12 minutes of everything wrong with DBD

Yeah some map designs are genuinely embarrassing

some windows make me think the people who designed god loops 6 years ago still make maps

and then some maps are just deadzone bonanza

But that's the thing, he's just saying that it needs fundamental changes, he doesn't come up with any ideas on how that should be done, only pointing out that it needs changes, saying ''fix these issues'' is not giving solutions.

It may be the devs job to fix things, but there is a reason feedback & suggestions exist, which is to provide feedback and ideas on how to fix and improve issues exactly like maps and sbmm, however as stated before, it's kinda hard to change things like maps when the community are not in an agreement on what a good map design standard is to begin with.

You can't change maps to fit all killers, some maps would have to either be changed entirely to how they play, they would no longer be the same maps they used to be.

I am of the opinion that you shouldn't aim to change maps to fit every single killer, instead what should be done is change how many loops & tiles there should be on one map, what should main buildings be like and how big should maps be in general.

I also think you can't fix the way maps are structured without removing alot of map variety in general, which i believe is a bad thing for the game overall.

Except the playerbase wasn't lowered, it got a small boost for a period from what i saw.

His video felt more like a rant rather than being some objective talk and some of his points i don't agree with.

Old Legion simply had no gameplay. You just waited when mechanic does work for you and survivor just can't do anything about it. You can't say it about any current killer.

Old SM wasn't a healthy design, but at least there was some gameplay against her. I can say, it was even entertaining show, when some comp SWF tried to outplay her strategically. She was called Chess Merchant for a reason.

And Chase Merchant never was a problem at all, just most boring variant of "leave a loop".

For me personally, I feel like the SBMM is the core issue. They also upped the cap and I feel the more they do this the more unfun the game will be.

I get that for those of us with higher hours will win the majority of old red rank games, but it allowed for us to also chill out a lot more or try some new builds etc without feeling like we are under as much pressure. With the new matchmaking a lot of my games feel super close and I have had to do more to win, the sad part if you can just bring stronger builds to get yourself a higher MMR anyway even if your skill does not reflect it.

Overall I actually miss old red ranks, back when I felt like I could actually try out variety without the pressure of queueing into survivors/killers who are playing to win.

Honestly? He’s right. When he said if two gens aren’t finished by the time the killer gets their first down the game is pretty much over for survivors he was saying something. At the start of the game both sides are basically in a mad dash for the end. Good survivor teams will send a sentry (hopefully a good looper) to find and distract the killer with the understanding that survivor may not make it to endgame, but three others might. And it’s a byproduct of anti-play killers who are a byproduct of poorly designed maps.

Is SBMM really the problem, though? Or is it the ultra competitive attitude of the player base that's actually the problem?

I personally don't get too many sweaty lobbies as either Killer or Survivor and I think that's because I'm not sweating either. In most of my Survivor lobbies, nobody even bothers to bring an item unless it's a med kit.

My Killer games can sometimes be tough, but mostly I find myself matched with wannabe bully squads and very rarely against gen rushers. Bully squads can be a nightmare to face for very inexperienced Killers, but since I dedicate half my build to countering their shenanigans, they don't really bother me anymore and I can win most of my games against them. I don't see many gen rushers because they probably win too many games to be in my MMR. Most of my matches are against (or with) uncoordinated SWFs and Solos running the off meta perks they like or find fun. I suspect I'm somewhere between low and mid MMR on both sides, which is where most of the fun in this game seems to be found.

The system is not perfect by any means. It struggles to put together a reasonable Solo Q team. It breaks down badly when player numbers are low and there aren't enough sweats for the other sweats to be matched with. And from what I've heard (though this is pure speculation), for players who take a break or pass the soft cap, MMR doesn't decay (at least not very fast) and they can never really go back down in MMR, no matter how often they lose. So in that respect, I think the system may have failed these players as well.

Some players expect to have multiple 4E and 4K trials, but then seem to be surprised when the MMR system puts them up against opponents that are willing to sweat just as much as they are.

