http://dbd.game/killswitch
People min/maxing this game ruined it for me
Efficiency killed this game for me. No matter how many times I lose, I still end up playing against survivors or killers focusing on max efficiency.
How am I supposed to enjoy a game like this where people are mostly pretentiously and desperately trying to be a comp player?
Comments
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You cant this is just how people are with PvP games and it does not help that BHVR have encouraged this mentality with SBMM, stat trackers and a heavy influence on streamers.
That and even for a PvP game losing is awful as if often feels like you don't get to do anything while one side stomps you, even a lot of MOBA's aren't this bad.
PvP games like this are just an arms race and if you fall behind the meta will crush you, sorry if this sounds like doom posting but this is DBD in 2026.
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So you want to play a PvP game but you don’t want the other players to try to win?
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play how you want to play, no matter what others do, and realize that you are already dead when the game starts. And try to have the most fun with the time you have left.
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My experience is quite the opposite, and I'm a comp player. I never see any competent players, especially on the survivor side, unless I'm in a 4 man swf and majority of my teammates escape multiple times in a row, then we get some S tier killer running 4 slowdowns and get spat on.
Harsh truth is that most players just aren't very good, and that's fine, but when BHVR balances around these inexperienced players, things start to get messy for high MMR. Still waiting for all killers to get individual tutorials and some on the fly videos in the loading screen to at least help survivors understand who they're playing against
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You must be aware of the quote
"Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game."I'd argue tunnelling is a textbook example of this quote proven right.
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The thing about a lot of other PVP games is that there's usually a chance of a comeback in the mid-late game, so even if you're clearly at a disadvantage it feels like you have a chance at winning every step of the way. In DbD that chance is often incredibly small (sometimes so small as to seem mathematically nonexistent) and games are effectively won/lost extremely early in the match, leading to huge sense of agency issues if someone in your team is tunneled out with 4-5 gens remaining or you can't get any pressure going as killer.
It also doesn't help that DbD is intentionally full of a lot of nonsensical anti-competitive BS on top of already having the flaws that come with an asym game.
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Ok, and survivors will use comms to constantly call out killer location, who is going for hook rescues and which gens should be completed. That’s not fun for killer players.
Both sides will use “unfun” tactics to try to win as optimally as possible.1 -
I don't understand the win-by-all-means mentality amongst many players of this game. I usually match the energy of my opponents. If I'm playing killer and survivors are AFking under hook or running up to me to die, I pull back. If I'm survivor and the killer opens the door for us after getting two hooks, I'll give them my item and be friendly. It's not that I won't win in both these scenarios, but I'll try to not make people feel awful in the process. It's a game. It's suppose to be fun, not an exercise in punishment and cruelty.
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Stick to 2v8 then and wait for it to become a permanent mode.
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In my opinion, the problem with DBD isn't that people try to win.
The problem is that toxic playstyle behaviors that make the game unfun for the other side is the most effective way to win.
You're basically rewarded by ruining the experience for other people.
That's I prefer playing this game with friends, we don't care if we win or lose. We just mess around and and try to have fun.Post edited by EntityNea on5 -
Such is the nature of PvP games. If you don't like it, then play singleplayer games. There's no PvP game in existence that is immune to this and I don't know why people expect DbD to be any different.
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You can't blame players for optimizing the efficiency in this game. The game is literally ABOUT efficiency. Everything can be measured in time in this game, time for both sides. Thus optimizing your usage of time and hindering the time of the other side is literally the entire game.
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1: It also applies to single player games. Perhaps more so.
2: The concept of the quote is - 'this is how players will behave, devs should design a game based around it'. Basically if a strategy is effective, but boring, players will still pursue it (@GentlemanFridge 's example of tunneling, but we can throw in four BNPs as well).
Because of this, developers should strive to make the boring stuff not as powerful to make an interesting game. This is something that most games seem to get, but DbD weirdly leans into.
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Because of this, developers should strive to make the boring stuff not as powerful to make an interesting game. This is something that most games seem to get, but DbD weirdly leans into.
Because it's not possible. It's just something inherent to the 1v4 nature of the game.
There is one Killer whose strength lies in having better stats than the individual Survivors (primarily movement speed in DbD's case). And there are four Survivors who are individually weak but (collectively) have the ability to be in multiple places at once, meaing they have a greater ability to pressure the map and greater combined efficiency on objectives than the Killer does.
