crogers271
crogers271
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@xGodSendDeath said:
Killers should be able to abandon if 3 gens are done and # of hooks is less than or equal to 1
@CrypticGirl mentions this already, its a different discussion. Whether people should be able to surrender early in the match when one side seems to be dominating is a different discussion.
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@NaveR said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3929424#Comment_3929424
Errr. Not my problem if they "did". I read exactly what people say and not invent things people don't say and that is fine, especially if it comes from an official representative. It's not abstract art lol. They said what they said, that's it.
You're missing the whole discussion thread there about people wanting the statement to mean more than just 'in this case' when Mandy was responding to one thing. Did they say that about the one thing. Yes, but nothing more.
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@subdl said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939578#Comment_3939578
To be honest, I’m genuinely surprised to learn that there’s a group of players who equate finishing a match by hooking or mori’ing a real survivor with the kind of taunting that happens at the exit gates.
That said, if that’s your perspective, I have no intention of denying it.
However, for the vast majority of killer players in Dead by Daylight, the core enjoyment lies in defeating real human opponents.
There’s no sense of satisfaction in cleaning up bots, and the experience left behind is ultimately hollow.
Once again, I must say — discovering that there are people who equate the act of legitimately executing a real survivor as a killer and winning the match, with the kind of taunting and mockery survivors do at the exit gates, was both surprising and — in its own way — deeply revealing.
To be honest, I’m genuinely surprised to learn that there’s a group of players who equate finishing a match by hooking or mori’ing a real survivor with the kind of taunting that happens at the exit gates.Well that's not what people are arguing at all.
Saying that your enjoyment is somehow dependent on other people being present after the match has been decided (example from your post:
There’s no sense of satisfaction in cleaning up bots, and the experience left behind is ultimately hollow.) is saying you want some form of taunting. At this point all we're discussing is degrees.When the match is over and neither side has a realistic chance of improving its position, people should be able to leave. Feeling the need to hook a real human is the same as the need to only exit when the killer is there to see it.
The difficulty, as many have mentioned, is that determining when the killer is in a position where the game is no longer able to be advanced is much more difficult as just the gates being powered or opened isn't just an end of the match, killers frequently gain kills after this point.
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@Smoe said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939500#Comment_3939500
Dead by Daylight is M rated, which is 17+.
So if we follow the ESRB, then no, minors shouldn't be allowed to play this game.
As @Mr_K says, its about purchasing, not playing.
Its like an R rated movie. Under 17 can't go in alone, but with a parent, that's fine.
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@Aven_Fallen said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939521#Comment_3939521
But why does it matter if you hook the remaining player(s) instead of the Bots?
This whole issue has been kind of eye opening for me.
Whenever the issue of the remaining survivors just standing at the exit gate tbagging the killer comes up everyone seems to post 'that's BM, it's not good, people shouldn't behave that way, but most of the ideas on how to fix it wouldn't work'.
I never expected quite so many people to be open about not just wanting to win as killer, but feeling it necessary that survivors be there as they spike the ball.
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939405#Comment_3939405
Your job as killer is to prevent the gens from popping too fast. Sometimes that's out of your control - though the devs are even doing something to fix situations outside of your control in this upcoming patch, which shouldn't be left unsaid here - but for the most part it's up to you to play well and occupy the survivors so they're not able to pop gens super fast.
Tunnelling is a very good way of turning losing matches around, because it provides huge value for little effort and often little risk. It's the definition of a crutch, and if you care about your longterm results or getting better at the game, my personal recommendation is not to rely on it.
I'm not saying this is equally easy across the cast. I will say every killer can perform and only two really even struggle to engage with the game on a basic level, but there are definitely some picks where keeping the pressure looped is harder. I'd be in support of buffing those killers and nerfing the particularly egregious stuff on the survivor side they struggle with, absolutely. They just don't have to resort to tunnelling.
Tunnelling is a very good way of turning losing matches around, because it provides huge value for little effort and often little risk.I think it's the opposite of this, though, like everything with tunneling, it depends on your definition.
People like to justify tunneling based on - 'if I hit a 4 person SWF and 3 gens pop on the first chase, what else am I supposed to do!?'
Except if true, tunneling is the worst thing you can do now. If its truly a 4 person SWF playing just to win, they're going to ignore the person on hook until its safe (unless they have anti-tunnel perks). They're going to just do the gens, open the gates, then maybe try a rescue if they care about the 4e.
One of the reasons I think they need to look at tunneling isn't that killers can use it to comeback, its that when a killer already outmatches the survivors they can turn a winning match into a boring stomp.
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@AmpersandUnderscore said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939192#Comment_3939192
Doesn't even need to be a loss, really, we've seen plenty of 'look how OP this survivor thing is' with screenshots of a 4K attached
My personal favorite recently was a thread right as they giga buffed thrill there for a couple weeks. It was a video of: 4k, 5 gens remaining, and the survivors' only accomplishment was finally breaking the thrill totem.
There were people in that thread trying to claim that "since they broke the totem, survivors are clearly too powerful and need to be nerfed" and "this shows that Thrill is balanced".
As though the rest of the match was anything other than a rock solid, slam dunk, not-even-close win for the killer.
It reminds me of the discussions about the 8 gen regressions: If I kick a gen and apply eruption, and I have surge, and then I down three survivors right away, I've used up over half of the regressions!
Yeah, and the survivors are dead.
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@Rogue11 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939174#Comment_3939174
If the game not being balanced is "fine" they wouldn't need to create multiple systems to try to force survivors to continue playing matches that are over in the first two minutes.
Eh, more the point that its fine to argue that the game doesn't have to be balanced. Lots of people do, people don't have to pretend that their desired kill rate numbers are somehow necessary.
Personally I think a kill rate target of ~55% would be healthier for the game but having it be a little harder for survivors is okay. I think the bigger issue for getting survivors is lack of variety in comparison to killers and the ability of killers to engage in playstyles that make the game miserable are bigger impediments than the kill rate number.
Escaping 1 more match every ten wouldn't change the games of killers tunneling someone out early, camping, being stuck on the ground, lack of interaction, etc.
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@NarkoTri1er said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939130#Comment_3939130
What? I don't think I've ever seen any evidence to suggest that the DbD community is somehow more unfamiliar with other video games in comparison to other communities.
it's like with other games, big part of League players barely plays anything else, big part of CS2 players barely plays anything else too. But dbd has even bigger problem due to general community mindset.
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3939145#Comment_3939145
you can, because winrate in dbd as an asym game is calculated completely different and thus killrates are the priority to look upon because they are more accurate way to determine overal average percentage of wins per side. Survivor escape rate is based on INDIVIDUAL escape/die outcome (not team where 3+ men escape counts as a win), while killer outcome is based on...how many survivors are killed. It's really not nuclear physics, with MMR system like this determining balance based on individual survivor escape rates is completely wrong thing to do :)
it's like with other games, big part of League players barely plays anything else, big part of CS2 players barely plays anything else too. But dbd has even bigger problem due to general community mindset.If its just like other communities, why would it have an impact on our community behaving differently?
you can, because winrate in dbd as an asym game is calculated completely different and thus killrates are the priority to look upon because they are more accurate way to determine overal average percentage of wins per side. Survivor escape rate is based on INDIVIDUAL escape/die outcome (not team where 3+ men escape counts as a win), while killer outcome is based on...how many survivors are killed. It's really not nuclear physicsIt's not nuclear physics, but people who are arguing that its somehow balanced are trying to find a math that justifies their bad math
All possibilities give a lopsided killer advantage over survivors even if we take your win rate percentage as what happens:
1: Kill rate vs escape (BHVR's), 60 to 40
2: 50% win rate, killers win 10 to 15% more than they lose
3: Use killer win rate and survivor escape rate. Even then, even if we cherry pick two unalike things, its still killers. That's killers having a winning experience of 50%, drawing 10 to 15%, and losing the remainder, while survivors have a win rate of 40%. Even if you count all the draws as losses, that's still killer winning 10% than survivors.
The game isn't balanced. It's not designed to be balanced, that's fine, its balanced in the killer's favor.
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@NarkoTri1er said:
People who choose to play killer aren't magically better at the game than your average survivor. There are just as many mediocre killers as there are mediocre survivors, after controlling for the 1:4 ratio, obviously. Most players are average because they aren't professionals and shouldn't be expected to be professionals to have a rewarding gameplay experience. So if the escape rate is less than 50%, which it is by quite a large margin, this indicates that the game design itself favors killers, which it obviously does.
killrate 60% = winrate 50% (2k on average). With the current matchmaking, this basically means the game is balanced (even though with improved matchmaking killrates would surely drop by significant margin).
Escape rate of 50% would mean 50% killrate, which further means killer winrate going somewhere around 40-45%.
With this fact, average killer wins 50% of the time.
To turn around and then say the escape rate is low because most survivors are bad, completely ignores that most killers are just as bad, on average. But the OP game mechanics killers have at their disposal makes it far easier for mediocre killers to win against mediocre survivors. In other words, an intermediate survivor loses against an intermediate killer, most of the time. You need an expert survivor to consistently beat an intermediate killer in DBD. An expert killer will beat expert survivors most of the time, too. It is only a minority of elite survivors that can actually prosper against expert killers, and killers don't even face these teams very often because elite players are a tiny percentile of the player base. The balance differential is clearly evident in the absurdly long kill streaks that some killer mains have achieved, which is unheard of on survivor side, and unheard of in other popular PvP games that are sensibly balanced. The margin only gets smaller as you approach the very top of MMR, and even then, 4 man SWFs still escape less than killers.
game mechanics make it easier for mediocre killers to win against mediocre SOLOQ survivors.
Regarding expert survivors vs. expert killers, you are plain wrong, expert survivors will wipe the floor with majority of killer roster most of the time.
And please let's not talk about MMR where soft cap is so low that you can easily reqch it quickly, not to mention how matchmaking functions thanks to oversaturated soft cap level.
Regarding killer winstreaks, you literally have top <1% players winstreaking because their overall game knowledge is significantly higher than game knowledge of their average opponent (ohh yeah, the well known MMR again where person that is amongst best killer/survivor players in the world goes in lobby with people who don't have nearly as much skill). Same goes for both sides. .
The fundamental principle of game theory is that you have a balance of challenge and reward, which produces a flow state, and that is called "fun". But if survivors aren't rewarded for skillful input, because low skill cheese tactics are so effective, then the game ceases to be fun, and they rage quit (i.e. go next). This is not a skill issue on the players part, it is a critical game design issue whereby a large percentage of the player base doesn't even consider a match worth playing until the end, because the mechanics are inherently unfun. In fact I have never seen such a high percentage of quitters in any other popular PvP game, compared to DBD.
you literally...already have skill input in terms of macro and micro knowledge of the game. This has nothing to do with game design, it has to do with people usually looking at the game from one perspective only (thinking long chases are almost everything that matters etc.)
The very harsh fact about this game is that it has a VERY STEEP LEARNING CURVE similar to games like CS2.
And the main problem with the "go next" epidemic is that dbd players usually don't play any other game, suffer from burnout but don't wanna uninstall because they don't know how to fill the void left by taking a break from dbd. Not to mentiok that dbd has one of the most petty and entitled communities i have ever seen in any video game.
