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The current "Swish's Tourney" shows why this game will never have a legitimate competitive scene
I want to preface this by saying none of this is a case of "I could do better," or "the players aren't good," etc. I'm just saying that this game is not built for any form of competitive/esports level of play, and the notion of the devs devoting any time to competitive features would be a complete waste of time.
- First, balance.
This game is not well balanced on both a broad level, and in many smaller cases. When one of the most public tournaments has half the killer cast completely removed from being selected, it just goes to show that there is a massive spectrum in strength of killer powers and their ability to control a match. This really isn't a huge issue in most situations. There are fringe cases of really poor killers that see very little play, and some that are incredibly strong that are hugely popular in high tiers, but getting into a match it largely doesn't matter what killer you're against if the player on the other side is practiced. In competitive, however, teams must select their killers for each round, and seeing the same faces performing in much the same way over and over gets old fast, because some are just flat out better than others and have powers more conducive to a competitive result.
- This is a key part of my second point, and probably the biggest issue, RULES.
I come from Dota originally, which has one of the biggest competitive scenes in gaming and regularly breaks prize pool records. I don't have much experience with other competitive games like Lol or CSGO, but I imagine the situations with them are much the same; *in competitive matches, the rules are "play the game."* Any other form of rule tends to be around how long you can pause for, or other situations that aren't actually to do with gameplay.
Many of us have tried watching DBD tournaments, whether ones like this or the ones run by BHVR for anniversaries etc. THERE ARE SO MANY RULES JUST TO GET A BARELY FUNCTIONING TOURNAMENT.
In the case of this one, half the killers are banned (and a few of the ones allowed are still yet to be picked). Killers are broken into pools of 4 where you can only pick twice from each pool all tournament. Each killer has a preset map they'll play every match on. Duplicate survivors and perks are banned. Most killer add ons that do anything outside of minor stat changes are banned. *Every killer has a set of perks that are banned for them and banned for survivors to bring against them.*
All of these are aimed at producing more diverse matches across the tournament (god forbid another repeat of BHVR's 'all Nurse, all Claudette' tournament) but it goes to show how far the game is from any form of state conducive to fair and balanced competition. You can't have a compettive scene when every tournament needs a 21 page book just to spell out the basic rules, because 75% of the game needs to be banned and picking multiple killers mandated to have anything resembling entertainment.
- "Scoring" a game like DBD is never something that can be done fairly, and in a way which is entertaining to watch.
One of the biggest pitfalls of competitive DBD is the gameplay itself. In a normal match, players choose what they consider a win, and how they play. In competitive, a scoring system dictates why they make decisions.
The most notable point of this is hooks vs hook states. If you score the killer based on how many hook states they get, camping becomes ideal because you're much more likely to protect a hook for 60 seconds than to find and catch a new survivor in that time. If you score based on hooks, then the survivor team can exploit the situation, as when playing as survivor in the second match of a round, they know what score they need to beat, and can leave survivors on the hook to reduce the score the killer gets, potentially to the point of the match being unwinnable.
The Swish tournament goes for the former, and the gameplay is downright boring to watch. Nearly every match plays out exactly like this: One survivor is found and hooked. The killer camps this survivor until second stage, 3 generators are completed. The killer looks for someone else as soon as they progress to second stage, but in most cases return to tunnel that survivor the second they are unhooked. The final gens are completed with one survivor dead. The killer has NOED and one stack of No Way Out, and attempts to catch someone before No Way Out ends and they leave.
Not joking, that covers like 90% of the matches so far. The only exceptions are Oni, who is forced to capitalise off his power so camping is not ideal, and Blight, whose "techs" are so ridiculous on a practiced player that they actually feel confident to go for other survivors.
It flat out does not matter whether this is the best way of getting points in the match or not. At a fundamental level, competitive gamelay must be generally entertaining to watch for the average player, and when the ideal strategy for the killer player is the most utterly boring strategy in the game, associated with how brand new players play, the matches aren't fun to watch. It doesn't matter how skilled a killer player is when most of what we get to see them do is staring down a hooked survivor that they know nobody is coming for.
