TheWheelOfCheese
TheWheelOfCheese
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That's because people are realizing he isn't as strong as he seems. Every killer release works this way: everyone cries that the newest killer is OP, survivors adapt, turns out everyone overestimated the killer's power. And sometimes BHVR nerfs anyway, because the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
He's a pub stomper. Coordinated teams will not have a problem with him unless they are awful at juking.
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@ThatRyanB said:
Thanks for taking the time to report this. A couple questions/notes for you as we try to narrow down reproduction on this:
- If you're playing on PC, if you'd be able to get your Player Log from a session where you encountered this, that would help a ton in investigating what may be happening here.
- Are you encountering an issue getting progress on both sides of this quest? Both for killing Survivors and stunning the Killer?
- On the Killer side, to confirm, this quest requires you to kill Survivors via Mori. Sacrificing them on a hook will not count. Just to be sure, you've been Mori'ing Survivors, right?
On the Killer side, to confirm, this quest requires you to kill Survivors via Mori.
If that is the case then the text is misleading. It says "kill 3 survivors." Not "kill 3 survivors with your hands," as mori quests/challenges typically say.
This is how the text has worked in the past:
- Kill 3 survivors → You can kill the 3 any way you want.
- Sacrifice 3 survivors → They must be killed on hook.
- Kill 3 survivors with your hands → They must be killed by mori.
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Nobody will ever me able to convince me that matchmaking actually exists in any meaningful form until the devs release stats. In my experience it seems to be indistinguishable from completely random match-ups.
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It has nothing to do with charging, it has to do with having consistent controls for similar abilities.
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@Iabloko said:
God, how I understand you. I play as the Huntress 99% of the time, and every time I approach the first rank, I just end up with tournament survivors in every game.
Today I played 11 games, and in 8 of them, I was up against esports survivors. They are impossible to find, catch, every survivor stays in the corners and counters any opportunity to throw an axe. Just so you know, there's a window in the Shack, and in some Shacks, opposite the open window, there are two closed windows. I throw an axe into the closed window between the boards, and the survivor COUNTERS that axe. They counter orbital axes.
Maybe it depends on the region, maybe on the rank, but I'm so tired of sweating in every game. I can't enjoy the game and have fun at high ranks in my region.
every time I approach the first rank, I just end up with tournament survivors in every game
If you mean every time you approach grade 1, then this is not the reason because grades aren't used in matchmaking. Your MMR is not shown in-game.
This sounds like a case of back luck and confirmation bias to me.
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It's only "rigged" in the sense that most perks suck. Given equal odds to get each perk, you should expect most of your perks to be garbage perks in most matches.
Also there is no perk called Soul Bond so I'm confused about what you're referring to there.
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@Ayodam said:
Surprising to see killer mains here push back against you suggesting survivors only have one hook state, OP. I thought they would be thrilled by the thought of easier games.
It's almost like we want fun and challenging games that are still winnable if played well. Absolutely shocking.
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There's so much in the video that's incorrect as well. He assumes that one's rating is limited to 2100 and therefore the maximum possible MMR you can reach — but that's the soft cap, not the hard cap. That is, your rating can go above 2100, but when being considered for matchmaking, anything above 2100 is treated as 2100.
Therefore, his assumption that we can just assume that the maximum "trusted" rating is equivalent to 2100 is just completely wrong. The maximum "trusted" rating will likely be far in excess of 2100.
There's also no proof that the lowest possible rating (0) correlates with 0 in the exported data. Some systems under the hood use 0 as the average, which would equate to I believe 1400 in Glicko, with negative numbers representing skill below the average.
This means that the range 0-"maximum trusted rating" does not exactly linearly scale to the range 0-2100. It might scale to something like 0-2600, or it might scale to 1400-2600. Or some other range entirely.
People who do not understand rating systems should not be making videos like this.
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3865197#Comment_3865197
A survivor win is that individual survivor escaping, though.
3k and 4k are wins for the killer, and I'd personally call a 2k a draw even if there's not as much to suggest that in the game, but I don't think it's necessarily a fair interpretation to say that because of that only a 0k or 1k count as survivor wins because that's not really how this game works.
