http://dbd.game/killswitch
was it worth it?
really? the whole dbd went nuts over the streetwise kill switch, so so much negativity, so much down votes, so many comments, so many platforms informed etc and in the end, switched it off? was it worth it? why have all the bad press etc just to turn it off? i dont know…….
Comments
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If it results in BHVR being clearer and more consistent in how and when they use the killswitch in the future, it was absolutely worth it,
For me, the issue was bigger than Streetwise, it was about how a powerful tool (the killswitch) is used. Because it sure seemed like it was almost arbitrary.
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I’m really not sure what else you were expecting?
The outrage, while dramatic, was justified. That it resulted in a review of the killswitch process is a win in my book.
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Well, my friend, there was an outrage because a tool specifically designed to deal with an uninteded exploit wasn't being used to deal with an uninteded exploit.
Now the exploit will be fixed, players don't have to deal with it while the fix is being worked on, and there will be a review of the Killswitch system. The results are positive, imo.
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I think Op meant the rhetorical question more toward the devs, as in "Was it worth not killswitching it before the backlash?" At least, thats how I take it.
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I can’t even begin to understand the thought process of whoever was calling the shots at BHVR over the last week. How someone could think that massive community outrage and PR embarrassment was more preferable than temporarily disabling a rarely used perk for a few days is completely beyond my comprehension.
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There was no negative impact from the complaints, only positive. How would it not be worth?
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It's amazing how fast devs act when killer mains start complaining.
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????
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It sets a dangerous precedent, because it teaches the community if they keep yelling and screaming BHVR will capitulate.
Killswitches should only be used if something is a demonstrable problem, BHVR was calmly observing if their stats would prove Survivors would be getting any advantage from this. But the community would not have any of that, they felt hurt that someone might could have gotten an advantage and they would not stand for that.
What this means is, that every time in the future if something is bugged even if it is benign the whole feature must be Killswitched because of the ghosts of advantage is plaguing the minds of the users, which means every feature is probably deadlocked at release.
Though I dont hope BHVR will meaningfully change the Killswitch Process to cater to unproven advantages, that would be absurd and destroy the game instantly. All major Killers have a bug or two that could give an advantage in some situations, like Dracula its possible for a Survivor to get hit twice by the fire attack if the connection is bad. It happens very rarely, but nono killswitch it now.
What I do hope they do is that they allow their community managers to be more clear about the specific Killrates/ Winrates and Pickrates on a given problem, it would be great for me, because I respond well to stats. Other people might not, people might still be frustrated about problems that isn't happening. Which is somehow desperately close to real life politics.
The message to BHVR should be clear, tell us clearly if a bugged perk is performing too well on diffrent mmr levels, as that should be a clear indication that it should be killswitched.
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This is exactly what I was thinking but expressed better than I could have.
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I've been double tapped by Draculas Hellfire before with a stable connection my end
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Couldn't have said this better myself. It was my understanding that the Kill switch was for things that are genuinely game breaking. That is, game breaking in the sense that they cause a crash or can be used to grief players and hold them hostage (like the Flashlight / locker glitch).
Having an infinitely charged item is not in the same category as crashing the game or preventing someone from playing for an hour. So while I personally felt they should have kill switched these perks (as well as other bugs that arise and give unfair advantages), I can also understand why BHVR initially chose not to.
Weird thing is, we know they have player consultants. I wonder if they reached out to any of them to ask if they felt these bugs could become a much bigger problem. Maybe they could form part of a future new and improved kill switch system?
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Q: Was it worth it?
A: Yes.
BHVR is going on nearly a decade of active development of DBD; this stuff isn't acceptable anymore.0 -
There's always one.
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Except that in the past they've used it for add-ons, perks, and killers that granted unintended advantages but didn't necessarily impact the stability of the game, so I think a little consistency would have gone a long way.
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I agree. If anything positive comes from all this it will (hopefully) be some consistency.
I would have hit the kill switch on Springtrap's invisibility bug, but we all know why they would have been very reluctant to do so.
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So I'll start by saying that I don't necessarily disagree, but there are a few things to consider in this case also:
Killswitches should only be used if something is a demonstrable problem, BHVR was calmly observing if their stats would prove Survivors would be getting any advantage from this. But the community would not have any of that, they felt hurt that someone might could have gotten an advantage and they would not stand for that.
True. However, that's not anything that was said through official channels, at least not with this Streetwise issue. I don't necessarily have a problem with them "gathering more data into an issue", but they never said that, or used that in response to community feedback (in this example).
