My rant about the state of the game - Feels like its about time

Akumakaji
Akumakaji Member Posts: 5,619
edited February 2023 in Feedback and Suggestions


Hello everyone. I will try my hand at one of this rants, too, just to talk it off my soul

Today I tried a couple interesting non- meta builds and I failed miserable. Unless MMR throws you a bone and you get a full team of potatoes, losing two gens first chase is now the norm, often with the 3rd one following shortly after.

I then tried a couple of games were I hard-core tunneled from gen 5 on, which sometimes stalled the game slightly due to altruism. But someone would always stay sticky to the gens, no matter what happened and every single game proceeded to the end-game or 1 gen remaining with massive progress on that one.

I won those few games, where I managed to down two survivors at the same time and got an early kill, but even games were one survivor DCed at 4 gens, when they realised that they were tunneled weren't a walk in the park and still had me to play devious or perish.

And DH is literally everywhere and hard-carries a lot of games. A lot has been said and discussed about DH this last couple of weeks, but it has become so oppressive that it basically feels like pre-6.1 Yes, in theory it's "much fairer" and you can "bait it out", but by now all the good survivors have adapted to DHs new rules and know exactly how to bait out hits or put the killer in lose/lose situations.

Heck, most of the time I can call out when a survivor is going to use a DH pre-vault and often it's still a 50/50. And at palettes this game sense doesn't give you any advantage at all, as survivors can drop the palette the instances their "parry window" closes. The killer has literally 0.1s to hit the survivor or get stunned

and this is such a dangerous gamble, as if you fail your are left with nothing to show and the survivor doesn't even have to mend.

DH once again has a stranglehold on the game and the killers are mostly relegated to survivors playthings. Many claim that killers have it at their easiest, but that was the week or two after 6.1 dropped; this times are long gone and survivor's can greed palettes with impunity again, having so many resources that they basically can never run out.

I know I sound like "just one more salty killer main who got rekt", but I don't consider myself a bad killer and it really pains me to see the game in this state again. It feels like pre-6.1 all over again, were 3/4 of the games are just torture and you have to play in your most unfun and unsavory way, just to get a foothold, while sniffing each and every survivors butt.

I think that the problem is more complex then a single perk or a couple or overtuned numbers: some players have literally thousands of hours and know this game inside out. They can run every single tile absolutely perfectly and greed every single palette, no matter how unsafe, to its absolute max. This might indeed be the hallmarks of a great survivor, but against such opposition the game mechanics just break down, and you get multiple safety nets like DH, BT basekit and now hyper efficiency via HUD on top!

In the past the game was meant as a desperate war of attrition: you chase, get a couple of palettes out of the way, you eventually win the chase, hook and repeat, while slowly gen after gen was done. Now most of the time it's chase, greed, greed, greed, maybe get one palette out of the way, DH, t-bag, 3 gens pop.

I won't be leaving the game, but soldier on and suffer, and I am aware that few will have any sympathy or empathy for my plight, but: DH needs to go asap, for each match that it stands, it's sucking more and more joy out of the game. And maybe we need more dynamic trials. Let the Entity work as a game director and help the side that has fallen behind and gets stomped a little bit out, it would even be lore accurate. Let The Entity block windows or destroy a couple paletts if 3 gens pop at zero hooks, or hide the survivors scratch marks and maybe respawn a shack palette, if the survivor in chase is on death hook at 5 gens.

I don't know, maybe I am just worn out and burned out by this game, but it doesn't feel like a skill issue, as I was fine till just a couple of weeks ago. Could be that it's mostly the HUD change? Well everyone, you can now shoot me down.

Post edited by Rizzo on

Comments

  • TheSubstitute
    TheSubstitute Member Posts: 2,618

    I'm sorry to hear that. I think your idea about more dynamic games is a really good one and it would help shake up the games a bit. I really hope it goes better for you but I honestly have no idea what to suggest.

