Is 3-gen strat back in the game?

I must have, because that post of mine is already much-abbreviated and doesn't go into much of any depth regarding much of anything. There's books to be written about my grievances with this game and its development!

Truly though, I haven't even mentioned huge issues like the matchmaking system, hitreg system, event design and upper-end balance approach yet, to name a few. Plenty of "pain points" left unaddressed. Them planning to tackle the balancing around camping, tunnelling and slugging is promising though, however cautiously.

I’m not trying to be funny, if you haven’t read it I highly recommend it. It’s fantastic. It’s only like 98 pages or something. It’s a short read but it goes into different mindsets ,fallacies, and problem solving.There’s a difference between pointing out pain points and offering constructive feedback that they can work with to help them better understand grievances.

I won't say I'm surprised that their implementation of the "surrender" feature lacked forethought, although it is still pretty crazy and disheartening just the extent of, well, incompetence that went into this.

This is kind of where I'm at. When the surrender system was announced there were plenty of people who had questions about what specifically it meant, how many variations will be there, and what term should be used. There seemed to be plentiful feedback about the issue at really basic things like wording and none of it seemed to have been taken.

More generally speaking, I'm really not feeling the "substantial quality of life initiative" much at all yet. The most tangible improvement have been the search bar changes, but only because their initial implementation was clunky as hell. It has been more than two months since their announcement of "operation health", and we've had little tangible improvements to the experience of DbD. 

It's funny that BHVR said for a long time an operation health wouldn't really have much of an impact because of how their teams are divided, kind of crazy that it came out to be true. But as you mention, they do have a few months left.

Just look at the fact that the bulk BP spending feature - something that really should have been here long ago already and that should be fairly simple to implement one would think - hasn't been introduced yet,

I do try my best to resist the knee jerk reaction to blame the developers for a profession I'm not involved in, but there is definitely a gut feeling that they slow roll these simple changes for the live service purpose to keep players invested.

The plot twist thing affects solo q survivors too though.

If a 3-SWF thinks the solo q teammate “isn’t good enough”, and loses a chase too early, then the 3-SWF can all plot twist, abandon without penalty, and the solo q survivor is punished.

I'll make a note to read it in my reading list! It's a little funny still though to suggest - and much less in that way - someone should do less complaining about solutions and more constructing their own, when the topic is a company doing their job. It's not my job to come up with working solutions, and seeing as how they've embarked on this "quality of life initiative", they should be expected to already have identified and understood these grievances and thought at length and depth about possible solutions to them that improve the experience. I just think much of that is rather lacking.

I'll also note that I have in fact provided countless suggestions for solutions to various of grievances both personal and general with this game throughout the years. Some of it has been acknowledged in some way, a little of it even made it into the game (in some form or another, be it due to me directly or indirectly or not at all due to me), most of it is thrown into the ether for naught. And that includes very simple solutions to obvious issues like having the hatch close itself automatically after two minutes or so, as currently both the killer and survivors can camp the hatch and create undesirable game experiences doing so.

While I acknowledge that things obviously aren't as easy to implement in a piece of software (and even less so one that spans platforms and is a global live service product) as they are to describe in plain text, not only is that also their job (and they have hundreds of people working on the game supposedly some 8 hours 5 days a week), but again there's incredibly simple things that any coder or software dev will tell you would be trivial to implement that can take many months or years to come about in some - and even then often less-than-ideal or rudimentary - form in this game, or haven't been introduced at all. Or simple perk improvements that would just be changing numbers within existing code. And on.

BHVR is obviously doing a lot of things correctly since the game is still going, and I won't pretend or delude myself into thinking all of my suggestions be they proposed somewhere or in my head are perfectly reasonable and would improve the game at a net benefit. Nor am I oblivious to the simple facts of logistics and economics within a company that can complicate these things quite a bit. Although even with that in mind it is still pretty crazy to me how little happens in this game, and how glaring some of its unaddressed issues are. Players VPNing across the world because they benefit from having high ping as killer? And their opponents do not get warned of this? Winning 2000 matches in a row? Only a few dozens of hundreds of perks seeing regular use, of which a huge chunk is 8+ years old? Just for a small selection of glaring flaws that would be pretty crazy to think of in other games comparably as popular as DbD, with a comparably-sized team working on them.

