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Competitive or Fun

I'm curious how other players view DBD.

Considering how imbalanced each game can be, maps can favor one side over the other, certain Killer, add-on and perk combos are completely broken and, the wide desparity between levels of play that matchmaking fails to separate, I don't see how anyone can sit down to play DBD for anything more than a bit of fun.

In actual tournament settings the organizers have to set specififc standards to try to midigate these factors. Using only Yellow add-ons, choosing specific moderate maps and Survivor teams planning synergy in perks, specific roles and style of play. All of these moderating factors are non-existant in a normal game of DBD.

I'm Survivor main and, I mostly play solo, sometimes with friends if they happen to be on but, we certainly don't meta-game. Yet, we constantly face sweaty Killers who decide to use the most oppressive, broken set ups to destroy the team as quickly as possible and make use of all manner of not fun tactics such as slugging, camping, tunneling, ect. to secure a 4K.

It seems to me that a majority of Killer mains take the game seriously competively, while the Survivors are goofing around, dropping hooks, doing challenges and sand-bagging eachother, lol.

I know my experience is Survivor biased but, I can honestly say, I don't play to "win", I play for fun.

Comments

  • pseudechis
    pseudechis Member Posts: 3,904

    Fun is subjective, competitive and fun can go hand in hand.

    Problem is competitive and sore loser often also go hand in hand.

    I prefer an immersive game that feels like a horror film being played out over a competitive game of loopy loop, but I'm not going to denigrate anyone who likes the opposite.

    What kills the fun of this game is not competitive play, but the "I only have fun if I win" attitude. Those players know who they are and nobody wants to play with them but sadly you often have to because its an online game.

    Fingers crossed for custom game bots as we don't always have a group to play kill your friends with.

    Some evenings the cry baby sore losers are out in force, resulting in a string of matches against people you really would not play with under any other circumstances than being forced to by online MM.

  • Friendly_Blendette
    Friendly_Blendette Member Posts: 2,923

    People can have fun by slugging everyone to death then watching them rage in the endgame chat and other people have fun by trying to find spots to space billy off and completely ignoring survivors. Fun is entirely subjective.

  • humanbeing1704
    humanbeing1704 Member Posts: 8,999

    I only 100% always play in mind to have fun and not really care I never play competitively in any multiplayer video game

  • Junylar
    Junylar Member Posts: 2,005

    Is that why they implemented DC penalties, like in CS:GO, DOTA and competitive mode of TF2? I'd like to remind you there are no DC penalties in non-competitive game modes.

  • Carth
    Carth Member Posts: 1,182

    Never understood this line of thinking. Why do we have exhaustion then? Or people dying on hooks? Why can't killers just knock people down in one hit and you just get more blood points for hooking more people? Surely that wouldd be more fun, no more worrying about tunneling or camping and now you can sprint burst 24/7. Killers should move at 200% move speed cause that would be fun The games not competitive so it should be fine right?

  • JimboMason
    JimboMason Member Posts: 759

    Competitive aspect does not equal balanced gameplay. The things that you mentioned are features of the game, you literally are proving nothing

  • JimboMason
    JimboMason Member Posts: 759

    Yes cause one minor feature dictates that a game is part of a certain aspect. The reason why the DC penalties exist are to punish people for ruining others experiences. You prove nothing.

  • TheMadCat
    TheMadCat Member Posts: 2,203

    Exactly. Something fun for someone isn't fun for someone else.

    And being competitive doesn't mean excluding fun.

  • unluckycombo
    unluckycombo Member Posts: 582

    'Fun' is subjective, 100%.

    As Orion said, it's not like this is a 'One or the other' situation- I mean, there are plenty of comp games that I would describe as 'Fun' with how many hours I have invested in them. (I might not be great in Overwatch, but that didn't stop me from sinking nearly 2k hours into the game and playing a lot of comp back in the day.)

    However, I think the issue that plagues this game worse then others is just the mindset around PUBs. If you go into a match expecting a competitive experience (Because we have those pretty useless rank numbers) and you just stomp on random memers on either side, you're probably going to be disappointed in some way. The same can happen in reverse- playing a meme-y build for laughs and getting put against someone/some group who is treating it like a comp experience, and it feels awful.

    And to add to this, there seems to be a distinct lack of seperation on where people should play certain styles. I've always thought that Comp-style play should be kept to KYF, since that's what Tournaments use and allows for consistent practice. On the flip side, I've had people tell me that if you wanna play casually, you should play in KYF- so everyone has different ideas on how do do things. Mix this with the lack of a true win condition, and it's a complicated mess.

    With that being said, I have a hard time taking the comp side of things seriously because of how unbalanced it is. Solo is so weak it's not even funny, 4man SWFs have the potential to destroy everything, and Killer add-ons go from being disgustingly OP to absolutely awful with practically no rhyme or reason.

