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A Weird Problem With DbD...Or Am I Crazy?
I just realized something. Bear with me, I'm going somewhere with this one.
When I play killer, the pattern with matchups has, for the last while been something like:
Survior 1: 10k hours. Absolute beast. I cannot catch them unless I force an engagement somewhere weak.
Survivor 2: 1-3k hours. Intermediate player. I can catch them but I have to work for it.
Survivors 3 and 4: 300-500 hours a piece. Low intermediate. I generally roll over them.
So we have 1 survivor that outclasses me and has about triple my hours. 1 who is about right. 2 who struggle.
Now this isn't the SBMM rant you expect - it's more…I can't think of many games where, at 500 hours played, I'd still consider myself a near beginner. Not even games like Starcraft 2 or League.
What is it about DbD that makes it like this, where the learning curve is a vertical wall and the skill floor is sky high?
Is there some way to make it a little more accessible?
Comments
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A part of me feels like the under explained mechanics are in a tangential way intentionally part of the horror of the game. Not the horror of not knowing how to play and getting killed. But the horror of the intrigue and mystery of anything can happen in the trials, where every little discovery is deserved and contributes to a library of Survival/Killing knowledge.
I’m probably wrong but idk this is how I’ve always seen it. 🤷🏻♀️
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Part of it is that you can't carry over many skills you learn from other games. You could be incredibly good at FPS games but that wouldn't translate into you being an amazing survivor / killer (maybe it would help a bit with Huntress, Trickster and Deathslinger but you get the point).
We also have a lot of different things that you need to learn by now. Douzens and douzens of maps and killers, hundreds of perks and perk combinations, like a thousand addons etc. that make a big difference. When you want to learn how to play the game as a survivor, then you need to play a few hours against each killer to figure out what does and doesn't work against them. Some things apply to other killers as well but generally speaking they are all distinct enough that you need to adjust. As a killer that can be easier because you can focus on learning the killer that you play instead of the other ones.
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There are 40 killers in the game. You can hardly learn how to play against so many different killers, especially when the game doesn't have a practice mode.
Some killers have powers that don't even fit the description box anymore. Some, like Dracula, have 3 powers at once.
Imo attempting to learn survivor in 2024 is like trying to learn 40 languages at the same time
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This game has little transferable skills to and from other games and even between Killers. The game has also been out for a long time.
It’s more noticeable when you play as Survivor compared to Killer imo. There are 38 Killer powers plus their add ons you need to learn how to play against. That’s just a lot of info plus maps (gens, bones, loops)
Also, 500 hours on Nurse vs 500 on Pig is completely different and the same goes for 500 hours on Survivor. 500 hours on Nurse /= good Survivor player or make you good at 115 Killers.
If they wanted to make the game more accessible they could start with stricter matchmaking so people aren’t fed to wolves, stop making heavily sided maps and stop using perks as bandaids for game design flaws (anti tunnel and slug, Killer slowdown)1 -
The game is really unforgiving to new players on both sides, and BHVR doesnt do enough for the casual playerbase to make the game more accessible.
There is way too many perks and mechanics which make the game abysmal for people. If you can't even make mistakes in a match how on earth are you supposed to learn from them4 -
Because DBD is not a "skill based" game it is a knowledge based game. The person with the most knowledge likely wins the game. And because of the fact that we have hundreds of perks, 38 killers with 20 different addons (some that completely change their power making them almost a new killer), 20 realms with 59 different maps, RNG map generation on many of them making learning how maps are generated matter, it takes thousands of hours to understand all that.
If i'm an FPS player, playing call of duty and have 500 hours, i can probably still click heads about as well as someone with 8000 hours and have things come up closer to even because knowledge isn't as important in those types of games and clicking heads in one game isn't much different than clicking heads in another game. And in DBD very few of the "skills" you use carry over from other games.
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Eh…I think most M1 killers are analogous. For instance, Trapper, Pig and Myers - while they have different mechanics - are very similar.
Hag, Huntress and especially Nurse are so different that they are their own thing. I know I cannot play Nurse much because I start unlearning how to play everyone else.
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There's a few reasons I'd say it takes a lot more hours to get good in this game than in others.
- Skill generally doesn't transfer from other games, especially on survivor. Aimlabs-esque training can help with some killers, but for the most part DBD gameplay is quite unique and I've yet to see any other games where the skill transfers over. The AT&T annihilator cup demonstrates this really well iirc. They pitted video game streamers in different games, including DBD, and despite having talent like shroud playing, none of them were that familiar with the game, iirc, and they all played somewhat poorly.
- There's an ever-increasing amount of content to learn in this game. New perks are constantly being released, things are being reworked, new killers come out. You have to keep track of all of this in order to not make mistakes, on top of learning the maps as new ones are introduced and old ones get reworked.
- Hours are inflated by time spent in lobby/not in a match.
There are probably other factors but I think these are the top 3.
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In my eyes, it mainly comes from the fact that the game simply wasn't intended to be what it is.
What most people consider the core gameplay loop to be, well, looping, and that wasn't even intended by the developers, as they expected most players to simply run as far from the killer as possible and initially designed pallets as stop gaps of a sort for that.
The competitive aspect of this game was clearly unintended considering how little regard for balance there was in first few years of the game.