And that's not even going into things that could improve the game from its current state beyond just fixing glaring flaws. The rift (deep rift, BP, very exciting), mountains of charms that nobody uses (and if they do it may reveal their position since charms get bugged and hover above them or clip through lockers and other textures), tons of lore dumps only the fewest of people engage with (at the very least, you know, tying it into the actual gameplay would make people more interested in it), no new items being introduced and existing items only being nerfed instead of improved even though they are basically the survivor equivalent to killer powers and could make for more diverse and exciting gameplay, limitless lobby dodging being a thing, the dated solo experience (I don't personally mind this too much beyond the matchmaking issues and a few others, although it is BHVR that years ago have claimed to want to bridge the SWF and solo gap, with an emphasis on information, and yet things such as the AFC meter being shown to everyone are not in the game, for just one glaring example of how lacking their progress on this goal of theirs has been), quite some regions lacking servers, the same old black loading screen when it could be made much more interesting, same old lobbies, no minigames or anything to do really during queue time apart from the mindnumbing spending of points (also something they've years ago said they were looking to do), no ability to go into a custom match alone (as survivor) just to experiment and try stuff, more compelling event gameplay and modifiers instead of rehashing the same few ones without even tangibly improving on them and bringing more ambitious gameplay changes within them. And much more.

Some sort of system to turn useless items, add-ons and offerings into something else? Hell, community workshop integration and the universe of content that would entail. What about the entire competitive sphere of the game, by the way. They not just refuse to do the bare minimum and improve the spectating feature, they don't even make sure not to introduce spectator bugs every other patch and take ages to fix them. That's a far cry from things such as implementing ways for tournament organizers to create balance rules, map seeds, let alone innate means of structuring a tournament, with point systems and side switches and peer-to-peer connection and whatnot.

There's no end to improvable things I could be and have for years been talking about, and while there have been tangible improvements and good changes that were surprising to me (and at times even things I believe I effected or at least affected in some shape or form), I will still never understand how little happens in this game and what BHVR's approach or "philosophy" is regarding many of these grievances or opportunities to improve the game. Or what their internal logistics could really be like to lead to this state where they, I don't know, for instance can barely muster to touch two handfuls of perks per year, then most of the time still not getting them to crack the 1% usage mark either.

…But there's also seemingly no end to my interest in this game, at least to the extent I'm playing and engaging with it now, and while I can talk at length about grievances or things that could be improved, ultimately I don't actually "grieve" over this game nor do I need tangible improvements to keep playing. It's a game I like, it has an incredibly compelling and addicting base game loop and basic gameplay mechanics, and anything good that happens is a net positive, with the bad stuff not taking anything away because in the end it's still a game I play for fun. And most of my posts are not complaints, mostly just idle discussion, often even about the game as it is being played and less so its development.

With the surrender system it's most mindboggling to me that they thought to "solve" this obscure issue (I have legitimately never faced an entire group deiberately just trying to hide as long as possible) and not something like the infinitely more pressing and prevalent 2v1 issue with its "excessive hiding" and "excessive slugging". Bringing back "excessive defending" of gens in the process is hilarious. But yeah, plenty of headscratchers at a basic level too.

It's funny that BHVR said for a long time an operation health wouldn't really have much of an impact because of how their teams are divided, kind of crazy that it came out to be true.

I don't even remember their responses to requests for an "operation health" throughout the years, although I'm sure some of it was also just outward-pointing talk to appease people. What really is causing them to for instance take more than two months to implement the bulk spending feature after they announced it beats me. Sure people always say they have various teams working on various things, but I mean, there's only so much (or rather so little) happening in DbD, what are the hundreds of people doing on a daily, 8-hour basis?

I do try my best to resist the knee jerk reaction to blame the developers for a profession I'm not involved in, but there is definitely a gut feeling that they slow roll these simple changes for the live service purpose to keep players invested.