This is not a fault of the people making the rules and scoring. It is a pure dilemma between scoring in a way which leads to boring strategy, or scoring in a way which is truly exploitable. It is just an inherent fact of a game which is not designed for tournaments or competitive gameplay.
So just as a basic conclusion. We play a game riddled with balance issues and bugs. We have a dev team who struggles to address either of those things in anything resembling a timely manner. Asking for developers to divert their time away from the work they currently do in order to implement features like seeded maps etc which only have a tangible benefit for a competitive match is asking for a detriment to the game for everyone. Accept that competitive DBD will only ever exist as a tiny, fringe community, because it loses most of the appeal that the game, and watching the game, has.
Comments
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I mean it worked for smash bros.
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Smash Bros has clear win conditions and scoring that are inherent to the game. The only parallel to DBD is that they need to turn anything resembling fun or interesting off, but even that has been baked into the game's settings since incredibly early days, if not the start. Even if DBD ever had some form of settings like "no good add ons" or "no duplicate perks" they'd never be applied to public matches and would only serve a purpose in competitive.
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Dbd is impossible to balance, in your example it's basically swfs, and the rules to try and make it balanced kill it entirely.
Nevermind the normal people play solo, who cop the full wraith of full imbalance on everything.
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Mario Party is a more competitive game. Once people realize that, perhaps they can finally start having some fun.
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Normal people won't play solo, especially in this game.
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But some people just don't have friends to play with at all like myself who have no friends because they quit this game because of how BS it is
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More or less, sad or not, those people are actually in minority.
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All you have to do is play Killer for a considerable amount of time to see that the game isnt balanced competitively. Even knowing that, it will likely never be balanced. Instead these groups will continue to try and profit from this game and people who like watching it. I just watch my favorite streamers and live vicariously through them instead.
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Im much the same, ive only ever played with swf with one person, and he quit a patch or 2 before boons, so now im a solo Killer and very rarely a solo surv if i want to play carefree.
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Proof?
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Probably pretty hard to prove or disprove really, unless the devs released some stats, and with so many variables, regions and times i doubt there would be to many similarities, maybe in times for swf which seem to be consistent in peak hours.
But many regions say mornings have better Killer queues and afternoons for Survs and vice versa.
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They did release those stats.
Two years ago, iirc.
Here's the link to the thread since I can't post images:
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It doesn’t need to be, though?
Some games just aren’t suited for a proper competitive scene. Hell, some big names aren’t either, yet are forced into it by their studios.
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Ahh nice, i imagine the trend has continued.
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It's a alwayas been a CASUAL PARTY GAME.
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I've watched that and the survivors are bad or is it just me? like 5 games in a row these said "comp players" gave Oni his power 10 secs in the match??? And twins S tier possibly??? they do well in the comp scene.
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The Oni matches are weird, they give him an early hit every time.
Twins has always been a good killer, the biggest issues they face are perks, many of which are banned in the tournament, and the fact that they're frustrating to play with transition times etc. They take a lot of practice but with the ruleset favouring camping, they do that better than anyone besides Bubba.
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To be fair DbD has a scoring system too, the endgame score screen. Hypothetically you could have a tournament where the goal is to have the most total points at the end of a set of five round robin matches where everybody gets one chance to play killer for instance. There would still be luck involved in what map comes up and such but in principle there wouldn’t be anything fundamentally wrong with it.
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The problem is people look at it as competitive. I agree.
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Something that we've learnt from MMR is that kills don't necessarily reflect how well a game went. And with only 5 possible kill number outcomes, nearly every round robin of your suggestion would have to have tiebreakers.
