That might be part of their "all survivor trap perks must work the same" design philosophy. Since you can't "work on" a pallet for 3s for the new pallet trap, better take away that requirement from the gen traps.
Which is dumb, IMO, but totally in keeping with BHVR design philosophy.
As an aside, I've been running Wiretap a lot recently, and getting crazy value out of installing it on some central gen at the minimum 3 seconds of progress, so killers don't bother kicking it. Especially good vs Jolt, which will make the gen unkickable.
Every game against her feels like going against Tombstone with all the bullshit that involves, which is usually just a teammate that doesn't know what to do putting you immediately at an unwinnable situation. A lullaby gives more warning, but teleports let her go across the map.
One time my team beat her for a 3 out does stick in my mind. She even had fucking Ring Drawing, but we had me, with SB pre-running and refusing to give her a hit, somoene with Inner Healing who was fine healing themself, someone with a beefy as shit medkit and Self-Care, and a clueless David who eventually died, but too close to the end to stop the last gens. It was like a Skull Merchant game though and took for fucking ever. I think she had two hooks. If not for the Overcharge bug, or if she had been running Fearmonger, it's very likely she would've gotten a 4k just by attrition. Which is fucking idiotic if you're basically never committing to chases.
My opinion on it is pretty mid, though I'm sure if you had a group of 3-4 it would be a blast. I've tried leaving voice chat on wich resulted in hearing the expected obscenities. Also I have no idea why they allow the two teams to talk to each other at match start and end, that's just asking for toxicity.
Granted one thiing I love is killer feels so much less stressful with three of you to mess up together, haha.
Anyways I imagine once alien comes to dbd i'll end up back in that game and forget about tcm, but hey it's on gamepass so if you have that (and some friends) i'd say it's worth a crack.
(Edit) After playing some more, seems like rush meta is still in full swing. Usually the victims are out of their restraints before the opening cutscene is over and connie insta opens a door. Makes the game a lot less interesting when the first "act" of the game is skipped in like 10 seconds.
Zavianuniversal peace sounds better than forever warRegistered Userregular
edited August 2023
I've been having a heck of a lot of fun with TCM since release, it feels a lot more like Friday the 13th to me than Dead By Daylight where there's multiple exits and ways to escape, and a lot more stuff to interact with than the same annoying generator minigame over and over again in DBD (I only play survivors in these games, so DBD got boring to me real fast). I get xp for going around as Julie stealthily opening up barricades and locked doors, which encourages me to help my team instead of rushing, and thats the type of gameplay I want in these games
as for balance, the opening basement part I think is fine with having only leatherface down there and the victims having a slight advantage, the game would drag if the basement part went on too long. connie being able to get out fast with her ability isn't really as OP as you might think at first (theres more than one exit in the basement, survivors are spread apart, it isn't like connie opens the door and everyone rushes out, especially since it makes a noise when you open it alerting all the killers). the house map specifically also discourages rushing, so hoping we get more maps like that (though in my experience, especially with console players, not many people are rushing, there seems to be a lot more casual players than hardcore DBD types).
TLDR in my opinion the survivor gameplay of TCM is a lot of fun and keeps me playing
luckily it's on gamepass with full crossplay support (except for last gen consoles), so should have a healthy playerbase well into the future unlike F13th which died out except on PSN/Gamepass where it was free (I dont think Evil Dead was free on any platform? maybe EGS?)
I've been having a heck of a lot of fun with TCM since release, it feels a lot more like Friday the 13th to me than Dead By Daylight where there's multiple exits and ways to escape, and a lot more stuff to interact with than the same annoying generator minigame over and over again in DBD (I only play survivors in these games, so DBD got boring to me real fast).
as for balance, the opening basement part I think is fine with having only leatherface down there and the victims having a slight advantage, the game would drag if the basement part went on too long. connie being able to get out fast with her ability isn't really as OP as you might think at first (theres more than one exit in the basement, survivors are spread apart, it isn't like connie opens the door and everyone rushes out, especially since it makes a noise when you open it alerting all the killers). the house map specifically also discourages rushing, so hoping we get more maps like that (though in my experience, especially with console players, not many people are rushing, there seems to be a lot more casual players than hardcore DBD types)
TLDR in my opinion the survivor gameplay of TCM is a lot of fun and keeps me playing
luckily it's on gamepass with full crossplay support (except for last gen consoles), so should have a healthy playerbase well into the future unlike F13th which died out except on PSN/Gamepass where it was free (I dont think Evil Dead was free on any platform? maybe EGS?)
I suppose it's all anecdotal evidence, but in the last few games I decided to play before essentially giving up on the game, in each match the survivors had already woken grandpa by the time the opening cutscene finished for the family, basically putting them on the backfoot for the rest of the game, as essentially grandpa is now offline until someone gets enough blood to turn him back on (aha what a sentence) and good luck finding time to do that whilst also guarding all the exits.Then of course, when someone escapes, instead of escaping, they remain and wait to t-bag because that's always the way in these games apparently.
I'm also cognizant of the fact that I'm sounding like I'm only playing the family, but this has been my experience on both sides. In fact I had a game that lasted just over a minute where everyone escaped via the fuse exit and I'm unsure what the family could have done better to prevent that win, they’d have still been securing the doors and things.
Granted I agree with you that there's fun to be had, especially if you had a group of friends to play with, but seeing as no-one in my friendship group is interested, it's a pretty miserable time solo. I'll check back in after a month or two to see how it shapes up.
