http://dbd.game/killswitch
Lack of empathy in DBD
DBD has always been a game with an infamous reputation for it's community. While it isn't necessarily as toxic as games like Siege or CoD, it definitely outweighs both of them in sheer pettiness.
One issue I've personally seen is the lack of empathy for the other side during the match. As a killer main I get playing rough to win but I feel like people take "Playing to win" a bit too far.
For example, going for a 4-man slug right off the get-go. It's a good strategy and survivors despise it.
When asked why they play in such a way killers usually say that they don't do this to be toxic, they just want to win and don't care about the other side's fun.
This is a fair viewpoint to an extent but I feel like you can still have fun while still not being a douche. You don't have to care for the other side's enjoyment, but you can still have basic courtesy.
When going into public you don't have to care about stranger's feelings, but you can still be respectful and courteous.
TL;DR This game brings the worst out of us
Comments
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IMO, the problem has been and continues to be people who don't play both sides consistently. Like in life, not having perspective makes it too easy to fully "other" your opponents.
I know how this goes in DBD; my first 800 hours or so were almost strictly killer, and I really developed some attitudes about survs. And then I started 50/50ing my gameplay and that went away. Recently, I've been playing a lot more survivor (kind of spurred by 2v8's killer queue times), and have caught myself doing (and saying) some of the things I used to look down on others for.
DbD is a rare pvp game in that the roles are so distinct they're almost like different worlds. You have to have a foot solidly in both not to develop a serious bias, imo.
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The overall issue is people not playing both roles to at least a competent level. Not only would they be better at their preferred role with such knowledge, but you get to see & feel the difficulties and problems from the opposite perspective. This would absolutely create some empathy for other players, outside of the super sweat competitors who do only play just one role.
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yep, this is it. So much of the us vs them toxicity that we see on this forum would be gone if people actually played both killer and survivor role. It’s very clear that many do not.
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It has not much to do with empathy for the other side. The playerbase has gradually become worse. And thats in correlation with the way the devs changed the gameplay. If you make it easy to annoy other players, people with that bad mindset will gather more and more. And thats what happened.
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I think the horror genre attracts a really diverse group of people and we all have different expectations for how people are supposed to behave when they're playing a game, and we're all at different places in terms of emotional intelligence, social skills, self-knowledge, etc. So, there's naturally more conflict about who's behaving inappropriately.
One thing I have learned from this community is that there are a lot of people who take for granted that, if you win a game, that means you're allowed to shame the person or people who lost. And, if they don't want to be shamed, they should try not to lose.
That belief is completely foreign to me — and I think it speaks to a larger worldview about winners and losers, which I don't share — but that's part of what I mean about people having different backgrounds and expectations. I don't think anything I say is going to change their minds.
The game also wasn't really designed to prevent griefing (some games are), so, as @DeBecker says, if you are attracted to the idea of bullying someone, this might be a game you enjoy because you have more opportunity to do it.
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Empathy can only go so far. To play that way over and over again while having matches where you, the player, are on the side of needing empathy but not receiving it will wear anyone down. Even those that show empathy will not be rewarded for it and at times taunted.
But why should players have empathy for the other side? Are you truly helping killers by giving them hooks? Are you helping survivors by letting them get away with blatant errors? How are players supposed to learn how to play? Through trial and error. If you never error then you never grow. If they never grow, then you just have a player base that complains when killers act like killers. You have a player base where players complain when survivors try to survive.
If as a killer you have 3 survivors on hooks and you find the 4th sitting on a gen, are you supposed to show empathy for the three survivors on hooks? Do you nudge the survivor to get off the gen to go save their teammates? Or do you pull them off the gen and hook them?
That very situation I've run into many of times and I have done both solutions. There were times the survivor just stands there and looks at me while the three survivors die. Where was the empathy for ones own teammates? To me, it is better to end the match there without making it seem as though such action require reward.
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Only show empathy when your gut tells you to, otherwise end the game as quickly as possible to show that you value your own time more than anything else.
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I think the problem is more that a large part of the fanbase is whiny, entitled, and has an overly inflated ego. That goes for both sides and it especially doesn't help when both sides have things that they objectively SHOULD NOT HAVE but do. So when people abuse these things the victories go to their heads, resulting in a sense of entitlement and the ego. Dear lord the ego. I honestly feel like people's ego's are the worst part of dbd, because it goes beyond the game itself and translates into discussion surrounding the game as well. We've all seen people trying to give ideas on how to balance parts of the game and almost every single time there's always someone stroking their own ego by claiming they're "top MMR" or "Im at the top of the leaderboards" or "I literally main x, which this topic covers so you're wrong because I know more than you" etc. As if any of those things somehow invalidate anything when 9 times out of 10, they don't.
It just feeds into the us vs them mentality that the community has. Every time Survivor loses something that's broken and shouldn't be in the game (old Dead Hard, old Mettle of Man, old Made For This etc) people screech and lose their minds while killers basically giggle with glee at their opponents losing their toy, same goes for killers. Every time a Killer perk or a Killer themselves gets nerfed there's always survivor players going "Yay! That was super obnoxious and now I don't have to deal with it anymore!" while Killers mald about losing their toy. But no matter what, both sides just aren't ever satisfied with the balance because "x is toxic, they are mean to me, I want them to lose."
TLDR, the toxicity is a self perpetuated cycle that promotes a lack of empathy because a large part of the community refuses to think rationally and look at the game without a biased point of view.4
