A Theory on The DC Epidemic: Perk Changes & MMR
I've been thinking about this for a while and came up with a theory about why so many people quit at the slightest inconvenience, an epidemic that pains me to say has stopped me from playing.
I just want to test this idea with everyone and see if anyone agrees.
I think it's the burnout of course, but why? It has to be slightly more than that and my idea is the combination of Perk Changes and MMR.
Let me explain:
You see, if you were a good player because of your perks - and let's be honest - everyone is helped by them - you won 🏆 a lot!
As a result, your MMR kept increasing of course. But, when your perks got nerfed, your mmr didn't change.
In order not to make this too long, my point is perhaps way too many players are in an mmr they should no longer be in but because it's so hard to drop now, they are stuck.
I think this also leads to "hot takes" with each side demanding perks be buffed and nerfed long after they've been available.
What do you think? Am I onto something or way off base?
Again, please be respectful 🙏
I'm a Freddy Killer main and a Nancy Survivor main. I played both roles until this new trend just made me say enough is enough and I'd like to see it significantly be reduced.
Thank you 😊 🙏
Comments
I don't think it is subjective. Leaving your teammates behind is objectively a bad thing to do. That is why we have punishments for DCing.
If aren't going to play the match, then don't click "play". The exception is if something happened irl and you have to leave, but some cases are clearly rage quits.
It isn't objective by the definition of the word. They are the rules put in place by the developers based on their subjective view of how the game should be played. The issue is that people WANT to play these matches, but they want to have FUN.
There might be something to the MMR thing in so far as, iirc, once you somehow make it past a certain mark you can't drop below that threshold anymore. If, due to changes to mechanics, perks etc. that lands you in perpetually unwinnable situations (if you're up against someone who's too far away from where you're at there's literally zero point; you won't be able to learn from that experience. It's like trying to read a novel in French after having had French at school for two years…. ten years ago and that novel is the first French thing you see since then; it ain't gonna work).
There is loss prevention, but I think only 5% of the player population is in that bracket. It's not easy to reach. Between that and MMR being out for 3 years at this point, I imagine most people who are there can survive there. Obviously, there is a skill distribution within that, so some players in that top bracket will be relatively bad compared to others.
I have had people insta-DC against my Doctor as soon as they hear my static blast. Just so fast it's gotta be an ALT+F4. I don't know. Maybe people just only want to play exactly the way they want to play, but there's 5 people in a match and not everyone gets their way all the time.
But there is no room for it to be contested here. Disconnecting is objectively a bad thing to do, it is poor sportsmanship. Hence why many games out there will punish such actions.
Would you consider slugging out for 4 minutes poor sportsmanship? I would, but it is not an actionable offense that leads to bans. What you consider poor sportsmanship and what another considers poor sportsmanship is subjective. It is objectively true that you will get banned for poor sportsmanship because the rules based on subjective viewpoints are there.
Yeah, it's a big problem. Before they hid prestiges, I had one match where I was dodged 8 times before a killer stayed simply because I had a p100.
Therefore, disconnecting is objectively poor sportsmanship in DBD. Hence why your account receives a punishment when you do it.
If someone disconnects because they have an IRL emergency, would they then be considered a poor sport? How about a bad internet connection? Subjectively, I think those are valid reasons to disconnect, but the system does not. A player is penalized regardless of the reason; however, in reality the situation has nuance that any system cannot accommodate for. Nobody is disagreeing that you won't get penalized for disconnecting, the topic at hand is trying to diagnose why, despite a penalty, people continue to do so.
Nope, but I said that on my previous reply. These things happen from time to time. The problem is that DCs / hook suicides are happening way too much these days, and it is very unlikely all of them are caused by irl problems.
So let's keep the goalposts in place and talk about "go-nexts" on hooks. I must again reiterate what I said in my last post: if you solve the underlying problem, people will stop leaving matches. It's really as simple as that. You're focusing on the wrong problem.
In my opinion and also honesty I know that its because of the constant survivor nerf perks=dead hard/old iron will(no exhaust) circle/spine chill, adrenaline (distortion ofc) and am sure you know the rest so I wont list all of them. Yeah killer perks get nerf too but no where as bad as survivors version.