  • hiken
    hiken Member Posts: 1,188

    i cant understand the frustartion but imagine if even playing chill and with pretty much useless perks u could win agaisnt better players what do u think would happen if said killer also decides to bring the best of the best? GL to survivors then, they wont win a game ever again in their lives... the game may need a total rework and that wont happen

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  • I_CAME
    I_CAME Member Posts: 1,626

    I think upper middle to high level survivors are just better now. I can say from my personal experience that changing dead hard made me a significantly better looper than I used to be. My timing is tighter and I am much better at knowing when to drop the pallet and when not to drop it. Before I just relied on dead hard to correct any mistakes I made in a loop. You could severely misjudge a loop and still get away with it because of how massive the distance from old dead hard was. It was the definition of a crutch perk. Nerfing perks like DS and Iron Will also forced me to start using perks like windows in order to mitigate tunneling. As a result I now know every map like the back of my hand and can run most killers for a long time. Survivors are also much more likely to pound the gens than before due to how strong the killer regression meta is. You HAVE to be efficient to have any chance of winning in the eruption era. Of course actually getting four good teammates is rare so the game still isn't survivor sided in my experience.

  • Witchubtet
    Witchubtet Member Posts: 642

    I think this is one of the most honest posts about how someone feels. Akumakij I think you’re absolutely right about how it feels to play DBD a decent bit of the time.

  • Sava18
    Sava18 Member Posts: 2,514

    I would actually agree that the game does feel like the couple months leading up to 6.1.0. Same perks every game, survivors running extremely good things to make up for a lack of skill. I guess I am just bored of the game again more than anything. The funny thing about being a blight main is that the counter play to dh has not changed, if you have sufficient collision dh is nothing. Blights always fun, but overall survivor skill and the state of the game has made the experience boring again.

  • Basement_Bubba420
    Basement_Bubba420 Member Posts: 397

    This is why they should release the full stats.

    What is the avg number of hooks per kill?

    How about number of hooks before the first kill?

    If they did this we would probably see lots of tunneling. They don't want to release it because it would make them look bad.

    Same reason they fixed colorblind mode after it made the news. They made up some story about how they've been working on it for "a while". Well I would think that such a feature would take around a 3 month sprint. So when did this feature release? 3 months after they announced it....... It didn't make the midchapter patch either. So clearly they hadn't been working on it for a while. It got moved to the top of the feature list so they didn't piss off anymore people and get even more publicity. Then and only then did it get done.

    They don't care about the players, only optics.

  • Tostapane
    Tostapane Member Posts: 1,667

    i feel your pain... especially when certain premades will also abuse map offerings and bad hook spawn

  • Nirgendwohin
    Nirgendwohin Member Posts: 1,251

    I think the core problem is that many players don't have room to improve their skills anymore. the killer buff and meta shake up have forced many to improve their skills. the people who play a lot did it better and the people who play little took a little longer.

    for the game, this means that there is hardly any room left for mistakes on either side. the killer's first chase is going well? the match is almost lost for survivor. the first chase goes badly for the killer? his chances of winning are not good.

    The game is in a state where both sides have exhausted everything. every small change makes the balance scales swing very strongly. Ultimately, however, it's just a tinkering around with symptoms which arose from the missing game modes.

    Unfortunately, there are no new ideas in sight, at least from the developers' side.

  • Sava18
    Sava18 Member Posts: 2,514

    Players don't have room to improve their skills????? This is the only game I have ever been genuinely mad at for the lack of skill in nearly the entirety of the player base.

    Even now. One good chase from a survivor or two fast downs from a killer will throw the game back in either direction, it's not over early. Although quite a bit of the killer cast has such low skill expression and reliance on mistakes that a good survivor can make a good killer look bad simply because of the killer they chose.

    If the third paragraph means that games can be very one sided due to the loadouts or player mentality/intentions then I agree

  • Beatricks
    Beatricks Member Posts: 857

    What truly scares me, is that as bad as Killer is currently (make no mistake, it's a very frustrating experience if you are not a pro Nurse/Blight/Spirit player), it doesn't even come close to the utter misery that is SoloQ. And with the constant barrage against the HUD change (that didn't even increase survival rate by a single percent mind you) I can all too easily imagine the devs doing something so disastrous like adding another gen to finish, which would bump the current 80%+ kill rate to well above 95. Maybe the game would actually die then?

  • Seraphor
    Seraphor Member Posts: 9,436
    edited February 2023

    It's power creep.

    There was a time when Inner Healing was considered a good perk. When killers could play a hit and run style without tunnelling or throwing the game. When gen regression was limited to either Ruin (counterable) or Pop (limited), so survivors didn't have to genrush to stand a chance.

    The more effective tools you give either side, the more you limit the viable tactics the other can employ.

