do this on purpose, so they can laugh at the killer, because the survivor in the locker is immune because the knocked down survivor is blocking the search locker prompt. And if the killer picks up the knocked down survivor, then the survivor in the locker will jump out with their flashlight so they can get a flashlight blind.
TD;LR searching a locker should have a higher priority than picking up a survivor that is directly in front of the locker. Killers can change their camera angle to choose to pick up a survivor, but they can’t change their camera angle to choose to open the locker.
Priorities have nothing to do with this situation. When a Survivor is entering or exiting a locker, you cannot search the locker at all. It's not that it's prioritizing the Survivor on the ground, it's that searching it is not possible. At that point, you can only interrupt them by using the attack button. The attack button has zero chance of picking up the Survivor on the ground. Patience and keeping a cool head will counter a locker CJ every time.
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You can very easily counter those by:
- Seeing that there's a Survivor next to the locker
- Watching the Survivor enter the locker
- Wait a fraction of a second
- Use the attack button rather than the search button to grab them
Locker blinds, meanwhile, could have no counter when done correctly. There was nothing forcing the Survivor inside to leave. If you chase the Survivor who's in position for the save, the Survivor in the locker would be free to leave and could swap places with the other Survivor (they hop in the locker, other Survivor gets in position to save them instead).
It's a creative use of lockers- and pallets by extension- for sure, but the point of the locker blind change wasn't to force people to use lockers a certain way, it was to remove a situation that could have no counterplay. In this case, the counterplay is very easy. It might catch you off guard the first few times, but then you'll quickly learn how to spot it and how to deal with it.
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I promise we aren't ignoring them! There was a tentative fix in the last update for some of their issues, but it doesn't seem to have caught all cases of the movement bug. We're looking into it further and will try to get another fix out as soon as we can.
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It would definitely be nice to see on paper, but in practice I could see it turning sour pretty quickly.
Groups of two or more make up about half of all Survivors (varies per region). You're probably facing and beating some sort of group in each match, but you may not even realize it because on average, grouped players don't really perform better than ungrouped players. While great Survivors playing together and coordinating can be very powerful, the vast majority of people are just casually hanging out with their friends, no harder to kill than anyone else.
On paper, this sounds like a great thing. You'll see that you're beating groups on a regular basis and it might show how rare these unstoppable squads are, maybe even show that even competent solo players can do really well sometimes. But in practice, that's not how brains work. It's easy to look at a win and go, "I won because I'm good." - you just won what is supposedly a hard match, after all. It's a lot harder to swallow a loss and say, "I lost because I didn't do as well as I could." This isn't something that's exclusive to any side or even Dead by Daylight/gaming as whole. When someone's frustrated, it's very difficult to take a step back and think rationally.
I do fear that showing this would only lead to SWF becoming more of a scapegoat when someone has a rough match (if one was even present). It becomes an easy thing you can point to and go, "Well that's why I lost." - even if you killed multiple groups without any problem in your previous matches. It doesn't make you feel better about your loss, it doesn't make you reflect on what you could have done differently, it just directs your anger to people who are simply playing the game. Features which help you direct your frustration towards other people rather than reflecting on your performance will always be a tough sell.
And to be clear, yes, although they are very rare, there are some super coordinated highly skilled groups out there who could very well be very difficult to catch, and by no means do I mean to deny that. The scapegoat situation I'm referring to are the games that definitely could have played out differently depending on how you performed and the decisions you made.
Short version: Would it be cool to know? Yes. Would it be beneficial? I'm not quite convinced. Ultimately, the time spend working on a feature like this would probably be better spent on balance or new QOL features to make those kinds of matches less frustrating in the first place.
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@[Deleted User] said:
I'll give BHVR props for addressing time limited cosmetics. I also wrote in another thread that I was suspicious it was a way to circumvent their shard policy for non-licensed outfits. I wrote I would eat my word if wrong. So I'll eat my words. I still think it's a ploy to drive people to purchase with cash because sure you can use shards but you have to wait for 12 months until the outfits are back.
On another note this line did have me worried:
"If you went back in time one year and told people that “too many Bloodpoints” would be an issue, nobody would have believed you. Yet here we are. "
I know they only talk about making it quicker and easier to use your BPs but I hope it doesn't mean they'll be looking at ways to reduce BP gain.
