Toxic Community

Dead By Daylight has gathered a collection of the most entitled and toxic people of basically any gaming community to the point it has become a community meme that if one side(most of the time, killer. I have had maybe 3 salty killers compared to thousands of salty and/or toxic survivors in my 4000 hours with the game) does anything the other side doesn't like(which can be basically anything, but especially efficient gameplay) they will be met with salty and/or toxic behavior. The behavior can take the form of gameplay insults, personal insults, death threats, saying to physically fight and a lot more. I will not be showing examples here because they can be distressing, but if you are fine with that and so wish, check the problematic public personalities and salty/toxic non-public personalities section of my website for evidence.

Refusing To Punish People They  Endorse After  They  Spew Personal Insults Over Video Game Strategies

Partnerships With Person Who Supports Bigots

Dead By Daylight claims to be very LGBTQIA+ positive and supportive of out groups. Which is why it is so two faced that they would partner with Five Nights At Freddy's given the fact the creator, Scott Cawthon, still owns the rights and has been shown to make political donations to bigots such as Donald Trump. Because Scott still owns the rights, Dead By Daylight is essentially putting money in his pockets that he spends on supporting bigotry. When questioned he even double downed and said "And yes, I supported President Trump, because I felt he was the best man to fuel a strong economy and stand up to America's enemies abroad, of which there are many." I've heard people argue DBD might not have known about it, but I heard about it a month after the trailer release, so there is no way a company with an estimated 364.8 million in revenue a year could not have known about it.

Practically Condoning Their Partner Scamming Their Players

During the release of the Hellraiser DLC, Dead By Daylight worked with an NFT company to use the Hellraiser character from Dead By Daylight in NFTs. If you know anything about them, NFTs are basically worthless and sold pretty much exclusively at an insane markup to tech bros and tech illiterates to scam them out of their money with "theoretical value" similar to "meme coins." As such, Dead By Daylight giving their blessing to an NFT company is once again them choosing greed over morals and allowing the NFT company to scam their playerbase. And if that wasn't bad enough, the NFTs take up a ton of energy as well with the Renewable Energy Hub reporting that one transaction uses "as much power as the conventional household over a day and a half."

Literally Life Threatening Bugs Going Unpatched For 2 Months

Dead By Daylight is by far the buggiest game I have ever played which, once again includes 4 years of Call Of Duty with most of it being Warzone 1. These bugs have ranged from seemingly innocuous  to literally life threatening with fixes for both taking forever. You may think I am exaggerating when I say life threatening, but there was literally a bug where when a specific killer used their power the screen would randomly flash in a way that could induce epileptic seizures. Dead By Daylight had a feature called a killswitch where they could disable the killer because of this bug but even so it took them 2 months to do it. If you have any sort of health issue that can be brought on by a video game, it is literally dangerous for you to play because of their gross negligence and incompetence. And if it takes 2 months for a life threatening bug to be fixed, you better believe it will take 10 times longer for other issues to get fixed, especially if you happen to like playing a killer with a low pick rate.

Bad Design Set Up To Punish One Side For Doing Their Objective While Rewarding The Other For Doing Theirs

Dead By Daylight’s main “balance philosophy” appears to basically be “make changes for the side that whines more and makes more money” rather than actually basing their changes on what good players want, like with pretty much any other competitive game. This is evidenced most through Dead By Daylight’s response to playstyles mentioned earlier. Instead of expecting survivor players to actually learn the game, Dead By Daylight added features like no regression after 8 gen kicks punishing killers for defending their objective, an anti-camp meter that allows survivors a free escape off hook while their teammates do their objective punishing killers for defending their objective, and a vast plethora of strong anti-tunnel, anti-camp, and anti-slug perks such as shoulder the burden which can literally regress the killer’s objective substantially at the press of a button or babysitter which allows survivors to vastly outspeed the killer off hook. Dead By Daylight is pandering to survivors who don’t want to learn by dismantling killers’ powers and playstyles, heightening the survivor skill floor, and giving the survivors second chance perks with no compensation to killer power rather than actually expecting them to learn. This was most shown in the latest proposed patch where Dead By Daylight wanted to add even more basekit anti-gameplay changes such as not allowing the killer to defend their objective and kick generators if they tunnel, giving survivors free unbreakable and tenacity(2 already existing perks), giving free off the record(one of the strongest if not the strongest anti-tunnel perk), giving survivors free information, and taking away vital killer information. It was truly the most mask off suggestion in Dead By Daylight, showing the dev's clear bias towards appeasing newer and/or entitled survivors rather than expecting them to learn. It didn't go through because of mass community backlash, but it still shows the mentality the developers have.

And if you don’t believe me, hear it from the number 1 Pig(potentially weakest killer in the game) player-12:35.

Why This Is Extra  Bad

These changes and philosophy are bad for many reasons. The first is that every anti-gameplay change they make just adds fuel to the entitled and toxic players who insist normal gameplay strategies are morally bad and toxic. It's like giving a treat to a dog immediately after they shit on the floor, enforcing that negative behavior and whining will be rewarded. It is for this reason entitled and toxic players believe Dead By Daylight themselves actually agree with them that normal gameplay is bad and toxic and/or that anyone who does it is a bad person and/or taking advantage of a 'broken game mechanic.' Giving into the pressure of entitled and toxic players has the same functional equivalent as agreeing with them. This also sets a precedent that players don't actually have to learn the game. If bad players just wait around for long enough and complain hard enough, eventually they will be able to win. This also then gives them an unearned ego which they use to write off any legitimate gameplay complaints of the other side as a "skill issue." Additionally, the same treatment is not applied to survivors with there being basically no basekit punishment for a survivor doing their objective efficiently. Also just making survivor stronger does not stop the base reason for survivor being unfun to play which is the fact their main objective is to just sit in one place for 90 seconds while pressing one button occasionally. For maximum efficiency only one survivor can be in chase at a time, so that leaves 2-3 survivors at a time just holding down a button.

Identity Crisis-Casual Vs. Competitive