Skull Merchant

The literally addressed it back during the AMA. They are working on an update for her, but they didn't give a timetable because it is very early in that process considering she's not even been out 6 months.

What is there to address? People do eventually lose games.

I made a post to kinda remedy the whole three gen issue which I think would work out, wouldn’t even be necessary to change killer powers

I also want bHVR to do a big statement about my losses.

Your argument of DBD being a party game makes it even worse if you think about it. In a party game winning is not everything. So 1hr match where barely anything happens is by definition HUGE flop. Like worse then gen sometimes not being fixable. Worse then Greg being invisible in his nightfall. Because those ruin part of game/a few minutes. SM ruins almost an hour of game IN A PARTY GAME! It's VERY MUCH worth killswitch provided we are indeed talking about just a party game.

You want BVHR to make a statement over 1 game, because it involved 4 specific players. That's just ridiculous.

Not to mention it completely ignores the fact that BHVR already made a statement on skull merchant and 3 gen during the anniversary stream.

Like I really don't know what you want, because it just sounds like you want BHVR to play favorites.

Whether or not they are truly the best players, there's no leaderboard or such to truly determine such. They are 4 specific players that you want BHVR to recognize by commenting on a game that has nothing new to discuss.

Also the event is already over. People love to keep talking about Skull Merchant and then wonder why people are playing Skull Merchant.

It's very clear that you simply don't pay attention to things that BHVR actually announces and just want them to play favorites with 4 players you like.

The trolley problem is both inadequate and flawed even in the proper philosophical context it was created for.

The Greater Good theory is often far too binary to truly be applicable to basically most situations in life that don't boil don't to "Do X or Die". Situations in life are often more akin the outcome of Kobayashi Meru test in Star Trek where the only real answer was to not engage with the binary choice to begin with.

Also they do something minor to compensate, they buff the heck outta Deja Vu specifically to aid in pointing out a potential 3 gen cluster and giving you a decent bonus to repair speed so you can do those gens faster. They also made slight changes to Merchant herself to try and encourage more players to do other playstyles outside of hard 3 gen, but minor number changes can only do so much when the power itself is so centralized to whether or not she can make full and free use of her drones. Ultimately, every other way of playing her is suboptimal compared to just playing her in a highly territorial way because from the killer's side, she NEEDS survivors to interact with the drones to have a power at all. From the Survivors' side if the killer doesn't place the drones in areas where they need to be interacted with it is exceptionally easy to just path around them and Skull Merchant doesn't exist as a result.

Her power has good bits to that make her fairly decent in a chase and it has potential make her an excellent stealth killer, but those factors are contingent on her drones rather than her and need addon from addons that are a bit pricey.

The game can't distinguish between a suicide and fair hook so that is a useless thing to look at.

DC's are such a rampant issue no matter what killer is played and again the game can't determine reason for a DC only that it happened which makes it useless to look at as well. There is a reason why people constantly complain the devs making decisions based on stat lines and you're asking them to do that very thing.

How does one determine the exact reason why someone stopped playing DBD? Unless people self report there is no way to know that answer so how would you remotely use that as a factor.

Please be a bit more reasonable. With your logic the devs might as well Killswitch everyone but Trapper and Hillbilly.

1, if all killers have 10% DC rate and 1 have say 40% DC rate, it either means she breaks the game, or ppl don't want to face her

2, if all killers have 10% people dying on first hook and then you have killer that has 50% people dying on first hook, you know you have a problem with that killer (either suicides, or too good kit for camping)

3, if you track what people (connections) play and when they log off from game, you can easily collect information which killer was the one that they faced as last. If killer is played in say 5% of all matches, but is still 20% of all last games for said connection/player, you know you have problem with that killer.

There is very good and strong and vocal majority of people that clearly say, that the killer is problem. Compound it with stats and you have good data with good interpretation = good information. Problem with behavior's decisions based solely on stats is with missing context followed by wrong interpretation of data. There's 0 chance in that if you look at overwhelming feedback given to her.

Killswitch is PERFECTLY reasonable in this case. The only people defending her are exclusively those playing her (and even good part of those will admit she needs changes) - which is similar to say survivors asking for OG MoM - without any regards to the other side and to the pain it brings.

I'd rather have her killswitched for a long time (like bloodlodge) until they really fix her, then have broken thing spoiling games for all the players facing her.

And yes. I HATE HER WITH PASSION. I don't care if I win the match, because it's going to be boring anyway. At her current state, 24 hrs ban might be preferable - because you can do something more entertaining at the same time - like cleaning the house or literally anything else

If people dc on average in X amount and against specific killer X times 4 amount, you can be sure there's something specific to the killer that makes people DC that much more specifically on that killer.

Same goes for last game and same goes for dying on first hook.

You can expect that people will actually complain about the reason why this abnormality happens (say if she had game-breaking bug that kicks players from game, you would see many posts about it). And this is in fact already true - see the sheer number of threads about deleting/changing the killer with so many replies (like this one).

