Why the whole "just get good" thing doesn't apply to dbd
If a bunch of people are struggling to play a game, I understand where the whole gamer advice of "get good," comes from. In a lot games, just putting in the practice and effort makes sense. But you can't really apply that kind of logic to dbd because dbd is a game where you can have literally a thousand hours in it and still be considered a noob. A baby that can still get curb stomped in games because you don't know five thousand things about five thousand different things. It's totally different than a lot of other games in that regard.
So when people suggest that strugglers "get good" they're suggesting that you should be sinking a TON of time into playing this game. An unreasonable amount if you're already not enjoying it, some might even say. The problem becomes, IS dbd a fun enough game to sink that amount of time and effort into? What do you really get rewarded with if you do? That's why I really believe dbd needs better rewards just for playing the game. It needs to have so many rewards, in fact, that if you do go on some massive miserable loss fest, you at least feel like you've accomplished something. Because that's what I struggle with most with dbd. At times, it feels like it's more struggle than it is actual reward. And I don't know if the game is fun enough as it is to warrant putting such a massive amount of time into to become a high end skilled player.
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It needs more precise matchmaking. If the people with 300 hours that aren't too good get put together, great. If the decent 3k hour players get put together, great. If the 15k hour sweat players get put together, great. The frustration in many of my matches comes from these groups mixing together and that seems to be the case for many others as well, and it's hard to feel good about matches decided in the lobby.
But yeah, better regards would be nice. It's really a bummer when you get obliterated by people out of your league and you have no BP or pips or anything to show for it.
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That might also cause frustrations of its own eventually. Like imagine you go to play killer but because of your amount of hours, you will never have a decent casual round again as the only opponents you will ever recieve are people that will go all out every time. And then because you dont enjoy killer anymore u switch to survivor and get turbo tunneled every single round no breaks in between. Mixing the playtimes does seem to allow some breathing room but not always
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I'm using hours as an example. I personally want people on the same level as me. I'd like to win some and lose some, but not stomp or get stomped. My most unfufilling matches are getting 4man slugged by psychoBlight in soloq or 4king at 5gens against players with 200 hours. I don't find either of these scenarios fair. People shouldn't be fodder for opponents with zero chance.
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Those would be the worst case scenerios, maybe they can find a happy medium by cutting everyone into groups of hours/skill like new people that escape allot, go against new killers that kill allot, people who played for 7k hours but kinda suck would be paired together while the elites that want to win everytime get paired together etc. Because 2 categories to everyone playing are knowledge and skill, both are seperate.
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This game is different from FPS games, and I think it requires a different understanding of how to play. The game is about time efficiency, and there is no detailed tutorial that explains the exact time to drop a chase as Killer or the route to take as Survivor. Everything depends on the player's game sense alone, and that's something we need to practice on. In my opinion, it's a matter of understanding patterns, paying attention to the opponent's/teammates' decisions and making the best decision ourselves.
I don't think it takes long to get used to the game's loop and learn how the average player plays. It's just a matter of what we learn from each game and what we choose to take from it to get better.
For example, I couldn't for the life of me understand how to run tiles. I thought it was okay to stay at a tile after a pallet was kicked down as long as there was a window, only to learn later after about 1k hours, that this was the reason I got downed after a 5 second chase.2 -
Every decision in this game is a knowledge check to some degree, even the smallest ones like when to take a swing or when to press A or D to dodge. Larger ones are self-explanatory - it takes knowledge to know when to stick to your gen vs when to heal/unhook/pivot to another area.
While you could argue the same for most games, in DBD the difference it makes is astronomical. In a basic PvP shooter, knowledge will let you know favourable fights to take, expected TTK and other things, but an opponent with good aim will have a shot at winning the fight even with all those advantages in your corner. DBD has mechanical skill to it, don't get me wrong, but there are little-to-no transferable skills from other games. It makes skill increase very unituitive in the very early hours of play. Later on, you'll still be coming across new information such as how some niche perks interact with each other, in situations where having that information earlier would have been the difference between a win and a loss, regardless of how good you are mechanically.
My first few survivor games where I was actually trying to win were rough because of this. Chases felt impossible to escape and downs felt like they were guaranteed in seconds. Likewise, my first killer games once the MMR system let me out of baby jail were night and day, going from slaughtering newbies, building my dunning-krueger, to a massive and absolute humbling when I came up against what I'd call a mid-tier player for the first time.
