Last good update was a year ago
4.5.0 was in January 2021, it's when we got the new HUD, clown rework, wraith buff etc. Let's see what we have been getting since then:
4.6.0 - The Trickster, one of the worst designed killers in the game, still remaining as such.
4.7.0 - The Trickster is buffed and now it's impossible to suicide quickly (skillchecks): someone will still save you before you can go to the next game, forcing you to throw the game and seek the killer to finally end the suffering.
5.0.0 - RPD
5.1.0 - More Trickster buffs, that infamous Pallet Hit Validation (aka "they scream but don't take the hit")
5.2.0 - Escape Based Matchmaking
5.3.0 - Boons (5.3.1 - Dead Hard hit validation)
5.4.0 - Yet another anti-looping killer, The Artist. Not a disaster like the previous ones, but still can't call it "good", although not being a disaster is already good by modern DbD standards.
And we have the removal of Bubba's masks coming in the next update, a change nobody asked for.
So for the last year the game is gradually becoming worse, update after update. Not only that, but the devs don't even recognize their mistakes now: they screwed up with the Trickster - have some tweaks, no rework intended, they screwed up with RPD - deafening silence, they screwed up with EBMM - same. As if they completely changed their course after just a year ago.
Comments
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5.3.0 was much more than just boons, that's being incredibly reductive for the sake of a point. That update was very very good overall, even if the DLC that launched alongside it introduced a perk that causes balance issues- and, to be fair, one of the many many things in it was also done pretty poorly.
It's also worth mentioning that 5.0.0 also contained good things, not just RPD. 4.7.0 did too, in fact- specifically, the struggle phase skillchecks! Just because you or any other player has a tendency to get salty and want to leave the game without a disconnect penalty doesn't make them a bad addition.
Come on, man. You're being hyperbolic for a point, I get that, but it's so hyperbolic that it renders your point completely incoherent.
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Ok, by "good update" I meant "an update that didn't bring something horrible and generally hated alongside"
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Walking it back to a pretty different take there, then, aren't we? That still leaves 4.7.0, since Trickster buffs and the change to the struggle phase were good things.
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No walking back here, that is exactly what I meant.
The new struggling system makes it much harder to suicide, as I already said, which is not a good thing if you are stuck in a game you don't want to continue.
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Unless the conditions are that you're being camped, which means that you can't really be saved anyways in the first place, if you're killing yourself on hook because you don't like a killer or didn't loop for as long as you wanted is just you being a bad sport. Rarely does killing yourself on hook have a logical explanation. The only time I find it acceptable is when someone is trying to get their teammates to leave at the endgame so that the killer doesn't get extra kills they don't deserve.
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It's absolutely walking it back. There's a giant difference between a bad update and a very good update with bad things included, which is what 5.3.0 was.
Okay, great. It's still far easier on people's keyboards/controllers and far more accessible to people with repetitive strain injuries, arthritis, or any other physical health issue that makes jamming a button hard- as well as being much less annoying to deal with for everyone else. You can't spin an objectively good change into something bad just because it makes it harder to pout and leave a match early.
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Not really a big difference. If an updated adds Escape Based Matchmaking, this one feature ruins the whole update (and the game too), whatever good things it might have added alongside. If I could rollback this update as a whole, I would've gladly done so just to revert EBMM, without even caring what good the update could've had added, since no fix or "nice addition" is worth the disaster of EBMM.
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5.3.0 introduced less hate for Spirit so it's a net gain.
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That's great, but it doesn't change any of the other updates you mentioned that were a net positive. It's also a weird hill to die on since the emblem system was worse, but that's getting away from the point.
I'm not sure why some people are so dead set on making everything out to be doom and gloom all the time. Do you think it softens any criticism you want to make to acknowledge anything that's being done right, or something?
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I'm sure the emblem system was much better than the current implementation of MMR, and the majority of player agree on this point.
