The players are the problem

TBF, i think this is most out of how the devs handed and developed their game than a community fault. Of course, this community is quite harsh, but the devs did very few things to address toxicity, imbalance and bad matchmaking in this game through the years. The community is just a reflection of this lack of care - although they are trying more in the recent years.

I think the biggest problem with the game is that there are often wildly different expectations from the player base. Rather than committing to a clear direction for the game, BHVR is trying its best to keep everybody happy. That could be possible if the game grows to a point where it can sustain multiple modes. Ironically, a lot of the changes that do (or don't) come to the game to accommodate the more veteran players tend to drive away newcomers and casual players, so the game never grows and this casual vs competitive tension is never resolved.

Players feed into the problem in the sense that they often tell BHVR they want this, that or the other when in reality that's not really what they want at all. Take better match-making, which many players say is something they want. What a lot of players don't seem to realise is that this will make their games a lot sweatier because those 70%+ Kill rates and 50%+ escape rates have to come down for a fairer match-making system to work. At the top end, this will mean longer queue times, the same repeated opponents and less variety than they probably face currently.

It's puzzling to me when content creators ask for this because what they actually want is to be able to juggle talking to chat whilst simultaneously going on some absurd kill/escape/perk streak. You can have chill games or you can have competitive games, but you can't really have both. I'd prefer a solution that keeps the current looser match-making but gives weaker players some protection against being totally obliterated by a more experienced opposition.

Players might say they want an alternative to the exhaustion Survivor meta. But then BHVR created Made For This and people still complained because a small number of players could get insane value from the perk, especially when stacked with Hope. Then they decided to limit haste stacking and players complained yet again, because it would kill goofy builds like end game haste Legion, so that was shelved too. Personally, I'd rather have stronger individual haste perks over the option to stack but I guess that's just me (7% haste Batteries Included was so good).

Lots of recent changes have been about limiting options and railroading players into very specific play styles. Like being stealthy but active? Never mind, we're nerfing Distortion so that it's useless to anyone except the Survivors that like to take chase (they would never use this perk anyway). Like to bring a "selfish" back up perk in case your team is half dead at 5 gens? Cool. Let's nerf Wake Up! so it's only useful if you can stop your 50 hour Bill from being tunnelled out early. Stuff like this just pushes players away that don't want to conform to playing aggressively with constant Killer and Survivor interaction. There isn't much respect among the player base for different ways of enjoying the game. You could put the upcoming Spirit Fury nerf in this category too, although there's a good long term reason to make this change so I'm not certain of that. These are just a few examples.

I honestly don't think this community knows what it really wants from the game half the time. Do we want a goofy casual experience or a more balanced "competitive" one? I don't know.

I don't disagree with your first point, and I often do the same in regards of letting people go in landslides. But the fact of the matter is that we're making a choice to let those people go. Game balance cannot be weighted upon player choices. That would not be game balance, that would simply be a community preference. Balance of a game has to exist first and foremost outside of player choices before factoring them.

The game not being balanced or incentivized in a particular fashion is not something that can be easily dismissed. It may, by example, be considered in some circles a rude play to take a pawn with a knight on turn three of Chess but that does not make the move illegal, it just makes the move discouraged. There's a difference between game balance and social expectations of a given game and we'd be playing the fool to not acknowledge them.

You're absolutely right in that DbD is not balanced for a competitive experience, but unfortunately it is a competitive experience. There are defined losers and defined winners. You can 'lose' a match, and when you do so your opposition 'wins' that match. I'd love to see a world in which letting people go is more and more common, but hoping for others to adopt that mentality is just that, a hope. There's no meaningful incentive to do so, and the very game genre itself exists in counter-intuitive opposition to the act.

Perhaps this could be alleviated by blurring the lines on what it means to win, or lose, a bit further and creating a gradient? I'm not personally fond of the idea but it is tennable. The recent survey did spend no small amount of time focused on what people consider a win or a loss after-all. If the results of those surveys are taken to the direction we discuss, perhaps we'll see more and more meaningful incentives given to Killers to not aim for a 4K with consistency. It would be nice knowing that letting a survivor go at the end of a match would see meaningful reward, and not just be a gamble of whether I'll be tea-bagged at the gates.