You can rest easy, we absolutely do not plan to reduce BP gains (or slow progression in any way). We're only looking to make them easier to spend.
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@StarLost said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3328285#Comment_3328285
For the love of fluffy little kittens - let it be Badham because that's...well, GoJ is worse, but it's still a gigantic smelly butt of a map.
Badham was one of the first, so it's off the list. But just a quick FYI, visual updates are not directly tied to balance changes. We review balance independently (like we just saw with Eyrie of Crows), so there could always be changes in store for Badham some day.
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@Gamall said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3328260#Comment_3328260
The pictures seems referring to the Crotus Prenn asylum
I wouldn't read too much into that banner, it's just a concept art from a past visual update since we aren't ready to spill the beans on which realm is next just yet. (But you are correct, that is Disturbed Ward.)
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They definitely are not on the same level even with this HUD. A coordinated group will always be able to plan things out better than a group of solo players with the HUD. The HUD is simply aiming to close that gap as much as realistically possible.
Why? Because asymmetrical games like Dead by Daylight have a very unique balance problem: Both sides are not the same, so each side has to be balanced around the other. This gets even more complicated when you add solo players vs. groups into the mix. If we balance Killers around solo players, coordinated groups would have a field day. Meanwhile if we balanced Killers around coordinated groups, solo players would have a miserable time. By reducing the gap as much as possible, it gives us a much tighter range to balance around. Ultimately it's a necessary step in order to make the game more balanced.
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The short answer: Right now, they're a very basic AI that knows how to run and not die to the different powers, but that's about it. It's good enough to get some practice in, but some edge cases like this will happen. We'll be expanding and improving on the feature over time.
The longer answer: Bots are incredibly complex (and I'd love to do a bigger blogpost diving into it if there's enough interest). Not only do bots need to know how to hear, see, and move, but they also need to know what to do with that information. Teaching them all of this is incredibly difficult, unreliable, and costly in terms of performance, so we instead feed them a bunch of information about the match and then dumb them down. They'll know where the Killer is at all times, for example, but we'll prevent them from acting on that unless they have line of sight or hear the terror radius.
In most cases, this works great, but there's still some work to be done to make sure they respect every Killer's power. The Spirit, for example, is invisible while phasing, but the bots don't know that they aren't supposed to know that. That said, she does still provide directional audio while she's invisible, so it's not unreasonable for a bot to know roughly where you are and react to you.
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Realistically speaking, folks who are going to call out a teammate for not doing anything are already doing that without any evidence. I can't foresee that increasing unless someone actually isn't doing anything. Otherwise, the HUD will show the other Survivors that they're keeping busy.
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While time is definitely something that Killers need to manage more closely than Survivors, I would really hesitate to boil it down to an equation. There's simply far too much nuance in any given match to possibly put a single number on it. While yes, there are four Survivors in a match, if only one Survivor is free to work on a totem (e.g. one is hooked, one is being chased, and one is going for the save), they're still ultimately spending 14 seconds blessing that totem, and those are 14 seconds that could have been put into a generator. In a case like this where the Killer's got a lot of pressure, the Survivors' time becomes far more valuable.
It's also borderline impossible to put a time on how long it takes to find and kick a boon. If you're chasing someone and they happen to run right by it, it takes practically no time at all. If you don't pass by it and instead have to go out of your way for it, it would instead take much longer.
Numbers are neat and can tell you a lot sometimes, but in this case, I don't think it accurately captures what's going on in a match.
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Everyone will reach a point where you plateau while playing the way you would typically play. This point will vary person to person: Some people are absolute legends and will climb really high without much effort, others will cap out fairly low (and that's okay!). This is exactly how MMR systems work. The game is trying to find a spot where your playstyle, whatever it may be, will work about half the time.
That said, if you try to play in a way that'll make you win more often, your rating will increase and you will get tougher matches, eventually plateauing again where your new strategy only works about half the time. The harder you try, the tougher your opponents will be. If you feel like you need to tunnel after tunneling to win, it's more than likely due to the fact that you've climbed above your comfort zone.
To be very clear, if you're hyper focused on winning more often than not, you will have to try (and try hard at that). The game will not try to give you easy wins. Winning consistently means the other side is losing consistently, and that means the matchmaking system isn't working.
