Why people are acting like this game survivor-sided while killers wins majority of games?

It's either pure corporate-speak or they just straight up lied. Because Mandy confirmed on Tofu's thing that the changes were, as others had assumed, to break SM until the rework 

Wasn't Mandy's statement in text form and done to someone she has a connection with? I know people at the time said she was joking around with him about it.

I didn't see the stream or know anyone involved, but I'd take a statement on the official channel from the design team as the overarching one. Also they walked back some of the extent of the nerfs they had on the PTB, if the intention was just gut with nothing else they could have left SM in the original PTB state. It's clear that Skull Merchant was a problem: her high kill rate, survivor dislike of her, take your pick - they all get to the same short term outcome.

Thats a kinda silly determination. Companies like capcom and sony weren't involved in the evolution world championships until over a decade after they were founded, and they had players traveling from around the world to compete. Competition doesn't need to be sanctioned by the product's creator in order for it to be legitimate, coming from someone who used to run tournaments for multiple genres of games. The main thing that makes a competitive scene is player participation and agreed upon terms of competition (rules.) Spectators and even prizes aren't even necessary as long as you have those first two.

I have mixed opinions about DBD's comp scene, but thats a pretty bad stance.

It's not silly at all. EVO is a bit of an apples to oranges example for you to give, because it's more akin to a giant convention for all fighting games, which is funded by ticket sales for all games (more people would go to watch street fighter 6 over street fighter 3, yet street fighter 3 is allowed to be there), vendors, and sponsorships. That is completely different than ONE game's esports scene like LCS for League, OWL for Overwatch, or Dota2's esports league; which all have lesser avenues to fund tournaments via the community and would thus need the support from the developer or publisher.

I'll go another step further: what makes it competitive versus a normal match? Why compete if you aren't in it to win a prize? Every game in the past 2 decades that has introduced a ladder or rank mode to it has invariably created its own esports scene. These games have given out prize money, in game cosmetics, and other items for winning. By your own definition, the game as it stands for normal matches is "comp" because in order to play 1) there needs to be players, and 2) they agree upon the rules aka the game as it is with everything in it. If I said this, I'd be met with "no it's not comp." Well why? Because unhooking on first hook wasn't banned? Because Shoulder the Burden wasn't banned from the match? Because made up "balance" rules weren't thrust into the tournament for people to agree upon? No, it's because nobody is winning anything.

I don't know what tournaments you used to run, and I am skeptical in just taking your word for it, but I guarantee there was some sort of prize involved. If all that's being offered is a $5 dollar gift card as a prize, that's hardly something that would be considered a comp tournament. It's just a custom game between people that agree to be there at that point.

Thats what it is now. Thats not what it was when it was Battle for the Bay, nor is it what more than 20 years of its history was. It wasn't even bought by sony until like 2020, and it started in 1996. The biggest draw of it for years was being able to play top players from around the world. It also started as just Street Fighter (as do many competitive scenes) and grew into more games and multiple main stage grand finals over the years. It was a very long time until any corporate entity even contributed a penny to it.

You're also forcing a massive false equivalence, because the game uses random matchmaking in its "normal" mode, yet custom games have always existed (even as Kill Your Friends.) There has nearly always been the ability to fine tune the rules of the game and remove most of the random elements, something that competitive scenes for games like Smash Brothers have also been doing since the N64 days. Which means, again, agreed upon rulesets. These are not the same as the casual unfettered random elements, which are allowed to be enabled or disabled to a similar degree as Customs in DBD.

I have also said that I have mixed opinions of DBD's comp scene. I have no love or ire for it, was simply pointing out your conditions for what makes gameplay be "valid" competitive contests were flawed.

As for my tournaments, no, many of them had zero prize. They were just events for people to improve by playing other players who also wanted to improve. The experience was worth more than the prize most of the time (even when there was one,) and a lot of us (myself included) gained more through our losses than through wins. Thats a completely different mindset than your average DBD player has, which is maybe where your hangup originates.

