The Main Issues With The Way BHVR Patches DbD
Who is ready for a wall of text, because I am since so many people seem to not get game development and how DbD is screwing it up.
Part 1. Time management.
BHVR is a company with groups of people working on certain games and projects, DbD is one of those teams and is not a small one, but it isn't a big one. We are not talking Bioware, naughty dog, or DICE levels of people working on a game. I will give a ballpark estimate given what they have said in the past and how much time has gone on since then and for a nice round number say their team is 100 people large. It's probably more like 80 or 90 but 100 is an easier number to work with. That being said 100 people need to be dictated to do everything that goes on in DbD which is where the problems with the communities perception of what BHVR can do and what they can really do. DbD's team of devs are split into further teams, visuals, gameplay design, story, GUI, map design, sound design, and so on. Basically, the main point of that is in this patch just because they didn't create a new map doesn't mean they can redirect those people to work on say Ghost Face's power since they would not know how to work on that. However, this does not mean that they are just sitting around and not doing anything, most likely the people dedicated to working on maps are doing the Badham preschool rework for the Mid Chapter patch. Overall, this does mean that we should hope that whatever they are doing is well thought out and not buggy when it releases, but that brings us to the main problem with how BHVR does DbD patches.
Every 3 months we are expected to get a new chapter with new content, usually, this is in the form of 1 new killer, 1 new survivor, and 1 new map with a variety of balance changes and bug fixes. However, it is clearly obvious from this latest patch, especially that this time is not enough for them. There are at least 5 major bugs in the game that players either need to deal with on a daily basis or players abuse for an unfair advantage. Not to mention how simply ignoring these bugs without so much as a peep from any official sources on forums or Discord is really deafening, big patches like these should not release is such a poor state. This brings us to the next part of the development.
Part 2. QA testing and PTB's
Both of these are meant to reduce the number of bugs that get released into the main game, definitely not to find and squish all of them, but at least enough that it will not send the community into an all-out riot asking ourselves should people be getting banned for abusing any of the major bugs that released into the game. However, these 2 processes are both majorly flawed, at least from the view of a consumer knowing what they should be doing. First up is the QA team and I would say I don't know where to start, but I know exactly where to start. 3 issues could be causing their job to not be done correctly. 1. they are really bad at searching for bugs so a lot make it through to the PTB without dev knowledge to fix them. 2. They can find bugs but the bugs that are found are too difficult to fix before they make it to the PTB/the QA team tests too late into the development time that a lot of bugs are just brought to the PTB, Or 3. They know about the bugs and either ignore them or are told to ignore them in pursuit of something else. Any of these situations/combinations can be the reason why we as consumers crap on their QA team so hard since we know what they should be doing and somehow their job is not being done. Which leaves the job to us PTB players.
The PTB almost every patch is filled to the brim of game breaking and game ruining bugs making the PTB unplayable from a regular gameplay stance. KYF to test out certain things works great and the people who do it should keep it up since it is apparently the only real way to find bugs that the QA team in combo with the Dev team should have fixed. But again like with all things DbD, there is one major catch to what is really a great concept.
*ahem*
2 weeks to fix every bug found in the PTB is not enough time.
Given that we get the PTB 2 weeks before the patch is supposed to release, it will take time and testing to find all the bugs and anyway you slice it even if we knew about all the bugs as soon as the PTB releases there is no way a Dev team that DbD has could squash out all of them and what usually ends up happening is they target the major ones, but in the wake of their bug fixing they break as many or more things with the game, and then the patch goes live. So if the bugs are only just being swapped out for others, what is the point of having it in the first place? Overall, the main area of concern is how much time is actually being dedicated to certain tasks for the devs. However much it is, it's clearly not enough time and every game company currently is running into the same issue and usually does 1 thing that BHVR refuses to do, and for good reason.
Part 3. Overworking
A lot of companies overwork their staff to meet deadlines, I won't go into specifics but its a lot if you just do some searching around, but one good thing I found out is BHVR as a company refuses to overwork staff and put in rules in place, and to avoid spreading misinformation I won't try to go from my memory, but I do know that they put in a rule that said no employee could sleep at work.
Now I take this point to give BHVR a giant pat on the back, it takes a truly moral company to not overwork their staff, especially in a game development environment where the competition is fierce. It's really nice to see that there is hope for the career of game making and companies can see their employees as people instead of fuel.
That being said now its time to fix every issue with DbD with one simple sentence. Give the team more time. That is it. now BHVR is a company and therefore really their only goal is to make money, but DbD has shown they want the game to be as much theirs as it is ours, and currently only weeks after celebrating 3 years together they are starting to tear that relationship between company and consumer apart by making the game so terrible for an average player, and even worse for die-hard fans. This change will take some time for the community to get used to and I doubt it will happen since I am just a simple player on Reddit spouting and ranting about the game because I'm bored, but if anyone has read all of this I want to say thank you for reading and hopefully you know now why DbD has the problems it does, and if anyone that can have an effect on the game's future can read this hopefully it goes to the team as a whole can might be able to make the game a little better.
All I know is that giving more time for updates, bug fixes, content, and ideas to sprout in the team and in the community the game will be better off. I can't count how many times ideas were implemented into the game with the players being amazing, but then were later removed/reworked because the DbD team didn't like them, and vice-versa, the community complained, but the change was added anyway. More direct communication between players and dev concepts would help. But overall time is the greatest issue in DbD, it plagues the game, it plagues its development, and it plagues its content creators.
This post is mainly about how giving the devs more time to fix issues and develop ideas would help out a lot it making the game more fun and more appealing. Fewer bugs, better content, better ideas. Just a month or 2 to iron out bugs and have multiple PTB's for players to give more of a say on what makes it into the live game would remove a lot of toxicity and controversial changes/patches.
TL:DR this post isn't for you if you skip to the bottom and don't want to read the whole thing :P
Also if you did read the whole thing and some things don't makes sense, probably because I did this mostly because after discussing issues in discord and forums so much I wanted to put my findings and ideas all into one big long post so I can direct it to anyone that either doesn't know why DbD has such a troubled development cycle, and for anyone who doesn't really know why we all complain so much. Alright, that's my discussion over, time to go play some games instead of talking about them.
Lastly, if I happen to mention Reddit in here that is because I originally created this on reddit and want to share it to everyone here also.
Comments
If BHVR actually put rules in place to prevent crunch time and overworking their employees, then I will happily support DBDL...insomuch as my broke butt can.
In this era of companies treating employees like disposable cups, we need to let companies know what we will and will not accept from them.
And any company with a conscience is okay in my book.
Heck, I want to be a voice actor someday (Getting my foot in the door is really hard :( ) and I'd rather work for a company that treats its workers like people, instead of a larger company that does crunch time and assaults its workers and lies. (Randy Pitchford & Gearbox; I'm looking at you.)
Really good read you have really put time and effort into this and thats awesome. I personally think bhrv are in a rock and a hard place when it comes to pleasing the community and keeping new things coming maybe a slight over judgement in the teams output maybe i feel they are stretched to thin i honestly dont know we can only assume.
But credit where due they work hard have passion and drive and i hope they can slow down on new content once the rift comes to work on bugs.
But for those that want bug fixes im sure others want more content like i said rock hard place they can't please everyone.
I've learnt to just except what happens i love this game no matter what and i love how the devs are so down to earth it makes all the difference.
I agree that it would be better to give BHVR more time to flush out updates and bugs quality over quantity. But the problem is when a game company doesn't give out content fast enough the game will suffer from playerbase drops sadly although I would rather them fix bugs and have more time. And it is nice that they don't overwork their staff.