Is DBD Supposed to be Competitive
With the recent QoL patch being rolled back, I'm curious what DBD is.
I dont see it being like League of Legends competitive ranked queue. Although since it has a ranking and MMR that means it's not a party game?
So what is DBD. Is the point to see how good you can get or how theoretically high you can go? Theres no ladder aside from ranks that you basically cant demote from and get to red rank by just playing enough.
At what point do players weigh having fun versus wanting to win with a competitive mindset.
Basically with the supposed changes it seems like theres an issue between a player getting to enjoy and play the game versus a player wanting to win regardless of how its done. What is BHVRs goal for this game, is it about getting a win or is it about having an enjoyable game for both sides.
I always thought DBD was a chill party game to enjoy with friends but it feels like I'm wrong.
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We don't know.
One of this game's biggest problems is that BHVR can't seem to make up their mind about how they want the game to be played.
Sometimes they balance around the highest level of play, and introduce features you'd expect in a competitive setting (such as MMR).
And other times they balance around low-level casual play (e.g. the continued existence of Nurse is because of this).
They flip-flop between stances depending upon what is convenient at the time, as well as prevailing community consensus (which is as flippant as the wind around here).
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Supposed to be? We're going with no. Dbd has no competitive ranking (ranks here is more like monthly rewards for playing) and MMR is just there so things like newbies aren't getting stomped by veterans (your miles may vary on how well it does so). There's a good amount of people who would want it to be fully competitive esports esque and there's a "comp" scene but dbd is really not set up for that.
At what point do players weigh having fun versus wanting to win with a competitive mindset.
This has been a problem plaguing dbd for a long while. There's always going to be those who will do everything in their power to win just like there's always going to be goofballs, with neither of these liking each other. We'd say the devs are trying to find a middle ground between them, where you doing everything to win doesn't inherently make the goofballs miserable. But who knows, maybe they're just stumbling along.
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If it was supposed to be a competitive game, we'd still have ranks
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Don’t believe that a comp mode would ever work out with the majority being casuals.
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I think theres large misconception that it has to be one or the other. Just because it isnt a competitive title, doesnt mean its a party game. Its sort of... its own thing.
MMR, (usually something used in more competitive games) is simply used to make matchmaking better to have a more enjoyable experience on average. While its controversial and a lot of people like the say it doesnt work at all, I myself notice a MAJOR difference when playing 2v8 or Chaos Shuffle, where we know MMR is disabled.
Now Im not saying its a perfect system, far from it. Its great that it isnt since otherwise high level players would literally never get a break, but its still better than nothing. (and I say that very loosely) Hopefully there will be noticeable improvements when they get to it as mentioned on the road map.
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The term competitive is used to differently that its hard to say. Some use it only for E-sport, for others its just every PVP-game (competitive vs cooperative). So there are competitive party games like Mario Party.
So the easier question is whether DBD is a party game.
Opponents: most party games only work with friends. You play them mostly in a private lobby with people you know. So DBD can be a fun party game in KYF, but online it doesnt work.
Skill: you can get better at party games, but everyone has always a chance. In DBD a experienced player will win 100/100 games against a new player. I can play Mario Party with non-gamer-friends, but DBD would be pointless. (I can play silly builds like mirror myers, but as survivor i just did gens or healing)
Easy to start: a new player can grasp the core experience fast. Do gens or die kinda, but honestly theres a lot more and too many killer.
RNG: random elements make the game unpredictable. There are some things, but like i said: even with luck a new player has no chance against an experienced one.
So in conclusion: You can play DBD in KYF as a party game, it works great if everyone has no idea or the experienced killer goes for jumpscares/scary moments. But online it doesnt work.
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You have the streamers to blame for this as for most situations in this game.
The require the game to be competitive when it's a party game by nature. Their viewers need it to be competitive to stay engaged. A new perk comes out that's whacky and fun? It gets scrutized to death 4 videos made about how some edge case "is problematic for the game" and poof.
Party games become inherently broken when people take them more seriously and if listened to it will be to the detriment of the game. You can clearly see behavior trying to balance the game around fun as mentioned the lasted ptb would have been a huge push in that direction. The recent survivor item "fog vile" is another example of adding fun to the game. But it's aggressively critiqued by the very top players of this community to the point of death.
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I don't think so, no. Mainly because the balance of DBD seems to break down at the very high levels of the game. You only need to look at the comp scene to see how the game is clearly not designed to be competitive from the ground up. Survivors are on comms, only a handful of Killers appear to be viable, a ton of perks are totally banned or resticted by the rules and tunnelling someone out seems to be the main go to strategy. No disrespect to the comp scene, but the way they play DBD would be as dull as dishwater to almost the entire player base. If the game has to be changed to such a degree with external rule sets and communication tools not provided in game, then I can't see how anyone could think it was ever designed with serious competition in mind.