Evil Dead was free on Epic for a bit. It's dying a slow death with a few key folks and hackers abound since Saber has basically abandoned it other than some questionable design decisions.
I dunno if TCM can capture the magic of the opening weekend where we are collectively dumb, but it was enjoyable enough to play off gamepass.
There are some fucking weird bugs this patch. Survivor models can get 'stuck' in animations and just plain vanish except when performing other animations, not too dissimilar from the invisible Wesker bug, and Doctor's hallucinations are all appearing stuck halfway into the ground for some reason. Multiple people are also reporting that Xeno can get stuck permanently in the tunnels somehow, and never get out.
They also apparently somehow accidentally reverted WoO's description to what it was a year ago, but didn't actually re-nerf it, and if there's a bot at the end of the game, it spawns an extra model on top of them in the escape animation. It really is a mystery how they break the most random of things.
Ugh. They apparently didn't actually fix fast vaults, but reverted them back to the previous broken state. ie It drops you flush against the window at the end of it instead of a half step away or whatever needed to not be hit from the other side. So get used to being hit on every single one of those again, especially against any killer with bad ping.
E:
Oh wait. They didn't even do that. They just like halved the distance gained by fast vaults, so female survivors get shoved flush up against windows at the end of a fast vault, but males are a half step away. BHVR, what the absolute fuck. So I guess continue not playing female survivors because it puts you at a major disadvantage.
E2:
I think I'm also coming around to Ultimate Weapon needing to be hard nerfed. It's just idiotic with DMS and any teleporting or mobility killer, especially on maps like Midwich and Gideon, and especially ESPECIALLY on killers like Wesker with their big TRs, though Demo is also getting idiotic use out of it because of his portal bug. It's a free interrupt and survivor reveal on command, and just murders any iota of stealth gameplay even more. But on like, Oni, Blight, Nurse, even Myers, it's ridiculous, and is another huge incentive/buff to slugging.
Unashamed to admit the Alien DLC finally got me to buy and play this game. It's a lot of fun! Boy is it glitchy for a game this established, though. That has been a surprise. Every time I look at the licensed killers, I shed a tear for Friday the 13th.
It really is incredible how they break multiple things every single patch, and then only fix half of them over the next two to three months.
I've been having a fucking awful run of it lately though. Yesterday was all either facecampers or rage quitters. Nothing like sitting on gens for two minutes and then depip because the killer's being a pissy little baby. And yet, still better than just facecamping. Especially since it's becoming known that they either increased the killer hitbox or shrunk the unhook box and now killers can fully bodyblock every hook. Just... Just fucking incredible job, BHVR.
Today has been almost entirely facecampers. The only non-facecamping game I had was against a Nemesis on Midwich, which fucking miserable, but he had only one hook before the last gen popped. My teammates were idiots though, so I traded after 99ing the gate, assuming that'd give them a chance to get themselves out of the corner and use my Kindred to meet up and heal. Instead, one tried to hide behind the hook while injured and immediately went down, and the other two healed and then pointed at the Nemesis for my entire second hook state when he wouldn't move away and just watched me die despite only one hook state between the two of them.
E:
I see that VHS has officially completely shut down. And TCM's devs are... uh... causing some backlash because apparently they run the official subreddit, and predictably are not interacting with people there in a... uh... productive way.
The devs are doing an AMA on Reddit right now, and the only thing they've answered with something other than "We know you're concerned about that, but we can't share anything now" is "There'll be a PTB before we fix the fast vault bug."
So I guess get used to that sticking around for another two months at least.
Ugh. Apparently some streamer was abusing the shit out of a couple gamebreaking bugs, and now they've broken containment. The subreddit and bug report forum are getting flooded with people complaining about others abusing them, and I ran into people abusing both.
Specifically, survivors can clip into lockers really consistently, making them impossible to hit them or pick them up while still being able to get back out (so not like some of the earlier times a similar bug came up and they were softlocked), and killers can fully bodyblock any hook. The former is pretty fucking severe, and stream snipers are using it to grief streamers, but the latter with the usual cocktail of facecamping perks means anybody, not just Bubba/Trickster/Huntress can abuse the shit out of it.
It's not even technically flashlights that are the problem. Lockers are broken and can be clipped into fairly easily. Clicking a flashlight as you push against them was just the easiest way to do so. But on certain maps and certain configurations, you can just... do it without them. And it's even easier if you're downed (requires Unbreakable or similar to not bleed out). Possibly worse, people have found an even more severe way to glitch out lockers. If you're grabbed while slow-entering a locker, you lose collision with that locker until you enter it, so now you can just run to that locker and be invincible to everything but like Pyramidhead, Artist, and Knight.
On top of this, the Blast Mine/Wire Tap exploit has also become a lot more widespread and even though it's apparently pretty random if it happens, people are running it just to try to get it to trigger.
It's a shitshow all around, and I think the funniest part is that the subreddit's moderation consider themselves to be gatekeepers and protectors of BHVR's reputation, so they're removing all comments around this stuff, even just mentioning what the bugs are, and banning anybody who says anything. There are entire threads that are like 90% "This post has been removed for violating the rules."
alright TBF on them for that. it's not that they're protecting behaviour's reputation. It's to make it as hard as possible for your average person who goes "Huh I've heard there's some exploit to make it miserable for other people to play the video game. I want to do this. how do I"
big streamers are banning people talking about it as well. not out of some desire to help behaviour but out of desire to not publicize about the bugs any further than they already are.
They're banning even people saying why flashlights are killswitched though. It's just thread after thread of:
"Flashlights are killswitched for an exploit!"
