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I may have found out why there is so much toxicity in this game.
So, get ready for a fairly long post, folks.
The question: "Why is this game so toxic?" or "Filled with toxicity?"
The answer: "The game itself is fundamentally flawed due to EXTREMELY simple and stale goals, making it unfun all around."
Now, before you twists your heads trying to understand what I just said, let me explain.
Dead By Daylight works on a singular gamemode with events adding in EXTRA things to do during a trial. But the thing is, the actual gameplay elements of Dead By Daylight is a mix of "Extreme Slowness" and "Extreme Danger".
The goal of this game is to make the survivors feel like in the shoes of a horror flick survivor. Becoming the ultimate savior or the man who just wants to live another day.
And make the Killers feel in the shoes of a slasher. Invincible, Unstoppable, Unwavering.
Unfortunately, the goal of the game is poorly designed.
You are required to fix 5 generators out of the 7 in the map in order to open up the exit gates so you may escape the hunting ground. The Killer is trying to deny that from happening.
But the actual 'gameplay' in doing the generators and even opening the gate makes cookie clicker look like a SFW version of DBD.
The Survivors are forced to work on generators before they may have so much a chance of getting away from the savage killer from the actual match.
However, they are forced to sit down and watch a bar slowly fill up whilst holding down M1. You HAVE to focus because there are skill checks to complete that make it TWICE as boring as you cannot look away, nor can you let go of that mouse or your finger over the space bar.
That's not 'interactive gameplay', it is a 'clicker game'. That's it. Nothing more. Nada. Nope. Nuh-uh. Change my mind.
The reason why most survivors are aggressive to get into chases is because they want to feel the thrill, the ACTUAL DANGER of the killer. The times where you have to hide from the killer is usually overshadowed by you needing to outsmart and outrun the killer so they waste time on you. The reason why they want you to continue chasing them could be that they're killing 2 birds with one stone. They're making their teammates safer whilst ALSO having fun.
They tend to try and justify toxic actions like running sweat builds or etc with all sorts of dumb excuses.
The killer is forced to play along with this because a side without the other cannot be fun.
Why both sides are consistently hating on each other isn't the toxicity. Not at it's core.
The toxicity is *fueling the fire* and was created by the *poor goal mechanics* that are generators.
Survivors are 'Toxic' is because they're forced to do so, otherwise they're stuck with excessively boring tasks that are the generators. They literally cannot win mentally because they're forced to either sacrifice winning for having fun, or sacrificing fun for winning the game.
Killers are often hated because the Survivors getting caught by a good killer is indeed unfun for them, now that they have to hang on the hook doing nothing but watch survivors be survivors as punishment. They go to all sorts of ridiculous lengths to try and make the killers look like they're hindering the game because they are the primary obstacle of the survivors. At least, one that's ACTIVE.
It's why one-hit perks are looked down upon excessively. You can't have fun in a chase if it never started in the first place.
So. let me put it more simpler.
The Goal and only objective of dead by daylight is excessively boring.
The survivor being bored leads them to trying to get chased and run builds MEANT for being chased so they can have fun.
This leads to toxicity to Killers when they catch and outsmart the survivor, (most likely) due to their ego denying the possibility of someone being smarter, and them being toxic to killers, which the killers respond in 'Toxicity' either involuntarily or because they were sour in a previous game or are actively sour.
The results of that toxicity made killers unfun to play as, and the results of the generator by mechanics have to be suffered through or to be chased by a noob killer to make fun of as they can't have fun anyway else.
Dead By Daylight is filled with toxicity. The core cause of it are *GENERATORS!*
Comments
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On a side note: I also just now thought that in an attempt to have fun, they must directly hinder the other side from having that fun as well.
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Agree and disagree. I don't think it's the CAUSE of toxicity, but I do agree that the design of gameplay objectives can result in rather bland gameplay at times.
Consider that peak survivor gameplay would basically involve never letting the killer interact with you while you hold M1. And if they do find you, then peak gameplay is holding W and running in a circle, or following a predetermined optimal path around a certain tile. Ideally for so long that the game just ends.
It's not the sort of thing that feels super competitive or fulfilling for either side, honestly.
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I'm surprised now that I think that people play this consistently.
