Mental health tips for new players?

If this game is causing you to self harm don't play it. Seriously. There are an abundance of other games for you to play that don't have the toxicity that this game has.

Hello! I am currently in a master's program (But got a doctorate lined up) for communications with a focus on systematized exploitative systems. DBD, as a game I both enjoy and am familiar with, is frequently something I look at. I also sometimes struggle with mental health issues and copulsive behavior myself, and 'deconstructing' why something makes me feel bad but I still want to play it helps me 'escape' those things, or understand how I can feel less bad.

I hope by explaining this in very meticulous detail I can help you out, because its literally what I want to do with my life.

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Let me say right off the bat, DBD's dev cycle and core gameplay loop is VERY toxic in a way that I worry will affect vulnerable people, but in a different way than other exploitative or toxic developments do. It isn't like Fortnite where your getting kids to cyberbully each other and attach a lot of prestige to overpriced artificially limited skins that affects real world interactions and causing them to plunder their parent's cards for V-bucks, instead it solves the asymmetry problem in gaming in an amazingly cruel way.

See, most asymmetric competitive videogames don't work out because it sets the dev up for failure: it splits the player base, one side is more social than the other and is the 'many' and thus is economically attractive, the other is the 'power role' and is solo and thus isn't as economically lucrative but is the unique hook to draw people in to play it. Most games fail because its just not very fun to get clobbered by someone not playing by the same rules as you at all. Like most historical competitive asymmetric games have you ultimately playing the same game in the end, like Starcraft or League is 'fair' because everyone is playing by similar rules and just has different quirks, but heavily asymmetric games tend to fail because either the many doesn't stick around and the game can't grow, or the few don't stick around and the many can't find games and are forced to play the less fun role and thus don't stay.

DBD 'solves' this by doing a few things to condition you to develop an attachment to it in a way that can become very unhealthy. For example? They let the killer absolutely dominate at low low low ranks. This causes your first few killer games to be easy and feel great, before you gradually get lowered down in ranks and find harder and harder players prevents you from instantly realizing the game's design isn't at all about feeling like a powerful killer but instead creating a situation where you gotta bust your ass to get anything as a killer while systems are designed to make playing survivor feel fun, easy, and powerful, and to derive pleasure and enjoyment from essentially cyberbullying someone else (which the devs pretty actively lean into as a selling feature of the game). Survivors don't REALLY want competitive DBD, they want an Ochido (An old member of the streaming community who was FAMOUSLY TOXIC and basically helped sell the game as 'be mean and frustrate someone to no end' as a selling feature) simulator, which causes them to recruit 3 friends to play, who then go on to recruit more friends, and so on. As a bonus, because survivors are more social, they tend to care more about cosmetics, meaning they are more monetizable twice over.

This is why at high ranks survivors outnumber killers by ridiculous margins. At some points in time survivor Qs hit 30 minutes, while killer was at 5 seconds. This meant for every 4 survivors finding a lobby 360 killers found one at that rank, which is uhh... huge, as it means at high ranks at those timeslots there are around 1500 times more survivors than killers. This sounds real bad but as long as the Qs aren't so long survivors quit this is ideal, the devs financially want to stuff as many survivors into the game per-killer as possible. Again, killers are infastructure, survivors are your actual userbase buying content.

The devs work REALLY hard to maintain this dynamic. End Game Collapse is a good example. DBD had a problem where it was a bit 'too much' for survivors to bully the killer by forcing them to run each of them out of the gate one at a time over 4 seperate 2 minute long minimum chases back when the survivors had infinite time to leave. Killers wanted a surrender button, a way to elegantly end a match when it was clear they were getting trashed. However, instead of implementing this relatively simple system, the devs delayed for quite a while in solving this problem because part of the selling feature to the most financially important segment of the playerbase was teabagging at the gate and gloating about your win, forcing the killer to participate in their own loss.

So instead of adding this surrender button, they gave themselves a lot more work creating the end game collapse, which by design didn't let the killer end the game ellegantly even if they used the 'just ######### end it' option: even after opening a gate you had 2 minutes of survivors being able to run around and gloat, because, again, abusive behavior is a key selling feature.