So if the Survivors' biggest strength is their numbers, it follows that the best thing a Killer can do to increase their odds of winning is to thin out the Survivors' numbers quickly. Reduce their ability to pressure multiple areas of the map at once by taking someone out, and the match swings in your favour because you've mitigated the main advantage they have over you.
It's the logical conclusion of a game with asymmetrical team numbers, and has been the go-to strategy of players who want to win in every asymm that I've ever played. DbD is unique though in that players here view it as a great injustice rather than the strategy that makes the most sense mathematically for their opponent.
It doesn't matter how many carrots or sticks they add, tunneling will always be the most effective way to play Killer so long as:
- Survivors outnumber the Killers.
- Survivors are individually weaker than the Killer.
To eradicate tunneling, you'd need to fundamentally change the dynamics of the game to an extent that it couldn't really be considered the same game anymore. If Survivors no longer outnumber the Killers, then it isn't an asymm. And if Survivors are equally as strong as the Killer, then it isn't a horror game. There's only so many planks of wood you can replace on a boat before you have a new boat entirely.
I used to find tunneling very offensive. I complained about it quite a lot here on the forums. But my mindset shifted when I realised there's no way to solve it without drastically upsetting the balance or core mechanics of the game, as we saw with several previous attempts at anti-tunneling mechanics. At that point, DbD would no longer be the game I fell in love with an sunk 6000 hours into so nowadays I accept it and come prepared to counter it. I've since had a lot more fun on Survivor as a result.
There's conversations to be had about the accessibility of tools Survivors have to counter tunneling. I.e. giving solo queue better ability to communicate with a callout system. Or not restricting anti-tunneling perks behind paywalls. But unless they do something truly drastic, tunneling itself is here to stay and players should either accept it as a possibility when they launch the game, or move onto a singleplayer game where they can curate their own experience.
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It might be cliche for you but you should really get better at the game, so then you might have a chance against to people who are playing "tryhard in a pvp game".
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It's not "people" min-maxing it for me, it's BHVR. Their attitude for the last 6 years has been geared toward making the game more attractive to one side and using comp tools in a half-hearted way. One big one is that the game wants you to respect MMR without even knowing what it is or even if it's doing much of anything at all. Rounds of nerfs and neglected balancing have left us in a state where nothing is good unless you make your own fun, which is a sentiment one only expresses when playing bad games.
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The game's min/maxing comes with problem of very one sided morality.
The survivors objectives = 5 emotionless generators
The killers objectives = 4 very emotional survivor players
The killer is expected to show a courtesy of not tunneling, while the survivors will never show an equal courtesy. As avoiding tunneling is the equivelent of a survivor leaving a generator that was almost complete - regress back to 0 while they go start a new one. Never going to happen.
Infact in a scenerio where a killer chases someone across the map to your hook, your first instinct is to weaponise the basekit antitunnel endurance to rob the killer of a free hit/down. Then if the killer still shows the courtesy to chase after the unhooker instead, your very next move is to go back and "tunnel" the generator he chased you off of, simply because he isnt tunneling his own objective. So the same courtesy is never shown back. Making it a very one sided sense of morality in the game, With the only major difference being the generators don't get mad at you for finnishing them.
Simply because of what either sides objectives are, killer doing their objective fast = mean, survivor doing their objective fast = just playing the game.
I used to complain about tunneling and get mad all the time until i realised all this^ and now if i get tunneled out i try not to say anything and just go to the next round.
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This is why we should have a casual and a ranked playlist. The game is crying out for it. I find the same as OP. Everybody tryhards at the game because everybody else does.
I play killer pretty well and am mediocre at best as survivor. In my killer games i could easily get 4ks in most games, but I'm restricted to playing killers I'm good with and using meta perk builds. Unless I'm running at least 2 slowdown perks gens fly and the game is a struggle. I'm not particularly fussed about winning, but it would also be nice to kick back, play a low tier killer with an experimental or niche build and not be guarenteed to get a sub 10 minute game that's a 0k and constant BMing.
As survivor i just get constantly clapped. I'm not particularly good at running chase and can't loop to save my life. Getting good at running chase is phenomenally hard. My swf friends are the same sort of level. In fact most of them are worse at chase. When we swf we usually end up getting hatch games with the occasional 2-0k due to our co ordination or cing up against a baby killer who doesn't opt, or fails at tunneling. Honestly it puts me off playing survivor, it just ends up feeling like I'm banging my head against a brick wall. And despite my atrocious escape percentage, i still get matched against super sweat killers with 3k hours plus.
