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Has anyone actually recommended this game to anyone recently?
How do you tell them "oh yeah if we play survivor together we are supposed to lose most of our games, its by design"
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"Oh, a fellow masochist. Can I interest you in one of my favorite "games"?"
I assume that's how the average recommendation would go.
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I think most players come into a asymmetrical games expecting to lose against the monster. It's not really hard to sell them on it anyway. "hey! this game got all the iconic slashers" look fun.
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Yeah, that is basically what happened when I last recommended DBD to some friends.
I didn't even have to explain anything, they were already familiar with the game.
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"Hey, want to try this horror pvp game? It's 4 horror victims trying to survive and escape against a killer so you'll lose a bit more than you win. It's fun, minus the matches you get with players who sabotage games by giving up at the very start."
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Yeah with all the big names I'm not suprise your friends knew already. The real challenge is retaining players on this game not finding them.
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I had previously recommended this game to friends and even bought it for them. None of them play it anymore because of the terrible balance, sheer commitment, and cost required to get all the perks and killers. Now Dead by Daylight is a massive joke among my friend group and I'm the only one who still plays it because I've invested too much time into it.
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Yep, that's true.
And I think it was easier to do it in the past because there was less to learn and grind. I started when the Darkness Among Us chapter was released and my experience as a new player was good, but the current "new player experience" might be a bit overwhelming at first.
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Its not an horror game anymore until they add the old maps back so better don't recommend
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Funnily enough, most of my friends that would’ve been interested have already tried it on their own. A fair few stuck around too.
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I really wish Behavior made the game more beginner friendly and didn't have locked perks behind levels 5, 10, and 15 I believe.
It's very hard to recommend this type of game to new people because you have to invest a lot of time in both killer and survivor from the start with only one or two perks to get started.
Not to mention, the heavy grind it is to get to prestige 3 to unlock all of the teachable unless you want to use shards for perks in the Shrine of Secrets.
I even said that adding the perks of others in the pause menu and allowing people to hover over what their teammates bring would allow people to learn more about perks and create more of a gap between solo and SWF too — we have so much space in the pause menu and we hardly utilize it.
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with the community like this, i would rather recommend League of Legends
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The issue is not just that you lose, but that nowawdays in DBD you spend almost all your time watching your character die or waiting for unavoidable death to come, rather than playing the game.
Bleeding out is the best example. The devs still consider it an acceptable game mechanic, for a player to be forced to wait up to 4 minutes on the ground doing nothing, just watching their character die, potentially while the killer watches them die to humiliate them, too. 4 full minutes doing nothing but waiting for the game to confirm you lost. In a game where the average match length is 10 minutes, and the average chase time is 1 minute. I am honestly puzzzled how someone ever considered an unskippable timer of 4 minutes to be something reasonable to have in a video game, let alone never changed for 7 years.
Even when you're not getting bled out. How many times does the game feels like it's over in the first 2 minutes, and then the game just drags itself out for 10 minutes. How many times does a match start, and within 30 sec your teammate goes down and gives up on hook, and it's already a 3 vs 1 at 5 gens, and you have no option but to wait patiently for the game to finish you off, AGAIN?
And of course, let's not forget the iconic hatch game. Because if you thought that 3v1 game was dragging itself out already, you as a survivor are in fact encouraged to drag it out even more: by hiding in a corner! That's right, you can still win this game, but for that you need to be the one who will hide for the LONGEST. Don't do ANYTHING or you'll lose. Because if there's one thing that this game LOVES it's when everyone sits there doing nothing! The killer, however, can counter it. How? By slugging the other survivor of course! How lovely, now it's not just ONE survivor who has to sit 4 minutes on the ground doing nothing, but now we have THREE players waiting patiently for him to die, and this is a core mechanic of the game!
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Honestly this is one of the biggest reasons i cant recommend to anyone right now. In no other game can someone just take away your agency for 4 minutes straight. Not to mention all the aura reading they dont understand why they are being found when they are hiding.
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Now it's even better because the killer will bleed you out for 4 minutes then mori you afterwards. If you thought that was already not humiliating enough.
Your 2nd point I've suggested it years ago to become a 2nd effect of Distortion (allow survivor to know when the killer can see their aura). But I quickly realized nobody cares about new players on this forum, and meanwhile, the devs have completely gutted Self-Care and now Distortion, so I think the message is clear and new players can go f*ck themselves.
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Yes actually to people who enjoy Horror.
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I started playing in November 2021 about the time when boons were pretty new and Artist was released. It was difficult to learn what survivor perks did and recognising killer perks back then but I have no idea how someone new could start playing now on their own like I did. The sheer number of killers, maps and different perks to deal with must put so many off.
With how inconsistent MMR seems to be even the worst killers must destroy new players on the game in solo queue, god forbid the new players end up going against experienced killer in backfill lobbies. An absolute steamrolling that would scare away a lot of people surely?