Survivor base things nerfed such as injure speed boost reduced/ great wiggle skill checks removed that use to give faster wiggle off. Finally terrible smaller clutter filled maps with like 50 + hooks and unsafe loops and pallets(haddon field the king of it)( I know the extra hooks was because of old boil over abuse and maps was way bigger and what not but this is not a thing anymore )
Honestly I remember before 6.1 days people rarely if never dc, survivors even seem to rather be chased or even goof around and not be on gens all the time and do more fun stuff and not even hide when good perks like circle use to be good for healing and recovery, even if survivors also lost they where very less toxic or not toxic at all.
Then these latest killers are having so much antiloop amongst other broken things in their kit or add ons. I remember I use to play and stream this game everyday even after my 8 hour full time job so its as if am working from 8am to like 12am lol, now as time progress the most I play is maybe 1 day(just to do my 8 hours in) and honestly its more am forcing myself to do it since I do not have a major game I can think of to keep my viewers and losing 90% of my swfs during these time too is no longer better, its a miracle if ever some how get lucky with a full 4 man as even having a 3 man , I tend to get the random who kamikazee on first hook when down fast.
I pretty much agree with everything here. Those things are ruining my experience. The map changes are my biggest issue. Every map they touch becomes worse for survivors than what they did to the one before. It is not fun to play on a super small deadzone with terrible loops.
The nerfs to good perks get out of hand too, they constantly nerf perks that don’t need to get touched and far too often they make those perks useless afterwards instead of making fair changes, which keep them in a good spot.
I literally said earlier to get rid of lobby dodging, last second switching, and hookicides all together.
it would make the game so much better.
You are addressing the symptoms of the problem not the problem itself. It's not that hard to understand.
2v8 > 1v4
In my experience, most of the DCs come from the following cases:
-A survivor is quickly knocked down in the first chase.
-One survivor dies fast and all his premade friends decide to leave with him.
-The survivor, usually with a previous cocky attitude, is humiliated by a mindgame or a perk he didn't expect.
-An undesired killer/map.
In one word, "ragequitting".
People are just burnt out but they don't know how to take breaks from the game and come back when they feel better.
Here’s how it actually went down:
So now it's been a snowball effect of having always at least one survivor who will give up if they're hooked first, so the rest of the players have their game ruined and some start doing it as well.
It mostly burnout... that said there's a lot more to it then general burnout
Killer burnout: Survivors that play against a specific Killer more then 5 times in 1 session have all of the reason
Killer playstyle/perks: also playing against the same playstyle is just as draining
Maps: for me specifically this would be a reason for a lot of burnout... playing on the same Map more then 5 times
Player(s) mindstate: after playing a game for as long as some of us start to see any pattern in any of those^^^ points will cause us to DC at the drop of a hat
But as far as I can think/remember your threoy does hold up... us as player get comfortable with certain things
I think there are three main reasons why people dc. 1.) They don't enjoy playing against the killer. 2.) A sandbagging or total potato teammates who make the game completely miserable 3.) They've grown to understand map pressure and snowballing, so they understand early losses mean they won't be escaping anyway.
It doesn't help that so much of the game (including the MMR) revolves around escaping. If the games at four gens and everybody is on death hook, there's not much of a reason to even bother touching a gen, as the killer is just gonna mow you down anyway. I feel like there needs to be more XP and more bp for doing things like gens, altruism, etc. It does suck to work your butt off all game to get left on hook as your teammates run through the exit gate.
The worst is that you done your part in helping sorry team mates who can't do nothing but gens cause they get down in 5 seconds in chase and you gotta carry them to do it and killer is not evening camping or they do not have noed and it's not something like Bubba.
Had a match on dead saloon vs a doctor who was pretty bad couldn't catch me all game yet catches my team 2 times each so I would force him to come for me as they was on last gen, then ofc I get down by crutch need and what's crazy is a person did cleanse it and one was getting chased yet Dwight as they typically are is spinning and t bagging at open exist gate instead of getting me where I died.
Dwight ofc is the one at 4th place and am in 1st even though I died with 0 hooks and it's those very same players who gets karma to them and when it happens to them, they come into your stream to tell you off. Its the same reason now I start being some what selfish now to random and do the same thing unless it's my swf ill happily die for them only.
