Uncomfortable truths of DBD

Hahaha, I can imagine that is the case.

Many of these issues for newer people can be solved with BETTER TUTORIALS… I don't think BHVR know how to make anything BETTER though.. They just sort of listen to the community and see what sticks. When the community is secretly making the game for itself, we have a problem…

Tutorials need to be made to show new Survivors what objectives are most important at what time, WHEN is a good time to unhook, do a gen, etc. We need Killer tutorials that try to help newer Killers understand what they're focus should be as soon as a match starts, or WHEN to stop chasing the same person. The game has none of this.. Without good tutorials for your players, you're automatically telling them that you expect them to like the game enough to look all this information up themselves, which is NOT going to happen most of the time..

If the game never explains how it should actually be played then why would anyone continue to play it if they're lost? Instead of marketing this game as "A DEADLY GAME OF HIDE AND SEEK" and have your new players sitting and hiding the entire match…. you should really be helping them understand the steps of each match and how to get through trials as best they can. The tutorials we have atm are extremely lackluster for how complex the game really is. It seems simple of course but it really isn't. DBD isn't only in a more niche genre for a bigger audience to enjoy, but the play style required to succeed is even more unusual than most games.

DBD has never been one of those games you can just pick up and have fun due to the huge learning curve on each side that refuses to be acknowledged. This is why when a large amount of new people come into the game, most of them are gone within that same few weeks or month that they joined. New people tend to see the game as shallow and simple, when it's actually quite the contrary. At almost 10 years later, I really don't understand why we can't get better tutorials for new people to add some sense to the madness.. Just letting everything be a Free For All gives the message that you as a new person are on your own..

And just so everybody knows this, there is a reason the devs DON'T have a specific outline on how a match should be played out. MCote has said they've embraced the chaos of DBD. Let all 4 Survivors pick the same character with the same outfit to confuse the Killer player even more… Let all 4 Survivors run the 4 strongest perks and be in a SWF at the same time. Let the Killer just stomp 1 Survivor only into the ground. As long as the other 4 are having fun who cares right? No limitations whatsoever. The reason for this is it just gives them an excuse to not have to try so hard to keep the game balanced. When the chaos is being embraced it will only lead to downfall. No structure. The higher your structure is going to be, the deeper the foundation must be as well.

DBD was a beautiful mistake. They even admitted it when it starting gaining traction back in the day. BHVR isn't some asymm game making genius or anything. They simply got lucky with this genre and any/all licensing companies ever agreeing to using their prolific horror icons.

The answers are literally right in front of BHVR… Finding a spot to fit this into their unreasonably tight and probably questionable "priority list" is another thing..

Same!

There's no time! You start the match easy, get 2 chases in, and lose 4 gens. You start the match easy, get 2 chases in, and lose no gens. It's literally impossible for you to tell what kind of match it's gonna be, because you're not told ahead of time what the gen speed will be like. The survivors don't even have to play well in chase. They just do their objective and win. But then you have players who don't know what their objective is. I would rather kill them all quickly, using whatever method, so we can both move on from the clearly not worthwhile mismatch. We want to beat good players, not noob stomp. And it's not a lack of trying or improvement on those harder matches. The gens just go too quick; There's nothing to improve upon, because you can't control it.

She was NOT moving 146% lmao. She was moving at 88%. Slower than Billy, Slower than Bubba, Slower than Slinger, Slower than Trickster and still the slowest movement speed in the game besides fatigues and Meyers stalk speed.

The speed was not problematic at all and no one can, gas or will ever have a good reason it was because simply put it wasn’t.

This. Well, kind of.

I feel like the mindset of "tunneling being necessary at a high-level of play" often translates to "tunneling is the only way of playing" for a lot of people. Instead of using other strategies, spreading hooks, or focusing on improvement, players often focus on playing a specific way because the community tells them that it is optimal and nothing else matters in the long run.

For me specifically. When I was a new player I would tunnel, camp, and slug in all of my games, and I won a lot of them, but I also did not grow as a player either. I got my head stuck in the mindset of "I got to get players out" then I never took a moment to analyze ways I messed up and ways I could improve. By the time MMR got added, I eventually came to realization that I sucked and worked on personal growth.

Part of me just feels like along the way we kind of just forgot that actually learning the game should be the forefront of everything first before winning, and new players should be encouraged to experiment, try new things, and take the game at their own pace.

In fact, you can look at some of my old, old Forum posts see this progression happen as time went on.

Sorry but that was a failure on your part for picking a completely random number that is also close to killer movement speeds.

