http://dbd.game/killswitch
Killers with high ping are getting out of hand.
every game I had on EU last night and tonight are 80-200 ping… this really needs to be addressed now as it’s such a game killer. It makes me and my friends not want to play as it’s such an unfair advantage.
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they also do it on purpose to cheat…without being caught
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I think this factors into it. ive had some strange matches where killers have high ping spikes in seemly convient locations
holding animation and insta swinning out of it, standing still for seconds longer then they should at flashlight pick up then jolting away to avoid save
my ping is always 30-40 but in these situations killers ping always spiking to over 200 then conveniently going back down to around 6013 -
This. I have noticed the same a couple times now.
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This is one of the most debated technical topics in the Dead by Daylight community. The "undeserved hit" (getting hit 5 feet past a window or after dropping a pallet) usually boils down to the discrepancy between what the Killer sees, what the Survivor sees, and what the Server accepts.
Here is a technical breakdown of how Behaviour Interactive (BHVR) could theoretically address these desync issues to reduce those frustrating hits.
1. Tightening Server-Side Hit Validation
Currently, DBD uses a system that largely "favors the shooter" (the Killer) within a certain margin of error. If the Killer hits you on their screen, the server asks: "Was the hit plausible based on the Killer's ping?" If yes, the hit counts, even if you were already safe on your screen.
How BHVR could fix it:
- Stricter Ping Tolerance: BHVR could reduce the maximum allowable latency for a hit validation. Currently, if a Killer has 150ms ping, the server gives them a generous "buffer" to make the game feel fair to them. Reducing this buffer would result in fewer "magic hits" for Survivors but would cause more "ghost hits" (seeing blood but dealing no damage) for laggy Killers.
- Priority on Vault/Pallet States: The server could be programmed to prioritize the Survivor's animation state over the Killer's position specifically during vaults. If the Server receives a packet saying "Survivor has completed Vault Animation," it should instantly reject any incoming hit packets from the Killer that occurred during the transition, regardless of the Killer's ping.
2. Increasing Server Tick Rate
The "Tick Rate" is how many times per second the server updates the game state. DBD servers typically run at 60Hz (60 updates per second). While this is standard for many games, competitive shooters (like Valorant or CS2) push for higher rates (128Hz or "sub-tick" systems).
How BHVR could fix it:
- Higher Tick Rate: Increasing servers to higher tick rates would mean the server knows exactly where everyone is more frequently. This reduces the "gap" where a Survivor is safe but the server hasn't realized it yet.
- Packet Processing Optimization: Even with 60Hz, if the server code is inefficient, it might process hit logic slower during busy moments (e.g., lots of status effects triggering at once). Optimizing the backend code to process physics checks faster would reduce the feeling of desync.
3. Dynamic Hitbox Adjustment (Hurtbox Manipulation)
In fighting games, "hurtboxes" (the area where you take damage) often shift or shrink during specific animations to match the visual model. In DBD, the Survivor hitbox is generally a static "capsule" (a pill shape) that doesn't lean forward when the character runs.
How BHVR could fix it:
- Trailing Hitbox Correction: When a survivor is running, their "capsule" trails slightly behind their visual model due to interpolation. BHVR could shift the hurtbox slightly forward in the direction of movement on the server side to match the visual representation better.
- Animation-Specific Hurtboxes: When a Survivor vaults, their legs often trail behind. BHVR could implement a system where the hurtbox is aggressively disjointed or removed from the window frame the moment the "vault success" flag is triggered, rather than waiting for the animation to finish.
4. Matchmaking Ping Limits (Region Locking)
The biggest cause of "BS hits" is playing against a Killer who is geographically far away or using a VPN.
How BHVR could fix it:
- Hard Ping Caps: Currently, the game tries to match based on ping, but expands the search if queue times are long. BHVR could implement a "Hard Cap" option, allowing players to choose to wait longer for a match to guarantee the Killer is under 50ms-70ms.