I'm not good enough with numbers to draw any other conclusions, I'll be the first to admit that, but I do think it misses a lot to define "survivor win" only as the killer losing, when the game is set up asymmetrically.
This belies a more individualist and selfish interpretation of the survivor role. Yes, being killed is considered a loss for the purposes of MMR, but it does not have to be how the player defines a loss.
When playing survivor I consider a 3-out a win even if I'm the one that died. I hardly think I'm alone in this.
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@Mandy How is this not kill switched yet? It's easily reproducible, happens most of the time, and creates situations where the killer has zero counterplay to even the most poorly-timed flashbangs unless the killer looks up every time they pick up someone or goes around a corner.
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@Reinami said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3852185#Comment_3852185
Well, in theory, the reason they made the change was because the perk was underpowered/underutilitized. So just nerfing it back to where it was just makes the perk bad again. Personally i think they should try meeting in the middle, it was 10%, they buffed it to 14%, lets try 12% and see where that lands us. But knowing BHVR they will probably nerf it down to 8% and make it even more useless like they did thana.
They did this thana, they buffed it because it was bad, buffed it a bit too much, then nerfed it to be worse than it was before the buff.
That's totally fine, but that's not really "compensation," that's just balance. OP was suggesting that as compensation for nerfing Thrill, they should buff some killers, which is totally ignorant of how balance works.
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@GeneralV said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3851810#Comment_3851810
Yeah, from what I've heard it was that bad.
Though I do think they nerfed Call of Brine a little too harshly. It was one of the perks that I used quite a bit because I really liked Sadako when she first released, but now it seems kinda useless.
The best part is that the rationale was "3 gens" but then they fixed that with the regression event cap, and never went back to revert CoB. It would be completely fine now, but BHVR only has a 10 second attention span, so they never reverted it.
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Compensation… for what, exactly? If they made each hook state 5 seconds and people complained, would you say that reverting it back to 70 would require "compensation" in some way? No, that would be lunacy.
Everything else mentioned in your post is completely unrelated to Thrill.
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As a Whispers enjoyer, I think this buff would be too OP. It's already not very hard to triangulate even a moving target with Whispers. A hot/cold mechanic would just make the perk braindead.
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BHVR really needs to look at the core gameplay loop and redesign aspects of it. This cat and mouse game of "nerf the bad thing" always has the unintended consequence of making a worse thing meta.
Winning is more fun than losing. Therefore, players will generally look for the most effective way to win.
If you make spreading hooks the most effective way to win, most killers will start doing that. However, this means you're going to have to make spreading hooks more powerful than both slugging and tunneling a survivor out, or you need to make both impossible somehow (shared hook states, basekit UB) and then balance the rest of the game around that. If basekit UB is added then a ton of stuff needs to be looked at, in particular gen speeds and hook stage duration, and probably also second chance perks in general.
But is BHVR going to do that? No, they're going to release more Feng cosmetics and buggy chapters.
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There is no way she's B or C tier unless you are going against absolutely terrible opponents.
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@Ayodam said:
In my experience from strongest to least goes Hillbilly, Blight, Nurse, Wraith, Huntress, Spirit, and Trapper in that order.
TBH I think Wraith and maybe even Huntress beat out Nurse in this iteration of 2v8, and I'm speaking as a Nurse main. The maps are huge and she just doesn't have the mobility. Due to the chaos of the mode, I think a good Wraith will land hits more consistently, and Huntress, while not 4.6, pressures a larger area since she is ranged.
Killer in 2v8 is a game of fast chases and pushing survivors off gens. Nurse can sometime pull off fast chases, but she is terrible at map pressure here.
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It's rough for killer, for sure. Personally, I only play killer now when there's something else I'm also doing, whether that's playing a single player game, working, or random surfing / video watching.
I will say that I'm absolutely blowing through my unfinished survivor tome challenges, though…
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There's just too many greens, I think. Every realm has a map offering, then you have BPS, envelope (for survivor), 4 BP offerings (one per category), sac ward, 2 luck offerings (for survivor), and oak and mori (for killer).
Meanwhile, there are a whopping 21 map offerings. This means on killer, if you roll a green node, there's a 72% chance it'll be a map offering. Getting any specific green offering (including BPS) after a green has been rolled is a 3.4% chance.
