DBD has lost 27% of players and it's falling.
Before I get into the downward trend, and the reasons for it from my experience of talking to other players. I will post the chart that shows what I'm talking about.
An ongoing analysis of Steam's player numbers, seeing what's been played the most.
You can clearly see a 27% loss of players over the course of the last 2 months. This coincides with the release of Legion. But it's not the Legions fault, per say.
That release also saw a change to the games engine. This change not only broke the sound engine at the time, but introduced a bug that is still destroying games to this day. Yes, I'm talking about the frozen load screen.
No one likes 3 survivor games. Killers don't, and survivors certainly do not. It's boring. Even twitch viewership is down, because those kinda games are boring to watch. But there's about a 1 in 4 chance that you will be playing one any time you load into a game of DBD.
But this isn't the whole problem. Another part of this problem is Legion. Not the killer itself, but the atmosphere around them. It is currently completely acceptable to d/c against them. People have seen their favorite streamers do it, been in games where it's happened enough, or whatever reasoning they have, and they start doing it themselves. It's a plague, and not that cool new killer.
And since these d/c's happen so often, they are carrying over to other killers. People are just d/cing against killers they don't like. This means that even if you load into a 4 survivor game, it's not guaranteed you will have one. All it takes is for one person to go "oh, screw playing against Hag." and bam, it's a boring game.
This problem is killing the game. To the point that just patching the frozen loading screen probably wont fix the problem completely, as it has created a zeitgeist of d/cing against killers you don't deem 'fun.' I honestly don't know what BHVR should do, but it is clear that something needs to be done. Sure there are periods of loss on the charts. But the playerbase has dropped to where it was a year ago, and is dwindling for longer periods then when DS was released.
Edit: This is not me doomsaying. This is me bringing attention to the fact that there is a serious problem. I love this game, and want it to self-right. And so, i will now link the treads I have made with real solutions to the problems.
This is my petiton to hold Fog Whisperers to a higher standard:
I've been saying it for a while, but I've been hearing other people talking about this topic lately as well.
Ideas for fixing the d/c meta:
There's a hundred idea's floating around. I thought i'de give my idea's, since I play this game to much. 1: A D/c penalty needs to be applied.
And a game adjustment i've playested in KYF:
Second chance perks are Over Powered. Why? Because with a single second chance perk and a little bit of skill, all gens can be done in one chase/hooking.
Comments
One thing to take into consideration is that between February and May each year the numbers always seem to dip the lowest, why this is who knows but I wouldn't say this is anything out of the ordinary as yet, even with the dlc releases the numbers each year tend to say maybe people don't have time to play or it's a time where there are generally other games being released to play for a while.