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A newer player's experience in DBD
I started playing DBD at the start of the year in January. I held off buying the game for a relatively long time as I did not like this game's monetization being an upfront price, tons of DLC, and an in-game cosmetic shop. I finally decided to buy it and started playing killer and survivor relatively equally. I want to put my experience out here because I believe the developers need to see this.
I'll start with survivor:
It was a weird experience. Most of playing survivor does not feel very intuitive, beyond avoiding the killer. Holding a button on a gen, looping a killer, utilizing pallets, understanding what bones do, what lockers are and how to use them, what perks you are being affected by, and interacting with certain objects give the survivor little to no feedback and there is no guide inside the game to explain how to perform certain actions. There is no tutorial, no training tools. The only way newer players can really understand what is happening is if they already know how the game works via some of the streamers and content creators that play this game. This issue is why a bunch of newer players hide and try to stealth rather than loop as looping itself is not explained in the game at all. The same goes for doing totems, playing around perks, opening exit gates, etc. Players either do not know they exist or how to play around them.
Luckily for me, I did have prior knowledge of the game and how to properly play it so it wasn't as much of an issue as it could have been, but if I didn't have those creators to draw from, I would have dropped the game almost instantly. Playing survivor was still relatively simple, even if I didn't understand or notice what was going on. Pressing a button down on gens and simply avoiding the killer worked in rank 20 games and kept working until I honestly got bored of playing survivor around rank 6-5 after a few weeks.I would play survivor intermittently throughout the following months but only a few games mainly to complete some rift quests. I was awful at looping and didn't want to spend time trying to get better, I felt like the few times I actually did focus on trying I would get affected by dedicated servers, glitch to the other side of a pallet, or have something like haunted grounds pop when I was going to tank a hit. It made attempting to practice feel awful and as I didn't have any friends who owned the game, doing SWF or KYF wasn't possible.
Now for killer:
Killer is slightly more intuitive than survivors which made playing it easier for me, but a bunch of base knowledge still felt required. How to loop is never explained or demonstrated to killers either so new players are basically left out to dry. I played a bunch of pre-change Cannibal, Plague, Trapper, and Spirit. I did play other killers as well, but not enough to feel like I should mention them here. Killer felt really stressful in a majority of games. It felt as if I couldn't relax and have fun because otherwise the game would just be over. My prior knowledge of DBD really helped me out as I started leaving rank 17 behind. I started hitting a bunch of purple and red rank survivors after that and this was definitely one of the factors that led to the games feeling so stressful. It felt like I couldn't try new killers since I would automatically lose to good survivors, if I deranked and wanted to play Cannibal again or Spirit, the game would be fun but most opponents at those ranks would disconnect or kill themselves on first hook, leading to boring experience. I ended up getting to a similar rank in killer as my survivor but ended up taking a break from DBD as I didn't enjoy survivor much and killer was overly stressful to play.
Overall issues with the game:
I'll say this right now, matchmaking in DBD is the worst I have experienced in any game (Games I compare it to: LoL, Dota2, TFT, Valorant, Overwatch, HotS, Dirty Bomb, CSGO, and many more). This is before and after the recent MMR changes and is one of the big reasons I feel like I won't pick the game up again any time soon. I would constantly face survivors and killers way above or below my skill level. It made playing feel awful as I got killers or survivors who punished me trying new things extremely heavily or ones that weren't even a minor challenge to play against. This doesn't even take into account SWF groups or any other out of game advantage.
Bugs - I have experienced so many bugs from the killer being stuck in map terrain to survivors being unable to be hit. Some of these may have been hacks but either way the game needs to address the lack of polish DBD is after 4 years of being released. Maybe they should do that than release another licensed killer.
Visuals/Sounds - The game varies in visual fidelity from alright to awful. Animations are consistently broken, along with sounds. Again, this game really needs to be polished more.
Lack of game modes - No training mode, no map seed selector. DBD has no interesting new modes or ways to play, it simply has only one game mode, this would ordinarily be fine, but with the amount of existing issues, not having other game modes feels like the developers' main focus is not on DBD.
Leveling up - The blood web is an awful way to level up. Instead of interesting new perks or add-ons to play differently we see a large amount of items that do nothing. Mist offerings and luck offerings all feel awful to see and even BP offerings are annoying as its just (here is a way to spend BP to hopefully get more BP). The leveling system in itself isn't enjoyable as it hurts new players badly. I hate playing new characters now, not because they themselves couldn't be fun, but being stuck with one perk and no add-ons or items is not enjoyable to play and it takes way too long to level a character up while trying to get a collection of add-ons you actually want to use. Not to mention prestige takes all your items and perks away meaning if you want additional cosmetics you need to suffer through playing that way again.
Killers - I'll be honest, I hate seeing more licensed killers. Why can't we actually have more killers designed from the ground up to be inside DBD, same with the maps and survivors. It isn't fun to play those maps, and isn't much fun to play against/with most those killers, Myers is the only one I really enjoyed as his mechanics work properly. Ghostface on the other hand has so many bugs and issues it sucks to play against him.