If you're a really good killer main, you don't need BHVR to hold your hand to help you kill survivors. Your skill as killer will make you an intimidating presence all by itself. If the survivors aren't intimidated by you, then you're just not good at killer role. And if survivors don't consider the game worth playing, then the devs need to address their game design instead of blaming the survivors for "not working together".
this literally goes for the survivor side too lol, yet you see new handholding mechanics arriving to "help newer players" while they end up being abused by veterans. You are again looking at the very situation from rose tinted glasses and are acting like survivors are leaving the game and are doing so because "game is killer sided" which is factually wrong.
killrate 60% = winrate 50% (2k on average). With the current matchmaking, this basically means the game is balanced (even though with improved matchmaking killrates would surely drop by significant margin).Escape rate of 50% would mean 50% killrate, which further means killer winrate going somewhere around 40-45%.With this fact, average killer wins 50% of the time.It's probably closer to ~54%, but that's not the major issue and someone else can do the math discussion.
You aren't discussing draws. If the killer wins 5, loses 4, and draws 1, and the equivalent survivors win 4, lose 5, and draw 1, that's not balanced, that's in the killer's favor.
Whether you want to just do a 60% to 40% comparison (the way BHVR does it), or a 3k or more / 2k / 1k or less (the way a lot of people in the community do it), either leads to the killer having a win rate higher than the loss rate.
Regarding expert survivors vs. expert killers, you are plain wrong, expert survivors will wipe the floor with majority of killer roster most of the time.Two things here as well
First, you're missing OPs next sentence about elites
Secondly, and again more importantly, you're not comparing alike things. An expert killer choosing to play a D tier killer would be like a group of expert survivors choosing to run No Mither. If you want to limit it to the extreme end of the survivor side, you need to limit it to the extreme end of the killer side (i.e. only S tier killers). If you want to discuss all killers, then you need to discuss the full range of survivor possibilities, sweaty, soloq, fun builds, etc.
The very harsh fact about this game is that it has a VERY STEEP LEARNING CURVE similar to games like CS2.The issue of the learning curve is that unlike other games, its not equal on both sides. It's an asym so its probably inevitable, but, in my opinion, picking up the killer role is considerably easier.
And the main problem with the "go next" epidemic is that dbd players usually don't play any other game,What? I don't think I've ever seen any evidence to suggest that the DbD community is somehow more unfamiliar with other video games in comparison to other communities.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3938278#Comment_3938278
You don't just to get to state things and presume the other side was arguing them all along. I never said growth was 5% or that was my claim. Your presuming I'm arguing from those same standards.
You asked for what I defined as significant. I defined it. If you want to disagree with what significant means to you, that's fine, but this is the metric I'm working off of. The executives at any company wouldn't see "growth" as "just a single player increase or player retention," they would want an actual, tangible percentage, which is why I arrived at a fairly lenient percentage of 5%.
My standard on growth, which I've repeated a few times: any growth is remarkable for a game of DbD's age.
I showed with the month by month player averages that DbD is not growing. Temporary player increase is not player growth. Month over month player retention is what matters.
To turn the question around: Please explain why June 2021, 2022, and 2024, beat June 2020?
If you would have read my entire post, you'd have seen that I explained it to you:
Since the pandemic began, there have been 3 separate instances where the average player count for a period of time was significantly higher (>5%) than June/July of 2020: the first Resident Evil DLC, where after 6 months, the majority of those players (or a combination of existing and DLC tourists) left; the infamous Patch 6.1.0 in June/July of 2022 (PTB and Live), that only lasted that month; and the D&D DLC, most likely due to Stranger Things' D&D influence, and Vecna being a long desired addition to the roster.
This is missing the forest for the trees.
It literally isn't. The only thing different from conventional sports (which are games) and video games are the physical aspect.
Except as one generation ages out, another generation ages in. This does not apply to video games because the amount of competition increases substantially (i.e. what kids play the same games their parents played when the parents where kids, that's pretty rare and usually is things like Call of Duty or Madden that are constantly releasing new versions)
The second wave of Minecraft players would like to have a word with you. Sorry I know you haven't played Minecraft, so feel free to avoid that fact.
You asked for why sports are different? Well a possible reason is that its just really, really hard to start a new sport (think of how incredibly rare something like pickleball taking off is), while new video games come out constantly.
As a child I played 2 on 2 basketball with my friends and 5 on 5 organized games with my school. When we had an odd number of basketball players we made up our own games (the most common being 21, but that has different names) I've played football with anywhere from 3 to 30 players. Kids around the world make soccer pitches out of small lots with however many kids they have on hand.
So which is it? You can't start a new sport, or you can start a sport based on what you have on hand? I think you're conflating major league sports with just general sports. You can make up literally any sport physically imaginable. Getting that to be a major league sport? Sure that's another thing entirely.
If we were having this discussion before the survey how would you be talking about it?
It would have been the exact same because I felt the same way about updates as bhvr did prior to the survey.
Video game companies don't get to ignore human nature. If you're arguing that video game companies should just let these players go, that's a different discussion.
They cannot control human nature. If you polish a turd, it's still a turd. People get bored of turds. That was my whole argument about the core gameplay loop. If it's a good core, people will stay.
The physical activity is a bigger part than you make it out to be. The adrenaline, the endorphins, the bruises, they are real things that happen. Video games are a simulation of an experience. Inevitably the 'simulated' experience will die off if the creator doesn't keep it fresh.
So the adrenaline and endorphins you get from playing video games is just fake? Do you know how the endocrine system in the body works? When your palms are sweaty from nervousness or anxiety in a game, that's just "fake" or "simulated?" Sorry, you statement is just flat out wrong.
At the end of the day, games are games. Sports are games.
This will be my last post on the topic as its getting a circular and I'll try to sum up my arguments. You're welcome to have the last word.
1: Growth and inevitable decline.
You say -
You asked for what I defined as significant.Not that I can find, though in fairness its a long discussion so maybe I'm missing it or you interpreted something I said different than I intended. I said significant was subjective and then I explained my point on the growth issue. Getting into what executives and a company might be looking for growth numbers was never an issue.
The point of the growth issue has always been connected to the player count retention issue - games have a pool of players that they appeal to. Over time players will naturally move away from the game. Depending on the game type the timeframe this occurs over may change. Looking at the history of games, a game not on the decline nearly ten years into its life cycle is amazing.
Comparing it to things like Minecraft is like saying a business isn't successful because it doesn't bring in as much money as Amazon.
2: Change it up - Going back to your original statement that I responded to:
I don't know where people get this idea that games need to "change it up" in order to retain their players.When someone says a games needs to change, I presume they mean change until I see a qualifier. I don't think they inherently know that they are supposed to be using a standard from a survey that BHVR conducted and that clearly some forms of change aren't part of the topic.
You seem to agree that lots of forms of change are necessary, though when I've asked for clarity you've avoided the specifics. This makes the discussion difficult and you're arguing with a strawman.
3: Player counts - You have to compare like to like. You have to compare June with June, April with April, etc. You also have to consider other factors that could impact the player counts, in this discussion mainly the availability of players during the pandemic.
Looking at the numbers any other way than this I think is flatly wrong. On a month by month comparison 2024 is on par with 2020 and overall slightly beats it.
You also seemed to have a misunderstanding of what the numbers meant that come from things like Steamcharts for the monthly player count and that players having more . You didn't address this which means:
There's been a miscommunication - not addressing it makes the discussion impossible.
I'm the one whose wrong - not providing me the info on why I'm wrong makes the discussion impossible
You're the one whose wrong - in which case a fundamental premise of your discussion on players is no longer true and needs to be acknowledged, not avoided.
4: Core gameplay loop - No one ever disagreed that a core gameplay loop was important. We're not talking about fixing bad games, we're talking about what is needed from a successful video game to retain it player counts.
5: Games are games - Just because two things have similarities does not mean they are the same. This seems to be a massively overdrawn connection on your part that ignores reality. As an example: a scary movie, a scary game, and a scary haunted house all evoke similar feelings, but also have massive differences in terms of things like their repeatability.
An obvious point being: if they were the same, why have all three?
The experience of running to an exit gate while chased by killer while actually sitting in a chair holding the W key is radically different than the experience of actually running down the field with an actual human trying to catch you. Are there similar reactions? Broadly speaking, sure. Can a good simulation mimic this for a limited amount of time? Absolutely. Are they the same? Not at all.
With how things have gone with things like the sports issue, I feel like no matter how many times I list clear factual differences between two things, you're just going to say 'games are games' and ignore them.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937836#Comment_3937836
Literally not the argument chain that happened.
In my first post I claimed:
DbD hasn't just retained their players by changing it up, they grown over the years.That was one point out of four and the briefest point. Note I did not specify a year (see below).
It was in your original argument, one of your 4 main points. You even quoted it yourself. Everyone can see it. It was a part of your argument. And even besides the point, in which I will elaborate further, I said that dbd does not retain players. The DLC tourists are a temporary influx of players which quickly leave after their DLC is over.
The second thing to point out: if a game has grown by even a single player, than it has obviously retained its player count, the point of disagreement.
This is extremely pedantic and completely disingenuous to the thread at large. Growth would signify a continuous increase in player numbers to a significant degree (more than 5%). Please explain to me how out of the past 58 months since June/July 2020, only 17 months had player numbers higher than the average player count for July 2020 (40,500 players)? Please also explain to me how out of those 17 months, 9 of them had a player increase at least 5% higher than July 2020's numbers? 7 out of those 9 months were the direct result of the first Resident Evil DLC releasing (June 2021), but notice how by that December, the numbers quickly retreated to that of July 2020, even dipping lower after that; most likely due to the DLC tourists finally being done with the game, and also pain resonance being added with the Artist chapter.
So to recap: Lasting significant growth? Nonexistent. Temporary number padding? Absolutely. Since the pandemic began, there have been 3 separate instances where the average player count for a period of time was significantly higher (>5%) than June/July of 2020: the first Resident Evil DLC, where after 6 months, the majority of those players (or a combination of existing and DLC tourists) left; the infamous Patch 6.1.0 in June/July of 2022 (PTB and Live), that only lasted that month; and the D&D DLC, most likely due to Stranger Things' D&D influence, and Vecna being a long desired addition to the roster. That bump only lasted one month. So no, there is no lasting significant growth. Did you know based on that same data, 34 out of the past 58 months saw significant (>5%) decrease in numbers lower than the average player count of June/July 2020? Almost 59% of the time since the beginning of the pandemic. Hence my stance. DbD is losing players more than it retains them. Having a DLC release to pad player numbers temporarily doesn't mean those players are retained. The core gameplay is losing players at a rate that any DLC release cannot make up for. Those are the facts.
The history of every video game, ever. As your point out, the vast majority of games drop, most even quicker than the first few months.
Did you read the second part of my statement? The players that remain are long term players. It's a reciprocal slope. We are at the point where the slope is still negative, but close to zero where players are hopefully being retained, and the amount of players dropping is drastically lower than the first initial months. As I demonstrated above, this is the case.
Games that grow a player base are a rare exception, they are almost always associated with live service or subscriptions, and even then the time frame they can maintain this is limited.
Temporary growth is not lasting growth. Live service and subscription games are the case in point here. Most people subscribe for the month of a new patch, if they decide to resubscribe at all. FFXIV is currently going through this right now.
You talk about DLC tourists. Are they not players? Do they not exist in other games? You are discounting a whole portion of the player base.
You are talking about player retention and player growth. The majority of DLC tourists leave after a few months, usually permanently. This is what the data shows. They are players, but they are not retained. If they would stay, they would be counted.
I've only played Minecraft once for about ten minutes, but a few observations:
This is obvious when you follow up with this:
This makes it impossible for them to say a former version was better
The Minecraft launcher allows you to play ANY version of Minecraft that has been released over the past 16 years. I do not have a number, but a sizeable amount of the Minecraft player base plays on a version that is not the current version, or even a version from the last 3 years of development. The reason there are more people playing is 1) because gaming as a whole has increased over the last 15 years, 2) an entire generation of new players has been born to play the game.