My gut feeling is more so that they aren't incredibly well-managed, and the apparently pretty massive layoffs they've had happen not too long ago might be suggesting something similar. In either case, there's a lot of things they could be doing but aren't (or taking a perplexingly long time to do) that I can't see promote player investment, on the contrary that I believe would drive player investment and excitement a lot if they were to happen. Although of course, as you rightly say, for a company there's always quite a few more considerations (and calculations) attached to those things. For instance, them not revamping the hit reg system (despite having claimed to want to more than once) could be both a "this is the time and money and effort it'll cost us to do this and what - concretely, in numbers, revenue - is even the potential upside?" thing as well as a "let sleeping dogs lie" thing of the game having been as successful as it has with the unfair hit reg system in it, so it may seem best not to stir the pot too much on this for a non-obvious return on investment, particularly insofar this would be hitting the hornets' nest of killers actually getting punished for their latency as well, hits not connecting when on their screen it looks like they should have, and the sheer outrage that would cause.

I actually think a lot of things that they do (or rather: don't do) are informed or "motivated" by this same mindset. They don't actually know what makes DbD so exceptionally successful and popular, much as opposed to most (or all?) of their other in-house projects. They very much stumbled into its core success formula and I think a lot of what they're (not) doing is in service of maintaining this "fluke" of a magic cashcow. I mean, they have literally tried to replicate its success formula in a shooter format themselves, and failed miserably (how good Deathgarden may have been as a game notwithstanding, it flopped hard). So yeah, I think what also plays into their development decisions and the lack of really ambitious and compelling, fundamental changes is that they're scared as hell of losing whatever emergent magic quality it is that makes DbD work commercially. So they'd rather miss out on possible improvements than risk ruining its opaque success formula in trying to improve on it.

Of course, they will understand some of the formula, better than me or most of anyone, stuff about licenses and the basic gameplay loop and whatnot, but if they actually knew precisely what makes it tick they wouldn't have failed with their other projects after DbD that they very much hoped would become if not as successful as it, at least not die within mere months.

I'll conclude on noting that part of what appeals to me about DbD funnily enough is the relative incompetence of its dev team. It has its charm, it's sympathetic. You don't have to be afraid they'll go off and change everything or do some misguidedly ambitious modernizing or whatnot that other games may, at a fundamental level barely anything has changed about DbD since 2016. It feels familiar and homely in that way, and the silliness of some of its aspects (e. g. its look, best described as "grim-dark Scooby-Doo" with its cartoonish and campy feel) as well as even the hilarity of the regular bugs and misdesigns are part of its charm. Even the frustrations that come with that, driving player investment too, including stuff like making people like me yap incessantly about them online.

The game could be much more than it is, there's stuff other studios do that seems like a different world from what is happening in DbD. But it doesn't have to be, I like it like this (and so do many others) and seeing MCote on another anniversary stream saying many of the same things without the game really having changed much nor being in any prospect of changing much, well, it's comfortable, like a yearly tradition, the entire thing feels a bit more like family, "our" little at-times-dysfunctional game.

You make a lot of great points, it is far too long for your average forum reader, I appreciate the time you spent to explain yourself.

witch is a good thing because there a chance that the game turns around and can turn into a win when chess merchant was broken and the tournament top surv players played against the top skull merchant back in the day if that feature was implemented the 4 stack of tourney surv would have lost it took them around 51 mins + to win that game and it took them everything no surrender feature should even give you a free win just because you delay the game that mechanic of time pressure already exist as the 1h timer no side should get a free win by surrendering and one last thing when i play the game on ether side i know at the worst case scenario the game will last 1 hour most ppl can't even cope with the fact that the game can last that long and just want to "go next i won" and the surrender option giving that show this is a huge crutch and some ppl are willing to use it even tough the match is not decided until at least 3 ppl are dead

Yes, it has exploded in popularity due to certain content creators for this game introducing it to the public.

I can't say for sure if this update is actually happening, but I stumbled across someone on social media speculating about Sadako Yamamura's TVs being placed near generators in Dead by Daylight. If that turns out to be true, it could seriously shake up gameplay. While some might argue there's a counter due to the time it takes Sadako to emerge from a TV, there's no denying that this setup could fuel some sweaty, nerve-wracking 3-gen situations.

With how often survivors abandon or DC at the drop of a hat or abandon as soon as they get their last hook because they don't want to wait for the sacrifice animation or the last survivor is downed and they DC because they don't want to wait for the Mori animation, nearly every match I have would be a net zero.