Splitting the playlist between an honest to god ranked playlist with all sorts of shiny prizes to tempt the sweats and actual effective mmr with a casual playlist would help.
Note: i say help, not fix. I'm well aware some players would just aim to seal club on casual. It's unavoidable, but there would be more decent games than there are currently, with everyone going full throttle because to not do so invites constant unpleasant losses.
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It’s not that we expect anything different. It’s that I would’ve expected the devs make more of an effort to disrupt the optimised strategies.
The big anti-tunnel update was a real good start, but not only did it never leave the PTB, it didn’t even survive for two days.
And for the record, the concept also applies to PvE. I’d argue even moreso, since there’s no opponents complaining about said strategies outside of the game.
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So I'm going to jump to the middle of what you type because I think it cuts to the heart of the issue and is frequently how these discussions go off the rails:
To eradicate tunneling,I don't think I've ever seen a serious suggestion for anti-tunnel that actually aimed to "eradicate" tunneling, though frequently the counter arguments act like that is the goal. So much of what you type would be true if that was actually was what was getting argued, but its not.
To go back to the quote about players optimizing, the goal isn't to rip something out of the game because its been optimized to the point of being boring. It's to find a way to adjust it to make the game work in a better fashion, usually by 'deoptimizing' a strategy so that more game approaches are equally viable.
Take camping. The killer just standing in front of the hook was boring and in the case of someone like Bubba really bad game design. That doesn't mean we need to go to the extreme opposite and make every hook rescue completely safe, instead they adjusted it to allow more gameplay (the radius around the hook) while still keeping the ability of the killer to pursue the survivors (it not applying when a survivor is near).
Or take infinites. They didn't 'eradicate' looping, because looping is fun, but just finding the best spot and sticking there is optimized, boring gameplay. So they hit it with three things, map redesigns, bloodlust, and window blocking. Anti-loop didn't need to remove looping, just take out the extremes.
But my mindset shifted when I realised there's no way to solve it without drastically upsetting the balance or core mechanics of the game, as we saw with several previous attempts at anti-tunneling mechanics.I mean if you take BHVR's 'what if we blew up the entire game' approach as the only way game design can happen, sure.
Just about everyone agreed that their initial approach was way over the top. But does this mean there's 'no way to solve it'? There's plenty of approaches. Something like hiding unhooks or buffing survivors in the 3v1 while slowing down survivors in the 4v1 easily could have kept the game feel, it's just an issue of finding the right numbers. It wouldn't have suddenly made DbD a perfect game, but that's not the goal. It's not to eradicate something, it's not to seek a perfect game, but to find something that is commonly boring and improve it.
At that point, DbD would no longer be the game I fell in love with an sunk 6000 hours into so nowadays I accept it and come prepared to counter it. I've since had a lot more fun on Survivor as a result.I never had a problem with old DH when survivors had it from the beginning of the game. Do the head nod thing, make a choice about whether to swing through it near pallets, remember which survivors have it, etc.
I also liked survivor more pre-HUD upgrades. I enjoyed the feeling of not knowing what was going on around me.
On both of those though, I recognize that my personal feelings weren't reflective of either the community's thoughts or what would be needed to grow a game. Which is all to say if you don't have a problem with tunneling, great, but we could do that for any issue now or that has ever been in the game of finding someone who preferred it that way.
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The thing I always wonder when this comes up is, what would they be like? If the ranked mode looked like regular 1v4, what would the casual one look like, because it would have to be drastically different to appropriately split the playerbase into chills and sweats. I'd assume it would look like 2v8, with pre-built classes and remote hooking and whatnot, and I wonder how that would go, because I consider myself causal but a game that mostly plays itself is really unappealing to me. I'd be left not really want to play either mode. So as much as I like it as an abstract idea, I do wonder how the application would go.
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the hyperefficiency is where we are at in today's game it's just how it is.
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* Standard 1v4 (ranked match) as before * 1v4 (casual match) with restrictions, but maintaining the normal 1v4 feel as much as possible on both the survivor and killer sides. * I'm used to tunneling, camping, and slugging generation rush, so I'm not sure. * Setting restrictions on these might be an option.
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But if they're pretty much the same, what's the incentive to choose one over the other? And what keeps the sweats out of the casual lobby? I don't think BP or anything like that will do it.
