why is the player base decreasing?
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The playerbase decreases a lot, but it’ll go back up for the next chapter.
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That’s exactly the case, and correlates with the delusional people in this thread saying that killer is easy.
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Depends mainly what's available on Steam, alongside what PC players are enjoying currently and a whole host of other stuff. It's too wide to pinpoint one particular thing.
As you say rightly, this is just the Steam charts. According to Activeplayer.io DBD had the most players in a single day that it has ever had since a few years back, across all platforms (~1,600,000) and although the average monthly player is a bit down than usual, it's still well over 7,000,000 averge players a day across all platforms.
So I'd conclude the Steam drop (albeit it's really around the lower number of the average it's had for some time) is a Steam-related scenario. Steam may have games coming out people want to play more, or are burned out from DBD. However, there is no singular reason why this is the case.
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sorry, but did you read the whole text or did you stop at the title?
*** ...and I'm not saying dbd is dying.***
***In theory the player base should increase and not decrease.***
I never said the player count is bad🤣
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Steam charts brought up, opinion disregarded
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I did read. I read the whole thread. The only part of your post I take issue with is I don't see this player decline. 14 months of a very stable player base that shifts around 30'000 is not a decline.
However a big portion of my post was not aimed at you. I was more responded to a lot of the rest of the thread, that seemed to jump on the chance to spin their own narrative, despite having no, or at best extremely flimsy evidence to support it.
In answering your question directly see this post above:
The 'dip' in the player base falls quite in line with the end of lockdown, particularly in the US, and it remains very stable after that.
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It's why I've mainly stuck to killer this week for the modifier. I'm only one person but I know those people have an amazing game when there's a killer that plays well and doesn't do that.
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Steam charts only tell part of the story. Most of the playerbase is on the consoles, and those numbers we cannot ever know. So we guess the patterns are similar across all platforms, not an unreasonable thing to do, but in the end just a guess.
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Oh yeah the OP knows.
OP failed at a bait and a gotcha its kinda funny🤣
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I have to force myself to play at the moment. Solo survivor isn't in a good spot, imo.
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OK - because it makes total sense that the trend would be way different on other platforms, right?
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because solo-q is a bully simulator instead of fun. All my friends quit because of it, although I stuck around because I also like to play killer. Too much camping, tunnelling and oppressive killers for soloq to have fun with.
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Poor balancing from BHVR.
Everything fun gets nerfed.
MMR causes people to sweat like their life is on the line.
Killers are too strong.
It's impossible for survivors to win unless the killer is very bad at the game.
Match outcome is usually determined early in the game causing people to forfeit in most games.
New players have too steep of a learning curve which is overwhelming, especially for survivors.
BHVR priority should be making BOTH sides of the game have equal efforts in winning. It needs to feel that way as well. It is simply comical how easy it is to win as killer but impossible when you switch to survivor.
I think the game will continue to die unless changes are made to address these points.
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SoloQ is pretty bad, Lights out wasn't a good enough event, normally there is a decrease around the time of the ptb which I'm guessing is because burn out, and the mid chapter only had 1 appealing thing that being billy.
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If the lunar new year did happen this year, more people would be playing. However since the only thing people got was Lights Out, people just decided to take a break.
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Game is bad for new players and old players are probably tired of repairing generators for 25 years now
Post edited by Rizzo on3 -
Map are NOT balanced and at least 10-15 killers are just crap, game is a bit more balanced than before but still not balanced enough
What has lead me to leave the game are
-cheaters : way too many cheaters and too little effort to stop them
- q&a : they keep pushing out content but the q&a is very very lacking, too many bugs, too many emergency fixes, "balance" changes take months or even years
-very few changes : the core game is the same as 7 years ago
-lack of communication from the Devs
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Soloq is awful and killer is too easy. It just gets old after a while.
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Because play killer is stressfull and play soloQ is miserable.
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While dbd is at an all time low in regards to player base, its still massive for a 7 year old game.
I think bhvr dropped the ball on soloq balancing and then had the nerve to say it's a skill issue.
I find killer should be at 50% win rate. I'm an individual and have to rely on no one but myself. I want to earn my kills. Buffing killers to get a 60% win rate overall is not balance, it's just something to say, "Hey look guys, killer ain't so stressful, we gave you +10% on a coin flip."
Survivor role should have a preset dialog option as it does in the mobile version. If one developer thinks it's fine and the community requests it, then why not?
Big question is why touch Quick Gambit first but leave Decisive Strike till end of the year?
It's cause they don't care if soloq is miserable and I'm glad the community is doing what it should in respect to that.
P.S
I had to quit soloq for the first time in 5 years. So this is me projecting I suppose.
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Over the years I have been playing DBD on and off (since Jan 2019) I have seen the player base go up and down but it always seems to end up settling at around 30-35k players on Steam. I think its because it tends to lose old players at a similar rate that it gains new players.
Specific chapters will bring in fans of that IP, some will stay but most seem to leave but they get replaced with the next lot of noobs.