Scoring exists in tournaments for DBD because there's a huge difference between a 4k with 5 gens remaining, and a 4k with the gates powered. Even 1 escape can be someone leaving out the gate while the other person is hooked vs getting hatch when the other 3 died before one gen went off. Those two cases in a Bo2 shouldn't be considered a tied match. DBD does not have a clear cut score that can be used to progress teams in a tournament reliably, and a tiebreaker always has to be another 2 matches to be even which can again tie. A more variable score is needed to assess matches and not force endless tiebreakers.
A game like Smash Bros is generally played 1v1 or in teams, and there will always be a winner and loser decisively based on the last one standing.
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It's 2 different questions.
Is DBD a competitive game? Yes. You compete against another team and a vast majority of players want to win, not just mess around having fun.
Is DBD a game which can sustain a fair and entertaining "competitive" (ie, esports) scene? No.
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This is a tangent, but that’s something you say is true about MMR and there’s definitely not a consensus about it. I happen to think the MMR ratings are pretty accurate personally, most of the mismatches are due to other factors like the system trying to balance making people with outlying ratings wait a long time for a match versus putting them in an already available game, filling gaps in lobbies left by dodgers quickly, and how to calculate what MMR a killer should be when the survivors are in a swf with widely different ratings, for example.
Also you apparently misread my post about a tournament using the endgame score screen. To clarify, I said every player plays killer once and survivors four times. You add up your total endgame bloodpoint scores at the end and the person with the highest total points wins. It’s extremely unlikely that system would have any ties.
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Bloodpoints would be even further in the direction of bad scoring.
A Nurse can down all four survivors in under a minute and one hook all of them. They crushed the enemy team but come out with sub 10k points. A Plague plays a 12 hook match and ends with next to nothing in the deviousness category because her scoring is terrible. Do either of those deserve to lose to a killer who also got 12 hooks, but got more points because their power scores better and it took them longer to do it, resulting in more points?
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I never said bloodpoints are good from a matchmaking perspective, I said in reply to your above comment that “Smash Brothers has a scoring system and a clear win condition” that DbD has a scoring system too and in principle that could be the objective win condition for a tournament. Whether or not you think a tournament that is based on the endgame score screen would be fun to watch is subjective, in principle though it would be totally fair for all parties.
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Yes, but I just gave you pretty clear cut examples where using bloodpoints as a score are objectively wrong when assessing who performed better across multiple matches. You're missing the point that a scoring system used in competitive has to be both clearly defined, and accurately compare how much better one team did than the other, and a system that completely rules out killers just because their BP scoring on their powers is awful doesn't do that.
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How is what you described “objectively wrong”? If a bloodpoint tournament existed then all players would know those sorts of things going into it so would presumably play in certain ways and pick certain killers and loadouts to maximize score. Why would you go for a slug heavy strategy in that type of tournament when the object of the tournament is points?
P.S. And keep in mind his whole discussion came up because you were saying DbD had no scoring system for a Smash Bros type tournament. Clearly Smash Bros has characters are are better at scoring points than each other, that doesn’t prevent them from having tournaments though.
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I do think the game will never have mass appeal as an "esport", a tournament game, but will always only be appealing as that to a fairly niche audience (of competitors and spectators). That said, for those people it absolutely is just as "viable" of an endeavour as with much of any game, competitors and spectators are having quite a blast.
Balance rules can easily be made and understood by everyone in these communities, and since we have been having a rather consistent tournament cycle for years now, the common rulesets are very streamlined and known by this point. Definitely an issue from a more mainstream perspective, but not actually standing in the way of the proper and enjoyable holding of tournaments within the respective communities (well, there are still issues that arise from this, such as accidental ruling offenses that require restarts and come with point penalties, or generally a little more set-up time required to make sure everything is in order, but this is not at all prohibitive to having well-functioning tourneys).