    They really need to start focussing on game health additions. Rebalancing existing perks to incentivise healthy playstyles, and new perks that discourage camping and tunnelling. Old BBQ with it's secondary win condition of collecting 4 stacks. MYC, a perk that literally cannot be used if you camp or tunnel. Gift of Pain, if it wasn't outclassed by other perks like Pentimento.

    The extra 10s to gen times across the board was a bad idea. Because 'buffing killers' in general does just make camping and tunnelling more effective when those buffs don't discriminate. But an increase to gen times that scales with how many survivors are currently in the trial, would have an impact on tunnelling.

    For example, increasing the maximum charges of a gen to 100 (currently 90), but then reducing the maximum required charges of every gen by 25 for each survivor eliminated, bringing it down to 75 for 3 survivors, or 50 for 2 survivors (and 25 for 1 but that's neither here nor there). This could make it slightly more difficult to get a 4-man escape, but it would drastically reduce the killers chances of snowballing if they eliminated survivors early on. Killers would be incentivised to spread hooks around, and wait until later into the game before eliminating survivors.

    This sort of change, that puts the 4K/4E results into the extremes, and makes 1,2,3K games more likely, creating a normal distribution of win conditions, would be a much better environment to play in, for either role.

  • Gandor
    Gandor Member Posts: 4,384

    So after you play meta and then play chill you get surprised you lost a few games. That sounds very weird to me. Like if I was going 4man squad with ranger medkits, perfect callouts and this all for quite some time and then swapped to soloQ itemless with meme perks - how much entitlement would I have to have to EXPECT to win the games? Just play a few more games so that your MMR adjusts. Then you are free to meme around and still win some.

    My last 3 games (to rephrase it - all of my killer games played yesterday) on killer were 2x GoJ and mother's dwelling on legion, ghostface and artist (all in this order) all 3 of those were 3 or 4 kills. No more then 1 gen poped at 1st chase (but sure my build on all 3 of them contain CI). The ghostface game ended at 5 incomplete gens (I presume the team was "bully squad", but they were bad), artist ended at 3 incomplete gens and legion game was 1 gen to go.

    The game had DH's but it's at worst 50/50 to bait it out/swing too early/late for them to register making it absolute no brainer/no problem. I have to agree the perk is used a lot. But it hardly matters.

    some players have literally thousands of hours and know this game inside out

    So you don't even have 2k hrs and want to win against more skilled players anyway. Do I read it right? Do you think you deserve to win against people with more skill/experience then you? How is that fair? How would such a thing be good design? We can speak about how matchmaking is not good, but do we really want to get to the state where 10hrs killer has real chance to win against survivor lobby with 40k hrs combined? Ideally with meme perks as you wrote in the very beginning? Is that really our goal here? Is that your idea of fun for both sides?

    Overall in my experience - killer is still way easier to win on average (but it does not provide "relax time" where all you have to do is hold M1). As a survivor in current state of game - I am happy if we got into endgame anyone escapes from my team via gate (meaning all gens done and gate opened). I don't even count if I personally escaped and really cherish games where everyone escaped. And I have had my fair share of games where killer got 1 hook until 5 gens pop and it still ended up in 4K - so what does it matter if in 1st chase even 4 gens pop if there are no more resources on the map and killer is able to slug/kill everyone right after that. 1st gen by far has MUCH LOWER value then the last one. Anyone that complains about 1st chase and gen pops just outright ignores this fact.

  • Akumakaji
    Akumakaji Member Posts: 5,619

    Rest assured. At least a 6th gen won't be added, 100000000%. Yes, soloQ needed the HUD update and don't have to be the punchingbag of the game, but now we need to vocalise what many had seen as writing on the wall: that killers would suffer and that they now need to be buffed in some way, now that SWF and soloQ are closer in terms of efficiency.

    Tbh, I actually would prefer if they did some kind of health update and instead of just buffing and empowering the killer role in this continued arms race, somehow took a few steps back on both sides and rewind the power creep. This is easier said then done, but you can only upgrade both sides firepower so much, we are basically at the ultimate What might be possible. 5 gen stomps? 4min gen slams? It can't get any lower then this, and it's neither fun nor healthy.

  • Akumakaji
    Akumakaji Member Posts: 5,619

    People sometimes have some truly bizarre ideas, what off-meta means. I talked not one iota about playing funny meme builds and expecting to win high or even stomp and then came crawling back to the forums, crying my heart out, quite the contrary, I can take quote a beating and come back for more. But the last couple of weeks just have drained my out and left me exhausted, so to speak. And judging by the resonance I got, it's not a singular opinion or feeling.