Trying to boil the game down to an equation doesn't really work. In your example, you haven't factored in the time survivors spent saving their teammates. This is by far the most important factor in the game: Pressure. If you have one survivor on a hook, another in a chase, and a third going for a save, that leaves only one survivor left free to work on generators. This is also something you sacrifice by tunneling one survivor; the other three have nothing to do but generators since you aren't giving them a reason not to, so your generators will fly by. There's way too many factors to stick a number on it without grossly oversimplifying it.
All that aside, I really wouldn't assume you're at high MMR (not just you, OP, but anyone). The actual distribution of people across all MMRs is like a bell curve. There's a lot of people in the middle and very few at either extreme (high or low). The vast majority of people will fall somewhere around the middle. While I don't doubt that some folks here truly are playing in the high MMR range, the amount of people there are so low that it's a really bold claim to make when you can't even see your rating.
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It's normal for those bonuses to change over time, even throughout the day. Since it's heavily based on your region, it's not uncommon for there to be fewer survivors playing in off-peak times and instead waiting to group up with their friends after everyone gets home from work. This (among loads of different factors) can cause the incentives to shift at different times of the day. If there's fewer survivors during the day, they'll likely have an incentive. Meanwhile if a bunch of people group up and play survivor with their friends at night, the could leave killer with an incentive.
That's just one of many things that could be affecting it, of course. There's loads of different factors which could cause the incentives to change.
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While it might have a slight effect, for the most part, these icons shouldn't affect Blindness. Auras will still provide far more detailed information (and different types of information, like Windows of Opportunity) than those icons ever could.
That said, if it does end up having a bigger impact than anticipated, the Blindness status effect could always be updated with new functionality, similar to Hemorrhage a while back.
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Status effect durations work a little differently from cooldown reductions. Status effects are all the same- one blindness is the same as another blindness effect- so when you have two or more add-ons/perks that give you the same status effect at the same time, the game applies the longest duration of the bunch. If the status effect is already active and a new one is applied, the duration is extended (with a maximum of the duration of the newly applied effect).
So in this case, if you have two add-ons that apply blindness, the game will apply a 60 second blindness effect, then try to apply a 30 second effect. They already have more than 30 seconds of blindness, so the second add-on wouldn't do anything. This is by design, they are not intended to add together.
Meanwhile, non-status effect stats (like cooldowns) are all combined before being applied together, so they will stack.
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@woundcowboy said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3310669#Comment_3310669
By your own metrics, Nurse is not a top performer. Even at high MMR, her kill rate is not significant. Again, this is from the data you released. How are these nerfs anything other than a reaction to complaining?
We have stated many times that those stats are very broad and do not paint a full picture and should never be used on their own to form an opinion. Nurse, having a very high skill ceiling, tends to fall much lower on those charts because of that. For every crazy good Nurse out there, there's dozens more who are still learning her who will drag that kill rate down. Even among the top 5%, there's still a big disparity between the very best and those who are still learning purely because she's such a difficult Killer to master.
I can't stress it enough, those charts are not detailed enough to form an opinion or argument. We do not use those charts to make balance decisions either. They might show us where an issue might be, but you absolutely need to dig deeper to know for sure.
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One thing to note: The PTB has a very low population compared to the live game, so ranked matchmaking is not enabled. I wouldn't read into the results of a match too much, there's a very real chance you aren't going against the caliber of players you normally would.
That said, this change isn't aiming to gut Nurse as a whole. A really good Nurse is still a really good Nurse. Playing well and getting kills isn't so much of a problem, but slapping on a couple perks or add-ons to skip the practice and skill and jump straight to being unstoppable is. (And by extension, this prevents the already really good Nurses out there from becoming even more powerful with those perks/add-ons.)
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I can confirm that, like before, DCs will not count as kills towards Merciless Killer ratings.
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@woundcowboy said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3309400#Comment_3309400
So in other words, if people complain loud enough, you will change something whether it’s right or wrong.
I'm not quite sure how you got that from that message. The Nurse was a hot topic and we have no shortage of proof and strong arguments showing that she was performing far too well, especially when certain perks and add-ons were being used. For us to ignore the many people raising valid complaints would be silly.
Trying to insert a strawman as an "in other words" never ends well. I'm not your enemy, if you disagree with the changes, tell me. I'm here to pass on your opinion to the team. But intentionally misconstruing what was said isn't going to help anyone.