    Imho, the game either needs a dedicated comp mode or the community needs to kinda come together to make a better distinction between where the two should be played. I think just that alone would really help the game's community out. I've always been a believer of people being able to choose their own gameplay experience, and the fact that everyone is forced into one queue with no separation causes a lot of frustration for everyone tbh. Even something as simple as more community support for comp-specific groups would help imho.

  • grayon444
    grayon444 Member Posts: 757

    Depends.

    When i wanna sweat.I will sweat.

    When i wanna play for fun.I play for fun.

  • Volcz
    Volcz Member Posts: 1,185
    edited August 2021

    DbD is a casual game but just because its a casual game, doesn't mean it can't be competitive for people. Fun is defined by each person differently. Some people enjoy the tryhard aspect of it and hate the goofing around, while others are the exact opposite. Its really up to the person playing.

    I personally find the game more fun when I'm trying to win but so is the killer/survivors I go against. So I guess I would fall under the 'competitive' category even though this is a pretty casual game that comes with a lot of frustration.

    Its not a BR where you have to rely on mechanical skill (for the most part) or a game like Dota/LoL.

  • DragonMasterDarren
    DragonMasterDarren Member Posts: 2,850
    edited August 2021

    There are 3 types of “fun” I generally see, Casual fun, Competitive fun, and crybaby fun


    i am much more of a casual person due to the game’s, quite frankly, hilarious idea of balance but I can see why someone would want this game to be more serious, however I am hesitant about any changes made to the game that try to make it more competitive due to one simple thing, TF2’s Meet Your Match update.

    For those of you who have no idea what I mean, MYM was basically the devs asking a stupidly loud vocal minority what they wanted out of TF2, and then proceeding to dump all of their suggested balancing changes onto weapons that were completely fine and screwing over the matchmaking system all for the sake of appeasing the comp players, who didn’t care and just went back to playing their own versions of the game that had existed for years at that point

    i don’t want a DBD version of Meet Your Match, which is one of several reasons why I don’t want stuff typically reserved for competitive games added to this one (*coughMMRcough*),

    If te devs wanted to add a competitive mode with it’s own restrictions and rule set, fine by me, but don’t dump whatever changes said rule set would make onto everybody else

  • fogdonkey
    fogdonkey Member Posts: 1,567

    For me usually fun = competitive.

    What does it even mean to play not competitively? Try to farm and cooperate with the other side? Joke around?

  • Kalinikta
    Kalinikta Member Posts: 709

    Since when did meaning trying to win a game equate to not having fun?

    The query is biased and totally misleading. Just because you play to lose? Don't you try and win? Most people enjoy winning when they play a game and there is nothing wrong with that!

    Don't be a bad winner or loser, but to judge people on trying to do their best and win... to claim they aren't trying to have fun is complete bogus.

  • bjorksnas
    bjorksnas Member Posts: 5,621

    Yes but in competitive games fun usually takes the backseat in favor of skill based gameplay first and fun as a more secondary objective.

  • Zomboid81
    Zomboid81 Member Posts: 9

    The question I think you are asking is whether I view DBD as a competitive or a casual game. With the current trend of recent killers and my usual playstyle, I view DBD as a more competitive game than it was. That being said, the overall balance of the game and general attitude of a lot of the playerbase indicates the opposite. What I have noticed, killers tend to treat this game more competitively while survivors tend to try and treat it more casually. I have played both sides and I generally play killer when I want to challenge myself and I play survivor when I want to chill and chat with friends. So to me DBD is more competitive, though a lot of other people tend to say the opposite.

  • Axx
    Axx Member Posts: 392

    I try to play well on both sides. On killer I want to 4k every game, so I will play to 4k. On survivor I want to win which for me is a pip, and a 3 or 4 man escape. I sweat as survivor and as killer. I usually solo so my sweating isn't really that impactful on survivor, but I still do try my best to do well for me and my team.

  • LordGlint
    LordGlint Member Posts: 8,554

    People get confused that competitive and fun is not opposites. If your idea of fun is memeing as opposed to trying to win, then MAYBE dont get into a match with strangers that arn't on the same page as you. Playing with your friends with mario party and treating it as a drinking game is obviously not in a competitive spirit and is clearly different than joining with random people over the internet for a game who have a drastically different mindset than that. If you want to toss away the competitive spirit entirely and play a DBD drinking game or something...KYFs is an option. Labeling the entire game as not competitive because you have discarded the competitive spirit is just kind of silly. Also labeling something as competitive or not based off the presence or lack of an Esports scene is also kind of silly.

    Either way though, you CAN be competitive while playing a game and still have fun.

  • Carth
    Carth Member Posts: 1,182

    My entire point is that where you draw that line? "Fun" is an arbitrary word that has no meaning, we can't derive it from stats, we can't use in-game evidence, and one persons definition of fun can be completely different from another persons. My entire problem with this word is that there are many people on this forum who argue for in game changes in the name of "fun" and dismiss other issues as "competitive issues" and they should be ignored thusly. E.G. Sprit/PH/Nemesis/DS/Huntress/Trapper/Hag/Myers are all "unfun" killers, they need to be changed due to this. High rank SWF/Survivors that can slam out gens in under 4 minutes? That's a balance problem and this game isn't competitive ergo we do not need to adresss it.