Not a single video game, ever, has achieved the levels of sustainable player retention that sports have.
Sports and video games don't work the same.
The only difference between sports and video games is that sports require more physical activity, aka the health benefits. That's it. Oh, and perhaps it's more socially acceptable to spend the majority of your time playing sports than video games 😁. Games are games. In fact, you talk about player retention: how many people do you know that have kept playing soccer or football or basketball outside of their high school or college years? I'll take a guess: not many. You'll have a FEW people play in rec leagues, but the majority of players stop playing outside of extracurricular activities. That fact undermines your entire counterargument. Video games retain MORE players over a LONGER period of time because the physical barrier to entry is much lower, and the medium is more accessible.
As I said earlier, you're drawing a thread that basically entails 'changes I'm okay with or are supported don't count'.
No, you just completely ignored my comments about how even bhvr specifies what is a "balance change" and an actual "content change." The thread is about content changes. Balance changes are not those.
And I'm discussing them because they are completely normal human behaviors. As I've said, I'm not aware of a single video game that has managed to overcome this, the ones that hold it off the longest are the ones with change.
If you are doing the same thing over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over, you will get burnt out. Everything should be done in moderation. It shouldn't be up to the game to regulate a player's self-control over if they are playing too much or too little, and the game absolutely should not change for simply the sake of change to appease those very players who cannot control themselves.
This is extremely pedantic and completely disingenuous to the thread at large. Growth would signify a continuous increase in player numbers to a significant degree (more than 5%).You don't just to get to state things and presume the other side was arguing them all along. I never said growth was 5% or that was my claim. Your presuming I'm arguing from those same standards.
My standard on growth, which I've repeated a few times: any growth is remarkable for a game of DbD's age.
If you think those numbers aren't relevant, that's fine, I disagree, but we're back to the retention of the player count.
Please explain to me how out of the past 58 months since June/July 2020, only 17 months had player numbers higher than the average player count for July 2020 (40,500 players)?This is simple
1: COVID
2: The summer months are generally DbD's best months
3: Any months later in a game's history having a higher player total is remarkable,
To turn the question around: Please explain why June 2021, 2022, and 2024, beat June 2020?
If changing it up is bad, why haven't player numbers dropped? Why aren't those months lower?
The Minecraft launcher allows you to play ANY version of Minecraft that has been released over the past 16 years. I do not have a number, but a sizeable amount of the Minecraft player base plays on a version that is not the current versionAs I said, I've never really played minecraft so without some sort of numbers kind of impossible to discuss.
The only difference between sports and video games is that sports require more physical activity, aka the health benefits.This is missing the forest for the trees.
What video game has matched sports levels of player retention?
Looking at the numbers its clear that they aren't the same and can't be compared. The 'why' is a fun academic question which I get into later, but a distraction from the issue.
In fact, you talk about player retention: how many people do you know that have kept playing soccer or football or basketball outside of their high school or college years?I asked for clarity in the last post whether we're discussing playing or spectators, so I guess we're on playing.
This actually backs up my point a lot. Most people move on from sports, which as I've been saying is the norm for human activities. Except as one generation ages out, another generation ages in. This does not apply to video games because the amount of competition increases substantially (i.e. what kids play the same games their parents played when the parents where kids, that's pretty rare and usually is things like Call of Duty or Madden that are constantly releasing new versions)
You asked for why sports are different? Well a possible reason is that its just really, really hard to start a new sport (think of how incredibly rare something like pickleball taking off is), while new video games come out constantly.
No, you just completely ignored my comments about how even bhvr specifies what is a "balance change" and an actual "content change." The thread is about content changes. Balance changes are not those.I'm asking for clarity:
If we were having this discussion before the survey how would you be talking about it?
If balance changes create a new meta is that a balance change or changing it up?
Where do features like the abandon system fall?
Where do things like new mods like 2v8 fall?
New killers are content changes, are they part of the issue?
It shouldn't be up to the game to regulate a player's self-control over if they are playing too much or too little, and the game absolutely should not change for simply the sake of change to appease those very players who cannot control themselves.Video game companies don't get to ignore human nature. If you're arguing that video game companies should just let these players go, that's a different discussion.
Much like with DLC tourists, they are players. What does a company have to do to retain its player numbers?
The only difference between sports and video games is that sports require more physical activity, aka the health benefits. That's it.I put this at the bottom because I don't think its related to the discussion, but you are really missing how substantially different these activities are. There's probably more than this, but here's five in addition to what I've discussed:
1: The physical activity is a bigger part than you make it out to be. The adrenaline, the endorphins, the bruises, they are real things that happen. Video games are a simulation of an experience. Inevitably the 'simulated' experience will die off if the creator doesn't keep it fresh.
2: Ease of access and versatility. As a child I played 2 on 2 basketball with my friends and 5 on 5 organized games with my school. When we had an odd number of basketball players we made up our own games (the most common being 21, but that has different names) I've played football with anywhere from 3 to 30 players. Kids around the world make soccer pitches out of small lots with however many kids they have on hand.
With just a little bit of equipment and space people constantly modify sports to fit what they have.
If you play a video game, you are playing the game that has been designed. Even with games with mods, you are limited to whatever the community has created for you. If the only way that people could play soccer was 11 by 11 on a full size pitch it would not have nearly the level of player retention.
3: Sports have an off season and less frequency of play.
4: Level of competition for the activity, there are generally three to five major sports in a country, with potentially a dozen minor options that a person might have reasonable access to. The level of video games that are available vastly exceeds that.
5: Timespan. The first major league baseball game occurred in either 1871 or 1876 depending on what standard you want to use, though the original version of the game was vastly different than what exists today. If ever a video game has a development cycle of the length of sports, then it might be a different discussion.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937539#Comment_3937539
Where is it written that dbd should have its player count decreasing? The major drop off point for any game is usually within the first few months after its release or major updates. The players that remain after that point are usually long term players. Look at any player retention chart, it's always a reciprocal slope. And all of that is besides the point: your original argument was about growth, not retention. The small increase blips are major DLC releases. Notice how quickly those numbers return back to where they were before, and are even getting smaller.
Comparing pandemic numbers is the only reasonable strategy in a post-pandemic world. The lockdowns allowed many people to be introduced to this game; players we would not have had if the pandemic did not happen. You can't just start comparing numbers prior to that major event because it was the catalyst that allowed dbd to have its highest player growth ever. You just got done telling me that dbd gained players between its release and 2020, which is true, but only by about 4-5 thousand players total. The pandemic alone brought almost 17 thousand players on average per month. People don't need to play 4 hours a day to be counted as a monthly player. After being introduced to the game, a good portion of those 17 thousand players have stuck with the game well into 2025. Just because they have less free time compared to the pandemic doesn't mean that they just up and vanish if they are still enjoying the game.
I gave a range between 2019 and 2020 for my estimate. Peak player count doesn't mean peak gameplay. Look at minecraft. It has become bloated with systems that do not serve it, but it currently has the highest player count it has ever had. Most people would say minecraft peaked either during the pandemic or back in 2011-2013 during its initial hype.
Perk balancing changes are different than DLC updates and "new content." In a player survey released last year, bhvr made the three distinctions: balance updates - just number tweaking, major updates - functional changes that keep with the same theme, complete overhauls - start fresh, may or may not keep previous theme. The overbrine meta could have been solved in 1 week. It requires one person to change cooldown numbers, to build the game, QA test the change, and submit the build for verification. That's because it is a balance update. That is not new content. That is not "switching it up" to provide new content for people to stay.
What study does it say that it takes longer to burn out on sports? That "truth" seems like a complete thin-air pull. If you were to argue that sports provide more physical benefits, I'd agree, but to "burn out?" How would you even quantify that?
So Bobby Fischer, one guy out of the billions of people who have lived since chess was created and modernized, was bored and made a fun party game variant of chess. That proves my point more than anything. Nobody is ditching normal chess for random chess, and I would hardly consider it "new content" to the base version of chess. Chess is still fun for those who have found it fun.
My frequency is based on a yearly basis. It's been 45 years since the three point line was added to basketball. More than half of the entire world's population hasn't lived in a world without the three point line. Would you consider changes like the three point line a frequent or common occurrence? And this point is very similar to my point about balance changes versus new content. Adding a three point line versus having more defining rules on penalties change the game in drastically different ways. Even the yearly NFL rule changes are more akin to balance tweaks rather than "content updates." I'd argue the recently added kickoff rules lean more into a partial rework, aka more like a new content change, and the majority of NFL viewers hate it in terms of entertainment. None of your examples are examples of "switch it up" content like you are describing for dbd. Marketing strategy changes is not a content update.
People can burn out from anything if they are exposed to it for too long. Burnout for dbd isn't an issue unless you are playing at least 20 hours a week. I'm not sure why you are fixated on "burnout" being such a major issue. I know a common sentiment among killer main apologists on the forums is that "survivor mains are just burnt out," no, survivor players are tired of being second rate players to killer mains, who are allowed to have killers like release legion, release kaneki, oni/legion 2v8, and metas like overbrine, chess merchant, etc. for sometimes MONTHS at a time before their concerns are addressed. However, these changes are not "switch it up" content. These changes are balancing updates because the game currently has ebbed into a very one sided state, most likely due to actual content additions like call of brine, like overcharge, like eruption, etc. Boredom is not a function of a lack of change, it is caused from overexposure to a less than ideal experience.
Edit to add: I discuss it more below, but please explain what you mean by 'change it up'. The discussion won't be very fruitful if we have very different standards on that.
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And all of that is besides the point: your original argument was about growth, not retentionLiterally not the argument chain that happened.
The first thing to point out: I'm responding to you. I am not the originator of the argument. In my very first post to I specifically cited the claim you were making about retention that I disagreed with.
The second thing to point out: if a game has grown by even a single player, than it has obviously retained its player count, the point of disagreement.
To go through the discussion -
In my first post I claimed:
DbD hasn't just retained their players by changing it up, they grown over the years.That was one point out of four and the briefest point. Note I did not specify a year (see below).
In your next post you said:
Third, like I said, dbd has not had any significant growth since 2020.I respond:
'Significant' is incredibly subjective. Games almost always lose players over their lifespans, games that are growing at all are an extreme minority. I'm sure there are a few other examples, but games running on ~10 year old engines that have any level of player growth are all live service or MMO style games. The fact that DbD is experiencing growth at any level is rather remarkable.Please note my explanation. DbD having any growth at all is remarkable. I'm quite clear here that I'm not claiming the growth numbers have been large. Everything should be working against the game, time, competition, boredom, etc. Even slight gains at all are remarkable, especially considering the growth the game experienced compared to its original starting.
On the issue of significant you reply:
Sure, significant is a subjective word, but I'd assume that significant meant any number above 5%, which dbd's numbers are not.This confuses two issues
1: Taking into account DbD's age any type of growth is surprising and significant.
2: Ignoring the growth of the first few years. BHVR had to 'change it up' to achieve that level of growth. This is important to the discussion because as I argue in a few places people aren't opposed to the idea of changing it up, people are opposed to specific changes that have been made.
In summary: Your original argument was about retention, I was disagreeing with that. I said not only have they retained, they've grown. You might not think the growth is amazing, but I think even the small numbers of growth are bucking the expected trend
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Where is it written that dbd should have its player count decreasing? The major drop off point for any game is usually within the first few months after its release or major updatesThe history of every video game, ever. As your point out, the vast majority of games drop, most even quicker than the first few months. Games that grow a player base are a rare exception, they are almost always associated with live service or subscriptions, and even then the time frame they can maintain this is limited.
