Who is or has recently stopped playing and why?
I want to give the community a thread to express why they have stopped playing or why they plan to stop playing - from both killer and survivor mains.
Personally, when 2v8 ends, it is very unlikely I will boot up again until the next 2v8. While 2 killers 1 survivor is not fun, the mode IMO is still more enjoyable than 1v4. I am scared to see what these 57 perks they are changing will be and what damage they will cause this time all in the name of diminishing returns which had very little effect on the game.
The MMR changes missed the mark.
The repeated broken promises over the last year and a half are unbelievable.
The Judgment was less than thought out all while trying to gaslight the community into the "well you designed it" belief. No, we did not design this.
Overall, I just don't have fun on survivor anymore. Killer is absolutely boring because it's just too easy especially now with the MMR changes.
These are just my opinions that I am voicing while giving the opportunity for other people to do the same. Not really here for a debate. Maybe the devs will read through this and see all voices in one place then maybe actually listen to some of it. I feel like its a futile attempt but there was a point where I loved this game and I would like that to come back.
Comments
The primary issue is that any small thing can make a match hopeles within seconds of it starting for survivors and then it looses all meaning. The simplest effort would have been to try something—like anything at all—from the anti-cheese ptb they'd already made and then adjust it accordingly. Right now I'd like them to make Elusive and Haste at least 20s off hook. That can't be abused if the Endurance stays 10. I don't think percentages are really that relevant because there are so many variables. Some people 8 hook and let everyone go. Some people go for fun chases and get themselves killed without a care. Some people, like me, obsess over numbers over gameplay. There's too many mindsets for those mass percentages to be important to me.
Though I have a more complicated idea, a different take on matchmaking/ranked mode.
I'd like to see them go back to something like the old emblem system (and tighten it up) but with different elements at different levels. So the bottom levels get 20s of full BT, the next is 15, then 10, then 5. Different anti-camp and slug as well, like slugs can stand up at a lower tier, like in 2v8. Adjusted gen speeds like 2v8 as well. Then you can kind of choose your sweat level. If iri tier is too sweaty you fall back to gold or whatever. Perks should be tiered as well, with stronger/weaker/additional effects at upper levels. Iri I could even be perkless. This way different levels would have thier own balance. It'd be a different game at each level but we are all already all playing a different game than one another, even just in the forum. Some have 100 hours, some have 10k. Some play comp, some goof off with friends. Some only care about half the game. Some are lying about their experiences to get what they want, which effects everyone if it happens. 2v8 already has the idea in place, they just need to be combined with regular mode in a way that pleases everyone, and a sliding scale of difficulty on a single mode makes the most sense to me.
And I don't want to see one single accommodation made for CCs. Hour long wait at iri 1? Cope. We have pwyw now too. Go play survivor. They need accurate queues for these people. I don't ever want to play against momo again as a mid-level player soloqing just to be another notch in his winsteak. Matchmaking won't fix it. A bigger change is needed.
I think people argue over the wrong things, I don't see how a greater appreciation for the basic game wouldn't benefit everyone. what I mean by that is basically that, while things have changed over the years mechanically, the actual core gameplay is just the exact same. that, by nature, is what's causing a much higher ratio of Survivor main fatigue over killer main fatigue because for people that play exclusively killer, there is real tangible content in the form of a new killer and killer power/addons in every single chapter, but for the survivor it's three more (usually bad) perks and a different skin to run them on.
When you consider that disparity and the fact that BHVR balances the game around perks rather than base gameplay, the survivor is disproportionately impacted. this is because changing perks is akin to changing basekit for survivors since they have no power and are bound to six bringable items (three of which are borderline useless, one of which is entirely useless (Fog Vial) and four perk slots (obviously 16 perk slots for an entire survivor team but lets be honest a very small percentage of survivors are picking perks to compliment their teammates perks, that's just SWFs, and a good portion of SWFs are just picking things to annoy the killer.
I would rather BHVR take an entire year, or even more than that, and instead of getting the next chapter or the next killer, they would just address the staleness of the actual core gameplay. at the heart of DBD is not a comp game, it's a horror game and when horror icons and original horror characters become bland stat merchants the game is failing for both sides. I'd reason that's for two things: when a killer is otherwise uninteresting the only thing to keep people playing them is whether or not they can win with them, that's why so many killer players are distressing over winrate/perk builds all of the time, because there's actually really not much to soundly differentiate the killers, if I wanted to win I would play blight over Ghostface because… Blight has better stats…. that's not good, not because Blight has better stats but because Killers should have draw for individuality not for stats. and this also negatively effects the survivors because it feels less like an engaging challenge to face the different killers and more "what form of pain is up next".