Edit: also in case you aren't familiar with how the qualifiers worked, many other smaller tournaments would get added to a qualifier system for each game, determining eligibility/seeding/travel funding/etc with these conditions growing as the tournament series did. Its very similar to how most sports use qualifiers leading up to their end season championships, and this didn't really have any corporate sponsorship (unless I missed some earlier contributions, havent read up on the behind the scenes history in a while) until post Street Fighter 4. In fact 5 was the one that really put Capcom's back into it.

So your comp SWF comments have already been touched on, you dont interact with them common enough for it to be this huge overlying reactionary force the person I was responding to makes it out to be. You see them once in like 12 matches. Its a joke when I hear this because it doesnt happen often.

Comp SWF is broken, I dont think anyone has any issue with that.

But we dont need to stack broken ontop of broken. That just equals more broken. And we definetely dont need to be like "well what if comp SWF does this in my 4 matches across 2 weeks, maybe Ill start playing like a POS in every match"


Sorry it just doesnt happen at any high rate. And it doesnt happen at all in matches to have tunneling or slugging to even happen. Just play survivor … at all to know this fact.

And in terms of what you say about the majority of the player base, these "changes" makes it just unfair and a waste of time for survivor players.

To start:

1. Take back this stupid free mori crap developer decision that even got put into the game let alone thought of. You literally load up survivor to have your time wasted. That is whats happening.
   
   Slugging was only made worse with this idiotic decision.

2. Tunneling will take time but they have had 5+ years to fix this issue and never landed on anything. Perks are not the answers.

Start removing things like unhook notifications, maybe make the 2v8 mechanic for hooking until endgame… Anything would be better than the time wasting crap you have now.

Anti-tunnel perks dont even do the one thing they are designed to do, and last I checked:

I dont have to take perks to tunnel, why do I have to load my survivor character out with perks I dont want to use but when I load up killer, I can just use whatever I want? Wheres the agency? Wheres the balance?

We all just have to take DH/DS/OTR/Shoulder every single match? Thats DBD survivor gameloop? And still get tunneled anyways since these just delay and not solve tunneling?

ON TOP OF all these map reworks that have…. completely made survivor hilarious. All the windows users have to be like… "where is a single window or pallet for 1/4th- 1/3rd of the map?"

Yeah, SBMM essentially being nonexistent is obviously a massive factor. Almost every match has at least one inexperienced player in it, often more, even when you have 10K hour players in the same lobby. If these extreme winstreakers were facing four survs of similar experience to theirs every game, they probably couldn't get to 50, much less 1K.

But of course that will never happen, because to match five players at the highest level every match would make the queue times not just long, but borderline eternal. And obviously there's an in-between that level of SBMM and where we are now that would have longer but manageable queue times, but as you say, the vast majority of the player base are casual players who won't tolerate longer queue times.

For me, the whole issue circles back to one inescapable fact (though many won't accept it): the game wasn't conceived or built to be competitive, and the majority of players aren't looking for a comp experience and therefore won't waste their time waiting in long queue times for the sake of balance. The just want to hop in and get a few quick casual games in.

You drive those people away, DBD dies, and probably BHVR with it, so I don't think we're going to see them risk it.

Many have floated the idea of a dedicated ranked queue, but we've seen (and are seeing right now with the separate event queue) that a lot of the sweatiest players will play in the casual queues because in the end, their fear of losing is greater than their competitive spirit. And I think that's the appeal of DBD to some of these people; it's a game where do don't actually have to be good to win, you just have to learn and exploit its design flaws.

And none of that is is even touching on the longstanding issue of what criteria is even best used to determine MMR in first place.

So yeah, it's a conundrum.

In an ideal world full of rational people the solution would be for people to stop taking this silly mess of a game so seriously, but we don't live there.

I never said that no restriction wasn't a ruleset, and I'm not sure what you're going for with that. I said

The main thing that makes a competitive scene is player participation and agreed upon terms of competition (rules.) Spectators and even prizes aren't even necessary as long as you have those first two.

