South African Servers and a rant of the 200 ping experience.
I'm blindly going into this, I'm kinda going to wing this whole post and hope for the best.
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Obviously, as the title suggest... South African servers me and a large community of South Africans since the announcement of dedicated servers have hoped that South Africa might see some action and that we'll be maybe get servers and that we'd be able to officially be able to locally play with other south africans. Now we saw that this wasn't going to happen yet and upon reading the other posts regarding south african servers it's been told that the demand is high but the support is very minimal or just not there at all. Now me being who I am have decided that I should shine a light over this statement and really talk about why no one except for us, the south african community really care about this. And I'll probably divide the things I wanna talk about and why it seems like we're a small group of individuals who are requesting and praying for this. I can comfortably tell you that there is very easily a massive SA community around this game and although I might not be able to effectively prove my statement I will try and explain what I mean. But first I'll talk about the huge issues that we, the SA community have to endure because of our 200+ constant ping. And I'll start with:
The hate...
All my SA brothers and sisters know that you playing killer will get you salt, accused of cheating/lagswitching and then upon that have people dm you on xbox or PS or go onto your steam profile and get bad mouthed for something not within your control. The problem with 200 ping isn't always a disadvantage, on some killers you have an advantage because your 200 ping gives you 9 foot arms and lets you obliterate people vaulting through windows. This is where the "salt" comes in. Now, because you completely clapped a survivor using your 9 foot arms, it's YOUR fault for having 200 ping, it's YOUR fault for making their experience "unfun" and it's honestly got to the point where I start to normalize this because people don't like killers who throw their arms at you. AND TO MAKE IT WORSE, upon playing HUNTRESS or TRICKSTER boy will you get salt. I'll go into that in a minute. But, we are aware that the DBD community has a massive toxicity problem and we honestly just accepted that, now onto the next topic.
Specific killers like huntress, trickster, dredge and nemesis.
To those of you who have bought these killers, you know that ping plays a role on how you can use their unique powers. I'll start with nemesis(Pyramid head is the same deal as nemesis so don't question why I didn't include him here.)
Nemesis(DISADVANTAGE) has a quick and simple power, however the issue is the quickdraw of his tentacle strike is determined by ping, if someone is at a pallet a 50 ping nemesis would go for the tentacle strike and quickly draw and whip them. But... this is 50 ping. When you're a nemesis main like me with 200-250 ping you draw that tentacle out and wait eight years before you can whip someone with it and that means you have to be so precise with when you use his power, because you'll try and hit a guy and he'll be around the corner and because of your ping you can't strike them fast enough and this makes nemesis from a hard killer to a SLIGHTLY HARDER to use killer because you have to factor in so much more because of that ping making him just a sub-par experience and it's really exhausting. On the survivors POV you'll whip the wall and they'll get hit and voila, now you're going to get insulted and accused of lagswitching cause a individual just can't handle being whipped around a wall for some reason.
Huntress(HUGE ADVANTAGE) boy is she fun on 200 ping. Let me make a quick little idea of a 200 ping huntress. Huntress throws hatches on 50 ping, and that's it. But, on 200 ping she decided she needed to up her game a bit... y'know be more deadly. So, it's just natural that instead of throwing hatches, huntress now throws you with samsung smart fridges and her fridges can now go around massive corners. Honestly, I thrive with huntress on 200 ping because you're not dodging a fridge the size of nemesis lol. Naturally it's your fault for throwing fridges and now its your fault for making the other people have a "bad" experience. I will comfortably tell you that I am not exaggerating, you literally throw people with cars.
Trickster is the same deal as huntress, but instead of fridges you throw people with 4x4 car tires. So once again you get very stupid hits on someone with minimal effort because you're playing on 200 ping and add onto the fact that you can spam the hell out of these knives or TIRES too.