- VPN Detection: Aggressively filtering out players spoofing their region would prevent high-latency scenarios that the server currently tries (and fails) to compensate for.
5. Why haven't they fixed it perfectly yet? (The "Ghost Hit" Problem)
This is the main dilemma BHVR faces.
- Scenario A (Current State): The game trusts the Killer's client.
- Result: Killers feel good, hits connect visually. Survivors feel cheated because they get hit through walls.
- Scenario B (The Fix): The game trusts the Server/Survivor more strictly.
- Result: Survivors feel great. However, Killers will swing, hear the scream, see blood splatter, but the Survivor will keep running uninjured because the server said "Too late."
The Solution:
The true fix lies in Predictive Netcode. BHVR needs to improve the algorithm that predicts where a player will be in the next 100ms. By blending "Lag Compensation" (rewinding time to check if a shot was fair) with better prediction, they can reduce the window where these two realities conflict.Summary
To fix undeserved hits, BHVR needs to move the slider away from "Favor the Shooter" and closer to "Server Authority," specifically regarding interactive objects (pallets and windows). If the server confirms a pallet is down, it should act as an absolute shield immediately, overriding any latency-based hit claims from the Killer.
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VPN Detection:Aggressively filtering out players spoofing their region would prevent high-latency scenarios that the server currently tries (and fails) to compensate for.I agree something needs to be done with people region hopping The problem with that its not just VPN, you can block amazon servers in your firewall by making it tell any other server you cant connect and x region is the only one you can join.
(a lot of Australians had to do that around venca release because dbd decided to start picking Aussies who where not near Sydney and putting them high ping Asia servers and refused to address after myself and multiple people emailed support so bhvr don't even care people where being put in incorrect regions)5 -
80-200 is a pretty wide range. To reiterate from the other recent topic on the issue, are we really calling 80 unplayable now? Maybe next topic it'll be 80-400.
Is this an AI generated argument? I mostly ask because "Just increase your tick rate" isn't how things work on a nearly 10 year old game, that kind of thing is a pretty nuclear option from my understanding. You would have to re-create almost all of the game's logic to make that kind of adjustment, and it's completely irrespective of the hardware the game runs on.
Spikes from things like lag switching or VPNs are one thing, but people seem to forget this was a P2P game at its core structure that was converted to use dedicated servers. The killer is still load bearing in many aspects, which is constantly used as validation for why they're not allowed to disconnect as haphazardly as survivors can. In the end, "what we want" and "how the game is structured" are often two different things.
The approach should be around preventing excess and tracking reasonable levels. I agree that there should be some type of max ping allowed by matchmaking, but people wanting only 20-50 ping matches are being pretty unreasonable. Especially since some people can only get 100+ to their nearest geographical server location due to their region. Putting things in place to counteract or at least punish stuff like lag switching would be the right direction, even if some kind of hidden counter that tracks the number of abnormalities in latency and activates like a DC penalty if it registers more than rare occasions. Only other thing I really agree with is in regards to hitbox visualization, as when not understood they look very misleading in many latency-hit scenarios.
also
To fix undeserved hits, BHVR needs to move the slider away from "Favor the Shooter" and closer to "Server Authority,"Did they not try this? I could swear the determination was that due to how the game was originally designed, moving validation away from the killer for hits especially felt extremely bad and increased the frequency of stolen hits, leading to a lot of situations like blade wipe desyncs and some powers like plague vomit flat out not registering properly (then again, when have they.)
Post edited by Ryuhi on2 -
yes 80 is high, and often hits over pallets. I’d rather not go against a 80 ping killer if I had the choice. Let’s not encourage bad internet or VPN to make the game easier. It’s a bad tactic.
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and again tonight… more high ping killers with bull hits… needs sorting tbh. Let people see the killers ping in the lobbies.
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If I can perform one frame links or side flipping headshots in UT at 80ms, you can lean a tiny bit more into reads than reactions. Again, I understand that stuff like 200+ is unreasonable, but not being able to deal with 80 is, for genuine lack of better terms, entitled. This game has no EX Mallet smash.
