Dbd and whataboutism
Continuing my tradition of writing forums where I complain about the community late at night, I wanna talk about whataboutism, because it's incredibly common amongst the community. For anyone that doesn't know what whataboutism is, here's the definition on wikipedia:
Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument.
I'm not going to make an extended research on how to define whataboutism, please spare me.
Now, there are a lot of whataboutism examples in the forums, let me give some of my favorites:
Ds/OoO gets nerfed? WHAT ABOUT NOED?
Moris got nerfed? WHAT ABOUT KEYS?
Undying got nerfed? WHAT ABOUT UNBREAKABLE
The list goes on. But why does it appear so frequently on the dbd community? The answer is obvious. You see, the community is split to mostly survivor and killer mains, with hybrids like me being a minority, but because we're a minority we're often mistaken as survivor mains if we defend a survivor viewpoint and vise versa for killer. This causes one side to feel like they always get the short end of the stick, they feel that the game balancing is unfair and assist the other group more. So when they try to defend their ground on what they believe is balanced, even if it's not, since their arguments aren't entirely reasonable they proceed to whataboutism, in the form that x needs to be fixed before nerfing what I protec. The answer "one step at the time" isn't fulfilling to them at all, so they demand x to be changed before the devs even THINK of nerfing what they protec. If the nerf hits the live servers, they normally proceed to do one of the following: argue that the devs care about the other half of the community, proceeding to whataboutism to prove their points instead of actual evidence, quitting the game and making a forum post about it or moving on with their lives. And I gotta say, I'm no innocent here. I've proceeded to whataboutism as well in the past, and complained in the forums, but since the game moves forward, it's the best for me to move forward as well.
So why do I make this forum? Since it's a common tactic amongst the community, and it seems to work, it could be difficult to explain to everyone why what they do doesn't prove their points. Dunno, it sounds like an interesting discussion point and I just wanted to point out an observation.
Here's a donut for your trouble 🍩. Comment your opinion below, or cute puppy pictures. Both of them are acceptable.
Comments
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The doodle is tired, he needs NOED to be changed so he can sleep
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I was gonna post a puppy, but my internet sucks i guess ;-;
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I agree with your final point, but not on what you said earlier. Ds is a pain to balance and the nerf that it received actually hurts, since people still complain in the forums and will shift the entire meta. Did it take em a while? Yes. But I feel it's harsher than undying, in my opinion. Keys will be nerfed in the future because they said that changing moris is just a few adjustments to some numbers, the key nerf is a complete overhaul. If they wanted to release a patch where both get nerfed/reworked, it'd take em longer and the community outrage would still remain. So imo they didn't do anything wrong, but they did move slow
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Here is a cute kitten instead
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I specifically said puppies, but since you're one of my kind I can accept your offering.
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I can only agree. Too many of my posts on this forum have been trying to cool down survivor and killer partisans circlejerking about how bad the (mostly good, usually) new changes are for their preferred side. I just want to go back to looking into interesting questions, making bad jokes, and complaining about Deathslinger :(
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Honestly, I think one of the main issues is the lack of people that play both roles. I’m not going to lie, when I used to just be a survivor main I always thought that certain killer tactics and perks were so ‘scummy’ until I actually started playing killer and realised how much more stressful it can be and combining that with the amount of survivors that’ll just try to annoy you, I then realised why so many killers play the way they do.
This is also the same for the survivor role, especially for those of us that play solo. Solo life for a survivor can at times, be miserable and when you only play killer you can get into the mindset that “Survivor toxic. Must die.” When a lot of us are just trying to play the game and aren’t out to screw you over.
Some people also complain because they like being able to exploit certain perks and they don’t care about things being fair. Let’s face it, there’s nothing fair about a survivor being able to sit on a generator whilst still having DS active. You don’t need it active if you’ve got time to do your objectives. It’s just logic. But unfortunately logic is a thing very few gamers use.
I once had a survivor say he’s reporting me because I slugged him and his friend and that’s a bannable offence (LMAO) - the best thing to do, is just not try to understand these people. It’s like with racists and homophobes, you’ll honestly be better off talking to a wall. Don’t waste your time trying to understand stupidity.
Also: Doggy Krueger
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There are 3 things I think you're missing from this analysis.