Currently, the game won't even let me play killer, I have queued for 30 minutes 3 separate times and on 3 different days and found no matches, but I can find one within a few minutes as survivor.
I don't want to tell others how to enjoy the game, or that they should fix what I typed about above, but I want other people to know and hopefully understand my experience as a new play and ideally bring me back into the game somehow.
Shoutout to Otz, ScottJund, OhTofu, Noob3, and Ayrun who made my time playing the game way more fun than it had any right to be.
Comments
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Well, I have to say I agree with your points. At this point in time, I've pretty much moved on myself. I say "pretty much" because I obviously still lurk at the forums, hoping beyond any reasonable hope that BHVR will fix and polish the game. But I can't say that I am physically logging in anymore. I did play for two days under the new MMR. But of course, BHVR screwed that implementation up as well, as admitted by two Mods here and at the Steam Dbd Forums. Then I got hit with Error 111 several times, and uninstalled it again.
Might I reinstall it and come back to playing down the line? It's possible. But BHVR needs to get a lot of work done, first. And I honestly, at this point, have zero confidence that they actually will.
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I agree.
The priority should be this I think:
- Fix game breaking/hindering bugs
- Make the game more accessible (optional colorblind mode, the visual indicators as seen in the mobile version)
- Add more modes (there's a number of good proposals floating around)
- Add/overhaul maps (there so much storytelling in these maps, it's often a shame that things like Lery's or Glenvale have just one version)
- Add new original killers and survivors (maybe even a roleswap dlc that adds survivor versions of the killers to the pool and vise versa)
- Add a skill overview to see how good people are with individual killers and their abilities (which might prompt people to play killers differently)
- Polish the balancing.
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I just picked up the game myself last week. Yeah, I do not like the DLC model either. Cosmetic shop is fine, but only because I don't care about stuff like that. If I did though, I could see being a bit annoyed.
If I want to buy the game today, I'd have to pay about $20 for the base game - if I want to unlock the rest of the killers/survivors, I'll need to pay another $50 or so. I'm sorry, but no - $70 to access all the content for a 4 year old game of middling popularity...? Never gonna happen.
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And every three months, BHVR just adds to the pile of DLCs. Though it seems that lately, even the new perks aren't that great.
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The base game is the base game, dlcs come on top, because they were added to the base game later. Only 5 out of 22 characters must be bought for real money, because they are licensed, others can be unlocked with ingame money. Perks.. ah, yes, devs also sell perks in dlcs and one or anti-tunneling perks is in dlc. Ok. You win. I agree that DLCs are crap. :^)
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The only dlc I have paid money for is one survivor for inner strength. Other than that I have gotten most my perks from the shrine. I have all of Lori's perks and don't even own here.
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Not just new perks, latest killer powers themselves have not been the best received (disclosing the awesome Bubba rework, must give props), and a lot of the new add ons are just blatantly terrible. (5% more speed when flashlight is on you? Really?) And yes I know they changed that one, but the fact it even made it into the game is a huge joke.
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Just wait till the game and the dlc are on sale and you could get the game and a lot of the dlc content for like 30$. And there is a playable Tutorial as well.
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After the way Mettle of Man launched, I'm no longer surprised by the crap that makes it into the game. 🤣
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I've been playing since the end of June all through the anniversary event, every day. I agree with most of your points, and mentioned several of them in the player survey they sent out like a month ago. There is an in game tutorial, but I didn't even notice and learned from YT and reading wikis etc I was facing red ranks (before current MM, and still after it, just even sweatier) from about rank 18 on as Killer, Survivor MM only recently took that nosedive, there are often SWFs, on both sides, which sucks as both solo queue and killer.
BHVR's attitude sucks, especially from senior management, they act like it's a casual game you should be playing like once a week for 20 minutes as if you could do anything at all that way, and if you aren't, well you should just play something else. Don't forget to stop by the gift shop and buy a $15 locked cosmetic set or a $10 recolor!!
The game literally has tournament teams despite the fact it's a million light years from any kind of esports balance. Optimization is extremely poor, Scott Jund did a great video about how they likely used Blueprints from UE4 as the main basis for everything, which after a little research, seems highly likely. Cheats and bugs are rampant. I would be fine with any kind of MM that didn't require amusement park ride wait times. All this at B2P, AAA pricing with F2P money scumming tacked on.
The game can be fun, the idea is great, I think the art team is a bit better than you give them credit for, but the rest is frequently extremely frustrating to deal with. I don't blame you at all for walking away.
It was $85 for all the DLC (except one $5 neon cosmetic set I didn't want) and the base game during anniversary sale, which is better than any other sale they've had since.
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That's a good perspective. I'm glad someone that just started out this year has been able to put their input out like this. I'm hoping they listen to your some of your input. I was curious as to someone's thoughts on the game now would perceive it. I haven't played since the release of pyramid head and don't plan to until crossplay is released. Which I'm sure will be a buggy mess on release as well
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I'm both an even newer, and a much older player. I played the game for a while at launch, and quit shortly thereafter because survivors could literally go through windows an infinite number of times, meaning the vast majority of windows were brainless infinites with no danger at all. That ruined the game for me.
