http://dbd.game/killswitch
Unpopular opinion: DBD is one of the hardest games to master
The reason i made this topic is because of the big amount of posts in this forum where people complain about incompetence of teammates or that playing killer is almost impossible to win.
As you can read in the titel, i think that DBD is one of the most difficult games that i have ever played. Even some games that are considered e-sports titels dont have such a hard time to master. League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm or CS GO are not that much harder (if even) to get good in.
On the other hand, this game is ballanced for a casual level but also tries to be fine for the top players, more or less.
I think, and i would be more then happy if someone corrects or even proves me wrong, that this is the main problem with Dead by Daylight. The amount of stuff you have to learn (maps, killers, addons, tiles ect ect) that you even surpass beginner level is at this point a lot, even close to LoL or Dota level.
Any thoughts?
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I'd say shooters are harder to master simply because the skill ceiling on aim is infinite. DBD can be harder to learn and understand in some cases though.
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It's kinda hard in terms that you don't get an immediate feedback on what you are doing wrong. In shooters/moba/something you either land a shot and get the enemy damaged or you don't, but in DbD you might never realise that you have to zone survivors towards weaker loops, for example.
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Idk what to tell you. League also has a lot of stuff to learn, admittedly the champions that are in the hundreds. I guess you canget away by one tricking a specific champ but that doesn't mean you are necessarily good at the game, and the same is true for someone DBD, if someone plays a killer that essentially skips part of the basic gameplay say chasing), then that doesn't mean they are well rounded, but they are extremely specialized in that one killer. Claiming LoL etc. aren't hard to master is silly, unless you are in the ladder of top 100, since that would indicate mastery of some kind and still might not even qualify you for esports teams regardless.
What about fighting games that have been around 20-30 years (Tekken, Street Fighter etc.) and their players have amassed decades of experience by now?
Mastery is really not something that is accessible to most people, because it requires effort, time, the desire to learn for learning's sake, dedication and probably more.
Now if you were to tell me grasping the basics and using them reliably might be easier in other games than DBD, I might agree with you. Although I am not sure if that is so much skill, as it is the design of the game that makes it impossible (bad matchmaking, reluctance to separate casuals from try hards etc.), problems that other games don't have in spades unlike DBD. Those problems make it impossible to have a uniform experience in DBD, but in other games it's more expected, DBD is a game of extremes, so of course your basics will be challenged a lot (as in if you get matched with a 100 winning spree Wesker, maybe your basics don't matter, because you'd need specific counters that work only on Wesker and specific co-ordination against him to beat him, which the game itself makes hard to come by and outside of your control.
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I am not sure about that. Cant you also say the same for DBD in terms of lets say chase? There are so many maps, so many tiles and so many killer and every tile/combo of tiles or map in general plays very different against any of those killers.
And also a killer =/= killer. Every loadout or diferent combination of perks makes it often very diferent to play against a certaint killer, right? Same can be said about playing vs survivors. You as a killer has to react to so many factors, and every game is different.
On top of that, in DBD maps are always different, you most likely will never get the same map twice. The RNG factor plays a big roll.
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I still have no clue what perks are from I think Zarina, and then some are like others but reversed, my mind is not as young as it once was, so more challenging for us older peeps lol. The thing is I think this is a game that can't be mastered? because it's always going to be changing, but that's my opinion, for me now I just stick to what I am comfy with and know, sounds boring I know but it works for me.
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I think a lot of it comes down to what is involved in mastery of a specific game? Mechanical skills, macro game, micro game, knowledge base? All games require these to various amounts. Dbd is difficult to master imo, because you need to have a fairly strong skill set in all, where as a lot of games that still take years to master only require focus in a couple of areas.
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I don't think DBD is close to being as hard to master as let's say Starcraft 2,dota/League, CSGO or Fighting games... It's not even close, the RNG makes it so that you don't need to learn too much about maps but the general map layout, perks are mostly irrelevant because 90% of them don't get used anyway because they don't have an impact that is relevant for you, same goes for killer addons.