Dredge(Slightly disadvantaged) Honestly the only reason I listed him here is because that delay he has when exiting a locker is painful, but there's a more terrifying reason I've put him here. Rubber banding... Dredge I believe is the only killer that if you rubber band at the wrong time while using his power, you are not going to be able to catch anyone, your movement speed is now permanently stuck so damn low that a survivor can out WALK you. Naturally, this is a massive issue since I have not seen anybody in low ping games get this issue.
Overall, most South African players I know play killer now. Simply because you catch people off-guard at window vaults and loops cause you have "extra range" on their screen. It looks weird on your screen sometimes too. I'd honestly argue that 200 ping is amazing on killer. But now we'll move onto survivor, I have a lot to talk about on survivor.
The expected experience of a 200 ping survivor...
Good luck having ANY sort of fun against ANY mediocre killer. SOMEHOW I DON'T KNOW HOW, BUT SOME GODDAMN HOW you are so disadvantaged on survivor that you literally think that this game is gifting the killer free downs and free wins. Bro, you thought a 200 ping killer smacking you through a vault was bad, guess what? Imagine a 200 ping killer on a 200 ping survivor, my god the hits are so out of sync that you literally fear the tiles and structures more than the killer because they get you killed. Anyway, lets discuss what your average 200 ping survivor experience is like in rows and the agreements you make when you decide to play survivor in South Africa.
You agree to:
Giving the killer 8 foot arms.
Giving the killer bigger projectiles if they are ranged killers(Insta-down clown is annoying especially.)
Allowing the killer to grab you even if you aren't in a vault animation anymore and have started SPRINTING.
Being grabbed off generators while actively standing and not repairing said generator.
Being grabbed after finishing unhooking your team mate, they're unhooked, you're grabbed?
Not being able to get ghost face out of his stalk effectively.
Being insta-downed by billy through a barrel.
Granting any killers power an extra 3 meters range.
Allowing that you can get hit through walls and AFTER dropping a pallet(Pallets dropped, you're sprinting, killer M1s you through it.)
Having a slight delay to the killer terror radius(Hardly noticeable)
a Delay to any action in the game(vaulting, cleansing, healing, dropping pallets, doing generators, unhooking, breaking free of pinheads chains and basically every action in-game.)
Giving up your ability to bodyblock a moving killer without them teleporting through you.
Being dead hard validated(Downed but exhausted mid-dead hard animation.)(Can dead hard after finishing a vault and the killer is left MIGHTY confused cause they should've gotten a hit on you)
Being hooked after using DS on the killer(Rare, but happens and is prone to make you smash something)
Getting hit around large objects(It looks so weird.)
Makes reaching iri 1 incredibly difficult.
Makes the other 3 survivors experience less fun, due to 1 team mate(YOU the 200 ping player) getting killed and sacrificed in 4 minutes.(Exaggerating the 4 mins but you die fast as hell once the killer sees you have bad ping knowing that you'll be easy to pick off.)
Giving the killer 60 foot arms if they too are playing on 200 ping.
Consistent rubber banding.
I'll provide some clips at the end of the whole rant?
Lets compare all those disadvantages to the killer experience.
Expected killer experience on 200 ping.
Pallet validation(Survivor will scream, you'll see blood after an M1 but they aren't injured after they drop the pallet)
Some killers will have slugish and slow feeling powers.
Get a lot of vault hits.
Get dead hard validated(Same as pallet validation, just with dead hard.)
Consistent endgame salt.
Hooking people who have DS after they DS you.(Rare but happens more often than it happens when playing survivor, usually this is followed up by a DC.)
THIS IS A LITERAL 19/4 RATIO not including the other problems NOT listed here. You have a awful time playing survivor, but an amazing time playing killer except at pallets and when Dead hard is used. Your killer gameplay is MOSTLY unaffected but your survivor gameplay is beyond noticeable. I can't be very accurate with my statements because its been a while since I've played a 20 ping dbd match, a LONG WHILE. Last time I played on 20 ping was 2018-2019 and I was a young lad back then. I was 14 years old when I last played a 20 ping dbd match.