Well, yes, some of the updates did something good besides ruining the game in some of the other aspects, sure. But isn't it supposed to happen? Isn't it what the updates are for? Being happy for updates actually doing something except just wrecking the game is like being happy for the grass being green and the sky being blue, it's some low quality of life depth we got into if we are easily satisfied with updates doing something good once in a while.
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I suppose I can't really progress further without actually addressing the assumptions hiding behind your arguments, can I? Alright, let's get stuck in, no sense dancing around it any longer.
Nothing you've mentioned so far has ruined or wrecked the game. Not even close. Circle of Healing is the closest- it is causing some pretty real damage to the game's health- but even that isn't game-killing, it's just deeply, deeply annoying and should really be fixed ASAP. What else have we got here? RPD is bad, but not game-ruining. Trickster may be disliked by a very vocal minority but a ton of people like him. MMR may not be very good but it's definitely better than the emblem system was.
The updates have good and bad, and some of the updates you listed were absolutely a net positive because the bad things in them are not ruining the game. They're just bad.
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This post is very well put, but MMR I think is worse for game health than Circle of Healing, if you could quickly address that. Just my two cents.
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Sure! I don't agree, though- the MMR system isn't working very well, I'm hardly going to argue that it's perfect and needs no notes, but games are undeniably more consistent for the majority of players than they were under the emblem system. The emblem system would have such a wild amount of variance that games were a complete diceroll- "rainbow ranks" was a big thing for a reason, after all.
What I think people are noticing is that they don't like the state of the game's meta, and because their games are actually more consistent now, they're noticing it more often. That is not a fault with MMR and positioning it as one actively works against fixing the problem that does exist.
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If the case is that MMR is revealing the meta to be boring / unhealthy for the game, doesn't that just make Circle of Healing a byproduct of MMR giving people more meta based games, or am I reading into this wrong?
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Not really. All the old system would've done is hide it- you'd have the occasional game that's actually closer to your skill level where you'd get the frustration of a sweaty meta team, but then you'd also have a ton of games against relative newbies who run green level perks and don't look behind them, so you wouldn't realise how much you dislike any given meta perk/playstyle.
Circle of Healing (and a handful of other meta perks/addons/items/etc on both sides) are unbalanced completely separately from the MMR system. They don't become more balanced just because you're matched with newbies that don't use them, y'know?
(I'd also like to note that I don't think the meta is as dramatically awful as people make it out to be, but there are problem areas people are probably seeing more consistently now.)
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Ah, okay, thanks for clearing everything up. I thought it was more the problem of how players used meta perks - a good team using circle of healing is much more of a threat than a bad team that uses circle of healing. Still, you are correct that perks and the MMR system have no corrolation other than higher MMR usually means more meta perks, not that they're stronger.
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5.0.0 literally killed the game on Consoles (the majority of the playerbase) for over a month and a half.
It was #########.
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Nurse bug fixes happened this PTB patch, so you are wrong.
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That really doesn't change my overall point, but it is relevant to mention, I suppose.
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You can only justify Escape Based Matchmaking unless you play soloQ. For soloQ (aka the most oppressed class of DbD society) it turned the game into pure hell. Emblems were much better. But I can see how killer mains can be in favor of this new system, because it's now trivial to AFK 5 games in a row to drop the MMR drastically and have easier games, it took much longer to derank with emblems, so I can see where you are coming from.
I don't get what you mean by that attack about masks. The majority of players hate this change, they only did it because some twitter celebrity complained about an "issue" that hasn't ever been an issue in actuality. The devs showed that the opinion of one twitter celebrity overweighs the opinion of the players.
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Ah yes the Clown "Rework".
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This. The RE chapter came the closest yet to killing off the consoles completely and utterly. Whatever residual good came along with that patch could not possibly balance that scale out.
The subsequent scramble to "fix" this patch no doubt pushed back or shoved aside most of whatever else was being worked on like no chapter before or since had done. I bet they're still behind their own schedules due to it.
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Another perfect example of forum users reading what they want to read.
