The Developers do not want you to play how you want to play.

[Jester]

Does anyone remember when the devs had that "Cinematic Mori" thing where if everyone was dead and the last person goes down they'd be automatically mori'd which only caused the game to be played in exactly one very linear and boring way?

I believe that ever since before then, the developers of dead by daylight do not care about different playstyles or perks, they just want everyone to play in exactly 1 way so that their job doing moderation for their community and game will be easier. Maybe the reasoning is different, but it has been made extremely clear with recent updates that the developers would rather you camp and tunnel than play in a way that is actually fun.

Do you want to go out of your way for a fun endgame build? Too bad, since you didn't bring pop/pain res, all 5 gens are gone and you only got two stacks of no way out.

Do you want to have fun with a pentimento build and go out of your way to get everyone hooked? Doesn't matter, you didn't bring slowdowns and now pentimento has no use.

Do you want to play with a jumpscare only playstyle? Too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bad.

This is why more people are slugging and tunneling.

Bring back jank. Bring back imbalance. All this balancing nonsense is making the game linear and extremely hard to enjoy. It's 4v1 Asym Horror, imbalance is literally in the title of the genre of the game. 4 is not the same as 1, therefore it's imbalanced. So instead of focusing on balancing the game, why don't we focus on janky and fun things like Nic Cage perks and blinding survivors with Hex: Two Can Play.

I'm SICK of bringing 4 slowdowns just to get 2 or 3 kills and I'm sick of running full meta/anti-tunnel just to survive more than 5 minutes!

[Kriegor]

skill issue

[Elikir]

Originally posted by Fizzie:

It's 4v1 Asym Horror, imbalance is literally in the title of the genre of the game. 4 is not the same as 1, therefore it's imbalanced. So instead of focusing on balancing the game, why don't we focus on janky and fun things like Nic Cage perks and blinding survivors with Hex: Two Can Play.

The devs also try to balance things around survivors with very, very VERY low skill level (perhaps their own skill level?)
if you balance the game around the bottom of the community it will only lead to exploits and unbeatable players

i completely agree with you, wether they want competitive or just chill/fun game, the best way to "balance" this game is to give more build variety, make many perks strong, so no many are strong anymore :p

If you restrain your community to play only one way, don't be "surprised pikachu" when the game is stale and boring

[Jester]

Originally posted by Elikir:

Originally posted by Fizzie:

It's 4v1 Asym Horror, imbalance is literally in the title of the genre of the game. 4 is not the same as 1, therefore it's imbalanced. So instead of focusing on balancing the game, why don't we focus on janky and fun things like Nic Cage perks and blinding survivors with Hex: Two Can Play.

The devs also try to balance things around survivors with very, very VERY low skill level (perhaps their own skill level?)
if you balance the game around the bottom of the community it will only lead to exploits and unbeatable players

i completely agree with you, wether they want competitive or just chill/fun game, the best way to "balance" this game is to give more build variety, make many perks strong, so no many are strong anymore :p

If you restrain your community to play only one way, don't be "surprised pikachu" when the game is stale and boring

I completely agree, I believe that if everything is broken then none of it is. Imbalance is a huge part of pvp gaming, especially 4v1's, and especially Overwatch and games like it.

[Jester]

Originally posted by Cam:

Originally posted by Fizzie:

I did read your post, and you made it abundantly clear that you did not read a single word of my initial post. You didn't "just accuse the devs" you were saying that imbalance is bad when a lot of the time it isn't. If it is OVERLY Unbalanced then yes, it can be bad, but there's a sweet-spot. You clearly ignored my point and tried to counterclaim it by telling me that it's just outright bad with 0 evidence.

Look at other games with similar inbalances, I'm right and that's just a fact. Inbalance is sometimes good and it makes a game fun more often than not. Trying to balance ♥♥♥♥ by nerfing perks that make the game different or buffing tunneling whether you meant to or not, is the most boring thing in the universe.

Look at Outlast Trials. It's literally a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ singleplayer game and they're nerfing some of the stronger stuff that makes it fun for the sake of "balance" and has lost hundreds of players because of it. Dead by Daylight is doing the exact same thing. Soon, it won't be surprising to see only about 50k players a month and eventually 10k.

