BHVR has to be the most distant dev team of all time
I've seen all kinds of developers and the way they deal with their community from playing many different online games in the past but BHVR really takes the cake when it comes to ignoring its own playerbase. I don't even see them come to the forums anymore, it's just the mods who seem to perform damage control whenever threads get out of control but that's it.
It's extremely obvious that the game is in an abyssmal state right now (with boon totems/CoH being the worst offender) and yet we didn't get a single change to address this issue when The Artist came out. You'd expect at least SOMETHING after 3 months.
It's just regular business as always, ignoring killers and cashing in on gullible folks who buy this game on a whim just to drop it later anyway since the new player experience is absolutely horrendous. I've seen so many killers recently (on the forums and on YouTube) who picked up the game after being begged to try it just to be massively disappointed. MMR is flatout not working, another great issue which has persisted how long now since its introduction? Six months?
For those who decide to endure the painful learning curve this game has they still arrive at the same conclusion they had at the very beginning: this game is neither fun nor balanced. If you try to catch any of the devs on Twitch they will lock themselves behind chat settings which require your account to be verified just to make any contact with them even harder. And the occasional community streams with their Q&A segments feature cherrypicking at its worst when it comes to answering actual questions relevant to the health of the game.
Just watch as the devs will ignore this thread, too. Their twitter only exists to post memes anyway, not even once have they responded to REAL questions from the community. The regular art retweets are nice and all but they do NOT solve the issues this game has.
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Blizzard is way more distant and antagonizing when dealing with their playerbase.
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Yeah, I really don't think that's true.
Besides, with a tone like this one coming at them so often, can you really blame them for being distant? There's no right way to respond to stuff like this from a PR perspective, it's a lose/lose scenario where not engaging is the best option.
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lol no, the most distant has got to be Valve
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Anybody remember when Behaviour did weekly streams? I do. :(
Heck I'd even take once a month streams, if it just meant they could share more news regarding future changes and updates.
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They dont care man, cosmetics sells. Thats all that matters.
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Valve aren't even a game developer anymore, all they do is sell games on their platform. Half Life Alyx was just a pleasant surprise which I can't play anyway since I lack the money to purchase these expensive VR sets along with a computer that could even support all of that.
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They used to be far more community driven some years back, with weekly hour long dev streams and the such (they aired at 4am my time, I remember waking up early on school days just to catch them lol).
But the community's toxicity kept growing, and the devs gradually stopped doing them because they knew they would get ######### on regardless. I can't really blame them. The DBD community is awful, and I wouldn't want to put myself as a target for vitriol by being the face on those streams (just look at the hate Coté gets for example).
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I also wish they were more vocal, but I honestly can't blame them for becoming distant. There's a lot of vitriol simmering in this community. Just watch one of their Twitch streams or read some Twitter comments and you'll see a lot of anger. I know I wouldn't wanna deal with that if I were in their shoes.
That being said, I hope they at least read through the forums occasionally.
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To be honest show me any other dev team with a game thispouplar that takes better care of their playerbase. They all do not much, cause they dont need to.
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As someone who started playing recently (138 hours) I am sad to see that DBD has no dedicated team for player relations...
My favorite game of all time is Heroes of the Storm, but Blizzard would never make any comments, or address anything concerning it. Blizzard games only get the attention of their game's respective developer teams, and even then, really, early Overwatch, Starcraft, and Heroes of the Storm are the only titles that received transparency from the devs.
Fast forward to today, Starcraft is no longer getting content, Overwatch is essentially on life support with recycled events, and HotS is in maintenance mode.
The HotS developers are still very open to the community, when they can be. With all of the lawsuits protesting with Blizzard, all of their games are sort of in a bad spot right now, and generally, they can't openly say much regarding staff numbers, being moved to new projects, when new content will be released, etc.
I think a quick fix on BHVR's half could be to reach out to popular community members and allow them to be middlemen for the rest of the community. Let the players who understand the game the most give input and bring forward proposed issues and what not.
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Mandy is a dev, they post all the time.
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Love how everyone is blaming the community's toxicity when the developers have created the toxicity.
Glacial update speeds combined with a 1 step forward 2 steps back approach to balance would make anyone angry.
Look at Decisive strike. 3 years of complaining just to get a side grade while still being meta and in return we get hit validation and boons.
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The time I'll give you, but they did just straight up fix Decisive Strike. It was a problem, and now it isn't- the change we got wasn't subpar, it was exactly what it should've been.
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They did.. after how many changes while being told to do this for ages?
KEYS! They made killers wait a year for them to make a change that people were saying from day one of the mori nerf and on top of that gave survivors ample warning to use their keys up while killers got practically no warning.
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"Told to" is weird phrasing when they're not beholden to do what any given internet user wants them to, but I did already say that the time it took is a fair criticism.
Regarding keys, I've never really understood this argument. They didn't give killer players warning before nerfing moris, alright, I'm on board for that being a bad thing, but then they... didn't repeat that mistake, and that's reason to be annoyed at them too?
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There are plenty of excellent games out there with ambitious developers. We gave feedback this is how far we got. Unless people put there money where their mouth is nothing will change.
If there's no pressure to change why would they. Games like ff14 had the pressure of wow to get it to push forward and improve. Even if there is no competitors to dbd there are plenty of experiences that will give you aspects of the dbd expiernace.
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The reason they didn't tell killers is because they viewed Mori's as "toxic" They even called mori's toxic in one of their streams. They gave survivors warning because they wanted to give them warning. I guess 3 man keying out after going afk on the hatch until the killer found your group was funny to them.
I guess you could say it was suggested to change ds but now we are arguing semantics.
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It doesn't matter what phrasing you use, it's not semantics. They are not beholden to do anything said, suggested, aired, or ranted about by random internet users, that ain't how game dev or even community feedback works.
