Dead by Daylight is a Sinking Ship: The Playerbase, The Mechanics, The Developers -- Is It Even Possible to Save?

We are all aware that the most recent developer Dead by Daylight Q&A was nothing short of disastrous. Questions were dodged left and right, and it was made glaringly clear that the new lead game designer (and team overall) have no clue how their own game functions.

Even worse, content creator Dowsey made a joke by quoting one of the lead game designer’s blatant misunderstanding of the game only to find that his Twitch streamer shirts had been manually removed the next day.

This tweet was apparently considered “targeted harassment” and warranted the removal of his content-creator specific cosmetics. Originally it was speculated to just be another one of BHVR’s notorious mid-patch bugs, but it was soon confirmed that they take memes very seriously.

I can only dream of being this petty. It’s absolutely pathetic and a juvenile response to genuine criticism that people have with the game.

And yet, this was addressed as soon as they found out about it. They had the time to go and remove specific cosmetics from one creator, yet nothing changes with the rampant cheater problem, the stale meta, the ridiculous time commitment, the power creep of perks, the horribly unbalanced map design, the inability for most of the killer roster to compete against a group of coordinated survivors, the disgusting amount of toxicity in the playerbase, the god-awful “skill-based” matchmaking system, the quickly declining number of killer players, and, of course, the incalculable number of bugs.

Survivor queue times are easily 15+ minutes in the evenings, despite there only needing to be one killer for every four survivors. When asked about the number of active killer players, we were never given a concrete answer.  

The only two killers that even stand a chance against a coordinated team are The Nurse and The Blight,who both require many hours of learning their unique mechanics before they become viable. Nurse, despite being considered by almost everyone to be the best killer in the game, has the lowest kill rate, because she is extremely punishing for new players.

I have put over 400 hours into The Nurse, and yet all of my expertise can be “outplayed” by a survivor clicking their E key.

All of that time and I am countered by a button. And iron will, because survivors who are injured with iron will no longer make breathing noises, making them even harder to track than when they are healthy. So now, with two perks, I cannot track you through walls and you survive one hit completely for free. Now consider that you don’t just get one dead hard/iron will combo per match. It’s constant. It’s on an average of 3 out of the 4 survivors I face every match and that isn’t fun.

I would also like to mention that while I was learning Nurse, I was constantly running into survivors whose entire motivation was to make my time learning miserable. Clicking flashlights in my face and blinding me constantly out of fatigue, spamming loud noise notifications, and teabagging incessantly because haha you aren’t good at the most difficult character in the game yet!

Now they just disconnect because I down them too quickly. 

I’m not going to lie I don’t really play this game anymore. I tried to play a match after a while and was a bit rusty, especially with The Nurse because I had to regain that muscle memory. First match was a full squad of 4 dead hards (e to outplay) on Badham Preschool – a map which is not only extremely unbalanced in the survivor’s favour – but extremely buggy for Nurse’s blink. 

I got clicked at by some survivor who would have been dead ages ago if she didn’t have an E key. 

The new Boil Over perk: You wiggle an extra 25% when the killer drops off a “great height”. Which was tested and falling two steps into the basement counts for it. So now we have groups of survivors trying to abuse it with boil over, hook offerings, and no mither to make it impossible for the killer to hook and impossible to slug. 

And then they gave up when I kicked their teeth in. because I’m the Nurse, baby. But ANY other killer (except a good Blight) would just…lose. To perks and offerings that they have no way to counter due to terrible design. 

There is an event going on. I am the only one who brought the offering that allows everyone (survivors and killer) to get bonus points. The rest of them brought:

• RPD Badge. A massive map with bugged blink areas, notorious for having areas where you cannot hook a survivor even without any offerings, as well as complex corridors making finding hooks incredibly difficult.

• 2 Putrid oak offering. These make hooks spawn further apart an do stack with one another.

• Jigsaw Piece. Sends you to The Gideon meat Packing Plant, one of the safest maps in the game (unless you happen to be facing a Nurse, who actually benefits from that map)

As well as a 3-stack of Boil over, unbreakable, flip flop. They were 100% intending to abuse the terrible design of the Raccoon City Police Department, but the final survivor who was not a part of the trio happened to offer the Jigsaw Piece. Which normally isn’t a good thing because it is covered in super safe pallets – however since the Nurse ignores pallets for the most part, the open areas make the map lean more in her favor. I was lucky enough to get The Game map, and I made them unable to abuse some poor, unknowing killer. Honestly, if you see offerings like this during an event, just quit during the loading screen, you won’t get penalized if you do it before the match loads. They gave up as soon as they realized that their plan to bully wasn’t going to fly. It always makes me laugh when they try to do something to cause the killer player frustration, but then can’t cope when it doesn’t work out as intended. 

At the end of the day, this is a rant. This game isn’t fun anymore. I have it downloaded so I can play a match once a week and to continue to keep my shrine posts on time. 

I actually uninstalled it, but then reinstalled it so that I could make my shrine posts on time. Look at what I do for you people. 

So yeah. For those of you who want to know the shrine as soon as it drops, I update as soon as it drops. It takes about 20 mins for me to write each perk’s effect and what my personal opinions on them are, but by 7:30 EST every Tuesday – The Shrine is here. Saving you from having to log in since…whenever I started doing this.