And of course like I said you have absolutely no argument and nothing to stand on when it comes to it being bad for her to move at that speed. I don’t need to see a video. I played her on the PTB for the whole week she had the buffs. I played against her a lot too. She wasn’t overpowered, not even remotely. 10 hatchets was bad and leaving the shiny pin add on in was bad and that was it.

Thinking an 88% Huntress is Overpowered is a skill issue plain and simple.

Many killers aren't in over their heads. They're facing people of the same caliber, skill and experience, as themselves. But they're losing and drawing by default. The bar for survivors is so low to win with, you have to play like 5x better than them to beat them, and at a certain point they're just too "good" to be beat, because the killer lacks tools to push to that level. And this obsession with "proving" that using strategy is skilless, or puts you above your level as killer, I'll never understand. The game doesn't provide killers enough time to go for random chases and still get the win; the gens go way too fast for that. So killers improvise, and go for tunneling and 2-hooking. In order to get to those positions, the killer has to be good at chase, so your argument on them simply not being good enough in chase doesn't work. Because if that was the case, why don't people at top MMR or tourney just go for random chases, since they're somehow good enough, and still get a 4k? It never happens, because it isn't realistic. They're still getting draws at best most times. No amount of skill or game sense enables you to bypass loops or counterplay which usually work for survivor, and that waste a guaranteed, arbitrary amount of time. You're just hoping that the survivors lack game knowledge or skill, aka accidental smurfing.

I don't even know where you're going with the killer team coordination thing. There's 1 killer, 1 mind. If you go to a gen and find there's no survivor there, you've just wasted time. There's no other voice in your head that tells you, "Don't go there, because there's nobody there." You're all alone and have to operate on instinct alone. You can, of course, use aura perks but they won't cover everything. And if you're spending slots on aura, you're giving up slots on chase, which you need all you can get. And that's not even factoring in reading survivor caliber. You're supposed to just know that a chase will cost you 3 gens after looping someone for 3 pallets, when you reasonably thought you'd have them down by then? No. There's no indication that you're taking a bad chase, or that the gens are too fast, until it's too late.

You even agree on the killer vs solo vs SWF issue. Survivors playing bad? Here's a buff, we'll bail you out. Killers playing well? They're getting too much reward, nerf them! SWF with a 95% win rate? Never nerf them, because solos exist.

The stats thing is kind of pointless to talk about, because people don't understand it, and don't factor in... other factors. The escape rate is way lower than it really should be, because survivors throw all the time, way more than killers. Most times, that's because a good survivor gets put with absolutely hopeless teammates, who couldn't even beat a killer of their own level, and the game decided to give them a super competent killer. That's forced mismatches from MMR skewing the data. It's why the data is so unreliable right now, and you can't even have a discussion on imbalance with most people because of it.

Killer doesn't determine the pace of the game. Survivors do. Instead of doing a dull totem, a chest, or healing when unnecessary, they can do a gen during that time instead, and suddenly the game is a lot closer. 1 gen left til done instead of 2-3. It's that simple. The killer can only be in 1 place at a time, and thus cannot stop the gens until at least 1 person is dead. Only then is he somewhat capable of dictating the match result, but then again the match is usually over by that point.

Agreed on the reactionary updates. I'll add that they're usually survivor-protecting reactions.

I don't think the devs are balancing for SWF. They're buffing killer. But are those killer buffs making killers, who lost constantly to SWF before, all of a sudden start beating them? No, of course not. They only marginally help against solo teams. There's such a power difference between solos + killers and SWF, that you'd have to almost make the game unplayable for solos for killers to have fair matches against SWF. Now, that's an assumption using this same pattern and the same way of thinking that the devs/anti-killer survivors have been using for years. I'd instead suggest to simply nerf SWF, to a point where there'll be no more "But what about solos?!" It's a stone wall discussion, currently, until they're nerfed.

