Teaching My friend Dead By Daylight! OH NO!!!

So me and another friend of mine have gotten one of our friends into DBD. Yeah? except by watching him play and letting him learn the game on his own, its shown some issues for the new player friendliness this game lacks. He's played a total of 10 matches so far. in order he has faced a Deathslinger, Clown, Freddy, Spirit, Pig, Ghostface, Pyramid Head, Wraith, Spirit, and finally a Deathslinger.

I bring this up because his number one frustration so far is that he feels like the rules keep changing. Now you and I both know how the game goes and how all the killers differ a bit. Yet for him it feels like as soon as he starts to understand a bit of how the regular gameplay loop is suppose to go he faces a killer he's never encountered before and becomes helpless because the tactics he self learned don't work like they previously did. He also is bombarded with new information on the myriad of afflictions a survivor can encounter, different perk concepts, hex totems, end game collapse, undetectable, being grabbed from gens, general gameplay mechanics. It's a lot. He feels overwhelmed and frankly seems to be having a terrible time.

Another thing that is really hampering his time is the que times. his first 3 matches had 7 minute long wait times. He was gobsmacked as me and my other friend just scrolled through twitter and reddit as we waited for our regular que times.

There is a silver lining to this though, he had little victories like being able to do a generator without blowing it up, surviving for more than 30 seconds in a chase, he actually ran across the map to open the exit gate that my other buddy needed open as he was stuck in a loop with a noed killer getting them both out. he's getting better, little by little and he might keep playing.

This does bring up the topic though is how do new players get into this game without having friends there to help him learn. I started by myself but I started on and still main killer, by doing this I learned the game as a whole a lot easier than just popping in as survivor with little to no direction. The tutorial for this game is god awful for survivor, its barely better as killer but that's not saying much. The game has so many perks, killers, and maps that getting into the game now is so hard that I'm surprised new players stay. so how do we fix this, or at least how does BHVR make the game more friendly with brand new players? I frankly have no clue without making very significant and drastic changes to the game like perk and map consolidation into more manageable numbers but that's an unrealistic ask/project for BHVR. (for god sake there are 5 variations of badham preschool alone) Maybe with the new MMR introduced they can limit the amount of maps in the rotation pool but that wouldn't work for perks or killers.

With my friends experience and also watching popular streamers try out the game one thing is clear, this game has a lot of little rules in it that make the new player experience awful on both sides.