As others have also pointed out, there are no real ranks or leaderboards. Nothing to grind for to definitively prove that you made it to become a top ranked player. I'd also say that with fairly loose match-making and lots of RNG, a loss is just as likely as a win sometimes. The outcome of a trial hardly ever matters.
Sure, you can play DBD with a competitive mindset if you want to, but that's true for Monopoly or tiddlywinks or any other game usually played by most people for fun.
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If you want the original design for this game? Not at all. But there is an insane influx of Late Gen-z kids that see everything as competitive, mainly ones who graduated HS during Covid (or after), you do not see this with older people nearly as often. You can see it in every single game out now, people are incredibly toxic and need to do everything in their power to win. The problem is BHVR has done nothing to separate these people from the "casuals" or the rest of the community. The survivor players that has no interest in "getting better" because they enjoy the game for being a casual mess around with your friends horror game. Or the Killers that only play jumpscare myers, or "friendly" Ghostface. The community has no disconnect to differentiate the two, there is nothing telling the 4 people who are bringing toolboxes are trying out some new gen-rush with BNP or they are just 4 randoms who are trying to get tomes done. There is no telling if the Blight you are facing is some 3k hour sweatlord or someone going for Adept (until after the game).
Personally BHVR needs to address this, its hurting the game and its rightfully shown. Both casual survivors and killers are fatigued, killers don't want to wait 10 minutes to play their funny builds or mess around with others. Survivors don't want to queue to be tunneled at 4-5 gens or eat dirt for 4 minutes. Either this game needs stricter MMR restrictions or it needs a "competitive" mode that is forced on the hyper-competitive players. (Or a plethora of other options, I'm not working on the game, these are just my opinions as a fatigued player who was looking forward to the game I loved actually being enjoyable from a casual standpoint)Post edited by BoopsPlease on6 -
It's not comparable to other games given the asym nature. Things like ranks would never work because the best Nurse can never be matched up with the second best Nurse.
Usually in a game people are competing for the same objective, or both teams get a turn on each side. DbD doesn't have that and it can't practically have it outside the organized comp scene.
I liken it to basketball. You can play just screwing around and no one is keeping score, you can get into organized leagues and teams and practice together. DbD can be both of those, but I compare it to pick up basketball. People are just grouped together, with someone doing a rough job to match up skill levels, and people are trying to win, but none of them would be interested in doing dedicated practices.
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the fact that there are 2 sides competing for opposite goals i would say yes its competitive. the concept of horror and fear doesnt scream out "chill" to me. survivors struggling to stay alive and escape a killer thats constantly hunting them doesnt sound "chill" to me
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It's compesual.
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Comparisons dont really work because its an asym game, but its neither a hardcore competitive game (aka lacking a ranked climbing system) or a "party game". It sits in-between as a semi-competitive PvP game because all PvP games are competitive at their core, just on a sliding scale.
We have DBD League for the hard comp scene, but the main problems are people treating the game like its uber casual when its just straight up not because of the length of time required to get good at the game, understand its particulars, and that you will match against people with different expectations of the game who treat it as it should be, as a regular PvP game. And so these expectations clash and cause conflict.
On a sliding scale the people occupying the middle with a balanced view of standard PvP seriousness but neither too casual or too hardcore would be "right". But in this case the hardcore comp is segregated.
DBD weirdly has the opposite problem to many games, where people take things too seriously usually, we have too many people taking things too lightly and expect things to conform to them rather than meeting the expectations of the game.
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No PvP online game is not-competitive. You can treat it as such if you want but don't expect it to be the norm.
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comp kids want it to be competitive but it isnt. Go into a match with the intent to goof off and youll find all the survivors are like "word, we memein then". The fact that 2v8 almost annihialtes regular 1v4 in players shows that community as a whole prefers the casual more relaxed mode over the more competitive mode.
comp kids are just really really loud about wanting it to be comp while the rest of us are just tryin to vibe
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This is the literal answer ^^
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I think that if the community wants the game to get these base line changes for more enjoyment they need to realize that leaning towards competitive is better for them. Working out all of the unenjoyable parts and balance around it will make the game better but slightly more competitive. comp doesn't mean sweating, it just means balancing for people who are playing to win(NOT hardcore tunnel level but just not trolling). You can't balance out really strong "strategies" as much as I hate that word in dbds context without thinking of people actually trying to win.
People playing chest builds with no intention of winning don't really get to have an opinion what's enjoyable from their perspective or other people.