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Can we also talk about how long RPD was disabled on release?? That was pathetic.
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I do play SoloQ whenever I play survivor so I understand why you would think that, but the emblem system categorically was not better. It's also a completely unnecessary personal attack to imply that I purposefully drop my MMR to stomp on new players just because I disagree with you, so you're not doing your argument any favours with that one.
It may have taken a lot longer to derank with emblems, by the way, but the point is that you didn't need to because of how inaccurate they were.
Also, plenty of people had very legitimate arguments for why the Bubba masks (specifically the Smartface mask) were inappropriate and maybe not a great idea. You may not agree with them but that doesn't mean they don't exist, nor that they don't have a point.
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Yasssssss I wonder what Capcom thought of that as well!
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"So for the last year the game is gradually becoming worse, update after update"
This has been happening for way longer than a year.
Save for a few exceptions, things have been going downhill since mid-2019.
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Those arguments might be legitimate only within a specific political ideology, not from the game design point of view, so those were purely political and ideological arguments. Even if there were some people who genuinely complained about Smartface, they were just a few, comparing to the great majority of other players who don't want the masks to be removed. So they listened to a handful of people providing political argumentation and implemented their wish overnight.
Meanwhile the whole community has been complaining about SWF since day 1 of release, providing completely legitimate game design (no politics attached!) reasons of SWF being the main problem of the game, and only after 5.5 years they started reacting to it.
So even if we accept the removal of masks as something "legitimate", as you say, it still doesn't show the devs in a good light, since they accepted completely external demands of a vocal minority (which is so small that calling it just a "vocal minority" sounds like exaggeration, it was no more than a dozed complaints a year) instantly, while continuously ignoring the greatest demand of the general population throughout the years.
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I'm... huh? Wow, okay, so, let's... see what we can do to untangle this mess.
We're going to sidestep the whole "political" thing because that feels very much like bait for a kind of argument that would get us both in trouble, so let's just glide past that entirely.
Now, let's actually take a look at your other argument- or at least, what little we can discern from it. You say "the whole community has been complaining about SWF since day 1 of release", and that the devs "ignore" it. So, first of all, obviously the whole community doesn't complain about SWF. Even ignoring the parts of the community that are playing with friends - something we have literally no reason to do, they're not less a part of the community - there are plenty of killers, myself included, who haven't been "complaining about SWF" since that's incoherent nonsense.
Which leads us to the implication- that the devs should have "done something" about SWF. What on earth does that mean? How are they supposed to "do something" about the obvious reality of online gaming that sometimes people play with their friends? I'm assuming you aren't talking about the gap between SWF and SoloQ since they aren't ignoring that, so what exactly do you mean here?
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So you want to say SWFs are completely fine and don't hurt the game balance in any way? And that people don't complain about SWFs being OP, especially comparing them to soloQ, about every single day here on forums? If so, then I guess any kind of discussion if futile here. That's besides the fact that you imply the removal of Bubba's mask was motivated by some gameplay reasons rather than completely exogenous political ones.
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SWF can't hurt the game balance because that implies SWF can be removed or reigned in. Since it obviously can't, and since it's not as though you need to use comms to use and abuse most of the very strong things in the game, mentioning SWF is only relevant in the context of how SoloQ are left in the dust- which they aren't ignoring so can't be what you're talking about here.
Again. What do you suggest they do? What is the criticism here, what should they "do about" SWF?
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The HUD was bad IMO. The rest was not that interesting especially given what they did to Wraith afterward.
I don't recall of an update that was good.
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There have been so many suggestions on how to make the situation better. I've already replied about that some time ago, let me find it...
Here it is:
There could be several options.
Bringing solos to the level of SWFs completely, like this: adding icons showing who is doing what (including chases), adding quick global messages like "the killer is near me" or "my gen is X% done" (that would show the exact %), adding text team chat at least, making Kindred, BT and DS basekit, etc.
Moving SWF to a separate game mode with separate game rules.
