http://dbd.game/killswitch
Can BHVR dev's answer - do you actually play the game you develop, or is it just pretend?
I'm a big fan of DBD - played since it's inception. But these last few releases have been appalling.
What has happened to the quality control…. I'm serious in my question - all it would take is for one person to play clown with 10% efficiency to know this was the most ludicrous changes.
MFT was disliked by killers for 3% speed, and it was decided to give clown up to 20% non-stop speed. C'mon guys…
Not to mention Ghoul being broken with the "hostage techs" - making him unstoppable when played properly.
It just seems that you guys are repeating mistakes from pervious killers (chucky release shares so much with Ghoul).
I won't even mention the "promise" of mixing up the meta every so often… completely dropped off the list.
I fell in love with this game but I'm just finding it so hard right now and I just need an answer.
Is anyone else with me on these points or am I being unreasonable in this?
Comments
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Even if they do play their game, which I do believe, there are too many killers for the devs to properly deal with all the bug and balance problems in a timely manner. Killers like Clown get unnecessary buffs while Twins, Plague, Pinhead and more are left with frustrating bugs - that have been reported! - for months on end.
IMO, BHVR needs to massively expand the size of their QA team, or even more killers will break down as content is further added, with no one available to address them.
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If BHVR is one of Canada's largest independent game studios with 1,000+ employees I would assume they have a proportional QA team for a game studio of their size. Could you explain your reasoning for wanting a massive expansion of their QA team? Assuming they have enough QAs for their company. I mean, at what point are you just bringing people in for the paycheck and paying them to do the least? What if it's not a QA issue, but a culture issue at BHVR that goes even higher up to management?
What are the standards or what is being told to their team to where even the most glaring issues are passing right on through like a morning cup of coffee?
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If the priority was on killers we wouldn't be waiting months/years for bug fixes, reworks and adjustments.
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If they're priorities were killer I'm sure we wouldn't have skull merchant in their current state, and as for the survivor experience not being valued well isn't there going to be some big survivor quality of life changes coming soon?
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I agree - but because the sheer size of content now and not be able to deal with it all because of how much we have IS the problem. Like you said, and I will add to is the team needs to be massively increased. The bandwith they have is too short for whats on the table.
Stuff takes to long to release whether its a bug fix or just some killer tweaks. It shouldn't be like that. Its really frustrating. Changes have got to be made
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They already have your money for those older killers. They want you to buy the new broken cash grab killer until they decide in 6 months whether to:
A. Balance it properly (Wesker)
B. Nerf it into the ground (Skull Merchant)C. Leave it in a broken overpowered state forever (Blight).
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What we really need aside from just survivor / killer QoL changes is an overhaul of maps. Most of the recent maps has been pretty well balanced, in terms of size and tile-variety. Maps that you can play well as survivor, or as the killer. That is what I mean.
But then you get the problematic ones, like Coldwind Farm, Haddonfield, Borgo, Badham Preschool, Eyrie etc. Maps that swing too much to one side or the other.
Maps that are way too small, especially when considering the kinds of killers we have in the game. Killers with crazy mobility, who can get from one side to the other in a matter of a few short seconds.
Or maps that are on the larger side, which slower M1 killers struggle with.
There has to be better consistency in map sizes.
Also, the clear ambience allows for way too long sightlines in some cases.5 -
They clearly don't. Or at least, they don't play Survivor, cause if they did they wouldn't be screwing the role over every bloody patch.
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They occasionally play between themselves on private servers. That's pretty much it. People loved to badmouth Almo's skill level but he at least regularly played public matches.
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First, Skull Merchant is fine, you people just hate having to try. Second, the first "QOL Change" they did were the Fog Vials, and thanks to Killer mains complaining they've nerfed it into being useless. They don't care about the Survivor role, and no amount of people like you crotch riding the devs will change reality.
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First, Skull Merchant is fine, you people just hate having to try.
She isn't fine, my friend.