There's just no other viable explenation why would people DC more against her (random chance would be so astronomically improbable, that you can win lottery much easier), then what you can see in all these threads - that she prolongs the game by insane amount. Just show me 1 other plausible explenation that would explain it considering all the feedback that is given. But you can't. Because there needs to be reason why it's always SM that has so many DC's instead of say Billy - or Knight for that matter. There's no other feedback then people saying she is insufferable.

Killswitch under these conditions makes perfect sense - the killer is doing more harm (to whole survivor population), then good (to a few killer mains that enjoy her). This is perfectly reasonable response to the issue at hand - limit the damage to the game

Sorry, but I have yet to see a game where there are 4 live survivors that can't fix all the gens in 30+ minutes (counting all the killers you mentioned). Provided we are not talking about skull merchant. Like sure - there's knight that can come semi-close to it, but he's still weak in comparison.

Huge difference is, that you can actually dodge legion's hit (FoV tech, pallet, locker, 360, etc) or even if you don't you can still fix the gen while being injured and for some time also while mending. You can also hide next to gen while legion is not in frenzy and so on. His kit is just bad in comparison to SM in holding 3gen. Like he can postpone the game, but not keep the gens at 0...

After going against a skull merchant that kept me hostage for about 45 minutes, yeah she gotta go. Remember before end game collapse were survivors would hold the game hostage?? Yeah me too, I see that DEVS fixed that situation so hopefully they fix this skull merchant situation cause it's flat out ruining the game.

You're literally sitting there trying to classify her design as a bug when it most definitely isn't a bug. It's bad design, but it isn't a bug for better or worse it was intentional and intended. Like her kit didn't just materialize and have a bad reaction at random that folks are exploiting. Skull Merchant's kit went through both internal and public testing, there very little chance that the possibility of this being the way she was going to be played was unknown at the internal stage. At the public testing stage WE KNOW for a fact that everyone and their mother demonstrated how effectively she could hold a 3 gen and how terrible she is comparatively at anything else.

It is not bug, it is intended design are worst and at best it is just gross underestimation of either players' desire to push the limit of what was shown to be possible or the limitations of the design itself. This is nothing like Sky Billy or Space Billy which were actually bugs that just happened to be fun and harmless. Billy turning into Elton John's Rocket Man was never intended design in any way where as Merchant just playing around holding a 3 gen with her highly territorial area denial power is exactly intentional. The unintended part is the lengths to which people have gone to hold a 3 gen for the maximum allowable amount of game time.

Other killers can most certainly come to achieving the same feat with the right perks and depending on the killer right addons. It takes much more work and is less consistent overall as you'd need to account for the use of specific maps, but it is possible. If you look back at DBD's past Doc actually held games hostage for far longer than Skull Merchant ever could purely due to the games didn't timeout during the peak of hostage Doc. Forever Fredboi was notorious about drawing games out to insanely long degrees and didn't get hard disabled for doing the vast majority of time he had his original power set. Legion in the past actually drew games out to huge degree due to how mending and deep wounds used to work on top of having bugged addons that made mending essentially impossible. They can't just make you have an infinite mending issue anymore, but they can just keep wounding and kicking with their most recent addon pass giving them buffs to damage actions while in frenzy.

3 genning as a strat has been in the game for years because it has been in the game since day one. Most killers just weren't built to take advantage of it and perk support to make hard 3 genning didn't come till later. The biggest issue with 3 genning isn't the killer it's the way gen spawns are handled! It's a years old issue that killers outside of Skull Merchant have been able to weaponize to varying degrees based on their personal kits and perk support available at the time. Killswitching Skull Merchant does not change that fact.

You either don't know enough about the history of this game or you're so extremely biased that you beyond incapable of being reasonable..

You are still missing the point. It's huge difference if "forever Freddy" was able to stall the game. It's very much different when OG ruin with OG undying prolonged the game by insane amount (you had to possibly get rid of up to 5 totems or you had to reliably hit great skillchecks). It's entirely different that doctor had a build that made skillchecks super hard for some people. These are all just "broken OP" things. It's just not the same. None of these and none other then SM can force the game be so long, that the server just shuts down. That's unique just for SM and her alone. That's why she and only she breaks the game. That's why she and only she needs to be killswitched. None of your previous examples were able to hold the game forever (and also - server shutdown was possible even before - it's that the time to shutdown got changed to 1 hour. But you could have done that for a long time - and some survivors were indeed abusing it - that's why crows when not doing anything was implemented).

So again. She is the only one that can abuse (and was able to abuse - again - not counting knight on certain map for a brief period of time) server shutdown feature that was ABSOLUTELY not intended as a win-condition. So she is the only killer in whole game that warrants killswitch. No other killer can do that. Not even OG legion (which BTW had issue with no counterplay to him stabbing you in ability - instead of not being able to progress gens). It's just SM and her alone