Insane discovery
So for about 18 months until a few months ago I almost exclusively played dead by daylight and for the most part I had alot of fun. However, with overwatch '2' and warzone 2 recently releasing, I thought I'd come back to those games for a bit instead of playing dbd. Also dabbled in a couple other multiplayer games like Apex, smite and what have you. And what I discovered is actually groundbreaking.
There's a huge difference between these games and dbd, and that difference is how long I can spend complaining about the game.
With the overwatch for example, I could properly spend about 40 minutes. It has a lot of issues but for the most part, they're easy fixes in the grand scheme of things that have good chances of coming to the bands in the future. (Rare strange map geometry in places, balance changes that only really require a few number tweaks, maybe one or two character reworks and poor anti-consumer monetisation techniques) and don't negatively impact the actual game too much.
Whereas with dead by daylight I genuinley cannot gauge the amount of problems I have with it. Even with about 1500 hours on each game almost equally, the difference is staggering. Playing a game that isn't dbd felt so strange because there wasn't 5-6 things happening every single match that are simply deranged gameplay mechanics, features, oversights or whatever.
If I was to try and pick ONE thing to change about dbd, I'd struggle IMMENSELY. Fix soloq? Rework nurse? Map overhaul? Actually fix the hacker problem? The list goes on and on.
Whereas if I was granted that ability with a game like overwatch, it'd be aggressively easy. Fix the monetization so players feel rewarded for playing the game.
SMITE? Make it easier for new players to start playing the game by introducing an actual tutorial, as the games skill floor is extensively high and without a deep understanding of the games mechanics you simply won't have fun, a common issue with mobas.
Which also reminds me, when's the last time someone you know picked up this game and stuck with it? Personally, it was ME. 3 YEARS AGO. This game is so impossible to get into these days because of how many perks there are and how long it takes to unlock them all and the fact that there are simply no other new players. Imagine buying dbd, and playing the Wraith for your first pub match. What perk (singular, you're level 1) do you use? POS 1, 2, or 3? Either way you're going against 4 players that combined have AT LEAST 1000 hours on the game and probably have fully decked out loadouts with level 3 perks each from different characters. Same goes if you want to play survivor, you pick Dwight, put bond on, probably get facecamped by a Bubba because you don't know how to chase yet and boom you're dead.
You know what happens when you're new in overwatch? You get into lobbies with other new players, pick a simple hero like 76 or ashe, and you just shoot people. And it's fun because nobody else has any idea what they're doing because NEW PEOPLE ACTUALLY COME TO THE GAME AND STICK WITH IT.
I understand that dbd isn't exactly a triple a game, and that it's asymmetrical so it's hard to balance. But in what world do you allow things like nurse and badham to exist for 6 YEARS with minimal changes?
And yes overwatch has bad maps too, but the thing with overwatch is that both sides play both sides in competetive, so it's still dependant on each team's skill.
Even though I want to play dbd and unlock the knight because I love the game so much, it simply isn't fun anymore because I know I could be playing literally any other multiplayer game. I can't bring myself to play it.
Another key point is that on my xbox one s, even huge games like warzone run at completely fine fps. But when I load up dbd it runs at like 24fps and it actually nauseates me now that I'm used to actual framerates and not flipbooks.
Dbd makes my hair turn gray, I'm done for now, I'll come back later ig.
I'll leave some stuff for you guys to point out, I could continue but it'd ruin the fun.
Edit: noticing a trend in the comments and I'm not saying dbd should be on the same level as these games, I'm just saying I don't want to play it when I could play these games instead. It's entirely understandable that it has these imperfections (even if nurse, map design and soloq have all been major issues for the entire lifespan of the game).
Comments
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It's true that DbD is insanely frustrating as a beginner, to the point that there is not much more than spite to hold on to for those first hundred(s) of hours until you're at an okay level.
However, it's extremely difficult to balance the game to take into account both killer and survivor fun, and at all levels of skill.
DbD really is a complex thing, and for all that we can criticize BHVR for how they handle everything, I don't know anyone who can pretend to know better how to handle those issues.
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I agree about new players getting matched with skilled players, but unfortunately DBD doesn't seem to have the numbers to support a more strict matchmaking system. I thought this game had much more than it currently has but most of the time it doesn't break 50k on average. Comparing DBD's playercount to Overwatch 2 is silly. Of course Overwatch can support good matchmaking when it has 1mil players playing daily and DBD only has like 35k.
DBD reminds me a lot more of fighting games and what they're going through atm. You maybe be a new player and you get matched with someone who might be playing the game for like 10 years. Why? Because those are the players left. And it has a big problem retaining players for that reason. Doesn't help that fighting games are not only mechanically hard to get into but also rather expensive.