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The players that remain after that point are usually long term players. Look at any player retention chart, it's always a reciprocal slope.You talk about DLC tourists. Are they not players? Do they not exist in other games? You are discounting a whole portion of the player base.
That you talk about how these players exist proves the point that companies need to do things to attract them. We're talking about retaining players, not retaining just a specific set of players.
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Comparing pandemic numbers is the only reasonable strategy in a post-pandemic world. The lockdowns allowed many people to be introduced to this game; players we would not have had if the pandemic did not happen. You can't just start comparing numbers prior to that major event because it was the catalyst that allowed dbd to have its highest player growth ever.And you can't act like a time when the player pool was substantially larger is the same as what happens after.
You just got done telling me that dbd gained players between its release and 2020, which is true, but only by about 4-5 thousand players total.That's just not true. June 2016, 11k, February 2020 23k, that's a 100% growth.
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People don't need to play 4 hours a day to be counted as a monthly player.Wait, no, this isn't how the average monthly count works.
Steamcharts scrapes the Steam API every hour and counts the people playing. You can read about it on the about page or just look at how the numbers shift over a 24 hour period. If there is any more info about their methodology out there I'd be happy to read it.
There are ~33k people playing DbD as I type this. There were ~36k people playing a couple of hours ago. The average monthly player count is an average of how many people are playing DbD at any given time. That means the more an individual plays, the more they will be counted. If a player plays for four hours, they get counted four times.
The average monthly players is the average amount of people who are playing at any single moment of the game. Average player counts can be increased both by gaining more players or players playing more.
If you are aware of any info that this is not how Steamcharts works, or if you are using a different cite that has a different methodology, please let me know. I'm open to being wrong on this, but the Steamcharts page can cause confusion because because when they say average players they mean average concurrent players.
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Peak player count doesn't mean peak gameplay. Look at minecraft. It has become bloated with systems that do not serve it, but it currently has the highest player count it has ever had. Most people would say minecraft peaked either during the pandemic or back in 2011-2013 during its initial hype.I've only played Minecraft once for about ten minutes, but a few observations:
1: You have a lot of confidence in the opinions of what millions of players would say over two different games.
2: If more people are playing now, then that means there are a lot of players who could not have been playing during those periods (i.e. new players). This makes it impossible for them to say a former version was better.
3: Even if point 1 was true, this looks like a good indication of how people's behaviors are better indicators of how they feel then their words. Why are more people playing if they like it less? Since that time there are more games, more competition, more options. Why would even more being playing a game that they agree they like less?
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That's because it is a balance update. That is not new content. That is not "switching it up" to provide new content for people to stay.What examples are you talking about? We are multiple posts into a discussion and it seems strange to have not brought up earlier 'well, when I say change, I don't mean all of these examples of change, I only mean this limited set of changes'.
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What study does it say that it takes longer to burn out on sports? That "truth" seems like a complete thin-air pull. If you were to argue that sports provide more physical benefits, I'd agree, but to "burn out?" How would you even quantify that?Let's start with the obvious fact:
Not a single video game, ever, has achieved the levels of sustainable player retention that sports have.
That's just a fact that undermines your entire argument. Sports and video games don't work the same. Trying to say that a video game could just be like a sport, even presuming your earlier argument about sports not changing is true, then why has not a single video game managed that feat?
Now I then discuss why I don't think they behave the same way. You're welcome to disagree with those reasons (though just saying they are a thin-air pull isn't actually explaining why or recognizing the differences), but the underlying fact remains is that they don't.
So Bobby Fischer, one guy out of the billions of people who have lived since chess was created and modernized, was bored and made a fun party game variant of chess.Your argument relies heavily 'Skyrim', a single, outlier of a video game that I don't think even backs up your point. What is your standard for how many examples I need to provide in contrast to your own?
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None of your examples are examples of "switch it up" content like you are describing for dbd. Marketing strategy changes is not a content update.As I said earlier, you're drawing a thread that basically entails 'changes I'm okay with or are supported don't count'.
Also are we discussing people who play a sport, or people who watch a sport. Because we seem to be discussing the latter, in which case marketing content and presentation changes are significant content updates if we're making a comparison between sports and video games.
I'm not sure why you are fixated on "burnout" being such a major issue.I'm talking about becoming bored and burnout, with burnout being the more extreme stage of the former.
And I'm discussing them because they are completely normal human behaviors. As I've said, I'm not aware of a single video game that has managed to overcome this, the ones that hold it off the longest are the ones with change.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937371#Comment_3937371
I selected ~June 2020 for multiple reasons. The pandemic was the greatest influx of players dbd has ever had bar none, so it would be fitting for the "post pandemic" numbers to include only "post pandemic" stats, otherwise you are comparing apples to oranges. Secondly, this is the exact time range where I said that dbd was at its peak. I am using it as a point of reference. Thirdly, I am using average monthly player numbers. People who only play once a week or even once a month are factored in. Not to mention, 2020 was dbd's 4 year anniversary. We are now 5 years from that point. Dbd's numbers have been stagnant for 5 years (more than half its lifespan), yet you call that growth. Even if dbd is not retaining old players and brining in new ones to replace them, the delta in player count is still nonexistent. Nobody with a single iota of intellectual honesty can call that "growth," let alone "significant growth."
I'm not arguing that 100% of players will stay playing a game if no changes are made. I am saying that if your core gameplay loop is good, the people that enjoy it enough will stay. DbD is a unique game being asymmetrical. The majority of the players that do end up staying are the players that enjoy the game for its gameplay loop: the chases, the mind games, the game sense macro gameplay. The people that don't end up staying are the people who only come for their favorite DLC franchise. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but for that to be your draw for new players? It feels like we're operating on borrowed time (pun intended). The fact that skyrim has retained its players despite not having an update in 12 years shows that its core loop was beloved by many. 2020 dbd was very similar in that it felt like the best this game has ever felt. It wasn't until 2021 where the survivor movement changed, resident evil was added, 2022 when 6.1.0 dropped and destroyed the overall soul for this game did dbd feel like a husk of its former self. And why was this? Because changes were made for the sake of change. Because changes were made that did not serve the most important thing for both sides equally: the gameplay loop.
You are giving examples of live service MMORPG games, so those examples are already irrelevant. People pay around 15 dollars a month to ACCESS WoW and FFXIV. If I was paying 180 dollars a year to even play a game, yeah I would expect there to be 180 dollars worth of content for me to play.
If games need to change things over time, explain to me how chess has managed to exist for so long? How about soccer and football? How about basketball? All these games have existed with next to ZERO rule changes, and the ones that have changed are done in the name of player safety and not in an attempt to "retain players." That's my core disagreement with your post. A game is a game. You play it for fun. If you have fun with the game, you will play the game. It's really that simple.
I selected ~June 2020 for multiple reasons. The pandemic was the greatest influx of players dbd has ever had bar none, so it would be fitting for the "post pandemic" numbers to include only "post pandemic" stats, otherwise you are comparing apples to oranges. Secondly, this is the exact time range where I said that dbd was at its peak. I am using it as a point of reference. Thirdly, I am using average monthly player numbers. People who only play once a week or even once a month are factored in. Not to mention, 2020 was dbd's 4 year anniversary. We are now 5 years from that point. Dbd's numbers have been stagnant for 5 years (more than half its lifespan), yet you call that growth. Even if dbd is not retaining old players and brining in new ones to replace them, the delta in player count is still nonexistent. Nobody with a single iota of intellectual honesty can call that "growth," let alone "significant growth."My original statement was a single sentence
>
3: DbD hasn't just retained their players by changing it up, they grown over the years.You're really trying to focus on this growth argument. I really should try and redirect this to the point about retention, which is where my initial disagreement with you is, but I'm a sucker so I'll go in.
A game of DbD's lifespan, any player growth is impressive because the player counts should be decreasing. Comparing 2020 to 2024, 10 of the 12 months of 2024 had more than 2020. The fact that numbers are even marginally higher is amazing.
Going through your points
1: Comparing pandemic numbers is an awful idea. There were more players available.
2: And GeneralIV has the peak at 2019. The OP has the peak at 2 to 3 years ago. why is 2020 the peak? It certainly isn't the peak player count.
3: I've never used anything but average monthly numbers, I don't know why you keep bringing this up.
I'm not arguing that 100% of players will stay playing a game if no changes are made. I am saying that if your core gameplay loop is good, the people that enjoy it enough will stay.To what degree? How do you measure this? Of course some players will stick around, even unsuccessful games have some players stick around.
DbD is a unique game being asymmetrical. The majority of the players that do end up staying are the players that enjoy the game for its gameplay loop: the chases, the mind games, the game sense macro gameplay. The people that don't end up staying are the people who only come for their favorite DLC franchise.I think the asymmetrical nature causes the opposite to be true. Things like the Overbrine meta took a little while to really set in. Asymmetrical is inherently harder to balance, if things aren't changed up players will overtime figure out the min/max path.
I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing, but for that to be your draw for new players? It feels like we're operating on borrowed time (pun intended).Everything is operating on borrowed time. Even Skyrim will eventually die out. People get bored, new games appear, its just the way things are.
If this was the end of 2023 / 2024 I'd be more likely to go for the argument that the game was in trouble because player counts did seem on the noticeable decline, but counts rallied after that.
You are giving examples of live service MMORPG games, so those examples are already irrelevant. People pay around 15 dollars a month to ACCESS WoW and FFXIV.You throw out Skyrim as an example even though it is a very different genre, I'm trying to give you examples of games with ongoing charges, inevitably those games are going to have some type of monetization. What's your standard for games that we can use as examples?
If games need to change things over time, explain to me how chess has managed to exist for so long? How about soccer and football? How about basketball? All these games have existed with next to ZERO rule changes, and the ones that have changed are done in the name of player safety and not in an attempt to "retain players." That's my core disagreement with your post.Because they are totally different things. But to get into some of the obvious differences
1: It takes a lot longer to burn out on sports. Most people don't have the opportunity to play a sport with near the same level of frequency as they do a video game. For those who do burn out is not at all surprising.
I'm far from a chess expert, but Bobby Fischer developed Random Chess out of frustration with how stagnant chess could become.
2: Sports are more complex than video games as they incorporate a physical element into the game that creates its own variety without a rule change.
3: For next to zero rule changes, it depends on your frequency. The NBA didn't have a three point line until the 79-80 season, in the NFL a player on the offense and defense now gets to have the mic helmet, not to mention they kick extra points from a different distance (and I'm old enough to remember when two point trys were a college thing). The major sports leagues have rule changes that they discuss every year.
On top of that, in terms of professional sports, they change up how they present games, how they market them, how they try to attract fans. This is in addition to having enforced scarcity with off season or, in the NFL's case, limiting their games to a few days a week.
A game is a game. You play it for fun. If you have fun with the game, you will play the game. It's really that simple.And if someone burns out on a game, they'll stop playing it. And human beings will eventually get bored with just about any activity no matter how good it initially is without variety.
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@GeneralV said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937363#Comment_3937363
1: If that version of the game had just been the static version for the last 4 to 6 years (wherever you are drawing the line), would the players have stayed?
I would have, that much I can tell you.
But I think it has less to do with wanting a static game and more of a disagreement with how things change and how the game was handled.
2: What level of the enjoyment is not from the game design, but how people played (i.e. the game feeling new and fresh)?
Well, I cannot speak for everyone, but I can speak for myself: it is the game's design I miss.
To me, it really does not matter if my opponents have a couple of techs memorized. What matters is that I'll have Old Freddy to play and I'll face them with older perks on a older map. What matters, to me in particular, is having the things I liked be available.