Oh but it's actually worse than that, because there's also green add-ons (and items for survivor). (Admittedly I don't know what order and weight each "thing" is — is rarity rolled, then type, then item? Or just rarity and then item? Or type, then rarity, then item? Regardless, the problem with BPS being rare is 100% because of how many green offerings there are.)
This is another great argument in favor of getting rid of map offerings. Every new realm dilutes the pool of green nodes even more. If they want to keep map offerings that badly, IMO they need to have a dedicated rarity just for them so the other greens have a decent chance of appearing.
Heck, just make map offerings iridescent, then bump each mori down one rarity. Then the only iridescent offerings are map offerings, and they should be rare considering how game-changing they are.
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@Rudjohns said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3844263#Comment_3844263
Slippery Meat needs to me meta for this to actually be true. One less spot for any exhaustion perk, Unbreakable, Adrenaline, Made for This, WoO, Resilience etc
It doesn't need to be meta for those numbers to be true at all. Even the basekit rate would be not a small buff without any downside. If 4 survivors are hooked at least once and they all get 3 free attempts to unhook with a 4% basekit rate, this means there's a 38.7% chance of at least one free unhook per game.
If you add Slippery Meat to each survivor, this increases to 86%.
This idea is a non-starter, unless the odds and/or number of attempts are changed. And even then, it's all reward and no risk.
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I reported someone for being AFK, and opened a ticket with video evidence. They declined it saying they don't ban for being AFK, that their automated system handles it.
The automated system that bans for being AFK works about as well as SBMM.
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Just make it so you can't self-unhook unless everyone is down, hooked, dead, or you have an active perk that grants self-unhook. Those are the only times you should be self-unhooking.
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Basekit rate would be ~11.5%, which would increase to ~39.4% with Slippery Meat (assuming no changes to that perk). Giving these odds without the downside of going second stage would be incredibly busted.
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@SidneysBane1996 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3844195#Comment_3844195
You know that they won't. They're invested. Instead of doing the healthy thing, which is taking a break.
I've heard Civilization is pretty fun.
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This is what happens when you base matchmaking logic on a deluded belief that your game is anything like hockey.
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@Rogue11 said:
Or we could try to make 1v4 matches enjoyable enough for 80% of the playerbase that this isn't a major issue.
Or the people who don't find the game fun can just stop playing and ruining it for everyone else.
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@Pirscher said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3843935#Comment_3843935
Exhaustion-status and Revealed-status are two completely different things though ..
I'm not saying they're the same thing, I'm saying it would make the same amount of sense.
Some information is intentionally hidden from both sides. For example, survivors don't know they're exposed from Devour Hope until someone gets hit. Showing when a survivor's aura is being read to that survivor would completely destroy Scratched Mirror Meyers as well as severely reduce the viability of stealth killers, who depend on the element of surprise.
A huge part of skill expression in this game is knowing what perks exist, figuring out what perks the other side has, and then playing around them. This is a problem that can be solved with some situational awareness, not by adding more stuff to the HUD.
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This is about as silly as suggesting that the killer see each survivors' exhaustion timer on the HUD.
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This is kind of a weird post. The hint text doesn't say to kick gens and ignore survivors, it says patrolling gens can help you find survivors, which is true and useful. There are other ways to find survivors as well, and those are learned in time.
I think you're spending a lot of time arguing against a straw man you've created.
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@GeneralV said:
Map offerings aren't the problem, the map themselves are.
No killer wants to see The Game, no survivor wants Haddonfield or one of the Coldwind deadzones. If the maps were better balanced, something like the good old patch 3.7.0, we wouldn't have this issue.
When survivors play a Game offering but I'm playing Nurse.
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Something something hockey something something.
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@Iron_Cutlass said:
AFK Matchmaking Bans are done by an automated system.
If you sit too long AFK as Killer, you get kicked. If you sit too long AFK as Survivor, you get AFK Crows, and by proxy, killed.
Is it the best system ever? No. It definitely has flaws. But a system is at least there.
A system not there and a system that exists but doesn't do anything is a distinction without a difference.
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@100PercentBPMain said:
Qs are long enough that people are legitimately not coming back in time. I have a feeling you knew that already though and are just venting.
