Is someone at BHVR trying to kill DBD?
Please read before you make fun of me.
I feel like BHVR had new devs who are in charge over what happens with the game. I've had this feeling after the RE chapter and I'm still thinking about this sometimes. Just think about everything that happened after the RE chapter: SBMM was added, Cheaters and Bots have been a huge issue(It has never been this bad), Optimization has been really really bad and the game has lost an insane amount of players in a short period of time. It makes me worried, it feels like someone at BHVR is trying to kill this game. Why? Maybe they work for another company and try to eliminate any competition. Anyone else felt like this or am i just going crazy?😅
Tagged:
BHVR
Comments
No.
I've thought of this before. Sabotage from within is always more common in companies than one would assume. It is very possible. Making certain suggestions/decisions that seemingly have a lot of passion behind them, only to already realize exactly what result they will have on the game as a whole over time. Pretty crazy to think about but its crossed my mind before, especially with BHVR. Who is to say? The truth would never come out regardless of if this "tin foil hat" theory actually turned out to be true or not.
They made me do it.
How could you!? 😫
😂
I mean you are right, we should never know but I just want to know if I'm the only person who was / is thinking this.
Everything there can be explained without even being bad, let alone someone trying to kill the game.
SBMM: An actively good idea that people within the community wanted. While it hasn't been implemented well, the community at large seems to have a tremendously poor understanding of why- think about how many times you've seen people say it "doesn't accurately measure skill".
Cheaters + Bots: A problem every game has to deal with that only gets worse as the game grows, and one that BHVR are simply having a hard time dealing with quickly. Certainly room for criticism, but there's nothing malicious about it on BHVR's end.
Optimisation: That's just inherently going to get worse as time goes on, and there are a lot of games that are poorly optimised. Again, something that can be criticised, but there's no need for conspiracy. A lot of games just generally aren't optimised well.
Playercount: While the game's average playercount has gone meaningfully down, I think, people always cite the dramatic falloff after the Resident Evil chapter without understanding that they're doing so (Steam numbers from July 2021 to Feb this year, in that infamous and damnable screenshot) and the game's playercount is still stable enough to not be in critical condition.
In general, the game isn't actually in as bad of a state as people like to claim it is.
Thank you for explaining. Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is true or not I just want to know if people thought about this or not. I really hope you are right and I might exaggerate it a bit sometimes but the game is in a very bad state in my opinion. I just want to have fun again.😥
I'd say quite the opposite. Legions add on and power rework was great, the results and transparency of the last SMMR test were encouraging, they had a big ban wave of cheaters, and at this moment seem to be listening to the right voices in the community more.
BHVR is run like any other company. Quarterly profits first, long-term health a distance second. Knowing what needs to be addressed is easy. Getting higher ups to approve it is another thing entirely.
At least they treat their employees well from what I hear
No crunch culture and they get weekends off, for a game studio these days that's quite a feat given the rest of the industry
I'd love to know tbh. I'd want an interview with whoever would've hypothetically done it so I can get the full picture.
True. I'll always give them a ton of credit for that. Other places in the industry sound downright psychotic with the hours they require
Also on the topic of this thread, while I don't think it's happening 1 recent occurence has bothered me greatly
I'm sure you're all aware of what I'm talking about if you follow dbd content creators/twitters and so on. How something like that happens in the first place baffles me but the fact that something many of us were looking forward to was prematurely spoiled ahead of time does make me wonder.
it happens all over the industry but this is the first time in a while it's happened with BHVR
honestly the horror stories i've heard
some ppl apparently had to go into therapy while working on Mortal Kombat 11/Last of Us 2 bc they had to watch real gore videos to 'get it right'. Not sure if it was mandated, I hope not but that bothers me on so many levels lol
I don’t think there are any nefarious intentions. There’s just no sense of urgency whatsoever to fix problems with the game. The player count, after falling dramatically from its peak, has been holding reasonably steady recently. This game has no serious competition. As long as there’s no existential threat to the company, they will continue to take their sweet time making changes that people are asking for. If you really want quick change, stop playing the game.
Repeat after me "good idea boss" that's how you run a company.
The goal of good decision makers is to encase themselves in a hard shell of subservient yes men, that's how stuff get's done. 👍️
I have no idea what you mean tbh.😅 I don't follow any fog whisperers anymore.
Yes, I'm asking a serious question but if you want to make fun of me feel free to do so.😃
Damn how do I word this
The recent 'rumours' circulating on soclal media about the upcoming anniversary chapter's content and alledgedly future chapter content afterwards. You know, people having screenshots of stuff they weren't meant to if you get what I mean
Yes, I understand now. Thank you!
Thank you for the answer (and for not making fun of me😉).
The steam charts data is not very reliable. It does not account for a lot of things like the game being added to epic games store and the fact that covid restrictions being lifted have allowed people to play less games and do other stuff.
I haven't really thought about this tbh. Thank you for your answer!
as far as player count no its not. no one wanted sbmm that as a whole is why most people left. and the main reason people are leaving is because its boring and they don't work on fixing core issues look at the state the game is in right now streamers don't even enjoy the game anymore they get on stream to get the viewer count up and leave to go play other stuff even the youtube viewership is down.
10 Reasons why Playstation is the Best Selling Platform. Good read.
https://www.thegamer.com/playstation-best-selling-platform/
You can't deny this. But tbh this is how it should be. You should treat your employees like that. The people that make the Music, Graphics, Maps, Characters and Cosmetics for example are extremely talented.