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in League of Legends, you can get stomped by your lane opponent, your team can hard int and still, you will need 3 positive votes after 15min mark passes. You can just sit and watch opponent constantly destroying your turrets, inhibs and then nexus. Dbd is literally nothing compared to it.
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There sure have been a lot of "survivors don't escape enough" posts recently. Seriously, people need to spend time playing both sides before forming their opinions on this issue. Nobody wanted to play killer when the kill rates were lower. If you want EZ escapes and t-bagging killer at the exit gates, just play a custom game with a bot killer. If survivor side sucks so much, then don't play it - I will gladly welcome the shorter survivor queue times in the peak evening times when I play.
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Started playing 2016 after release, have over 7k Hours in DbD and the last time I recommended the game to someone was either 2016 or 2017. I would never recommend this game to anyone anymore. the biggest reasons are the community, balancing and the amount of investment you would need ontop of BHVR being the devs. The History of DbD is a messy one and it reflects that BHVR mainly programmed Nintendo DS games no one ever heard of.
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Except there are comeback mechanics and you can play for the team when behind, also the fact that there actually is a surrender button so you can leave when its reached the point of no return
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Nope and will never until proper balance is back which is never.
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The reason people don't want to play killer has nothing to do with killrate.
During 2vs8 event, the killer role had the longest queue times ever seen in DBD, about 15 min queues, and survivor had +600% BP incentives. Which shows, people overwhelmingly play killer, when they can do it with their friends.
But outside of the event, survivor is the only role that allows that. You could buff killrates to 99%, as long as killer is still the 1v4 role, the majority of players will not play it.
The all-time peak player count of DBD was in 2021 btw, when the killrate was 50%.
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On the question of if I recommend the game to friends, I do not. Not because I don't enjoy the game - I do, quite a lot - but because the complexity and sheer amount of content have gotten out of control. When I started playing the game back in 2018, I had a group of friends who started playing as well, but nearly all quit pretty quickly due to how overwhelming it is for new players. And that was years ago. The learning curve for new players is exponentially worse now. Just way too many killer powers to learn how to use/counter, perks to learn how to use/counter, etc.
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you CAN'T play for a team when behind if they are trolling, even if you play a champ that can 1v9. They will hold you hostage for 20+ minutes just because they find it fun
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I still only know one person in real life that plays this game, because literally everyone else I know that plays PvP games, only likes ranked mode, and thinks this game’s lack of a ranked mode is 100% proof this game isn’t skill based enough to play.
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I don't think it's fair to use the 2v8 mode to assess the popularity of the killer role. That was a very unique event in the game's history and people were drawn to the killer role due to mode offering 2 killers being able to play together for the first time ever.
Yes the peak player count was back in 2021 when kill rates were lower, but I also remember survivor queue times being extraordinarily long back then. My queue times for survivor during peak time are now maybe just a few minutes at the most. Back then it was like 15-20 minutes. The deficit of killer players was definitely worse back then than it is today, and that's because killer doesn't feel as unfun to play as it did back then.
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Sir this is a Wendy's.
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I used to recommend the game, but my three friends did exactly the same:
Play survivor with me for about a week, we get pissed off because get into a losing streak.
Decide to play killer by their own. Literally just click people to death. 1 to 3 weeks of playing the game on and off.
No one wants to play with me anymore.
They get bored because we can't play killer together but we don't want to face a 12% escape rate either.
They leave.
I'm the only idiot that likes the concept enough that's willing to put up with people that don't know what balancing a game means in the forums, and the ######### show that solo q is. And still I need plenty of breaks or this game will make me lose my mind. Heck, this event is already testing my limit as a fan of the game.
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I keep seeing posts like this from people who claim they escape far below the average rates. Only one of these things can possibly be true:
- They actually escape more frequently than they are claiming
- They are far less skilled than the average survivor player
- BHVR is providing bogus escape rate statistics
So, which is it?
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Its not uncommon now to go on a dozen or so loss streak now, whos going to sit through that many losses before finally getting the win is the problem. in his example he is more experienced than his friends so they for the most part get matched at a higher mmr
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Yes this can happen to certain people, but if BHVR's escape statistics are really true, then it's not happening to most players. If it was, the escape rates would be far lower. In my experience, when I've played with 2-3 friends who are lower skilled and likely have lower MMR scores, we tend to get matched against baby killers.
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Hyperbole it's called. To add a bit of drama and let other people see me and my friend's desperation about the state of the game.
My actual escape rate isn't exactly 12%, that number is largely chosen out of what it feels like and not what it actually is. But neither is the 39% average escape rate officially provided by BHVR.
Just last night I played the event for several hours and I managed to escape twice, one of the games out of a killer rage-AFKing. Most games were a full wipe (4k), with a few having either pity or legit hatches. No matches had any more than single player gate escapes.