Now that I've gotten ALL that of my chest I believe its time I address the whole "Not enough people support this" idea.
The entire South African country and community is not like your average american, russian etc. We south africans are very keep to ourselves type of people, not all but a lot of us are, especially within the gaming industry... There's only a handful of us who actually interact with people other than friends, and there's a even smaller group that resides on the DBD forums(I'm talking like maybe 20-50 on the forums.) You'll especially notice this if you were to take a look at the games that HAVE south african servers and you'll quickly see how accurate my statement is. The issue is that not really anybody cares about us because we're not worth it, communicating with some of us is akward and the MAIN problem that stands out is that the DBD community usually plays on 50 ping so they don't see the same thing we see, they don't feel the way we feel and they don't get enough of the experience we endure to know how bad it can get. Now, back to our keep to ourselves type of nature, when you open twitter, how many times do you often run into a South African? Once? Maybe once a month? a week? If you want to find where most of the South Africans are on social media it's on private profiles on facebook, snapchat etc. We're not very big on a lot of other social medias like discord, twitter etc. So, it's understandable to see from the devs perspective that there's not enough support or that the demand is not high enough, I understand it wholeheartedly and if I weren't a South African myself would 100% agree. You'll start to slowly notice how we behave when we ask for things, it starts small like any other then theres a sudden surge that occurs where people suddenly appear and ask, I honestly believe it's already happening and believe it'll be enough proof to show that, yes there's a massive south african dbd player base. Obviously it's not in the thousands, it was at some point. When you directly view the community you'll notice that we're around 250-300 maybe 400. And the times aren't consistent when we're playing, and I'll come out and explain why it seems like that. We also don't really involve ourselves in steam groups or dead by daylight discord either so you won't get consistent numbers there either.
Loadshedding
This term is very foreign to you fellows not from South Africa, but this is essentially the guys who run the power in SA known as eskom, and loadshedding is reducing the electrical demand by shutting off entire blocks for an amount of time determined by the STAGES of loadshedding. Example being: Stage 2+ being your block is cut off power for around 2-3 hours. Making the SA dbd community look WAY smaller than its viewed and the play time of us being very inconsistent leading to the belief of "we're not in high enough demand."
My childhood was built with DBD and I remember me in this school where of the 1000 kids in that school, 700 of those kids knew what DBD was and 400 of them actively played it(including me) when we got home from a long day of school and we essentially had this massive group on whatsapp of 670 children all being dbd fans. I don't know if those kids to this day still play dbd, don't know if they still have that active whatsapp group and don't know if DBD is even popular there anymore to begin with.
I also believe that we're not a few players on dbd, because a lot of small to medium sized streamers have a couple south africans in their games on occasion and I do hope that the people consider watching a couple dbd streamers just to get my points across so that you can see for yourself. And due to the more of keep to ourselves nature we like communicating in our original language "afrikaans" most of us speak perfect english but most of us don't really speak it more often than afrikaans, of course some of us do since some of us are born in an english family, but for instance I'm not. And we really enjoy each others company as south africans.
I'm not expecting anything, forcing anything or attacking anyone. I'm just a dude submitting a request and hoping that we'll one day get noticed and that we as a community can all enjoy playing this game without being looked at as a problem due to something not in our control.
I hope you enjoyed reading about this massive piece, I didn't expect to type this much but I did.
Have a wonderful day further to you who have somehow read this entire rant and that you might even post your own opinion and experience if you've ever run into one of us.
Comments
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I couldn't include the clips for some reason, however I'm gonna add onto the discussion above that the devs aren't in any fault, the community isn't in any fault, it's no ones fault and I really hope that the comments if there'll be any will be professional and won't directly attack anything or anyone.
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AWS launched here 2 years ago and still nothing from BHVR.
I really think we should try do something to get their attention if there are enough of us playing from SA.
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