Blatant cheaters?

exactly that, nothing more to add.

As people above said, every 3 months there is a referendum conveyed throughout our community. The question of the referendum is: "Is the game fine?". By buying DLC and other content you vote YAY. By not buying anything or even uninstalling you vote NAY. It so happens that every cycle the electorate (including you, I might assume) votes YAY with an overwhelming majority, and our devs, being a good democratic company they are, heed to the results and keep the game in this most favored by the community state. Therefore, nothing will change about the cheaters, as well as anything else, as long as this game is fine and players keep voting for this option.

Yeah… that’s basically the uncomfortable reality.

BHVR obviously knows cheating exists (they run bans, they use anti-cheat, they have a reporting pipeline), but from a player’s point of view it’s still mostly whack-a-mole: you see the same categories of obvious cheats year after year, and the practical “solution” is still record it, upload it, file a ticket, hope it gets reviewed.

The part that makes it feel hopeless isn’t just “cheaters exist”… it’s that the burden is on the victim and the system is horrible. If it takes 20–30 minutes of recording + trimming + uploading + support ticketing (on top of the in-game report which does nothing on it's own) to deal with one blatant case, that’s not a protection system, that’s crowdsourced QA.

And if you want a very public example of how deep the problem goes: the official Walking Dead collab stream with Chandler Riggs got repeatedly disrupted by bad actors to the point they couldn’t even play properly. When your marketing stream with a celebrity guest can be derailed live, that’s not some niche edge case…it should be a serious wake-up call.

Here’s a short recap from Scott:

Also, subtle cheaters are the real poison. The blatant ones eventually get clipped and banned. The “soft” ones (info tools, minor speed tweaks, timing assistance) can look like “good reads” or “skill,” and unless you have multiple POVs and hard proof, they’re basically untouchable in normal matches. That’s why people keep feeling like something is off even when they can’t prove it.

So yes: people know, BHVR knows, and the visible impact hasn’t changed enough to restore trust. As others said, the only lever players realistically have is to stop rewarding the problem (spending/engagement), and in the meantime: record/report when it’s blatant… but don’t expect the manual process to keep up with the scale of it.

I get why the “remove DC penalties because of cheaters” idea sounds attractive at first glance. Nobody wants to sit in a match that feels illegitimate. The problem is that removing the penalty does not just affect cheater matches. It changes the entire game’s baseline behavior, and it creates more damage than it prevents.

It is the same kind of short sighted fix as saying “some cars have unsafe brakes, so let’s remove seatbelts so people can jump out whenever they feel in danger.” You would solve one uncomfortable situation for a small subset of cases, but you would also guarantee constant abuse everywhere else. Most people will not DC only for cheaters. They will DC for a bad map, a killer they dislike, a rough early game, a teammate mistake, a perk reveal, a gen popping too fast, a mood swing, or simply because they do not feel like finishing. In a five player PvP match, that decision does not just affect the person leaving. It directly degrades the experience for everyone else.

Bots do not fully solve that either. A bot replacement is still a quality drop. It changes chase patterns, macro decisions, pressure, and the pacing of the whole match. If DC becomes frictionless, the “optimal” way to play for many people becomes leaving anything that is not favorable. Over time you do not get a healthier PvP environment. You get more partial matches, more snowballing, more people giving up the moment something looks off, and a queue experience that feels like you spend more time searching for a clean match than actually playing one.

Also, not every match has a cheater. The cheating problem is real and it feels worse than some players admit, but treating every suspicious match as justification to remove the entire integrity system is not a serious solution. It is basically admitting defeat and turning match quality into “whatever happens happens.” That helps cheaters too, because it reduces friction and increases chaos. It becomes harder to separate legitimate play from manipulation when lobbies constantly collapse.