Fast forward to about 2 months ago or whenever the Silent Hill chapter is announced, and it catches my interest. I come back because I think it's a good fit (I'm not against licensed killers, if this point doesn't make that very clear) and I wonder if they ever fixed the infinite window issue. I had no idea the game was so popular or had such hardcore players.
So I start off playing very casually with a friend or two on survivor, and it's pretty fun. Like all new survivors, we do a lot of stealthing around because that's literally what the game tells you to do, and it works out well enough. But eventually we hit a brick wall where it feels like we're missing something.
For one, I never had any idea how any of the killer powers actually worked. And I feel like until you play them yourself and feel their limitations, it'll stay that way unless you watch an in-depth video about them, and even that might gloss over basics you'd notice within a few minutes of playing yourself.
Which would be fine, except a ton of killers are locked behind paywalls or utterly ridiculous grinds.
So I turn to Youtube. First person I find is PainRelievers, who I think is still my favorite DBD content creator, despite having not made anything since basically before I got back into the game. His videos were highly informative and enjoyable. He taught me the basics of things like what looping even is or how to select good perks.
That helps a lot, but I'm still feeling a bit lost. Then I find Ayrun's videos. All the weird techs and tricks he uses, even if occasionally he can come off as a bit of a bully to the people he's going against, are very good and really accelerate my knowledge of the game and how it works. Then of course I find Otz and Scott Jund and all of them.
The base game teaches you almost nothing, and based on how DBD is actually played, it teaches you how to lose.
I feel like every single killer needs a tutorial, preferably voiced (c'mon, you've got millions of players, you can afford a little voice acting) that teach you basic, intermediate, advanced, and master-level techniques for every single killer, and how to approach different situations. And the same with survivors. You'd probably wanna stay away from perks since they're a lot more likely to get reworked over core killer powers, but as we've had multiple killer reworks, maybe going over a few just to give examples wouldn't hurt, either.
And all of this is just how it feels to try and learn how to play the game.
For every one of us that stuck with it and learned despite everything being stacked against us, there were surely dozens, if not hundreds who dropped the game immediately because it's just too much.
We haven't even gotten into the cosmetics, the DLC, the matchmaking, the performance, the server issues, the ######### RNG progression system that makes no sense, all of which you covered, but I could write an encyclopedia on my thoughts on why these things are busted and how I'd like them fixed. But I think BHVR is very well aware of all of them. I just hope they're working really, really hard on addressing these issues. DBD is a really fun game, and could be an amazing game if it wasn't plagued by mountains of issues.
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I think the devs are doing the best they can for the playerbase. The dlc aren't badly priced. A lot of the dlc are licenced hence why the expense. I have played for 3 years and I'm proud to say I have bought all dlc up to date and I have got a few of the cosmetics. The point you aren't seeing is that BHVR are still a business and need to make money. You can still buy older certain games for £50 - £80.
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I mostly agree with your points. Starting out in DBD is ROUGH. Still remember grinding all the perks back then and having to start from scratch....
Interesting that even a newer player can point out flaws of the game so accurately. I´m sure it´s not only me who wishes for a massive polishing/optimization campaign to push this game to the next level.
I´d even be content to not get new content for 3-6 months in which all their ressources would be put into solving bug issues and improving consistency and performance.
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Dude if your main complaint is that there’s no tutorial or guide I don’t know what you’re on about. In the main menu there’s literally a tab called “Help and Tutorials” with tutorials for survivors and killers and an overall guide to the game. How do you even miss that after playing for months? You’re ignorant about what you’re talking about.
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Ngl it took me 2 weeks to learn how to loop efficiently, and when and when not to do gens. Not difficult. Killer is a lot easier, especially if playing someone like spirit, also op.
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- Agree. Top Priority.
- Also a Top Priority. The game's missing out on so much stuff that's literally standard for so many games in the main gaming industry.
- This is not a priority right now. While it'd not hurt with more modes, there's just so much negative things happening in the game right now.
- Most definitely. There's so much that can be improved in terms of maps. I'd not mind a new map in every Realm that have a Clown carnival in it.
- Right now, we need to fix the game instead of adding more.
- The MMR system needs to have a visible indicator of high up you are in the system, and if you're going up or down after games.
- Absolutely.
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I'm very agitated by your name.
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To your informations, the penguins are doing the melting
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So you're just ignoring the fact the tutorial teaches you pretty much nothing about the game on both sides making it a waste of time?
You can't even pick a killer and test/use the power during the killer part of the tutorial and as survivor you don't even get to use a pallet.
How can you possibly call that a tutorial?
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Ive been saying all these things since starting playing last year aswell.
The problem is that instead of reworking the core mechanics they keep plastering over the old issues, creating new ones. Bringing out dlc to sell more seems like their numero strategy.