3: These threads tend to be self selecting. I usually ignore threads like this because jumping in and saying 'guys, I played the game a few times back then, and I hated the game' (which is true, I played the game around release, and then a little more around 2019, and both times didn't see what people saw in it and gave up on it pretty quickly).
Not sure about this one. We could make a count, but that would take too long.
My only point here is that a general idea that the 2019 DBD was widely praised is something that existed.
My only point here is that a general idea that the 2019 DBD was widely praised is something that existed.Sure. I think that's a very common thing and is in no way unique to DbD. Take long running series like Call of Duty, its not unusual to find people whose 'best' version of the game was in the past.
And that's not even limited to video games. It's a common joke that musicians will have fans who will insist the earlier stuff was better ('you should have been here in the early days'), or long running shows like SNL fans usually have their 'golden' version of the show.
My only point with all of that, is that change is necessary for entertainment forms to have a chance at thriving. Video games, music, television, either update and change, or decline. Some people, inevitably, won't like the changes (for a variety of possible reasons). It sucks when you're on that side of the equation, but everyone ends up there sooner or later.
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@Nazzzak said:
Being a console player, I can honestly say you don't even need a chat box. BHVR should give PC folks the option to just remove it.
We can hide it pretty easily.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937204#Comment_3937204
I would expect for someone who is lecturing me on "subjective" points to not retort with subjective points of their own, and wrong data to boot.
Your first contradiction is that you say dbd's numbers have remained stable, but then the next paragraph you say they have had growth. Those are mutually exclusive. You cannot have stable numbers and also growth. Stable means no change. It's one or the other. Second: June 2020, dbd had 40k players. May 2025, dbd has 42k players, while the previous 7 months had values in the low 30s. How can you with a straight face say that that's growth? It's not growth. That 2k difference is DLC tourists oscillating the player numbers by a couple thousand before they leave. Sure, significant is a subjective word, but I'd assume that significant meant any number above 5%, which dbd's numbers are not.
You are completely missing the point of my skyrim example. I never said that a game's player count wouldn't naturally fall off after its release, my point was that if you have a good gameplay loop, you will retain players, extra props to skyrim for having numbers comparable to dbd while being a 14 year old game and being a single player experience. Skyrim's original success is irrelevant. For a game that has existed for 4 console generations, 30k-40k players after almost 14 years is a miracle. Just because skyrim was the most successful game in 2011 doesn't mean that translates to it having a very active player base 14 years later.
Your last sentence is a flat out denial of the community sentiment. Ask anyone on the forums who played before the pandemic. They'll tell you 99 out of 100 times 2019-2020 was peak dbd. You can have a personal disagreement with that, but that's how the majority feels.
I would expect for someone who is lecturing me on "subjective" points to not retort with subjective points of their own, and wrong data to boot.I'm saying that the claim that the majority of the community feels a certain way is a subjective claim.
It's obviously subjective given that it is a personal impression unless you had a survey of the community members (even then how would we define the community and how well does it represent the overall player base)?
Your first contradiction is that you say dbd's numbers have remained stable, but then the next paragraph you say they have had growth. Those are mutually exclusive. You cannot have stable numbers and also growth. Stable means no change. It's one or the other. Second: June 2020, dbd had 40k players. May 2025, dbd has 42k players, while the previous 7 months had values in the low 30s. How can you with a straight face say that that's growth? It's not growthIt's where you're choosing to pick your starting value.
June 2016, 11k players on average. Beyond a shadow of a doubt DbD has grown since then.
June 2020 is right in the heart of the pandemic. You talk about 'tourist players', but what about the pandemic players? DbD's numbers are at the same point without the same pool of available players. Given that people have less time to play, but their player numbers are around the same level, the logical conclusion is they've added more players than they lost to make up for the less available hours.
But your original argument was -
I don't know where people get this idea that games need to "change it up" in order to retain their players.Even if you want to discard the growth over the games first four to five years, they've definitely kept the player numbers.
I never said that a game's player count wouldn't naturally fall off after its release, my point was that if you have a good gameplay loop, you will retain players, extra props to skyrim for having numbers comparable to dbd while being a 14 year old game and being a single player experience. Skyrim's original success is irrelevant.Skyrim's original success is the most relevant point.
We're discussing player retention. How many players does the game retain without changing it up? To have a discussion of that we need to actually look at the player count at its height and how much it drops off.
That's what retention is. I don't know how you can have discussion about retention without that being the most relevant number.
If you're arguing that literally 100% of the players won't quit the game if it stopped changing it up, well yes, obviously. There's still people who log into Deathgarden (a peak of 11 in the last 24 hours) despite it being dead for quite some time.
For a game that has existed for 4 console generations, 30k-40k players after almost 14 years is a miracle. Just because skyrim was the most successful game in 2011 doesn't mean that translates to it having a very active player base 14 years later.Earlier I tried to do counter examples of games that saw player drops, let me try a two different examples:
World of Warcraft - 21 years, somewhere around 1 million daily players
FF14 - 15 years, somewhere around 400k daily players
Those are games that change things, add things, update things, to keep players invested. And even then, these games are nowhere near their heights. Because, and this is my central disagreement with your original claim, if a game does not change things up over time their player numbers will inevitably, and substantially, drop.
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@GeneralV said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937204#Comment_3937204
Majority seems subjective
Like I said, there was a general idea. Obviously there will always be disagreements, but what @Valuetown said is absolutely correct.
I wanted to find some threads as examples, but the search feature here is pretty bad. Here is a little one I've found:
Worth reading it, I'd say. You can see both a general idea and differing opinions.
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3937266#Comment_3937266
Ask anyone on the forums who played before the pandemic. They'll tell you 99 out of 100 times 2019-2020 was peak dbd.
As a 2018 player myself, I confirm this.
Worth reading it, I'd say. You can see both a general idea and differing opinions.But the differing opinions is kind of the key issue.
I'm not denying that some players preferred a prior version of the game. But there are a few core problems with the argument
1: If that version of the game had just been the static version for the last 4 to 6 years (wherever you are drawing the line), would the players have stayed? I find that argument to be almost impossible, the player count would have inevitably dropped.
2: What level of the enjoyment is not from the game design, but how people played (i.e. the game feeling new and fresh)? The level of efficiency, of techs, doesn't seem to have been as common back then. Inevitably that would have changed over time as well, and likely more quickly without the game changing up.
Like I enjoyed the game the most when I first really got into it, 2022, but that's because it was still new and fresh.
3: These threads tend to be self selecting. I usually ignore threads like this because jumping in and saying 'guys, I played the game a few times back then, and I hated the game' (which is true, I played the game around release, and then a little more around 2019, and both times didn't see what people saw in it and gave up on it pretty quickly). But even within those threads you have differing opinions, making the argument that there is a clear majority self defeating.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3936773#Comment_3936773
There are multiple issues with your post.
First, your assertion that because dbd has changed it up they've "retained" players is wrong. Looking on steam charts, dbd has not had a lasting standing increase in average monthly player count (that hasn't lasted more than a month for DLC releases) since the start of the pandemic back in 2020. For the "change it up" theory to be correct, dbd's average monthly player count would have seen a steady increase due to the amount of DLC releases. This means one or two things: 1) the players who join for DLC do not stay after the first month, and 2) the players that have joined from new DLCs are joining at a rate proportional to the players leaving because dbd just isn't the game it used to be. Either way, that's not "growing."
Second, I don't disagree with your point about different games having different lifespans, but is your assumption working on the fact that you think people should be playing the same game every single day? Is your argument based on the fact that the only way for dbd to retain players that play 4 hours a day, 7 days a week, is to constantly cater to those players as opposed to the average player? My point about skyrim is that it has not had a content update in almost 12 years, yet is still sees numbers comparable to dbd, showing that you don't need a constant stream of DLC updates to have good player numbers.
Third, like I said, dbd has not had any significant growth since 2020.
Fourth, that's correct, but around 2019/2020 is the point in which the majority of people agree would be an ideal middle ground to return to - before dbd starting going majorly downhill.
A few responses:
First, your assertion that because dbd has changed it up they've "retained" players is wrong. Looking on steam charts, dbd has not had a lasting standing increase in average monthly player count (that hasn't lasted more than a month for DLC releases) since the start of the pandemic back in 2020.This confuses retention and growth.
Retention - we have no idea how many players are being retained vs players leaving and being replaced, but the player count numbers having remaining in a stable 30k to 40k range for the last five years.
Growth - The numbers have trickled slightly upwards over that time, which I'll cover a little more later.
Second, I don't disagree with your point about different games having different lifespans, but is your assumption working on the fact that you think people should be playing the same game every single day?What?
We're talking about overall player numbers. I literally have no idea where you're going here.
Third, like I said, dbd has not had any significant growth since 2020.'Significant' is incredibly subjective. Games almost always lose players over their lifespans, games that are growing at all are an extreme minority. I'm sure there are a few other examples, but games running on ~10 year old engines that have any level of player growth are all live service or MMO style games. The fact that DbD is experiencing growth at any level is rather remarkable.
My point about skyrim is that it has not had a content update in almost 12 years, yet is still sees numbers comparable to dbd, showing that you don't need a constant stream of DLC updates to have good player numbers.Skyrim is one of the biggest, most successful games of all time. Just 'be a Skyrim' is not practical advice.
It also ignores the larger point I made that Skyrim, like the vast majority of games, has seen its players numbers significantly decline over time without those updates. Skyrim has retained approximately about 10% of its player base compared to its height, but its height was about 10 times the size of DbD's current average.
Fourth, that's correct, but around 2019/2020 is the point in which the majority of people agree would be an ideal middle ground to return to - before dbd starting going majorly downhill.Majority seems subjective. Every time posts like this come up there are many people I see replying in the comments that the game is in a generally better state than its ever been.
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@Valuetown said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3936676#Comment_3936676
I'm not trying to win anything, I'm just trying to have an honest discussion. If you don't want that, then sure, let's agree to disagree.
I'll jump in. I agree with most of what Shroompy said, but will add on my own:
Let's go back to the original claim
I don't know where people get this idea that games need to "change it up" in order to retain their players. They really don't, especially if it's an asymmetrical game like dbd. If your game loop is good, people will play it. "Live service" is a fancy way of saying DLC is the primary revenue stream. You don't need DLC to enjoy a game for what it is. A game like Skyrim is going on 14 years old, and it has comparable player numbers to dbd. If you need the game to change in order to like it, you didn't like the game in the first place.A couple of issues:
1: At its height, Skyrim had 287,411 players on Steam. The release of the special edition saw a height of 69,777 players.
Simply put, Skyrim has only retained a fraction of their players. If DbD stopped 'changing it up', they would retain some players certainly, but not nearly the amount that currently play the game.
2: The games are radically different genres. Different genres have different lifespans. As an example, X-Com 2 released the same year as DbD and right now ~5k people are playing it. Does that make it a bad game? No, X-Com 2 was awesome, worth multiple plays, but not something to play consistently for years.
3: DbD hasn't just retained their players by changing it up, they grown over the years.
4: Even people who are clamoring for an older version usually want a version somewhere along the line (i.e. not the OG) - such as claiming 2019, or 2020, or 2021 was the best year. Basically everyone wants some of what BHVR changed up, just not everything.
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@CruelLimits1982 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3934141#Comment_3934141
This logic is so flawed it's why anecdotal evidence is literally the worst form of evidence by your logic solo q doesn't need a buff because you 4 man outed against a Nurse on Haddonfield with 4 slowdown perks once so its ok
He was challenged to post a video of his play under certain circumstances. He did that and warned against moving the goalposts. Now there are posts acting like he started the argument with videos of his gameplay instead of in response to a challenge.
