How many players have to quit playing before BHVR fixes solo queue? Huge drop in players...
Looking at steamcharts, this game isn't looking too good. 28k average players and dropping, the lowest it's been since 2020...
Players, and your community leaders have been stressing that solo queue needs help, weather it be informational, basekit perks, perk chnahes, or major ganeplay changes, yet BHVR has stuck to thier stubborn ways and not only ignored it, but blamed thier own players for the major unbalance in thier game.
I'm just honestly curious to how long BHVR will continue to ignore and punish thier majority playerbase? Does it have to drop to 20k? 15k? 10k? What's the magic number that starts sounding off the alarms at BHVR so they finally start listening to thier own community and do something about how awful the solo queue experience is?
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The question is, how to fix solo queue? We already got more or less all the meaningful buffs. The HUD shows exactly what everybody is doing and therefore it shows what everybody is supposed to do in the current situation.
Sure, basekit kindred for solo survivors might be an option, but this wont still be the ultimate solution since the main advantages of SWF come with the voice coordination, especially for specific situations.
Unless they add an ingame voicechat (i would HATE that) i dont see a good solution to Solo queue. Solo feels sometimes so bad because you never know what teammates you get. Some are just in for the BPs, some want to win and some have a daily quest and only care for that.
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It feels like every week someone is posting the Steam numbers and yelling the game is dying. How many years had DbD been dying? It sure is taking a while.
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It's just the Steam charts, which is a minor portion of the player base, so I doubt it'll worry them too much. Too much weight has been put on this chart for the longest time.
Also, what drop there is will be due to a number of factors. This drop won't be solely due to Solo Q. Solo Q has been perceived as problematic by players for the longest time, so there's no real reason for this dip to be solely based on that.
It's not ideal, but at the same time it's not a large enough portion of the playerbase to accurately reflect what is happening. We simply do not have all the figures.
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"Some are just in for the BPs, some want to win and some have a daily quest and only care for that."
Yep, this combined with mmr means survivors in solo queue have to be severely overtuned to be good. There are games where solo queue actually matches decent players together who are actually trying to win the game, but that's rare. The kill rate was still 53% back in prime 100% CoH, God Dh validiation and IW UB DS meta.
ALSO, it's likely decently rare to get 4 solos in one lobby. Back before I even started playing they released stats saying I think 48% of survivors were in some sort of swf. With how this game has gone, that number has likely gone up quite a bit.
Any single survivor could be fishing for flashlight saves the entire game only to come up short, doing dailys/rift, only trying to get value out of their wacky build or even just not doing gen enough or helping. Then you factor how wacky mmr is into getting 4 different players who are trying, what do you expect? The game doesn't facilitate solo queue to do well and neither does the playbase.
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How would you fix it? What changes do you recommend?
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TBF
If you look at the player base carefully.
Everytime a killer buff news is released,the player count will go higher and everytime a killer nerf news is released, the number will go down.
If they really care about the player count, they should keep buffing killer.
But we can see the road map went to a totally different path.
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I'm almost convinced, as a 99.9% solo player, that we have no clue what do lol. BHVR could give survivors the ability to fly and my teammates would still go down in 10 seconds and never touch a gen.
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This. The vast majority of my solo queue failures don't come down to minor episodes of miscommunication. It comes down to other survivors being absolute dimwits, and no amount of communication tools can fix that. It's usually survivors giving up early-mid game, or survivors bombing the hook and giving the killer a slug pile.
There are things that would improve solo queue, but not drastically. They should still be sought after, but there's no magic bullet.
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I don't think it's the actual player count that's concerning, it's the lack of interest in new chapters that concerns me.
Alien and Chucky brought in players, sure, but nothing like what we used to see. That tells me that DBD has become stale to the general pool of players and that they're just not interested anymore. Not really surprising, as the game us going into its EIGHTH year, but still, a little sad.
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Alan Wake would have been a dull chapter whenever it came out. One uninteresting survivor with mediocre/awful perks.
Alien had a ton of hype, and lots bought it, but the power design was flawed and quickly dropped off, the issue here was design.
Chucky by comparison was only a half chapter, but was very well designed and well received. It was fairly hyped and lived up to the hype.