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The concept does not apply to PvE because you're entirely in control of your own experience there and if you choose to optimise the fun out of it, that's entirely your own fault.
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It's not appealing to people who don't have any particular complaints about tunneling, camping, slugging, generation rush, etc. To be honest, I don't actually see the point in separating ranked and casual modes. I just think that separating the modes like this might help people who drop out of the game early.
*Additional Notes
*Unfortunately, this game only has Escape and Execution . *Many inexperienced players have a hard time getting used to the game, causing frustration on both sides. *If the gameplay process is improved, more people will play this mode. *Players who want to compete and work hard can play in the regular 1v4 mode. *We currently use the MMR system, and if matchmaking is further improved, "unpleasant players who want to play against weak opponents" may be kicked out of the game. *I don't have a problem with unpleasant players being kicked out.
Post edited by ONSAN on0 -
I don't think I've ever seen a serious suggestion for anti-tunnel that actually aimed to "eradicate" tunneling
Sorry but this is just intellectually dishonest. The goalposts for anti-X changes shift further every single time the developers do anything to address any pain point in this game. Camping has been basically removed as a viable strategy outside of a select few Killers or in endgame and yet Survivors still complain about it endlessly.
You personally might not want to see them completely eradicated, but most of the casual audience these changes are geared towards do and they won't stop complaining about these things unless they're literally impossible.
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This is why the gameplay has to change on a fundamental level. When everything has been optimized out of the game, and we are stuck in the same monotone gameplay loop, it is time to change how the game is played.
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I wish they brought the blood gens back, but with the perks actually working on them this time and being more properly balanced. I felt it was a fun way to spice up survivor gameplay even if they were easy to do. But it was so negatively recieved that it seems like that they ditched that idea entirely.
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this is why dbd need proper rank system with 1v1 rank mode and 1v4 rank mode.
(Edit- this way normal games will become casuals and people who sweat too much and play full meta in non rank mode would not be able to flex on anyone)
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Sorry but this is just intellectually dishonest.No, I think it's accurate and your take is intellectually dishonest, but saying that doesn't get us anywhere.
The goalposts for anti-X changes shift further every single time the developers do anything to address any pain point in this game. Camping has been basically removed as a viable strategy outside of a select few Killers or in endgame and yetHere's the conceptual problem - people will always complain.
I could turn this right around on a killer example. Despite everything that has been done to weaken loops over the years (perks, map design, bloodlust, window blocks) killers still complain about loops being too strong.
And maybe they're right. Saying 'look how much has been done' isn't relevant, what matters is if doing something more/else would be better or worse.
People aren't a hive mind. If 10 survivors had a problem with old camping, and 3 of them thought the camping changes were perfect, and 7 thought they good but more could be done, of course 7 of those people are still going to complain, but that doesn't change the overall improvement.
Survivors still complain about it endlessly.I don't think that's accurate. Especially when we look at the complaints.
It used to be 'remove this entirely'. Now people complain about how long the timer is, the radius, or whether killer powers should be active around hook. That's progress, people are going to continue to discuss how to refine a system to improve it.
Which, to be clear, this is what we should want to happen. People should constantly discuss (i.e. complain) about how things could be made better. That's why we have a discussion forum and go back and forth on these things over the years.
You personally might not want to see them completely eradicated, but most of the casual audience these changes are geared towards do and they won't stop complaining about these things unless they're literally impossible.Taking your statement basically boils down to a slippery slope extremist fallacy. Each complaint and issue has to be looked at on its own merits. The fact that some people will still complain after a change and that some people will have bad ideas are completely normal things.
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It’s not a fallacy when I’ve literally watched it happen over the past 10 years but whatever you say.
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you just have to pick your goals so that your not just going into escape or get 4k.
defending the other suriviors the best of you're abilites .
trying simply learn different way to play a killer .
challanges stuff like that .
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To be honest in my head, ranked would have it's own specific balancing changes. Similar to the rules imposed for a lot of dbd tournament. I.e. limitations on perks, characters maps.base mechanical changes to fine tune the experience to the high mmr crowd. Extra limitations for swfs depending on how many people they are playing with. Like a 4 man swf would have more limitations than a 2 man swf. There's so much that could be done to cater for those wanting to play the game at the highest possible level. And tbh if you dropped exclusive prizes for attaining certain ranks that would be enough to pull competitive players in, badges, charms, banners, even full on exclusive skins for survs or killers each season themed on achieved rank would be enough to pull in competitive players. The 2v8 class based system is an interesting idea though, would certainly make it easier to balance the experience. Just think it might put people off since they can't make their own perk builds.