The usual scoring system is not actually as limiting to the gameplay as you imply. Survivors get points for finishing gens and escaping (with giving away as few hook stages as possible), which is clear and poses no problem. Killers get points for hook stages (usually 3 for the first stage of every survivor and 2 for every consecutive stage). This encourages going for fresh hooks a little and doesn't discourage going for hooks in general, while still of course having the main focus be on getting as many kills as possible, since that automatically means more stages. While a fair few of the "M1" killers are definitely reliant on camping, tunnelling and NOED/NWO to consistently perform, the matches just aren't actually as stale as you make it out. Let's look at some Swish tourney stats:
Hag 1k 3stage, Plague 4k, Demo 1k 5stage, Billy 4k, Plague 1k 5stage, Huntress 4k, Billy 1k 8stage, Oni 4k, Huntress 1k 5stage, Huntress 3k 10stage, Billy 2k 7stage, Blight 2k 7stage, Billy 1k 7stage, Blight 4k, Billy 0k 3stage, Twins 1k 5stage, Twins 4k, Spirit 4k, Twins 2k 7stage, Spirit 4k, Nurse 1k 4stage, Oni 4k, Billy 2k 7stage, Pyramid 2k 8stage, Billy 1k 6stage, Blight 4k, Oni 4k, Pyramid 4k, Billy 4k, Plague 1k 6stage, Blight 0k 4stage, Billy 4k, Blight 4k, Plague 4k, Blight 4k, Blight 4k, Billy 1k 5stage, Billy 4k, Spirit 2k 6stage, Huntress 4k, Oni 4k, Oni 3k 9stage, Pyramid 0k 2stage, Plague 4k, Plague 1k 8stage, Pyramid 2k 7stage, Huntress 0k 0stage
That's 2.55 kills and 9 stages per match on average. This tells us that not only are matches not simply cases of camping/tunnelling out 1 survivor and killing a 2nd survivor in the endgame (which would be a 2k 6stage, a result that is in fact only present a single time among these 47 matches), but also that skills play a definite role here, because the result spread on individual killer characters is affected a lot by who plays them and who they play against, with some players consistently having better results. These results are indicative that the matches are much more competitively interesting and viable than you claim.
Don't get me wrong, I do think the game cannot have a very wide appeal in this tournament mode because it is not at all easy or possible altogether for casual viewers to appreciate what entails good play here, and even for advanced players it is not necessarily always very interesting play (you have to basically be into comp for comp's sake to really enjoy it). There are exceptions, it can lead to some action-packed, nail-biter and otherwise thrilling situations, but the game is just not a great spectator sport (it's fun to watch, but not from a very competitive perspective for most people). On top of this, it's not easy to tell for most people who is winning or what has to be done to win, since the hook stage scoring requires people to do math to figure this out. This is definitely an obstacle to mainstream appeal, because it's difficult to root for or be invested into anything happening if you don't always very clearly know what the standing of the match is. It's not a huge problem because it can usually be figured out quickly and the commentators will usually point it out too, but it would definitely be another thing restrictive to its chances of wider success.
I do want to point out that there have been tournaments without extensive rulesets, but yeah, while they are actually still fairly competitively interesting and balanced and not merely "camp/tunnel 2ks" either, you do get a fest of mostly Nurse and Blight. Maybe there could be much more entertaining custom tournament formats, such as actually making it about hooks (you'd have to force survivors to actually unhook though, as you point out) or chases (everyone spawns into a map and you go for 1v1 chases starting at a designated location, if the player goes down the next player starts their chase at that location - you do this one after the next until all players had their chase, then simply add up the times, afterwards you switch sides), but that's of course something even more displaced from the actual game mode.
The tournament scene is actually pretty healthy, and between things like Swish, DeadbyEsports, DBDLeague and various bigger regional tournaments, there are some such events that actually pull hundreds and thousands of viewers, but yeah, BHVR would have to do a lot more to bolster the game as an esport, and they'll likely never do it (years ago they've said they want to, but nothing much has come of it). Hell, they are not even giving us more spectator options such as free cam, or map seeds as you've said, or the ability to make custom loadout rulesets.
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Mario kart as well is more competitive too. I get to hit someone with a blue shell so I can be 1st.