Ideally doesn't it benefit literally everyone to move the game in the direction of: Every killer alters the main objective (bend the game around the killers individually rather than bend the killers around the game) which doesn't mean load into an entirely different game, keep the core win conditions the same but I think every survivor player would appreciate solidified and important ways to interact with the killers that can actually help the team as opposed to most killer interactions being a net negative for the survivors… on the other side, killers have a reason to be played, even the ones with very low playrates right now because.. they're actually different, and not in a "better at 3 genning / better at chase / better at slugging kind of way, but in a way that's seriously different. and I think balancing survivor perks across the board, or killer perks for that matter… is even achievable, BHVR should always balance around the individual killers. if Blight is too strong, actually change the blight, or if the clown has an issue with a certain survivor perk… actually change the clown… expecting perks to be within the same realm of viability in an asymm game is just unreasonable and it's making people angry.
I say all of that to say, at the minimum, as a long time survivor player, I probably will not return to playing the game consistently unless something along these lines changes… nevermind tunneling/slugging/camping… the gameplay on the survivor side is stale and that's really not the fault of killer players when you boil it down to the basics of the game, we just haven't been given anything new that's worth doing… Invocations and Fog Vials are really it…
For context, I've been playing since 2019, started out as a killer main and have slowly shifted to being a 50/50 player (I probably reached fully even split in like 2022) and now to about a 60/40 surv player. I have only played solo queue (well, I have played in SWF like 4-5 times, the last time probably in 2020). I have about 6K hours.
As recently as last year I was a player who would iri 1 both roles every single season. I haven't done that once this year, and more often than not it's bronze/silver. I'm definitely trending toward burnout. I've had phases like this over the years, but they only usually lasted 3-4 weeks. This is like 9 months. I log in, hit my dailies like it's my job, and then log off.
There are a few reasons I may quit soon, I think; some of them have been discussed in this thread. But I'll list some of them:
1. Simple burnout. I think a lot of people suffer from this and perhaps don't realize it, especially those of us who have been playing for many years. It's hard to play one game this long.
2. Stale gameplay. Related closely to #1; at its core the game hasn't changed much, and the loop is not that deep. Other game modes have helped (some more than others), but so many times I'm sitting there looping or being looped and thinking "why am I doing this again?" I know what my opponent is going to do, and they probably know what I'm going to do.
It's like Groundhog Day.
3. Despite what some people want to believe, it's not particularly skill expressive. It's mechanically simple and imprecise. Being good at DBD is more learning to exploit the game's innumerable bad design elements. I guess that might constitute skill to some people, but not to me. At a certain point it just stops being rewarding. It just becomes doing the thing because it's the thing you do, not because you really want to.
4. DbD is flawed at the genetic level and will never be "fixed". Ever. Those of us that have done this for ages know this, even if we don't want to accept it. It's a house made of spaghetti sitting on a foundation of sand. BHVR would have to start from scratch to make a fair and balanced game (they won't).
5. As futile as it is, the devs seem to either not want the game to be balanced or are too incompetent to know what it even is. We see this in just about everything they touch from perks to maps to powers. They can't make a sensible change without trying to compensate by making an unnecessary counter change. Lots of going too far, too much overtuning, never knowing or caring when they've gone too far.
I mean the current state of killer/surv balance is a testament to this; if you were to go back to 2020 and tell someone that the game would be anything but decidedly survivor sided (and boy, was it) they would have thought you crazy. Yet here we are. They went right past balance to imbalance again, in the opposite reaction. Changes all seem impulsive, hamfisted and poorly thought out.
They can't/won't fix one thing without breaking another; if I didn't think it was incompetence I'd think they were trolling us all.
After 10 years, there's not much reason to hope they'll learn or change (or care to, even).
6. As a veteran player, I'm (we're) never going to be their priority. It'd be bad business. I've spent my money (far too much of it), I'm a well with not as much water in it as a new player. And there are a lot more of them as there of us.
And like many, I'd bet the main reason I didn't quit years ago is sunk cost. Almost seven years and many hundreds of dollars. Feeling like you have to throw time and money after time and money already spent is a profoundly dumb reason to keep doing it, but it's human nature thing.