I dislike Skull Merchant as much as the next person, but you're giving her way too much credit. It's not like anyone went "oh wow disconnecting has no penalty" because of her. Keep in mind that the knight was released just before her and people were looking for a killer that wasn't just another anti-loop zone killer. The problem is the killers that have been released since 6.1.0 (pinhead) have had built in misery to each of their kits. I must reiterate that I don't condone DCs, but both sides need to be fun, and the past 2 years of killers just haven't been facilitating that for survivors.
tbh, with the virtually endless epic accounts I've honestly started to wonder if the 5% even mean anything
I've played since Oni was released, I DEFIANTLY see the writing on the wall was majority of matches and the outcomes.
If they add rewards like that, I'll just stay in game, even if it's a Knight or SM. Currently, playing survivor is not rewarding compared to killer BP. Now If you get tunneled at 5 gens, you'll get ~9k BP and killer get around 25k. So why not commit suicide and try to find more enjoyable game where you get more points.
Hard to say. We really only have BHVR's word on MMR and player distribution. Other sources claim differently, but I'd wager that they're script kiddies who don't understand the tools they're using. Nor do they have a connection to any backend database+access to a data dictionary. If they did, we'd have much greater problems than the occasional hacker.
The problem itself is survivors ragequitting because they have a way to bypass the DC penalty, a symptom of that is people make excuses to try and justify such behaviour.
What needs to be understood is no matter how much the game is changed those people will always ragequit at the earliest inconvenience as long as there is an option to do so with no repercussions.
By your rationale lobby dodging shouldn’t be removed, they should gut everything killers dislike and find unfun to try and make them not shop for lobbies like survivors do with match shopping.
giving up plague is not really perks/MMR problem tbh, but instead a mixture of players being fed with one type of very toxic mentality and devs basically rewarding those players. As a cherry on top, you have people who are burnt out from playing dbd so much that they will give at every slight inconvenience.
I refuse to believe it was due to “balance issues” alone. Yes, there are extremely obnoxious builds and playstyles that almost intentionally invite “going next”, but that doesn’t explain the sheer amount of it happening right now. People are going next in perfectly winnable games, throwing them in the process.
SM is the perfect example. It never was a balance issue with her. Was she obnoxious? That’s ultimately subjective. Yet even after her, what, fourth major update, people are still going next against her.
I say remove hook suiciding altogether. It’s become its own symptom regarding low survivor morale, and thus self-perpetuating. That way, people are actually forced to play, and in doing so may actually figure out how to counter the strategies/killers they so despise.
Yes, forced. You queue’d up, you’re here to play a game. If that turns out to be an issue for you, the dc button is right there. Take responsibility and either play the game, or eat the penalty.
We’ll figure out the balance issues from there.
That isn't the problem. Even if you get rid of "going-nexts" on hook, people will just stop playing the game altogether. The game needs to be fun.
My logic is allowing both sides to be fun simultaneously to facilitate people wanting to play instead of giving up. Since, after all, it's a game and that's the entire point of it existing. To be fun for the end user.
The majority do find it fun and stick games out, a lot of the fun is sucked out by people ragequitting and it being rare to actually play a normal game for those who enjoy the game and want to.
The people who wouldn’t stick the game out without an easy way out obviously don’t want to play the game and should play something else maybe come back after a break. A lot would not ragequit if there was no easy way out option.
Fun is subjective and you’ll never please everyone; someone has to win and someone has to lose. People who only have fun when winning will ragequit as long as there’s an easy out option when they aren’t winning.
ummm...the point is that people that are clearly burnt out from the game stop spreading their misery to others and eventually stop playing the game for some time if that's what it takes for community to be a healthier place.
Atm, people are visibly tired of the game because many have been playing dbd and nothing but dbd for such a long time, it's literally a normal thing to take a break once in a while, dbd community is just obsessed.
Also by removing the easy ways to remove oneself from the game without a penalty, maybe some of these people will realize they don't actually like the game and stop playing altogether.