No, I'm not going to entertain this, sorry. You want to state what's fact like you're the arbiter of truth? Fine, let's see sources for all of it. Show me proof that the licenses are what makes the player count stagnate. Show me proof the game was more fun back then. Show me proof that 'balance is bad' and 'unbalance is good.' Do you have literally any, or are you just stating your opinion and then saying "That's fact"? Because that's the one it seems like to me. I read your post, I gave you a good faith answer, and you're just ranting and raving at me while deciding your opinions are facts.

Chucky and Xenomorph, the two biggest licenses of dead by daylight history have both failed. That is undeniable fact.

The viewer counts on old dead by daylight videos compared to new ones are astounding. Even on youtube there were massive communities who loved and cherished the game and its creators. Now people like SpookNJukes can hardly hit 100k views while Monto, No0b3, and Puppers were hitting over 500k. You can check that one yourself, there are no videos on it.

We've already lost Demogorgon to numbers falling and not making enough revenue. Now that he's back because these new licenses promise more money and didn't make that- we could lose him again.

Albert Wesker saw a 20k player flop and was not as popular as ANYONE before Onryo.

The release of Onryo saw a steady decline in the playerbase and fanbase, around the same time Onryo was released, there were a lot of massive changes that game to the game that caused players to simply not want to play anymore. Using our ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brains, we can tell that players not wanting to play anymore = no longer fun, therefore if fun = before onryo, then slight unbalance is a good thing.

Dead by Daylight's best years were 2018-2019, before and after that we saw that "overly unbalanced" thing I was talking about and people tended to have more complaints about it. Even currently, all anyone does is complain and blame the other side, that is irrefutable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVlofEuFK6A <-- source one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Swf91-di97I <--- source two

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLRGoH-liQE <--- source three

https://youtu.be/xHrltMfZe28?si=O7vKd-iRXK5AqM2U <--- source four

[Lord Cyphre]

That's every game ever basically.
People have an idea for a a game and how it shpould play, devekop and then release it.
If you don't like how a game is played you play something else instead of demanding the game be changed for you.

Now rthis game has changed a lot since its inception though and t5he devs do pander to their fanb ase a lot.
It started off as more of a hide and seek style of game but changed into a more fast-paced chase oriented experience, which is what the majority of players wanted.
That's the style they stick with and they have to stick with one thing otherwise balancing is impossible.

4 slowdown perks won't help much against a decent team. Most slowdown perks require the killer to get downs for them to anything to begin with. If you're not getting downs gens will go by, with or withpout slowdown. If it takes you a long time to find and chase down survivors your not getting much out of your slowdown. If you are getting a lot of downs in quick succession you might not even need slowdown because the survivors don't have much time to do gens to begin with.
The way to counter slowdown perks is to split up anmd do gens. If you can't get multiple survivors busy at the same time you won't slow them down at all.
As a killer you want to minimize the time spend on finding and chasing survivors. 4 slowdown perks don't help much with that, it's a much better idea to bring 1 alongside some perks that help with chases and finding survivors. That way you minimize the time spend dpoing nothing which in will give you more value from your slowdown.

Mindlessly tunneling is also pretty bad. That can be a surefire way to have all the gens pop quickly because you're not keeping multiple survivors busy. Even without poerks there's enough anti tunneling/camping mechanics in the game now to give the survivor an edge. Tunneling only works well if the survivor(s) play poorly.
If you find you need anti-tunneling perks to get have a chance at survival it's more likely that your teams isn't playing all too well.
If you're an easy target and a fast down then a killer likely won't think twice about getting you out of the game asap. Don't take this the wrong way, nobody's perfect, I'm not a god gamer either, nobody has to be and we all started off knowing nothing about the game. I'm just trying to say that sometimes it's beneficial to rethink ones approach and try to find a way to improve. The harder you are to find and catch the less likely it is that a kilelr's going to tunnel you because they can't afford the time. Killers have been hardwired to go after the so called "weak link" for an eternity now.
It could also be the team making poor decisions that gets you tunneled. Like making terrible saves, not taking aggro, being overcommited to stealth and/or not being productive can all lead to being tunneled.

Most of the problems are caused by the players, not the devs. The devs biggest mnistakle is them trying to pander too much to their community when a lot of the times the suggestion aren't that good.

