BVHR Messing Up Balancing On PURPOSE?

The problem here is your root observations, rather than the explanation for them.

Getting the game more press and relevancy by keeping unbalanced things in the game for them to talk about would make sense as an active decision IF your observations about the current state of the game were correct... but I see no evidence for them being correct, so the conspiratorial thought doesn't really graduate beyond baseless conspiracy theory.

Things like "recycled killer powers" and "copy paste survivors" are great examples of root observations that just aren't true. They haven't been doing that - you're falling for the popular narrative that all new killers are lazy recycled elements and all new survivor perks are worthless trash. It's the same with the core idea that the game is currently actually all that unbalanced, when it's actually the closest to fully balanced it's ever been.

A lot of people have a tendency to either overblow the few bad decisions BHVR actually makes, or act like perfectly reasonable (or at least neutral and unproblematic) changes are themselves bad. In extreme cases, it's both. Rather than trying to come up with justifications for why those things might be true, it's better to examine the claims themselves to see if they hold water. Most of the time, they don't.

I see the reasoning, but it wouldn't make good business sense to deliberately sink the biggest cash cow they have going.

There are some unusual decisions made, perhaps based off data we have no access to, but then they can take longer to resolve clearer issues. I just wish they were quicker to respond. It's understandable they want to avoid kneejerk reactions, but issues often go on for longer than really needed.

If DBD was a smaller game and they wanted to pump more resources into a more successful game, I could see them moving people across and therefore make the game more problematic, to eventually move everyone across, but it's a little risky to the brand.

I think it’s exactly this. bHVR has gotten big enough now to the point where I can almost guarantee that a lot of decisions are taken out of the hands of the people that understand the game the most. They’re probably just given a checklist of things to do at the start of every week, and suggestions more than likely have to move a couple rings up the ladder before they’re implemented.

I don’t think there’s a big conspiracy here. Like people above stated, it’s easier and more cost efficient for businesses to retain their customer base, not reach out to new ones, and the best way to retain your playerbase is a positive user experience. There’s no way they’re intentionally making what they would view as bad decisions.

At the end of the day, everyone here are humans, and we’re all flawed and make mistakes. This game going on 8 years strong is proof enough that they care about the game and want to see it succeed, they’ve made a lot of positive changes in the past year.

While I agree that they release certain perks and changes to shake up the meta, I don’t think this is at all to “give people stuff to complain” about. There’s been people on the forums for years that were begging them to shake the meta up and when they finally do it, it’s seen as a conspiracy? They’re simply trying to keep the game fresh, not spark controversy.

The devs aren't intentionally messing up anything.

The community is very divided on what they actually want the game to be and anytime the devs do make changes based on community feedback, there's just a new set up complaints.

For example, before the anti-facecamping changes you would see many posts complaining about facecamping and how uninteractive it was. So the devs add the new system to deal with that specfic complaint and now people are focusing on proxy camping which has always been fine according to the devs.

Ultimately you just can't please a group of players who don't even have a strong grasp on what they want the game to be like.

Exactly, they are trying their best to keep the game fresh and enjoyable, and OP just like you stated, they can't make everyone happy. This is an asymmetrical game, both sides have very different issues and mentalities, this is truly a case of not being able to please everyone. Anytime they make a positive, quality of life change to one side, the other is usually feeling left out and think that the devs favor one role over the other, when in reality they are simply trying to please their playerbase. Not everything in life has some hidden conspiracy under it.

While yes, it's true that some people thrive under chaos, don't go making the assumption that everyone is like this. A lot of people value enjoyment and pleasure, especially with something like a video game, where most people use it for a form of escapism from their daily lives. And yes, discussion videos are a strong medium for this game, but they are more niche and viewed by people who are actively in the community. The videos that get the most views and bring people into the game are gameplay videos of people messing around and having fun with the game, you can't have these if your playerbase and by extension content creators are unhappy with the game, it shows in their work when they're not enjoying themselves.

And there's always room for balance discussions, no game in history has ever been perfectly balanced, this is purely a pipe dream, especially for an asymmetrical game. If there's one thing I've learned in life, there will always be a contrarian, no matter how perfect things are or appear to be. You can never truly make everyone happy.

No, I don't think there is a big conspiracy happening here.

BHVR is unlikely to sabotage its own product.

Quite the conspiracy theory :) But I really think it's far more simple and less nefarious - they just don't know how to and/or are unwilling to balance the game. I think it's a bit of both. There have been so many times when broken/OP things have been tested, people screamed that they were broken/OP, yet these things got implemented into the game anyway only to be changed later or sometimes not at all. Also, the biggest balance issue in my mind is the advantage that SWF teams on comms have. I don't think BHVR are willing to do anything to change that because if they did, a large portion of their biggest revenue base would play a lot less or leave the game entirely.

I don't think they messing up balance for the reasons you say, but rather they don't want to work on the game anymore. They do everything they can to alienate their biggest player base and then ignore them.

People are screaming that survivor is unplayable, the player counts are decreasing and nothing being done. Not sure, but it's obvious what they are doing.

1: I definitely think BHVR wants to keep an ever evolving game. They don't want a perfectly balanced game per se, they want perks that go in and out of usage. That fact that DbD has been able to be broken up into eras based on what was meta probably keeps the game fresh.

2: Personally I think asymmetrical games are absolutely impossible to balance on a game by game basis.

3: Given that DbD has different metas in different regions of the world (Self-Care S Tier perk in Asia!) there's no ways to balance for that.

4: Lots of DbD is a guessing game. Ultimate Weapon came out, and this shot up the value of calm spirit. This led to a decrease in the use of Ultimate Weapon. Both sides are trying to guess at what the other has.

For some reason I thought it was a quote from someone over at Gun Interactive, but wasn't 100%. Interesting that it got met with disapproval though. I would think apathy would be the worst thing you could get from a playerbase as it means people have stopped caring.

Ah yeah. I suppose it depends on how it's interpreted. I took it to mean knowing the playerbase is still there vs worrying that the playerbase has moved on.

At least I can only assume that there is no staff to balance the map. Some staff also added an overheating system to the Hillbilly as a "deep" adjustment.

I wouldn't say they are doing it "on purpose" at first i thought that they had no idea what they are doing. Then they recently have made some great changes, like billy, but then in the same patch they nerf sadako because of "tunneling" and the nerf literally re-promotes the style of gameplay they were trying to avoid.

In the same patch they "fix 3 genning" but in the most convoluted way, when there were far simpler and easier ways to do it.

In the same patch, they buffed up base kick regression, but they allowed survivors to "gen tap" and have wiretap on forever, even after we told them this.

In the same patch, they buff ruin, but the wrong part of it.

In the same patch, they nerf STBFL.