How many players have to quit playing before BHVR fixes solo queue? Huge drop in players...
Looking at steamcharts, this game isn't looking too good. 28k average players and dropping, the lowest it's been since 2020...
Players, and your community leaders have been stressing that solo queue needs help, weather it be informational, basekit perks, perk chnahes, or major ganeplay changes, yet BHVR has stuck to thier stubborn ways and not only ignored it, but blamed thier own players for the major unbalance in thier game.
I'm just honestly curious to how long BHVR will continue to ignore and punish thier majority playerbase? Does it have to drop to 20k? 15k? 10k? What's the magic number that starts sounding off the alarms at BHVR so they finally start listening to thier own community and do something about how awful the solo queue experience is?
Comments
Why is it so bad for a well equipped SWF noobstomping a killer with help of a perk, however it remains unaddressed for a well equipped killer to noobstomp survivors?
Both is considered bullying in your description.
A killer that camps and guarantees a kill in endgame with or without assistance of perks could be considered bullying to the one survivor since it is uncounterable.
There's information still being denied to solo Q such as "What perks do my teammates have". If I KNOW my teammates have deliverance for example, I know it's completely unnecessary to go get a save and possibly put myself in danger. SoloQ teammates though DONT know that and might cost them.
Nobody said it wasn't an issue, the problem was it was a MASSIVE issue before the nerf and didn't really fix the intended flaw to begin with. In fact, I remember back then most killers just committed to getting DS'd because swapping targets risked even more active DS strikes. So why not tunnel the one and get the 1k at the very least?
The problem is DBD, whether we like it or not, has these design flaws by the nature of the game itself. Throwing overpowered perks, combinations and broken strategies isn't going to solve it across the board on either side.
Again, you can argue killers using slow down perks is "abuse".
Slugging could even be considered abuse.
Mostly BHVR's development time. If you look at everything else that hasn't been addressed or touched, it takes them a massive amount of time.
It's not entirely on them being lazy or whatever either, if you think about it they have to constantly deal with changes people want with killer kits, behind the scenes bug fixes and counter-cheating, coming up with new content to keep themselves afloat and other development responsibilities. I'm not sure how many people at BHVR are on-board with DBD itself either, the manpower could also be a problem.
The vast majority of the playerbase is on all of the consoles, and it's not really that close, with most of them on the PlayStations. We get to see Steam numbers, and probably can find those for Epic, but unfortunately we cannot ever see the numbers for the consoles.
All we can do is assume the patterns are similar for the number of players across all platforms, and that isn't too unreasonable, but it really is a guess.
It is just a massive pet peave for me there is double standards to balance. In almost every case, the feelings of the killer is always the most important.
A survivor hung by a NOED totem is no less of a problem than a survivor using their one time perk to escape at the end of the match. It is simply wrong to nerf one for reason X without looking at similar situations for the other side.
Even NOED has been nerfed crazy amounts though. Unless the killer hooks next to the totem (which at that point the other survivors should just take their losses and leave) the others can find it because it gets highlighted.
Really if you think hard, killer side got plenty of nerfs. Lots of gen regression got hit hard too. And speaking as a Sadako main, she is getting unjustifiably nerfed compared to the recent PTB on accusations that make really no sense if you sit down and think about her power and counterplay.
And again, a lot of things could be fixed or alleviated by basekit design choices. Personally I think the anti-3 gen system coming up is a good example of the right steps to take. A limit on regression events and a hard counter to gen tapping, something both sides should praise if they know anything about the struggles of both sides.
Not saying it's all perfect mind you, but with BHVRs track record on nerfs and buffs, we take the little victories.
Please tell me again how I'm a killer main. I'll add it to the massive pile, right next to the other massive pile of people accusing me of being a survivor main every time I argue for something in favour of survivors.
The fact is I enjoy playing survivor, inspite of dying fairly often, because I find it to be fun and currently fairly well balanced, because I still enjoy solo queue and escape often enough, because I enjoy the horror aspect and the rush of escaping against the odds.
I'm probably more of a survivor main than a lot of the self-professing survivor mains who only enjoy it when they stand at the exit line teabagging.