[Cam]

Originally posted by Fizzie:

length snip

Youtuber opinion pieces are not factual sources. I already know the playercount hasn't changed much lately, but that doesn't mean the licenses failed. Did the devs say their chapters failed? I want to see financial data from BHVR to confirm things like that, not what youtubers making videos with clickbait-y algorithm friendly titles think. Kind of reminds me of when Nurse got a minor nerf a while back and several creators who I won't name here made videos like "NURSE BUFFED? CRAZY 5 BLINK NURSE?" and then a moderate chunk of people believed they'd given Nurse 5 blinks with no restrictions, and not that it's a specific gimmicky add-on combo with various restrictions. Far weaker than her old range add-ons, at the least.

For the record I've seen two of those already, just watched Coconut's a couple hours ago. It's not like the videos are bad or unhelpful, but they are just speculation/opinion, and youtubers do need to angle for that algorithm to boost them. Controversy and drama sells. "DbD is dying and it's BHVR's fault!" will definitely get more clicks than a random gameplay video. None of these guys are privy to information that we don't have. I'm pretty sure even Otz who's a fog whisperer has said that they don't tell him anything special.

The playercount is stable, not in decline.

In fact, if you go look at the history of the steam playercount from 2018-2019 you can see that the highest average players were "23,463." DbD's peak in popularity came with a license. With Resident Evil's first chapter, in July 2021, where the average players online on steam peaks at "62,487." Steamcharts has December 2023 at "31,258" for average player count. Barring a single month dip to 29k in April 2022, the player count has not dropped below 30k average in-game since March 2020. That's only for steam, of course, but other platforms don't have data like this to go look at.

Here's an alternative take: DbD is a weird, niche game that not everyone is going to like. Chucky and Alien didn't bring the numbers that RE did for several reasons, but I don't see anything that makes them a failure. I see a lot of people have bought and are playing Chucky.

One possible reason is that a lot of people who haven't tried the game might've tried out the RE chapter, since that was a huge crossover. RE is a bigger license than Chucky, and probably Alien too. Especially in video gaming. Not everyone who watches the Chucky movies is going to get into gaming just to try him in DbD, but Resident Evil fans already play horror games. There's just more market overlap there. A lot of people tried the game with RE and didn't stick to it, but the playerbase did maintain some of the gains from RE, since the numbers never dropped as low as they used to be after its release. Who knows how many of those people didn't come back for Alien because they had already tried the game with RE and didn't enjoy it?

I don't see any dip in players associated with Wesker, certainly not 20,000. Steamcharts shows that month as -1,309 players, but the very next month is +2,276. It didn't bring in the huge wave of people that Nemesis did, but RE fans had already had a chapter to come check out just over one year before. There's no way all of them were going to return and try the game again for Wesker, but the people who liked RE, came in for RE, and ended up liking DbD? They probably all bought him.

I can only work with the data I have, which is steam playercount. As far as I know the devs don't release any of the information that would make your claims (or mine) confirmable, so we'll only ever have speculation and opinions.

Originally posted by Fizzie:

Even currently, all anyone does is complain and blame the other side, that is irrefutable.

You're not exactly wrong, but It isn't 'anyone', it's just salty people with a lack of perspective. You have to be pretty overinvested to think that picking survivor or killer actually means anything about a person. Devs are who should be held accountable for the quality of the game, not players. I'm pretty sure we agree on this part though.

(This was super long, I'm not proofreading it lmao. If there's a mistake there's a mistake)

Small Edit: The chapter that actually put the playercount over 30k and never let it drop was Chains of Hate, Deathslinger's chapter, so go figure. Missed that when I was looking at the charts, but just noticed it now. Nemesis brought a bigger boost, but chains of hate did really well for the game.