Listen to this:
Almost half if not more of the killer perks existing are perks to fix certain things that would make the game even worse for them. (vice versa for surv.)
(PgTW, which slows gens which wouldn't be needed if gens were reworked, Ruin, Bamboozle because looping, Healing perks etc)
They just put bandaids upon bandaids and created a whole mess from what I can see.
Totally agree with the gamemodes. The game gets stale very quickly. Sure it's always a little different (aka maps other players) but the core thing is rather bland really.
M1, shift, backspace- repeat. (m2 if ur killer, such wow)
Skillchecks are actually Attention Checks, no skill involved except maybe hitting a great one which has to do with reaction time, not skill.
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Welcome to DbD and thanks for your input but i dont get it to be honest.
Why would anyone want to know right from the getgo how a game works ? Isnt it one if not the best part of a video game experience to explore what you can do and what you can not? I would have felt robbed if the game teaches me in a tutorial or by some youruber how to do everything instead of realising that by my own. That is also why i normally dont watch youtube videos or streams of a game the first few weeks because i want to experience it by myself.
And how is this game not intuitive? It is the most intuitive experience since Tetris. A killer is coming... and he is there to do bad things with you. First you will try to hide and use your inviroment for stealth, then you will realise that there are defense mechanics and later you will combine and expand your knowledge.
EDIT
About your overall thoughts
Overall issues with the game:
I'll say this right now, matchmaking in DBD is the worst I have experienced in any game (Games I compare it to: LoL, Dota2, TFT, Valorant, Overwatch, HotS, Dirty Bomb, CSGO, and many more). This is before and after the recent MMR changes and is one of the big reasons I feel like I won't pick the game up again any time soon. I would constantly face survivors and killers way above or below my skill level. It made playing feel awful as I got killers or survivors who punished me trying new things extremely heavily or ones that weren't even a minor challenge to play against. This doesn't even take into account SWF groups or any other out of game advantage.
I agree, the matchmaking is really not that great, but lets see what MMR does in the long run.
Bugs - I have experienced so many bugs from the killer being stuck in map terrain to survivors being unable to be hit. Some of these may have been hacks but either way the game needs to address the lack of polish DBD is after 4 years of being released. Maybe they should do that than release another licensed killer.
In almost 3K hours i have not run into "gamebreaking" bugs a single time. Yes there are bugs and sometimes they cause funny or unfunny moments (especially when you loose your life because of one of them) but for me all in all this is not such a big problem as many claim.
Visuals/Sounds - The game varies in visual fidelity from alright to awful. Animations are consistently broken, along with sounds. Again, this game really needs to be polished more.
The Visuals and especially the sounds are great, i dont know what you have. On top of that, they are working right now emphatically on it. Check out those screenshots, looks really nice to me.
Lack of game modes - No training mode, no map seed selector. DBD has no interesting new modes or ways to play, it simply has only one game mode, this would ordinarily be fine, but with the amount of existing issues, not having other game modes feels like the developers' main focus is not on DBD.
We dont need more game modes and especially not a training mode. Experience it in a round, thats all what the game is about.
Leveling up - The blood web is an awful way to level up. Instead of interesting new perks or add-ons to play differently we see a large amount of items that do nothing. Mist offerings and luck offerings all feel awful to see and even BP offerings are annoying as its just (here is a way to spend BP to hopefully get more BP). The leveling system in itself isn't enjoyable as it hurts new players badly. I hate playing new characters now, not because they themselves couldn't be fun, but being stuck with one perk and no add-ons or items is not enjoyable to play and it takes way too long to level a character up while trying to get a collection of add-ons you actually want to use. Not to mention prestige takes all your items and perks away meaning if you want additional cosmetics you need to suffer through playing that way again.
I like the bloodweb as it is. Without the grind, the game would not nearly have that many dedicated players aswell.
Killers - I'll be honest, I hate seeing more licensed killers. Why can't we actually have more killers designed from the ground up to be inside DBD, same with the maps and survivors. It isn't fun to play those maps, and isn't much fun to play against/with most those killers, Myers is the only one I really enjoyed as his mechanics work properly. Ghostface on the other hand has so many bugs and issues it sucks to play against him.
Licensed killers made and still makes the game big. And there is not a single bad designed licensed killer so far, actually all of them are very true to the movie/series/video game template. Excellent job.
Currently, the game won't even let me play killer, I have queued for 30 minutes 3 separate times and on 3 different days and found no matches, but I can find one within a few minutes as survivor.
I don't want to tell others how to enjoy the game, or that they should fix what I typed about above, but I want other people to know and hopefully understand my experience as a new play and ideally bring me back into the game somehow.
That is very strange. No matter what role i play, once i press ready and i want to get myself a coffee, i am already pretty much in the game when i come back. Guess this is more off a problem for console somehow, Xbox and PS4 suffer from longer queue times then PC. I hope they bring crossplay anytime soon. Bigger Player base = better matchmaking/shorter queue time.