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The game was objectivly speaking the most ballanced between mid 2020 and mid 2021. They removed until then the most op stuff like moris or insta heals... you get the deal.
Since then, killers got their most impactful buffs (big map changes and reworks, deleting of the last remaining direct connected tiles, new very strong perks, longer gen repair times, less distance for survivor after hit, faster break ect ect yadayadayada).
Since then, numbers went down on steam from 60K to 28K. I firmly think your argument is questionable.
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The entire problem when it comes to soloq is the fact you never get 4 equally skilled survivors a game. You also have challenges that want you to throw the game. This MM has terrible agency for a solo player.
They could make challenges not require survivors to throw the match and have MM based of the players performance instead of the team. Old emblem based matchmaking was miles better on reset compared to what we currently have.
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True but not only that. You as a solo player dont know what every other survivor is capable off. Or what their playstyle is. Even tho in a friendly non tryhard SWF group, everybody knows whats going on, so they can adapt. If someone is a good looper, this person can take the heat while those who are good in finding and repairing gens do that job. Just an example.
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You as a solo player dont know what every other survivor is capable off.
I would think knowing what build you are running would be helpful in identifying what type of survivor you are, but why can't we show all survivors what everyone is running? Well survivors will dodge lobbies if they don't like those builds. But doesn't that then raise a different question in if that is the case why are those survivors even be matched in the first place?
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Gens and roaming the map while the Killer is elsewhere might seem dull, but the TR and the looming uncertainty of where the Killer is can keep you on alert, and your own navigation and interaction with the Trial keeps you focused.
However, when an individual survivor is losing: Sitting on hook repeatedly, holding recover while bleeding out. There is no uncertainty as you watch the Auras of all your allied survivors and have only critique available as entertainment. You have little interaction with the Trial, the only agency you have is Killing yourself on Hook, and even if you want to try you may just be killed early anyway.
In SWF this can be mitigated with the understanding that you're with friends, whom you can chat with and have a bond. But solo, you just get annoyance.
Though, even if you're killed as a Survivor, if you have a decent amount of chase time and have done other objectives, yeah it can sting a smidge, it's offset by all the other gameplay you had fun with.
SoloQ's problem is a lack of entertainment when losing hard. It's no longer DBD, the survival horror game. It's waiting/watching sim.
However, I think the primary concern with regards to overall player retention likely has to do with a lack of core gameplay shakeup(s).
So I'm glad they're trying new gamemodes.
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This may be a weird take, but I believe BHVR is actively trying to kill their game.
It's like a worker protesting to a parent boss by purposely making bad food.
This is why Skull Merchant is like she is. Blight is not being really nerfed despite players being undefeated in the game with him. Why is Decisive Strike nerfed to like it is currently? Blight, Nurse, and a few other killers have no negative reactions to this. They laugh at decisive strike users.
The best way to cause a game to die is to ruin the balance for the majority (overbuff killers) or ignore broken killers, and allow the survivors be as miserable as possible.
I'm honestly very surprised the game is still played as much as it is. Tunneling and watching survivors lose all the time is not really entertaining to watch.
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Hate to shatter whatever broken logic you’re trying to push here, but your statement has no basis in actual fact.
It takes 4 survivors to play a match, how many survivors you think are going to stick around for an even more killer sided mess of a game than it already is?
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The game has been hovering around 30k active players with bursts when new chapters drop.
This isn't a new thing. This isn't the game dying.
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I believe it’s MMR that’s an issue. Whether it be backfilling or way too lax. I’ve just had a match against a p100 Wesker with 4 slowdowns and his best add ons against me and 3 baby gents….
the next match a 0 prestige wraith going for adept against 4 of us with 2-;3k hours each. I think they need to be stricter
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They are ruining the game trying to "balance" the game. Everything they touch gets ruined, literally every perk they touch. The game is just not very fun anymore as survivor specifically because you have to literally sweat every single game just to get 1 gen done in this current meta. This is MY personal reasoning as to why I've reduced my playtime significantly, i play strictly solo q as well. The devs are trying to make this a competitive game but they don't realize that everything they do makes the game LESS fun, if you just go in and nerf everything that's fun its going to cause people to quit playing.
