Why do BHVR prefer to fix things in mid-chapters rather than hotfixes?
In the approximate year that I have been playing Dead by Daylight, there has always been one question on my mind - why don't BHVR hotfix more often? Why do they wait until mid-chapter unless it's absolutely gamebreaking?
It was shown in the PTB already that they had somewhat fixed the loading screen crashes, and implemented a match cancel if one person fails to join. This is the single most critical issue in the live build that is literally killing the game. I'm an avid fan and lover of this game, but it's come to the point where I've had to stop playing Dead by Daylight because not only am I sick of broken loading screens and incessant crashes, but I don't have as much time recently to play it as I used to. That time that could be spent playing Dead by Daylight, that isn't being spent playing Dead by Daylight, is spent playing other games like For Honor, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, Terraria, or whatever else I'm bored enough to play, because not only am I currently finding them more enjoyable, but I'm actually getting the chance to play them and make progress before I run out of time to play them, and I end the gaming session or the day happy that I made leaps and bounds in my skill level, story progression, or whatever else.
If BHVR have already figured out a fix for one of the most critical issues of the game, why haven't they hotfixed it? Why are they waiting to patch it with the mid-chapter patch which is still days, or even weeks, away instead of hotfixing this problem now and keeping the game alive and retaining the player count? Why are they letting Dead by Daylight die and its players suffer and stop playing due to broken matchmaking and critical bugs that are preventing them from playing, instead of fixing it ASAP? To add on to this, why did they bring out a Bloodhunt before fixing the constant crashes and lobby breaks, instead of bringing it out after a hotfix or the mid-chapter?
There's also the Legion blades bug and the multiple killers exploit. These have also both been fixed for the PTB; why don't they release the update to live right now? Instead they put out a warning on the forums - and for a time, ONLY the forums, because it was only later after discussions about people who don't visit the forums that BHVR put out a warning in the game as well to tell players about the punishments of these exploits - when they could have rather hotfixed the bug out even before the PTB was released. What is their reasoning for not patching out these exploits as soon as possible? The least they could have done was disable the Legion's blade add-ons or changed their effects, or literally anything, instead of waiting for mid-chapter when the Legion has been overhauled to patch it out.
You can take a look at any other game developer, like Digital Extremes who run Warframe, or Ubisoft who run For Honor, and see how they handle their games. If there's a critical bug or broken aspect with one of the weapons, fighters, heroes, or the maps, the developers recognise it and try to hotfix it as soon as they can. It might take days, it might take a week, or even slightly longer, but they do their best to find the problem and fix it as soon as possible. For Honor's Black Prior, one of the newest of their heroes, had a broken bash against an out of stamina opponent where a blocked light confirmed the follow-up bash which confirmed another 20-damage light attack, and Ubisoft fixed it within a week. Warframe had a bug with Focus 2.0 Trees, such as Naramon giving increased crit chance to every attack, not just melee, and fixed it as soon as they caught wind. These are just two examples of many things in each respective game that got fixed as soon as possible. Each example was fixed within weeks as they were unhealthy for the game and drove off players or made them unfun to play due to no accessibility to counterplay or power creeps that make the endgame as easy as the early game.
BHVR generally seem to prefer to fix issues with larger patches. Why? Is it because console updates require certification from Sony (PlayStation) and Microsoft (Xbox) and BHVR don't want console players game versions to be left behind while PC goes forward? Is it because it's obscenely difficult to fix Dead by Daylight's bugs due to its infamous 'spaghetti code' problem that everybody on the forum talks about here and there? Or is it due to some other reason?
I, and many other players and forum browsers, want to know the answer to this question; Why don't BHVR Interactive hotfix the game, instead of waiting days, weeks, or months for a mid-chapter patch or new chapter to patch out critical issues?
Comments
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They like to release everything all at once, rather than release one small thing, try to work on a new thing, only for the one thing they released to have a bug and put away their time and effort on making new DLC and content by fixing a bug that could take up most of their time.
