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The State of this Game is Appalling [An Open Letter]
Before June 15, 2021
Everyone: "Keys need to be nerfed, devs. They're too powerful and running a single perk to counter them isn't efficient or valuable enough."
Developers: "Okay, we hear you."
Also Everyone: "The game's performance is also somewhat of an issue, and we hope you fix it sometime later."
Developers: "Okay."
June 15, 2021
Developers: "We nerfed Franklin's Demise to no longer remove items from the Trial once the timer is up because we couldn't hard code the vaccine to not despawn and forgot to do some quality control for our latest patch, so now the R.P.D. crashes the game at times, there's performance issues and FPS drops abound!"
Everyone: "What is wrong with you?"
Let's Be Real, This is an Open Letter to the Developers
Developers, BHVR. This is an open letter to you in regards to the current state of the game. 5.0.0 was meant to be a monumental patch with the release of a brand new Killer from a legendary franchise in horror, and was meant to be something everyone can enjoy.
But this patch also highlights the issues that your team are putting yourselves in for absolutely no reason. I understand bugs and glitches can happen from time to time, but that's why you had the PTB and you have your team to test these things out before releasing the full product; it's called "quality control", and if things like this, especially game-breaking or game-impacting bugs such as the performance issues (one I personally witnessed was the difficulty to turn my Killer), slip by, then you didn't do a good enough job to make sure it didn't happen in the first place.
And then there's the nerf to Franklin's Demise, all because of one little item that is practically inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Instead of choosing to take the time to properly hard code it so that Franklin's Demise doesn't affect the new craftable items, especially the vaccine, your train of thought was to simply nerf it so hard that now you've created a greater issue: Keys having zero counters.
You deliberately do not listen to the fanbase in regards to what needs to be done; this includes both lower and higher ranking players, many of whom don't even want to run Keys because they're just too unfun to play against, and you don't give these patches a proper test before launching them to see if things are just right in the end or if things need to be, you know...DELAYED?
There's a complete and utter disconnect that you guys have with the community that is utterly appalling. You make changes no one asks for, you don't make changes people ask for, you don't really communicate to your own community about what changes you want to do until you release a PTB or a patch, and you put in an incomplete version of an update from time and time again.
Honestly, I don't care about your Realm Beyond stuff, I don't care about Boon Totems, I don't care about the "additions" you guys are making. I don't want a game with better "graphical fidelity". I want a game where things just work right and the balance can at least be discussed between the developers (you) and the players (us).
We aren't warned of balance changes ahead of time, we aren't given much in terms of what to expect until the day of release, and there's still prominent bugs or issues with this game that permeate to this day, and are just created update after update.
This game needs not a graphical update, nor new content or features, it needs to have things fixed and stabilized first. I could go however long without a Wraith graphical update or an update to a map, so long as some of the already-existing features of the game can be looked at first, fixed or rebalanced, and the quality of the gameplay is better. And I think every other player can agree that the feel of the gameplay should come first and the additional content and graphical updates should always be second.
BHVR, communicate with your community. You don't need to talk about the next Chapter or anything, but please tell us your ideas for rebalancing the game, for fixing the problems that still linger around, let the community help make this game better in some capacity and listen to what we've been trying to tell you. I understand that the process of developing something is probably extremely strenuous and arduous, especially with people hounding you guys about "balance this or balance that", but at least understand from our point of view, some things need to be talked about and discussed with the community. If something is commonly agreed upon to be bad for the health of the game, talk with your players and fans, your streamers, your top players and low ranking players. See how we feel about the game.
You can do better than this.
I'll end it off with one simple question, one that I'm hoping one of you guys can answer: Will you start communicating with your community in more detail about future updates so that we can actually properly talk about it, or will you remain to be vague and never give us any information until you release it in a patch or PTB?
Or in short: Will you speak with and listen to your players, or will you not?
Your call.
Comments
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This gives me a "sad, yet a little hopeful" vibe. I do have my fair share of complaints regarding the current state of the game. They may not be for the same reasons, but I understand where you are coming from.
However, a little bit of advice: Do not get your hopes up.
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I agree, and it's sad because I'm not really sure what excuse BHVR has at this point. They have the money to hire devs to fix this stuff, god knows they should be making plenty of money considering the aggressive pricing of DLCs, cosmetics, etc.
And yet:
-Spirit, Hag, Twins, and Slinger haven't received any changes despite almost every survivor hating them.
-Keys are still grossly overpowered.
-9/10 perks in this game are garbage filler, and the perk grind is outrageous thanks to perk tiers.
-Every patch results in a plethora of game-breaking bugs.
-Devs don't listen to community feedback regarding map designs, such as everyone hating breakable walls and indoor maps.
-Generators get completed so fast that killers feel dependent on at least one of either Pop or Ruin to win, both of which are gated behind DLC.
-Camping and tunneling have never been addressed except with perks.
-Generators are still stupid boring to work on for survivors.