And don't get me started on the new killers they've been adding, CHUCKY, ALIEN. These killers have barely any counterplay, they are literally just damned if you do, damned if you don't killers in chase. Want to vault the pallet? get smacked, want to vault the window? get smacked, want to fake the window vault? even if successful you get smacked due to having to reposition. These new killers just have far too much utility in their kits to make them "balanced" and it makes the game severely killer sided and UNFUN for survivors.
This is all.
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The only further change I feel SQ needs is some sort of option to know if someone is going for the save. Whethet that's a form of basekit kindred that shows the closest survivor within 'x' metres of the hook or an emote like in the mobile version.
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DC penalty and hanging on a hook not being able to do anything at all makes me not want to play this game anymore...
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I disagree that you can't draw conclusions from the Steamcharts player number trends. Yes, this represents only a fraction of the total players, but is there any reason to believe that the trend isn't similar for other platforms? Why would only Steam PC players be leaving the game?
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From the last AMA:
We always monitor the difference between survivor groups (SWF and solo) and our current stance is that lack of information is not the crux of the problem, but rather that friends work together by nature and solo survivors don't (as much). -Mike
They don't think it's a problem (or, at least, Mike doesn't.) So to answer "when" - never, probably.
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I don't believe they are actively trying to kill their game (that wouldn't make much business sense), but I do feel like they've been complacent for a long because they have had no serious competition in this genre. The model of focusing resources on new content and deprioritizing balance issues, fixing bugs, fixing broken maps, adjusting perks and killer add-ons that are too strong/too weak, etc. has worked for them for many years now. The lack of new interest in the game (based on Steamcharts player count) that the last few chapters brought I think is a sign that the old model is starting to lose its effectiveness.
As more and more content gets added, this game becomes more and more overwhelming for new players to learn unless they are willing to sink a ton of time into it. I'd love to see BHVR take some time off from cranking out new content (like, a whole year) and solely focus on game balance, fixing bugs, updating weak killers, fixing broken maps, re-working/replacing the majority of items and add-ons that nobody ever uses, and most of all working on adding new elements to the game and/or introducing new game modes. The devs will say that they are working on this kind of stuff in addition to new content, but the fact that it takes months or years for this kind of stuff to make it live into the game shows that they are clearly not putting a lot of resources into these things right now.
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The problems have been the same for years. It's matchmaking and maps. And the devs have been insanely stubborn on both fronts.
They have an almost abject refusal to put 4 solo survivors on equal footing in the same lobby. Does this cause issues elsewhere? Yes, so address those issues. But don't take the design issues out on the players.
When they last raised the soft cap, I was getting matched with killers who sometimes got 1 or 2 hooks the entire game in solo queue lobbies. I'm not going to go down to an M1 killer when you give me a a rock filler facing a long wall jungle gym that chains into shack. Don't make that my problem by matching me with teammates who have 4k fewer hours and run into walls to compensate for the fact that you still can't balance a map and insist on RNG map generation in a 2024. It breaks the game for M1 killers. But don't make that a problem for solo queue players.
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The incentive is almost always on killer. Survivor queues can take ages while killer queues are instant.
There's a huge shortage of killers already. I reckon the game will do just fine if there are more killers playing. It'll making queuing up for Survivor much more bearable, and with a more evenly balanced playerbase matchmaking might actually have a chance to work.
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Show builds in-game on the offerings screen or something, at the very least.
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I agree - there are definitely ways to give solo queue more of the information that SWF teams get for free. It's a very common suggestion for improvement on this forum. Unfortunately I haven't seen any mention by the devs about any plans to work on adding these to the game :(
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We kinda did this to ourselves with the MMR. Every time they ask this community if they prefer queue times vs. quality matchmaking, the resounding answer is always queue times. Their system gets one shot at a fair-ish trial, and then that gets borked when there's a dodge & backfill. So much of this problem is on us.
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I see the incentive vary throughout the day between killer and surv. So I believe it strongly depends on region, MMR, and time of day as to what we see.
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The player count will go back up when whoever the decision maker is gets over their "killer must be the power role" design choices. Everyone I used to play with has quit because they think survivor has gotten way too hard for casual players. I am the only one left from my group and I play far more killer than survivor these days.