I see a few familiar names in queue on the occasions I return to play a bit but most of the players around when I started left DBD long ago
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Ultimately depends on the chapter content
I mean Alan wake Alone literally didn’t bring any wow factor
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There are many factors as to why those numbers mean nothing. Come back when the steam charts show 10s of thousands of players leaving in a short period rather than less than 3,000 leaving and coming back over a few months.
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The game has been balanced for SWF game play. Solo Q has just been abandoned and forced to play with console who have no communication. Players will only take so much loss before they just leave.
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It's not.
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All games die.
That's the natural way things work. New games are constantly coming out competing for attention. Meanwhile, no matter how good a game is, people get bored of it and look for something new.
Maintaining an active playerbase for as long as DbD has is an amazing achievement. Time is far more of a threat to the game than any particular complaint people have about it.
In theory the player base should increase and not decrease.Given what I mentioned above, game improvements need to be made just to keep the player base stable.
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Solo queue is usually an abyss of suffering with tunneling killers, so they're quitting. That means that non-tunneling killers that are left have to deal with more toxic SWF bully squads, so they start to quit or permatunnel. Then all you have left is toxic tunneling killers vs. sweat drenched SWFs spiraling the game into even more and more deranged behavior on both sides.
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Many friends left dbd from anonymity function implementation, and, as for me, will largely damped.
The present solo play is the worst ever
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All bad games die*
fixed that for you.
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The main reason why many people misunderstand that it is a killer advantage is simply that the matching is not working properly.
The management is so obsessed with shortening the waiting time for matching that they create groups of survivors whose play skills are not unified.
This is the most difficult factor for SoroQ, and in other cases, even SoroQ can escape very easily.
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This is a pretty poor excuse for a lack of growth. Most big games have practically the same number of players as they did during the height of the pandemic. Counterstrike, GTA, Dota 2, PUBG, etc. Good games that are enjoyable for everyone hold steady or even grow their playerbase over time.
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The management is "obsessed" because people even from this forum was complaining about the wait times back then. The problem at that point in time was "There are not enough Killers to match with all the Survivors"
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Burn out... for the most part
Not wanting to play a game in which Players are (for lack of better word) toxic... Killers playstyle aren't pleasant, Survivors that deal with SoloQ
Nothing new other then Killers and perks that will be nerfed 6 months after release (or the perks aren't worth it)
Lights Out is a fun gamemode but it isn't a permanent gamemode so it's not worth getting attached
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People really don't understand the amount of solo players in this game.
Since 6.1.0 solo queue has been so painful that I've migrated to playing killer more often. And regardless of how much killers complain each time they get nerfed, I've had a solid 85~ish% kill rate with, like, a couple of unusually hard matches each month. Getting BP, completing missions and winning the game is super easy as a killer because solo survivors do not play efficently, they're here to have a good time, and killer is so, so, SO ahead of them that walking to them and clicking them immediately makes them combust. 90% of the chases are about 15 seconds long.
Every time I go back to play survivor (Because I still like the concept of survivor more than the concept of killer, as I'm more a fan of the Alien Isolation type of powerless fantasy rather than the God Of War power fantasy), I am about 95% sure I'm queuing into a losing match. My rank must be so low it's physically impossible for me to find worse killers, and regardless, killers keep winning. My only escapes tend to be either a lucky hatch or a killer takes pity on us or is memeing around. That's the MAJORITY of my escapes.
And yet, killers keep complaining when they can't double tap people off the hook, and SWF keep playing the martyr card with their "You can't punish us for playing with friends?!?!?!?!?!? How will we cope?!?!?!?!".
Most people that play this game are usually solo players that like the concept. By focusing balancing around SWF, you make the game only fun to play in a SWF, while you push out every player that feels like they're being punished because they don't have a group of friends they can play with.
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First of all, I dont think that DBD is dying or anything. Threads like this pop up every few weeks and in general, it is normal that games lose players at some point and DBD is no exception.
However, I would agree that it is indeed most likely Survivors who are leaving. SoloQ is absolutely awful to play. In general, everything aside from 4 man-SWF is currently not really enjoyable. I only play Survivor in a 2 man-SWF, but this is too much RNG. We can have two Teammates who are really awesome or two teammates who barely do anything. A few days ago I had a Meg on my team who was in the same Corner the whole game. Yesterday I had a David who did not touch a single Gens the whole game. And two Survivors (I think both were Solo, because one of them was on Console) who suicided against a proxycamping Killer.
And then it does not matter that we both have a high amount of playtime or can coordinate (even tho we dont really do it in any competitive way). Because you cannot win a 2v1, or, if we are lucky, a 3v1.