As for the skill involved in playing, yeah sure you can spend a few thousand hours in survivors and the same for many of the killers, while probably a majority of them is rather easy too Master, with not much other than m1 killer gameplay... But when you look at those really competitive games, where you actually can make a living out of it, and you have those players that play for like 10+ years every day 6-10 h you cannot tell me that dbd is even close to those... Macro Strategies in dbd are rather simple whereas when you think about strategy games with all the different build orders and unit counters and perhaps blind cou ter because some player you are facing mostly plays one thing and so on and so forth. As for the mechanical skill there are very few things in dbd that can compare, maybe Billy, Blight and so on, but not a lot of them. But even then all those precise inputs you have in strategy games are just overwhelmingly harder than anything you can do in dbd...
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DBD requires an enormous amount of time invested to master more than anything else. The skill requirement isn't that high since almost everything that goes into being good comes down to knowledge and experience. DBD doesn't require mechanical skill in the same way that a competitive shooter or RTS does. Anyone can be good at DBD if they invest enough time. Investing a bunch of time into a shooter will never make you the next Shroud.
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A fair share of the whole "survivors are bad, you can't dev for that!" rhetoric that is constantly spun around here is by killer mains, with their own agenda.
You have to take a lot of what's said here with a grain of salt.
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When i picked up CS GO it took me close to 600 hours to reach Global Elite and beeing able to hold that rank. Sure, this is not pro level, but had a strong grip on that game and knew basically everything the game had to offer, including nade spots, strategy and an overall good gamesense plus the machanics like movement and aim. It is a lot of muscle memory and that comes relatively quick when you practice every day.
Dont understand me wrong, getting a pro in CS GO might never happen, even if you spend 10.000 hours but i am not talking about that, i simply mean becoming a master of that game. There is a big difference.
Thinking about Dead by daylight, after 600 hours i think i was barely more then a advanced beginner. And when i look at many people i know from my POV even they have 1000+ hours they are still not much above beginner level, especially knowledge. Does that mean DBD is more difficult? Absoluty not, but the amount you have to learn to surpass beginner level and eventually reach mastering the game is so much more then in any shooter i know.
Maybe it is also the nature of the game, why not many people want to pick up the game and learn it properly because it has a casual touch and is not that serious? That would explain why the skillgrap between all those matches is sometimes sooo enorm.
After 5000 hours in DBD i dont think i am even close to a master in every aspekt. I am trash with quite a few killers (blight for example), and even to this day i do here and there silly mistakes as survivor that a master should not be doing.
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Yeah but the question is how much shooter experience did you have before? You could translate that experience into csgo whereas DBD does not really have other games that allow you to do the same...
Maps in dbd are less complicated but far more, while most of them are utter trash, besides indoor maps they all work by the same pattern, mainbuilding, shack and jungle gyms are in fixed positions and all the other tiles are mostly rng... So you have to learn like 5 things about every map + what tiles there are... I think it is possible to learn all this within a day if you really wanted, whereas made spots and such takes much longer in my opinion...
As for csgo in general, I used to play it with friends, but I was always terrible at the game, and even my buddies with a few hundred maybe thousand hours weren't global, so maybe you are more of the exception than the rule in that case...
Seems more like the question of what is mastery... I would say the closest to mastery you can get is usually the pro scene or some players that are at a similar level at only one or two heroes or killers or whatever...
The skill gap between matches is that the mrr in this game is basically useless, because it cannot grasp skill and works with a soft cap so us mediocre players can still get matched against Knightlight Nurse... There was some information by data miners that this softcap is basically so low you can reach it in a single day... So yeah, unless you are completely new to the game, you probably have the chance to get matched against people with several thousand hours that play for 7 years...
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I'd say you're spot on tbh.
While DBD isn't that mechanically intensive, there isn't really anything like DBD to bring your gaming experience to. If you have 5000 hours in Counter Strike, you can swan in to CoD and will probably do quite well with minimum adaption.
DBDs skills however are all timing, positioning and game knowledge, with a little execution thrown in... all of which are completely unique to DBD. You can't carry skills over from elsewhere, so your learning curve is quite extreme.
Not only that, your skills don't really translate from one killer to another or 1 survivor build to another. A Distortion/Sprint Burst player focusing on gens will have a totally different feel and timing to the game compared to a MFT/Resilience player trying to loop the killer. Then again it changes further based on the killer power and their chosen perks.
DBD is actually extremely intricate, as we've seen all too often where 1 unexpected perk combination can totally swing a game based on whether or not the other side guesses it.
I'd say it most definitely is a very tough game to master... if you even can really.