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Yes if you play during downtime in the middle of the day, it'll fluctuate.
If you play at peak time on evenings/weekends when the vast majority of players are on, it's almost certainly on killer.
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Everyone you used to play with only played to troll the killer and see how much they could pallet stun, flashlight save and teabag.
Instead of being a challenge to get as many stuns as possible before all four of you casually strolling out of the exits, it's now a challenge to, you know, survive. As it should be.
I say this as someone who plays both roles. Playing survivor is supposed to feel vulnerable. You're suposed to have to try to escape. The games where I just repair gens and escape with 10k BP are far more disappointing than the games where I have to fight to survive, maybe don't survive, but end with a score above 25k.
Meanwhile for killer, you have to advance through two-thirds of your objective before you can secure a kill, out of a possible four. To walk away with zero kills after doing that much work is soul destroying. There should be a baseline of at least 1 kill every game the vast majority of the time to make that a credible threat, with 4 escapes being rare. A 55-60% kill rate is how you get there.
In a horror game based on horror movie tropes. There should be more parity with the 'final girl' format, where some survivors actually die before the last ones escape.
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Decisive strike got gutted because players were abusing it. It was added to counter tunneling and was used as an extra healthstate against killers who didn't tunnel.
Either the killer, playing fair btw, hits the ds blodyblock and loses the other guy, or they eat the ds and still lose the other guy
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I agree. There isn't much else BHVR can do at this point.
However, there have been a few suggestions for a chat wheel such as in Dota 2, League of Legends and CS:GO. That would come with some of the perks that SWFs have but way less drawbacks than a voice chat would provide. Combine this with the ability for all survivors to see their team mates' perks during the lobby and during the game and solo queue should be in a better spot.
Overall though, this would not fully bridge the gap between solo queue and SWF. Because the main difference isn't communication but that everyone is on the same page. Meaning, the Nea won't just disconnect (or hook suicide) because the Huntress hit her with a hatchet, the Claudette knows better than to self-care in the same corner for over 40 seconds and the Dwight won't be hiding in lockers for the whole match while Feng uses Lithe to run into the killer.
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The problem some might find in showing all the perks is as @Trollinmon mentioned that people will dodge lobbies more frequently because they dont like certaint builds.
I dont really understand what a chatwheel can do for the game. I guess in DBD case it would be more emotes. But frankly, how should that help? Unless we are talking about across the map, which should not be in the game, since it is destroying the core design philosophy of DBD as a whole.
I agree on the last part. It is much less likely that survivors give up when they know each other and are in a party. Nothing we can do about this.
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Steam charts are not the numbers to go off of. DBD has been added to epic games which is another PC platform that is going to take away from the steam charts. I agree that solo survivor could use some love, but the steam charts don't tell the story you think it does. Seeing load outs of teammates prior to match would be a nice QoL for solo survivor and I would love to see it implemented.
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Nah man, not buying this at all.
If you want hard games on survivor side, there is plenty of things you can do to handicap yourself and ensure that you die all the time.
You and the few others killer mains on here constantly parroting for harder and harder games ( for survivors only, naturally) under the pretext of “BUT KILLER BE SCARY!!!” Is out of touch and way off the mark.
There is no horror aspects left in this game. That shi* went out the window with all the ridiculous neon outfits and bunny outfits and introducing “killers” such as Trickster.
People are not going to continue to play and support any game where one side is so blatantly favored over the other.
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Don't put too much stock in steam charts for this game, people take regular breaks between content. The numbers constantly fluctuate, and not to mention with how old this game is, it's normal for some to completely drop it or numbers to dwindle down outside new content.
That said, SoloQ does need more assistance. But we need to be careful not to just add buffs that can be exploited. My suggestion is more information in-game about things like killers, their powers, addons, items and perks in a neat and organized compendium instead of having to go through loading screens and between killers/items to get the information.
Also, cutting down on a lot of complicated explanations of powers would also help. There's still people who think Skull Merchant's drones are the same as they were on release, and making it more streamlined and explained with proper in-game notices about reworks would do wonders.