"That's crazy. Why?"
--10 comments removed for "disrespecting the game's integrity"--
It should also be mentioned that the competitive scene and community events in general are basically dead this patch too because spectating has some kind of massive memory leak and makes the game run at a massively unstable 5-15 FPS. It's difficult to say if they could've made the game more unfriendly to streamers if they tried, which is amplifying everything.
Very minor patch out. Fixes a couple softlock bugs with Xeno. Nerfs movement speed on a tail miss back to the PTB value. Fixes not losing any speed whatsoever on downs with tail. Fritzed turrets from leaving tunnels now destroyable. So a very small nerf and small buff. Flashlights remain locked and somehow, Blastmine/Wiretap remain unlocked.
Still think it needs to be pretty majorly nerfed past that though. Power is too oppressive for both how difficult and time consuming it is to even temporarily knock him out of it, and that's on top of the mobility. This is Deathslinger 1.0 except without any reload, hits over pallets and height-vaults, moves at 115, freely usable teleport to every gen with info along the way, and innate slowdown if you want to even TRY to counter it, not that you'll necessarily succeed.
There are a lot of dials that could be turned at least, but it feels awful to play against and you get so little even when you are able to successfully juke it or knock him out of his power. I'd buff turrets first. Perhaps a full stun if knocked out of his power, but I suspect that won't be enough since it's so quick and trivial to get back and running the anti-turret add-ons makes them a complete joke, and you're getting intel/mobility as you do so. More of a wind-up on the tail could help too, or maybe just lose power any time stunned like Plague.
Leakers are also saying there's a PTB next week and BHVR is posting images of drones fritzing out on Twitter, so I guess the Skull Merchant rework is sooner than expected. I really hope it's something a lot better than just putting drones on a somewhat different kind of CD, but I also dread any resurgence of Skull Merchant players at all, both to get in their last licks on her broken, miserable current form, or whatever awful version BHVR comes up with next.
E:
Also went against the most bizarre Ghostface today. Used his power literally once as far as I could tell. Got one hook relatively quickly, dropped chase to try to tunnel them, but then when two people came to body block and that failed, refused to commit to any chase for more than like 10 seconds. I ran to a jungle gym, vaulted once, and he just turned around and left. This happened on even relatively weak loops at least 2-3 more times. Confused newbie? Except was P20ish. I don't understand people.
Looks like the anti-facecamp mechanic is coming this PTB too. That's a nice surprise since their recent comments made it seem like it was a long, long way out.
Predictably, the Reddit and Twitter killers are going ballistic in their usual nonsensical fashion. It's both OP and useless, therefore do nothing and let facecamping stay. I am concerned that it'll be woefully insufficient to deal with basement, Trapper, Bubba, Nurse, Blight, etc. But still much better than nothing.
Teasing a Borgo rework too, though what it really needs is to not be so damn red, which ain't the change they're making apparently. Seeing screenshots of people using Reshaders to play on it to make it grey makes everything look so much nicer, if a lot more generic. I imagine that they're just shrinking it though, which is probably fine and more or less what it really needs. Too much to hope it just gets a general cleanup and smoothening all around, though that'd probably make it super oppressive if they don't do something about all the basic pallet loops. For as technically strong as they are, they're riddled with random little bits that I feel like I always get caught on and screwed by.
Has matchmaking just been utterly butterly fucked for anybody else lately? Like, I played four games last night, two survivor, two killer. Ran a Pinhead on RPD as the first chase for about two minutes, he lost 3 gens, then rage quit. Singularity on Garden who facecamped and hard tunneled some poor Claudette straight out at 3 gens. Took two and a half more gens to get his next down, at which point it was all over for him, but I had the poor luck to be the last one chased with Terminus in play, so he downed me and spent the entire EGC BMing without picking me up. On the killer side, I know my MMR is probably weird since I 8-hook and then farm a lot when I outclass teams, but I wouldn't be surprised if this was literally the first games either of these teams had played... except they were all prestiged. I got two gen grabs as Dredge... not in Nightfall. Just walked up to gens and snatched people off them. When they ran, their pathing was just flat out insane. Doing a C around an obstacle just to veer back in front of me.
Anti-Camping exactly as specified previously. No numbers given.
Skull Merchant rework
No active drones. They do the radar scan thing, and if you're pinged three times, you get a trap. They can be set in two modes. Stealth has the radar lines be invisible (but you can see the light on the drone itself to estimate), and Active where the lines move much faster but are visible. Scans do NOT ping stationary survivors, which includes interacting with gens or totems. Traps now just straight up instantly injure, or put in deep wounds, and are broken as long as the trap is on. Getting pinged again while a trap is on reveals and slows them.
Automatically gets undetectable when deploying a drone.
Drones cannot be remote activated.
6 drones.
Lock on never decays.
Drones can now be placed closer together.
Failing a hack only gets 1 stack of lock on (instead of full).
Borgo rework
MacMillan rework
Buffs to Trapper, Huntress, Trickster, Slinger, and Legion.
Couple very, very, VERY minor perk buffs. As in Furtive Chase going from totally worthless to completely worthless.
MacMillan rework is interesting. I kind of hate Trapper buffs because as weak in chase as he is, chases with him end in a frustrating way, and then they all facecamp with traps. Maybe the anti-camp mechanic will make that less shitty, but you just can't escape basement, or RPD, or Lerys, or indoor maps in general against one anyway since they can just trap all the exits and entrances. I suspect the buffs to the other killers are a band-aid for MFT hitting 110 killers while (for all the whining killers do), not actually doing much of anything against 115 killers.