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I mean does dbd have more problems than something like ow2 but in my mind at least it's a bunch of minor problems all compounded onto each other where as OW2 they made us wait 3 years for what was effectively a balance patch with egregiously worse monetization. If I don't buy a new characters in dbd it doesn't really matter but if I don't buy a battle pass in OW2 and that character is meta I'm gonna have 4 people screaming at me that I'm throwing for 10 minutes most games. So while DBD has problems I guess I can look past it because at least I don't feel like thier trying to squeeze me for everything I'm worth in the most cynical way possible like Activision-Blizzard.
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OW2 = Competitive game. Winning is all that matters.
DBD = Casual game heavily dependent on RNG. Escaping or killing doesn’t really matter that much, it’s more about having fun with each unique map / killer power. You can play DBD how you want, you can DC the penalty is short tbh, you can throw as survivor playing a trash build nobody is going to report you. Same goes for killer, you can play huntress / deathslingers trying to get fancy shots and chilling. Also DBD has a big roleplay side with the skins, I mean why some people play Jeff who is huge when they can pick Feng who is small and can hide easier ? Probably because Jeff is cooler for them.
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I mean i started april this year and the game got me hooked right away.
Pun fully intended.
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I see what you tried to do here, but I don't think you should compare these games
Making that comparison kinda made this thread have no sense whatsoever
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been trying to get into soulcalibur 6 because of the customization and having your own hand crafted fighters beat each other up. But all is left is macro combo spammers with their default characters XD
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I also play Soul Calibur 6 or at least tried to, but queue times were over 30 mins long and I don't like having to pay 8 euros every month to be able to play online on playstation.
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Dbd might have been born as a casual game, but the mentallity of a very big part of the community is definetly competetive, your example with feng and jeff, comparing the number of people that play feng and jeff shows that under what you propose people are choosing the more competitive option, altho I do not believe personally people play feng for this reason.
Secondly when you see content for the game, the biggest content creators are people who are good at the game, and to some extend a great majority of them talk and make content related to the balance of the game, hell look at most youtube channels and tell me the tier list videos do not have more views than a video about a "fun" build, even more, if you search for builds for a certain killer most results are "best x build","disgusting x build", and very few of them are "most fun x build", dbd may not be a competitive Esports game but it has an incredibly competitive audience.
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that right there is why i switched to PC. I will never understand why XBOX and Playstation want us to pay double for our internet.. Like.. We alredy pay our providers right? And the extra 8bucks or how much it costs is for like... Using their plattform which is basicly just a generic Hub for purchase games and use the internet, what you can do on pc for free. Oh and you get games monthly, but completely random.
Just hope microsoft and Apple dont decide to do that same thing for computers aswell.
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For most issues with DbD it does boil down to spaghetti-code. They seem to be smoothing things out bit by bit, restructuring the code, which leads to new issues.
The rest boils down to how people play, or more precisely what the game rewards and what is punished.
I'd say the fixes are easy, but very time consuming, and might/will likely piss off a decent chunk of players.
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Yh but people do not play it casually in the slightest
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Obviously Blizzard and BHVR are very different companies, but there's a marked difference in their agility and responsiveness. We should point out that Blizz managed OW1 into the ground with the Brigitte launch and GOATS meta. BHVR isn't the only company to make poor balance decisions only to immediately plug their ears and start shouting for 6+ months.
But Blizz has also completely removed maps because of their unpopularity and is generally much more agile when it comes to character balance. A lot of his has to do with being a symmetrical game though. A problematic map in OW is problematic because of gameplay for both teams. A problematic DbD map is often because it overly favors one side.
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The thing is that you don't need a psn subscription to play all the games online. I remember Path of Exile on PS4 is both free AND you can play it free online. So I don't understand what is up with some other games. And PS3 didn't have such a thing, you payed to have good deals for games but you could play any game online for free.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft wanted to pull something like that but lets not forget that XBOX is microsoft and they already had that kind of service for XBOX360 so if anything it seems they poisoned the well.
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yeah im surprised windows users dont have to pay extra since xbox is owned by microsoft. They could do the same and denie accsess to the internet unless you pay a monthly fee. Maybe that will become normal one day, all though i hope not.
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I hope Internet v2 is around the corner. That's such a supervillain plot. Would not be surprised if some of those people are considering it and making plans for it, I just hope by then there are other alternatives.
Social media currently is very meh for me. I really miss old-school forums like DBD even if it's a bunch of whiners.