Sadly, I do not think this aspect is solvable. The way the game is built necessitates this.4 -
I get those worse case scenarios pretty much every time I play. Those are both personal examples from the last week. Yesterday I had someone great with almost 8k hours. Next match was someone awful with less than 300. The matchmaking is way too loose as is. But they also need a system that accounts for more than just escapes and kills. Hopefully the MMR rework will tighten the brackets and sort people better.
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Not that I disagree this game could use better reward structures - I've been mulling over ideas for it myself - but I do disagree with part of the reasoning here.
The idea that players with a thousand hours are still noobs is a really harmful falsehood, in my opinion. There are angles from which that can be true and even constructive - for example, this game is dense enough that just having upwards of a hundred hours doesn't INHERENTLY mean you actually know anything if you aren't actively trying to learn - but it gets sanded down into a generalised 'you need X many thousands of hours to get past noob' statement that I would argue is just flat untrue.
DBD is dense, yes, but it's never struck me as substantially moreso than the average fighting game or MOBA. I think it's only really all that dense in comparison to the average FPS game? But that might just be that I don't have much experience with shooters these days. Gone are my teenage years playing Black Ops on my beat up Ps3…
"Get good" is never useful advice in any game, but the useful variants on it where you give constructive advice on what to improve, how to improve it, and why you'd want to do so, that all absolutely applies to DBD, it really isn't THAT complicated.
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I think there are only two ways to play DBD - You either play completely casually, goofing around with silly builds and not caring at all about the outcome of a trial. Or you take the game very seriously and devote much of your free time to improving and learning all there is to know. Anywhere in between these two extremes is where you'll find the most dissatisfied players.
It's not really the kind of game that you can learn as you play. Of course you do learn some things, but there is a limit to how much you can learn by just playing. Eventually there comes a point where you kinda have to do the homework to improve further and (for me at least) the game begins to feel more like work and less like fun. Unfortunately for me, my preferred way to learn games is discovery through play. So I've reached the point in my DBD journey where if I wanted to get any better, I'd need to really knuckle down and put in the work. I honestly can't be bothered to put in the extra effort, but I also think I'm maybe a bit too competitive to fully embrace a casual mindset at this point.
And aside from familiarity with the basic first person viewpoint of playing Killer, there are not many transferable skills that you can bring from other types of games. DBD is its own unique thing, which is both its greatest strength (because it offers something few other games do) and its biggest weakness (newbies struggle because it's so overwhelming and different). The extremes between casual play and competitive play is so much greater when compared to other games, as well. You can watch casuals and experts play other games and see that they both have more or less identical play styles, it's just that the casuals are much, much worse. In contrast, if you watch casual and expert DBD players, you'll quickly see that they have genuinely different approaches to playing the game. I think a lot of newer players get their first impression of how the game is "meant" to be played by watching content creators and they often try to run before they can walk.
I also think BHVR have really hurt the accessibility of their own game for beginner Survivors by nerfing the hide and seek aspects of DBD so much. This is pretty much the most obvious and reliable strategy that newer Survivor players can employ to evade the Killer. I still don't understand why BHVR thought it would be a good idea to make the beginner experience even harder than it already is.
Take all of this together and you have a game that can only really be balanced for a casual audience, imo. Otz said something in a recent video that was very telling, that they would "hate for the game to be balanced around ignorance". This is surprising to me because Otz should know better, especially as a content creator who's made tutorial videos for beginners that take an entire day to watch. DBD kinda does have to be balanced around a degree of player ignorance, because pretty much the entire player base will have pretty big holes in their knowledge of the game. It's unavoidable.
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Dbd is one of the most simplistic games out there.
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The main issue is how good a survivor is at chase.
Getting good with killer isn't too hard. But survivor is very different. I know a LOT about the game, i deep dive the wiki and learn all about how new perks and killer mechanics work. My tactical play is good. But running chase as surv is probably one of the most difficult skills to get good at that I've ever seen in a game. I'm still not particularly good at it with well over 1k hours. Whereas when I play against good survivor teams they know how to optimise every movement in chase. Safe pallet loops feel impossible to get hits on, versus when I play surv and no pallet loops are safe because I'm incapable of looping effectively.
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