It does suck though, waiting ALL that time just for a game like that. I'm sorry to hear that.
Your incorrect attempt to intuit my motives is duly noted.
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@Kl0bürste said:
didnt matter. The mode is so absurdly survivor sided that you would have lost anyway.
I don't disagree, but that's still not the point. If I want to play solo I will… play solo. The point of 2v8 is to get silly plays with your teammate, not watch them stand in one place the whole match.
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@Crucifilth said:
bros reporting someone for being AFK, yikes
When I'm waiting 15 minutes to get a game, absolutely. The least you can do if you're queuing killer in 2v8 is play the game.
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The only reason it's good is because of queue times. That's it. Encouraging more people to play survivor is a good thing.
I sure as hell am not waiting 15 minutes to get a lobby for the game to be over in 5.
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The same reason as for any number of other problems in the world: people on average are terrible.
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@I_Cant_Loop said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3779947#Comment_3779947
I agree that SBMM is effectively non-functional. I've had so many times where I will lose, either as killer or survivor, and then in the next match just get completely stomped. Or the other way around - I will win, and then next match win even easier. It seems completely random and I think it seems that way because in reality it is completely random.
Here's what I think is really happening: the SBMM system exists, but there aren't enough players in the pool most of the time to make it work well AND give you short queue times. The only way to make the system work well when the player pool is smaller is to increase queue times, and BHVR aren't willing to do that because longer queue times means more people leaving the game, and that's the last thing they want. So shorter queue times gets the priority and that means expanding the MMR range for matching players to the point where it is effectively meaningless.
Of course, I could easily be proven wrong if the devs would show MMR scores in the game (just show in the scoreboard after each match), but I don't think that's ever going to happen. The excuse is "we don't want players to know their MMR scores so they don't intentionally tank it" is not a legitimate one - players can do that whether or not they know their MMR scores. I think the real reason they don't want to show MMR scores is because it will reveal what I stated above to be true - that the system effectively does not work because of how wide the MMR ranges need to be to allow for short queue times.
I agree with this completely. The reason BHVR gives for not wanting to show MMR does not hold up to the slightest bit of scrutiny, yet they desperately cling to this reason as they think that it's the only way they can possibly save face — not realizing that it's transparently disingenuous. Revealing MMR would demonstrate to everyone just how badly the system works.
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I don't believe SBMM works at all. I've seen no evidence presented that it actually functions in any sane way, other than Peanits claiming that it's working as intended, and of course not providing any statistics or anything.
At this point I've exhausted my "benefit of the doubt" supply on the developers. I don't believe anything they say at this point unless they provide some form of evidence to back it up.
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@hermitkermit said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3767903#Comment_3767903
First off, if my message came across as hostile in any way I want to make it clear it was not intended to be so. Sometimes tone is difficult to portray in forum messages like these, and I do appreciate you taking the time to have a discussion about this, and to explain your points of view. I respect your points of view, even if I do very much disagree.
There is nothing wrong with trying to win, but the methods chosen to do so are a personal choice. Acknowledging flaws in the game and then exploiting those flaws because they're available does, in my opinion, reflect that individual. And that's where the lack of empathy comes in. The distinction between playing to win and BM is very subjective, but even strategic moves or traditionally "unfun" playstyles can be done without exploitation.
For example, slugging can be a valid tactic during specific circumstances like if sabo or flashlights are in play. But slugging an entire team to bleed them out, especially now that hooks respawn even after death, in my opinoin, crosses a line. It is still technically allowed, it is still a strategy, but you are knowingly creating a very poor experience for other people, and that does show a lack of empathy. Bully squads show a lack of empathy, even though continously blinding a killer over and over is not against the rules, it is still knowingly making someone else's experience as miserable as you can.
When it comes to your opinion on "the problem is the people who continue to play even though they are not having fun", I agree to an extent. If you're unhappy most of the time when doing something, then you should spend your time doing something else. But that doesn't take away individual player accountability to recognize when strats/perks/playstyles/items/combos etc. harm the collective enjoyment of the community as a whole. I do not think good sportsmanship should be discouraged or ignored.