I'm not sure what your point is, would you mind elaborating? They didn't tell killers and they did tell survivors- which one of those is the problem?
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The one that increases the divide in the community and fuels the theory that the devs are biased towards one side or that they do things out of greed to keep one side happy.
I can tell you how to tie your shoes and you are free to ignore the obvious. You still got told how to do it though.
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So... which one? I'd argue they shouldn't have done it with zero warning the first time, and to be consistent with that belief, I think it's fine that they gave warning this time around. It's all well and good to say they shouldn't "increase the divide in the community", but logically, that would mean that they should do something wrong twice so one side doesn't feel unfairly maligned. It's actively arguing against them learning and growing, which I don't support.
Cool example, now let's add in the fifteen thousand other people giving conflicting methods on how to tie your shoes, a solid two thirds of which are asinine and stupid, and we're in a more comparable position to this situation.
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- The game is survivor sided with zero balance nor care towards Killers (The Snowmen event is the latest proof of that)
- The Perk library is a wasteland of useless perks with only a small handful to actually use (that goes for both Survivors and Killers)
- The entire game is just Survivors gen rushing the game and abusing tactics that force killers to camp and tunnel.
- Maps are so unbalanced that there are infamous maps no Killer wants to play in nor is good at regardless of their unique powers.
- Cheaters roam free and make fun of the devs and their incompetence to deal with them
- Cosmetics is the number one priority to BHVR, and even for that, they fail to hire some decent artists able to design actual cosmetics and not some generic clothing you can find in Walmart while pricing them more than what they are worth.
I swear, at this point, I am begging for a new Dead by Daylight competitor to step in and show how it is done, maybe VHS when it comes out.
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Fortnite, League of Legends?
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Remember - If you ever think a company is just tryna do cash grabs for mediocre content.
Think about skylanders.
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Nah theres a whole slew of Korean developers who are way more distant. That isn't to say BHVR is some god send, but theres waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay worse.
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The point is whatever they do, you will keep playing this game because you're addicted. And they know it.
That's a fact.
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I honestly think they do read the forums and consider feedback, but what ultimately drives all decisions is the financial factor. It’s a business and they have to worry about the bottom line. They’re going to design the game in a way that keeps the most amount of money coming in. I believe (but have no way to prove) that most of the money comes from SWF players, so keeping them happy is always going to be top priority. Unfortunately this means that killer is going to remain incredibly frustrating to play
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To be fair about Cote:
He kinda brought it upon himself with condescending comments that ignored the question the community asked.
Hence the "Go play Civ" quote gets memed on to death because it was both of the above.
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Gonna be interesting to see what killer nerfs will be in the mid chapter....and I bet Boons will go untouched.
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You mean the clip where he gives the correct answer to the question that was posed to him? Weird example to use if you're trying to make out like someone deserves the verbal abuse they're getting online, friend.
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If I went to the subreddit or forums to read feedback and it was posts like "noed basekit", "killer is impossible", "killer isn't impossible", "ds basekit", etc I would maybe not listen as much either and instead stick with the players that know what they are talking about.
also they have definitely proved they listen and have implemented changes nearly exactly how we asked.
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It didn't answer the question(if I am remembering correctly) of:
"How are you going to improve killer gameplay to make it less stressful/frustrating"
Which the response completely ignored.
People saying dumb things then getting talked down to for saying dumb things isn't unusual but I never said harassment was ok, just that he did provoke people.
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That wasn't the question, and it's very important to understand the difference between that statement and the question actually aired. See, the one in that clip actually had a really long preamble about how the question asker was feeling burnt out, didn't feel as though killer was feared anymore, perceived it to be frustratingly unbalanced, and then asked effectively "what are you going to do to fix that for me".
The answer in that situation is that the question asker needed to take a break. Period. The answer "Take a break, play some survivor for a bit or heck, play something else" was a straightforwardly correct one, there is nothing wrong with it from any perspective other than a cynical business angle (where, to be fair, it's not a good business move to tell people to play something other than your game, no matter how correct you would be to say it).
Now, if the original question hadn't been so loaded, whiny, and frustrated, I'd have supported tacking on something about future plans to the end of that correct answer, but given what the question actually was, you don't want to encourage and support that approach, so probably for the best on that front.
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Bruh....if you're gonna answer community questions to the tune of thousands of players, the last thing you ever wanna do is tell people to go play something else. Everybody eyerolled his response even Not_Queen. An editor off cam was even cringing like "Nah fam....this ain't the play chief".
The answer to that question wasn't supposed to be "GTFO"
It was supposed to be (if they cared) "We're looking into balance" <---at the very least.
The reason why he got memed out of the water is because his response to player frustration with the game was just to make a joke of it. Kinda like how they've handled things thus far. AKA Dismissing player concerns. Doesn't matter how the person who played it phrased their view or experience, you don't just tell the customer to go to Best Buy unless you wanna end up non existant like Radio Shack.
Terrible customer service will have you lose money before you even open your mouth to make a sale. Good customer service will make someone buy what they came for and something extra for a friend especially if you help someone solve a problem, they'll stick with you for life after that. If bad customer experiences are met by jokes, BHVR is going to get meme'd on with that same energy....period. Now if BHVR were doing GODS WORK, fixing every bug, going above and beyond, best customer service, most based ideas for fixes, always on point, always great balance, etc etc, they wouldn't get negatively meme'd on instead they'd end up like Gabe Newell as some kind of Lord and Savior of video games across the universe... PRAISE GABEN!
But some people are allergic to success so ya know....whatever....
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Yes, like I said, from a business perspective it wasn't a particularly great move, hence the incredulity from everyone else.
In terms of answering the question, though, I've already outlined why he was just correct.
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