As you can see, even if the figure is made out of feel rather than hard data, it aligns much better than the so-praised 39% escape rate BHVR gave us.
It would be completely fine saying that I could suck as a survivor, yet this opens the question: Why are there no killers at my same skill level? Is perhaps the skill floor for killers just nonexistent? Survivors are required several thousands of hours to perform "acceptably", but killers can just walk and click to win?
And so, we loop back to the issue I presented.
I recommended the game to my friends. We played together. Inevitably died for hours on end. Absolutely stomped as killers. They got bored, they didn't want to play survivor only to escape two matches a day, then they left.
Is this reply acceptable to you, or do you have more ChatGPT-esque doubts you want me to solve? Because I swear this reads as a "Gotcha!" made by someone that has never talked to an actual human being.
I cannot recommend this game to people if they require 1000 hours of play time and an academy-level training course by Mish herself to have more than two escapes a day. I already tried and none of my 3 friends liked it.
Only one of my friends reinstalled the game, and it was exclusively to play 2v8. The moment the game mode left, they uninstalled again because they do not want to play survivor with me.
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While I agree dbd should implement begginer friendly mechanics, showing that your aura is seen would make a lot of aura perks useless, see alien instinct for example, perk is practically non existant and does nothing if the affected player is barely sentient.
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I don't know where this "15 - 20 min survivor queues" claim comes from, but I'm pretty sure it is wrong, even though I've seen several people claim it. I've been playing since 2021 and queues were never ever more than 1-2 min, assuming you played during peak times and on one of the major regions.
If you want factual data about this claim, we can look at old VODs from 2021 of random streamers on Youtube, there are tons of old VODs. Here's a random one I picked from Feb 2021, see by yourself, all his queues take like 10 seconds:
I did not cherry pick this video, you can try yourself, type "DBD 2021 VOD". I've looked at the first 3, all queues take less than 20 sec for the majority of games.
So, feel free to link it if you find one that takes 10+ minutes, but otherwise I'm calling that claim wrong.
In contrast, I can easily prove such high queue times for 2vs8, check these VODs. All the queues take a consistent 10-15 min:
https://www.youtube.com/live/zNuEGzJsNzs?si=PQ8_0ZFRgVBfDjjI&t=1890
https://www.youtube.com/live/olwvyRkri2U?si=GYHK0tDJfUFQFIA9&t=7996
https://www.youtube.com/live/4y0IAE6t-5k?si=12-Sb6rffJzFEzjT&t=16852
It's possible there were some queue problems in 2021, but it was incomparable with what happened during 2vs8. During 2vs8, queue times were 10+ minutes for EVERYONE, to the point where pretty much no one streamed killer past the first few days.
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BHVR exclude games with DCs for some reason (even though it translates to a survivor loss the majority of the times), and even then 40% is an average, so a significant number of people probably lean more around 30%, with this rate running into long loss streaks is not only possible but actually rather expected.
Doing some very rough math, if you escape 33% of the time, a 10-loss streak should happen on average every 70 games, so very common actually.
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Me
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I have. I love the game. Do I get frustrated with it? Sure. If I do, I go play another for a bit until the developers make improvements, then waaaahlaaaaaaaaa I am back!
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I've not recommended the game since 2020.
Friends? All my friends have left the game long ago.
Discord? All my teammates have left the game.
I'm basically the last one still playing.
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I've found a 12 hour video for comparison, but the lobby and queue times aren't shown in the video :(
Anyway, there was a problem with survivor queue times in May / June, iirc. The Forums had some threads about it:
In my experience, players blamed a supposed "killer exodus" as the reason for the long queue times as survivor.
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Survivor tomes are on average harder to complete cuz youre at the mercy of everyone else, Unhook challenge? Someone else beats you to it everytime or the killer found you while going for the save. Escape challenge? now your tunneled out. Complete gens? The killer chases you all game or no one is going for save so you have to.
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I realize you didn't cherry-pick the video, but there are aren't going to be many posted to YouTube that have long stretches of the streamer just waiting in a queue. Nobody is going to watch those. In other words, you're most likely to see only videos with short queue times if you're randomly pulling stuff off YouTube because people are not going to upload their videos that have a bulk of the total time just sitting watching them wait for games.
All I can tell you with absolute certainty is my own experience. Even now, during peak evening times in my region (US eastern time zone), killer queues are instant and survivor queues are consistently a few minutes long. It was way worse before recent buffs were given to killers to help boost kill rates up to the current ~40% average. If survivor queue times are still a few minutes even now after these buffs, that means that there is still a deficit of killers in the queue pool (less than the 20% needed to make a perfect overall 4:1 survivor-to-killer ratio). The killer role is still not attractive enough to get enough players to balance the queues during peak times. I don't play during the day very often, but I assume it's probably not as bad during "off-peak" times because there aren't as many people playing together in groups, and solo players are probably on average going to choose the killer role more often.