• I'm a player who LOVES good games and I don't care about winning at all. But when I play survivor mode, I simply get depressed, both because of the MMR that REALLY randomizes matchups, and because of the killer... some are so bad that they can't win even with hard tunneling and a full set of slowdown perks, the situation is really worrying. Sometimes I ask myself "Am I so bad at the game that I should be put in a match with this killer?" Where are the REALLY exciting games? Maybe 1 in ten.

Aren't you kind of exemplifying the OP's point? You are not DbD Batman. Targetting people out of the community because you don't like their behavior isn't righteous or just. It's just trying to upset someone because you enjoy it, which is markedly lacking empathy in itself.

Not that I can't relate, mind you. I'm no saint. I've had my own bouts of 'they deserved it' and should strive to be better as well.

I'm tempted to agree, but out of curiosity, can you think of a way to make DbD Fun for everyone? I've been trying lately and I can't come up with a way to do it, given the competitive nature of the game. It's particularly rough for the survivors, as even if there's only one kill a match that's always 25% of the survivors sitting on the hook doing not much but dying. Assuming you could find a way to get Killer to be happy with only killing one and that being fun, you're still isolating 20% of the matches players into oblivion.

Legitimately, any ideas? I'm curious, but I can't come up with much that has any sticking power.

It doesnt matter if people are satisfied with one kill or not. Its about the core mechanics that are actually just pain out of hell. Just get rid of tunneling, camping and slugging and look how the core game works out. But BHVR is just afraid of making the game fun for everyone, so they hard cater to killer since years.

This, effectively. I would be fine with tunnelling, slugging, and camping being hard-coded out if the reasons Killers needed those tools were also removed. But I suspect we'd just find something else to fight about at that point, sadly.

I think the OP meant more something like "I have to win at any cost".

I want to sacrifice (or mori) survivors as a killer, and I want get myself and as many people as possible out as a survivor. But that doesn't mean winning is so important that I become toxic to others or needlessly use tactics, that limit their ability to play the game.

Some Tactics like Hard tunneling and facecamping kinda limit other peoples ability to play and to grow . I usuallly try to spread hooks for that reason, so every player gets some time to play. And I definitely "win" less because of that. But I think it's worth it for a better community.

nobody else will discourage the behaviour. when I play killer, if I see the last survivors sure I may slug to finish it so we can all move on faster, but to just drag the matches out is torture.

I make attempts to keep finishing the generators, even with 2 survivors at 5 gens. however, if the killer makes it impossible, I will keep making that attempt in good faith. if that means the killer could have played 1 or 2 whole matches if they just hooked, so be it. maybe they'll think of me the next time they try it. I'm just thinking of the next people, I was born with too much empathy.

these killers will always end up resorting to teaming with the survivors because they get upset that I'm simply too good at not being caught

I don't understand why you would make this point. Because what is anybody supposed to do with this information? The players can't change. The game can.

Assuming this is about the cancelled anti-gameplay updates. Despite all the fearmongering, there was many valid criticisms that i believed in and i also believe it's what the devs agreed with as well because i found they demonstrated that clearly in a community stream. I found their conclusion that it would make the game worse overall reasonable.

Fearmongering is not something i support or partake in, but it happens because people want their concerns to acknowledged and they don't have the capacity to do anything more.

So i do not believe that the players were at fault here. I actually think the blame still traces back to BHVR.

They should not have promised these anti-systems so far in advance because it felt like the solutions that were proposed and tested were rather basic, something that i imagine any designer could have come up with in weeks at most.

So players that see these issues as a large source of frustration had their expectations built up. I can understand the disappointment that they were scrapped but the solutions were radical and i think bhvr was right to cancel them. I just think they were foolish to promise it, in general the QOL initiative was too ambitious because they were practically expected themselves to do more things with basically the same amount of time. It was only until the awful release of TWD did they realise that they actually needed to slow down if they want to take QOL seriously.