You won't notice this unless your trained to look or you get thrust down in ranks too fast, or if your vulnerable to it and the experience makes you feel so awful its harmful. This is why mid tier killers stick it out: the good games give juuuust enough of a dopamine hit to make them want to stay even though most games stink. Bad survivors stay because the social aspect helps them endure and losing as a solo survivor hurts way less because you just get booted out of the game and find a new one right quick. The game is... fun for killer if your a real ace, but then because the survivor community is deliberately toxic you get verbally abused for using any strategy that works well in this game. Oh, and bonus points for BHVR not using even the most basic 'anti-toxicity' chat filters or automated bans like is industry standard by now, its wild the game has a more toxic community than Dota, almost as if berating the killer at the end of the game is a feature, weird.

Unlike other methods of exploitatively manipulating the psychology of your playerbase, your not targeting vulnerable people. Fortnite WANTS kids who are uniquely anxious about their social status among their peers and prestige to FREAK OUT and buy 600 dollars worth of V-bucks. But DBD doesn't want you to freak out, your just an 'accident' caused by the pressure cooker being a bit too high for you, and your baseline mental state not being ideal. So its... better in that way I guess? Still scummy and gross.

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At the end of the day, its a game. Any transient fun you get from the fun parts offsets the low parts of the game, sure, that is how gamestates and gameplay loops work. But that clearly isn't happening for you.

While I enjoy DBD because I play solo survivor so the fun for me there is challenge rather than being a dick with my friends, and am a good enough killer that the toxic elements don't really work on me, I would never recommend this game to anyone. I don't know if it would affect them like its affecting you.

If you find the joy of striving to be better worthwhile and enjoyable in of itself, of losing itself to be fun, recontextualize the ######### elements as challenges to overcome. If your in a mental state where severe downswings in your control over the game is fine, and you smile when you see someone being a cocky dick and just strive to make THEM look like an idiot so you can humiliate them in turn and flip the script, killer on DBD is fun (Sometimes I pretend to be a bad nurse before going nutso with Devour hope, for example~), and its a worthwhile game.

But if a bad turn of events in DBD is so upsetting (and, again, its DESIGNED TO BE MAXIMALLY UPSETTING to be bodyblocked, or flashlight saved, or whatever. Part of the point is the survivors know how AWFUL it feels as a killer even though they indeed are 'supposed' to do it and its 'fair' and there are ways to avoid it) that your just feeling miserable most games, don't keep playing to chase the good games.

That is a skinnerbox. That is addictive behavior. Recognize that your trying to chase a high and that your hurting yourself to do it, and walk away.

PS: To be clear, I don't think every survivor is toxic, and I don't think its 'toxic' to use the tools you are given, even if they are designed to be as infuriating as possible. But pretending DBD is not economically built on being complete ######### to each other is self-delusion. Both sides have stuff to be upset about in the game's design, but holy crap lets not pretend the Devs aren't doing things to encourage you to be mean to people.

It helps that I am basically aiming for a doctorate in 'Anti-human design' so I have a better vocabulary for it and thus can notice elements of it easier.

Also, to be extra clear because I left this out:

It is highly unlikely a lot of this is deliberately, maliciously planned by BHVR. No one chooses to be a supervillain who cackles saying "That .5% of our playerbase that is vulnerable to intrusive thoughts of worthlessness and shame are an acceptable cost to keeping our poor stupid killers around while catering to survivors."

This sorta thing happens because of economic incentives, its a gradual slide. Part of why DBD survived while other asymetric games don't is because it happened quite a bit by bit, as an accident, rather than launching as a killer bully sim and never getting a stable killer main population. I mean back in DA DAY of the the beta, Trapper could outright trap the only unhook spot, it was a lot more 'even' in ways to be a jerk and survivors had to be a bit more spooked (Until they discovered some infinites, whoops!).

Things 'slid' here, they didn't start here, and people didn't choose to be here. They just made choices that over time resulted in this being the economic model for the game. Little, innocent things like "Well having that final run out is fun and the game suddenly ending because the killer gave up would be anti-climactic' which are true but also conceal something darker behind these choices.

The people at BHVR seem like nice people, and I am super glad this kinda outfit that made a game they are clearly passionate about found massive success, its very rare and in some ways we are lucky this 'indy' game is one of the most popular games on steam, period.

Its just that the space for 'human friendly' design is vastly, VASTLY smaller than designs that are anti-human. And if your going along blind just following what makes you succesful without an overarching 'top down' view your going to end up in a toxic space because maximization tends to be the way to do that.

DBD sorta was shaped by an evolutionary algorithm that tries to maximize paying customers in the ecosystem without completely burning out killers, which results in trying to maximize survivor count at pretty much any cost to the killer play experience that doesn't cause them to quit to the point that survivors can't find games, and maximization algorithms pretty much INEVITABLY create deeply troubling and anti-human designs.