The players of Dead by Daylight are currently going up in arms and letting their hatred run free. Fair enough, finds Cortyn.
The Dead by Daylight community is currently in turmoil, the subreddit is full of memes, complaints, and also increasingly rude attacks on the developers. This is about a patch that has not even been released. However, how the makers of Dead by Daylight justify their changes just makes me want to bury my face in my hands. I agree with the players’ criticism on almost all points and want to vent my displeasure here and show why Behaviour is currently treading a path from which they will not be able to escape.
What is happening in Dead by Daylight?
Before I get to my little “rant,” I want to first state the facts of the upcoming patch:
This is how Hex: Ruin currently is: The upcoming patch brings some changes to the perk “Hex: Ruin” (in English “Hex: Ruin”), arguably the most popular killer perk so far. In high ranks, it is used in over 80% of all cases. So far, the perk ensures that survivors receive difficult skill checks on generators that either set back progress or do not grant bonus progress if completed perfectly. The perk is deactivated once the associated totem is destroyed by a survivor.
This is how Hex: Ruin is supposed to be: In the future, Hex: Ruin will no longer affect the survivors’ skill checks but will impact all generators that are currently not being worked on. These generators will then automatically regress, even without the killer touching them. We have explained this in more detail here.
I have to politely ask: Have you lost your minds?
The developers’ justifications are absurd
The developers justify these changes by claiming that new players would have a particularly hard time with Hex: Ruin. New survivors might get frustrated by Hex: Ruin quickly and wouldn’t be a big help to their team if they are put off by the red, difficult skill checks. In “internal playtests,” it has been shown that the revised Ruin is not so dramatic for new survivors and would not diminish the fun of the game.
And here comes a newsflash: New players are not bad because Ruin is present in games. They are bad because they are new and have not yet mastered the mechanics. They do not yet know that when hearing the terror radius they should not panic and run away. They cannot yet accurately assess the environment, the threat, and the actions in the game. Dead by Daylight has a steep learning curve that one must overcome. It is not always easy, but it forms survivors over time who understand and can handle their tasks.
I can understand the desire to make it easier for new survivors to get started. But this is a giant step in the wrong direction.
The entire perk is being changed so that it is no longer frustrating for new players. However, Behaviour is losing sight of the core community of long-standing players. The changes ensure that Hex: Ruin has no significance in matches with somewhat experienced players.
After all, Hex: Ruin was just a “band-aid” to fix perhaps the biggest problem of Dead by Daylight: the duration of matches.