Skull Merchant rework sounds fucking awful and if anything, seems like it'd buff being able to hold the game hostage by being even more easily able to spam drones and fucking buffing the Exposed effect. You can't ignore Deep Wounds if injured like you can Exposed, or run out the timer if you were healthy. You still get put in one-shot range, and can't stay there anyway because as soon as she shows up, you're getting hit by a 10% movement speed debuff which will immediately make you go down. I do not at all see how this pushes her in a more "chase oriented direction," especially with the active zone removed so it needs LoS. She has less info, sure, but more slowdown, and is patrolling a three gen anyway. Just removing the active zone and requiring LoS makes her a lot weaker and less bullshit on two floor maps, but I don't see how she's any better in chase or this stops 3 genning.
Does the killer get to see this meter, or get any vague audiovisual clue, or is it totally an educated guess for them? I haven't been following the chatter about it until now.
Unknown. For Plague and Sadako, you can't. For Trickster, you can. They're inconsistent about this stuff. If I had to guess, I'd assume it works like the former, where you can see if there's some lock-on progress, but not how much.
PTR is live tomorrow, so we'll see then.
E: Oh, do you mean anti-camp? Again, no idea. I'd assume no, to prevent abuse (it'd be a free Whispers around the hook). For the hooked survivor, it's a bar under the unhook meter. You'd think they'd show it to other survivors to prevent trades when camped, but no comments or signs of that
E2: On Twitter, they've confirmed that there are going to be additional protections from some of the more egregious facecampers. eg Bubba won't be able to double-tap people through Endurance. They didn't specify what it was though.
Yeah, sorry, I meant the anti-camp. Good point about it essentially being free Whispers, since it changes depending on the proximity of other survivors. On the other hand, without any kind of indication for the killer, it's going to be frustrating, especially initially, to not know how close is too close, or how long is too long, for otherwise normal behaviors like patrolling or even just moving around hooks, particularly hooks in high traffic areas or in hallways. It'll be interesting to figure out.
I think it'd be fine to have a "you're close to the hook" status effect or something, regardless if another player is there or not. Some perks like MYC and Devour give that for free. Could even disable killer's power for like 5 seconds if self-unhook with that status effect up. Would hit stuff like Blight and Nurse way harder than M1 killers, but if they're camping anyway, I have no real issues for 'accidental' punishment. I guess technically coordinated survivors could abuse if being chased, but wouldn't even be able to activate unless facecamping had been done anyway. I think the bigger issue is that campers will just do so from slightly further away, especially if you give them an easy way to tell, the mobility killers who just 180 right back to the hook will be totally unaffected, and stuff like the basement is still going to be completely inescable. We'll see on the implementation. It will certainly make completely denying unhooks harder at least, which is still a huge issue with the killers who can one-shot or chew through health states way too fast.
E:
On Reddit, they said that basement Trapper is being targeted too for the anti-facecamping measures, so it sounds like they're really genuinely trying to kill that kind of stuff. Hopefully it works.
I'm watching Otzdarva's games in his successful "random perk streak." So far it looks like roughly half the games involve camping the shit out of the basement. Which, when you're playing bad killers with shit perks, sure, that is probably how you have to play to win consistently. Not a very interesting way to play, though, and I dislike that it subtly encourages his many, many viewers to think that they should play that way.
Streamers have been pretty weird about DBD the last couple years and I really think it has a major deleterious effect on the community. They DESPISED when MMR was introduced and it was fairly tight because they were suddenly having to actually try and only winning like 80% of the time instead of 99% of the time. Then 6.1 came with the grand killer buffs and it became massively easier for killer. And MMR was gradually loosened until we're back to it being essentially turned off, so they're back to making up weird challenges massively handicapping themselves, and still winning like 95% of their matches even with the handicaps, but the goal is 99.4%, so that excuses treating every match like a cutthroat comp one.
And you can see it in the way that Otz narrates them like a complete lunatic. He NEEDS to hard tunnel this person because that last person might have Deliverance, unhook themselves, do two gens and the exit gates before he's able to hook the other person. Meanwhile though, other comp players like V1, KnightLight, and even Hens are doing stuff like "If we play Trapper, M1 only, no camping or tunnelling, how often do we win?" and still putting up 90% win rates, trying to show that no, you don't need to play every pub match like your life depends on it. Nurse, Blight, and even Sadako players were putting up 4k winstreaks in the hundreds, if not thousands, which is ridiculous, and that's only gotten worse as the intel perks for killers have gotten so much better and the stuff like DH that was almost a needed counter to deal with the high tier killers was nerfed so severely, just making them even more oppressive. How Blight and Nurse have been allowed to exist in the state he has for as long as they have boggles the mind.
It's been really interesting to watch the recent MFT arguments play out. The killer complaints that things are specifically built to specific speeds and specific expectations is something that survivors have just had to deal with for the game's entire run. Is the Wraith uncloaking 20% faster than normal? Is Devour giving a tiny speed boost? But when that uncertainty is on the other foot, it's completely unacceptable. And Otz, to his credit, has very nearly connected the dots, calling out Coup as similarly messing with expectations and why is it okay for one side to have that but not the other. I'm not sure I agree, but I also largely feel like MFT is nowhere near as strong as people believe. It's quite good, yes, but only for Shift-W or loops that need to be brute forced anyway. Anything with a mind-game, and you're not at a flat out run. You're going to checkspots and waiting. You only have a couple seconds to get somewhere safe and MFT ain't doing shit there. I still prefer SB, both to counter stealth and to bait killers into chases.