Edit: To address your edit that was put in after the fact:
Let’s not encourage bad internet or VPN to make the game easier. It’s a bad tactic.Please tell me where I have ever done that. In fact, I specifically mentioned in the post you responded to that there should be systems in place to monitor and either prevent or punish ping manipulation. Please don't put things like that on me when its the exact opposite of my position.
My stance is simply that 80 is "average" and not "bad." Your grouping in a range all the way up to 200 is being done to try to make the two look more similar than they are by evoking expectations of an unrelated extreme.
Post edited by Ryuhi on0 -
Bad killer ping starts already at 60+ and I totally think this shouldnt be a thing in a game where hitboxes are already so wanky. And there is just no reasonable argument to why killers are favored on so many levels regarding ping and action priority.
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60ms is literally less of a delay than many games have baked into their local input delay. Street Fighter 5 notoriously had 8f (roughly 130ms) built in on a game where reactions and input accuracy were wildly more important than this one. To reiterate, it would literally take longer than that for the game itself to read your inputs before it would even attempt to send or receive that data to the other player, and you are expecting all interactions with people in other parts of the world should be less than that. Meanwhile, people competed internationally for more money than either of us will see in that game. Unless you plan to personally restructure telecommunications in various countries and regions, learning how to play in a slightly more predictive manner might be more effective at relieving your frustration.
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DBD isn't a high precision game that requires everyone to be lower than 50 ping. Less than 100 ping is more than fine for DBD. Once you start hitting 120 ping though is when you have problems.
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It's been getting out of hand for years now. Still waiting on DBD to open the Stockholm server so that Frankfurt can finally catch a break.
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Abandon feature can save it only since devs aren't competent enough in coding their servers and yeah game is crazy killer sided rn with all the new unloopable trash filler pallets that can't be chained plus 2 medkit addons are dead even styptic for no reason
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yep thats true, but people with 80+ ping shouldnt be rewarded in my opinion, i think the lower the better thats how it should be.
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Well there are even swf with cheaters as friend to get easier matches and you can prove nothing to them which I find even more problematic than 80 ping killers (which is sometimes servers fault because not in any other game I had so bad ping as in DBD and best was like 34).
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DBD devs think this is normal:
This killer would down me through walls, then nod his head because he knows the bs he's doing. When not in chase, his ping was 60.
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It's not the killers fault that DBD's netcode sucks.
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Sorry for being unable to get better internet where I live. If you wanna come out to my place of residence and tell the closet ISP to run a dedicated fiber line straight to my house so I can have good ping then I would be eternally grateful, but until then I will continue using the only available internet I can get.
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Exactly right, and excellent feedback. Of course, for Killers playing on VPNs, mobile hotspots, or Timbuktu, they want the lag advantage. The fact that we almost NEVER see killers complaining about lag tells you everything about how one-sided the experience is. The other part people don't realize is that it's The Killer's ping plus yours to get the actual latency figure. The devs are overly concerned with The Killer's experience; they have said so on the stream multiple times.
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The problem is that when you reward lag, it leads people to induce those conditions, such as using a mobile hotspot or a VPN for an advantage. Your internet troubles or limitations, such as poor internet infrastructure, shouldn't dictate the experience for everyone. There are players in remote corners of the world who expect a great experience at the expense of everyone else. It's not fun or fair to see your ping at 20 and The Killer at 200, easily getting hits that shouldn't connect.
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I don't see how this is my fault in all honesty. I have Starlink internet. I don't purposefully have satellite internet for an advantage. It's literally the only internet that I can have where I live. I've called every possible other ISP around me to get better and faster internet and I am unable to. I can understand being upset over people purposefully using those things for an advantage but I am not among them. I would get better internet if possible.
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The reason this is usually considered entitled is because internet access is not universally available (or even affordable) in all regions where people play the game. When it gets to the point of numbers like 200+, it becomes something that the offending player needs to evaluate how disruptive they are being toward the game (similar to people who have frequent outages/dc issues) but thats part of why these ping thresholds are important to be reasonable about. something like 80 or 90 ping might be on very good internet, just far from the nearest regional servers. Its a topic where hyperbole is particularly misleading, which is why people acting like 90 ping is as bad as 300 aren't particularly helpful to the issue.
