Feedback from new players who didn't want to stick around.
This post is primarily directed to BHVR. During the past couple of months, I have tried to introduce DBD to my gaming friends. On paper they should love the game; they fit the target audience perfectly. While everyone loved the premise of the game, many (to my dismay) decided to quit the game permanently after a couple of gaming sessions. Out of 15 friends who either bought the game or played during a free weekend, only 3 remains. In a feeble attempt to persuade them into joining our little band of survivors again, I asked them to explain why they decided to drop the game so early. As the feedback was more or less consistent among the different players, I wanted to relay it to you guys. Without further ado, here's a brief summary of the most common feedback from my deserting friends:
(i) Excessive camping/tunneling kills the mood. Many of the deserters mentioned camping and/or tunneling as a huge turnoff. Or to be specific: being camped/tunneled in consecutive games killed the mood of the survivor(s) being subjected to it. The general notion of all the deserters is that the game can turn sour really quickly. It doesn't help that the weakest of the team often becomes the target.
(ii) Not reliable. Many mentioned reliability as a big issue. The examples of this ranged from the game not loading to stacks that doesn't proc and so on. A majority felt that the game was too unpolished to play seriously and that they'd rather play a more tried-and-tested game.
(iii) Hard to pick up and play without your friends. No desire to play alone as it felt too stressful and isolated. Quite a few reported that they felt they lost repeatedly due to unfair circumstances (such as being left hanging on the hook or being farmed by teammates).
(iv) Steep learning curve and grind. Many of the deserters felt that they didn't understand the core mechanics even after playing for 30+ hours. Knowledge on maps, perks, killer specific abilities, sound mechanics, items, looping etc. was not covered in the tutorial. They also felt the grind/cost to unlock perks (borrowed time and decisive strike for instance) was too much.
(v) Not balanced in terms of add-ons and offerings. A lot of the deserters felt put off by the fact that the add-on mechanic altered the strength of the killers, rather than their playstyle. They did not perceive items as an equal "tilt" of the game. Additionally, mori's, mist and map-offerings could alter the survival rates tremendously. All in all, the fact that you can heavily affect the outcome of the game creates too much of a gamble.
The feedback above is solely from a survivor's POV and a rookie one at best. While I don't agree with all of it (don't shoot the messenger please), I think some critique is justified. Anyways, I hope this sheds some light on the experience of new players!
Comments
Just as something funny - in between - for this discussion:
You think dbd has many dlcs and is expensive?
Look in the dlc list of this game and the price if like to buy this game + all the dlcs.
I still laughing while I writing this posting, after I have read how many money those guys want to see from a customer for that game and all the dlcs...
Fortunately I am not interessted in those kind of games :D.
Well, that's a game design issue. But the same goes for survivors. It won't take long for them to realize they can easily run the killer for 3 - 5 gens just by looping him from pallet to pallet, since there are more than enough of them.
Both scenarios are tremendously unfun for the other side, but it's obvious the game designers had them in mind when coding the game.
I mean it's obvious they wanted some kind of gameplay revolving around hooks, or else survivors would take 6 hits to get downed but would die as soon as they're hanged. Like it or not, plays around hooks were thought as part of the game.
The same goes for looping. Whether it was intended from the beginning or not, looping is an essential part of survivor gameplay, and so far I haven't met a single killer that says "I love getting looped for 3 gens man, it rocks!"
I agree though, that new killers should be explained thoroughly in the tutorial and additional in-game references, what kind of gameplay is encouraged and healthy for the game. There's zero information about that in the game itself.
Just out of curiosity, did you play the kyf mode with your friends? Because this way, you could regulate camping and tunneling in your circle of friends. If you didnt, why not? Was noone out of 15 people intrested in playing killer?
Or was killer too weak and frustrating to play against a swf time and again?
@sulaiman We did with some of them. It varied in terms of quality game-wise. Biggest problem was that (a) it didn't net any BP and (b) the ones interested in playing killer didn't match the level of those who wanted to play survivor.
I wonder if these problems are even solvable within this genre. It's essentially meant to make people angry at each other by design, because each side is given frustrating mechanics that are hard or impossible to play around. It's easy to feel like a victory wasn't earned, or like a loss was not preventable.
There are plenty of other competitive games -- Hearthstone, League of Legends, whatever -- where I can look back on a match and go "Well, I got outplayed." It's harder to consistently feel that kind of closure here, and I think it's a genre-wide problem. Friday the 13th often felt quite the same way.
Good talk.
OMG some still say that tunneling and camping is only within low ranks. Thats totally wrong. Even in redranks you get tunneled and/or camped purposely every second game. Thats the truth. The game has become really annoying and still nobody at BHVR wants to Do something against this issues. Dont blame anyone for quitting after few games. The only choice to have fun in this game is not playing it.
The game isn't for everyone!
The grind sucks!
Being tunneled and camped sucks!
Bad teammates suck!
Get wrecked as killer sucks!
Having to deal with numerous bugs/issues sucks!
Ultimately though this is the game and it won't change . Learn to accept these things for your own sanity.
But wait, point b) is still true with random killers, isnt it? Basicly, since you are matched based on your lowest rank player, you still will have the same skill difference, but instead of frustrating one of your friends you frustrate a random killer for whom you dont care. And if he tries to counter with what few means he have, people quit because its so unfair, but it was the swf that makes it unfair in the first place.
@sulaiman I wouldn’t think so, no. First, the matching system does not match according to the lowest rank. With that being said, I don’t know how the matching system actually works. What I do know is when I play with my friends we tend to get matched with a killer that is the average of our combined ranks. Ish. Second, I don’t think it was frustration that led to tunneling/camping (I’m guessing that’s the strategies you are referring to). The camping/tunneling would occur regardless of the state of the game (easy chase, no gens done and so on). But these are only speculations of course.
Regardless, I don’t think it matters. The players still decided to leave. Their experience is their reality, if you will.
@Rydog I think you have been absolutely brilliant in this thread. You made me feel redundant. In my own post. :-)
Haha, thanks. I try. :D
@sulaiman & @kamisen the way that the matchmaking system works, is that it takes the average rank of the survivors and matches that with a killer. If the killer or the survivors have been waiting for 3 minutes or more, then they will be matched with the next available opponent regardless of rank. They’ve been playing with a widening of the range over those 3 minutes, but I don’t know if that is still in the system. In the end, if the disparity between killers and survivors is large enough, rank is completely thrown out the window to create lobbies as fast as possible.
"The only fair way of matchmaking is to use a hidden ranking system that is solely based on hours played, tiered in a progressive manor. "
No.
I know people with over 1000 hours that, not to be mean, suck at the game. They play for fun with friends and don't even play meta or use broken items outside of an occasional key.
I also know players with 500 hours that are really good at the game. Not amazing, and not good at everything like players with more experience, but they can do certain things well that you'd think they have 2k hours.
Also smurf accounts are a thing, this would just make it easier to smurf.
Any ranking system that would factor hours played is inherently flawed because hours =/= skill.
I think that this is hugely important, cause too many of us forget what it was like coming in. New players don’t have the knowledge or the experience, and as such have to deal with camping/tunneling and higher skilled players smurfing more than others. For the sake of everyone, even if it can be tough, we have to keep new players in mind.
mate you are dense. The post is from new survivors who won't play the game again, it's not an agenda, it's feedback. Re-read the post because you missed the point.
Nobody should ever rank reset more than 5 levels from their best rank. So if I top out at rank 5. I should never rank reset past rank 10. To do so is setting up newbies to face an unwinnable situation.
What about the whole unable to play the game because it keeps disconnecting you as a killer? This you need to be to be internet needs to stop.