This game is hard-carried by it's excellent core concept. BHVR seems to have no sense of priorities, and from an outside perspective the gameplay/balance devs just frankly seem either lazy, incompetent, and/or are criminally understaffed. BHVR claims 300 people work on this game, so when can we get some support for the issues people have been complaining about for literally years?
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BHVR has no excuse to hide from; and the game's core concept can only carry it so much until people abandon this game for the eventual alternative that will rear its head. It doesn't take someone hundreds or even thousands of hours to figure out that this game needs to be fixed and the developers need to communicate with their playerbase much better.
Anything, even an actual new forum to speak directly to the devs, or even just the devs acknowledging that they need to step up more for and actually showing that they're going to acknowledge the community, will just go a long way.
Because it's going to come to a point where everyone will burn out because of this game's poor optimization, bugs and balance, and licensed chapters won't be able to save the game.
I would take the next chapter/killer being delayed for a whole 6 months to a year if it means that issues with the maps, the characters, the balance, the hit detection, the keys, everything were fixed and investigated. I want the game to be in a better state BEFORE I want to see the next chapter.
And if the devs continue on this current path they're doing, they're just going to hurt the game even more. I don't want them to hurt the game more, either. I just want the game to be stable, fun and balanced, not pretty.
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I agree with this post. There are a lot of bug issues within the game but also some killers make it absolutely toxic for the survivor by camping and tunneling. There are some matches where it is impossible to get gens done because they camp and tunnel everyone. Also the anti cheat doesn't work what so ever and a lot of times the killers cheat in order to win. I was in a match earlier and a killer was legit teleporting in order to get kills.
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The post speaks for itself. We’ve been telling BHVR this since the dawn of time, and the discussion sparked again when A Binding of Kin and All-Kill dropped back to back.
BHVR will not listen unless we show them with our wallets.
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Well, Behavior has said in the past that the graphical and programming teams are separate to make it seem like graphical changes aren't the issue but I think one thing is that the programming team does have to stop what they're doing to implement these graphical changes. So in that sense I do agree, they need to stop bogging down the programmers with graphical updates and other unnecessary things and fix issues in the game. Even something as minor as the ready up bug that's existed for at least a year if not longer where if you're searching for a match and cancel the search it's still searching for a match and will put you in a match even though you're likely AFK.
Another bug that's existed for over a year has to the grabbing one, where you're grabbing a Survivor off a gen or if they're unhooking someone then the game just says "Nope, that didn't happen.". On another unrelated note, I want this filter feature I hear was discussed among them about being able to decide if you, as a Killer, want to play against SWF's.
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I personally wouldn't want to go against the programmers or the design artists too much, as the main people I harbor my disagreements with is those making the decisions for the game itself. The higher ups need to get it in their heads that the direction they're taking the game is not a good one.
No one is going to enjoy those fancy graphical updates, those new animations, those new legendary cosmetics, those new chapters and maps...
IF EVERYTHING IS BROKEN ALL THE DAMN TIME!
This, this is why I want someone, whether it be a programmer, graphics designer, or preferably one of the head developers of the game, to at least come out and communicate with us, the community, more often. They could even appoint a few people to be the bridge between them and us, it's not that hard to do that and it'd probably make things a whole lot smoother for everyone.
This would start solving so many issues outright instead of having the devs ignore them because it's possibly not worth their time. And no, McLean isn't enough to get us through; there should be at least one dedicated dev in every facet of the community; forums, Twitter, Twitch, etc.
Maybe there was a day where the developers of this game actually gave a damn about the community, and I envy anyone who had communications with the devs back in those days. If only the developers could just step up.
Or maybe they won't, and maybe there'll come a time where one game comes out and makes them change their attitude quick. Who knows?
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And don't forget about the match-making system! It's actually possible for a GREEN-ranked Killer to be matched against FULL RED RANKS 4SWF!!! That makes the experience terrible for everybody.
The Survivors players have no fan because with their effeciency and skill gap because there's practically no Killer on the map.
The Killer player has no fan because they stand absolutely zero chance against such skillful and gen-effecient Survivors who have the "legal cheat" of being on comms.
THIS IS NOT OKAY!
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Haha, that's exactly what I was thinking about while reading what you were saying. The possibility of another game to give Dead by Daylight some competition. The fact of the matter here though is there have been games that were meant to give Dead by Daylight some competition...but I believe they're all dead. Developers just abandoned them. Every single one. BHVR has listened every once in an Iridescent Moon. Like how they nerfed gen speed.
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I'm a Purple Rank Killer at the moment and I'd say roughly 95% of my lobbies include toxic SWF's with cancerous perks. No, it doesn't make the experience worse for everybody. The SWF's will thoroughly enjoy your suffering and make sure you know you suck from their point of view too even though they're totally cheating with the comms.
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This game lives off of licensing. The 5th year stream was a bunch of vague bs and selling points. Balance is garbage, game performance is garbage and the devs just send out twitter person to do damage control every once in a while.
