2016 Player Signing Out, My Personal Analysis of Dead by Daylight

It's been a fun and a wild run of this game but DbD has had its time to shine, failed to carry that potential it had forward, and is now in it's decline. Barring the recent changes announced or should I say leaked, yet again, I had already decided in the long run the day before these changes that I would be putting the game down for the long term. A whole list of changes are needed to preserve this game but they aren't coming, the game has too much content to realistically fix anything. Overall I did get 1900 hours of entertainment, take 400-600 off of that that wasn't fun, but still got my fair share of enjoyment out of it. Played both sides in the game.

Originally I had came from Evolve after I left it behind early in its decline. The negative day 1 DLC reception hurt the game and despite that I enjoyed it immensely and remember the times of playing it for 10+ hours in the night, competing against top teams and streamers, playing in tournaments. It lasted about a year for me but despite that short time with it, it's balance problems never compared to what DbD has to deal with.

The biggest problem of DbD is that there is too many big problems to begin with. The Map Design, the Perk Imbalance, the Killers, the Skill Gaps, the Matchmaking, the Connections, the Competitive "scene", the Streamers and the Base Gameplay.

Playing this game since June of 2016, I've experienced everything from:

• Double window shack with no bloodlust and no entity blocker with always fast vaults
• DC infinites where the survivor traps the killer in game refusing to leave and not being able to get downed
• Traps under the feet where your hooked at with a camping trapper and no borrowed time/DS
• Instant flash blinding killers and sabotaging all the hooks the map that would not respawn forcing ultimate slug matches/basement builds from killers
• Machine gun build killers
• Even worse maps with many pallets and multiple windows, or the exact opposite (Shelter Woods)
• Teams abusing all black Claudette cosmetics
• Basement blocking killers
• Lag switchers and DCers
• No timing required flashlight blinds and pallet saves
• Surprisingly missed day 1 Freddy release gameplay but I've watched
• Coordinated SWF Competitive/Rush squads to this day

I've experienced all that bullshit from both sides of the spectrum, did experience burn outs through the years but ultimately I decided a with a new year starting I would be moving on. I would finish the rift I started (Burnt Auric Cells at 69 because I was that dried out to even continue playing) and after achieving that on the 5th, I put it down finally.

Ultimately I would start with the maps as the biggest balance issue, there are 33 maps in the game, and I would say with some doubt, only 3-5 of them are balanced. The Badham maps that were recently reworked aren't even included upon these since all of them suffer from the strong buildings that can waste a killers time for half the match. If the first reworked map is still a mess, just imagine Lery's tomorrow when we see it, especially when Hawkins is barely decent quality. Were not getting reworked maps that would improve the gameplay for both sides and considering when we have map dependent killers like Myers, Nurse, Huntress, Hillbilly, Hag, etc, sometimes the game is just decided right at the start due to RNG and you can't win. Same goes for survivors when your given Shelter Woods with very little coverage of pallets or Azarovs that basically divides the map into a easy 4 gen strat for the killer.

I think my top 3 maps would have to be Coal Tower, The Chapel, and Wrecker's Yard knowing what we have to work with in this game. Good maps need to consider all the factors of the game and not play towards one specific advantage or another. They need to be a decent size, not too large, but not so small you can always hear a terror radius 24/7. They need to work with all types of killers from stealth, to mobility, to range, to traps. The maps need fair pallets for survivors to use but not to abuse the killers in endless chases. There should be good hiding spots, line of sight breakers, mindgameable spots for both sides. We haven't got much of any of this in the reworks or new maps, and if we did, it wasn't enough as a whole to make the maps fair. Poor huntress is pretty much hoping for RNG to give you a older map. 33 maps and were getting 2 reworks a year and another map to add to the pile, this isn't going to happen folks with map balance at this pace.