You are thinking from the perspective of a normal person, and not a streamer who has to keep escalating to maintain and grow an audience. A streak adds stakes which in turn keeps people watching which in turn means you gotta sweat it out every match. That’s just a trajectory you can easily find yourself as a streamer known for being good at the video game. Not the only one, but obviously a very easy one to fall into.
But they're basically useless, so wait for PTB (in 25 minutes) for actual numbers. And unless they forgot to include something, only Bubba has any extra facecamp protections. And all it is is that you get an extra .5 seconds of invincibility if hit during the unhook Endurance. You do get 15 seconds (rather than 10) for self-unhooks, but still, that's going to do nothing against Bubba, Slinger, Huntress, Trickster, Clown, etc.
E:
NOPE, PTB is completely broken and nonfunctional.
E2:
Kind of working now. Anti-camp looks very, very geared specifically only to the basement. Standing just like 12 meters away is enough to totally stop it, but the basement seems to track from the top of the stairs, or maybe the entire basement. Killer cannot see the meter or any indication at all. Other survivors cannot see progress either.
The Bubba thing is really dumb. It's not unhook protection at all. How it works is that if the saw is inside the survivor, they stay invulnerable. It needs to leave them for .5 seconds. So if a survivor takes an Endurance hit and both of you don't move, he stays invulnerable to the saw for the entire rest of the sweep. But if you look away for .5 seconds and look back, they go down. Basically, it only works if you're riding their ass the entire chainsaw sweep.
E3:
Okay, no. Maybe it's just Gideon basement? Or just weird? Because Otz tested it with standing in the doorway of shack with basement there, and it didn't build fast enough to be able to unhook.
New MacMillian maps are also bugged as fuck, with tons of huge invisible walls.
Oh, and they broke Kindred again. Yay.
It really looks like the ones that the anti-camp mechanic are going to hit are:
People who unabashedly facecamp.
Anybody who lingers around the hook and then tries to also proxy camp (ie Hag/Trapper setting traps, Huntress/Trickster reloading near hook, breaking a pallet next to hook, etc).
Proxy camping through multiple hook states.
And that's it. Proxy camping from just like 12 meters away WON'T trigger it in a single hook state. It starts ticking up immediately, but you need very little distance to bring it to a near halt. Better than before? Yeah, sure. Good enough to actually stop camping? Not even close.
E4: Borgo remake is actually weird. It's smaller and has less overall visibility (good things), but it has a shitload of new tiles. Some are like the ones on the alien maps and are basically useless deathtraps, but some are absurdly broken as hell. There's a building now that has a god pallet literally adjacent to a god window. Like... what.
Pig mask code for Meg is back, along with a couple random new BP codes.
Boop - Meg mask
Danke - 200 BP because German DBD twitter acct shuttered
Gamsahabnida - 200 BP because Korean DBD twitter acct shuttered
DBD's been uncharacteristically chill the last week or two. Can't help but think it's all the kids back in school.
I really wish I knew what the fuck was going on with my MMR though. I've been playing Dredge a fair bit recently, and the game keeps giving me people with like 20 hours, and Dredge is one of the few I just don't have patience for bad/new teams on because he snowballs them so much that it's easy to get to 8 hooks with still 4 gens to go and zero progress on all the rest because every Nightfall brings all progress on everything to a screeching halt. Regresses even. Then I switch to Mirror Myers, who I admittedly throw a lot on by just 8 hooks and going for spooks, and it's like "Hey, here's 4 P100 people with 12k hours total." It also seems to think I'm some kind of god Artist, and I am most certainly not. Every game with her feels like a total disaster, even when I get 2+ kills.
I've had almost constant asshole camping and tunneling from killers the last couple weeks, to the point I am running Decisive Strike and Dead Hard to make their life worse and hopefully get the three randos on my team out the gates if they're smart enough to do some gens (spoiler: they usually aren't)
Posts
Which is dumb, IMO, but totally in keeping with BHVR design philosophy.
As an aside, I've been running Wiretap a lot recently, and getting crazy value out of installing it on some central gen at the minimum 3 seconds of progress, so killers don't bother kicking it. Especially good vs Jolt, which will make the gen unkickable.
We got three out, but if they had hit even a couple more attacks at any point it would have been an easy 4k. Really dumb game design.
One time my team beat her for a 3 out does stick in my mind. She even had fucking Ring Drawing, but we had me, with SB pre-running and refusing to give her a hit, somoene with Inner Healing who was fine healing themself, someone with a beefy as shit medkit and Self-Care, and a clueless David who eventually died, but too close to the end to stop the last gens. It was like a Skull Merchant game though and took for fucking ever. I think she had two hooks. If not for the Overcharge bug, or if she had been running Fearmonger, it's very likely she would've gotten a 4k just by attrition. Which is fucking idiotic if you're basically never committing to chases.
My opinion on it is pretty mid, though I'm sure if you had a group of 3-4 it would be a blast. I've tried leaving voice chat on wich resulted in hearing the expected obscenities. Also I have no idea why they allow the two teams to talk to each other at match start and end, that's just asking for toxicity.
Granted one thiing I love is killer feels so much less stressful with three of you to mess up together, haha.
Anyways I imagine once alien comes to dbd i'll end up back in that game and forget about tcm, but hey it's on gamepass so if you have that (and some friends) i'd say it's worth a crack.
(Edit) After playing some more, seems like rush meta is still in full swing. Usually the victims are out of their restraints before the opening cutscene is over and connie insta opens a door. Makes the game a lot less interesting when the first "act" of the game is skipped in like 10 seconds.