It's really hard to put into words but that's the gist of it.
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No and yes. Strictly PVP games by nature are competitive. You can play how you want but not everyone is gonna be playing that way.
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The game first started as a much faster paced game, making it more competitive. But allowed for casual players to stay at the bottom of the rankings having fun while the people who played to win no matter what stayed in the higher rankings sweating all over eachother. Once they changed the rankings into mmr it just tossed everyone into an rng blender and the casuals end up playing against competitives most of the time. So its capable of both, but sucks at seperating those who want to play specific ways
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Strictly speaking, no it isn't
Competitive games are generally well balanced, have rewards for winning (however minor they may be) as well as punishments for losing, and are generally predictable and actually encourage players to try and improve and "git gud" as they say.
DBD, in contrast, is 80% RNG by volume, has had and still has balancing so bad it's almost intentional, breaks itself every other patch, is almost completely unpredictable, has zero rewards for winning and zero punishments for losing, and has pretty much never encouraged the player-base to actually get good and try to win.
60 people playing a "Competitive" format in customs does not a Competitive game make
Post edited by DragonMasterDarren on2 -
There's just too much rng elements to be truly competitive, and the MMR would have to be much more strict than it is.
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Casuetitive
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I agree that dbd is a party game. Desperately wish they'd add a ranked queue because playing surv with optimal perks and playstyle is so boring. At this point, idc if it wouldnt be balanced or if the queue times are hellish. In any other game, norms are meant for experimentation and learning. Whats the point of experimenting with perk builds on either side if you know that your nerfing yourself just to try something new? Like why does it feel so bad to just have fun at a certain mmr without caring about escaping. Its not like we get anything for escaping anyways…
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I'm in the middle on this. I think healthy competition is good for DBD, but ever since MMR it's been balanced for the type of competition that doesn't fit this genre. You can't balance from the top down, nor can you add changes to make the game better for those in the middle on top of that to try to ease the tension. Ideally it has to favor the middle at all times, which means leaning more casual and toward healthier competition. It's why I think all of these changes can help, but they're just avoiding the elephant in the room of including a scaling difficulty system.
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Ofc you can't balance for the top end in dbd, especially since way more than other pvp games a ton of the community doesn't actively try to get better. If dbd had a ranked system that worked like other games then the average would be silver and the top 1% would start as low as platinum.
My problem with people using numbers in this game is that a ton of survivors go into game doing some goofy build or fighting over chase while avoiding gens. There's no way to exclude games where survivors are essentially down a player from the start or even a 4 man who just play to mess with the killer until they get put down 15 min in. On the flip side there aren't alot of killer players putting themselves at a glaring disadvantage from the get-go.
With all that said maybe a comp mode is the solution so these problems can be avoided. I really don't think the argument of "sweats" all queueing normal is a real issue anyway, maybe nothing would change for normal players but a lot of people would have a more consistent queue to go into. Then bhvr would have more real numbers to work with and wouldn't have to actually balance towards killer being 60% anymore. Like at the end of 2021 during god validation DH, bugged IW, CoH pre hard nerf meta survivors were at like an average escape rate of 47-48% but it was data mined that during peak hours on NA there were less than 800 killers playing, clearly showing how skewed the game was towards survivor at that time regardless of the negative escape rate. I would say right now it's skewed towards killer for sure. All that to say until we get a more consistent mode to draw better stats from, they don't mean much.
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The fact that one side never could play with friends, outside of private lobbies, (for the first 6-7 years of the games release) against people that most often would do everything to ruin the others sides day for their own fun dismisses dbd from being a party game in my opinion.
Post edited by burt0r on1 -
It was for the first like year or maybe two that survivors couldn't swf, what.
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What are you on about?
Survivor got the functionality to queue with friends a few weeks after release in 1.0.3 because lobby dodging to find friends was outrageous.
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9 years and you don't have an idea because of a patch?
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It's not supposed to be competitive, however any pvp game needs to have some kind of ranking system just to keep it from being total chaos. Imagine if a brand new group of players, 4 soon to be survivor mains were thrown in a lobby vs. Otzdarva. They would get utterly destroyed and what would be their thoughts on the game? Not good. At least one of them would probably quit the game. However, if they are instead paired with a killer closer to their own skill level (maybe not brand new like them, but still one that isn't freaking Otzdarva) then while they might still lose, they won't be utterly destroyed.
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for me its a game I have to give myself challenges for as its not super fun to win as soon as I enter the game every game
when you play enough red rank becomes a constant in the first week of the reset as killer and survivor so if I can give myself a side challenge every game like gettin everyone dead on hook before killing them then ilI have fun but if not then its just boring win after win
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