shadesofjoe

When even the slightest intermittent lag spike can cause you to die during the struggle phase, the entire mechanic becomes pretty indefensible.

in Struggling mechanic QOL change Comment by shadesofjoe May 12, 2020

You know, I have spent the past week trying to defend this game after one of my friends quit. I told myself that I would just focus on playing killer in order to vary up the gameplay a bit. I even started streaming and was really excited about improving my skill level with different killers. But this... I can't even with this. I can't defend it at all.

"It is less useful in the early game, but very useful in the late game."

Show me a Hex: Ruin that even makes it to the late game more than five percent of the time. Especially at red ranks. Ruin is a vital early game tool in order to gain a modicum of momentum. I mean, I'm usually just hoping I can get one hook before the Ruin goes down, and it's inevitably gone within the first 2-3 minutes of the game unless I camp it. I find the assertion that this perk can be "useful" in the late game to be insulting to the collective intelligence of those who play killer even semi-regularly. It's just not. There is NO hex perk that you can rely on to be useful in the late game. Not a single one.

All of these notes talk about how this game experience is for survivors and take absolutely no account into the experience is for the killers. BHVR has made it very clear in these patch notes that their priority is making the game fun for survivors. For killers? Crickets. I'm Rank 1 survivor and Rank 2 killer at the moment, so it's not like I main one or the other, but the survivor bias from BHVR here is overwhelmingly obvious.

If these changes goes through, I don't think I can play this game anymore. I've invested so much time (and money) in Dead by Daylight and it makes me really sad to see where the design philosophy is going. It's all focused on the fun of new survivor players and killer is just becoming a chore. Eventually, the killers who do keep playing this game are going to get really tired of being a pinata and then lobby times are going to be even more egregious than they already are.

I couldn't be more disappointed in the direction of this game right now.

in BHVR killed Hex: Ruin Comment by shadesofjoe January 6, 2020

@Peanits said:
Balanced Landing could be used to turn some loops into infinites, which is something we want to avoid. Typically you wouldn't use the stagger reduction from Balanced Landing more than once in a chase unless you were taking advantage of one of those loops.
As for Decisive Strike, if you have to wait a full 60 seconds, that's because you're tunneling someone immediately off the hook. The perk is designed to prevent that, so of course it's going to be very punishing. If you had chased someone else and returned, their timer will be almost up and you'll be able to wait it out in under 10 seconds. It's fairly easy to avoid.
Borrowed Time, I'll let y'all debate that all you want. Again, it can be mostly avoided by not going for the same guy and instead hitting the unhooker. If you hit them before they get the unhook, you can hit them again right after they finish the unhook and you'll still have someone on the hook in the end.

One major problem with DS is that an entire second was added to the stun timer because (at the time) Enduring was a hard counter that made it so there was essentially no stun. But once Enduring changed to only work with pallets, the extra second of DS was not reverted. So now not only has the only hard counter (that doesn't require an unfun tactic) to the perk been removed, but the extra benefit the perk got to make the hard counter less punishing is still there. That just doesn't make sense to me.

And it's very demonstrable that DS is so much more than an anti-tunnel perk. Especially for the killers that excel in 1v1 chases, it's quite common to be able to down someone and hook them within the 60 second window without even having to slug the DS person. So you get punished for being really efficient if the next survivor you happen to find is the one who was previously unhooked. Are you just supposed to ignore them? Or slug them down and wait? Either option is a huge loss of momentum, with slugging being the lesser of the two evils. But again, this means I have to choose a really crappy and UNFUN FOR EVERYONE play style to deal with a perk that the person may not even have, but that I have to respect so long as I see an obsession.

This phenomenon is observable ad nauseum across the gamut of streamers who play this game consistently.

Do I think DS was designed as an anti-tunnel perk? Yes. But it does WAY more than that, which is the entire problem. It is a de facto anti-momentum perk that encourages slugging, which in my opinion is one of the lamest and most unfun tactics in this game for both killers and survivors. I don't say this with malice. I don't think the developers want the game to be unfun. But I also think we have to be realistic about the meta that DS has inspired in its current state.

in why balanced landing gone 0% directly and why not nerfing ds and bt Comment by shadesofjoe December 16, 2019

I think the speed at which a survivor repairs a generator should be tied to their rank. If you're a red rank survivor, you contribute less charges per second to the overall repair than a purple or green rank survivor, etc. This would have the natural effect of increasing generator repair times for full groups of red ranks while not punishing lower-level players who are trying to rank up. In fact, it would provide a nice, linear experience for improvement at the game. As you get better, things take more time--which consequently makes matches a little harder.

This also solves the problem of trying to balance changes to gen repair speeds for lower ranks. By tying the repair speed to the rank of the survivor and not the generator itself, you aren't inherently making the game harder for lower ranks, who naturally tend to struggle more against killers. By receiving no speed penalty (or a marginal one as they progress from brown to yellow) they still have the chance for a competitive match against the killer, even if they aren't the most optimal with looping and chases.

in So, about gens... Comment by shadesofjoe December 10, 2019

@Peanits said:
Gotta' chime in here; #1 is not true. There are also statistics on the amount of people ranking up on each side. The percentage was significantly lower on the survivor side when the emblem system first came out. These days it's much closer to what it should be.
That would also invalidate #2, although it's pretty nebulous to say in the first place since different killers earn emblems at different rates. The Legion, for example, gets a ton of chaser score because of their fast first hits and multiple chases. Meanwhile killers like the Plague, Hillbilly, etc. only hit survivors once to down them, meaning they lose out on a lot of chaser score, making them harder to rank. If it was just a matter of emblems, a killer like the Legion would be doing much worse as some of the people playing them would rank up further than they should and drag down the kill rates.
Anyway, long story short, we actually don't balance around kill rates alone. Kill rates are just one of the many things that might show us where a problem could be, but we do our research first.