Advocating for BHVR to make changes is important, but so is encouraging the community to make changes as well. Promoting empathy and responsibility in my opinion, is pushing for change. BHVR provides the framework, they set up the playground, but just because you can shove another kid off the swing doesn't mean you should. And if you do, I don't blame the playground.
I do want to agree with your first paragraph. I enjoy a good discussion and so far this has been, even if we disagree. Likewise, I am also not trying to be hostile, though I am admittedly often blunt.
The problem with your approach to perceived flaws in the game is that it's subjective. What you call "exploiting a flaw" someone else might judge to be playing efficiently, within the rules, which is objectively true. This is part of the reason "survivor rule book" is a meme among killer mains, because every survivor has their own set of rules, applied inconsistently, and often applied in ridiculous cases. You're not going to please everyone no matter how you play.
There is also a tragedy of the commons aspect. If I play sub-optimally then I am risking that the opposing team/player may take advantage of that and play in ways that I find unfun and "exploitative." I don't think it's a tenable position to say that people should play according to the subjective perception of their opponent.
The problem is that the rules of the game are what they are, and no amount of wishing will change that. If you want to alter your playstyle to make the game more fun for the other side, then by all means do so, but I vehemently reject the notion that not doing so makes you unempathetic. This is a video game that people play voluntarily.
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@hermitkermit said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3767009#Comment_3767009
I do understand your point, and I agree there are more things BHVR should do to change certain things, but I think the issue with this mentality is that it removes any form of responsibility from the player themselves, using BHVR as a scapegoat to justify playing selfishly with the defense of, "Well, it's allowed." There are plenty of things that are allowed and legal, but they still make you a jerk: interrupting people, rummaging through other people's garbage once it's on the street, filming others if they're on public property, etc.
This mindset takes all the agency away from the individual, which again, circles back to a lack of empathy. Refusing to change regardless of how it makes others feel because it's not against the rules is problematic. Of course, BHVR can and should implement measures to discourage certain playstyles/tactics, which they have done, but I think the fact that people still take advantage of a system that many people agreed is flawed, says more about the individual than BHVR themselves. At some point, people have to take accountability for their choices.
Trying to win in a video game has nothing to do with a lack of empathy. I reject this entire line of reasoning.
The game is flawed, but the game is what it is. Pretending to play an ideal version of the video game where those flaws don't exist is putting yourself at a disadvantage. Now, you may choose to do that for whatever reason you want (mercy, giving yourself a challenge, etc.) but declaring that those who do not are lacking empathy is honestly absurd.
If what you're doing in the game is furthering your objective or interfering with your opponent's then doing so has nothing to do with a lack of empathy. As I mentioned before, this is distinct from BM/griefing behaviors, which I would define as doing something with the intent of causing negative emotions in other players, and that does not further your objective or interfere with theirs in any way. This is where the "legal but makes you a jerk" part of your argument comes in — for example, bleeding everyone out for 4 minutes even if you can hook. This is not remotely in the same category as tunneling someone out, sabotaging hooks, getting flashlight saves, etc., which all directly further an objective or interfere with the opponent's.
I would argue that the problem instead is people who continue to play DBD even though they are not having fun, and then attribute the actions of their opponent to malice when they are bested.
None of this is to say that anyone should give up on the game; there is good in this game buried under the layers of BHVR's complacency. We can and should argue for change to the game, but blaming other players for playing the game as it exists today rather than how you want it to be is not the way.
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@hermitkermit said:
Unfortunately, being without bias is probably not possible due to the way humans in general work. I don't mind if you're a Killer Main or a Survivor Main, bias doesn't bother me, it's the lack of empathy, that bothers me.
I've said this in the past and I'll say it again, this community absolutely insists on playing the game however you want regardless of how it makes others feel. And so that's what players did. And now people wonder why the community is so "us vs. them". We did this to ourselves.
You can't just stop caring about how other people feel and expect peace to exist. In any capacity, game or not.
The problem isn't that players "insist on playing the game however they want." BM and griefing aside, this is a ridiculous argument.
There are playstyles that are clearly more efficient than others, and typically the most efficient ones are the least fun for the other side. This is not the fault of the player choosing the playstyle, it's the fault of BHVR for creating a game where the most efficient playstyle is so much less fun than less efficient playstyles.