1. Pointing out hypocrisy is valid as long as the other person is making some form of moral appeal. Ex: this is boring, unfun, oppressive, we need to help new killers/survivors, etc.
2. If you make a separate discussion with the topic being expressly about comparing the treatment of 2 similar perks and wanting them to be treated the same, it is not whataboutism.
3. You're supposed to use your knowledge of logical fallacies to improve your own arguments not to brandish as a weapon in discussions.
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I'm not entirely convinced of this, but I presume it's true.
I would argue that it's a valid argument in some cases. In a situation where you have only 2 opposed parties, it's fair to point out inconsistencies.
You shouldn't be talking about nerfing my best perks if you have converse versions of said perks. The symmentrical juxtaposition makes this argument sound as one side is expected to be able to counter the other.
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Alright, first of all:
da puppy
Second of all, I love hybrid players like you. You guys almost always have a balanced viewpoint and are generally willing and able to give accurate reports of the current balance and meta on both sides.
I honestly don't play survivor because I only get one to two hours a night to play DBD, but I would love play both if the wait times were shorter.
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I still disagree, ruin was still meta without undying, the combo just made it popular. Pop was still an extremely good alternative. Many killer mains just think that it's impossible to apply pressure without the undying rng combo, but it was possible before the addition of undying.
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I've been part of whataboutism but it try not to. But if something needs nerfing I'm just gonna say it, and I usually refer to the other side's equivalent of whatever I'm talking about. I'll just be glad that after moris AND keys have been nerfed, we won't have to compare them or even talk about them anymore.
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The game was fine before undying was implemented, meaning that it's not necessary in every build. When it got released people just ran it alongside tinkerer and it was extremely hard to counter this combo. You cleanse a hex, right? Now it's 50/50 if it's undying. If it was undying you gotta search for the hex ruin and you were fine. But, if it wasn't you had to search for another totem and cleanse it, which would in turn be another 50/50. Now, undying is basically a second chance for the totem. If you failed to protect it once, now you have one more chance. The brainless mechanic of equipping it and not having to worry about ruin is now gone. So, undying requires a lot more skill to use, and the rng factor isn't that significant. Personally, I believe that every change that removes or minimizes rng is a good change.
So, what they plan to do for ds? They plan to make it a flat anti-tunneling perk. If you progress the game by any means, this usually means that you're not tunneled. This removes the safety factor on the survivor side, and the annoying factor on the killer side. The survivors can't progress through the game and then hop in a locker if the killer wants to stop them, and the killers will be punished for tunneling someone.
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Correct, but hexes were designed to be high risk high reward perks, with some minor exceptions like retribution and haunted. Devour hope is the best example, it was designed as a gamechanger, based on rng. Undying took the high risk and threw it off a window because you didn't have to worry about, most, of your hexes getting destroyed. New undying simply gives a second chance on the hexes, its more of a, medium risk exceptional reward
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Well the issue I think is that undying revealed something is rotten in killerville.
Mainly, 'High risk, high reward perks' actually... don't make sense unless the reward is so overwhelming it basically wins you the game, and that killers aren't innately rewarded enough for winning chases.
I do think undying should be nerfed because it is just too critical and oppressive. But we should also look at WHY it was so in demand and what holes the killer base kit has, and re-evaluate the existence and purpose of hex perks when most are just too inconsistent to bother with despite the theoretically insanely high payoff.
Also, I don't agree that Keys vs Moris is a whataboutism. A whataboutism is when you point to an unrelated issue, but Keys and Moris are pretty linked both in the community mindset and in what they do to the game, in a way that say... DS vs NOED aren't (People like to pretend they are, but NOED is actually trying to do something very complicated and nuanced and fails at it pretty hard while DS was just a blunt tool that was VERY successful).
Specifically, both are alterations to the core objective of the game that cut it short in a way that so radically alters the win condition as to make the game almost unrecognizable. And, weirdly, keys are WORSE because while they don't help YOU win, they basically ensure the killer loses. And culturally taking a key was 'balanced' by the killers busting out moris for them. So saying 'Hey, these two things are pretty equivalently awful for the game, and the main reason to not do this awful thing was just removed, but you didn't remove the awful thing' is a valid argument to make.