I kinda resent myself for it some days. Most days when I boot up DBD I think to myself "I'm not even going to have fun; why am I not trying something new instead?"
One of these days I'll move on, and I feel like it's getting closer.
For me it's matchmaking and balance that mostly caused me to stop. Maybe just that I'm getting a bit tired of the game after many hours. It's just jarring to ping pong between very mediocre survivors you destroy with somewhat few hours and very good survivors that destroy you with loads of hours, even during peak hours. And this has been a problem even since before the MMR reset, not that it helped much. I don't think matchmaking will ever be good at all as long as they keep the pregame lobby which destroys matchmaking with backfill and needless lobby dodging, instead of just gathering up 5 players and sending them straight into a match. But whatever.
The other issue is balance. It's boring and lame to player lower tier killers, especially M1 killers and realize that the only times you have a decent chance is when the survivors misplay tiles or are straight up inefficient on gens. Decent survivors are generally just extremely hard to catch. Especially after pallet density, a good team that just predrops, loops the playable tiles and slams gens will win most times, and you rely heavily on survivors simply making big mistakes to actually win as some of the lower tier killers which are the ones I mostly enjoy playing.
And admittedly, the survivor experience isn't all that much better, with some games the killer barely getting 2 hooks before gens are done while others the killer is clearly far more skilled than both myself and my teammates and just obliterate us without any effort.
Cheating is still a pain point when it happens, and while I don't run into as many anymore it's still incredibly disappointing to meet a blatant "subtle" speedhacker that you straight up can't catch up to in spots you've otherwise caught survivors a hundred times before, and knowing that the server side validation to fix this will never be implemented, instead BHVR opting to try to band-aid fix it with some new version of anti-cheat which will get bypassed in a week or so, especially on less secure platforms like Epic games or Xbox which most cheaters play on, though Steam cheaters have become more common recently from the few I've met.
I'll say I'm kind of excited for the meta shakeup at least. Brings some pretty cool perk changes to both sides and I'm very happy that they were willing to go hard with the numbers and changes and truly change things up a bit. Still not a fan of the perk bloat and that you don't just immediately get Tier 3 perks once you hit Prestige 1 on a character, don't even have to remove perk tiers, they could just add both Tier 1, 2 and 3 as a reward to prestige 1 on a character if the spaghetti code prevents removing perk tiers outright. Not that it affects me since I've got all characters leveled anyway.
Couple of points that I probably would have saved for another thread, but now that I may never know if such a thread will appear in the next month -
I don't really believe this unless all four of the players are exceptional. In that case, yes, four exceptional people working together should win most of the time.When you compare the two roles
If you want to be at the top of survivor/killer you'd need to - play a lot, study your own game, find other exceptional players to play against, learn the possible perks/maps, take the sweatiest builds (probably a few other things).
As survivor you have to do all that, but in addition - find three other people who aren't friends but as dedicated to the game as you are, practice with them, coordinate schedules on when you are going to play, prepare counterplay for an ever growing roster, memorize the maps even more as you don't have the basekit info (i.e. the clock system).
And I think its inevitable if one side is asked to do more than the other side, and they actually do it, that they have advantage. What I find most surprising is the pure sweat vs sweat match (4 person SWF vs Nurse) is as close as it actually is.
While you mentioned that survivors has gotten basekit this and basekit that, alongside a near worthless anti-camp measure (that can be easily bypassed)So a very us vs them add on coming from me.
The gen block and the anti-camp frequently get brought up as ways killer play has been curtailed even though, as you point out, they aren't actually a big deal.
On the other hand, before the killer could basekit kill the last survivor, if a survivor was downed near the exit gates and the killer picked up, the survivors could body block / sabo the hook and make the killer drop the survivor and then all run out the door. The remaining survivor couldn't be picked up again because they'd wiggle off, allowing survivors to get a four out.
Now though, if the killer chases the others out, its an almost for certain guaranteed kill.
And I don't know if I've seen anyone other than myself point out that this was just a basekit buff to killers. Substantial? Of course not. Better for the game? Eh, probably. But for as much 'survivors get free stuff' that we here around some very lax mechanics, I've always been surprised that this change just goes unremarked upon. I think its a larger symptom of only seeing the issues for some people that back up their side.