The fact that people play to win is not problematic. Direct your frustration at BHVR, not other players.
IOW, don't hate the player, hate the game.
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It's really bizarre.. it winds up being kind of bad for both sides.
Huge dead zones are bad for survivor.
Meanwhile, bad locker placement and gigantic map are bad for (especially M1) killer.
The new BHVR standard is that nobody has fun.
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There's a reason I have profile comments enabled for friends only. People in the DBD community are unbelievably desperate to have someone else hear their salt. Just deny them the ability.
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@Halloulle said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3709782#Comment_3709782
I have no clue what the 3-band-fixed-frequency-part means but I take the rest of what your write as; the equaliser does what you could do in your headphone settings - just a lot better. And in that case no, using an equaliser would not be cheating. - It'd be like bringing your 5 kg carbon bike to the city race where most folks have some average 15kg+ bike but it's not cheating - they're both bikes and the force that makes you move is you pedalling - but one will do a significantly better job at moving. Cheating would be bringing an e-bike.
It's tryhard, sweaty, unneccessary, in my book scummy, and once again an instance of parts of the community optimising the fun out of the game but not cheating.
I have the same opinion on shaders and using vpn. I'd say that's why I use neither of these things - but I do in fact use a Luma sharpen filter cause choosing between the bluriness of the game with anti aliasing on and the pixelated mess and seeing hair cards with anti aliasing off is like choosing between the devil and the deep blue sea.I take the rest of what your write as; the equaliser does what you could do in your headphone settings - just a lot better.
This is exactly correct. Typically you get 3 knobs: volume levels (gain) for bass, mid, high. The frequency and width of each band are preset and cannot by changed.
A 4-band parametric EQ (PEQ) gives you 4 bands to work with and lets you select the frequency, gain, and width for each band. Sometimes you can turn the highest and lowest bands into shelves. So you get 12-14 knobs for this kind of EQ. Obviously, the number of knobs increases the more bands the PEQ has.
Here's the 8-band PEQ I have on my mic (I'm only using 3 bands currently):
There are also graphic EQs (GEQ), which give you a gain control for evenly-spaced (logarithmically speaking) frequencies. Often you'll have somewhere between 16 and 32 bands. You can't change the width or frequencies. This is probably the kind of EQ most people are familiar with. The 3-band bass/mid/high EQ many headphones and stereos have is really just a 3-band GEQ.
This is an example of a 16-band GEQ (at initial "flat" settings):
Ultimately they all do the same thing: adjust the volumes of certain frequencies. They can't "untangle" some sounds from others, unless all of the sounds primarily live in completely non-overlapping frequency spaces.
To be clear, I don't have any EQ on my game audio. I don't really have a bone in this fight, so to speak, but I find that people who think using an EQ is cheating have no idea how an EQ actually works or what it's capable of. The analogy to visual filters is very good, except that visual filters are more effective than an EQ at isolating important information. Between the two, if any should be classified as cheating then it should be visual filters.
I would definitely agree that it's sweaty, but there's a big difference between sweaty and cheating.
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@Halloulle said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3709775#Comment_3709775
no, I mean in the sense where you have a sound program analyse what sounds you have and eliminating certain sounds. - I'm not a sound person, so I don't know the terms, so maybe it's the wrong one. - Like, you know how if you display sound it shows up at waves - and now you pick certain patterns that you want to remove/alter in a specific way.
While with calibrating headphones if you reduce the base it's reduced for all sounds - not just a specific one. Does that make more sense?
no, I mean in the sense where you have a sound program analyse what sounds you have and eliminating certain sounds.
You cannot eliminate specific sounds, you can only tune the relative intensity of various frequencies. This is exactly what the headphones you describe can do, except an EQ is typically more granular. So it sounds like what you're saying is "a 3-band fixed-frequency EQ is not cheating, but anything else is." I hope that's not what you're saying because that would be a bit ridiculous.
Multiple in-game sounds will generate audio across a wide variety of frequencies. You cannot "eliminate certain sounds" with an EQ, not without affecting other sounds as well. You can attenuate specific frequencies, which will affect all sounds that occupy that frequency space.