Post edited by xEa on0 -
I too have been playing since January of this year. Some of these complaints are valid, like the lack of information on how perks and status effects work. Most are not. Is playing killer stressful? Yes. You're one person chasing four others across sometimes large maps. You're always thinking ahead, or a should be. Is looping easy? Not for most people. I'm not very good at it, but I'm ok. Here the dirty secret though: you only need a chase to last about 40 seconds for it to be effective. This can be achieved by literally running in a straight line. Just avoid getting hit twice in ten seconds and you're probably good. After this, it's about teamwork. Most survivor frustrations are team issues, but they do blame killer a bunch.
Killer issues are real. It is stressful. It takes time to figure out what gen to protect, where you think they'll go next, how to run tiles to your advantage. Even then it won't always go right. Just be ok with losing some games though.
The hardest part for a new player is the nuance of the game. As killer, how to use each killers power. How to blend in the add ons with each power effectively. How to blend in perks too. Perks and add-ons should djust your playstyle, but often killers don't act differently with different perks and add-ons. Mistake. As survivor, learning how to blend in perks into a playstyle while also learning killer perks so you can predict killer movement. This is the hardest part since there are like 170 perks. But this is also the fun of the game. The mechanics are simple, so building the nuance is what makes the game special.
Try to have fun more and not be obsessed with your idea of winning and the game is much better. As survivor I don't run DS or unbreakable. I have borrowed time for maybe 3 characters. I like to run one or two of each characters unique teachables when possible and I'm still rank 1-2 without being a strong looper. 85% of this game is doing the right thing at the right time, not loop the killer for 5 gens. Relax more, enjoy the Mori animation, and on to the next!
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There are tutorials for both sides, however they are extremely boring and terrible. Neither survivor or killer are shown what looping is. I’ve just recently watched a streamer get into DBD. He had over ~6k people. All of his friends were streamers too. It was 5 of them doing a KYF. They all did the tutorial and none of them, throughout their 3-4 hours playing, used a pallet or looped. They had no idea how to stop the killer once caught.
Also your bloodweb argument is true. There are several pointless things in each web. You’ll spend BP to get BP offerings that will, on average, keep you at the same BP, but you’ll have to do a game to get your points back. It’s just filler for a grind. Enjoy your day!
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The DbD Team needs to see this so I’m going to mention them here @Peanits @Almo @MandyTalk @not_Queen . Sorry for that but this is the kind of post that deserves attention and will help make DbD better.
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OP, you already talked about most of these points but I just want to add to some of them...
- In-game tutorial barely teaches new players how to play the game. The tutorial from the mobile version is so much better and I really think they should bring the same tutorial over to the PC/console versions. Like OP I also learned the game from watching YT/Twitch. Most players however won’t even be bothered to do that, they expect they will learn everything they need to know from the in-game tutorial.
- I agree with you OP that the game is lacking in terms of game modes. The game still doesn’t even have a training mode after 4 years. I think this is the only PvP/ranked game with no practice mode. Even the mobile version has one. Training Mode is very useful to explore the maps and learn layouts, practice new killers, their abilities, test perks, etc. Why can’t we at least go into custom matches solo so we can do some of that stuff? As someone who has no one to play DbD with (none of my friends play it) a training mode is something I‘ve been wanting.
- The game is an absolute grind and imo something needs to be done about the RNG in the bloodweb that doesn’t even make sense. It’s also especially frustrating being forced to waste 5000, 6000 and 7000 blood points on useless stuff you don’t want no matter how hard you try to efficiently spend your bp. IMO, the bloodweb and the entire leveling system needs a rework.
- Matchmaking in this game is really bad and has been bad for a long time. I also feel the same as OP, in that it’s also the worst I’ve experienced among all the online games I play as well. Sadly with the new MMR system it’s gotten even worse. However the system is new so I personally am willing to give it time but I just want to say someone who has played the game for instance 100 hours should not be matched with someone who has played the game for 1000 hours. Or brand new players being matched against red ranks. This is what we’ve been seeing with the implementation of the new MMR system and it just doesn’t make sense at all. Hopefully they keep improving the system until it actually starts working properly.
Anyway, you make some valid points, OP. Good write-up.
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I've found the lack of information outside of the tutorial more of a good thing going in. I had plenty of time to learn the basics properly before getting in high rank games. One of the best parts of the game for me was learning all this *mostly* on my own; it is satisfying winning mindgames and such. Of course with interest in a game usually comes watches YT vids or streams.
Good luck if you continue to play the game!
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Just to respond to your thoughts
Firstly, I play on PC.
I don't want the game to explain everything from the get-go but it should be easier to understand how things are affecting you in and out of game. Too many add-ons are not explicit with what they do (moderately/slightly etc). And other player's perks aren't either, I routinely get notified I am affected by a perk or add-on but have no idea what it actually does, its just a blue or red icon on my screen.