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No. Every game ever made have ######### in community. ######### are everywhere. Simple as that. This game have no more toxic players than any other.
But anyway - you are trying to say, DBD objective is more boring than driving to finish line with car, or shooting other people with guns over and over again, or killing mobs in endless grind? Every game is simple, if you think about this like that. Not every game is fun tho.
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Nah I think the root to toxicity is how appealing this game is to the Spike archetype of gamer (for clarification, there are several archetypes of gamers devised by the guys who created Magic The Gathering card game, you can look them up).
Spikes are very sore losers and tend to blame everything else but themselves, one of their defining attributes is "If Spike plays several games and loses only one, but feels they should have won it, they may be malcontent", pair that with the absurd "Only 4k is a win" and "Only me escaping is a win" mantras and you have a recipe for disaster and frustration, frustrated people tend to vent by lashing on others (being toxic).
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In my opinion the root of the toxicity is that it's a competitive game, you have two sides working to achieve goals that prevent the other side from doing theirs. Any time you get people to compete against one another it's a breeding ground for toxicity. What breeds more toxicity is the allegiance to a specific side. Mains breed more toxicity than anyone in this game because they refuse to play or see the things the other side is going through. While there are some mains that do listen to the opposing side and keep an open mind the vast majority on either side doesn't and it creates resentment, entitlement, and furthers the toxic divide between killers and Survivors. If more people played both sides and kept an open opinion on how matches go (after all it's just a video game) and balance issues the level of toxicity would reduce from Killers and Survivors. But that's just my thoughts on it.
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One big disagree on that survivors search the horror thrill and go for a chase. That is true for surely a lot of players, but there are also a lot of players that feel the thrill when the killer is around and they try to dodge him by any chance. So this is not really the core reason. Also, sometimes people also just like to take a break, sitting on a gen, and get angry when they get chased AGAIN.
This. It is simply how the world is. Has always been and will ever be. Anyone played Ultima Online back in the days? Where the term "player killer" was invented? That was already the case in the beginnings of the public internet. Also back in the 90's, when "chatrooms" were a big thing. Not much difference sometimes in these chatrooms compared to DBD post game chat.
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Another point: Your big article says that killers are only toxic because survivors are toxic. And I would 100% disagree from that being true. Not every killer playing like a scumbag had bad matches with toxic survivors in the past. Some people are just like that.
ALL SURVIVORS' FAULT is not really the reason "why there is so much toxicity in this game"
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i think the main rason are the toxic streamers that have influenced the community for many years with some kind of toxic behaviour, people werent like this in 2016 or early 2017 when the game came out and the game also allows it because how is made, is a casual game not a competitive game where if u dont make precise movements all the time without understaming the situation never u get punished, here that doesnt exist, well it kinda does for the killer and for survivors when the killer is extremely good, u will notice how those cocky survivors will stop doing stupid stuff if u are good because they will get punished hard.
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So should the gens be slightly more complex then? Making survivors give directional inputs or something to perform repairs? (Like, every 5 seconds, it gives arrows on the screen and you have to press those directions with your movement option to advance the gen.) The gens would be slightly more engaging, failure to complete in time or correctly would be the failure condition to set it off, and they could still pay attention to their environment.
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I think the answer is much more simple: Immature people are toxic. There's young people playing this game and I'm sure there's some immature adults, too. They get frustrated while playing and they have a temper tantrum. Sometimes they do obnoxious things in the game.
This game is interesting because it is meant to be cooperative on the survivor side. Selfish people have a hard time working with others. Giving big bloodpoint bonuses for unhooking and being a team player seems to keep the game from falling apart, but I still run into at least one jerk every day.
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I agree to a certain extent, however I find that the lack of a definition of what is a "win" makes it even worse. Since everybody seems to have their own understanding of what they count as a win, goals are not clearly defined. And every average mental health educational source will talk about the importance of setting clearly defined goals in order to then achieve them. It kinda reminds me of HIMYM's Lily, "it's fun against fun!" , only that oftentimes it's "misery against misery".
3 survs that escaped will be annoyed because their 4th man got tunneled, whereas the killer is also miserable because there was no way to even hit one of those 3 clicking dudes. Both sides will feel frustratred and not as if they've won.
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