So bringing this up in their defense is really putting credit where it isn't due. The main problem here was their communication and handling of the issue almost entirely. So if they had said what you said initially, that they're "looking into it, but need more data before we take action (and kill switching it will remove that possibility," then yeah, it would've been a different story.
But that's not what happened. Instead, we got official responses basically telling people "calm down. there are bigger problems you guys aren't even talking about. it's not that big of a deal", "it doesn't meet our criteria", and "we should've never told you the kill switch even existed."
So, officially being dismissive, downplaying concerns, not even acknowledging feedback, and using some incredibly vague "criteria" that has never appeared to be consistent (even for soft lock/crash level issues).
So, could they have handled this better? Absolutely.
Would doing what you said have been a better response (by saying "we need more time/data")? Most certainly.
Did they do any of that or deserve credit for that? No.
Did that lack of response, and the actual response they gave fan the flames to make this issue louder across the board? One hundred percent.
The message to BHVR should be clear, tell us clearly if a bugged perk is performing too well on diffrent mmr levels, as that should be a clear indication that it should be killswitched.
I could see there being an argument that "the time it took to find, open a chest, and repeat this process was similar to the time on gens otherwise". So it's possible that the overall impact of the bug on match outcome, or even kill rates, was possibly minimal.
But there's also a pretty big difference between a 90 second gen, and 60 seconds of "doing something else" that results in a 30 second gen (or so), even if the numbers are about the same in total. If there was a similar thing where the killer could, I dunno, open a locker 15 times but then the next hit was an insta-down, it would still feel pretty bad even if the total chase time was roughly the same.
But again, this wasn't the communication they gave us either, this is all just speculation on our part. Not unrealistic, but also not the stance they decided to take in talking about it.
It sets a dangerous precedent, because it teaches the community if they keep yelling and screaming BHVR will capitulate.
Unfortunately, we are way, way beyond "dangerous precedent" territory on this. (Some) people have had this mindset since about 6.1.0 and nearly every patch since with balance changes. There have been many, many examples of things that were changed (mostly nerfed) due to "feedback" either immediately after release, or directly from PTB before hitting live.
There are, unfortunately, many people who not only see this as a precedent, but feel entitled to making changes they don't like whenever new content is released. This cycle started with things like Ruin, Tinkerer, Dead Hard, and DS before 6.1 (and, truly, some things did need to be adjusted there), but it's now become the norm for people to scream early, loudly, and often with the intention that BHVR will change their minds.
The most recent biggest examples of this being MFT (and hope stacking) being "game-breaking", and then when BHVR actually took that to heart and wanted to remove haste stacking across the board, the same voices were screaming for them to change their mind again. Which they did. So we're not in "potentially problematic" territory, this is more "this is what some parts of the community expect now, and they will scream as loudly and often as possible with the expectation that doing so will affect the game balance."
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It sets a dangerous precedent, because it teaches the community if they keep yelling and screaming BHVR will capitulate.
Well, friend, I would say it already existed, specifically with balance changes.
Freddy's release in 2017, Skull Merchant 2.0 getting nerfed, and others. Unfortunately, some players out there always had the belief that if enough noise is made about something, even when it clearly isn't problematic, said thing will be changed, usually for the worse.
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There are, unfortunately, many people who not only see this as a precedent, but feel entitled to making changes they don't like whenever new content is released. This cycle started with things like Ruin, Tinkerer, Dead Hard, and DS before 6.1 (and, truly, some things did need to be adjusted there), but it's now become the norm for people to scream early, loudly, and often with the intention that BHVR will change their minds.
I agree here.
As problematic as the perk(s) were, I certainly do not condone the way parts of the community acted and probably will act in the future.
Overdramatic, exaggerated, partly vile, like their life was depending on a f-word game.
Criticizing game developers when something goes wrong is completely fine, but it is not a free ticket to act that bad mannered and emotional and creating some catastrophe that just is not there.
And tbf, I got the idea from BHVR that these perks weren't a killswitch topic at first. Killswitch should be the last option to turn off stuff that breaks the game with crashes, corrupting files or even damages hardware or is an epilepsy issue or stuff like that. The stuff that really is BAD and not necessarily gameplay related.
And as unfortunate items with unlimited charges or some weird haste bug on a new vault perk might be, to me this also doesn't necessarily meet the requirement for "it makes the game unplayable".
I hope BHVR will rework their killswitch process but won't get deeper into this "we listen to the ones crying and screaming the loudest to not hurt their feelings" way of dealing with things.
Because that will kill their game in the long run. There are many people who play the game and aren't remotely interested in drama within the community and I even would say these people are the bigger part of this community.