Its also worth noting that there is much more to netcode than just ping. And considering this game was a P2P connection that got morphed into using dedicated servers, the backend probably looks much different than any of us are aware. It wouldn't be unreasonable to want improvements to be focused there (beyond just shifting validations between clients and servers) as much as possible. Even something as simple as more server regions to reduce particularly long distances could make a pretty big difference.
For the record, I don't think anyone on any side supports things like lag switching or other ping manipulation, unless they're the ones doing it. Tends to be a pretty obvious way people tell on themselves if they advocate for it.
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I never said it was your fault, and I believe you. I have friends in remote corners of the world that would love better internet infrastructure, too! My point is that the way the game punishes Survivors with good or better connections to improve The Killer's experience. And while you're not among them, some people induce the conditions necessary to gain an advantage; it happens in other games, too.
It's entitled to think that a game should accommodate you at the expense of other players because you live in Timbuktu, have economic and/or geographic considerations/limitations that negatively impact your online experience. It's unfortunate, whatever the circumstances are, but I'm no fan of the punishing experience. Those players can choose not to play or accept that their experience may be diminished based on their internet connection. The server is neutral and fair, and it should be the arbiter of hits.
I spent a few weeks visiting a friend in Cambodia (an amazing country), and I couldn't play one of my favorite FPS games because that game punishes lag with Server-Side Authority. The game even warned me that my ping and connection were suboptimal and that I shouldn't play. I tried DbD as Killer, maybe 1-2 rejected hits due to extreme lag, but I got some 3-4ks, and I know the experience was miserable for the Survivors. I've also done experiments with using a mobile hotspot to test 'Favor The Killer,' and it's massive. Survivors get punished and screwed while my delayed and laggy hits connect. It's a bad system.
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It's entitled to think that a game should accommodate you at the expense of other players because you live in Timbuktu, have economic and/or geographic considerations/limitations that negatively impact your online experience.Remember when I said hyperbole is detrimental to this topic? People in flyover states in a country like the USA might only have one option that isn't satellite or dial up. Internet availability and network distribution can be a lot worse than you think, even in 2026. In that very post, I even stated:
When it gets to the point of numbers like 200+, it becomes something that the offending player needs to evaluate how disruptive they are being toward the game (similar to people who have frequent outages/dc issues) but thats part of why these ping thresholds are important to be reasonable about.Meaning, I don't disagree with that statement when its not just hyperbole. I do have reservations about geography however, as I'm pretty sure that is usually considered a pretty important aspect to trade regulations in some countries. Not sure what the thresholds are (if any?) regarding things like reasonable server distance requirements are on different digital platforms either, but it really could be a matter of reasonable expectation for that to be solved by BHVR and blaming the affected consumer would be a bit disingenuous.
The server is neutral and fair, and it should be the arbiter of hits.Its literally not in some cases, for the reasons I've already explained. Since the game was designed with an expectation that the killer's ping will always be zero due to being the host, a lot of things were impacted by the shift to dedicated servers. This can happen often with things like animation timings, as now they possibly need to have a more variable timing to avoid desync issues, and it doesn't take long for things like visible hits to roll back into misses, yet still potentially carry over followup code for things like the blade wipe animation. The game's foundation was not written to work that way, and we don't exactly know if they are still running into aspects of its p2p roots that are affecting how its netcode functions today.
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I have uninstalled this game because of this braindead issue that BHVR does not bother to address. I have even answered on the survey that the only thing that will make me return to this game is when they either:
- Limit the ping in the lobby to 60ms
- More servers
- Let us see all the players' ping in the lobby so we can dodge the lobby if it's against a killer of 60ms ping or higher.
In events it gets even worse, every single stupid killer in the even has 60ms ping or higher.
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