Why does it matter how the killer plays if you still get out?I'm going to add on to others as my answer is a little different and ties back to the original point.
I want to play an engaging game, try to win (play my best), as survivor play for the team, but am far more interested in it being a competitive game than winning/losing.
Let me break that down
Engaging Game - The mechanics are interesting. If I just do gens and leave, its not fun. If I do a mix of gens, chase, rescues, and still lose, that's a lot better.
Try to win - I don't want to handicap myself and want to set out to win.
Play for the team - hatch escape doesn't mean much, its just a small mini game at the end.
Competitive game - good games are ones where the survivors finish the gens or get really close. If I'm survivor and we lose but all the gens were finished, that's preferrable to a game were we all escape and the killer got only two hooks.
Where I think DbD fails on this -
If as a killer I engage in the 'try to win', I lose out on the 'engaging'. I proxy camp the hook, tunnel, and generally find it uninteresting even if the survivors are good and I end up losing.
If as a killer I instead go for 'competitive game', I feel like I've cheated myself and insulted the survivors by not playing my best. Sure its more engaging, but winning or losing feels ultimately cheapened as I know a handicap was involved (though still, I prefer this over the former).
As survivor, if I gen rush, its usually not very engaging (especially if the killer tunnels, we just do gens, leave).
But one of the things I realized the more I played, and this goes back to the thread title, is that the best game I had as a survivor the killers either didn't have very good game sense or, and I think far more likely, like me trying to play nice to have a competitive game. And then even if I won it was like 'yeah, but he obviously could have tunneled early but didn't for the sake of a better game' which really hurt the enjoyment.
This is also where I think toxicity comes from in the game.
It's kind of like why I, and I know others, where enthused by the anti-tunnel / anti-slug ideas even from the killer perspective. It would have allowed me to 'play my best' as killer, if a survivor made themselves an easy tunnel I wouldn't have felt guilty about doing it, because the mechanics meant it was a trade off I would have to consider. And then when the idea vanished instead of getting refined, well, it was the possibility of a better game that went with it.
I stopped playing a while ago, at first it was due to technical issues and other priorities, but the game felt less and less engaging over time after returning. Every time I saw someone's good idea on the forums (regardless of the "side" of who provided it) monkey paw'd into the game, it kinda reinforced how blatantly the focus of the game was lost. I don't know if its due to talent lost/replaced over the years internally, outside pressure/pandering, the sheer amount of vapid feedback having a negative influence on their internal process, horrible communication with the community.. whatever the reason, the community has felt more splintered than ever, and BHVR the least capible of making rational decisions through the noise.
The vision of the game has been long gone, and the old joke about wanting to become the Fortnite of Horror started to feel real since the rarity color changes. Accessibility felt like virtue signaling when a visual heartbeat was added then followed by the horrendous implementation of fog vials (followed by the constant fumbles on how they attempted to address them after the fact.) There have been some wins that were universally positive on the front over the years, but they were few and far between and led to constant tribalism/whataboutism due to being reactionary rather than understanding why people made the requests for them over the years.
Many people who played DBD for years did so for a few reasons, be they addiction, completion, progression, friends, content creation, dedication, etc. After the first few years, it felt more like I was following along the game's evolution more than anything, almost like a case study in why it outlives its competition so strongly and how much it uses its leverages to either take risks or prioritize appealing to loud voices vs core issues that fester for years. No matter how much any one of us may have disagreed on any given topic, there have been years worth of free consultation from a wide variety of perspectives that slowly gave up on trying to get through to BHVR over time, especially when seeing their advice turn into alternate versions that missed their point entirely.
It just kinda became harder to enjoy with each patch, some worse or better than others, but a gradual decline nonetheless.
I have stopped playing since December 2024 because BHVR has not cared about fixing high ping advantages, setting a ping limit nor adding more servers nor adding the killer's ping in lobbies.
Until I see that all of us play with 40 ping or less, I won't bother touching the game. You can give all the balancing of killers, perks, mechanics, maps and player interactions, but until connection issues are solved, none of this will make the game smooth. If I can load into a trial without having the need to check the killer's ping at all hits, that's the time it is worth coming back.
I have also spent money on this game, but it is what it is, and I played the mobile version too. I have never been so disappointed in a PC/console game over its mobile version. DBD Core has been a lot worse than the mobile version.
Once again, why is the community playing a game they have so many complaints about?