Once again requesting the ping indicator to be reinstated [Feedback]
The Problem
I just played against the same Nurse three times in a row, and every single game she had on-and-off red ping. Nurse gets questionable hits at the best of times, but add bad ping into the mix and it's a recipe for an incredibly obnoxious match. It was three games of nonstop:
- Getting hit from miles away.
- Rubberbanding around on her shoulder while she jittered about with Agitation.
- The game seemingly freezing up for seconds when she went to damage generators, break pallets and hook survivors.
- Her literally walking through dropped pallets and walls as if they weren't there.
When I loaded into the third game and saw the same cosmetics and the bad killer ping icon, I was very tempted to just hit the Leave Game button. I didn't, for the record, but I wanted to and I don't blame my teammate who DCed after the first chase.
These kinds of matches are simply not worth playing out. It's a pointless, miserable experience where everyone either:
- Gives up (someone DCed in two out of the three matches).
- Dies 30 seconds into the match because pallet stuns don't register and the killer is clipping through walls.
- Stealths around for 20 minutes because you cannot reliably run a ranged killer with unstable ping.
Dead by Daylight is the only multiplayer game I can think of where bad ping is actually a significant advantage. So much so that it's not uncommon for people to VPN across the world to take advantage of ping differences.
Ping Problems: A Brief History
Bad ping has been a problem since Dead by Daylight's inception, and ~6 years ago people were fed up of dealing with lagswitching, region hopping, and killers with general bad internet. Back then, games were hosted by the killer in a peer-to-peer (P2P) manner. Hence if the killer had bad ping, everyone would feel it. With BHVR being slow to implement any fixes to the problem, players took it into their own hands. Many opted to use a controversial third-party program called MLGA to view other players' pings in the lobby, and dodge those that were too high.
BHVR recognised that playing against bad ping was miserable, and even went so far as to whitelist the tool in May, 2017 while they worked on adding a built-in ping indicator. Dead by Daylight's own indicator was added with Patch 1.7.0 in September of the same year, and with it came a reduction in matches being ruined by shoddy internet. If you joined a lobby and the connection between the killer and you was poor, you could simply leave and find a different match.
Dedicated servers did away with the P2P format in 2019, and later down the line BHVR also did away with the option for survivors to see the killer's ping in the lobby. And once again, people were being forced to blindly enter into matches and hope the killer wasn't ridiculously laggy.
And that brings us to present day, where matches are still a lucky dip of whether or not your killer is going to be VPNing from the opposite side of the globe, or streaming 7 different movies mid-chase.
The Solution(s)
I don't recall an official statement ever being given about why this feature was removed, and a brief search turned up no results. I think the simplest solution to this problem would be to reinstate the ability to see the killer's ping in the lobby.
Fairness
I can imagine a few of the responses this thead will get, so I'll address them here:
"People shouldn't be punished for having bad internet."
I recognise that not everyone is in a position to have top notch internet -- I'm one of them! I live in an area with temperamental internet, and I also can't afford to pay for greater bandwidth and speed. That being said, DbD is an online game, and just as you need a good-enough platform to run a video game, you also need to have adequate internet. Repeatedly going into killer matches knowing you don't have a suitable connection to be doing so is unfair for the other four players, and I'd argue unsportsmanlike. When the weather is bad and my internet is being slow, I either play survivor or go and do something else entirely.
"Why are you focusing on killers with bad ping? Survivors can have bad ping too."
True. However, having a bad ping as survivor is usually detrimental and the only person whose match is really being affected is that individual survivor's. If they don't mind it, then that's up to them. A killer with bad ping is the opposite -- everyone in the match is going to suffer as a result.
TL;DR
Bad ping continues to ruin games and the ability to see the killer's ping in the lobby should be reinstated.
Comments
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I feel you. I really hope how connection issues impact the game get addressed at some point by the dev team and there can be something done with the servers. There is a reason why most of the people that VPN to other region are killers, because the hit you get as killer with high ping are ridiculous. There is no other game that comes to my mind that having bad connection can reward you the same way it does with DBD if you play killer. Bad connection should always punish the person who has it, not the rest.
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Hey dev team, I love vpn killers, gen rush, tunnel, camp, OP P2W DLC, nurse, blight, bugs, and SOLO queue experience.
Let's not do anything to change those, I think you are doing pretty good job so far!
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