And yeah I saw the abuse from the start screen. I might still check it out but it'd be through gamepass, not bought outright.
Alas! The DBD inertia continues, but maybe there's hope, one day.
as for balance, the opening basement part I think is fine with having only leatherface down there and the victims having a slight advantage, the game would drag if the basement part went on too long. connie being able to get out fast with her ability isn't really as OP as you might think at first (theres more than one exit in the basement, survivors are spread apart, it isn't like connie opens the door and everyone rushes out, especially since it makes a noise when you open it alerting all the killers). the house map specifically also discourages rushing, so hoping we get more maps like that (though in my experience, especially with console players, not many people are rushing, there seems to be a lot more casual players than hardcore DBD types).
TLDR in my opinion the survivor gameplay of TCM is a lot of fun and keeps me playing
luckily it's on gamepass with full crossplay support (except for last gen consoles), so should have a healthy playerbase well into the future unlike F13th which died out except on PSN/Gamepass where it was free (I dont think Evil Dead was free on any platform? maybe EGS?)
I suppose it's all anecdotal evidence, but in the last few games I decided to play before essentially giving up on the game, in each match the survivors had already woken grandpa by the time the opening cutscene finished for the family, basically putting them on the backfoot for the rest of the game, as essentially grandpa is now offline until someone gets enough blood to turn him back on (aha what a sentence) and good luck finding time to do that whilst also guarding all the exits.Then of course, when someone escapes, instead of escaping, they remain and wait to t-bag because that's always the way in these games apparently.
I'm also cognizant of the fact that I'm sounding like I'm only playing the family, but this has been my experience on both sides. In fact I had a game that lasted just over a minute where everyone escaped via the fuse exit and I'm unsure what the family could have done better to prevent that win, they’d have still been securing the doors and things.
Granted I agree with you that there's fun to be had, especially if you had a group of friends to play with, but seeing as no-one in my friendship group is interested, it's a pretty miserable time solo. I'll check back in after a month or two to see how it shapes up.
I dunno if TCM can capture the magic of the opening weekend where we are collectively dumb, but it was enjoyable enough to play off gamepass.
Alien patch is live. Small buffs to Xeno from the PTB, but nothing drastic or all that interesting.
The real treat is that the bugged Nic Cage intro FMV is finally fucking gone.
The buff to its move speed on missed tail attacks could be relevant.
They also apparently somehow accidentally reverted WoO's description to what it was a year ago, but didn't actually re-nerf it, and if there's a bot at the end of the game, it spawns an extra model on top of them in the escape animation. It really is a mystery how they break the most random of things.
Edit: wtf why did they change how Blast Mine is installed? Now it's press button 2 while standing next to a gen, NOT button 1 while working on a gen?
E:
Oh wait. They didn't even do that. They just like halved the distance gained by fast vaults, so female survivors get shoved flush up against windows at the end of a fast vault, but males are a half step away. BHVR, what the absolute fuck. So I guess continue not playing female survivors because it puts you at a major disadvantage.
E2:
I think I'm also coming around to Ultimate Weapon needing to be hard nerfed. It's just idiotic with DMS and any teleporting or mobility killer, especially on maps like Midwich and Gideon, and especially ESPECIALLY on killers like Wesker with their big TRs, though Demo is also getting idiotic use out of it because of his portal bug. It's a free interrupt and survivor reveal on command, and just murders any iota of stealth gameplay even more. But on like, Oni, Blight, Nurse, even Myers, it's ridiculous, and is another huge incentive/buff to slugging.
I've been having a fucking awful run of it lately though. Yesterday was all either facecampers or rage quitters. Nothing like sitting on gens for two minutes and then depip because the killer's being a pissy little baby. And yet, still better than just facecamping. Especially since it's becoming known that they either increased the killer hitbox or shrunk the unhook box and now killers can fully bodyblock every hook. Just... Just fucking incredible job, BHVR.
Today has been almost entirely facecampers. The only non-facecamping game I had was against a Nemesis on Midwich, which fucking miserable, but he had only one hook before the last gen popped. My teammates were idiots though, so I traded after 99ing the gate, assuming that'd give them a chance to get themselves out of the corner and use my Kindred to meet up and heal. Instead, one tried to hide behind the hook while injured and immediately went down, and the other two healed and then pointed at the Nemesis for my entire second hook state when he wouldn't move away and just watched me die despite only one hook state between the two of them.
E:
I see that VHS has officially completely shut down. And TCM's devs are... uh... causing some backlash because apparently they run the official subreddit, and predictably are not interacting with people there in a... uh... productive way.
So I guess get used to that sticking around for another two months at least.
Specifically, survivors can clip into lockers really consistently, making them impossible to hit them or pick them up while still being able to get back out (so not like some of the earlier times a similar bug came up and they were softlocked), and killers can fully bodyblock any hook. The former is pretty fucking severe, and stream snipers are using it to grief streamers, but the latter with the usual cocktail of facecamping perks means anybody, not just Bubba/Trickster/Huntress can abuse the shit out of it.
It's not even technically flashlights that are the problem. Lockers are broken and can be clipped into fairly easily. Clicking a flashlight as you push against them was just the easiest way to do so. But on certain maps and certain configurations, you can just... do it without them. And it's even easier if you're downed (requires Unbreakable or similar to not bleed out). Possibly worse, people have found an even more severe way to glitch out lockers. If you're grabbed while slow-entering a locker, you lose collision with that locker until you enter it, so now you can just run to that locker and be invincible to everything but like Pyramidhead, Artist, and Knight.