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@ratcoffee said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3935450#Comment_3935450
Killer designed to exploit scenarios where there isn't survivor communication struggles in scenarios where there is survivor communication. Story at 11
Seriously, if "sometimes the game is hard when entering a scenario that is explicitly unfavorable" is the best you can offer for scenarios of imbalance, it's really hard to take this in good faith
We could have 200 killers in the game and there would still be posts 'but what about Trapper, high MMR?'
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3 gens are still a huge part of the game. Can the killer just lock it down the entire game like they once did? No. But if the killer is given a strong 3 gen, a close game tilts heavily in the killer's favor at the end.
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@Jock21 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3934141#Comment_3934141
Ok and ? You can also 3-4 out Nurses, Blights, Billies, Ghouls or tunnelling killers in general, I did it plenty of times even in Solo Q matches, so I guess by your logic you shouldn't complain about these killers or their tactics either cause they're still very much beatable.
Kind of missing the prior messages that leads up to what @ChuckingWong is replying to.
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@ChuckingWong said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3933365#Comment_3933365
Ive posted gameplay nonstop on this forum for awhile. So I dont know why it was even necessary. The least you can do is reciprocate for really any further discussion* as this post of yours is just goal post shifting.
*(A match where you think you were required to tunnel)
First it was
"Show us how you play without tunneling"
Now its
"Show us how you play without tunneling, whilst you going afk at the start of the round, while spinning in place for 5 minutes, while the survivors are coordinating, while the stars aligning…"
You are creating a scenario where ITS THE BEST scenario for survivors, and THE WORST scenario for the killer to fit your narrative.
Hypotheticals dont support anything im afraid.
But worst and best scenario if you watched the full match, happens towards the end. Where I am not in any position to be strong or comfortable. And during the match I was never really in a strong position to begin with it was pretty even until the end where it shifted completely to them with 1 gen remaining and 3 hook stages.I watched the start of the video (don’t have time to finish it now, but will do so later), and I can already see that this match doesn’t apply to the situations I was addressing with my post. The first survivors you found were clearly F-ing around, not gen-rushing. It’s easy to see very early on why you didn’t need to tunnel given the lack of coordination or urgency to complete the objectives from the survivor team. I am not arguing that tunneling is required in matches like this. I’ve had plenty of matches play out the way this one did.
You're just dead wrong here.
They werent doing gens immediately to avoid disease. Its part of plague slowdown. The equivalent of this is stealthing out nurse at the start of the match. You dont just go onto gens immediately.
Plus they were in corrupt.
And you need to be reminded again, or you just didnt watch the video:
1 gen left, 3 hook stages.
I wasnt exactly in a strong position, ignoring that I am on Eyrie of crows to begin with.
No tunnel, no camp, no slug;
Just macro play. You see hints of this every time that little Yui went main.
My guess is most killers who think "tunneling is necessary" would continue chase with that person. Which would lose them the match. And then be like "SEE IF I DIDNT TUNNEL…"
Heres another one as well this time its pigeroni.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeGWe7d4C_s
Your response can basically be summed up as this common dismissal:
"Well those are low mmr survivors"
No matter what I posted you would have said this.Now its"Show us how you play without tunneling, whilst you going afk at the start of the round, while spinning in place for 5 minutes, while the survivors are coordinating, while the stars aligning…"I think that's a great point.
It basically boils down to: '[insert strategy here] is unbeatable, ergo if you beat the survivors, they must not have been using [insert strategy here], because its unbeatable.'
It is related the example of 'Good survivors are unbeatable, ergo if the killer won, the survivors must not have been good'.
People have established their conclusion and are working backwards from that instead of looking at evidence and working toward a conclusion.
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Glad to see go next finally being dealt with. As a few others have posted, I think a better idea would have just been disabling self unhooks for the first few minutes as those end game times when an unhook does occur were incredibly exciting. I also worry about how many people will bring perks to unhook, but am willing to take a wait and see approach to how things shake out.
@Nazzzak said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3933026#Comment_3933026
That makes sense, I just don't understand why it says while they're healthy or injured
- The final Survivor is in one of the following states (Healthy, Injured or Dying)
I suppose a possibility is that once the Mori stage activates, its active and doesn't turn off. So if the killer hooks a survivor with one left, Mori turns on, and if that survivor is unhook, its still on and the killer can now hypothetically mori two survivors.
But I'm thinking its just awkward wording.
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A bunch of possibilities I've seen:
Quick Matches Aren't Fun: Even if the killer wins because the survivors are easy to snowball, a few minute match doesn't have the back and forth that makes DbD enjoyable.
Absolutely fine complaint, though enjoyment issues always vary from player to player.
Full Gen Rushes Builds are Too Strong: The argument that if survivors load out on just everything to focus on gens, they are unbeatable.
Subjective complaint that I don't think is correct, but an important thing to have in mind.
Gens in General Go to Fast: Now the killer is replacing the survivors with who the real target of their ire is, BHVR.
I think the complaint is wrong both on the facts and who it is addressed at, but the first is the reason for discussion forums.
Tunneling Comparison: 'I'll stop tunneling survivors when they stop tunneling gens!' A bad argument for multiple reasons, but mainly because killers have various strategies they can employ, other than being chased survivors have very little else to do.
Just Trolling: Matches were all the survivors are running MFT, or DH, or Distortion are much rarer, so what else is there to complain about when the killer loses?
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@LockerLurk said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3932786#Comment_3932786
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3932846#Comment_3932846
I have a sick suspicion that because he only posted Killer-sided takes, he may have been targeted by people who dislike that. The same occurs for the downvote system. It's why it needs to go, it doesn't promote discussion, it only promotes trolling and targeted harassment.
Daniel did not deserve the ban, he did not post anything problematic, he did not harass anyone, and he did not post anything that was an issue to anyone. He just happened to post EXTREMELY Killer-sided takes that while tone deaf were harmless. I have seen this with countless other people here too - always Killer-sided posters, never Survivor-sided ones.
If it's not direct favoritism or targeting, then something is off with the ban detection or people are getting false flagged. That needs addressing.
Let's not make things worse. Discussing bans/forum policy in a thread is also against a rules. I've seen some survivor accounts get banned before and I was really surprised when it happened, but like Pulsar said, without seeing the post that caused the incident impossible to say.
But let's not derail @jesterkind 's thread, he's put so much work into arguing with so very, very many people :).
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The thing about a 'grind' system is that it is meant to invest players into something that would be much more straightforward if automated but it gives a sense of progression.
At some point people will have to ask: if I can just automate the blood spending entirely, why have the bloodweb at all?
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Is it a problem as a tactic? Not really, lots of times gen rushing still results in a survivor loss because the survivors are just slamming gens and thus are very open to being snowballed.
Should they slow down gens at the beginning? It depends, right now the beginning of the game is massively important to both sides. A long or short chase can basically decide the trial. I'd like it to be more evened out, but it would require broader changes.
Is a fully upgraded commodious toolbox too strong? Yes.
Gen rushing will slow down a little with a basekit change of survivors starting together as it will take more time to spread out, so the basekit change is coming.
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@subdl said:
“The gates being open isn’t the same as all survivors being downed.” Therefore, even if the exit has opened, the killer must keep performing their role — as if the show hasn’t already ended.
This is the logic some continue to insist on.
When all survivors are downed, they can immediately abandon the match — because “there’s nothing left to do.” When the gates are powered, the killer must keep playing — because “there might still be something they can do.”
This is the philosophy behind the current system.
One side is told: “Never give up as long as there’s a chance.” The other side is told: “If hope feels gone, feel free to leave.”
Why is the right to freely abandon a match reserved for only one role?
I believe most players who primarily play killer feel this imbalance — whether they fully realize it or not. Those who mainly play survivor, and perhaps even the developers themselves, may genuinely not understand what the problem is. Because when you’re never the one stuck in a match that’s already over, watching others leave while you’re forced to stay —it’s easy to believe the system is fair.
Why is the right to freely abandon a match reserved for only one role?Well, you explain it pretty well:
When all survivors are downed, they can immediately abandon the match — because “there’s nothing left to do.” When the gates are powered, the killer must keep playing — because “there might still be something they can do.”There's a big difference between 'nothing' and 'something'. Both sides have plenty of examples where the chance of improving their position is slim, but there is still something they can do, and neither side has an abandon option in that scenario. Now you can argue that the abandon system should be expanded, but its a different topic.
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As others have mentioned, we just had a massive thread on this. Gates being powered is not nearly as close to the game being decided as all survivors being downed. We can talk about more abandon conditions, but these situations are not that comparable.
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As @Shroompy says, what exactly do we mean by tunneling? This is one of those things that tend to derail these conversations. To me it means that the first survivor the killer hooks, they target above all other priorities.
On the other hand, if the killer came across three survivors who just finish a heal, one is on two hooks, the other two on one hook, and he targeted the two hook survivor I wouldn't call that tunneling and, all else being equal, is the right decision.
Agree on the game fundamentals. It would be incredibly easy for a new player on Wraith, to target the first player they find, after hook cloak and wait nearby, rush in after the save. They'd probably win a lot of their games until they improved in MMR, then they'd complain about 'good' survivors.
I think one of the primary reasons not to tunnel is that it now adds a huge luck component to the game. Did the survivor you pick / the rest of the team have anti-tunnel builds? You have no way to know that before you begin the tunnel process, and if they do, you're in huge trouble.
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They have separate teams.
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@MechWarrior3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3926562#Comment_3926562
If I may ask I made a Psychic Build to be lore accurate for one of my characters. I have Premonition, Clairvoyance, Alert and Empathetic Connection. Are there other psychic perks?
Are you going off how the perk is described? Because lots of aura read could be psychic, but are conceptually something else.
Like Alert seems to be more symbolic of the character's incredible powers of perception, more than a psychic ability.
Still Sight and Object of Obsession seem to be meant to be psychic links, though the 'bond' created by Object might be a psychic bond and not a psychic power depending on what you are looking for.
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@Ryuhi said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3930326#Comment_3930326
That was a single example given, while the entire rest of the post was ignored. It was an example where the killer's time is not respected despite the opposite (being slugged, also up to 4 minutes so same duration) being ignored. They have essentially acknowledged this by having plot twist not trigger the abandon condition for survivors IIRC, but there is nothing to stop people from doing this (especially vs killers who don't participate in the exit gate ritual.) My point, again, is that one side is being favored over the other in how lazily this system was conceived and implemented, and that they should adjust one or both sides implementations to not have parts of the issue disproportionally benefit one side over the other. If the killer role has limitations that prevent it from being even with survivors, then survivors can't have a way to BM and waste time for free with zero repercussions while having a way to avoid repercussions and reprisals.
Now BHVR has bungled both the implementation and communication of this, but you have a similar issue.This is my issue.
That was a single example given, while the entire rest of the post was ignoredI didn't want to belabor the point, but sure.
@Ryuhi said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3930089#Comment_3930089
1: If a killer slugs for the 4k, the slugged survivor waits for them to find the other survivor, down them, put them on hook, come back to the the slug, and then either put them on hook or mori, which might require waiting for the other survivor to die. That's can be a minute give or take of literally nothing. Dead time like that is awful for a video game.Then give them a way to quicken their suffering that is humiliating so there is parity with the killer in the exits scenario. Or make it so that they have to be slugged for at least 30 seconds before they can nope out. ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE TWO SIMILAR IF DESIGN LIMITATIONS PREVENT TOTAL PARITY. The issue is that they just threw in a system that is very catering to one side while ignoring the other, allows one side free reign to bm while not even needing to sit through a mori (Why did they even make them basekit in the first place.) Multiple times people have come up with ideas and approaches around finding a middle ground between what killers currently have and what survivors have, and it keeps getting ignored and the status quo outright defended. Thats the approach that should be taken, not "killers should have everything survivors currently do" or "killers should get nothing and like it." There's a middle ground.