Now on how intuitive the game is - You need to consider this is a multiplayer game with no single player and no real campaign, without friends it is very difficult to practice specific scenarios and actually get better, other similar games have replay functions and additional statistics to get past the aspects of the game that aren't intuitive to some players. Aspects that aren't intuitive in DBD can include simply running (took me a full game to figure out how to run as a survivor and not just walk around), how to find gens (took me a week to realize the streetlights above them), how many hook stages someone gets, what different status effects do, what does and doesn't alert the killer (fast vaulting alerting the killer across the map was something that took me a while), why to leave the exit gates 99'd (got flamed for this a few times), and actually running towards the killer to do certain actions. As a new player you want to stay away from the killer and their terror radius not run towards them to finish a generator or lead the killer away. I respect your opinion on wanting people to discover the game on their own but I think the game needs to have a better way to do that than it currently does.
Bugs - I am glad you have not had as many issues as I have, but in my experience there are way too many issues I have seen/experienced that drag down the overall experience including losing over 300,000 BP, having a black-screen upon loading into the game (sounds worked - visuals didn't), losing all sounds in a game (this was consistent), having untouchable survivors, floating out of the map, and many more. Some of these are funny, the issue is that they happened either consistently enough or in tandem with one another to lose the quirky factor and become downright frustrating.
Visuals/Audio - I am glad they are trying to fix it, but I can really only comment on my experience and not something that isn't in the game yet. I'd love to see the game in higher quality graphics but until I actually play it, I can't really comment on it. Sounds for me are consistently messed up from random ambient occlusion issues to them missing entirely. This doesn't mean the sounds are bad in the game, just that they have bugs/issues that hurt the experience.
Leveling - A grind would be fine if it was consistently rewarding which due to the blood web's RNG it can screw anyone it wants (ScottJund with his 6 million BP spent on Oni without a single point in BBQ acquired) meaning you don't get desired perks or add-ons. Instead you are forced to waste BP on items you will never use (for me things like mist offerings, moris, etc) instead of getting interesting perks or add-ons that would make the experience more enjoyable.
Licensed Killers - The killers themselves aren't the sole reason, its also the map, and how they work with the rest of the game. Licensed killers aren't specifically bad by any means, but I am very tired of seeing the conversation discussing the next one compared to actually fixing the multitude of issues I have experienced in the game.
As for my issue - I am on PC, was able to queue up for survivor just fine but could not get a killer match to save my life.
Thanks for the discussion - @xEa
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I'm sure your post deserves a full read, but for me you lost credibility and my interest as soon as you said there's no tutorial.
There's literally a tutorial and in-game guide telling you about many aspects of the game.
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I'm sorry that lost your interest. Honestly, until people in this thread pointed it out, I never saw the tutorial before, that is an issue in itself, but I understand your point.
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#6 is really key. If ranking no longer matters, then they really need to show the thing that does... because when I get 3 hooked in less than 5 minutes by a killer 16 rank points higher than me yet do well vs. killers near my own rank, rank seems to matter a whole heck of a lot more than they seem to think it does.
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Your experience mirrors my own to some extent although I'm only 3-4 months in. Even in that short time and while I have a greater number of enjoyable games with the new mmr than I did with the old. (By enjoyable I mean games where I feel I could participate in them and have an impact and get to generally play, rather than just watch gens fly by while everyone evades me or hang on a hook all game).
Match making is still a bit of a crap shoot and if you 4k for 2-3 games the next six games are against rank one death squads till they chuck you back against 4k in 1 minute rank 20-15's. I'd say 3-4 games in 10 feel balanced, 2-3 feel unbalanced in my favor, the rest unbalanced in the opponents favor. I guess that's an improvement.
I have to admit the initial excitement is starting to wear off. I used to play 2-3 hours at least 4 evenings a week, that's now down to 1-2 games every 2 days or so.
Its based heavily on the quality of game experience, if someone drops a pallet in my face on the very first chase then clicky clicks and butt dances I often consider DC'ing not always but sometimes. Not because it upsets me but why play with obnoxious people. The problem with online gaming is that you are often forced to game with people you typically wouldn't game with due to them just being bad sports, bad gamers, unpleasant people, tantrum throwing children. I just want to play the game and I tire of the antics on both killer and survivor side.
If I get 1-2 balanced games I call it because the later it gets the more toxic and abusive things become and that's not healthy for the game. If the new mmr 'balances' games eventually I may up my playtime again. At the moment though its a couple of casual games and call it because often its not worth anymore of my time than that.
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lol @ anyone who thinks this game has a tutorial. You clowns don't know what a tutorial actually is. A tutorial teaches you how to play a game and why you might want to do X or Y. Not just how to move and the very basic goal of "do gens" or "don't let them do gens." This game has one of the worst tutorials in the history of gaming. Not the worst, but damn is it up there.
You will NOT learn how to play this game at a level where you can do very well on your own. And to an extent that's fine, learning all the advanced techs and whatnot usually isn't tutorialized even in good games. But in this game you don't even throw down a goddamn pallet in the tutorial.