Note the wording, there are other optional factors as well. I didn't say that having those two elements automatically makes a game's competitive scene, just that they are necessary for it. I thought mentioning other common aspects of competitive scenes would drive that point home, but you seem to have attacked it for some reason. I'll just chalk it up to misunderstanding my point.

Smash brothers isn't the only competitive game.

thats… not even remotely implied by anything I said? I was using it as a relevant example due to its casual+random vs competitive+structured dichotomy. Ironically Nintendo flat out hated the competitive scene for the Smash Bros series, there were even mechanics put into brawl to try to discourage its growth. And yet it was just as competitive as ever, even though there were people who stuck with the older games (mainly Melee) and grew with its later entries (and even got Nintendo to come around a bit concerning its competitive scene.)

Another great example is DBZF. It seemed like Namco Bandai was straight up trying to murder its competitive scene for a multitude of reasons, but it existed and persisted just the same. Remember, the main point that was being responded to was your strange restrictions for what is "allowed" to be a competitive scene for a game, like sponsorship and/or endorsement by the game's creators. If your argument is that these games are not competitive because they don't follow Esports structure like MOBAS and Modern FPS (note, NOT older FPS like Quake or UT,) then don't even bother responding please.

If your tournaments offered no prize or are not recognized by anyone, they are essentially glorified practice sessions in custom games.

I played Bala, one of the best KoF fighters in the world, for absolutely zero reward and lost terribly. I still gained more from that set than probably a year's worth of matches. You call it a "glorified practice session," yet I got more out of that than I would have winning a grand prize at some overproduced spectacle vs lesser players. Some people don't play competitive games specifically for their prizes, growing as a player is worth more than money sometimes, and is no less valid. People literally enter pools, knowing full well they stand no chance, just to be able to get to play the world's best players.

also lastly, I never implied you need to be involved in comp scenes to want to improve. I said that the average DBD player does not share that mindset. Not only are the two not mutually exclusive, but your response solidifies my point: You focus entirely on some form of monetary compensation as the most important factor, which is not the only inspiration to compete. For some its barely even a secondary one.

You just defined what a player versus player game is. Congratulations!

That is exactly my point. You can have a comp scene for Beetle Goddamn Adventure Racing on the Nintendo 64. It doesn't require any of what you keep trying to claim is mandatory for such a scene to exist. I've been trying to emphasize this for you, and even conveying that you don't seem to understand that point, which you're then trying to condescendingly mimic.

Show me the records from all the DBZF "comp" matches. Show me all the records from early days Smash Bros Melee "comp" matches and tournaments. They don't exist.

Yeah, you're refusing to understand and seem to think that if it doesn't have some kind of MLG or ESports presence, it can't have a competitive scene. Street Fighter, in its many forms, didn't have a "comp" scene until it was on one of the ESPNs. Smash Bros, throughout almost all of its iterations, never had any form of competitive scene anywhere ever. People didn't travel the world to play these games competitively for decades, no sir.

You assuming that my main point was monetary compensation as the most important factor solidifies the fact that you are misunderstanding my point.

You forget that you also claim, as recently as this very post, that

My main point was if the game isn't officially supported by the developer or publisher, it essentially doesn't exist.

And my response has been that this is absurdly wrong, and these prerequisites are entirely made up by you. Completely pointless discussion, as you apparently don't understand what a competitive scene actually is, and try to pigeon hole an entire aspect of gaming competition to fit your extremely small definition, damn entire decades of history that existed before MOBAs were even a new custom game type in the original Dota. Get the last word if you want, I checked out a while ago.

Watch literally anything about the growth of Evo.

I would appreciate a certain level of intellectual honesty when discussing topics if you please.

Stop projecting. In fact, stop pinging me altogether, thanks.

And yet instead you literally called a video that spells out everything you refuse to acknowledge as a straw man, when that doesn't even make sense (not that you watched it.) I'm sure you want to "agree to disagree."