Would you say DBD is casual friendly?

The grind was absolutely not worse before. That's what BHVR pretends, I don't know if they really believe that it's true or are just delusional.

In fact the update made it significantly worse:

• for new players, need to grind characters to lvl 50 to unlock their perks now, whereas before you needed only the teachable at lvl 30. Considering that the first 15 bloodweb levels are almost free, that's a 2x increase in cost. Before you needed ~20 hours to get a basic build now you need more like ~40 hours.
• huge indirect nerf to BP offering drops now as you only get trash for the first 20-30 levels of the bloodweb, then you get some decent stuff and by the time you can finally sotckpile something then you have to prestige again. Same applies to items btw. It has become so bad that even long time players are running out of good items/addons while before most of us had 100+ of them. Now you see streamers run perks like residual manifest just to get a flashlight.
• As killer, the best and easiest perks are now mostly pay2win (Eruption, Deadlock and CoB specifically). BBQ does no longer give BPs. The BP incentives compensate partially for this but they depend on luck while BBQ was consistent and healthy for the game.

Regarding your original question: I've introduced this game to 3 different players and none of them played it for more than 10-20 hours (mostly due to the grind, but also a few very bad games).

But a new player doesn't care about having dead hard on all their characters. They want to have it on 1 character, the one that they play, so that they can make a basic 4-perk build on this character asap. But to get this build now will be 2x more expensive because they have to go to lvl 50. Only 100+ hour players are going to care that they get Dead Hard on multiple characters.

The BP offerings drop way less than before, as said, I used to have stockpiles of them and now I'm running out of them (Not that I care now, but new players most likely do). Just pay attention to bloody party streamers the next time you prestige, you can pass a full prestige without getting a single one. Don't know about cake but I assume it's no different. That's because in the previous update we had the large lvl 50 bloodwebs with a lot of choice, so we could pick whatever items we were interested in. But now the first 30 levels have way less nodes and don't give us this choice. So maybe you get just as much stuff now, but it's more useless stuff than before.

Gods no....the Grind is still immense, even with tweaks to it recently. Plus with how matchmaking can be, newer players can get matched against decent to great Survivors shortly and get demotivated if they lose too much, too often.

The tutorial is ok....but the game really doesn't teach newer players the real meat & potatoes of playing match of DBD. Knowing how to looping/run killers, when to rescue and heal, when to spread out Gens to avoid a 3 Gen situation.l etc. Then for Killers it can be harder with learning to chase, when to break off chases, pressure gens, how to utilize all the different Killers and their unique abilities. It can be a lot to take in. All of this isn't even taking into consideration Perks and how best to start unlocking them AND how many are indeed, locked behind DLC with a small chance to appear on the Shrine, which requires a huge time commitment to have the Shards to get Perks off of there.

Not to mention having to suggest people watch video guides or matches of DBD players is probably off-putting and requires a fair bit of commitment to a VERY grind game. Either the new player LOVES Horror Mobies and can get behind all the IPs BHVR has here, they like the gameplay enough, have friends that they can play with to alleviate the passage of time & grind. OR they're gonna drop the game after a short while because they keep being stuck with few Perks and options for their character and see the huge mountain of grind to even have the options to trinker with playstyles & strategies.

Heck, I'm a veteran player, having joined when Clown was just added and around the old Summer BBQ Event, who's played for years and unlocked plenty of Perks & characters. I took about a year, almost 2 year break and coming back, there is SO much catch-up for me to do...I can't imagine starting out brand new right now.

I think the big thing you're missing is the, what was it? 25% cost reduction to individual bloodweb nodes? A friend of mine recently got back in the game and she played Pinhead yesterday evening, and in not too many matches she'd managed to prestige him once. That immediately makes all his perks available on all killers, which is a huge improvement for how quickly she can put those perks into play. No longer do you need to go through 30+ additional bloodwebs, waiting for the right lvl1 perks to spawn in, they're just always there.

The grind improvement is the best thing about DBD's changes over the last year or so.

As for the topic's question: No, it is not a casual game at all. 6.1 raised the skill floor across the board. You need to know more, have more, and play better, on both sides.

I tried to invite new players but they couldn't assimilate quickly so one of them quited for good and another said he will might return to it later. He rather play VHS everyday despite low winrate and horrible queue times.

Not at all !

You really need to strap your ass to your chair until you're good enough to have fun, especially as survivor.

I wouldn't say the grind is too much now, I think it's reasonable, but it's not when starting out because you die a lot more.

Playing this game casually means even if you're trying you might not actually get better at the game because you don't play often enough to learn from your mistakes.

Right now I only have time to play maybe once a week (always chuckle at people saying they've "been on break from the game for a week", that's just my normal experience lol) and I really feel the lack of progress from no practice.

DbD is super discouraging when starting out, especially as survivor (since killer is easier on low mmr), so I understand your friend might prefer another game that's better suited to playing casually.

As it stands, DbD is beginner hostile and not a great game to start casually.

Regarding your point 1, you will still have to go through your main character's bloodweb now, because the prestige unlocks the perk only at tier 1, so you need to level it up to tier 3. So it's barely a difference. It's also extremely rare that you care about getting more than 1 perk on a character, I actually can't even think of a single one that has 2 good perks that synergize well (maybe Onryo?).

Even with the reduced BP costs, the math is still massively in favor of the old system.

Take an example, say a new player wants to make a basic build with 2 character perks + 2 regular perks. Say for example they want Sprint Burst + Self-care + Kindred + Resilience, which is decent.