Hotfixes would be nice, but I understand the mentality towards this approach; you can't approach one small thing if a bigger issue is currently at hand, so rather than doing one at a time, they could release all of it at once, see how it goes in the PTB, fix it up, and then release it all into one giant update so that it won't take up their entire schedule.
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Because when they were hotfixing stuff, people started complaining that there were too many updates.
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@Orion That’s so stupid! It’s to help game improvement! people find a way to complain about anything!
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Small fixes do happen at times but major fixes need a lot more testing, it's not as simple as fixing as they need to replicate the bug, find and issue, test it for a while, go over the results, make sure it works 100% and doesnt break anything else, if not go back to replicating why, find the issue etc.
Replicating a problem also isn't easy with how many setups there are out there with PC especially.
It can be frustrating waiting but I'd rather the fix worked than lots of little ones happening which don't fix the issue and could break something else.
Post edited by twistedmonkey on1 -
@PinkEricka Welcome to the life of a DbD developer, where practically every decision you have is catch-22.
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There's a lot more to it than it seems. Bigger issues specifically will typically take more time to pinpoint and fix. By the time we have a fix ready, the next update could already be very close. At this point it's in a build with all the other changes which may need some tweaking or other bug fixes before it's ready to go live. In order to hotfix that one issue, you would have to take that fix and make a whole new build with just that one change and send it out. For the console version of the game, this also means that it has to go through certification which could take some time.
You can imagine how that's not ideal when the update as a whole launches a week or two later. To make matters worse, each time an update is pushed, it disrupts the game. People on the old version won't be able to play with people on the new version and queue times are going to go up as a result.
With that said, we do hotfix things occasionally shortly after an update. If we have an important fix and the next update is miles away, we'd rather put it out now than wait for the next one. But when the next update is already very close, it's usually more trouble than it's worth.
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BHVR is not a top tier dev team. They got their start making B list, movie tie-in, or just junk/trash games in general. Look at their history if you want. It's filled with some good games, a few gems, but it is a lot of crap to be honest. A good chunk of their history is simply the games EVERYONE avoids or never played because of how bad they are.
When it came to making DbD they didn't do a good job at coding it. Near any change or new feature, somehow, effects more than it should and the game as a whole tends to break. That isn't a joke either. DbD breaks/bugs if you so much as look at it wrong when making changes/updates so they learned to take their time. Go slow with updates and spend time to get them right. Even then the work isn't high quality and several bugs go through with every new update.
If they pushed out updates faster then the game would be just broke pure and simple. I for one would rather wait for a functional game than to get content that isn't worth playing.
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@Peanits But regarding the legion mend time exploit... Isn't it possible to just disable those addons until the exploit is fixed? We know you can disable event offerings and the old bouquet offerings, couldn't it just be done with addons/items/perks as well whenever there is an exploit found?
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Not quite. Event offerings are designed with the ability to disable them in mind. After the event ends, they need to be locked out. Since that functionality is already there, we can easily disable those. Bouquets are a little different since those were disabled in an actual update. Individual perks and add-ons, on the other hand, don't have this built in at the moment.
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@Chewy102 Wow they made a lot of licensed games i loved growing up. I wouldn't call that list bad at all.
I played a lot of those up until after right naughty bear. Then nothing until DbD.
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Well, Riot games (did you heard something about it? hehe) Neither does it hotfix unless they are very important or seriously imbalance the game, and when I say it seriously it is seriously. I played for 5 years exclusively to the lol and I remember that they were not very common but had a certain regularity, (yes, DBD is not the only game with bugs,: o) but they were only done in extreme cases and if it was not strictly necessary, although it was an urgent bug, until the next patch there was nothing to talk about and the game is played by millions of people daily. DE is a company that leaves the skin for its game and it shows, i played many hours to warframe and the development team is very good, but there goes a fact, warframe came out in 2013 and believe me when I tell you that when it came out it was a lot worse than DBD has been in his short 3 years. It is normal that after 6 years and a solid base of players, the development team knows how to handle the game. Now BHVR even if you do not see it is making a lot of progress and and they are still almost half of the workers that DE team, since they have more than 200 workers and BHVR has 108 the last time they told us their number of employees. So do not compare negatively, only constructively.
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