You need to give new players enough information to succeed in a way that will remain useful and relevant as they play. The tutorial teaches you habits completely counter to succeeding outside of rank 20 matches. The tooltips are full of status effects you have to check a wiki to understand (maybe there's a place to look up status effects in-game? If so I haven't seen it, which is damning unto itself) and even things like keys use outdated nonsensical terms like "black locks." ######### JUST SAY IT OPENS THE HATCH.
Defend it all you like, I don't know why anyone would, it's a piss poor effort to onboard new players, so it's not going to make the game more popular or successful. And taken with the hits to the player count over MMR and the endless list of bugs, I don't think any of us want the game to drop in popularity. They need to address these things. Joe McBadass figuring out window tech on his own is great and all, but for the vast majority of people, we're not even introduced to the concept of looping. LOOPING. I mean good lord. I don't even think the tutorial teaches you that you can heal others without a medkit. It's been a while since I've done it, but there's just this huge collection of information you're missing from the get-go.
And it's not like there's a practice mode where you can go to learn these on your own. That's the dumbest part of all. You're thrown straight into ranked matchmaking, with constant pressure to survive or kill, so learning is much more difficult than it should be. This is less frustrating if you know people who play and can do KYF, but in that case they'll be giving you the information anyway. The very least they could do is pop up little tutorial boxes when something happens for your first few games. Or like a tips-and-tricks section after a match that goes over how well you did (lol, as if they have the telemetry to accurately determine how well we do) and facts about the killer you faced.
There's so much they could do to encourage new players to dig deeper.
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You saved me a post. Well said.
It's also quite telling that DbD Mobile has a bots mode to practice in, and yet the main game is looking more and more like it's being run by the junior varsity dev team by comparison.
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Your talking points are pretty spot-on. I've been playing for about three or four months now, and sadly if it wasn't for streamers I would have no idea how to play this game. The poor excuse of a tutorial doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of everything that can be done in this game. I personally don't understand how the mobile version managed to get a practice mode within a few months of being released, and yet dead by daylight proper hasn't received one in over 4 years.
New players and veterans alike need a way to test out mechanics without being expected to compete - especially new players! The last thing new players should have to do is be expected to compete against people far more experienced than them when they're just trying to learn the ropes.
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But there is a tutorial actually...
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There's so much truth found in this post. Many long time players have brought up these issues found within context of op.
Ultimately, BHVR has put more time and effort into their subpar community management than play testing. This monster is showing it's gums and teeth through this post.
BHVR is a business and it will always try to save money, but the sorely missing dedicated playtesting roles are still squashed under the rug, along with some with other swept up shtuff. These kinds of issues are going to keep happening without a paid dedicated PLAYTESTER employee, unfortunately.
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There sure is. If that joke counts as a tutorial, I'm to open a culinary school. I'll never have to attend because I can just put a sign up that says "make good food" and people will come to defend it as proper instruction.
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I came here to say there's a tutorial as well. I'm new (read my previous posts) and the tutorial explained what I needed to do and why.
It doesnt go through looping specifically but most people expect if you're being chased you run so it's not really not intuitive.
I dunno maybe it's because I've been playing video games most of my life but the tutorial was good enough to get started. Maybe some advanced techniques to further the tutorial?
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Looping isn't running, though. There's so much more to looping than just running away. I doubt anyone who learned how to loop from the tutorial that doesn't teach you how to loop will be even a low-tier looper, they'll be the guy on the floor after 8 seconds, and then will spend the rest of the match crouchwalking around the edges of the map.
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"Holding a button on a gen, looping a killer" - These two right here are what a lot of killer mains sling as insult to the survivor side. I find this a tough topic on getting bored of it because if they make the mechanic to complex in a game where the killer is going to be monitoring gens, it could make it very difficult to get anything done in general. (I personally would love to see like a button sequence they have to press in a timed manner like multiple inputs or fail a skillcheck) They already had issues with the games difficulty (I felt it would be harder on PS4, Xbox, & Switch) in the guise of Hex Ruin before it's nerf/rework. As newer players would run into it a lot due to the absolute abysmal matchmaking. Giving them issues actually getting skillchecks done while still learning. That was the closest I can say they really got in terms of any kind of skill or focus necessary. It could potentially scare newer players away for the reason of being to difficult to learn.
" Killer felt really stressful in a majority of games." This is controversial as it varies person to person on their experience. A lot of killer mains will in fact say this, while a lot of survivor mains will say the opposite (Example: playing killer is not stressful because you are the presence on the map)
My take (*Huntress, Pig, Clown main) the game is only stressful if you care really badly about getting 4 kills. 2-3 Kills in my opinion is still a win. It's honestly about strategy and perk synergy to me. You sadly have to accept that a lot of the time in this game, 2 - 3 gens will be done within the first 3 minutes or so (You have to bring perks these days like Corrupt Intervention, etc in order to actually prevent this sometimes as it gives, at least me anyway, enough time to usually find a person or two and sometimes you can get a lot of mileage out of it.) - but again it varies from person to person.