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Yes. Yes it was
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I might be mistake, but I'm pretty sure it was bugged out. Like, I think people found a way to refill items once they were placed in chests, not just taken items out of chests that lasted longer.
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blazen fast. Like a turtle in a snail race.
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Killswitch should be the last option to turn off stuff that breaks the game with crashes, corrupting files or even damages hardware or is an epilepsy issue or stuff like that.
That's fine as long as that was the way it was used. Which it's not. Example I saw during the riot was the Nemesis killswitch over not losing PWYF tokens while M2 attacking. That doesn't fit within your scope of killswitch but was what BHVR used it for. It's about equal treatment and killer's were told their pain was not at the same level.
Another thought, why killswitch a whole killer when the perk would be less impactful? Nothing else was wrong with him so why remove a playable character?
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I get what you are trying to say but starting this discussion will result in some endless argument.
If someone refers to "equal treatment", then the survivor side could also claim that Ghoul and Animatronic should have been killswitched right when they got released because they were obviously bugged/broken. Those two cases took place more currently than Nemesis. But they are somewhat similar.
Ghoul could free hit through walls and trees without even aiming and Animatronic was just an audio hell.
And BHVR did nothing for weeks. Were killers complaining then or were they playing those killers excessively not caring about the survivor side?
This spiral can be continued to a point were everyone is unsatisfied or feels in some "disadvantage" and throws poo at each other like little cute apes doing…ape things. This is probably the downside of an asymmetrical pvp game, but with all due respect I would love to avoid ape things involving poo.
That's why I said, they need to rework and rethink their killswitch policy and make it transparent, so that stuff like this will not happen again. I think we agree on that.
But the "mistake" has already happened now, it showed the flaws of their killswitch policy and the best they can do is to learn from it and avoid it in the future. And that's which they will try to do, as they have told us.
And still, I do not condone the way parts of the community were acting in this situation.
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what’s the point of this divisive “us vs them” comment? Do you think they’ve never made changes to killer players after seeing mass survivor complaints? Amazing that even something that like 98% of players agree on in this case brings out the “us vs them” toxicity
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No, it’s a good thing that BHVR responded to pressure. The dangerous precedent would be BHVR continuing to double and triple down on a terrible decision even after a vast majority of their community tells them that they are wrong. The lesson to be learned here is to listen to the community. I realize that’s not always going to be black and white because many decisions will have varying levels of for vs against, but in those case it was as close to unanimous as you can get in this community.
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I made my point :)
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Yes.
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Thank you, Yes. I haven't seen such back lash over a kill switch before, a lot was not happy, it was brushed off, my point was was it worth the negative comments, and peepstalking of it,no it wasn't when other should I say killer switches get turned off instantly. There wasn't a response by the mod to explain the whole what is the rules to kill switch was a politicians response
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Explain?
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While minor bugs like the survivor perks are nothing too special, the true problems arise when people start abusing (exploiting) these bugs to their advantage. That is why the kill-switch was a necessary action, to prevent exploits.
And come on, don't you think a toolbox with 300 charges is a little overkill?
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When they first announced the killswitch, they seemed more eager to use it. But ever since the bug with Merciless Storm lasted as long as it did way back when, I figured it was going to be inconsistent going forward and it has been.
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The devs stated the killswitch option was to do with anything which was game-breaking. According to the definition of game-breaking, this includes actually "breaking the game, rendering it unchallenging by altering its rules or exploiting loopholes or weaknesses."
Streetwise's problem of infinite charge collection fits into this description, so the devs had not followed the reason why the killswitch was to be used. They made an error by incorrectly understanding what game-breaking is defined as.
They have fixed it now, but it did harm their reputation somewhat. Whilst I do not agree with people ranting and swearing at devs, the reason for their actions was understandable (not necessarily justified). Therefore, I understand OP's sentiment, because it's reflecting on a reputational hit they took for something which could have been avoided at all, and may have resulted in the loss of some players due to the inaction. However, it's over now, so looking forward is the best thing - albeit people will be wary of their reactions towards issues.
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how dare the "killer mains" complain about a game breaking perk that was being explioted with no consequence
can you just not do that please?
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Devs just scared from killer community, there is no pther explanation, they just don't care on survivor wishes, I created tons of suggestions and none of the mods even taked a note or reply to me
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It didn't help that they were treating the killswitch as though the game hardly has any content and didn't want to killswitch too many things at once or else they'd deprive the playerbase of limited perks/abilities. When that's like hardly the case, granted I understand they didn't want to take too much off line, but Streetwise shifted the balance of the games so much it was borderline unfair on killer players, especially those who play basic M1 killers with no mobility or map pressure.
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