A revamp to the reporting system
This is my first forum post so bare with me.
I just finished a game with a hostage doc who brought distressing, overcharge, unnerving presence, high stimulus electrode and iridescent queen. I left about 5 minutes after i realized what he was doing and that we were making no progress. The other survivors d/c'd one by one until the final one could get the hatch. I've reported other players for other "illegal" things only for nothing to come to pass(to my knowledge). I am a console player so i reported him through dbd as well as Xbox's report system. This game play is not fun. Somebody on the dead by daylight team(unsure who) said holding the game for more than ten minutes is bannable, this match was going on 30.
I didn't just come here to moan and groan though, i wanted to pitch some ideas and get feedback from others on how to improve the current rendition of the reporting system.
Some ideas i have are taken from other games. One such idea was to implement an "over watch" type system where a community member above a certain prerequisite could review the players who meet the criteria. It might be difficult for a computer to detect certain things that constitute as bannable, which is why i suggest a human. However i don't personally think this would be a good idea for dbd as our player base is much smaller than other games that have this system.
Although the reason i'm writing this is because of a killer ruining the experience for a survivor, what about survivors ruining the game for other survivors? A way to avoid teammates would be a nice solution to this. Obviously there should be limitations to this, the specifics of which i do not know.
Any and all feedback or discussion would be much appreciated.
Comments
I have since found the forum post on game rules and what is bannable and not. As well as lengths and escalation. That answers some of my questions.
The reason nothing was done about those reports is probably because a post-game report is usually not enough to get a player punished. The devs need conclusive proof that someone broke the rules before they will ban them, so for anything that happens in the match (taking the game hostage, for example) you will need to send a support ticket with video evidence to supplement your in-game report.
As for the ability to avoid other players - it's a popular one, but it's been tried before in games like Overwatch and found to be a terrible idea. RockPaperShotgun did an article about it (below) if you're interested, but the long and short of it is, people would get avoided by other players not for being toxic but just for using unpopular builds or playstyles, not to mention it would destroy matchmaking and queue times.
You know, if only the devs would just invest in some sort of coding/tech that captures the previous game - and sends that capture with reports (AND STOPS IGNORING DC REPORTS BECAUSE THEY'RE TOO SCARED TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT..chicken shits).... reporting would be a lot better off.
This.. Give up to 15 minutes to report anything wrong with the previous game, afterwards anything not reported by then gets overwritten, or if you need some footage of anything that happened in the game, give timestamps so that part of the game gets attached to the report, and the rest goes away.
(And this would give people the chance to download footage from the game, to share with friends and whatnot, not necessarily for reports, without having to record the game on the client side.)
Disconnect bans are automated, which is why reports are ignored, and they're not too scared to do anything about it - in fact, they're overhauling the exisiting system as we speak to make it more effective. Do your research before calling people names like that.
And what you're proposing would cost huge amounts of money. They would need so much more server space, among other things, to make that work. Do you want them to have money to fix bugs? Cause insisting they record and store all your games for you because you can't be bothered to do it yourself is not the way to go about that.
Oh I would gladly do it myself, but they don't give you the option to upload video footage with your reports on console. I would gladly settle for the game automatically using the PS4 (i.e.) share capture when you send reports.
And no, last I saw they 'tested' disconnect punishments and they were "too strict". That was the literal last thing I've seen any Devs comment about Disconnects. Clearly whatever system they are putting into place isn't going to work unless it triggers on the first DC and not 'wait' until it happens a set number of times in a period.
And if it isn't Disconnect bans, it is touching hot-button perks like Self-Care; where the Devs have actually stated they are afraid to touch it because of Survivor backlash. Hence why it isn't being addressed or reworked or anything like any other perk that dominates % of matches used in.
Again, please do your research. It makes it very hard to take any legitimate points you make seriously when the rest of it is so obviously incorrect.
You're not supposed to upload video footage with your report. If you're reporting for something that happened during the match, you first report them in the post-game scoring screen, and then send a support ticket after the game with a gameplay video attached. If you're on PS4, your console records recent gameplay automatically for you, so you don't even have to manually start a recording before every game. Here is the link to the Game Rules subforum, where all of this is explained in detail: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/categories/game-rules
The developers have confirmed on several occasions that the DC penalties are still being worked on. They did a test, gathered feedback, and now they're making adjustments with plans to release the full system in the relatively near future. And the way you described is exactly how the new system works. I'm not surprised that you haven't seen any updates if you haven't paid enough attention to even know how the system you're criticising functions.
Also, could you please link me to exactly where the developers said they were too scared to touch Self-Care because of survivor backlash?