Likewise casual could be rebalanced for a more relaxed, even handed experience. Like the variable gen speed system they have in 2v8 currently. Or something even more funky, one idea I've come up with is a quick survey at the end of casual matches asking how opposing players ranged between casual/ aggressive, or were they fun to play against, was their behaviour friendly, neutral or toxic? And as these surveys are answered and build up they can affect matchmaking so that toxic tryhards get matched up with more of the same. Bit of a pipe dream I know, since the current matchmaking can barely take wins/losses into account, but still, a nice thought.
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Then we get into the awkward conversation of incentives. With more and more publishers going the "IP holder" route, what would convince a company with a title that's printing money to do anything to change it? I think it's more likely to expect that things will stay the same until it fizzles out, sadly.
Ideally, we would've been playing DBD2 by now with a much better gameplay loop.
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This brings up a lot of challenges in dividing the playerbase. What do we consider a chill player and what do we consider a sweaty one? And what would work for who? If I use the forum as my only gage of the community, I see endless complaints about what one side has and the other doesn't. It's a lot of people who want stuff for free. They want easy wins with minimal effort. That's not what I'd call a competitive mindset. But would these people just go into casual and try to stomp because they never wanted a challenge to being with?
The prizes are an issue too. If the prizes are a motivator, they'd have to be very regularly added. Personally, I play events just enough to unlock the stuff and then I'm out. I'm sure many are like that. Something like an additional track on The Rift could maybe work, but I've been done with the current Rift for awhile, so people who play a lot would quickly complete these external motivators. I think we might also be overestimating the effort BHVR would even put into this. They won't even make anything more than a badge for P100ing.
I'll never really be on board with blanket nerfs for SWF. I played 15 matches in a party today. We had one single 4 out (excluding two killer DCs). Almost all the matches were losses. Limitations would mean almost no wins for casual parties like ours, so the average SWF wouldn't play this mode, and I don't think there's enough psycho squads to really sustain it. Also, if youre playing competitively, you shouldn't want your opponenets kneecapped immediately, unless killers can't bring antigen perks or something similar, to balance it. If anything, ranked should be the free-for-all mode. Limitations make more sense in casual.
The survey is a nice idea in theory (honestly I wish you could flag people for BMing as is) but I think people will spam dislikes when they lose or get mad. That's just people.
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It's by no means a perfect suggestion. Never will be, especially in an asymmetric game. But I'm sure it would be an improvement on the current situation where everybody is just lumped in the same playlist.
We also need to think about why people have such toxic attitudes. Dbd is a vicious cycle, killers stomp survivors, survivors bm and bully killers whenever they get the chance.
Perhaps having a casual playlist where players tend more towards being friendly may help that attitude and decrease the general toxicity associated with the game. Note i say decrease not eliminate. Every multiplayer pvp game will always have toxic, corrosive little trolls who get their kicks by making other players as miserable as possible. Some people will absolutely do their best to abuse a casual playlist for easy wins. But how is that different from how players are currently anyway? People make smurf accounts, lose matches to deliberately tank their mmr. The main questions is will it be an improvement over the current status quo? And I'm convinced it would be.
As for ranked prizes? That could be low effort but still desirable. Most games use that system will release a cosmetic or weapon skin as the season prize. For dbd could just be different colour versions of a custom skin for one surv and killer per season, with different colours signifying the rank achieved. Is a season lasts 2/3 months like a rift they are much more low effort intensity than rift rewards.
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Obviously people are going to do it, but that doesn't mean it isn't kind of silly. I mean there are tightly balanced games where it's actually fun and sensible to make as science of winning, but man, DBD ain't it.
I suffer under no delusion that a certain subset of the player base will play this way, but I just find it kind of sad. For me, playing this game is all about the experience and not the outcome. With the amount of hours I have in the game, it would be a simple thing to start playing by the numbers and robotically pile up wins, but that would just suck the joy out of it for me.
I would much rather add artificial drama to a match by playing suboptimally against less experienced opponents than become a one-dimensional terminator, even it means losing many matches I could otherwise win.But BHVR has had a big hand in creating this by trying at the same time to cater to the common/casual player (that is where the money is) and the competitive ones, even though it's pretty clearly not a game well suited to contests of actual skill.
At this point I think everyone just needs to accept it is what it is.
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