No reason for the survivor to be stuck there.And no reason for the killer to be stuck waiting for a forever hider with plot twist hiding in a corner extending the EGC. There is no reason for survivors to be allowed to delay leaving the exit gates in a checkmate scenario. There is no reason for a killer to blow out their eardrums with loud noise notifications because they alt tabbed out to avoid the exit gate taunting. If you have a problem that affects X and Y, you don't fix it for X and just call it a day.
BM is part of it and I think BHVR should do more to address the issue, but it doesn't seem like they will, but there are other reasons for the abandon system beyond just the possibility of BM.This is why people are making such a stink about it, It doesn't seem like they will. Maybe in some alternate universe Jeff and Ada have the same voice volumes, like was promised years ago. Killer centric issues get ignored hard unless they're specifically related to balance (especially kill rates.) QoL has always been a mess for the role, and things like the survivor HUD never even amounted to killers getting hook counters. For the record I don't think the devs are biased toward survivors, but they sure as hell tend to be blind to killer issues, even if unintentional.
Then give them a way to quicken their suffering that is humiliating so there is parity with the killer in the exits scenario.Not at all the point I was discussing. BHVR seems to want to limit the abandon mechanic to the most clear cut scenarios. Gates being powered, or one survivor still standing, are trickier issues.
ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE TWO SIMILAR IF DESIGN LIMITATIONS PREVENT TOTAL PARITY.Parity is a bad argument. If there is a way that the game can be improved, it should be improved, even if it can only apply to one side.
while not even needing to sit through a mori (Why did they even make them basekit in the first place.)Hopefully not so 'survivors must watch this happen'. If you want to watch the Mori as either survivor or killer, nothing is stopping you.
Multiple times people have come up with ideas and approaches around finding a middle ground between what killers currently have and what survivors have, and it keeps getting ignored and the status quo outright defended.Thatsthe approach that should be taken, not "killers should have everything survivors currently do" or "killers should get nothing and like it." There's a middle ground.It depends what we're discussing.
Are we discussing ideally how we'd like the game to be?
Or are we discussing whether BHVR's design decisions are not treating both sides in the same way?
There is no reason for survivors to be allowed to delay leaving the exit gates in a checkmate scenario.Difficulty of implementation. How does the system determine a checkmate scenario in the same way it can with all survivors slugged. There are lots of reasons for survivors to stick around a match, mainly to try and help other survivors escape. Code it so killer can abandon if all survivors in the exit gate? Great, I'd support it, but huge chance survivors who want to BM just move slightly outside.
There's a number of possibilities that cross my mind on how it could be down, but they all require conditions to be met. Whether BHVR thinks a system like would help the game or be more confusing is not something I have any knowledge of.
There is no reason for a killer to blow out their eardrums with loud noise notifications because they alt tabbed out to avoid the exit gate taunting.Agreed, but its an example of BM, which was very much not what my post was about.
If you have a problem that affects X and Y, you don't fix it for X and just call it a day.Ideally you improve both, but fixing X doesn't make Y any better or worse.
Killer centric issues get ignoredhardunless they're specifically related to balanceI'm still waiting for the anti-slug that was tried years ago, failed, and they said they'd try again. We have another try coming up, its very possible that it goes as well as basekit unbreakable and never sees the light of day.
Anyway, back to the most recent post.
They have essentially acknowledged this by having plot twistnottrigger the abandon condition for survivors IIRC, but there is nothing to stop people from doing this (especially vs killers who don't participate in the exit gate ritual.Which was them taking a killer concern into the game.
But yes, survivors can hide. The game has hiding, I don't see a system you could reasonably code that is not already dealt with by the EGC timer and AFK crow to draw the line between good hiding and bad hiding.
If the killer role has limitations that prevent it from being even with survivors, then survivors can't have a way to BM and waste time for free with zero repercussions while having a way to avoid repercussions and reprisals.Again you're back to BM, which was not what my post was about. The abandon system for slugs as is can improve the gameplay experience for survivors with no BM whatsoever. The abandon system for survivors hiding out could improve the experience for killers with some slight changes.
EGC is an actively ongoing game for killers unless the survivors stick around to BM (or soloq potentially where the groups are split between the doors and neither knows of the other). And as I mentioned, I wish they would do more about BM, but it has to be pretty extreme to motivate them.
This is my issue.Except there is a substantial difference between saying BHVR failed in their implementation to take killer QOL of life into consideration (the survivors not finishing a gen example), and saying they did not consider it at all.
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@Ryuhi said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3930089#Comment_3930089
1: If a killer slugs for the 4k, the slugged survivor waits for them to find the other survivor, down them, put them on hook, come back to the the slug, and then either put them on hook or mori, which might require waiting for the other survivor to die. That's can be a minute give or take of literally nothing. Dead time like that is awful for a video game.Then give them a way to quicken their suffering that is humiliating so there is parity with the killer in the exits scenario. Or make it so that they have to be slugged for at least 30 seconds before they can nope out. ATTEMPT TO MAKE THE TWO SIMILAR IF DESIGN LIMITATIONS PREVENT TOTAL PARITY. The issue is that they just threw in a system that is very catering to one side while ignoring the other, allows one side free reign to bm while not even needing to sit through a mori (Why did they even make them basekit in the first place.) Multiple times people have come up with ideas and approaches around finding a middle ground between what killers currently have and what survivors have, and it keeps getting ignored and the status quo outright defended. Thats the approach that should be taken, not "killers should have everything survivors currently do" or "killers should get nothing and like it." There's a middle ground.
No reason for the survivor to be stuck there.And no reason for the killer to be stuck waiting for a forever hider with plot twist hiding in a corner extending the EGC. There is no reason for survivors to be allowed to delay leaving the exit gates in a checkmate scenario. There is no reason for a killer to blow out their eardrums with loud noise notifications because they alt tabbed out to avoid the exit gate taunting. If you have a problem that affects X and Y, you don't fix it for X and just call it a day.
BM is part of it and I think BHVR should do more to address the issue, but it doesn't seem like they will, but there are other reasons for the abandon system beyond just the possibility of BM.This is why people are making such a stink about it, It doesn't seem like they will. Maybe in some alternate universe Jeff and Ada have the same voice volumes, like was promised years ago. Killer centric issues get ignored hard unless they're specifically related to balance (especially kill rates.) QoL has always been a mess for the role, and things like the survivor HUD never even amounted to killers getting hook counters. For the record I don't think the devs are biased toward survivors, but they sure as hell tend to be blind to killer issues, even if unintentional.
And no reason for the killer to be stuck waiting for a forever hider with plot twist hiding in a corner extending the EGC.I think this is missing the point I was trying to make so I'll try again.
There are lots of situations where, totally taking BM out of it, survivors can be stuck waiting around. That's a failure of game design that the abandon system can potentially address. Those failures of game design can be used to BM, absolutely, but the problem exists whether a side BMs or not.
The parity comparison would likely be the survivors hiding out not doing the gens. Now BHVR has bungled both the implementation and communication of this, but you have a similar issue. You have a couple of survivors who want to survive, but progressing the generators is no longer realistic, so they go into hide mode. From the game's design, no one is here BMing, BHVR has always maintained a survivor playing for themselves is fine (they only have the incredibly vague standard about trying to 'progress the trial'). They've also said that the killer protecting gens over pursuing the survivors is fine.
You have a situation where everyone in these scenarios is playing the way BHVR says is acceptable, but also there is at least one player in the situation just 'stuck', that calls for something new.
Again in these scenarios no one has done anything wrong, they just come up in the natural course of gameplay and should be fixed.
BMing creates another issue for two reasons.
1: BHVR doesn't seem to want to address anything except extreme BMing. That sucks. They should.
2: Some elements of BMing are realistically much harder to address via coding. Take your plot twist example. How does the game tell the difference between a survivor using it to heal up so they can wait for the right moment when the killer has moved to rush for the gates? This applies to quite a few end game scenarios, how to tell the difference between a survivor observing the killer, figuring out what they are doing, and looking for an opening, vs a survivor just stalling out. A human watching the games probably could tell the difference, coding it would likely be impossible.
Slugged and not doing gens create a clear line that is easy for a computer to decipher. If all the survivors are down, if the gens aren't getting progressed, there is a trigger point that the system can process. There are lots of other situations on both sides where as humans we can tell 'yeah, this is over', that would be considerably more difficult to implement into the game. I think a clear line would be the gates open and all the survivors within a certain range, but BHVR seems to disagree. However I do think the idea of survivors just hiding during EGC would be far too difficult to implement that is not dealt with by the exiting EGC timer.
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Well skill checks are a big deal, but taking those out
To my understanding, the faster repair speed depletes the charges faster. You are reading 32/16 as seconds, not charges.
Perhaps a clearer way to think about it:
Commodious: Until you get to 32 charges, you work at 1.5 times speed.
Engineer's: Until you get to 16 charges, you work at 2 times speed.
So the Commodious let's you get 32 charges done (or 35.56% of the gen) in 21.333 seconds.
The Mechanics (edit: Engineer's - tired brain) let's you get 16 charges done (or 17.78% of the gen) in 8 seconds, then the next 16 charges take a second a piece.
So to get to 32 charges with the Commodious takes 21.333 seconds, while it takes 24 seconds with the Mechanics.
I'm exhausted so my math might be off, but here's a thread on the topic from a year ago from @UndeddJester.
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@LockerLurk said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3929430#Comment_3929430
You put this very well and again, this is all I am asking for. Parity. I just don't want one side to get their issues with BMing addressed, but not the other. I don't want an abandon to be seen as a loss for one side but a DRAW for the other, it's a forfeit, it's not a draw, it's admitting you lost the round gracefully. A forfeit is a loss you choose to take for the sake of sportsmanship.
I just want this game to consider both sides' sportsmanship problem. Because it's a big one.
I just want this game to consider both sides' sportsmanship problem. Because it's a big one.Except that's a far bigger issue than the abandon system. BHVR has, generally, said they are okay with BM to a certain degree. Teabagging, humping, insults in chat (that don't go into slurs or threats), broadly seem to be things they aren't going to try and stop.
If they were to change their stance on that, there are a lot of things that could be done to prevent some BM actions that are much easier to implement than an expansion of the abandon system.
Edit to Add:
Thinking about this more, we're over 250 posts into this thread and I think a key point might be alluding the discussion.
The abandon system is not just about BM. In BHVR's eyes it might not even be primarily about BM being that's something that usually doesn't seem to bother them.
1: If a killer slugs for the 4k, the slugged survivor waits for them to find the other survivor, down them, put them on hook, come back to the the slug, and then either put them on hook or mori, which might require waiting for the other survivor to die. That's can be a minute give or take of literally nothing. Dead time like that is awful for a video game.
And it doesn't have to be a slug for the 4k. One survivor dead, three slugged, is not that unusual (even four slugged against some killers), if you're the last survivor on the ground you're just waiting.
And the neither of the above would be clearly BM, its just playing the game. No reason for the survivor to be stuck there.
2: How it helps killers. Even before 2v8 killer queues were long. While they weren't intolerable before Kaneki, most people's reports are the killer queue generally being longer than the survivor. Well the quicker survivors can get out of their game and get back into the next game, the quicker killers can get to their match.