[Spicy_Pacifist]

That is why I uninstalled the game. I was a killer main. I stopped playing for four months due to personal reasons. Got back to it, and had a blast. I was able to have fun, play how I wanted (not sweaty), and just enjoy the game. (Note: I got games with randomized people, so each game was different. Some people played smart, some sweaty, some goofy, etc.)
Then...the MMR got released with Chucky and...god. I have never felt like the developers gave less than two ♥♥♥♥♥ before that moment. I tried to get past it, thinking that it wasn't that bad. Boy was I wrong. Every game was the exact same. People take the game way to seriously, finish all of the gens within seconds, have no personality nor fun while playing, then would insult me and tell me to nd myself over how crappy I played. (Note: I never played seriously, unless there was a challenge, or the occasional group was. I was fine with the occasional group, as long as it wasn't game after game of it. Guess what the MMR turned it into.) The only way I got kills was if I tunneled and camped. Me, personally, I hate doing that. I literally only did it if a person was bullying another player, I got little to no hooks when there was 1 gen left, or if I had a challenge for ages and just wanted to be done with it. So...the fact that because of the MMR, I was now required to do that in order to play the game? Yeah...no. Not to mention the death threats I got and insults for doing so.
So, I uninstalled the game, which sucked as I loved that game. Super there were some problems with it, but I loved goofing off, having fun, and meeting funny survivors in that game. But...because killers now have to play like a competitive player instead of casual...I can't do that anymore. And it ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ sucks.
Not to mention how the MMR change is pushing away new players. My friend, who just started playing killer, got to the MMR and is thinking of quitting. He literally just started a couple of weeks ago, and doesn't play that much to begin with. BHVR didn't just drop the ball. They drop kicked it into a canyon. They don't want anyone to have fun with their game anymore.

[KOutland]

The devs have definitely made changes to make the Killer role very much less varied (and therefore less fun).

There used to be a ton of different ways to play, but survivor complaints about each of the different play styles have fueled nerf after nerf , and new penalties to shape how Killers play.

So now there is basically only one way left to play if you care about actually killing as the killer.

And even now the complaints are coming about stopping tunneling, the Killer role is really becoming zero fun to play, many have already given up, if the devs do introduce something that makes tunneling no longer a viable way to play, it will only be a matter of time before a massive Killer shortage.

BHVR has been warned many times by the player base about the changes they make and plan to make, but they never listen. And proof is now upon us as the game is a mess.

People are always saying blah blah game is as popular as ever and then bring up some stats showing player numbers staying pretty much the same as always, BUT if a game was in a good place shouldn't numbers be rising?

All their proof shows is that DbD manages to sucker in as many players as they lose each month. DbD has a retention problem, because once you get past the initial "new game" stage, DbD proves itself to be problematic in peoples opinions, and its mostly only a matter of time before people grow tired of the issues they see and stop playing.

I miss the game as it used to be....fun.

[JustinGayme.TTV]

Originally posted by Fizzie:

Does anyone remember when the devs had that "Cinematic Mori" thing where if everyone was dead and the last person goes down they'd be automatically mori'd which only caused the game to be played in exactly one very linear and boring way?

I believe that ever since before then, the developers of dead by daylight do not care about different playstyles or perks, they just want everyone to play in exactly 1 way so that their job doing moderation for their community and game will be easier. Maybe the reasoning is different, but it has been made extremely clear with recent updates that the developers would rather you camp and tunnel than play in a way that is actually fun.

Do you want to go out of your way for a fun endgame build? Too bad, since you didn't bring pop/pain res, all 5 gens are gone and you only got two stacks of no way out.

Do you want to have fun with a pentimento build and go out of your way to get everyone hooked? Doesn't matter, you didn't bring slowdowns and now pentimento has no use.

Do you want to play with a jumpscare only playstyle? Too ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ bad.

This is why more people are slugging and tunneling.

Bring back jank. Bring back imbalance. All this balancing nonsense is making the game linear and extremely hard to enjoy. It's 4v1 Asym Horror, imbalance is literally in the title of the genre of the game. 4 is not the same as 1, therefore it's imbalanced. So instead of focusing on balancing the game, why don't we focus on janky and fun things like Nic Cage perks and blinding survivors with Hex: Two Can Play.

I'm SICK of bringing 4 slowdowns just to get 2 or 3 kills and I'm sick of running full meta/anti-tunnel just to survive more than 5 minutes!

Tbh I think two things are possible

1.) the company has a vision for their gsme and how they make it and intend it to be played

2.) people are entitled to play it differently than the developers want/intend

I have to admit though. Personally I’d rather a company stick to their guns. That way if I don’t enjoy it I can respectfully stay away.

Bending their vision to what others want may give a game/company more longevity but I’d rather one stick to their vision (for the record I only played for 10
Months I have no clue what their original plan was- I am just speaking for any game).