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@Halloulle said:
difficult to say without knowing exactly what those programs can or can't do. - If it's something that can also be achieved by calibrating your headphones in a specific way then no; it's not cheating. If it actually isolates specific frequencies and alters them similar to how some audio-software does it, then yes, it is. But I kinda doubt there's software that can do that realtime and without weird sound glitches.
It's almost like there's that debate in various sports; how over-engineered should shoes or bicycles or whatnot allowed to be? The one on a 6 kg carbon bike definitely has an advantage over the one on a 20kg steel bike - but that still doesn't mean the one carbon bike is cheating.
If it's something that can also be achieved by calibrating your headphones in a specific way
If it actually isolates specific frequencies and alters them similar to how some audio-software does it
These two predicates mean exactly the same thing. They are either both cheating or are both not cheating.
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@Mr_K said:
Chase music cannot be eliminated using an equilizer. Chase music is not one specific frequency within the audio mix that you can isolate out. Footsteps too are not within a single frequency to which you can boost. To cut out lower frequencies could mean missing out on footsteps. Cutting higher frequencies means you may not hear breathing. Compresstion just normalizes all frequencies at the upper and lower ends.
I get the feeling people here believe an equalizer is a magical box that can demux the audio tracks and mute certain ones. That's not how it works. To say an equalizer is cheating is to say any device that produces a better audio quality over stock speakers is cheating.
This.
If an EQ was as magic as people in this thread seem to think it is then I would have substantially fewer issues dealing with audio issues such as ground loops when doing live audio jobs — just make the EQ get rid of it! Yeah, it's not even remotely that simple.
There is no "remove the chase music" knob on any EQ. The music spreads across the entire frequency spectrum and overlaps with every single other noise in the game. The best you could do is find frequencies where the music tends to be louder than the sounds you want to hear and turn those down. While this can make footsteps easier to pick out, it will also cause parts of the chase music that occupy that same frequency space stand out a lot more, and without the context of the rest of the chase music frequencies, your brain will have a harder time telling what sounds are footsteps and which are the chase music.
I'm sure some EQ settings can confer some level of advantage but it's far from game-breaking in any reasonable definition of that term, certainly far less game-breaking than having comms and nobody had an issue with that even before the devs said they don't consider it cheating.
And… again… hardware EQs exist and aren't even that expensive. They are usually less convenient for sure, but convenience isn't really the point. We're also at the point where pretty much every major OS has system-wide EQ in some form, so this is something that nearly every PC player has access to.
Fun side note not relevant to this discussion: the DBD rules specifically talk about using third-party software to gain an advantage. Software that a user develops themselves is second-party software, so by the current rules any user is free to develop their own cheating software and use it.
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The problem with deciding if this is cheating is that the devs haven't weighed in, and there are enough exceptions to their stated rules (comms and crosshairs) that we can't really read their minds on this one.
Also, non-software EQs exist (so this is not PC-only, nor is it "using third party software" in all cases), and different headphones already have different frequency response so you could make the argument that choosing one set of headphones over another is "cheating" because it has a more advantageous frequency response for DBD. Some headphones and earbuds will also do dynamic range compression in hardware, which can help surface quieter sounds — is using these peripherals also cheating?
This is substantially more nuanced than "it's third party." So are visual filters, so are your monitor's contrast settings, and so on. There is a monumental difference between programs that take the signals output by DBD and modify them in some way (adding crosshairs, adjusting contrast, edge highlighting, audio EQ) and programs that peek into DBD's memory to read out the locations of players and draw them (wall-hacks). I believe the developers generally intend "third-party software" here to cover the latter case, but their public policies must necessarily be broad so that they can be sure that they cover the things they want to cover. Many environments even include system-wide audio EQs (I play on Linux and it's pretty much standard there) so you can't really even argue that you have to go out of your way to set this stuff up — it can come with the environment and be just as easy as tweaking your monitor settings.
I lean towards "not cheating" on this one, but acknowledging that the developers may have a different opinion and we should defer to theirs if they choose to express it (which I think they should).
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The matchmaking is a giant turd anyway, the tone of matches between "low MMR" and "high MMR" is not all that different. The devs repeatedly say that MMR is working as intended but have never produced any meaningful numbers around it, and over time I've come to quite firmly believe that it's not really any better than making matches with completely random players.