Honestly despite many of the games flaws, be it the new ones that come up or old ones that haven't been addressed yet - a lot of the more recent work is still quite incredibly well made - it's usually balance where issues arise but that's a tricky thing in a live service game I'm sure.
Even still I'm always finding random things to appreciate about the game. Whoever composes the music for BHVR is doing god's work. I cannot praise them enough
I couldn't agree more. BHVR has some extremely talented devs that (at least in my experience) keep this game alive and fun!
Everyone wanted a replacement for the emblem system. They wanted a more accurate and consistent matchmaker, and what that means is that what most people wanted was an SBMM system. Like I said, people have a generally poor understanding of what the flaws with the MMR systems actually are.
As for the player count, yes it is. Maybe it won't be sometime later, but right now, the player count is stable enough that the game isn't suffering tremendously for it. It'd be better if the numbers were higher, but the game isn't dying. You say the SBMM is why most people left, but the reason those steam numbers went down was that the Resident Evil chapter brought in a ton of new players who didn't all stick around, which is totally normal. Maybe some people did leave because of SBMM, but it's at best completely unprovable that it's why most left.
I can't speak to streamers. No comment.
I have looked at the state of the game right now. That's how I come to these conclusions, because it's not as bad as some people claim it is.
the game is awesome if the servers weren't broken and hit boxes weren't broken.
Believe it or not but I was excited for a better matchmaking system as well. I just don't think SBMM should be in this game. I had multiple friends who quitted becuase of SBMM. I think at this point BHVR is better of just removing it and try to focus on improving the ''old'' ranking system.
I still think you are right about the playerbase and RE. Not everyone stayed, which was to be expected but I also feel like the ''loss of players'' is not just RE.
I literally agreed about the player count its still top 30 on steam. but yea the emblem system was wayyyyyy better than this sbmm doesn't work the way they have it kills and escapes don't define a dbd match. I have like 2k hours and the state of the game is pretty bad my whole discord yet small only about 100 people who play dbd and no one is ever on dbd anymore and thats just my small group I see many streamers hate streaming it now also its in a pretty bad state. The rubber banding alone makes it unplayable.
Oh, I apologise- I misunderstood what you meant by "no its not", my bad.
Anyway, the emblem system was materially much worse than the system we have now, and even worse-- they have similar flaws, inconsistency, but the MMR system is inconsistent because of flaws in matching and the emblem system was inconsistent because it was inherently bad at judging a player's skill.
The MMR system, however, is very good at judging how consistently skilled someone is. Kills and escapes don't define a DBD match, no, but they are the win condition, and how consistently you win over a large batch of games is indicative of your consistent skill level. That's what I mean by people not really understanding the MMR system.
yea I get that part but the way they implement it makes for more camping by killers and less risky gameplay by survivors. if they want to fix mmr use the pip system. The same way it judges if you get a pip or not should just judge how much mmr you get.
SBMM would be fine if it wasn't for the poor implementation of calculating mmr.
One side is a team of 4, but they get treated as if it's a 1v1. Meaning regardless how you do up to the point you die doesn't matter. While they added a system to reduce the impact of mmr loss for each other survivor who died before you, they didn't consider to add the opposite of lessing the impact of mmr loss for each survivor who successfully escapes after you death. There's no incentize to go for end game saves and it simply sucks to survive til the last gen pops and then instantly die because of something like rancor or noed + camped.
Cheaters and Bots really isn't a new issue, just cheaters being far more open since the actual moderation of people who cheat is painfully slow and often inadequate. It's also too much work for the average player to report them.
Optimization has always been bad. It's just the map reworks are making it much more obvious because now more objects in the game are demanding more resources. And the devs are really slow to address these issues.
I wouldn't worry about the game being intentionally sabotage. It's more the devs are really slow to address long standing issues and often don't even understand their own game to properly implement fixes.
''Also, I'm going to make fun of anyone who thinks there's a secret conspiracy to "kill" their own game. That's just not what a rational person comes to as far as conclusions.''
You can make fun of it but it has happened before to other games as well. They work for a different company and try to eliminate their competition by ruining their game. Again, I'm not saying that this is happening. I'm just asking if I was the only one that was thinking about this, I'm not saying that this is happening.
The reason this game is afloat is that Michael Meyers, Freddy, Stranger Things, Ash, Bubba, Ghostface, and The Ring are in the game and people buy COsmetics. No one would even pay to play it without Killers and the COsmetics.
It makes me wonder too tbh, also don't forget that the best devs left the team in the last year(McLean, horvath, pat, not queen) they are all gone and there's for sure a reason behind it, at the anniversary stream we will see their intentions for the upcoming year and I'm curious if is somehow connected. But anyway, whatever they do or announce Tuesday, i have no hope because they didn't keep any promise from Last year roadmap anyway(beside boons)
I'm closing this thread here, the title alone is frankly not something that should be posted on our official platform.
Everyone working on Dead by Daylight, wants the game to continue to grow as it has over the last few years and to insinuate that there are people internally actively trying to "kill the game" is disingenuous at best.
As for developers that have moved on, that happens in any company, people move on to new challenges. However, the core staff behind DbD have been in situ for many years now - meaning Creative Director, Design Director as well as many of the designers.