On top of this, the Blast Mine/Wire Tap exploit has also become a lot more widespread and even though it's apparently pretty random if it happens, people are running it just to try to get it to trigger.
It's a shitshow all around, and I think the funniest part is that the subreddit's moderation consider themselves to be gatekeepers and protectors of BHVR's reputation, so they're removing all comments around this stuff, even just mentioning what the bugs are, and banning anybody who says anything. There are entire threads that are like 90% "This post has been removed for violating the rules."
big streamers are banning people talking about it as well. not out of some desire to help behaviour but out of desire to not publicize about the bugs any further than they already are.
"Flashlights are killswitched for an exploit!"
"That's crazy. Why?"
--10 comments removed for "disrespecting the game's integrity"--
It should also be mentioned that the competitive scene and community events in general are basically dead this patch too because spectating has some kind of massive memory leak and makes the game run at a massively unstable 5-15 FPS. It's difficult to say if they could've made the game more unfriendly to streamers if they tried, which is amplifying everything.
Still think it needs to be pretty majorly nerfed past that though. Power is too oppressive for both how difficult and time consuming it is to even temporarily knock him out of it, and that's on top of the mobility. This is Deathslinger 1.0 except without any reload, hits over pallets and height-vaults, moves at 115, freely usable teleport to every gen with info along the way, and innate slowdown if you want to even TRY to counter it, not that you'll necessarily succeed.
There are a lot of dials that could be turned at least, but it feels awful to play against and you get so little even when you are able to successfully juke it or knock him out of his power. I'd buff turrets first. Perhaps a full stun if knocked out of his power, but I suspect that won't be enough since it's so quick and trivial to get back and running the anti-turret add-ons makes them a complete joke, and you're getting intel/mobility as you do so. More of a wind-up on the tail could help too, or maybe just lose power any time stunned like Plague.
Leakers are also saying there's a PTB next week and BHVR is posting images of drones fritzing out on Twitter, so I guess the Skull Merchant rework is sooner than expected. I really hope it's something a lot better than just putting drones on a somewhat different kind of CD, but I also dread any resurgence of Skull Merchant players at all, both to get in their last licks on her broken, miserable current form, or whatever awful version BHVR comes up with next.
E:
Also went against the most bizarre Ghostface today. Used his power literally once as far as I could tell. Got one hook relatively quickly, dropped chase to try to tunnel them, but then when two people came to body block and that failed, refused to commit to any chase for more than like 10 seconds. I ran to a jungle gym, vaulted once, and he just turned around and left. This happened on even relatively weak loops at least 2-3 more times. Confused newbie? Except was P20ish. I don't understand people.
Looks like the anti-facecamp mechanic is coming this PTB too. That's a nice surprise since their recent comments made it seem like it was a long, long way out.
Predictably, the Reddit and Twitter killers are going ballistic in their usual nonsensical fashion. It's both OP and useless, therefore do nothing and let facecamping stay. I am concerned that it'll be woefully insufficient to deal with basement, Trapper, Bubba, Nurse, Blight, etc. But still much better than nothing.
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/kb/articles/409-developer-update-september-2023
Anti-Camping exactly as specified previously. No numbers given.
Skull Merchant rework
No active drones. They do the radar scan thing, and if you're pinged three times, you get a trap. They can be set in two modes. Stealth has the radar lines be invisible (but you can see the light on the drone itself to estimate), and Active where the lines move much faster but are visible. Scans do NOT ping stationary survivors, which includes interacting with gens or totems. Traps now just straight up instantly injure, or put in deep wounds, and are broken as long as the trap is on. Getting pinged again while a trap is on reveals and slows them.
Automatically gets undetectable when deploying a drone.
Drones cannot be remote activated.
6 drones.
Lock on never decays.
Drones can now be placed closer together.
Failing a hack only gets 1 stack of lock on (instead of full).
Borgo rework
MacMillan rework
Buffs to Trapper, Huntress, Trickster, Slinger, and Legion.
Couple very, very, VERY minor perk buffs. As in Furtive Chase going from totally worthless to completely worthless.
MacMillan rework is interesting. I kind of hate Trapper buffs because as weak in chase as he is, chases with him end in a frustrating way, and then they all facecamp with traps. Maybe the anti-camp mechanic will make that less shitty, but you just can't escape basement, or RPD, or Lerys, or indoor maps in general against one anyway since they can just trap all the exits and entrances. I suspect the buffs to the other killers are a band-aid for MFT hitting 110 killers while (for all the whining killers do), not actually doing much of anything against 115 killers.
Skull Merchant rework sounds fucking awful and if anything, seems like it'd buff being able to hold the game hostage by being even more easily able to spam drones and fucking buffing the Exposed effect. You can't ignore Deep Wounds if injured like you can Exposed, or run out the timer if you were healthy. You still get put in one-shot range, and can't stay there anyway because as soon as she shows up, you're getting hit by a 10% movement speed debuff which will immediately make you go down. I do not at all see how this pushes her in a more "chase oriented direction," especially with the active zone removed so it needs LoS. She has less info, sure, but more slowdown, and is patrolling a three gen anyway. Just removing the active zone and requiring LoS makes her a lot weaker and less bullshit on two floor maps, but I don't see how she's any better in chase or this stops 3 genning.
PTR is live tomorrow, so we'll see then.