This playerbase has some massive problems. One is the us vs. them, "role main" divide that makes people chronically unable to have rational opinions on the balance on the game. The other is their complete inability to handle losing, in a pvp game, where your opponent is also trying to win. And to top it all off, this isn't your typical pvp game, it's asymmetrical, which comes with it's own host of nuances, not least the fact that a 50% kill rate isn't actually balanced. Far, far too many DBD players are abysmally lost in these terrible attitudes.
As a survivor, you will die. You're supposed to. You are a fraction of the killers multi-point objective, and escaping is an all-or-nothing prize. To believe that as a survivor you "should" be escaping 50% or more is like saying killers should be getting a 4K every other game. Escaping is the best outcome you can acheive as a survivor, not the only outcome.
Kinda. But you're kinda not reading the part where old ds was used as a free healthstate for survivors to punish killers who actually played the way survivors wanted them to
The killer either ate the ds or lost the chase because of the bodyblock. It lead to a really unhealthy way to play where the killer was punished for playing how survivors wanted them to
That is all true but we know that when it comes to big changes, they can and will make these in due time. Slog Merchant for example got 2 reworks since her release. The upcoming changes are all very ambitious too. So, if they were to push this (especially since it doesn't take up as many resources as reworking a killer for example), they could definitely do it in a reasonable amount of time.
I fully understand that they only have so much bandwidth but increasing the priority on this change would be reasonable and shouldn't delay other adjustments too much. The visual implementation of such a chat wheel is about the hardest thing to do. The rest is very basic, once you know exactly how you want to do it. And that also is a thing of maybe 3 days to figure out (and that's generous). So I trust, it wouldn't take them longer than 3 weeks to design something like this and have it in a decent state. Among other things.
In DBD mobile they have such a thing just with emotes. If they were to do that without emotes, it would save them the time of creating new animations. This really isn't the most complex thing to do. It's just very low on the list of priorities. Which is a shame as far as I am concerned. I would like to see some discussions other than how solo queue is unbearable for a change and this would pretty much allow them to do everything they claim SWFs have as an advantage.
It's not a conclusion, moreover an assumption that can be made. The reason one system may experience a drop whilst another doesn't can be anything from system issues, new games and so on. Comparing the Steam Chart alongside Nightlight shows some clear descrepencies where both shows player counts going opposite ways.
Besides that, even if there are drops it's impossible to blame it on a single aspect. Things are more complicated than that.
Players pick up and drop games. New players are not going to play DBD on PC exclusively through Steam. The new players that would normally replace outgoing steam users would now have another option to choose from. That is how it takes away from the steam user base. Live service games will pick up and drop players constantly.
Their reply to solo queue issues in the last Reddit AMA indicates they don't see any way to help improve that experience. Or at the very least it's not of concern to them. Simply put, this game is viable for swfs. Solo queue, you simply get what you get.
I theorise that the reason matchmaking is so bad in solo queue is because long term survivors are leaving, but they're quickly replaced by newer survivors. So there's a larger pool of newer/inexperienced players, which is why the still hanging on long term survivors with like 3k hours are getting paired with survivors with like 30 hours. They have more than enough new survivors joining every day to make up for the ones that leave, so that's not a priority to them. The ones that want to stick around will eventually join a swf, while the rest are just kill rate fodder until they're over it.
The real question is what can they add to the solo qs to improve? What's left? The only thing anyone can think of is an emote saying "I'm going for hook." They have that info in the portrait messages. You see who gets off gen. The information is there, solo q just don't have the "this is my friend" drive swf do to play around the info
BHVR could give soloQ superpowers and they'd still find ways to lose. There's little more they can do other than try to instill more basic skills and game sense into the average player, and that is very difficult. Better tutorials and tips would be a good start though.
Less challenges that basically encourage throwing the game would also be a plus
Probably not much, hence why I said the game is really only viable for swfs. Unless you get lucky with matchmaking, but if my theory is correct then there's probably very little they can do about that either.
I personally don't buy into the idea that players would leave Steam to play on other systems.
I'm not saying it can't happen, but there is no significant driving force that should be causing Steam players to move platforms by the thousands. So while everyone is free to draw their own conclusions, I suspect console's YTD data looks very similar, albeit at a much larger scale.