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A few things:
The rules for Swish's tournament are the rules for Swish's tournament. Killer bans happen because it limits the amount of prep teams have to do and it makes it easier on staff to do the individual balancing for the killers. Some tournaments allow every killer, different add ons, different perks, etc.
The scoring will change from place to place.
As far as the legitimacy of DbD as a competitive game, the players who don't play comp get far more hung up on this than comp players themselves. We know. Trust me. You don't scrim every other day and practice regularly without realizing how dumb DbD is in a competitive environment. They do it because they find it fun.
Regarding gameplay, to each their own. I think it's far more interesting than braindead chase after chase without any strategy. High level DbD is very much about the macro things, and that's why a lot of players struggle when they get into higher MMR brackets. It's tough to get by on talent alone at that level. Plenty of players try it and wash out because they treat it like a public match and can't consistently manage more than 2 or 3 hooks
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I didn't say it has not scoring system, I said it has no clear scoring system. It has many scores, none of which decisively show who performed best which is why tournaments need their own score systems. At the end of a Smash game, there is a winner and a loser, and one can progress in the tournament the other does not. In DBD there are many metrics by which that can be judged.
A tournament and professional scene in a game is about finding who the best player/team is and having them move forward. Expecting teams to not play well, but instead play for capping bloodpoints doesn't show the better team. Especially since points are dependant on the other team. Did you stomp a killer and they got 1 hook? Your team has 0 altruism points and is going to lose to another team that got hooked a lot and got more points. That's an acceptable fact of pub matches, but trying to say that's a good way to score a professional tournament is downright ignoring issues out of stubbornness.
Are you really saying the teams who should win a tournament are those who play a farming match?
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I’m saying that the statement “Smash Bros has a clear scoring win but DbD doesn’t” from the post I replied to is incorrect. DbD’s scoring system is clear, you get points for certain events and it tells you how many points everything is worth. The only reason people don’t use the inherent scoring system for tournaments is because the organizers prefer other metrics instead. But there’s nothing in principle preventing a tournament from just using the DbD scoring system as the win condition.
You can complain about whether DbD is fun to watch or play and whether the survivors should be scored as a team, etc, but you can’t claim there’s not an actual built in clear point system because there is. It’s just not one you like.
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It's easy to find arguments to criticize dbd balancing, especially in a competitive/tournament setting. I don't think lots of players disagree with what you said. But how to you solve it? What do you propose to perfectly balance it then? It's clear that dbd is not the type of game to be featured in a esports competitive tournament and pointing it out it obvious. What I never really see is people coming up with solid and realistic ideas to balance it around it.
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A separate game mode would be good for this with a team of ideally non-bhvr people who just enable/disable the most unsuitable perks and addons as requsted by the comp community. As long as there was a consensus on which should be used and unused it could work out quite well. I just don't know how the team would get that consensus.
Alternately, a code could be generated based on what has been disabled and then anyone in a tournament could just type the code in or paste in in a game folder to get the same settings as the designer of the tournament.
I'm enjoying the Swish tournament.
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The reason why is the map that was used. If they had been on an autohaven map they could have gone around a short wall loop and played those safely to avoid getting hit. But because they were on coal tower the high wall loops make even the best survivors susceptible to mind games. On top of this these survivors have been practicing with stretched res, which means that they're actually a bit out of practice of how to deal with loops when they don't have perfect visibility.
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A few things:
There's an implicit bias in how forum users view a theoretical game of DbD. People assume perfect survivor play at all times and average killer play at all times. DbD doesn't happen in a vacuum.
There are a lot of skills that go into playing survivor for comp. A lot of good runners don't make it in comp because they throw games due to bad comms/game sense.
Killers in comp are very, very good. These players can look bad at times when they're playing each other, but they'll look like gods against a normal 500 hr player.
Lastly, nerves are a thing. It's not a regular match on a Tuesday night. I would encourage anyone to load up, sit in a custom lobby for 20 minutes or so, and then play in front of 2000+ people with money on the line. See how you feel once you're in there. It's different.
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