The real fix is boring, expensive, and unglamorous. It is better server side validation and better automated detection for the obvious stuff, plus faster action for repeat offenders. It is also making reporting less punishing for the reporter, because right now the player is doing a lot of the work. That is a pipeline problem. If the only reliable route is recording, editing, uploading, then support ticketing, you are effectively asking the victim to do manual moderation for a live service game at scale.

If anything, the compromise should go the other way. Keep DC penalties for normal matches, but create systems that specifically reduce punishment when the match is genuinely compromised. That could mean better automated flagging, quicker match termination when something extreme is detected, or protection for players when a lobby is clearly being disrupted. Removing penalties entirely is the nuclear option, and it would punish normal players far more often than it would save them from cheaters.

So yes, the frustration is valid. The proposed solution is not. The focus needs to stay on the root cause, not on making it easier for everyone to quit the moment anything feels inconvenient.

unfortunately it definitely seems like the cheater problem has gotten worse over the past couple of years or so, but the beginning of this year is probably leading into the peak of this epidemic lol. it's usually subtle cheats with faster movement speed, longer-than-usual flashlight beams, walls, or auto-skill checks, but lately it's been much more bogus with remote actions and purposefully locking survivors into place.

this screenshot is from a game i was playing with friends, this meg purposefully kept trying to sandbag while doing this. normally i DC the second i see someone like this because i can't even stand being in the same lobby as these people, but at this point it feels pointless when it happens so frequently. it makes me not want to play public games anymore because i half expect some foolishness to occur.

the same week i ran into this meg, i think i ran into at least 6 cheaters in the past 4-5 days, including a game where i had the chance to meet a wonderful streamer who unfortunately had all 5 gens pop on them with insta-healing survivors. i DC'd that game the second i saw it.

i really don't know what's going on at BHVR and i hate to be a negative nancy given i was once super passionate about this game, but it feels like they gave up on dead by daylight and are purely focusing on getting as much profit as they can out of it before it keels over. it's not a passion project anymore, clearly, and it's a shame to see it turn into what it is now. i may have repeated myself before, but i can't really see it any other way now.

the fact that i personally helped contribute to a support ticket entry that involved me sharing discord server log evidence (im talking an actual dump of data btw, including attachments, channels, images, etc.) of a community that was selling these cheats, blatantly, and there was no notice of action taken made me lose confidence in BHVR's willingness to address the issue. you cannot convince me that not one person on the team responsible for DBD hasn't heard about this being a problem. the deafening silence is actually unfortunate, and i partially believe it's due to management decisions. BHVR has recently been making moves to focus on publishing and social media marketing rather than game development it seems, so my outlook on DBD's health is quite bleak.

I agree with your point.

What makes this situation so frustrating is not that wallhacks exist. Those can be harder to detect. The real scandal is that we are still talking about bare minimum server authority checks. The server should reject impossible state changes, impossible progress, impossible movement, and impossible interactions. If a client can claim something happened and the server simply accepts it and broadcasts it to everyone else, then the game is built on the wrong trust model.

That is why the most blatant cheats look so absurd. Instant objective progress, impossible speed, teleports, actions happening in states where they should be blocked, interactions that should be gated by prerequisites. These are not subtle. These are exactly the kind of things a server should deny by default, or at the very least flag immediately.

The fact that we are years into this game’s lifespan and still discussing missing basic validation is an indictment of priorities. At some point “technical debt” stops being an explanation and becomes a permanent excuse. Players are told to record, edit, upload, and ticket their way through a problem that should be detected automatically for the most blatant cases, basically outsourcing enforcement to the victims.

And yes, it is hard not to notice what does get shipped consistently. Cosmetics, DLC, monetized content. Meanwhile the foundation that decides whether matches are legitimate still feels shaky. That is why trust keeps eroding. Not because people expect perfection, but because they expect the fundamentals.

No one is asking for a magical solution that eliminates cheating entirely. People are asking for the basics. Server authority, sanity checks, and a system that is designed to refuse impossible reality instead of accepting it and calling it a day.