I had a Wraith today who saw a lobby full of med kits and decided to bring Franklin's, Sloppy Butcher and a Midwich offering and I sincerely hope they got nothing but cracked SWFs on comms for the rest of their play session. Face it, if there is sweat in the game, it's because the players are bringing it on themselves.

Because making a misplay with those Killers is PUNISHING.

You miss as Trickster? Nah, not an issue. Misplay as Knight? Meh. Artist? No biggie.

Nemesis is punished for missing his Tentacle hard. Huntress is punished for missing a hatchet. Bubba is punished for hitting objects. All of these things can be reasonably done by Survivors. You can dodge Nemi or Huntress or Bubba (maybe not Bubba but you get it)

I still don't see how maps like Borgo or Nostromo are killer sided. If anything those maps are some of the fairer maps in the game now.

then explain bloodlust mechanic in the game. This game has bloodlust 1, bloodlust 2 and bloodlust 3. each level of bloodlust supposedly increases likelihood for a survivor to get hit. The game is definitely designed around guaranteed hits for killers.

every killer gets punished. the metric for how they get punished is chase time. The longer a chase is extended, the more likelihood there is for killer to lose in gen-time. even though trickster supposedly doesn't get punished for missing, if his chases are like 60 second long, that is still getting punished.

you can have nemesis who misses 1 whip and gets down in 30 seconds but nemesis who misses is still punished less then trickster because 30 second is lower chase time then trickster who had 60 second chase.

That's a MMR issue.

BL2 and 3 shouldn't exist.

Do you want to know why they are trying to make every killer better at chase (with loops obviously being the chase extender per excellence)?

Because survivors don't stop saying that chase and interaction with the killer is the fun part of playing survivor, while doing gens is the boring part, and BHVR is trying to do whatever it takes so they don't have to simply make generators take longer (i.e. the healing nerf alongside the regression nerf) even if gen getting repaired too fast is a problem for killers. With this in mind, the best solution is simply make chases shorter, so they don't have to make gens take longer. Technically, it should be a win-win for everybody: Survivors get more chases and interaction with killers while killers don't get that much affected by gen repair times being low without having to make longer what survivors claim is the worst part of their gameplay.

But apparently what survivors meant by "chase is the fun part" obviously was "being chased for 5 gens while having advantage in loops is the fun part", not "having more chases in the game and having to really be good at mindgaming and wasting the killers time is the fun part".

So, here we are, with content creators now claiming that "anti-loop" is the problem with the game without asking themselves why every killer is getting better at chase and anti-looping.

I think you missed the point completely, but aside from that what you said doesn't even make any sense. How is "being chased for 5 gens" going to be a killer expectation when the problem killers face is that in your average game you lose 2 to 3 gens before you do your second hook?

Seriously, I think you should re-read what I said, and maybe not take it so literally.

From my POV, the underlying issue is that BHVR concerns itself too much with what the community feels is good and/or bad.

Peanits has been quoted on the fact that different regions see different metas, because the game isn't played the same all around the world. That's not sustainable! A game must be something, and then people must decide if they like that thing.

To quote famous architect, Louis Kahn,

"You say to Brick, 'What do you want, Brick?' And Brick says to you, 'I like an Arch.' And if you say to Brick, 'look, arches are expensive, and I can use a concrete lintel. What do you think of that, Brick?' Brick says, 'I like an Arch.' And it's important, you see, that you honor the material that you use. [...] You can only do it if you honor the brick and glorify the brick instead of shortchanging it."

Dead by Daylight wants to be something.

Designers are suppose to figure out what that something is, but that is not how BHVR is operating. It's a shame.

BHVR is one good Asymmetrical horror game away from losing half of its player base. That's how starving people are for good game design. This game is fun thanks to its unique playstyle and licensed killers and survivors, but it's not gonna hold when everything else around it is so badly designed and unbalanced.

So I watched the video. It's filled with bad logic and poor arguments.

20 seconds in to the video I've already got huge problems. He says Chucky and Alien flopped hard and could have doubled the player count.