Even if you look at the live service aspect of the game, that wasn't even intended either. The devs simply started polishing off cutting room floor content they had after completing the base game, and eventually started incorporating licenced collaborations after the Halloween chapter proved popular. It wasn't until Clown I believe that the devs started working on fully original chapters with the idea of keeping the game around as their main dev project, although I could have that a little mixed up, I remember distinctly BHVR got full rights for the game from Starbreeze around then.
Overall, from the format of the game to its mechanics, there really isn't a single piece of media that's been so drastically and continuously iterated on as DBD has. Naturally, it isn't all sunshine and rainbows, but one does have to respect how far we've come from those three og killers back in 2016, even further considering I still remember being engrossed by some Beta or Alpha build where there was only Trapper and you couldn't kick generators. DBD is the kind of game where some of the people playing it have learned every potential nuance and tech that could possibly have been learned, so there's naturally all manner of people still struggling to climb up the mountain that is this games design.
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There is too much to learn in this game and it gets worse with every update. It's also the reason why windows is so popular. Normal players learning the constantly expanding number of maps is impossible. Behavior makes the learning curve worse by having so much RNG in their maps. One game a pallet might spawn and another game it might not. It takes a long time to remember all of the maps, variants, and RNG pallets/windows. This is in addition to learning the massive amount of killers and the proper counterplay for all of them. A great start to making the game easier to learn is to delete map variants and RNG spawns.
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Two points: SWF, and the fact that BHVR prioritizes queue times over balanced matches. In my opinion, if a killer goes against SWF, the MMR should prioritize the level of the highest survivor player. If one survivor is a high MMR player, then the system should take into account the killer player that is in the same bracket
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I still think making a ranked and unranked queue would some what solve this issue.
More casual players would just stay in quickplay, and before you say anything yes, Im aware that there would be some people who just play casual and still try hard, but this is the case for every single competitive title out there and its not a major issue.
Ranked it self could have a bit longer queue times to make sure everyone is similar in rank. I know this may seem like the game would be made more competitive with this, but if I'm being honest the game has already reached that point. Might as well just give the more competitive players a place to really test their skills.1 -
I think that a huge issue of this is lobby dodging..
From my experience, if I load into a lobby where I find 4 Survivors already ready .. This can co two ways.. Either I get stomped, or they do..
If I load into a lobby first and then the Survivors start to load in.. And no one leaves.. Those are great games.. Those feel like they were meant to happen (a few exceptions of course happen.. but rare in my experience)
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It's basically learn as you go. There's not really any proper tutorial. I think BHVR rely on content creators for that (which comes with a whole host of other problems I don't need to list). Alot of people also only play casually, so someone who has 500 hours spread over a year likely won't be at the same level as someone who has 500 hours spread over, say, 6 months. I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels a bit rusty when I have gaps between my play periods. Add to the fact that we get new killers to learn to play as or against and new maps to learn to navigate quite frequently, and those who only play casually can take a long time to comfortably adjust.
Not sure how they could make it more accessible. Better matchmaking would be a start but we know that's easier said than done.
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I wish they'd get rid of the lobby entirely. It adds nothing to the game and is only used to shop for lobbies. I feel like I have 1-2 minutes of my time wasted every time I want to play a match just from people on both sides dodging. It's one of those things that adds up.
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Agreed.. I'd be so happy if I click to queue up.. Wait a while.. See the symbol turn red - have a five second countdown and find myself in the offering screen.
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This. It's not a game that requires or reflects standard gaming "skill", and other than rudimentary ability to operate M+K/controller, almost none of one's previous gaming experience translates into it in any meaningful way.
What it demands is that you learn all of its intricacies and idiosyncrasies, which are unique to DBD. And since the game is constantly changing and expanding, that requires a massive investment of time, and that learning/adapting never really ends. Plus I think most people are used to games with clear parameters, but DBD lacks those.
I think even at 1-1.5K hours people are still essentially beginners.
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I remember this from Starcraft 2.
People weren't just sweating, they were smurfing like crazy for 'more relaxed games when not pushing ranks'. It was almost impossible to get matched against actual bronze-gold players some nights because new players were quitting after getting smoked by a Masters level player who was also absolute poison in chat because smurf.
It nearly killed the game.
So Blizzard added unranked and ranked modes, so the people wanting more chill games could go to unranked without worrying about losing points.
Guess what happened?
People just deranked the hell out of their unranked side while now being able to keep their rank intact. It was so much worse, as now you also had a split playerbase. Weirdly, the only way to get a chill game was to play Silver or so on ranked. Bronze-Gold on Unranked was wall to wall Diamond+ profiles.
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I am not even that good and i see this too. im something like 1.5k hours i think and i see this. I will always get one rly good hard to catch survivor i gotta ignore, one or two okay ones, then one or two rly bad ones. thats if I dont get a full on swf and they are all rly good. i rarely get a team of all rly bad survivor though.
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As long as unrestricted SWF lobbies exist, SBMM will never truly exist
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For my own curiosity, how often do you get those 'Full on SWF'? Trying to keep records of these things from anyone who states it so I get an idea of their perspective. Ty!
I agree. As it were, even if the landscape was ripe for a good, solid SBMM to be set up, I do not personally believe it can be done with the current team at Bhvr interactive.
I wish the demonizing of one side or another would be aimed where it actually should be, and its not the players.
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