BM is part of it and I think BHVR should do more to address the issue, but it doesn't seem like they will, but there are other reasons for the abandon system beyond just the possibility of BM.
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He's got more options than the killers you listed.
If the survivors heal, he pops power.
If the survivors don't heal, he can traverse the map really quickly. 8 injured survivors against two M1 killers should go the killers way unless they over commit to a chase.
Legion is an annoying killer to face, but if the survivors have a few medics and/or spread out they weaken his strength, meaning they can deal with his partner. With Oni and Legion the options significantly diminish.
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@Flawless_ said:
We all know "abandon" has basically become the new “go next” button, mostly used by survivors. The killer has almost no say, and when they do get to trigger it, it still counts as a loss. That already feels off.
But I also have a bit of an issue about how it undermines the killer’s experience. You play well, snowball the match, and suddenly the survivors throw themselves at you just to force an early end. Bots take over, and that's it. No satisfying finish, no sense of having earned a win, the game turns into a custom with bots cause everyone just leaves. I understand people want to move on but it feels a bit weird. It's like you're playing a sport, and when it looks like you're about to win your opponent just leaves, dunno.
What I personally enjoy about playing killer is that, even though games are a bit stressful sometimes, if you play well and efficiently it kind of builds toward something, but this system cuts that short the moment survivors are losing. It reeks of entitlement, like the expectation is to only stick around if you’re winning. Like if you get a slugfest two minutes in okay, fair. But 10 minutes into a solid match? Come on.
What really kills it for me is the double standard. As killer, if things aren’t going your way, you're stuck playing it out to the bitter end. But if the match turns against survivors, they can instantly bail as a group, no consequences. At that point, it's not even about slugging. It just feels like the game only plays to completion if the survivors are winning.
But the worst is, abandon counts as a draw. You could have one survivor dead and the other three slugged, and still not get credit for a win. That’s not a stalemate, that's just the surv team getting outplayed. Why deny the killer at least the win?
If this system has to stay, at least limit it. Make it only usable early-game or require all four survivors to be slugged. After that, it shouldn’t necessarily be an option.
Or just implement a real surrender system since, let's be real, that's what's really been happening most games, with people just throwing themselves at the killer in order to go next. At that point just let survivors vote to concede and just send them straight back to the lobby. And while you're at it give killers the option to forfeit too. That way both sides have a say without gutting the pacing or ending games in the most unsatisfying way possible for the killer whether they win or lose.
Right now it’s just a mess. Nobody wants to sit slugged for 3 minutes waiting for other people to go down, and nobody wants to get a draw whil being thrown into a custom with bots.
Just my 2 cents. I understand if most people don't agree with me on this one, although if the system is here to stay it feels like there's a lot of room for improvement.
You play well, snowball the match, and suddenly the survivors throw themselves at you just to force an early endI don't see how the last survivor trying to run for a minute or two, while the other survivor(s) just wait on the ground is better. Or survivors hiding it out. Better to get it over with.
Bots take over, and that's it. No satisfying finish, no sense of having earned a win, the game turns into a custom with bots cause everyone just leaves.I get the idea of wanting matches to play out, but this feels more like wanting the other side to watch your touchdown dance. There's no realistic difference in this situation between a bot and a human, that trial is done.
But the worst is, abandon counts as a draw.This was a disastrous post on BHVR's behalf that they really should revisit. They said it counted as a draw, but did not have an impact on MMR, meaning what they meant by draw was totally up in the air.
By everything I've seen, survivors abandoning count as them dying.
At that point just let survivors vote to concede and just send them straight back to the lobby. And while you're at it give killers the option to forfeit too.This would throw the game into chaos. Rare would be the game that went past the first few minutes.
Nobody wants to sit slugged for 3 minutes waiting for other people to go down, and nobody wants to get a draw whil being thrown into a custom with bots.It's not like you are starting a game with bots. The survivors are slugged and on the ground. Whether they are bots or humans has almost zero impact on anything at this point. If you feel that picking up the bots is pointless, well picking up the humans was pointless too, it was never in anyway meaningful gameplay.
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@NaveR said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928690#Comment_3928690
Errr, nope. This post is about giving killers the "abandon option" under a condition. Tbagging and other stuff are ways of reasoning for it.
I'm glad the forums are filled with so many people who are capable of knowing that when Mandy says "in this case" she actually means something much, much more than that.
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@cburton311 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3929354#Comment_3929354
I think the queues sort of speak to the issue. 2v8 there are just factually too few survivors and too many killers. How ever much specific people enjoy it, most don't.
The problem is that is doesn't have to just be 'most', it has to be a substantial majority, or killer queues will explode. It's one of the big problems for DbD modes (and asyms in general.
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@Volcz said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928288#Comment_3928288
So I'm supposed to just follow along and not call a spade a spade, just b/c others don't?
The reasons proposed for this feature are just flat out, disingenuous and incredibly biased. There's almost no objectivity.
- survivors can hide and run out at the last 5 seconds of EGC - legit 1% of the playerbase does this. Most people don't do this. Again, acting like this is the norm in your matches, is just a straight up lie to get people on your side.
- survivors can be pushed out but I don't want to face them at the gates for w/e reason - you're playing a pvp game where 1 side loses and 1 side wins. Sometimes you lose. Whats so difficult about pushing people out of a gate?
Survivors legitimately have no option when they're forced to bleed out. I'd be all for killers getting an abandon feature, if it made sense. This does not make sense.
This is just a 'scream for the feature despite not having any logic behind it' type thread.
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928297#Comment_3928297
Oh let me clarify. Killers. Not everyone, just the ones defending this or trying to get this implemented, knowing full well, it makes 0 sense and they just want it for selfish/ego reasons. Not saying survivors are any better, I will call them out just the same (& I have, in the past). But this right here, this is just stupid.
Survivors legitimately have no option when they're forced to bleed out. I'd be all for killers getting an abandon feature, if it made sense. This does not make sense.I agree with this. I came into the thread strongly supporting the idea, and now what I see people seem to actually be asking for, I'm just thinking 'there is no possible way that can work'.
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@MechWarrior3 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3929300#Comment_3929300
I guess but I am not sure how else they will do it? Who is gonna take my spot if it’s my turn to play killer and I am in a match as survivor while I wait?
Three possibilities (edit: that I can think of, I'm sure there are more)
1: It doesn't let you into survivor games when you are close in the queue. As a random example: let's say there are a 1000 killers in queue when you join, if you pop out of a survivor game and are below 250 you can't join the next queue.
2: Once you get to the front of the queue, the position is there for the next available game. Basically the system calls for 1, if they aren't there is calls for 2, if they aren't there it calls for 3, etc. So if you get to the front of the queue while in a survivor game, you get the next killer slot that appears when you exit the survivor game.
3: The queue creates a holding zone and an active queue. The active queue is where the system is trying to match people based on MMR and other considerations (even though MMR basically becomes irrelevant in this mode). Holding queue is just waiting for spots to open up in the active queue. While in the holding queue you can play survivor, not while in the active queue.
Option 2 would probably be the easiest to implement.
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@StalkingYou said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928928#Comment_3928928
ok ur right the gens should do themselves while im getting tunneled
Based on the arguments you are making, this would be balanced, because all the killer has to do is get better.
What's funny is @Pulsar might be one of the few who wouldn't be bothered by that level of challenge. It might bring him back to the game.
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@Coffeecrashing said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928550#Comment_3928550
She was talking about the general scenario, because she didn't give any other reasons. If she wants to add additional information, she can do that, but for now we need to assume that was the main reason.
There is no "best argument", because we were only given 1 official reason why killers don't have the abandon button.
This doesn't make sense for a lot ofreasons
1: There are 30 posts before Mandy posts. I don't see any discussing hiding, the discussion is about teabagging at the exit gate to taunt the killer. Your post seems to be the first one to mention that after she posts, you then seem to focus on trying to pull the discussion to that issue throughout the thread.
2: She quoted a specific post that dealt with survivors teabagging at the gate, not hiding, not EGC in general, just survivors teabagging at the gate.
3: The phrase 'push them out' is commonly used to refer to pushing out the survivor waiting at the gate, not hiding.
4: We weren't given an 'official reason' for why they don't have the abandon button here anymore than we were given a reason why survivors don't have an abandon button when a survivor gets eliminated or the survivor is the last one left alive and the hatch is closed - because both sides still have a realistic chance of accomplishing their objective. The trial is still ongoing.
To go to one of your posts from page 3 of this thread
People keep bringing up this strawman argument, of survivors that are conveniently waiting at the exit gates, just waiting to be quickly forced out of the exit gates. That’s not the main problem. The problem are the survivors that purposely hide during the EGC.This thread is about people waiting at the exit gate to teabag the killer. It's not a strawman, its what people are talking about. You seem to have another issue you'd like to discuss that you keep trying to make Mandy's statement apply to. If you think survivors hiding out during end game chaos is a massive problem, make a thread about it (the only situation I've ever seen that is a closed hatch and usually its survivors looking for a key, but I've seen plenty of teabagging the killer).
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@Coffeecrashing said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928311#Comment_3928311
Mandy’s statement literally said “the killer can do a lot to force survivors out of the match”. That statement is incorrect if the survivors are hiding in random parts of the map, until the EGC is almost done.
That's the only actual relevant thing to the conversation, because it's the official BHVR response. There isn't anything complicated going on here.
We're circling a couple of steps back in the discussion.
You say Mandy's statement is incorrect, but you aren't quoting the line she is referring to:
How is 4 survivors bleeding out on the ground for a few minutes any different than survivors teabagging at a gate and not leaving for a few minutes?She is talking about a specific situation, not just the general scenario.
I don't know how she would respond to the idea of survivors hiding out, but the best argument is that the killer can still kill them. Like the killer doesn't have to just force them out, the killer can still accomplish his objective against that/those survivors.
The abandon mechanic exists for situations were the chance for a comeback is astronomically low and/or the game could be dragged on for a ridiculous length of time. All the survivors standing at the exact line to exit the gate meets condition 1, the chance of a killer getting a kill there is almost impossible. A survivor hiding doesn't meet either, the killer still has a chance of killing them.
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@Coffeecrashing said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928260#Comment_3928260
I'm saying the actual reason why survivors don't want killers to have an abandon button, is because they want to taunt the killer.
I'm also saying people are making a strawman argument, that the killer can quickly just force the survivors out of the exit gates.
Both these statements can exist at the same time.
I'm saying the actual reason why survivors don't want killers to have an abandon button, is because they want to taunt the killer.And I'm sure there are killers who oppose anti-slugging and abandoning because they wanted to keep survivors trapped in the game for as long as possible.
But it doesn't make for a productive discussion to discount a person's reasons because you might think there is a bias behind them.
4 slugged and the gates being opened are different. As I've been saying, I think there absolutely should be a way for a killer to abandon in this scenario, however it is more complicated than the slug issue.
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@Coffeecrashing said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3928080#Comment_3928080
Let’s be real here. The actual reason why survivors don’t want the killer to have an abandon button, is because survivors want to taunt the killer.
I’ve seen so many complaints that the kill rate is “too high”, and killers shouldn’t sweat for an extra kill….. but this is the one scenario where the killers really should try for an additional kill? I don’t believe it.
Let’s be real here. The actual reason why survivors don’t want the killer to have an abandon button, is because survivors want to taunt the killer.I've said in my posts that this feature should exist, it might need some conditions. I'm a survivor main.
You originally were trying to argue about survivors hiding in the map. That is factually a very different situation as I pointed out. You're now trying to change your argument to presumptions about people's emotional reasons.