Aaaanndd you lost me, because you're citing that absolute sham of a Skull Merchant match. Given the same information, we've drawn dramatically different conclusions from that match, similar to how we disagree on other points. It's no small rumor that the comp scene, while definitely competitive, is likely less sweaty than your average top MMR match. Survivor stuff is banned, certain maps are banned, and so is some killer stuff. Top MMR matches operate without those restrictions. But you see the same thing, of killers always just camping/tunneling 1 out til dead, and maybe settling for a draw after, even as Nurse/Blight, because the survivors do the gens too fast. Looking at matches like that on ladder, I find it impossible that "the best team in the world" was held by Skull Merchant alone for that length of time. Here's what I noticed. They're facing an M1 killer (inherently weak) whose obvious best strategy would be to 3-gen using drones, as any other way would be a death sentence. They know this (or maybe they don't, because:) and yet they, rather than doing what every half-competent survivor team knows to do by default on Azarov's (although this is a different, albeit easier map) which is to 99' a far gen until they've broken the 3-gen, decided to play directly into 3-genning themselves. Against Skull Merchant. 🤦‍♀️ That alone disqualified them from their bogus title/reputation. And then they proceeded to, with 4 survivors still alive, not break the 3-gen, and in fact have people hooked and even downed, with no significant gen progress in exchange. At around the 16-minute and 23-minute marks, per Hens' timer on his video, I had my suspicions confirmed. Barely any rushing, let alone touching, of the gens. Dropped every pallet on the 3-gen side, and no gen progress in exchange. People just running back to gens, or standing around with a flashlight, instead of being on them. They just keep standing around, like ye old rank 20s. And they still beat her, after making every conceivable misplay and inefficiency possible (until they decided to turn their brains on)! So if anything, it shows survivors are advantaged, not killer.

The zombies are more braindead than I am.

I do not care about the other points but whenever I see that SWF excuse am going to always comment on anything swf. Seriously stop the scape goating, swfs are suffering as much as solo q , can you yall stop thinking coms=free wins. Do you ever think that possibly too all 4 persons in a swf =are new people who just got the game? Reality check both swf and solo q is doing the same role=survivor. SWFS groups are broken up and people move on to other games because swfs too are tired of every good survivor perk and mechanics gutted.

One of the saddest things is there were times where several killers were in a pretty decent spot, and were on their way to viability. They just needed 1 or 2 more buffs. Take pre-nerf Wraith, the best example I can give. I don't need to go too much into it, but he's got a boatload of counterplay, from baiting pallet drops, to rapid vaulting windows, to holding W to the next loop when he slows himself down or tries to body block. And yet, he used to feel pretty good. That speed boost/long lunge was awesome, and was basically anti-loop, even though it technically wasn't. But, and I know you won't like this example, if Tru3 (competitive DBD streamer) could face Oracle (some top team or something) for 5 rounds as Wraith (his best killer at the time), using different add-ons/perks each time, and struggled to get even 1 down vs a coordinated team (because of body blocks and pre-dropping), what does that say about the killer's strength? He doesn't have enough. He needed better base cloaked speed, faster uncloak speed (or less slowdown when uncloaking), something. But instead, the devs nerfed him. They nerfed him! 🤣 And there's several killers who were in his position, and still got nerfed, some that same patch. Deathslinger, Twins, Nemesis, Pinhead. And for what? Because survivors lost to them, after allowing themselves to be hit by their powers over and over, and get downed over and over, in exchange for no added gen pressure? The types of killer nerfs we've seen completely destroy these killers at high level, and make them more bullyable by SWF. But clueless solos will still lose to them, and so further down the road, they're just gonna get nerfed again! It's really ridiculous. I've never seen devs have a game so close to something beautiful, and then just disfigure it to cater to casuals. In a competitive online game! They just view it as competitive when it's in the survivors' favor.

I repeat confirmation bias because it’s what you keep doing by misinterpreting what im saying. I’m simply pointing out what’s happening as I don’t want my words misconstrued into something I haven't said. Majority is not an accurate measure of accuracy either. We can go into statistics on average reading comprehension levels in the world to back my reasoning for this if you want to but it essentially dismisses a “majority interpretation” argument for really most things in life in general. Idk why you’re so aggressive towards me in all our communication. We can have normal conversations on here about things we disagree on without being so passive aggressive and condescending. I’m trying to keep things civil and I haven’t been rude to you even though you’ve made countless jabs at me.

Also the devs have not confirmed they balance around swf, that is a false statement.

you would agree that his S tier placement (at the time), the way the nerf was done, and especially his nerfed Dream Pallet count, was uncalled for, right?

Absolutely.

As someone who mained him throughout the entire "Forever Freddy" era, I don't think he had the same level of strength Nurse and old Spirit had. And the nerf to the Dream Pallets, when they were never good to begin with, was pretty terrible.

However, I don't think he was healthy for the game either. For a variety of reasons that have already been discussed extensively here in the Forums, and especially due to the impact it had for people who played him before the rework. I wanted Freddy to change, yes, but I don't like the way he was changed.

I am not happy with current Freddy. Not at all.

Don't know what other perks were used, but they were most definitely negligible

Dying Light and Thanatophobia, if the Freddy player was going for max slowdown.