E: Oh, do you mean anti-camp? Again, no idea. I'd assume no, to prevent abuse (it'd be a free Whispers around the hook). For the hooked survivor, it's a bar under the unhook meter. You'd think they'd show it to other survivors to prevent trades when camped, but no comments or signs of that
E2: On Twitter, they've confirmed that there are going to be additional protections from some of the more egregious facecampers. eg Bubba won't be able to double-tap people through Endurance. They didn't specify what it was though.
E:
On Reddit, they said that basement Trapper is being targeted too for the anti-facecamping measures, so it sounds like they're really genuinely trying to kill that kind of stuff. Hopefully it works.
And you can see it in the way that Otz narrates them like a complete lunatic. He NEEDS to hard tunnel this person because that last person might have Deliverance, unhook themselves, do two gens and the exit gates before he's able to hook the other person. Meanwhile though, other comp players like V1, KnightLight, and even Hens are doing stuff like "If we play Trapper, M1 only, no camping or tunnelling, how often do we win?" and still putting up 90% win rates, trying to show that no, you don't need to play every pub match like your life depends on it. Nurse, Blight, and even Sadako players were putting up 4k winstreaks in the hundreds, if not thousands, which is ridiculous, and that's only gotten worse as the intel perks for killers have gotten so much better and the stuff like DH that was almost a needed counter to deal with the high tier killers was nerfed so severely, just making them even more oppressive. How Blight and Nurse have been allowed to exist in the state he has for as long as they have boggles the mind.
It's been really interesting to watch the recent MFT arguments play out. The killer complaints that things are specifically built to specific speeds and specific expectations is something that survivors have just had to deal with for the game's entire run. Is the Wraith uncloaking 20% faster than normal? Is Devour giving a tiny speed boost? But when that uncertainty is on the other foot, it's completely unacceptable. And Otz, to his credit, has very nearly connected the dots, calling out Coup as similarly messing with expectations and why is it okay for one side to have that but not the other. I'm not sure I agree, but I also largely feel like MFT is nowhere near as strong as people believe. It's quite good, yes, but only for Shift-W or loops that need to be brute forced anyway. Anything with a mind-game, and you're not at a flat out run. You're going to checkspots and waiting. You only have a couple seconds to get somewhere safe and MFT ain't doing shit there. I still prefer SB, both to counter stealth and to bait killers into chases.
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/kb/articles/410-7-3-0-ptb
But they're basically useless, so wait for PTB (in 25 minutes) for actual numbers. And unless they forgot to include something, only Bubba has any extra facecamp protections. And all it is is that you get an extra .5 seconds of invincibility if hit during the unhook Endurance. You do get 15 seconds (rather than 10) for self-unhooks, but still, that's going to do nothing against Bubba, Slinger, Huntress, Trickster, Clown, etc.
E:
NOPE, PTB is completely broken and nonfunctional.
E2:
Kind of working now. Anti-camp looks very, very geared specifically only to the basement. Standing just like 12 meters away is enough to totally stop it, but the basement seems to track from the top of the stairs, or maybe the entire basement. Killer cannot see the meter or any indication at all. Other survivors cannot see progress either.
The Bubba thing is really dumb. It's not unhook protection at all. How it works is that if the saw is inside the survivor, they stay invulnerable. It needs to leave them for .5 seconds. So if a survivor takes an Endurance hit and both of you don't move, he stays invulnerable to the saw for the entire rest of the sweep. But if you look away for .5 seconds and look back, they go down. Basically, it only works if you're riding their ass the entire chainsaw sweep.
E3:
Okay, no. Maybe it's just Gideon basement? Or just weird? Because Otz tested it with standing in the doorway of shack with basement there, and it didn't build fast enough to be able to unhook.
New MacMillian maps are also bugged as fuck, with tons of huge invisible walls.
Oh, and they broke Kindred again. Yay.
It really looks like the ones that the anti-camp mechanic are going to hit are:
People who unabashedly facecamp.
Anybody who lingers around the hook and then tries to also proxy camp (ie Hag/Trapper setting traps, Huntress/Trickster reloading near hook, breaking a pallet next to hook, etc).
Proxy camping through multiple hook states.
And that's it. Proxy camping from just like 12 meters away WON'T trigger it in a single hook state. It starts ticking up immediately, but you need very little distance to bring it to a near halt. Better than before? Yeah, sure. Good enough to actually stop camping? Not even close.
E4: Borgo remake is actually weird. It's smaller and has less overall visibility (good things), but it has a shitload of new tiles. Some are like the ones on the alien maps and are basically useless deathtraps, but some are absurdly broken as hell. There's a building now that has a god pallet literally adjacent to a god window. Like... what.
Boop - Meg mask
Danke - 200 BP because German DBD twitter acct shuttered
Gamsahabnida - 200 BP because Korean DBD twitter acct shuttered
DBD's been uncharacteristically chill the last week or two. Can't help but think it's all the kids back in school.
I really wish I knew what the fuck was going on with my MMR though. I've been playing Dredge a fair bit recently, and the game keeps giving me people with like 20 hours, and Dredge is one of the few I just don't have patience for bad/new teams on because he snowballs them so much that it's easy to get to 8 hooks with still 4 gens to go and zero progress on all the rest because every Nightfall brings all progress on everything to a screeching halt. Regresses even. Then I switch to Mirror Myers, who I admittedly throw a lot on by just 8 hooks and going for spooks, and it's like "Hey, here's 4 P100 people with 12k hours total." It also seems to think I'm some kind of god Artist, and I am most certainly not. Every game with her feels like a total disaster, even when I get 2+ kills.