I feel like many of the constant hook suiciders just don't enjoy DBD as a whole
If the majority find it fun, then why are we even talking about people leaving matches as if it's a widespread problem, since the majority of people stay because they're having so much fun? That statement is contradictory to the reality of the situation.
Burnout is a scapegoat. Burnout is a symptom of the game not being fun. People don't get tired of a game if the odds of having a fun match are high.
Even if you get rid of "going-nexts" on hook, people will just stop playing the game altogether.As a person who thinks they should get rid of the hook suicides and doing so would improve the game, I'll admit this is a concern. BHVR does have to worry if it would just lead to people quitting the game and moving on and, while its easy for players to say 'we didn't them anyway', BHVR as a company does.
That said, I think they are ways to work around it as it causes severe problems. There's no way they can ever make a game that people won't want to quit in some circumstances, and they need a mechanic that makes it not so penalizing to teammates. Even if they tried something like 'you can dc on hook for no dc penalty, but you gain no BP or Pips, hook suicides are prohibited during the first 4 minutes of the game' I think it would be a massive game improvement.
Because it only takes one quitter to ruin the game for the other 4 players, so there’s enough ragequitting babies spoiling the game for the majority of players who actually enjoy the game and just want a normal match.
burnout is a symptom of not having fun, yes. But what exactly is fun for people?
What exactly can you assume is fun for ppl who bring meta perks and addons on items into the match? quite a huge part of community)? Winning is the only answer here. Yes, there are ppl who like to goof off too, but they are not the majority.
And then, since winning is the major fun aspect of the players, they would do whatever it takes to win, right?
Well, the case with dbd community is...they think taking specific loadout into the game is enough to feed their fun hunger, while they don't have to basically do anything in order to improve so that they can further feed the fun hunger.
So, since they lack one critical aspect of the game, they will give up at the slightest inconvenience where they assume game isn't going their way, and thus, burnout happens.
I think they should test it out for a week or so. Don't tell anyone when it's going to start so people dont just plan something beforehand. I'm indifferent on it either way but at least they'd have a week or 2 of knowledge on how it would play out. Or make it a "bug" in a select number of games /wink /wink.
The reason the burnout argument doesn't work is because of how long dbd has been around. It has existed for more than 8 years. Why all of a sudden now of all times is it allegedly widespread and not a long time ago? 8 years is a very arbitrary time to say "yep it's burnout."
It is true that the definition for fun is subjective to everyone, but then what is the "fun" being facilitated by the current state of the game since morale is at an all time low?
So then 20% of people in a match are not having fun AT LEAST. That is a massive margin.
because depipping removal recently was the final factor that made people completely legitimize giving up so easily.
If you remember the times before where DC penalty was bugged and nobody received it for DCing, there were plagues of people giving up to the point where game was barely playable.
All in all, burnout is widespread for quite some time, removal for another specific sort of punishment for giving up and community considering bots as reason why they are more lighthearted to give up than ever a trigger for what's happening nowadays. Freedom for cherrypicking matches is at the all-time high.
People have not cared about depips since long before that. The better argument would be to choose back when they changed it so you could no longer depip out of a rank, but even still, that would imply people were going next back then as frequently as they are now, and they simply weren't. Removing depips has not affected that to any meaningful degree.
I'm not sure what you mean. - I'm just saying that between known instances of people buying accounts for hacking and burning through a dozen of them within a week or two (quite a few of them speak quite openly about it and sometimes even stream what they're doing) and there being absolutely no shortage of fresh accounts for that, I think you kinda have to wonder how many of the recorded players are actual players and how that affects any out-of-all-players-statistics.
Tbh, if they removed 100hrs or less accounts from these statistics I think they'd be a lot more accurate. - But that's besides the point of the topic.
then why did depipping removal have such a positive feedback and why did intensity of people giving up rise sharply after that change?
I claimed it didn't have an effect and you just claimed it did. The small amount of positive feedback was for people who want more bloodpoints at the end of the month. Pips have only been tied to bloodpoints for years now. The people disconnecting from matches do not care about bloodpoints, let alone pips.
its not mmr, in the past survivors dc even more without the dc penalty and i mean in the times of the rank system
My swf with 25k hours combined and 4x p100 was dodged 31 times. Beat it