First, no license has ever gotten a growth like that. DbD player count slowly climbed over its first two years from ~10k to ~20k players. It then stayed at ~20k players until COVID hit, were it saw substantial gains over the next two years, and then has seen a decrease from a high during the summer of 2021, which it only maintained for about six months, to a fairly standard ~30k players as the average steam count since then.

Secondly, its a misunderstanding of the live service model. While DbD would love to attract new players, the basic way they make money, especially at this point, is continually selling new content to the players that already exist. While sales numbers don't get released, I think we all saw enough Chuckies and Aliens to say that it sold well.

At around 1:20 we get the following: "BHVR has never understood the fundamentals of creating a well balanced map."

Respectfully to a lot of people who have criticisms of the game, the critics don't understand what actually makes the game successful. DbD is not designed to be a perfectly balanced game, its designed to give players unique and interesting experiences with every game feeling different.

Around 1:50 - complains about The Game and it having lots of god pallets.

Yes, and it has very few windows. He seems to mock the idea of 'hey, what would it be like if we had a map with a lot of A and not a lot of B". But that's exactly the variety that DbD goes for.

Around 2:30 talks about the idea of devs telling people to stay in their lane.

I'd say something that is much more common is critics who think they speak for the community, which is almost impossible given the game exists across multiple regions of the world that play the game differently. Like anyone, I have my criticisms of the game, sometimes major, but without some type of data point no reason to think that opinion stands for the community. Way too many critics take the idea of the devs saying anything along the lines of 'I think you're wrong' as some type of deep personal attack.

Around 3:10 he talks about his hatred of the anti-loop killer, and starts with the deathslinger and highlights Pyramid Head as the worst.

Let me be clear, he's now destroying his own argument. He starts out the video by talking about player numbers as a metric of evaluation. The problem with his argument about these killers: they came out right as the game exploded in popularity. Now I think the explosion of popularity is more linked to COVID, but if your claim is that we should evaluate the communities take on game design by player numbers, these killers were an overwhelming success.

Also, at this point he's now saying DbD has been dying for close to 4 years. Is DbD dying, or has he just never liked DbD?

We then get a few minutes of him talking about how he dislikes basically every killer but Sadako.

At 7:20: Survivors always rushed gens, it was not this extreme.

This is a non falsifiable argument. X has always been around, but I feel like X is more common now.

Overbrine and CoH went away. Players are still trying to do gens, but the killer can't slow them down as much and players don't have reasons to break away for slow heals (at least on US/European servers, watching a Korean twitch were all four survivors self heal is wild).

But I'd say the quicker games are a huge improvement of the old slog fests.

At 10:55 he is deceptive. He throws up a list of peak player counts, this is different than the the average monthly counts he cited at the beginning. Peak counts are far more variable - especially because some of the huge numbers correspond with free weekends, but even we look at them we see a different story than he lets on. December 2023 had a peak player counter of 50,431 - December 2022 had a peak player count of 46,470.

The issue is, the game is already so deep in trouble (fundamentaly) that it will be extremly hard to get out of it.

"Already so deep in trouble" - the standard for success here is wild. To stay within the genre, TCM has a steam player count of ~1k players. That's a game deeply in trouble. DBD is a game approaching its 8th anniversary in an industry were most games are lucky to remain popular for a few months. People talk about DbD like we're still in the beta stages of development.

People confuse elements of the game that they don't like with the game dying. DbD's is old, some people have grown tired of it. That's inevitable and nothing wrong with it.

BHVR took a steamroller to their own gameplay and flattened it all the way out. Healing was bad, so it got dramatic nerfs. Boons were introduced and removed again shortly after. For some unfathomable reason, Ruin got absolutely decimated, making all totems permanently irrelevant. DS got gutted, providing a huge buff to tunnelling, thereby massively increasing killer efficiency on top of the basekit killer buffs. Gen times taking longer was a solid buff to camping. Nowhere to Hide, Ultimate Weapon effectively removed stealth as an option. 6.1 also deleted the subconditions off WGLF and BBQ.

I remember thinking around the time of 6.1 that 'I used to goof off and do some totems for BPs', but anything that isn't rushing gens is just throwing at this point. The gameplay has become sweaty, and it's starting to grow mouldy.

