The killers in Dead by Daylight are unstoppable – at least that’s what some players believe. The latest patch hit solo players particularly hard.
A few days ago, Dead by Daylight had one of the biggest balancing adjustments of all time. Not only was the perk system revised, but many details of the core gameplay were also adjusted. The basic idea behind many of these changes was: Killers should become stronger, as they statistically achieve too few kills per round.
After all the changes, however, there is an outcry in the community: The game is no longer fun, killers are too powerful.
Several threads in the Dead by Daylight subreddit have 4,000 to 5,000 upvotes on the subject.
What is the problem right now? The biggest losers are the “Solo-Q” players, meaning those survivors who sign up for a match alone. They contrast with the “Survive with Friends” (SWF) groups, which generally team up and communicate via voice chat to inform each other about the killer’s position or actions.
Solo-Q players in particular have the impression that killers are now far too powerful. They are often caught very early, and the willingness of other players to help is lower when they are not in a group with them.
This is a problem, especially after the developers removed the blood points bonus from the perk “We will live forever.” This perk previously rewarded players with a massive blood points boost when they rescued other players from hooks.
Rescuing still grants blood points (as it always has), but a bonus cannot be accumulated through the perk.
Fundamentally, killers are now significantly deadlier. This is more pronounced against solo players; group players can still compensate for much of it through communication.
What do the developers say? Quite a bit, but without substance – at least based on the comments. MandyTalk from Behaviour wrote officially that they know the patch has brought significant changes. It will take some time for everyone to get used to the changes. Furthermore, it says:
However, we will not rush anything – when we see things that we know are a high-priority problem, we will, of course, make changes in the planned hotfixes. There may even be more changes in the future, depending on how all of this affects players once they have had time to acclimate to the changes.
In the end, the developers are sticking to their decision for now. The kill rates were too low and needed to be raised.
Dead by Daylight is a live game that is constantly evolving, and changes are based on that. The plan for this update was to increase the kill rates, as they were lower than we would like. It will take a while to see the full extent of the changes, players need to adapt, and so on. This update and its aftermath are definitely something we are monitoring closely.
Solo players are feeling worse and worse: One of the comments with the most reactions and awards comes from jimmypopjr on Reddit, whose opinion we have translated here:
I can only speak for myself as a solo-Q player with over 2,000 hours of gameplay.
This update has hit me pretty hard.
I love this game, but not unconditionally. I don’t expect to win/escape often; I just want to have fun and not be so frustrated that disconnecting seems like a viable option. I don’t want to be tunneled or see others being tunneled.
But since the update, the game has not been fun for me anymore. In more than 50% of my matches, I think to myself at the end that I should take a break. When the matches are frustrating, the matchmaking feels unbalanced, and the blood points and XP rewards are ridiculous (especially when you get tunneled out in the first few minutes)… then disconnects and long wait times just seem like the natural outcome.
It’s really unfortunate that such a fun game can also be so frustrating alongside these peaks. It feels like some people only use this game as a catalyst to make others feel as bad as possible.
And to make matters worse, this subreddit and this community, which I generally think is great, is unfortunately full of people who want to diminish the opinions and experiences of others with their own anecdotal experiences.
Now I’m stuck in a game I love, but it no longer feels fun and rewarding enough to be worth my time… and with a community that doesn’t care how disappointed I am that the patch has affected me so much (but still cares enough to tell me why I’m wrong or why I’ve been carried by the old meta, even though I’ve never played like that).
It feels bad.
This comment seems to resonate with many, as it has received nearly a dozen Reddit awards and over 1,000 upvotes.
What is your experience as a killer and survivor in Dead by Daylight right now? Are you having fun and enjoying the update? Or have the developers gone too far?