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Before CS GO? Almost none, i was more into strategy. I played a little bit Quake 3 and some single player shooters but thats about it.
I strongly disagree you can learn every single map within a day. Maybe in a week but then only on paper. Playing them is a completly different story. I would even argue, that the majority of players dont know every map plus tile that well after months of gaming. Especially because of their random nature its much harder as if maps had set tiles.
That is a good question, what actually is mastery. I would say (and that is also not easy to define) the moment when the game becomes 2nd nature and you know everything relevant.
True, the MMR seems to be not working that well, since a good (or decent) player will reach the highest relevant MMR very quick - probably within less then 100 games, depending on the player ofc.
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I mean... there are things that DBD that other games do have... but there's a bigger difference
Learning Maps (most games have that)
Learning perks (most games have that)
Learning characters (some games have that)
Learning that DBD is a 4V1 (less games have that)
DBD has to balance a lot more then most other games... Perks, Maps, RNG, Characters (Killers mostly)
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About the maps...
Because of the the rng there is not that much to learn about a map... You need to know only whereainbuilding and shack is + set tiles... Everything else is nothing you can know, because it is random... It really is that easy... All the junk tiles in between can spawn or not, be weaker or stronger and so on.. That's why I will still stay by my statement... Learning how a map in dbd works is not that hard... Go in a custom game, check for main and shack, figure out the position of jungle gyms, and that's mostly it... Most other things are rng anyway...
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Learning maps is more than knowing where structures spawn.
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What exactly is there besides it? You cannot know for sure which setup. Spawns so you don't necessarily know if loops are chain able or not, all you can know is which parts of the map are stronger, which can only be judged by the safe variants, since everything else is random... So what exactly is there besides knowing how the map is built?
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There are tons of things to learn. Totemspawns and generator spawns for example. How to run the map especially, how to traverse. Which zones to run in this and that situation. Which gens to do when and where. Which structure can you run in a certain erea vs a cetrain killer that you wont deadzone you. And basically the opposite for killer.
Thats why it is hard to learn the maps, because there is much more to it then just knowing the shape and size of it.
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Not so unpopular opinion i think.
DBD is a lot harder than you think it would be.
You need a lot of play time to understand whats going on. Maps, powers, perks is also a lot.
The grind for a new players at the moment is still insane to unlock everything.
Also to get really good you need to play both sides.
And even if you know what you have to do, to actually do it in game is another thing.
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It's kinda hard in terms that you don't get an immediate feedback on what you are doing wrong.
This, a thousand times this. You can do a lot of things wrong in DbD with no idea that you're doing it wrong. As killer, it is easy to lose all the generators with only 1 or 2 hooks and be left scratching your head with no idea how you could have done better. As survivor, it's hard to practice chase because when you do something wrong, you're down and on a hook and getting kicked out of the game with little understanding as to how you could have done better.
I still suck at chase because practice is difficult, and the cost of failure is not being able to play the game to practice more. A lot of skill in DbD has to be either learned from outside sources such as guides from experienced players, or intuited on your own time and effort which is REALLY difficult and time-consuming.
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I don't see value in learning generator spawns, outdoors they are fairly easy to spot... Totem spawns sure, but that's just memorizing locations on the map layout as well, just like tile positions.
Where to run is most often straight forward: to a safe part of the map, the only times you should not do that is if someone is working there on a Gen.
As for all that killer specific stuff, since you only know before mentioned structures for sure there is not much to learn but figure out on the spot by what you already know, so even in that scenario there is not too much you can learn beforehand because of all the rng.
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I would not say it's that insanely hard to master no. Although it depends on your definition of mastery, because there are few people in few games that you could be argued to be perfect. If you are factoring in a human element as you should then I would say no.
If you go out of your way to learn the game from creators you can get the hang of this game really quick. I was exclusively a killer player when I picked up dbd and the reason I did was from randomly seeing otz play hag. At around 300-400 hours in my macro was really good and my mechanics were good too(not there is too hard of mechanics in this game except for a few killers). My game knowledge was also solid. I would not say I was a master level killer player but definitely far far better than average.
I would say survivor is overall the harder role by quite a bit, at least for me. Learning how to chain loops together in the best way given your rng and knowing how to play against each killer takes quite a bit of knowledge.