Below is Steam Chart's player count data since the release of Nemesis (arguably the peak of DBD). Unless the game was to be a meteoric hit following Nemi's release, some fallout was expected after that time. However, it is interesting to note that the numbers just keep falling.
And now with the new boring, dull meta of gen blocking and regression BHVR just created, we'll see a lot less players playing including myself.
But it just truth ,if you go to see the patch note date and the player count.
Every time a killer buff, killer rework ,new killer, new events update the number go up.
And every time a killer nerf update the number went down,remember last year we had 3 big update nerfing killer back to back and the player number reached the lowest number in 3 years.
And then the new event come out saving the world.
My thought on the problems dbd faces:
I think the biggest problem is matchmaking, and it is intentionally (for whatever reason).
The devs said, the mmr algorithym can very accuratly predict the outcome of a match.
the most balanced outcome of a match, in my opionion, would be a draw, a 2 kill and 2 escape scenario.
However, most matches i get are very one sided, either the killer steamrolling the team, or the team leaving without the killer having much of a chance.
Those binary outcomes are much easier to predict, anyway, and since the mostly used metric for the game health and balance by the devs is kill/escape average, the devs can argue with those.
But that these come from matches that are mostly stale and unfun is found in no statistic.
I'm glad you enjoy losing so much. The game must be a lot more fun for you.
The game does disagree with what you've outlined though considering the heavy punishments to ranking and BP gains for survivors as a result of dying. It's very clear that you're not supposed to die often.
The problem with modern DBD is that people are too hung up on the asymmetrical aspect of the game and mistakenly want to balance the game around the story.
Whether or not you play killer or survivor you are still a full person. Not 1/4th of a person.
Survivor is far too reliant on teammates in a game that does nothing to enforce team play aside from maybe having an increased chance of escaping, which is lessened by the ability to take perks and offerings for hatch or exit gates.
If the game actively punished players for playing selfishly and removed selfish aspects of the game then it would make sense for individual survivor power to be weak.
Solo Queue is not a gordion knot; it just requires hard stances and intervention from BHVR rather than inconsequential incentives to maybe get players to consider playing differently.
If we're going to keep balancing the game as is, then scoring needs to be rebalanced around hooks/chases rather than kills/escapes. If killer is going to continue being """Power Role""'" and have the ability to tunnel and camp all they want; Then survivors should be able to solo queue, run the killer for multiple chases, die, and still double pip and get tons of BP.
As long as the above continues to not be true the game will continue to feel terrible for survivors imo.
Emotes won't solve the issue of relative skill differences between teammates. There's more than one problem in solo queue. But the biggest problem is one or two teammates usually being significantly worse than the other two to the point that games aren't winnable if the killer focuses on the weaker players and ignores the better ones.
Emotes don't fix that. They'd be good for 4 players on equal footing who are more or less on the same page. But solo queue lobbies often have 1 or 2 players who understand pre-positioning/spacing/etc and 1 player Urban Evading around a rock in a dead zone. Vastly different skill levels and approaches to the game. It would be like calling a play in a basketball game with one teammate who doesn't know what a pick and roll is.
To killers, every game is a 1v4. In reality, a true 1v4 is when they're playing against a 4-man swf. A solo team game is 1v1v1v1v1. People will tell solo players to be happy if they die but their team mates survived, yet it doesn't feel good when those team mates did nothing to help or were actively detrimental to the team. I'd rather die and be rewarded for my contributions to the team, I agree.
I bring up emotes as that's a change a lot of solo q ask for. If you kept reading, you'll notice I say it's a stupid idea
This is the main problem with the idea that solo queue needs buffs. In the end it won’t really matter. There’s no buff that can make a random not bring the killer to your 97% done gen. No buff can make a random not instant throw a god pallet without looping. No buff can make a random not crouch walk to you when you’re hooked and you go second stage because they take forever.
Bad players are bad. You can’t buff bad players without breaking the game for everyone else.
The devs don't want to fix the game and that's fine. I just won't play it anymore and I'm a day oner. Been playing since 2016.