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I can't. How am I going to recommend 'so, come play this game with me where I'd like you to learn how to play but you can't because you're new and likely to be found first so you won't actually get a chance to play because the Killer will tunnel you off hook. I might be able to help keep you alive longer by body blocking but I'll die from doing so. We can chat for the four minutes you're bleeding out while the Killer tries to look for the last survivor for a 4K. Well, you could have tried to stay out of the Killer's way before by hiding but since aura reading is so strong and the main counter to it got nerfed to the point a new player will struggle to get a new token you'll just have to get used to the Killer beelining to you.
However, if you play enough and spend more money on a new game you're not sure you'll like instead of spending on your entertainment dollars on something else you know you'll enjoy you can get something to help you last a few seconds longer while you get tunnelled out.'
That's not really an easy sell. As much as I consider pre 6.1 DH an abomination it would have been an easier sell back then as Killers still have access to tunnelling and camping which sways the odds as much as pre 6.1 DH did. However, all the busted stuff Survivor had has been properly nerfed and it's more apparent Killers can create situations new players (and players who can't coordinate together) have little to no chance of surviving in. Being tunnelled, camped and/or bled out does not make for an engaging gameplay experience that will hook new players. I could convince them to try Killer but as there's only one Killer there's no way to play together.
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My experience is that survivor queues are instant or almost instant while Killer queues take time during peak hours (NA West). That's why making generalizations (ie there aren't enough Killers) based off of individual experiences aren't really valid. A much larger sample size has to be used to make any even semi-valid assumptions.
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Nope, it's not new player friendly. At this point there's way too much to learn on top of learning the basics of the game. I honestly don't know how they get new players and retain them.
It's not like if I got a friend into it they would only go against the original killers with single abilities and face the option of a dozen different perks on either side until they learned and got comfortable with the basics like I did when I started. Instead it's 30+ killers with 100+ perks plus their own dozen add ons.
If 2v8 was permanent and stuck with handful of killers I would consider it because it really sticks to basics so would be easier to learn, but the regular game or if there's more than a handful of killers available at a time? No way.
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I don't want to sound rude but literally click the links I posted and you'll see these are 10 hour-long recordings that include queue times. This is because I search for VODs, not regular videos, basically those are complete recordings, often from livestreams. There are literally hundreds of them available from 2021.
Do the test, survivor VODs from 2021 show amost 0 queue time, while killer VODs frrom the 2vs8 period show 10+ min queue times. It is totally possible that you get 1-2 minutes now, but first, that doesn't affect the majority of the playerbase like it did for 2vs8, and second, 1-2 minutes is not 10+ minutes. Let's say an average match lasts 10 minutes, you getting 1-2 minutes means there is a 1.1x - 1.2x more survivors than ideal, so 5 survivors for 1 killer in your region - not ideal, but not terrible either. In contrast, 10 minute queues means 2 survivors for 1 killer - 2x less survivors than ideal. I repeat, but the survivor BP incentive during 2vs8 went up to +600%.
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I would say, are you interested in a game where you can cheat without having to fear any major consequences? There is hardly anything better than DBD.
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People have always been complaining about queue times for as long as this forum has existed, on each side. I've seen somebody even complain last week, and yet I'm certain queues take < 30 sec on each side now. Out of millions of players there'll always be a few who are unlucky, either because they are at a rare MMR, live in an isolated region, queue at a weird hour, or all of those combined.
If queues were so long in 2021 then people should be able to find examples proving it, there are literally hundreds of Youtube VODs from 2021. But every time I click on one, I see 10 sec queues, just try it yourself. In contrast, every single VOD from 2vs8 shows consistent 10+ min. This shows that during 2vs8 queues were incomparable to anything in 2021.
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Short answer no and here's why.
I am old school gamer like Space Invaders old. I had the original Nintendo when it was first released. Now gaming has come along way and I played COD and yes one can consider that toxic but it was seriously just trash talk to throw you off your game. This is just a whole new level of toxicity and the game is just is what it is. My gamer friends are basically all console and for me to get one involved it would take time they necessarily can't invest in or forget us remembering the perks. We don't have time or care about nasty messages and hurt feelings in a video game were people try way to hard for invisible trophies. It's fun yes but right now the state is just terrible and it's mostly the players general that just feel they need to spill their emotions onto a video game. Face we are playing with recycled Roblox players that really don't know how to play this type of game.
Now Secondly Esports is a thing and it's really taking off (like college scholarships). Games like this may end up losing players because they are focusing on other games that actually monitor interactions with other players and keep their games balanced and as cheater free as possible. The good thing about esports is these kids are learning gamer etiquette and losing is ok. So there maybe hope in the future.
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My que times are long on both sides. It must be regional.
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