A game like league is just so extreme in every aspect that is just outclasses dbd on mastery. League has over 200 items and 165 champions in the game, learning those interactions and figuring out the mechanics there could take a very long time on it's own. Then there's figuring out the intricacies of laning phase and how to play/build as your champion vs their champion. When to roam, when to just take an L for 5 min. Late game macro to be efficient but put pressure on the map and be in the right spots for team fights.
DBD is unique and has a decent skill curve but it just doesn't have enough in it to be "one of the hardest games to master". It may seem like I am downplaying it a bit, that's not what I am trying to do. The game isn't easy.
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Dbd is mechanically easy to play, all the difficulty comes from the zillion random knowledge checks the game has. Which 4x games have way more. This game really isn't that deep which is one of the reasons this game turns out old players at a huge rate.
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It's hard to "master" because it's a house made of spaghetti dropped on a foundation of loose sand.
Virtually everything about is so ill-defined and inconsistent that they very notion of mastering it is kinda comical.
The best you can do is get the basics down well enough that you'll be able to adapt to whatever new BS comes long better than your peers.
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Eh for a casuals/noobs it can seem overwhelming but someone who plays with a hint of seriousness can pick things up really quick.
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Depends entirely on the killer you play. For survivors, it can be quite different depending on if you play alone or in a swf.
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There is much, much more that goes into playing this game well than most people casually or vehemently assume. I won't go into any of that, it suffices to say that tournaments and 1v1 competitions show that there are teams and players that are consistently much better than others, and that's in an environment composed of players that are already better than 99% of those that don't participate in these competitions. People look at some content creators and think they are the holy grail of what is possible in terms of mastery in DbD, yet in actual competitive environments they would struggle to be mid-field. Doesn't mean they are bad, far from (and to be fair, they can be better at some things that competitive players barely or never even do because they are not win-oriented), it means the game has an a lot higher skill ceiling than many people realize. Even players with thousands upon thousands of hours make fairly fundamental mistakes fairly frequently, and almost nobody actually goes into customs to practice very specific things to really understand and master them. In pub matches, most of everyone just goes with the flow, hitting a plateau at some point and never really overcoming it.
If you want to put yourself to the test and challenge yourself, join the DbD scrim or DbD League discord servers, and play as killer against competitive(ly-minded) teams (or against such killers, if you already have a survivor group you play with) or play 1v1s on DbD League's ladder. You might have a rude awakening, but it will still be an awakening, that might get you interested in this realm of the game which can also be fun as well as allow you to reach higher levels of skill.
Here is a brief introductory video on this, by comp player V1rtual_Reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XX3PkAfoRA
The links to the discord servers can be found in the video description (DBDScrims Server: https://discord.gg/Fs6n5kSPu9 DBDLeague Server: https://discord.gg/U2a5Ku3ZMp).
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That is actually a very insteresting reply by you, since it somewhat proves my point. I assume you are a player with probably many hours in this game and i also like to belive you are interested in it (over 1000 posts). Yet, even an advanced player like you seems to not fully realise the importance of advanced map knowledge. Doing a random generator at a random time is absolutly not what a master would do.
Maybe you actually do it right, or at least in a decent way, but it seems you have not really dealt with map knowledge on master level.
I am not saying this is all rocket science (beyond master level, it actually is) but i stronly believe, that 99% of the player base thinks exactly like that. There is nothing wrong with it, but it showcases that a complex game is treated on a very basic casual level while a shooter f.e. CS GO is treated way more in depth.
This is by no means ment to be rude or condescending, i only want to point out that there is much more to it as it appears, but nobody really cares. And i think this is one of the main reasons the skill gap in this game also in terms of knowledge is so far apart.
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I can absolutly confirm this.
I for myself, while beeing extremly rusty but still a somewhat pretty good veteran player has no problem running a normal killer on public for the majority of the game. When going in a competetive 1on1 scenario... oh boy.. this is a completly different story.
And yes, the often praised "gods" in this game can often barly even hold a candle against the really good players.
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COD and dbd are games I struggle to master. For dbd you really need to know most perks at your opponent and your teamates if you are playing Solo Q survivor. You also need to learn to spin, when to greed and the list goes on. For killer you need to know your strengths and weaknesses. For example I main pig I need to know when I should ambush depending on the survivors skill level. DBD can take years to properly master which I haven't done yet. And with new perks being added and the meta constantly changing you need to always be ready to adapt.