Also, a thing that needs to be considered - there has not been anything really good for Survivor for a few months now. We had a Killer-only Chapter with Chucky which did not feature ANYTHING for Survivors. There was nothing for Survivor in that Chapter. And then the Survivor-Only Paragraph featured Alan Wake with some of the worst Perks in the game and lots of good Stuff for Killer (mainly Billy). And even before that, Xenomorph released alongside Ellen Ripley, who also featured some of the worst Perks in the game. And I dont really see anyone play Ellen Ripley anymore. Yet, Xenomorph was another good Killer (which is good!) and it came with Ultimate Weapon, which makes SoloQ even less enjoyable, because you cannot really coordinate (granted, same goes for SWFs not on Coms). And since it lingers, you cannot avoid getting hit by Ultimate Weapon, because you cannot just spend 30 seconds in a locker AND you dont know when the Killer is even activating it. Even Kindred does not really help with that, since you cannot really see the direction the Killer is going because the Hook Bubble blocks it.
So yeah, there was not much for Survivor for a few months and SoloQ being really horrible...
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Same for me. I quit survivor, because killer is far more chill and easier. I like the concept of survivor more, but not when I have to play like a robot perfectly.
I also dislike all nerfs that came for both sides since I started playing. They sucked all the fun out of the game. Same goes for the map reworks; no more good pallets, no good vaults, mostly deadzones. I hope they return old dead hard, iron will, ruin etc. I don‘t want useless balanced perks and killers. I want to have fun and mess around.
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well said. Same experience for me.
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I've been an active player for awhile, but this whole 8 gen limit crap as effectively moved me from playing every day of the week to once every week or two. I don't do 3 gen camping, but im often getting the limit hit, and it's beyond frustrating. Killer players keep getting all these arbitrary rules crammed down their throat every patch to the point where it's about what the killers can't do more than it's about what they can do. I'm a friendly'ish killer that prefers to make for a fun experience for everyone (including the survivors), but it's just becoming more and more unviable and painful to have a non 3 gen camping and non tunneling playstyle as an m1 killer, and now I have to deal with a regression limit on top of that which is incredibly easy to hit if running non regression kick perks - especially if mixed in with eruption or surge.
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I'd love an example of a good game.
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Are you talking about the killer strike? Can we talk about that or is it taboo? I remember survivor queues being so high bc a lot of killer mains quit. On a positive note, at least the devs made some QoL changes for the killer side following that.
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From what I remember it was basically centered around the anniversary and first resident evil chapter. We had three terrible releases in a row Binding of Kin, All-Kill, and Resident Evil. The first two had no maps, terrible realm beyond, overall weak perks, some of the worst killer design up to that point and was leaving a sour taste in the community. Then came Resident Evil, it was terrible. RPD became the most infamous map in DBD just like that and Nemesis felt, weak, boring, and uninspired. And they messed up the code and all forms of console actually became too laggy to play. Then after was Hellraiser, which would end up bogged in the NFT controversy. Yeah, it was rough time, and somewhat continued with Portrait of a Murder and Sadako Rising. All of this also being before the massive meta shake to the traditional perks like Ruin, DS, DH, cetra. And yet DBD actually started to fix things and the numbers recovered. In my memory that was the dark age of DBD and the numbers showed.
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Ahhh okay I missed all that(came back and there was a bunch of new content and things for me to catch up on). I was taking a little break from dbd around those times. Some other games had dropped that I was really interested in playing such as Elden ring, Gotham knights, stray and some other stuff. I’m not playing as much right now either bc suicide squad kill the justice league has me occupied(gotta get those bane infamy sets).
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Not to mention Binding of Kin and its patch (4.4.0) completely broke the game. Definitely one of the worst patches in the game's history.
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What happened?
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The bugs in this game know no bounds, they can be super frustrating but in hindsight always make me laugh. Do you remember the giant survivor bug where they’d just get really huge on the screen? Still makes me laugh to this day thinking about it.
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well i think it's because most people play to win which means playing the meta. dbd is way too shallow to have fun while playing the meta every match. yes dbd is a very basic hide and seek game at its core, only some killers can elevate the gameplay but up to a point, and the killers that break the rhythm (spirit, nurse) are cancelled, so it's just how it is. the older tryhards get bored and move on to their next competitive multiplayer and the stream of new or average casual hop on tonight players keep the train going. anyways that's my theory
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imo its probably the toxicity. play survivor? the killer will hit on hook, hump, shake head etc. play killer? survivors will just be tbagging you while stuff such as god loops and random god pallets save them then they all tbag and taunt you at endgame. both roles are miserable to play.
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I remember when Blight came out. That patch caused all Xbox1x machines (just those models mind you, not the other Xbox1's) to insta-overheat and shut down when you started up DBD. Wasn't fixed until the following hotfix, like a week later.
It's in the tech issues section. Good reads in there, the players were real understanding...
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Then they just leave messages on your profile. Like seriously, i have a open steam profile and can see on the comments of my profile, when i made a pause playing DbD.
This community has a serious anger problem. Treating a loss as a personal insult. Its one of the reasons i play less and less. I just wanna have fun playing a game i like. Not turn my profile to private, because i must fear the toxic comments that come after some matches.
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