'Competitive' and 'fun' are basically opposites, IMO. The more competitive DBD gets, the less enjoyable it becomes to the average player. This works for MOBAs due to the insane thrill you can get out of a 'hard-carry', where you become the star of the show, but DBD cannot bank on this.

Looking back on it, I think the rank system and WGLF + BBQ were actually pretty solid contributors to success. It's incredibly good for the gameplay loop of an asymmetrical multiplayer if a player's 'win' is not dependent on another player's loss. Back then, if you died on hook with 4 WGLF stacks, you were happy to have your BPs, and the killer was happy to get their kill. Even the rank system helped in this though, as getting sacrificed at the end of a long game where you cleared two gens, held a long chase, did a totem and got a safe unhook would count as a win for BOTH killer and survivor.

Honestly, thinking about it, the rank system was genius, at least for survivors. The win condition was getting the full breadth of the game experience. That was how you won.

Then what about Nemesis? His power certainly qualifies as anti loop but you can still loop him. I'd say anti loop is pretty much everything that gives you an extra edge in a loop. To that degree you can argue that every killer has some (sometimes very weak) form of anti loop. Pyramid Head is also an example of a killer with anti loop (in theory one of the more oppressive ones because he can hit you threw walls) that is still loopable.

The killers Choy mentioned weren't all taken into consideration because of their anti loop powers but because of how they encouraged the survivors and killer to play around rather than against each other. Against an Artist, you are screwed in chase, so you focus on not playing against her but winning the game by minimising interaction. Sadako is in a weirdly similar spot, where you do not want to interact with her even though her anti loop is pretty weak.

First chase cost 2 Gens is as frequently as 1 death before 2 Gens done. A match can go extreme to both sides. Except there is chance for killer to turn it into 2 or more kill. Its rare for survivors to get 2 escapes with a teammate death at 4 Gens.

You were pointing "survivors think a chase is fun when it last 5 Gens" as it should be a standard to survivors' opinion.

I just telling a chase last 5 Gens is more to killers' expectation (not survivors). You can search and find comments in forum that killers told survivors to play better and try not taking a single hit after survivors complain about making 5 Gens chase and died to Noed.

tbf, they have done things before that wasn't based on what the community felt was good or bad, the outcome is either that the majority either gets used to it eventually or that people will continue to request for it to be changed until it happens. Also everytime they do something that someone don't like, you are going to have people saying stuff like ''nobody asked for this'' as an argument why it shouldn't have happened, so it's kinda hard for bhvr to not concern themselves about what the community feels because more often than not, it'll just lead to some level of backlash and player dissatisfaction, which isn't a good thing in the long run.

I don't think that's a problem nor that it's unsustainable, having people decide for themselves what the best way to play the game just means there is enough player agency that allows for it which i think is a good thing. I think it would be a problem is if the devs were to try and decide/control for people how they must play the game.

Granted some player agency have already been removed for the health of the game, but there needs to be a balance between both in order to keep people engaged.

You need to remember that Asymmetrical games like Dead by Daylight is not an easy thing to get right as you cannot balance or design it like you would design a game in another genre. The asym genre itself is still relatively new compared to other existing video game genres, so there aren't really alot of successful games you can look to for ideas on what you should or shouldn't do to get such a game right, alot of other Asym games have died because they couldn't get it right for one reason or another.

Also whatever bhvr wants dbd to be, it's clear that the community have other ideas on what that should be instead, so they cannot do entirely their own thing without risking alienating the playerbase, but they cannot also do entirely what the community wants as it would be downright impossible since what the community wants is not just one thing and often it is very divisive on what it is they want, so the obvious answer seems to be finding a balance between both.

Bloodlust came about to help killers deal with infinities. BHVR said it was a temporary measure installed while they dealt with broken maps. But IIRC, when they tried to get rid of it (along with the last true infinite?) there was so much outcry they just left it and said they would continue to monitor it or something. I imagine with the new direction they’re taking with map design the bloodlust mechanic will eventually be removed.