Removing SWF completely: wanna play with your friends - go to Kill Your Friends and bully one of your own.
etc.
Yeah, they announced they would think about adding those icons eventually (still, I won't believe it until I see it actually implemented, since we all know what their promises are worth), but that happened after 5.5 years! And all this time they have been bombarded by decent suggestions. Scott Jund made a good review of a whole collection of great ideas on how to improve DbD, commenting that most of those ideas never reached the attention of the devs, and those that did and even were approved by the devs still haven't been worked on, even though the devs said they would implement it, like with that mechanism of promoting players taking the role that is currently lacking players, for the sake of more consistent queues.
The ideas are out there in great supply, even the good ones made by experienced players and generally trusted people like Scott and Otz, BHVR just don't see any point in listening to the community, they only listen to the game designers they hired and to nobody else.
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Cool, so you've admitted that they aren't ignoring the problem and you've shifted the goalposts to a different criticism. One I actually agree with this time, but it doesn't change the fact that you knowingly lied in the other message.
Of course, this conversation has gotten wildly off topic- the topic is that you claim there hasn't been a good patch in a year because you're selectively ignoring all the good that's been done in that time period. That's all I intended to dispute at first, so if you've got nothing more to say on that topic and just want to twist in the wind regurgitating unrelated points about BHVR as a company, I think we're done here!
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Where exactly did I lie? "Ignoring the problem for 5.5 years and only then responding with something that still might be scrapped and forgotten, as it happened many times before" is not much different from "Ignoring the problem". You seem to be running out of hooks to attack the criticism, trying to attach one label after another to me: at first I was "walking it back" when you misundestood what I was saying, then me saying that removal of the masks was motivated by purely political reasons (which they were) is "bating", and now I'm "knowingly lying" about something. I'm getting tired of these unfounded attacks, your goal is to defend the current state of the game at all costs while disregarding the opposite opinion with unfounded labels like "back-walking, baiting and lying", you made your position clear, fine.
you claim there hasn't been a good patch in a year because you're selectively ignoring all the good that's been done in that time period
I already replied to that. If an update contains something undesirable and makes the game worse at something - I call it a "bad update", because good updates should not make the game worse. There is no a single update (not mere bugfix) released within the last year that didn't hurt the game one way or another. This point still stands.
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Saying that they're ignoring a problem when they categorically are not is lying. You may have known in your heart that what you meant was "taking too long to address it", but that isn't what you said, so trying to draw a connection between those two statements doesn't really pan out. If you mean a specific thing, say that specific thing- or at least cop to the fact that you didn't say it properly instead of pretending what you said and what you meant are the same thing. If you say "they are ignoring this" and someone responds "no they're not", you don't get to pivot to "well it took too long" as though that's the same thing.
I'm not taking the bait regarding Bubba's masks because you're demonstrating quite effectively that you want to argue about whether the comfort of certain people is "political".
As for your "already replied", we've already tackled that: your definition of "make the game worse" is so broad that it includes the addition of an extremely popular killer that you don't personally like and one of the best accessibility changes in the game's history because it means you can't throw a tantrum and leave a game early. Those things didn't make the game worse, so AT BEST your initial statement is still wrong because those patches were good.
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I hate when you people talk about that bubba mask when literally nobody asked for it or used it. It's a safety thing. "Duh, just fix the report system and ban racists", boy, how sweet it would be if it was as easy as that. We don't have a racist detector, we would still have to wait long time so they can take providences and the system would be abused. Removing a tool of that while they kind of fix the report system(I hope) is the way they can go. I hate some decisions BHVR make, but that's not a bad decision of them.
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I don't personally think the trickster buff was overall a good thing, it was really a cheap and poor decision to a character that was difficult and annoying to go as and against, now making it just annoying to all possible points. I really don't like the Trickster's buff. They just heard people complain about it, and solved it by the worst way possible just so they can say they did something.
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if you're being camped or tunneled just don't ######### at all, keep going to get time for your team, so the killer get somewhat smashed
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