Also....No tutorial? Yes there actually is. Albeit they do not force you to actually play it, moreso seek it out if you wish to understand the game a bit better. Even then, what you can takeaway from that is not exactly the most helpful as I feel it doesn't really teach you the essentials. This game doesn't really hold your hand. It kinda let's you figure it out on your own through trial and error.
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Someone above said it best.....the tutorial in game pretty much teaches you how to lose. Would be very nice if they added a practice mode like what mobile has. I think that would help out a ton of people coming in to the game.
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The whole thing sums up to, "It's to hard and I don't want to invest time". No one is going to be a god at dbd the first time they played it and watching someone else do it doesn't mean you could do the same. The best example would be too tier hi huntress gameplay. You watch the video and now you hope on dbd thinking you're about to clap cheeks only to get slammed. Also, the part where you say "when you try something new you're punished for it" is a big bruh moment. If your trying something NEW then of course you're gonna have problems learning to play it or against it. Looping as well has no guild and only experience could help you. Like damn man, we have people here who have over 2k hrs and STILL not know how to play dbd! All and all your post is simply a pissy fit on how you had a bad experience...
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for a new player there should be a bundle of like all or most of the OC killers and survivors for free in based game.
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Yeah honestly I lost all respect for devs, the game needed operation health desperately and instead they just introduce a very unique and original idea called the battle pass, nerf ruin, nerf billy which turned out to not be so much a nerf and just a waste of time and somehow ######### up the auras and they also somehow made the FPS unbearable on console. I'm like you and just lurk the forums hoping that any second behaviour will get their ######### together because I like the game a lot but it's hard to enjoy it currently.
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Yep. I wouldn't "mind" playing again, but at this stage I just can't excuse myself spending time in the game. Sad really.
I'll just get my PvP fix in Overwatch. Then Avengers launches next month, Cyberpunk 2077 in November, and (likely) Overwatch 2 in the Spring. I imagine that one will be somewhere around May 2021 since Overwatch originally launched in May 2016 and Blizzard has a thing for franchise dates. So, plenty on the horizon to keep me gaming. Just not with BHVR.
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Specifically for survivor he said there was no guide or tutorial for doing gens or “bones” or how to use lockers. If you look at the game manual for survivors it has all of these categories: How to win, Health States, Dying, Avoid Getting Detected, Detecting the killer, Skill checks, Repairing Generators, Altruistic Actions, Searching Chests, Sabotage and Cleansing, Cooperative actions, CHASES (Killer Speed, Vaults, Break line of sight, Pallets),The exit gates, Wiggling, Hooks and Sacrifice, Items and ad-ons and the hatch. The game manual for killers is also very helpful: How to Win, Patrolling Generators, Damaging Generators, Hunting: Loud Noises, Scratchmarks, Sounds of the Wild, Bloodstains, CHASES, Bloodlust, VAULTS AND PALLETS, Survivors Health states, Attacking, Interupts, Transporting a survivor, Hooks and sacrifices, Disabled hooks, The basement, The exit gates, Memento Mori, Powers and Add-ons, and survivor awareness. Not to mention that every killer has an in depth description of their power and how it works. To top it off, there is a overall game manual that covers every single mechanic from perks to status effects to the endgame colapse. It even explains how daily rituals and the shrine of secrets works. I agree that the tutorial itself is lacking and it would be great for it to be much more extensive, but the game manuals cover literally anything a new player could hope to learn about. This mans is saying that there is literally NOTHING that can help a new player to better understand the game. I’m pointing out that that it’s silly for him to say that there’s no sort of guide when there is this vast amount of knowledge right at his fingertips. The tutorials could be much better, but I suggest you check out the game manuals and I think you’ll find they’re quite extensive.
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The tutorial is really only good for the BP you get from completing it. It's pretty much like reading an interactive instruction book.
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I have no clue where the game manuals are and have never heard of them before. If they exist - great, but they need to be easily find-able by players. All the resources I have found are player-made, please tell me where this is so I can actually find it.
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It's fine to be hard, many other games are difficult despite watching top level game-play, but DBD has no training tool or anything of the sort to allow you to improve. I'm fine with not being a top player, but I'd like to try a new killer/play-style without being stomped by red ranks or play one of my usual killers and not face rank 20's as an example. It's not that trying new things shouldn't be hard but the game/matchmaking makes it so much more frustrating to do (including bad teammates, face-camping killers, SWF groups, etc). The entire point about people with 2 thousand hours in the game still not knowing how to play is an example of my earlier point, the game doesn't give you enough tools and feedback to actually help those players improve, despite the time they have invested. You can call my experience whatever you like, but my thoughts have been echoed by others in this post and hopefully it lets others know these are some of the major reasons why DBD does not keep a good deal of new players.
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For sure, and I hope I didn't come across as snobby! Admittedly I don't remember what the UI looks like in order to get to the tutorial, so I can understand if it needs improvement.
In regard to all of your other concerns, I hope the devs take note for new players and veterans alike :)
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