While it is possible to win with her, her unnecessary nerfs really hurt her.
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She is fine - I'm probably one of the worst Skull Merchants around I do just fine with her. Mind you, despite not really knowing how to use her, I get 3 - 4ks pretty consistently with her. She's not weak, you just need to try.
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It actually does when you're buns with the character. I'm man enough to say I cannot use the character effectively, yet I get 3 - 4ks consistently. Can't do that on a weak Killer you're bad with.
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I was consistently surprised by the amount of QA people who popped up in the anniversary quotes on the loading screen. Coulda fooled me. I'd assume the deadlines are so tight that there's only so much they can do.
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As a Software QA Engineer, and someone with a degree is game development, the fundamental problem of games is the scale of new content and non negotiable release schedules.
You don't want manual testing in software development, it's error prone, time consuming and costly. You want automation as much as possible, and even if you could automate it (which would involve a pretty incredible test harness that I balk at the idea of even attempting to write), DBD's fundamental issue is it has so many potential interactions between killers, survivors, perks, items, add-ons, maps that even such a theoretical test harness would have literal millions of possible combinations, and would takes hours, probably days, to run on EVERY change.
I am not defending the quality of the releases, even as a programmer apologist, they've been pretty glaringly bad... and while I also hate the casual use of the phrase "spaghetti code" as an insult, the fact is some of these bugs do raise the question of how are they are occurring for seemingly unrelated features being updated. However in the same breath... it's just unrealistic to expect any level of manual testing to cover all these combinations, find these issues, isolate and report them, investigate and fix them all in time for the extremely tight release schedule.
What I do think might help is get the community involved a lot more, build the PTB to be a much more effective test build environment and give incentives in the real game for players to search for bugs.
Time based rewards doesn't work cause you get people who AFK farm, but establish a test queue system where instead of 1vs4, players can play 1vs1 or 1vs2 games with the rest as bots who AFK until the killer walks with 4m of them, to just experiment with new mechanics.
Add tally's/heat maps of what other players are playing in menus so players can see who is online and what might need covering. Make testing things in the PTB as easy as possible with short queue times and special mechanics with better support for testing purposes.
Create a proper in game reporting sysyem, and give actual rewards back to the main account for making good bug reports.
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You can, actually. The average DBD player is very casual. Even at "top" MMR.
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Pretty sure they do except they're super chill and casual playing. No one is sweating or tryharding.
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their priority is cosmetics and they cant even do them without bugs xdd actually is insane
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That's a fair point. I assumed that their lack of expedience in regards to addressing bugs/balance was due to a lack of resources. I suppose I want that to be true because then the answer is clean and simple: hire more people to help lighten the load. But if they already have enough eyes looking at the problems, and something like money is driving their agenda and causing them to prioritize new content over old broken content that needs fixing, that is a problem that is not easily remedied.
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I think the real reason behind Skull Merchant being disliked, is due to originally creating the killer in the way they did, has now soured the experience of playing against her… and it's lingering to the new versions/iterations of her.
It was such an awful experience, that no one wants to even entertain the thought of playing against her or as her.
I think they really hurt the game by leaving her the way they did, as it showed how little care goes into the actual game play experience.
And yet we're still unanswered by the Devs and if they play their game before testing… what makes this whole topic worse, is if it's a yes, and it went to 'Live' in the current state… well….
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this goes back to what i've been saying about the strain dead by daylight has been under as a product for a long while. project management and product testing becomes a nightmare when you introduce so many objects that have to be accounted for. this is probably as real of a "biting off more than you can chew" scenario as you can get.
and unfortunately with the added pressure of being a live service game, you're forced to operate within the lifespan of the game in order to grow your business, which incentivizes the usage of release schedules. this would be more manageable if dead by daylight wasn't scaled so aggressively i feel.
i'm not a software engineer, but looking at this from both a systems administrator and business owner's perspective gives me a migraine. i can only imagine what the project pipeline looks like now with all of the constraints they imposed on themselves.
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