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I wholeheartedly disagree. BHVR nerfed decisive strike because killers are entitled to winning and devs are oblivious to their game and blindly do what the community (killers tell them). Yes, they do a little here and there to help survivors but this is more of a ---look here, we are doing something ---. Take 3 genning for example. If they are trying to solve a problem of killers abusing a strat, why did they buff killers all over again? The 5% gen regression and increased difficulty of stopping the regression is a huge buff for killer. Another exploit of that non-thoughtout buff will be: how will survivors cope with a doctor that prevents survivors from being able to stop the regression. 8 times x 5% equals %40 regression per gen without any additional perks.
So why?
There is complaints everywhere surviving is next to impossible without being in a pro team. Why did devs just make it even more difficult? And, they are allowing a broken combo to go live that will basically prevent survivors from completing gens.
I would like to be wrong but this sounds like devs are trying to kill off the game.
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I agree. The anti facecamp was a very killer sided change. The 3 gen nerf coming up is also killer sided
The issue is that both sides are starting to feel powerless. Killers don't feel like they have any pressure unless they tunnel because survivors don't feel like they have anything useful to do but camp gens until someone is on hook. I say the solution is to buff the everlasting heck out of the current perks killers have that aren't getting used. Make hex perks worthwhile. Make anything but slowdown/gen blocking feel useful.
On the flip side, make boons great again. Give survivors more options than the second chance perks they all run
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Sorry but I need to roll my eyes every time I see someone say it was entitled killers that got DS nerfed.
It was bully squads all running it every match to bodyblock, stop other chases and guarantee escapes at the endgame with combinations where the killer couldn't make any other choices.
You could argue it was overnerfed and should have been kept at 5 seconds to compensate for the drop time, but let's not pretend there were broken combinations abused by SWF teams. If you wanna be mad, be mad at SWF.
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The decisive strike nerf was for exactly that. Because survivors abused the hell out of it. The same reason instant blinds got nerfed, because they punished the killers participating in fair gameplay with no real counter besides running lightborn 24/7.
It was a deserved nerf, but they don't actually understand balance so they only nerf. They honestly need to buff the massive backlog of survivor and killer perks
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You could say simple things like: "Hey, I need a heal.", "Help me repair this gen.", "Killer is near me.", "I'll go for the unhook.", Come towards me." etc. Of course some of these commands would need to reveal your location to your team mates. It would work across the map. Otherwise there wouldn't be much use in it. They could even add the risk of you being revealed to the killer, if you use it too close to them (like 12m or maybe less).
The core design philosophy of DBD is a bit all over the place. On one hand we have the game as a party game with killers like Chucky flipping survivors off, Naughty Bear and certain cosmetics (Mr. Puddles doesn't exactly scream "horror" in my opinion). On the other we have DBD as a horror game. The player base is also divided between people who want everything to be casual and people who want the game to be more competitive. So I think this isn't really a strong argument against a chat wheel.
Edit: There is a simple solution to lobby dodging. Apply a penalty of maybe 2 minutes before their queue starts again. Then raise it to 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 20 minutes for multiple games, if they repeat it too often. This is how LoL handles it iirc.
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Honestly if they kept it where only survivors can hear each other, and these changes brought up SoloQ to near-SWF levels since SWF would never reveal themselves with in-game vocals, it would pave the way for better killer buffs across the board to compensate any drop in killrates.
It'd take years though, which is the major issue.
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Why would the declining player count trend be any different for other platforms vs Steam? I'm not sure how Epic would "take away" players from Steam - why would people switch to Epic if they already bought the game on Steam??
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That response to the SWF question was absolutely laughable. Everybody knows that information is what makes SWF stronger and pretending that it's not is why the issue has go unaddressed for so long (other than the status indicators which helped some but still are nowhere close to the info you get with SWF on comms).
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You're right about that part of SWFs not revealing themselves. It was just an idea. I hadn't fully thought that through yet.
The thing that I don't get is, why it would take years. This isn't that hard to code. Just as survivors seeing each other's perks. So I can only assume that it's not very high on the list of priorities. But honestly, I think most of us would accept, if some other things were delayed a few months for this.
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I also question that statement considering it's not uncommon for most players that they don't know about reworks, killer powers and how to deal with them, and how to work with your teammates effectively. Information is absolutely a problem, both the lack of it and the overload that a lot of killer powers have a lot of moving parts and are more complicated.
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