    "Fun" on these forums is a way to basically justify "my issue should be fixed, your issue however does not fall into the fun bucket and this game is not competitive ergo we don't need to make any kind of adjustments in that vein".

  • Orion
    Orion Member Posts: 21,675

    Again, they are not mutually exclusive concepts. For many people, "fun" is the skill-based gameplay.

  • TacitusKilgore
    TacitusKilgore Member Posts: 1,380

    DBD is not a competitive game and never should be. I respect people who try to play it competetively, but i don't like them for quite a few reasons. They tend not to be the best people, and have very poor ideas on how to balance the game. Imagine multiplying the psychopathy inducing gameplay of dbd you get just from playing it casually by 4. Thats comp.

  • Chocolate_Cosmos
    Chocolate_Cosmos Member Posts: 5,735

    This game has way too many RNG (luck) elements and many unbalanced things that being competetive in any serious way is impossible, unless you would set big rules for that mode to balance it a bit better (like allow only top 3 killers, ban some perks, play only few balanced maps, no keys, no mori, etc.).

  • NaigEtarip
    NaigEtarip Member Posts: 60

    All players' fun have equal value, as long as they play as intended.

    We all choose to play, to be exposed to posibilities that we might enjoy or not due to the design.

    Any player that wants a more adapted experience you should start thinking about either changing the game or become a game developer, attributing negative connotation over other players' playstyles feels like plain selfishness being honest.

  • Emeal
    Emeal Member Posts: 5,186

    No better way to put it.

  • Patrick1088
    Patrick1088 Member Posts: 628

    I'm a killer main but enjoy both (65/35) . I enjoy playing the builds i like (i.e. all seeing wraith with Hex:DH, Scratched Mirror Myers, etc.). I just got to rank 10, and survivors are super sweaty in purple/red ranks. 15-11 were fun ranks as everybody was chill. But once I started seeing the higher ranks, matches became less fun. I try not get flustered, but I had a Meg troll me the entire time. They were rank 4 and tried to bait chases, flashlight clicking, etc.. When I finally downed her I actually gave a little smack on hook and then tunneled her out when her teammates hook bombed.

    Needless to say, I wouldn't have done that if they had played normally without the extra actions.

    I think some killers are sweaty, but I think survivors are more sweaty in general. It could be due to them having to wait a longer time for potentially less BP.

  • awustzdn
    awustzdn Member Posts: 320

    Neither. It's a BP farming simulator designed to maximize player retention via sunk-cost fallacy and the tiny glimmer of hope that someday you'll have enough BP to have all perks on the characters you want and a large stockpile of items/add-ons to run any build you want, which most people never will. It's far too imbalanced to be played to be competitive, and far too stale (and infuriating, depending on how a match goes) to be played for fun.

  • bjorksnas
    bjorksnas Member Posts: 5,621
    edited August 2021

    Yes they are not mutually exclusive however that doesn't mean they are the same types of fun that people enjoy. The majority of the fun in skill based games is first centered around skill based gameplay before the focusing on more general fun aka skill based play (which can be seen as fun / its own reward) takes priority over more classical fun that you see in games that put fun first. This does create a differing approach then what you would see in a non competitive game like zelda, or mario games which instead have their focus on fun first. I am not disagreeing with you that they are not mutually exclusive but they are different within their own category of how they approach "fun".

  • Razorbeam
    Razorbeam Member Posts: 594

    Plenty of highly competitive games can be based purely on rng, I'm not sure where this idea of rng negating competition came from but it's really bizarre. Dbd is a game about trying to stack the rng in your favor ( items, map offerings etc ) and then trying to win with the game as tipped in your favor as it can be, there's nothing uncompetitive about that formula. I would definitely concede though that it's much harder for the solo q survivor to be able to influence the rng enough to call it fair but a 4 man swf definitely evens it out.

    Sure to call DBD an esport is funny and redundant but it does ironically have one of the most important ingredients that any esport needs to be successful - it's very entertaining to watch, if you're game isn't entertaining to spectate and isn't easy for a random viewer to come into the stream and grasp what's happening your esport generally never takes off. What completely undoes this fact though is a 4 man comp swf plays so effiecntly that all entertainment factor is lost because even the best killers don't know how to counter how effective and boring playing the game at that level is.

    This game is filled with solo que survivors who play to climb, the odds are stacked against them and they are trying to use their skill and improve to reach rank 1, they are playing no less competitively than you do in any other game with a rank system to climb. Dbd is also a really fun group game to play with your friends and not care about rank and just have a lot of fun no matter the skill level, both sides all exist in the same que and neither side is less valid.