The other thing I don't think is 'whataboutism' is trying to address fundemental ways the community can be treated differently. If killers want to say Undying SHOULDN'T be nerfed because of NOED, that is silly. But if killers want to say 'It is absolutely insane that Undying was nerfed basically one chapter after it was introduced while NOED has been broken for 3 years and the devs just do not care and tend to place MUCH less urgency on addressing any major killer QOL stuff" I would say... "Yep, I literally have done studies on the toxic development cycle of DBD, way to spot the problem!" People shoulda noticed this the second they 'tested a bloodlust removal' or removed moris without warning but left keys in so killers would see endless keys: Survivors get communication and rapid response, killers get bones thrown to them after its clear the population will die off if they don't get some appeasement.
That said I DO agree the 'whataboutism' is a huge problem overall, despite those caveats. Its actually pretty immature to say 'someone else got something, where is MY something?' Sometimes, changes occur based on need. You don't need to be 'given' jack ######### in order for a needed change to go through. Undying nerf, machinegun nerf, MoM nerf, whatever. All of those things were bad for the game and its completely legitimate to remove them without offering something in return. As a developer its SMART to try to offer token buffs when things are nerfed, and its really actually kinda silly BHVR will create entirely 'one sided' changelogs so constantly, but it isn't 'unjust' that Undying, a perk that basically could lock survivors out of the game, got nerfed.
That said this is a logical argument to an issue that has become emotional because, again, DBD has a pretty overtly toxic dev cycle, and people struggle to articulate that, so instead they go for the more easy argument about balance, rather than looking at large scale behavior patterns like styles of communication that people notice but don't have good language to address.
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There isn't a lot of Whataboutism on this forum.
There are just a lot people who have can't refute the other player so they just shout Whataboutism as if that automatically wins anything.
Most people who for instance don't want nerfs to DS will not just say "what about NoEd?" they will also talk about why DS is fine. This ridiculous practice of playing the "Whataboutism" card here on this forum gets really old.
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That #3 really.
People like to point out Logical Fallaies like they're so smart and like it means anything. it doesn't. When it comes to making an argument what matters are your arguments.
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Logical fallacies are a part of the argument, though. It's not impossible to arrive at a correct conclusion based on faulty premises (I'm sure everyone's seen two mistakes that cancelled themselves out in math, for example), but the presence of fallacies does make the argument suspect.
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There are two ways to apply pressure and killers designed for either one, kill pressure (many hooks= all survivors being busy) and slowdown (perks like sloppy designed to slow survivor actions or regress their progress). The nurse belongs in the first category, if she's good she won't need a build dedicated to slowdown. The pig, on the other hand, belongs in the other category since her power and playstyle is designed to slow or sabotage survivor actions. Basically, if you're good you don't need a full slowdown build.
Undying removed the rng completely and ruin is actually pretty significant. The double regression hurts and even if the killer chases you for 30 seconds or so without hitting you, the gen lost a lot of progress.
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First of all, I went through the whole comment but not a single puppy picture or cookie for my effort. Disappointed.
Secondly, I disagree that the devs focus the survivor side first. It was explained why keys will be nerfed later. If you actually go through the patch notes, there is a lot of back and forth between a survivor sided patch and a killer sided patch. Allow me to explain.
The undying nerf was first, now we will have the OoO and ds change. Spirit was nerfed but so did metal of man. For each major survivor sided change, there's always a killer sided change waiting around the corner and vise versa.
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Sitting on hypocrisy, I think this is more of a streamer problem than the basic community. As you said, most people in the community main one side, and never play the other. Streamers on the other hand tend to play both sides, and they complain about things that they themselves do or use. Tru3 with Dead Hard; Otz with Soul Guard and Unbreakable; Jaee with pretty much every second chance perk. As much as it pains me to say it, our favorite content creators aren't squeaky clean either.
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Whataboutism isn't even about maining specific side, it's rather about selfish people who are trying to justify something broken, because something else is broken. They don't realize it makes things more complicated and thus never come to conclusion. But expecting from this community to have logical reasoning and actually come up with a solution is a very ambitious goal.
Maybe there's an alternate universe, where WE as a community can unite and discuss one problem at a time.
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There's also the fact that some things are connected, and recognizing that is not "whataboutism".
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That is correct, however trying to fix all at once is still wrong approach, it should be done gradually.
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