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If that ever happens i'll aim to travel to tibet one day, live there for a few weeks and considering a live without internet XD
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The very first thing that needs to be done to balance DBD is rework every killer perk and customize them to each killer. No perk should work the same on more than 1 killer. Some killers are stronger in areas and some are weaker and come with the perks they do for a reason. When you take that perk and it's used by a killer who's already strong, they go from strong to OP. Some perks should not even be equippable by certain killers, such as:
-Thanatophobia or Sloppy Butcher by Legion (Legion is insanely easy enough)
-Lethal Pursuer by a Myers who is using any tombstone add-on (and I am a Myers main saying this)
-Make Your Choice by the Hag
-There are many many more examples of this
Also pick ups from the hook should be disabled until the last generator is done or the endgame collapse or else killers just camp around the hooks waiting for unhooks and get a 2nd survivor. One killer I played against had someone hooked, was carrying an unhooking survivor they picked off the unhook and then dropped them to go for a 3rd survivor also trying to unhook. There's no way a killer deserves to get 3 hooks and/or downs that easily. That's just broken and resulted in the 1st hooked player DC'ing and I couldn't blame them.
Also depip protection needs to be also added. It's BS when survivors depip from a bad match after one of their teammates DC's early on and also BS when they depip due to an AFK killer considering how hard it is to get pips in the gold & iridescant ranks and how easy it is to already depip by tunneling killers (and by tunneling I mean early on in a match), which are in my experience over 90% of the no-skill players who play killer these days.
Then you have every killer from the Trickster onward who is broken and unbalanced in some way or another. The Twins should have been the last killer in DBD and everyone after should have been part of a seperate game or different chapter of the game (and by chapter I don't mean like the DLC but in a seperate area of the game where the older survivors with their perks would not play against them but new survivors with much stronger perks). The boon perks should have been part of such a 2nd chapter/part of DBD since those killers require them to have a better chance against. Look at Trapper and compare him with Dredge, Nemesis, Trickster, Artist, Pinhead, Wesker, the Knight, etc (also older killers who are now unbalanced like Legion and ones who were never balanced to begin with like Hag) and it's not even close how easy it is to get kills with the latter and how hard it is with the original killer of DBD and many who came after him unless you happen to get a map that really favors them like RPD
RPD itself is a disgusting nightmare to play on now. Before it was a nice and big map where both killers and survivors could have great or poor matches on and everything in between. Now it's so small that a killer can easily stay in one portion of those 2 RPD maps and force a 3 gen situation with very little effort. Add in tunneling so there are only 2 survivors left during the 3 gen and it's an easy 4k.
To address early tunneling, they could easily add a 15% (perhaps even stackable) gen boost that remains for all remaining survivors for the rest of the match as a penalty against the killer.
Another thing that can be done is splitting the game into SWF mode and solo queue mode where SWF mode (where if you even play with 1 friend) the survivors are subject to the survivor & killer perks post-rework and killers & survivors in matches where all the survivors are in the solo queue (playing with no friends) would be subject to killer & survivor perks pre-rework.
At the very minimum every perk's effects need to be customized for every killer or else things will always be broken. This is an assymetrical game, but there's a huge difference between assymetrical and broken and now it's broken. It used to be fun playing it 3-4 years ago but now the survivor queue is like an exercise in futility and killer is way too easy that I end up being nice to many survivors because of how much of an advantage I have and how easily I down them without tunneling (unless they're a SWF team which is when I won't hold back). There's no way killers should be getting 4Ks with the ease and lack of any talent that 90%+ lack from what I experience these days. Wesker for example is easy enough and players who play him usually camp the hooks and get an immediate hit on unhooking survivors and then use his dash slam attack to quickly down them after the unhook. At least with Hillbilly steering him with the chainsaw takes skill but not with Wesker. And with Oni it takes injuring and collecting blood orbs to power you up which Wesker again doesn't require. This is what happens when BHVR caters to the lowest common denominator (players who are new or not good at killer and need to play as killers who can get easy kills). They are killing their own game. These new killers will never be as good as some of the legends I've seen if they don't learn from mistakes. Instead, in post match comments when I ask them why they played like that, the reply I get is "I was scared of the prestige #s I saw, that's the only way I could win". If that's not a BS excuse to play toxically and not learn the proper way to play killers, then I don't know what is. This entitlement where killers think they deserve 4Ks every match is disgusting. If you want a 4K you have to earn it with skill, not by camping or tunneling out players early on. When I started playing this game it was on an underpowered laptop that had bad lag when playing as Spirit or Oni & using their powers and at times I would get my butt handed to me. But I never resorted to that type of gameplay unless a team was very toxic to me. And that's the furthest away from what I am reciprocated with these days.
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I personally think that they don't want to commit to a direction. They stated many times that they want their players to play the game as they like. Hide all game and escape solo with hatch, aggressively camp or tunnel from the get go, bring all gen speed perks and end the game in 3 minutes, play Nurse or Blight with ridiculous add-ons, play SWF and bring stun perks to try morphing the game into school bully sim 2.0, bring 4 gen kicking perks and go on for 30 minutes of gen kicking sim, everything is A-ok for them. It can't work that way, because when everybody expects something different from the game, then most won't get it, be frustrated, and quit.