'If its not broke, don't fix it'

I'd argue it goes a little beyond that "never change a running system" adage, since the "system" could be improved to run better, and there are things about it that are debatably "broken" and could stand to be fixed. Although with regards to its commercial performance strictly, yeah, I think BHVR is more afraid of breaking something somehow than they are of the prospect that DbD will not grow to be an even bigger success. It seems they are mostly content with where the game is at now and the level its been kept at over the years, or again at least more afraid of substantially harming its standing than interested in trying to substantially lift it.

Maybe they've simply concluded that a game within this niche never really can be much bigger than DbD currently is anyway, that they've already cornered the market and now just want to hold on to that status and size, bolstering it every so often with new licenses but knowing that it will gradually shrink back down again to an average that's been similar for years. I don't know whether it's true that DbD could not be significantly bigger than it is now - while a successful and popular game, it's obviously still a smaller player compared to massive titles that draw hundreds of thousands or even millions of concurrent players every day. I don't know that it couldn't, say, double its numbers if they were to do more ambitious things with it. There are games like PUBG that don't have an incredibly more compelling gameplay premise that draw multiples of DbD's players (at least when using Steam numbers as an indicator). But they'll likely know better. Maybe they think they could realistically grow the game by some % but that it wouldn't be worth the risk of losing its niche-defining status.

Rationally it doesn't make sense to have stumbled through that much.

I don't think so either, my argument was that they've stumbled into the original, core formula of DbD, its gameplay premise and basic mechanics that make it so addicting and appealing. Its lasting - and at some major junctions indeed growing - success has definitely not been in spite of their work on it since, the core formula doesn't carry that much.

One big thing obviously have been the licenses, the horror genre is a big draw and there's no game in this niche that offers what DbD does, a thrilling slasher-like experience featuring many of the most iconic horror characters. The early Halloween chapter release is likely majorly responsible for the game still being around today, without it the game would likely not have survived past the first hurdles. And then from there licensed chapters have always been injections of life for the game, significantly boosting its numbers temporarily and keeping its average on a healthy trajectory due to the retaining strength of the core gameplay. And BHVR was and is in a unique position to acquire these licenses and work with the respective companies, since they are a big and historied studio that has primarily engaged in collaborative work/work-for-hire/outsourcing, working on titles with and for other studios and IPs. Definitely not a fluke in that respect, those connections and that reputation built over decades were a major variable for DbD to be able to become what it is now.

They have definitely also done a lot of good things as far as developing the actual game. It hasn't fundamentally changed much at all, but lots about and surrounding it obviously has. With some notably compelling pieces of design, including various great killer and perk additions.

I just think the core formula that they have even themselves admitted they had more or less stumbled into does do a lot of heavy carrying and BHVR's reluctance/inability/whatever to try and improve substantially on it or change fundamental things about it is not born out of knowing and understanding that formula so much as it is out of the fear of losing whatever makes it such a success formula.

3: Even if they don't know the secret sauce, lots of people with time and money have tried to replicate it and crashed and burned. Either BHVR has a better idea to the success, or it really is such a fluke that they see all of these other companies try and improve on the model and fail, and we're back to point 1 of 'it it's not broke, don't fix it'.

Circular argumentation, but the actual logic underlying the phenomenon would in fact be sort of circular of course. I don't think their success itself is proof that they understand well how to effect and affect said success, like you in point 4 also argue, these things aren't so clear at all. Again, they have after all themselves failed to replicate its success.

One huge factor DbD has going for it over others that have tried to replicate it or to serve a similar niche is that it (to my knowledge) is actually genre-defining: there simply wasn't anything like it before it. Counter-Strike may also not have been the best tactical 5V5 shooter game at every point of its existence, and yet it has always dominated that genre, because it if not invented definitely established and defined it single-handedly. To the extent that people were (and are still) playing ancient versions of it decades later. The genre DbD resides in is even more cornered by it, the genre basically could be called DbD. It's much more niche of course, but that if anything also contributes to how much of a stronghold it has over it.