Hey man. Thanks for clarifying. I'm totally cool with being wrong about ranking up if that's what the data says. Do you have any insight as to why killers feel like it's harder for them to rank up compared to survivors? I play both sides and it certainly feels that way to me. Is there something we are missing about gameplay on the killer side that we should be focusing on in terms of ranking up?

It's cool that you guys balance the game around other factors besides kill rates. I think it would be nice to see some of that data, though. Releasing only the kill rates sort of creates a narrative (game is imbalanced in favor of killers) that maybe isn't true if we had all of the information, since the message I'm getting from you is that the game is in a relatively balanced state from the developers' perspective.

Thanks again for the information!

in Balancing Around Kill Rate Doesn't Work Comment by shadesofjoe November 26, 2019

@antgnstea said:
Your title got me interested in, but rest is just your opinions about irrelevant stuff with contradicting statements presented like they are based on the stats.
1-2. How could you ever draw any of the conclusions from just kill rates. Skill levels? Really? How do you read it from just killers and percentages? We don't even know how many matches against SWF which could include many ranks. Or mori, key usage in the included matches. There are just too many unknown variables to makes these conclusions.
.3.you just contradict yourself in this one. You are basically saying kill rate doesn't mean ranking up or down. Doesn't guarantee pips, therefore doesn't effect the rank. Then say they should change the already existing non kill depended system, into.. Into what exactly? Giving prop pips for just joining game.

It's cool. We can disagree. I think the argument at it's core hinges on these things:

1) Escape rate for survivors is not a measure of their overall success. You can do a lot to help your team (gens, unhooks, chases) and still die, which is why the game rewards you post-match with a pip. Survivors can also escape and depip because they didn't do anything helpful in the match. So that's why I think it's a little disingenuous to look at kill rates and say that the game is unfairly balanced toward killers.

2) Conversely, kill rates actually matter more for killers at red ranks. It is extremely rare to get two kills and receive anything other than a safety pip. It doesn't matter how well you do in your emblem categories. The only chance you have at pipping is by killing three survivors in all but the most extreme of edge cases. But even if you get four kills, you can still depip because emblem categories, while not overtly helping you, can absolutely hurt you. So not only do you have to get as many kills as possible, you have to get them in a certain way whereas survivors can just play the game (gens, unhooks, chases) as normal and get rewarded.

3) The above two points are exactly why the numbers are skewed. Killers at red ranks have to focus on getting as many kills as possible while still following them emblem rules in order to rank up, whereas survivors can rest easy in the fact that they can still die and rank up (or stay at Rank 1). The pressure is unfairly distributed to the killer. Simply put, the killers who get to Rank 1 and stay there are typically the most skilled, but you can make Rank 1 as a survivor and still have a wider skill gap compared to other Rank 1 survivors.

So what I'm saying is that the ranking system needs be more balanced on its own (or totally reworked) and that the game should be balanced around that ranking system rather than kill/survival rates because, as you have astutely noted, there are so many factors that can leads to kills/escapes that really aren't indicative of player skill.

in Balancing Around Kill Rate Doesn't Work Comment by shadesofjoe November 26, 2019

If you want to end slugging you should be advocating for a more fair emblem system for killers. Back when BHVR made the most recent emblem changes, all of the survivors complained about how hard it was to pip so the developers lowered the threshold. But they didn't do the same for killers. Once you hit the red ranks, it can be difficult to pip as a killer unless you slug for the 4k.

Nobody likes it. Obviously when I'm playing survivor it's not fun to get slugged, but even when I'm playing killer it always feels like a chore to have to slug. I'd rather not get punished with a black pip because one survivor found the hatch, though. So if I want to rank up, this is what I have to do. At this point, it's on the developers for creating an emblem system that forces killers into this box, IMO.

in Slugging for the 4k is Unhealthy Comment by shadesofjoe November 23, 2019

The problem with immersed players is that it puts an extra burden on the other survivors. Now three survivors have to deal with the chases that should be spread out over four of them, which means someone ends up getting three-hooked much quicker than they would have been if the fourth survivor would have been willing to take a chase instead of urbaning around the map.

Being immersed doesn't really help the team. If this were a 1v1 game I could see it, but it's not. It's a 4v1 game. Every second that you aren't in a chase you should be on a gen, except in edge cases. Anything else is just poor time managment and a lopsided spread of burden among the survivors, IMO.

in I HATE immersed players Comment by shadesofjoe November 23, 2019

Thank you @not_Queen for responding and conveying this. I appreciate that you guys are at least listening.

in Deceptive Marketing Comment by shadesofjoe December 13, 2018

So far all I've seen are ad hominem attacks and nothing resembling a counterargument.

I mean, if there were different character models for other killers (and not just reskins of the same model) for purchase on the store I could see the argument, somewhat. But there aren't.

Also, to suggest that there isn't a clear choice on BHVR's part to push four different personas as part of the essential marketing for The Legion is just disingenuous. If that's where you are, we can't have an honest conversation about this topic.

This whole thing is tantamount to a bait-and-switch. For some of you, that's not a problem. Good for you. But that doesn't make it any less unethical.