The Health State Of This Game (Dedicated Servers Feedback)
Hi, my name is Ussylis.
I'm a veteran DBD player, with 4.7k+ hours in this game and still going. I've been known to be pretty negative about this game, but I truly do love this game and care about it. Which is exactly why I've decided to try reach to the devs and give constructive feedback. There has always been balance issues in this game, with low skill cap killers being strong and over played like Freddy, rather than Huntress or Nurse, with the biggest skill caps in the game that are discouraged from being mastered and learned due to how easy playing survivor is. There is a lot with that to talk about, but that's going off-topic.
Balance issues are always issues in video games, but the absolute biggest problem right now is dedicated servers. I know a lot of people asked for it, and I could probably imagine that you guys are trying your absolute best to get feedback on it and figure out how to make them better, but from what I gathered from watching the dev stream, is you don't fully understand how they actually work.
The only true benefit from dedicated servers I've gathered is lobby dodgers and restarting the queue, but that is quite literally it. With a small upside like that, it came with a TON of downsides. The servers have made the game unstable and inconsistent. What was dedicated servers meant to solve? I don't understand why add something that was clearly peer pressured by the community. I completely understand that adding dedicated servers is always the right direction, but you can't just force it in when it's not ready. Adding dedicated servers for feedback was a good decision, but it's been many months and these broken dedicated servers are still in this game. I would highly HIGHLY recommend to take them off, work on it, then put them back on for new feedback.
I would imagine the main reason of adding dedicated servers is to make the game more consistent, stable, and to get rid of lag switchers, but it's only made it worse. Let me explain.
The game is more inconsistent and unstable because survivors who connect to a good ping server against a killer who has really bad ping or foreign (VPNing), will have the killer still landing all of his shots registering on their end. The ping in the game for survivor works in a way where all actions caused by them will act accordingly to the survivor. If the survivor has good ping, the action they perform will be instant, if they have bad ping, it will take time for the servers to recognize it, as said on stream. BUT all actions caused by the killer WILL BE REGISTERED ON THEIR END. Meaning killers who lag switch or use a VPN to play on servers that are far away will have all their hits registered on their end. So a survivor can play on their server (have like 5-20 ping), go against a killer that is across the world from them, and a survivor could drop a pallet, run forward for like 2-3 seconds, get hit, then seconds later the killer get stunned. There are lots of footage of this happening to a lot of people, and if you need straight up evidence, I will gladly show you if needed. Every other game for me is literally a killer from china while I'm connected to a west coast server, where I live.
Are you aware that this is happening to players? Because this wasn't mentioned during the live stream and that honestly makes me worried for the state of the game. I want this game to live on, and I understand that there will always be mixed feedback. And that's due to the fact that half of the people view this game casually, and the other have views it competitively.
If there is one thing I've noticed is that there is very poor communication with what's happening with the game, but that could just be me.
Comments
Not all actions of killers are registered on their end, its only the hits. Everything else needs server confirmation, like power, pallet/generator breaking, pick up, hooking, movement, et cetera et cetera. The killer is put at an disadvatage by dedicated servers as much survivors do.
The hits are literally the most important thing in the game. Sure the killer is at a SLIGHT disadvantage cause of a delay on actions, but survivors pretty much have no reaction time on looping, since the killer could easily do a small mind game on a safe pallet loop, and the survivor wouldn't know when to vault because by the time they do it, they get hit. There is a reason why killers using VPN to win games.