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The lack of communication between game devs and the players seems to be a trend hitting a lot of games currently. You know what this letter reminds of? It reminds of the same exact issues of another game company that, some of you might have heard of. It's a little company called Blizzard. Right now in regards to World of Warcraft they are doing the same exact thing, not really communicating with the community and being transparent about the decisions, (that they should be allowed to talk about) with the community. Same thing as well in regards to bugs not being fixed since beta testing reports as well. Also doesn't help that WoW still hasn't had their first content update, (the current expansion released in November btw) so the players are also kinda feeling burned out on just playing the same content for 7 going on 8 months now.
Overall this is a trend that really needs to stop. Hire a community manager if you need to, someone who can be the mediator, the bridge between the community of your game and the devs who are working on the game. If we already have a community manager then have them be more proactive, ENGAGE WITH THE -COMMUNITY- and just talk with us and help keep us informed here and there. I understand specifics can't be talked about, NDAs and what not, but just having someone there to communicate with and keep us engaged and informed would go a very long way, not just for BHVR but for other companies and gaming communities as well.
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I wish they'd do as Siege did where they spend an entire DLC cycle simply fixing in the game - I think it was called Operation Health or something in Siege? It was something I'd never seen a game really do before, purposely skip a normal DLC cycle, probably losing a lot of money, because they admitted the game was too broken so they spent the whole cycle simply fixing things.
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They're not able to do this not even when the game was only for Steam with like 1/5 characters and 1/3 maps.
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If they weren't able to do it then, then that's quite the unfortunate thing to hear.
There are too many problems in this game that if they continue to ignore, it'll cause the game to just lose steam and popularity outright. I honestly want to keep this thread going until a developer at least responds or they finally come to the realization that the game needs to go into a better direction and avoid their inevitable fate as a deserted game.
I've honestly seen this with Overwatch and Resident Evil: Resistance, where the developers tend to not listen to common community consensus unless something egregious happens or they get competition that makes them wise up.
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Not really, this game was little bit dying in early 2017 because devs don't listen and peak was like 10k players, now you have 50k+ only Steam, plus huge playerbase across all other platforms, this game will never die because of this. Everybody complaining but everybody still love and play this game, it's like miracle.
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I completely agree with the vast majority of what you've said and I just hope it isn't ignored so I'm putting this comment down in hopes to boost the popularity of the post
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Honestly, while I'm quoting this post in particular, I gotta thank y'all for all the support this thread's gotten. I'm hoping this thread can continue until (and maybe even after) a developer responds so we can finally make SOME sort of compromise to how things are working with communication and the game's health.
If we can get the developers to actually start listening to the people about the health of the game more, then that will be the success of this thread. But until then, I'm hoping to keep this thread alive so that the developers can't ignore it.
This game needs new direction, and so does communication with the community on the developers' parts.
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I'm going to risk playing devil's advocate a little bit. As someone with past experience at a VR studio, the process of making games always devolves into chaos and messy code and unoptimized work, and it can be very difficult and time consuming to bounce back from that. It is ESPECIALLY hard to program and balance a multiplayer game with as many characters as DBD, as any small choice in tweaking a perk or a killer power can throw dozens of other things out of balance, which then need to be fixed, which then throws more stuff out of balance, which then-
And it snowballs HARD.
I'm not excusing some of the more serious problems. Like this latest update, which definitely wasn't ready. I get tons of lag, freezes, graphical tearing, you name it. It's easily the most unplayable the game has been for me in three years. This update should have been delayed. HOWEVER, it's possible Behavior didn't have a choice: Licensed characters function differently, as they are communicating with other studios who have ownership over the characters. It's possible Behavior were given a deadline that they could not change, and even if they tried their hardest, there was too many problems for them to fix before launch day. Nemesis does seem to be the most complicated killer to have joined the game, what with the AI zombies and the additional healing items. In terms of programming, that team would have had to write a "brain" from scratch for the zombies to work, since the game had no AI beforehand (no, the tutorial bots don't count), and anyone who knows anything about programming can tell you that writing AI is possibly the most difficult thing to do for a game, second to server programming. Guess what? DBD has that too; it's pretty much built on server programming since it's completely multiplayer.
Honestly, I think the only way a lot of the game's problems are going to get fixed is if Behavior slows or stops their roadmap. Stop releasing new chapters for a while, maybe for at least a year. That way they can hunker down and try their best to polish what they have, as well as take in more community feedback and actually respond to it. Problem is, people will definitely start to complain about "lack of content" if they choose to do that. But even with hundreds of employees, they have too much on their plate. And trying to keep hundreds of employees on the same page at all times also slows development. That's really hard to do. I worked with a team of 30 and it was hard to keep everyone on the same page sometimes.
I think they need more tech artists and engineers too. The new maps look great, but they can definitely use some optimization. The game takes way longer to load than it used to aside from framerate issues and others, and that kind of comes with the territory of revamping and raising the quality of art assets. I know there are ways to optimize those kinds of things (see Insomniac's "Spider-man"), but I'm no tech artist so I can't give specifics.
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