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I'm not saying there is no thought process behind it, but it is not really map specific, but general knowledge, doing gens in a deadzone first, leaving safer gens for the end preventing 3 gens and so on and so forth, since gen spawns are somewhat random it would be way to much of a time investment to remember every single possibility of a good 3 gen spawning, it is fairly easy if the killer is not protecting a 3 gen to break it... For example on dead dawg, as survivor you usually want to prevent the 3 gen in the outskirts and leave the main building generator for last, because it is really safe, but that's not really map specific, because leaving generators in safer positions for last is somewhat of a general thing, and knowing which gens are safer is not really that much effort... Or what exactly would a map specific example of this be that cannot be generalized in that manner?
At this point it is general game knowledge and not specific map knowledge, for example you should also not just do one gen after another on your way through the map, to not limit the effective size of the map, so you should probably leave some corner gens and do some in the middle, or leave one out on your way there, but again this is not map specific, it is just the same on every map...
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So is it more about specifics rather then general or is it more about general then specifics
Cause I'm thinking that it's both
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Well I do not know...I believe that the db is not so big a threshold for entry, because first of all you are unlikely to have to study all the content in the game
Most of the perks pale in front of 4-5 perks that everyone uses and you just need to know how the 4-5 that are most often used in matches work and always expect them. Know several assemblies, the most effective combinations and when to use them best.
And for the murderers, many moments are repeated, there are only a couple of murderers whose gameplay is directly riddled with a bunch of different chips and radically different from others. The knowledge gained on Freddy in beating the survivors in the constructions will definitely be needed by you on the same cenobite, an alien, and it is not desirable to know those some killers thoroughly for a confort game.
The survivors have almost the same:why do you need to know thoroughly how to play against the twins if they almost never appear in matches? Most often there are only a few killers and the knowledge of how to play against them with enough to play comfortably, especially the knowledge gained against these can help you play against others. Again, the abilities of murderers are often based on the same elements, some killers even repeat the tactics of the game for and against, except that the efficiency and method of execution change.
I want to say that, for the most part, this is not completely new, which should be studied from the very beginning, but instead, after a certain base, they only get a couple of details that you don't always have to know thoroughly and which often do not have the same differences in relation to other killers: the same Freddy Krueger, the skull merchant, the clown are played in the same way: Survivor in the design - you use your ability, if he is not smart enough not to run into it, you strike. Of course, this is a strong simplification, but again, many moments are repeated at least in the chase.
Although the game is not in pursuit, too, is not much different...- try to fix the generators.The game is not simple, yes...but it's not terribly complicated, especially if you want, you can always find all this information.
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I think we have a compleltly different definition what mastering means. Sure, knowing the most popular perks and how some killers work is fne, but i would argue that what you discribe is so far off "mastering" the game, i would even say this is right in the middle of beginner level.
What you discribe at the end is probably what i actually mean. This is not "trying to fix generators". Thats why i made this topic. Most people think that this about everything you need to know in DBD (plus some little extras like looping), and that is in my humble opinion the reason, most people play this on a very casual level while thinking they actually know how to be good at the game.
Someone said it before at the very top: The game does not give you a good feeback like it is in other games what you are actually doing wrong and it is very hard to tell for someone who has not many many hours played (and watched guides/tutorials). And even those people struggle a lot.
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You basically need to watch a 5 minute video to know everything you need to know. The rest is just playing. DbD is one of the easiest games on earth. Yet most players have not even basic gamesense for watever reason.
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Its looks like a spooky hide and seek game, but its a really hard 1vs4 assym horror multiplayer game.
I agree. I've never played any other game where micro and macro strategies were so important to achieve a win.
Whiffing a hit/ falling for a mindgame can cost you a whole match; Also commiting or not to certain chases can very costly too.
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Depends on what you mean by mastered, but in general yeah, i would agree. I'm at around 1500 hours and I'd say I'm intermediate. There are some regulars here who tend to often call for nerfs or changes to make things easier for them, and they're in the few hundred hours range. I do think people have an expectation to do good in this game very quickly, but it rarely works out like that. I anticipate that by the time I hit 3k hours, I'll be as good as I'm gonna get at the game.
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