The BotB tournament highlights why this game will probably never be an esport.

Watching Hexy's tournament really showed just how far away this game is from being an esport, and in my opinion, why it never will be one.

The first issue is one that affects us casuals as well; the sheer volume of bugs. The entire upper and lower bracket as well as the finals have been heavily impacted by bugs. These are simply things you can't plan around or realistically adjust gameplay for. Spirit has not footsteps, DS only stunning specific killers for 2 seconds, survivors unable to be hooked without multiple attempts, the plethora of issues they had just loading into KYF, the hill bug being present in the round of 16. Dead by Daylight patches are consistent, but unfortunately it's because they're consistently buggy. We never have a patch that goes through without bringing several significant bugs.

Then there's how abandoned the spectator function is. Every Bo3 was impacted because the hosts can't spectate Spirit without triggering their vertigo, and they can't spectate Pyramid Head because the camera is inside his helmet. A game can't be considered ready for real competition while the devs care so little for the idea that they don't even check that spectating works. In addition to the most basic camera actually working, it would be incredible to include a birds-eye-view camera over the killer to get a better look at looping as it happens without switching between the two players.

However, I don't think the only issue is the actual infrastructure and maintenance of the game. The dynamic of the game makes it incredibly difficult to run a successful tournament.

Firstly, the killers. The brackets were really excellent to watch, because within them each team could only pick a given killer once. However today's finals were an absolute boring letdown when every 95% of matches were Nurse or Spirit. Obviously they're the 2 strongest killers, but watching one tournament has been enough Nurse and Spirit for me for about a good year or two. How do you possible put rules around that? Restrict the number of uses of a given killer over the whole tournament mayve? No more than 3 repeats for the team? Perhaps.

But then comes the scoring, and I really don't want to be harsh here because I know they tried really hard to make it fair, and not overly reward slugging or camping, but the flaws were seriously apparent.

For those who did not pay attention to the tournament, survivors scored 2 points per gen and per escape, totalling 18, killer scored 1 point per hook and per kill, totalling 16. Seems good to begin with.

Tournament Spoilers ahead.

However the survivors did not rely on unhooks to score points at all. The killer's points entirely hinge on the survivors choice to unhook or not. In the loser's bracket final, we saw a team win with the absolute scummiest play possible, choosing to throw the match and leave people to die on their first hook so the killer could not possibly get enough hooks to match their killer score. The worst part was they only switched to that tactic once it was clear that they WERE about to be beaten. I understand, it was their only way to win, and to have a shot at the grand prize, but if they were going to be that filthy about it they may as well have run at the killer at the start and suicided to prevent them winning. Personally I'm most annoyed about this because the killer they eliminated was Otz, and I'm not a fanboy or anything, but he was the only person coming into the tournament who was going out of his way to be interesting and dominated on some less seen killers like Wraith and Plague.

End spoilers.

So on top of only seeing the same killers played over and over again, any strong add ons were also banned. It meant every Nurse was running double blink recharge. Every Spirit was using some combination of minor stat boosts. A game is not adequate to be a real competition if everything even slightly interesting has to be banned out. By all means, ban out certain game-breaking ultra rares like iridescent heads, or Myers' insta-moris, but everything that could have made a Nurse match interesting or unique in any way being banned out sucked. And sadly they may be right in doing so to have a 'fair' match.

TLDR: The game isn't balanced around competition. The game is certainly not balanced around watching competitive teams play 50 matches back to back unless you like seeing the same killers running the same strats over and over. Even with pages of rules and elaborate scoring systems, they were still incredibly exploitable in ways that ruined the enjoyment of the tournament as a whole for some people.