Another huge factor are the licenses, naturally. You can play a PVP horror-themed Evil Dead, TCM or Alien game, or you can play DbD that has all of those as well as Freddy, Myers and an entire pantheon of other horror greats.

Those are very obvious and simple things that lots of people bring up every time in these discussions and that feel intellectually dissatisfying to explain DbD's bar-none success in the genre with (it was there earlier and has more cool characters; it has more iconicity and icons), but they are true and incredibly hard to get around.

Having played only little of the other games, I can't comment too well on how they compare to DbD gameplay quality-wise. I think some of them had really rather solid and engaging gameplay premises and mechanics, but in general my impression is that many of them lacked the surprising amount of depth DbD has despite the simplicity of its basic premise and mechanics. This phenomenon is typical of arcade-style game designs where you have very satisfying and satisfyingly simple base game mechanics and rules that however yield complex and compelling gameplay and metas. DbD falls within that arcade-style category of games much more than most of any of the others I've seen trying to have success in the genre. Its stylized campy look and goofy animations also fit the part, even if they have been "polished" to an extent over the years (old movement back when?).

Part of that arcade-like success phenomenon seemingly also is precisely the more unpolished ("buggy") nature of those kinds of games, that inspire a sense of exploration and exploitation in people, pioneers in the spaghetti code realm, and all the unique gameplay opportunities (ranging from riveting to ridiculous) and the hilarity that entails. Many of the other games appear to simply be too polished to have that quality that DbD to this day is essentially synonymous with. It's basically with every new update that people are clamoring to find new bugs and exploits, and they always find them and it's always interesting in funny or crazy ways. Would DbD be the same if we had never seen things like Dracula's bat stretching into humanoid form to snuff a totem, or his wolf with a cape, if Kaneki couldn't hurl himself across half the map in a split second, …if killers never could have abandoned a match and kill all survivors instantly after protecting gens for 10 minutes? Who knows, but my feeling is that too is essential part of its strange and ridiculous formula. Some of it more some less, but generally speaking I think it's really intrinsic part of what makes DbD tick. The relative incompetence and incomprehension of the team behind it and the results that yields in the perception of the game and actual game experience are like a running joke that doesn't get old, part of the life blood both gameplay-wise and culturally for the game (just think of the entire "pretty good job so far" meme).

Either way, that's a lot of yapping without a lot of valuable insights or pertinent points for the topic. For the actual topic I'll say that in a larger sense the lack of well-defined and communicated win conditions is both a blessing and curse for the game and it will always lead to points of friction like this design blunder. And BHVR is definitely blissfully ignorant to a fault in this regard, because it regularly leads to undesirable behaviours of players in the game. They likely didn't even think all that much about the proper communication and presentation of these "surrender" states. As killer I'm left thinking the survivors rage-quit because on my end the presentation is the exact same as that of a disconnect. There's not a sense of a benign surrender that is sensible within the game workings. As survivor it's obviously even worse, I just fall over and die if the killer "surrenders". The first time this happened to me we were literally left thinking the killer was a cheater. There's not even a basic sense of what these things mean, BHVR apparently didn't think much farther than deciding they want matches to be able to end at those points.

Beyond creating a sensible end state at a basic level for a surrender, one could obviously go much further and actually tie this in with the lore principles of the game and make it a much more smooth and cohesive experience, for instance by having the entity somehow in some form descend upon the tiral and take its players out because it grew weary or frustrated or bored with them, in some shape communicating as much. My simple suggestion for the surrender feature was for the entity to gobble up survivors like it does at the end of the EGC. Perfectly sensible and clear. Why do we need bots to remain in the trial at that point, forcing the killer to play against them if they don't want to lose "match progress" (also not defined by the game), as well as forcing the other survivors to play with bots?

But yeah, most importantly I think the specific issue that is even being sought to be "solved" here (survivors deliberately refusing to do gens and only hiding for as long as possible) doesn't even register when compared to the much more prevalent and pressing problems that could be alleviated with the surrender system, namely 2v1 and 1v1 endgame scenarios (I say alleviate because actually solving the problems of the design of these endgame scenarios would take much more, but offering a surrender option would already go a long way to rid us of the excessive hiding, slugging and stalling that happens all too regularly in these cases).