Killers is the next balance issue. It's currently more of ongoing battle between being too hard for newer players to face where they get slaughtered easily or struggle against some of the more annoyingly killer powers, to high rank gameplay forcing you to play basically Billy/Nurse/Spirit every game. 2 of those killers have received nerfs. Personally I'm not going to list out all the killers and the problems with them, I'm just going to say there are 18 killers in this game, I can only use about 6 (Billy/Freddy/Oni/Nurse/Plague of them for higher skilled matches, and Spirit only if I'm going against a dedicated team of players all on my level. The rest of the roster is for weaker players or meme builds that ultimately get little accomplished. It's been said a perfect balance is 2 kills/2 escapes but as killer you let that happen in purple/red ranks, you aren't moving up. A killer can only be considering winning if he gets 3 kills and multiple hooks on all the survivors, and the game is constantly working against you on all fronts to prevent that. Killers have to deal with more worse maps than survivors, they have less perk pool viability and combos to use, often needing to run ruin for those teams that know how to split pressure. RNG half the time is working against them unless your Spirit. Connection issues screwing up hits, matchmaking forcing you into games above or below your skill level. It just doesn't stop and now were at a crossroads where the average matchmaking time in most regions is 5 minutes+ for survivors and worse for those who SWF.

Skill gaps and matchmaking I'm going to talk about together since its hard to separate the two. DbD has always had the problem of matchmaking. Now the wait times weren't always bad, it jumped around a lot to short killer que times and long survivor times back in the day to long killer que times and short survivor times. That was due to the excitement a new killer being released brought to the game. But now today, that doesn't matter, there wasn't a line of players waiting to play Oni, survivor times were still very long in most regions. My region was the same (Midwestern America). I have always hovered in the 1-10 range, or now the 1-5 range since I steadily played nights after I get off work. Matchmaking for me at least has been all over the place, I would get streaks of teams try harding when I was trying for trapper rift challenges in the red ranks, but as soon as I switched to Spirit I dominated uncoordinated solo teams and baby survivors being matched to me from the green ranks. There is never any consistency to what you will be facing, and its only hard to tell when we can't see ranks in lobbies and pretty soon can't see them after the game. As a whole with what most people are saying tonight, I do believe the devs are attempting to bury the problem and don't have a solution. I don't blame them, when your games a constant cycle of new players coming in and older players leaving you don't experience population growth to keep matchmaking stable, DBD has been stagnating around 16-25k players online average, though the new year has seen it rise up to 40,000 at peak according to steam charts. This still hasn't helped with the wait times however to what I'm assuming is nobody playing killer. The skill gap is to significant most players don't want to get dominated by a team that will coordinate and outplay them and have all the advantages of bad map design, multiple perks to counter the killer, and simply knowing how to pressure gens. Those who try play to lose or they play Spirit. Naturally when I run with a SWF team of good people I add on my friends list, we dominate every game by split pushing gens through ruin, and just knowing how to loop. Only a high tier killer like I've mentioned previously can destroy a team I put together. Even with randoms in discord unless they are completely new.

Overall when it comes to skill gap the game is balanced towards the new players 100%. It starts with the fact we have nobody that knows how to play a high level being involved in the development process. The devs don't play or know how to play their own game the ways experienced players and streamers do. Watching McCote in the past play at a Korean event shows he never touches the game from a personal perspective when he got destroyed as hag by a SWF team. McClean streams and I've never seen him hit the High purple or even red ranks. And naturally he did deny the depip squad experiment done in the past as a non-issue when it was proven a team with comms or no comms can win 95% of their games easily with 0-1 deaths in by genrushing only. I don't blame the devs for their lack of play, they are busy working, have lives, and probably want some time away from their "job" anyway. But there is no skilled gameplay testers, the Fog Whispers don't contribute much of anything anymore since they aren't listened to and it now seems its just a yes man job to praise BHVR, since speaking out against them or criticizing has led to removal of some of the streamers from the program.