After the tutorials, they already sit at 100k. Getting to lvl 35 with the old system costed around ~800k. So they need to spend 700k leveling up Meg to lvl 35, then they switch to Claudette. They still need to level up Claudette around lvl 30 to get the full build, so another 700k. Total: 1.4 Million.

Those however are BPs from the old system, since then the BP caps have also been increased from 32k to 40k, so let's apply a 1.25x "inflation factor". Total: 1.6 Million

With the new system, you need 1.4 Million to prestige to lvl 50. Then lvl 30, so 2.1 Million total. If you know how to cut bloodwebs, it's less, but a new player doesn't know that.

So before you needed 1.6 Million to get a basic build, now you need 2.1 Million. That's a 25% increase in the playtime. And not just that but at this point the old player can switch to a new survivor and have their 2 teachables ready soon. While with the new system they need to continue lvling up Claudette to lvl 50.

It's a lot of assumptions but I'd say empirically 25% sounds right. I had friends grinding before and after the update, and the one after felt significantly worse.

I've tried multiple times to get friends into DbD but its always the same nonsense. They do the tutorial, then get tunnelled out of a few games and never play again.

8 have played DBD in the past 2 weeks, 5 of which likely played for 1 game session. 37 other friends haven't touched the game.

I logged in to DBD and I have 0 friends in game. Introduced 2 friends to DBD in June 2022, they both last played on the 23rd of July 2022 lol. I'd love to hear from new players what made them stick to the game.

When I started playing a few years ago, I was switching games with a couple friends. We had one guy who had played DBD for a while and was willing to play with us to get started.

It was really helpful to have a veteran player when I first started out. Having no clue what any of the perks were or what was happening was kind of overwhelming. I think we annoyed the veteran sometimes with how bad we were.

I feel like it's gotten less casual since MMR was introduced. I'm not entirely convinced it's all matchmaking either, it's more like the player base heard 'rated games' and everything except winning stopped mattering.

I used to be able to just play the game, and most games were just fun even if I didn't survive. It was a gg, and into the next round. Now the 'fun' games are harder to find, and I think that's because 'winning' play styles are generally less fun to go against.

I much prefer having fun, losing games to boring or sweaty wins. I'm not sure there's any going back tho. I miss the feel of DBD as more of a chill 'party game'.

DBD would be casual friendly if all the perks were unlocked straight from the start. This is however not the case and it takes forever to get them. Sure, looping takes some skill but that is about it. I don't think a completely new player would do badly in that situation after a couple of games.

I'd say it's somewhat beginner friendly. Theres a lot to unlock and learn, but the core gameplay loop is pretty simple to get a hang of.

Again, as people have said, playing the game is casual...it's sticking with it and becoming a long-term player and the game retaining those new, casual players that's the problem.

In terms of its basic, surface level mechanics, DbD is a pretty simple game, and the technical skill required is minimal. So on that point, it's new player friendly.

However, where it gets really unfriendly for new players is in the lack of balance, extreme inconsistency between maps (which requires learning the nuances of all the different maps), epically inconsistent matchmaking, and of course that it is a game that isn't technically pay to win, but is effectively pay to win.

I've brought this up before, but the moment when I began to realize what I got myself into when I was watching an Otz video a few years back and he said not to be hard on yourself and to expect you won't start to get good until about 1K hours (now 3K hours in, I'd agree with him).

It's kind of a crazy thing that a game that is so technically simple takes so long to master, but that's a result of the unevenness of the game.

So my answer to the question would be new players will be fine unless they want to win consistently. Or won't be thrown off by running into random buzzsaws without warning (due to poor MMR). And have a thick skin toward toxic jackasses, and patience for learning the wide variety of different codes of player conduct people seem to have.

On second thought, maybe they should just stay away.

A problem that only makes it worse because look at all the perks that are used and how scattered across the game they are. What, you want to play someone else? Nah, go level these specific people.

Maybe an unpopular take, but I think the steady stream of DLC has actually messed up the game and is the reason new players can't fully get into it and stick around anymore.

I started in 2019, around the Stranger Things chapter, and it was hard to get into then, but a fun kind of hard. There was a lot less to contend with, being that there were significantly less killers and perks overall. Now, there are so many variables at play, I can't imagine anything about the game would be fun to get into for a new player - particularly solo survivors.

Imagine being a new survivor and being tunneled out because you can't loop (or don't even know what looping is!) match after match after match. Or imagine being a new killer and gens fly because you haven't learned how to track survivors yet, let alone downing and hooking them. Most people aren't going to want to continuously face that kind of hopeless feeling.

At some point, you just feel like you've wasted time and money, and cut your losses.

I don't think it's casual friendly because it's quite stressful when you're not playing optimally, as mistakes are very costly. As a killer, if you waste a little too much time on a chase you'll probably see gens fly. If you don't know how to run tiles and mindgame, you will waste a lot of time in chases and end up having to break multiple chases in order to protect gens, which can be frustrating as hell.

As a survivor, if you don't know how to loop very well, you will fall way too fast in chase for you to enjoy it. If your teammates are more skilled than you, the killer is likely to notice you're the weak link and eliminate you first, possibly via tunneling.

To make things easier for you, there are second chance perks for survivors and gen regression perks for killers, but that just means you are pushed to get and use the best perks in order to have more fun in the game.

looping is much harder than chasing.

if a killer looses a chase, that's on them.

run into a tin can as a survivor for .05 seconds? YOU LOST THE LOOP LOL!