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@Marik1987 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3309479#Comment_3309479
Firstly I have to say this is probably one of the best midchapters Ive seen since I play the game. Its nice to see Killers come closer together (Nurse - Knight). Also the "small" changes look awesome. Thanks for that. Im really looking forward to the new Eyrie (and I assume other maps will follow), the QoL-Changes for SoloQ and - of course - the needed Nurse-Changes.
But: I really hope u dont look just for stats (Sadako, Freddy, Pig especially). Freddy is the least picked killer after Twins while dueling with Hag for 2nd last place for a reason. Im sure you know that :-).
My new-year-wish for Freddy: some Addon-Adjustments (hearing things louder or 3x Pallet-Addons / 3x Dress-Addons literally all doing the same in their "family") for QoL, not for Buff/Nerf / well, maybe slight buffs in terms of skill ceiling of the Killer-Player.
Pigs RBTs are the main reason for her to be where she is, I assume. Id love to see them a bit weaker (maybe 2 searches per Trap instead of 3), instead her ambush gets better (destroying pallets for example like Demos Shred, faster to start etc.) for more fun to play her.
Besides my little "wishlist" I am VERY PLEASED with this update. I play since Artist came out and this is the best Midchapter for me.
Thanks for this midchapter.
Don't worry, we definitely aren't just looking at stats. How something feels is also very important and not something that you can learn from a number. Though it is ultimately something we need to keep in mind. To give an example, if a Killer is one of the most deadly but perceived as weak, we'd need to be careful about how we approach them. Tweaking them in the wrong way can easily push them past the point of being strong and into frustratingly OP territory.
For what it's worth, when we do look at stats, we also have far more detailed data than general kill rates. We're able to breakdown how certain add-ons affect a Killer's success, even across various MMR ranges. It can reveal a lot of detail about specific playstyles that might be stronger than others. It's entirely possible that a certain set of add-ons are contributing to a high kill rate, for example, which might tell us that those add-ons could be toned down while the Killer itself could get some buffs/QOL updates.
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I can assure you that they are not forgotten. We only have so much bandwidth for changes in any given update. With everything already in this mid-chapter, there simply isn't enough time for anything else, especially for a Killer like The Twins which would most likely require bigger and more substantial changes rather than small number tweaks.
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My official answer: 🙂
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@Th3Nightmare said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3309400#Comment_3309400
I perfectly understand that the development of a video game undergoes constant changes, but sadako came out last year and very slight changes were made to it, I am surprised that it has not had a revision because in the last statistics it indicated that the killer had a 63-65% win rate so you have discarded the option to make changes, in addition to Freddy Krueger, Pigg or Myers...
You mentioned it yourself, but the stats revealed that Sadako was tied for first as the deadliest Killer (tied for 4th in the top 5% of players). That doesn't mean that she won't receive any changes at all, but it certainly makes her less pressing. The other Killers you mentioned are similarly performing well or average, making them less of a priority.
Even still, this doesn't mean that they'll never receive some quality of life changes, but you have to consider what's more important: A slight quality of life change to a Killer that's already doing pretty well, or changes to a controversial Killer that gets discussed on a daily basis?
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@Iron_Cutlass said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3309400#Comment_3309400
Just a question while you are here. So yall have a lot of changes planned in advance, or at least I would assume so, so would you say the time to make those changes being the hugest limiting factor, or is it just the update size being too big for certain platform being the hugest limiting factor?
Purely time. There's only so many work hours to turn plans into something tangible.
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@Blueberry said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3309390#Comment_3309390
Is it not true?
Can we have a rational conversation instead of just snarky comments at me?
To be fair, you haven't given any reason as to why you think that would be the case. There's a huge gap between 'Survivors can see what each other are doing' and 'The Killer is going to camp more because of that' - especially given half of all players are already playing in some sort of group. It's become a bit of a cliche to link any change to an increase in camping/tunneling/gen rushing no matter how unrelated it may be. Unless you make a strong case for it, there's not much to discuss there.
It wouldn't need nearly as much explanation if this were something directly affected unhooking (e.g. a hypothetical change that doesn't notify the Killer of an unhook) since there's a very clear connection between that change and Killers wanting to stay near the hook. But since it's not, it either needs some explaining or it can come across as grasping at straws for a reason to camp.