And lastly we have the base gameplay. It has always stayed the same for the game's lifespan. Survivors do 5 gens to get out after opening the gates, killers hook survivors 3 times or until they die. Nothing's really changed that much, we had entity blockers added to stop infinites, bloodlust, and minor gen regression. The EGC was added to fix toxic survivors refusing to leave and end hatch stand offs. Perks have been all over the place, every time we get new ones, 0-2 of them end up actually mattering when it comes to gameplay. We have a total of 74 survivor perks and 66 killer perks, but usually only between 6-12 on each side are being mostly used, with other players forcing them self to use less viable perks for the memes or just being forced to run Ruin or other slowdown perks because it's a requirement against any team that can do gens. I've always felt that the perk system just needs a massive overhaul, we delete garbage perks, we merge certain perks with other perks like for say Calm Spirit and Iron Will, or Agitation and Mad Grit. Another amazing idea of mine was to implement more regression penalties for gens that all killers would get to use. Naturally a gen should have always regressed much faster after being kicked than they do now with a additional 3-5% penalty New killers/survivors each would come with 1 Unique Perk instead of 3. Logically this happening is not likely just like fixing the maps, so we as a community will just wait over a slow, long period of time as small adjustments and the occasional rework is put in place.

Last but not least, the community is the last problem with this game. The toxicity, the variety of opinions all over the place, the lack of knowledge or the willing to learn, the streamers, and the general entitlement. As a game we can never have built in voice comms for solo players just by the fact what people will do with or use it for. A basic feature in other games like Counter Strike, Apex, even Deathgarden had it though it was disabled by default. Second most players aren't willing to learn or care to, this comes with the casual player mentality that also tries to be competitive. They don't want to put the in the hours but still expect the game to be easy for them and cry when they fail. It's a developed mentality that seems to never go away in most players till they hit a milestone of playing the game enough or becoming actually good. But even the good players like to bully as if we didn't forget back in the day people would hide all game or run the unblockable infinites. Lastly streamers can and have encouraged toxic behaviors in their community, anyone remember the Bahroo christmas where he showed off the glitch to run hybrid killers, T1 Michael with a chainsaw anyone? Not all streamers are toxic though but they contribute to the longevity of the game in a way that continues the cycle of new players coming in and older players leaving. Most of your big streamers don't really enjoy DbD anymore but continue to play, they turned it into a career basically. They continue playing this game, behaving as a source of free marketing and social media that drives players to want to play Dead by Daylight, every casual player gets excited at the thought of trying to be the next Scott, or trashing on killers like Pug. Personally I don't see DbD dying until the twitch community is at the point of letting it go which wont happen until a similar game comes around that actually succeeds in drawing them to it and bringing their followers with them. We just need to stop being toxic and learning to see both sides (killer and survivor) from a balanced point of view.

Dead by Daylight isn't dying this year, or next year. This game will continue on, the meta will update, the matchmaking times will get a little bit worse, and the DLC content will be pumped out. For all those leaving or threatening to but not really, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter I write this or say I'm even leaving, there will be a new player excited to play with all the cool horror characters from famous franchises, there will be a new player hoping to become a big streamer and not have to work a day in their lives, there will be a new player just excited to try be as good as their favorite streamer, and there will always be a flow of players joining and leaving, but never will the game grow to heights you can expect. And for those of holding out for the game to be balanced, just stop, there is a lot of work to be put into it and unless the devs announce they are stopping DLC and going full throttle in some Operation Health fiasco to fix the game, it isn't happening. Don't hold out forever, move on or accept what Dead by Daylight is.

My general wish is for Dead By Daylight 2, hoping a fresh start will allow the devs that developed this game that I played for nearly 4 years and enjoyed to address all the problems, have a stronger foundation built on for the coding, and hopefully things like doors!!! I will be looking for in the near future for the next Evolve/L4D2/DBD, but for now probably going to take my FPS skills out of the trash can and maybe start the streaming in the future with my new setup. Good luck for those in the future, weather these changes with the new ruin, doctor, and hiding ranks go through or not, I already made up my mind weeks ago to put DbD down. I just wanted to get my thoughts out. I never was really involved with the community on reddit, discord, or here, but always had ideas and followed the game near religiously.

I wish I had participated in the community in more but I always struggled in writing out anything really on forums and if I did start, I would stop halfway, then never come back to it, hence why I had to this write out all in one sitting since I would probably stop caring by time I woke up the next morning before work. I'll edit it later if I notice this post looks horrible or there is a lot of grammar errors.