    Just to circle back to my off-meta comment, in my own pov, please correct me if I am wrong, but anything that isn't strictly meta should be thus off-meta, right? So everyone knows that DH is the best exhaustion perk, with SB a somewhat second place, so even Lithe, an all around good perk, is off-meta, but playing with Lithe doesn't mean that you are memeing or throwing the game or that you should expect to get stomped.

    There is a difference between playing Quick and Quiet/Head On and playing Red Herring/Autodidact, both are off-meta, but one of this pair is somewhat viable, while the other is crap. So I wasn't memeing or throwing games, I just wasn't bringing the absolute ruthless best meta perks.

    Meta is meta for a reasons, I don't think that you should be forced to play them or "deserve to get stomped you entitled swine!!!1" (exaggeration by me). Being a good player and having good gaming sense, you should at least be able to have a fighting chance and pose a threat to your opponents, not getting run over with impunity, because you had the audacity to diverge from the meta a lil bit.

  • Gandor
    Gandor Member Posts: 4,384

    I can agree with that (not your own personal exaggeration who - not my intention in any way :D ). In my eyes off-meta was meme, because meta was not just best thing, but everything that is used "a lot" (so in this case all of DH, sprint, lithe and even BL or OC, but not smash hit). So there goes the misunderstanding.

    Still - in my personal experience - which quite obviously differs from yours, killer is still easier to win/not loose then survivor.

    And for survivor there's always that possibility of doing perfectly whole match (having 0 hooks for 5 gens) and then still getting 4K'd by one good killer play and one big survivor mistake. Meaning you have to be on your toes all the time while killer "can't really throw" that much (sure he can commit to bad chase costing him the game, but he needs to consistently do bad in said chase - it's never just 1 mistake).

  • Blueberry
    Blueberry Member Posts: 14,472
    edited February 2023

    Nah man it seems pretty accurate to me. I agree on most all your points.

    The difference in survivor and killer games isn't whether you win or lose, it's why you win or lose.

    Most solo queue games are lost from either me or my team making bad plays. If we don't play bad, we win, and it's essentially a bully simulator.

    What about games you lose as killer? Some lost through misplays, but way, way more lost through bad game design through unbalanced perks and extremely broken maps of which there are a lot. This is significantly less noticeable at low/mid tier games but very prevalent on the high end.

    There are literally tons of matches on killer where as you watch it back you're like what could I have played better or done differently to change this outcome, and lots of the time the answer is nothing. This is a lack of agency for killers as you rely on survivor mistakes to win for most killers. This is exclusively a killer experience, you do not have lack of agency as survivor. Every survivor game I rewatch you can see where different choices and different plays could have changed the outcome either by you or teammates. Now we could call it lack of agency if you're playing perfectly but your team is playing bad, however it's a 4v1, not a 1v1, so their mistakes are your mistakes. This whole factor is thrown out the window as well once you start doing 3/4 man swf of which is significantly more common at the top end.

    I play my survivor games to relax, as it is a very relaxing experience. Even the worst experience survivor matches with bad teammates and toxic killers is not even remotely close to the experience as the worst killer match. This is even solo queue mind you. Anyone who thinks survivor, even solo queue, is a worse experience than playing killer at the high end I don't think actually plays killer at the high end.

  • Devil_hit11
    Devil_hit11 Member Posts: 9,513


    Some lost through misplays, but way, way more lost through bad game design through unbalanced perks and extremely broken maps of which there are a lot.

    it comes down to the fact that killers in chase are balanced around their power plaster fixing god pallet and safe pallet design. this also applies to safe window design. If your killer is ineffective at outplaying the survivor at pallets, then you rely entirely on survivor's lack of experience at using pallets to win. there is also big map design which people like point as a problem, but its more symptom to the problem. If the map is very big, experienced survivor can run forward from one side of the map to another side of the map wasting the killer time before the killer is actively in a chase. Big maps allows you exaggerate this gameplay because there is more space to do that where as shorter maps have less space so you run into dead ends sooner. Recently content creator like Otz describe this problem as yo-yoing. This exploits another critical weakness of many killer is lack of mobility/lack of range attacks.

    Survivor: Lose to you or your team making mistakes

    Killer: Lose to game design unless you are play few select killers that plaster fix chase design.