Play League of Legend for example, what do you do ? You pick a lane and try to push to the nexus. EZ. How you do that and how effectively you and your team can do that will vary, but everybody tries to do that. Same with OW, same with CS...
The only gaming experience that I find close from what DbD is right now is CoD. Where the only goal for most players is to do kills. They don't care about the type of game they're in, they just want kills. Some camp, some use explosives, some rush with SMGs or shotguns. But, in CoD, just like in DbD, everybody rq all the time. And it's ok because nobody cares about the end result and people can join the game whenever.
In DbD however, you're now punished for that and for a good reason. Since the only real stated goal is survivors must escape, which is almost impossible in a 3v1, rq arm the experience of the whole team.
In my opinion, they should either commit and move the goal from escaping to a more diverse experience with interesting thing to do while not in chase and let people rq and join the game whenever. Or, set boundaries to get a "standard DbD experience" by including all aspect of gameplay into the base game.
Because, at a fundamental level, DbD is a race game, or a time bomb game, where each side try to optimize their actions on the map. Normally, chase and map control should be the defining factors of a win, but each side has too many resources that influence those aspects. So, a new player can get a grip of their goal and how to achieve it, and can get better at it at a reasonable pace. It's not normal that I can play with people with more than 500h that can't do gens or run a tile. Like, they could be bad at it, no problem, but not knowing how it works... that says a lot about your game.
How do you want a new player to understand how the game is played when the information can only be found on Otzdarva YouTube channel ?
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It might be extremely difficult to balance the game, but it's infinitely harder when they're not even trying.
I'll pretend to know better because they clearly don't have an overall vision of what DbD could and should be. As a player with thousands of hours I do have a vision of what DbD could and should be and almost every move BHVR makes seems at odds with that vision. A vision where there is a rhyme, reason and balance to maps, killers and categories of perks with each other and being able to see the overall picture.
They fail to make changes I've been wanting for years (QoL, perk search bar, standardized audio across survivors), they make overtuned changes (the 6.1.0 changes that changed the meta but didn't actually balance things where they made changes based on usage rates rather than actual game balance), they band-aid fix things (DC penalties, hacking), they are mor concerned with how things look than how they function and they push out scheduled content without being able to ensure it is of acceptable quality. They also devote their resources to developing other stuff while the game that put them on the map continues to flounder with what appears to be an inexperienced skeleton crew that takes aeons to get anything done.
One obvious thing that springs to mind for me is that they could have tried to keep the game simple(r). At some point they should have stopped the 3 perks per character standard and went to a 1 perk per character standard. We would have less perks but they would be of higher quality and the learning curve wouldn't be so disgustingly steep and the skill creep every dlc drop wouldn't be so bad. But they can't turn back time and we are stuck with 219 perks.
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Tbh it's the rate at which things are dealt with, even when taking into account how much they started to change since 6.1.0. They are going in right direction but the process needs to be expedited. It's not like the balance team is the same as the one that works on cosmetics or new killers.
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No, none at all. Every time I even try it I get nauseated, frustrated and bored simultaneously. I want to enjoy the game but it isn't enjoyable for me anymore.
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to me the fix for dbd is simple:
revert the game back to pre 6.1 update
this will solve 90% of the games current problems
we'll be back to survivors complaining about nurse and blight, and killers complaining about dead hard. the good ol' days.
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I guess it depends on what you are looking for.
You would pay me I wouldn't even launch Overwatch. (I'm not its target audience and I'm not vulnerable to its "selling" tactics.)
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I think DBD is unique in the sense they created a party game with whacky mechanics and a huge RNG component which could mean stomps from either side out of anyones control unless huge skill differences or throwing and then it evolved into this "thing" trying to be competitive while still being a LANparty game at its core (like Mario Kart or Mario Party). That and the kind of community it attracted is a very weird experiment on videogame world. Those games you cite were born with a very definite purpose in mind so the developers dont really have to change so many stuff to appease their crowd.
I think it was Scott Jund the one who said something this "DBD is the most fun when both sides dont take the game very seriusly, the problem starts when one side wants to sweat", and he was right, if neither side goes for the most busted stuff the game is much more enjoyable.
I honestly believe they should call some university social studies/psychology departament and propose them to study this "thing" because I believe they could find very weird interactions between the playerbase, the forums, the moderators and even the developers.
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Yh I don't buy its crap either but the game itself is fun as hell
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People still complain about those all the time, nothing changed at all fundamentally because perks were never the core issue of the game.
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This is deranged af
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