Yeah, the Anti-Tunnel and Anti-Slug changes show perfectly what the issue is. BHVR tried to implement some good and meaningful changes, but since players feared they win too less with those, mass complaints happen and now everything is scrapped. And this will happen again and again, until either of two things happen:

1. The Community accepts that it MIGHT happen that they win less, but will understand if they win TOO less, then the measurements will be tweaked - looking at the Anti-Tunnel changes, tweaks would have been easy and logical. Punishment too hard? Lower it. Benefit too small for not tunneling? Increase it. Still too much tunneling? Increase the Punishment. etc…
2. BHVR stops listening to the loud and whiny people. And then push their ideas through and tweak them on Live. Again - it would have been easy to tweak the PTB-changes back then. And BHVR used to be like this in the past, they listened, but did not suddenly do everything the community asked.

I have to disagree with Anti-Hiding tho, the initial system was way too punishing since you got AFK-crows when you just played the game normally with occasional hiding when the Killer was nearby or if you just traversed around the map finding a new Gen. But the current implementation is probably too lenient, I have not seen a AFK crow in months on any player in my games (which is a good thing, but probably means that it triggers not often enough).

So obviously the players are at fault. But i also think that BHVR is partially at fault, if you design something where you expect that parts of the community will not like it, you have to prepare to still stick with it and then make changes from there. Listening to loud people just to scrap everything in a few hours you have probably worked on for months is just dumb.

What frustrates me the most about the whole anti-tunnel/slug situation is that most of the community didn't even get to test the new systems. And the portion of the player base that did had already made up their minds before they'd even tested it. I wanted to see players testing it to destruction to see if they could still win by tunnelling and slugging. Instead, most acted as if the system was twisting their arm to get 6 hooks before a Survivor died. I feel like we didn't really get to see an honest test of the systems in action.

When it was unveiled, people talked about the AFC system as if it would kill basement Bubba but he is still very much alive. Getting another Survivor or yourself out of the basement is still a nigh on impossible thing to do against a Bubba. I felt like the new systems might be similar to AFC in the sense that you could still employ these strategies, but they might be somewhat less effective than before.

I get that certain Killer strategies need to be in the game to counteract the things that Survivors can do to deny hooks and for Killers to mount a comeback. I just don't want them to be as free as they currently are and I don't understand why Survivors aren't afforded comeback mechanics of their own. It's frustrating that an Oni can bypass hooking to slug the entire team and if nobody has unbreakable, he gets an easy win. It's frustrating that the most egregious examples of tunnelling have hardly been touched in the game's entire 9 year history. It's annoying that Killers can slug for the 4K to deny hatch. Even if players weren't crazy about a lot of the changes, did we really have to throw out the elusive status effect? The delay to unhooking notifications? Heck, even the mini pop reward for multi hooking had promise. There's no way there was nothing at all that was salvageable from that entire PTB.

For example, the slugging changes was a good idea.

It punishes killers who do nothing but slug over and over continuesly without a real reason without picking up within a reasonable time frame (120s)

This easily could've been expanded upon like the anti-camp addition and reworked until it benefited both players.

But of course, it got scrapped like the rest of the changes.

And now people call for an exhaustion nerf, which makes no sense to do so, stat wise (its at 40% on all mmr on all groups besides 4 man awfs) and because. If our problems cant be solved, why would i let myself be handicapped further with no insurance of getting compensated for it?.

To be honest i don't believe anything was salvagable.

I think the penalties could never be tuned to be balanced. It's either abusable or pointless.

Elusive won't do much against fast killers that can track you by just maintaining LOS.

I didn't like obscuring hook notifications, really didnt feel good as a killer and i don't think they would have done enough for survivors to make it worthwhile.

Most importantly i think the incentives were the worst part of the whole thing. The incentives were only really designed for the killers that got nerfed versions of them, the benefits weren't practical for majority of killers.

These issues go deep within the games design, i don't think it can be addressed in one patch. Ideally, everything in the game needs to be evaluated to see how it contributes these issues. But this would simply take too long, best they can do is keep it mind with new content and when updating older content. This is why the solution they proposed was focused on the symptoms rather than the causes. But it didnt work because it had to ignore why the game is played the way it is. And thats very unhealthy.