A little over a year ago, I bought the video game Dead by Daylight at the recommendation of my brother. Both of my brothers had this game and since it had cross-play support, we could all play the game together.
For those who don’t know, Dead by Daylight is an asymmetrical multiplayer horror game where you play as either a survivor, whose main objective is to escape, or a killer, whose main objective is to sacrifice the survivors to the Entity, a Lovecraftian-like being that feeds on despair.
The Killers are unique and follow slasher-movie styles, with many coming from licensed properties, like Freddy Kruger or Michael Myers. But there are plenty of original killers as well.
The survivors are basically just skins who come with unique perks that can be taught to other survivors. So ultimately, it doesn’t matter what survivor you pick since you can have one with all the abilities you could ever want.
Each game round features four survivors and one killer. It’s a pretty basic game, with each side having its own advantages and disadvantages.
But lately, there has been a lot of discontent with the DBD community. Behavior, the company behind the game, recently revamped the match-making system for players that nearly everyone disliked. Now, instead of being matched based on rank, which has a lot of factors, you are matched based on escape history, if you’re a survivor, and kills, if you’re a killer. Effectively, this caused a lot of players to change their strategies to resort to methods that encourage fewer chases by the killers and less altruistic survivors.
But it gets better. Many killers got their powers nerfed and the next patch is going to nerf some more.
Essentially, it looks like Behavior doesn’t care about games being fun unless you’re a casual player who mainly plays as a survivor.
To top things off, there is a serious hacker problem within the game as well and very little that regular players can do about it. Behavior will ban the offenders, eventually, but the offenders simply buy Steam accounts on the cheap from foreigners and resume cheating again. And these are the big cheaters. The subtle usually never get caught because most players aren’t sure if they are cheating, to begin with.
Rather than deal with the problem properly, Behavior just bans all discussions involving cheating.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Unfortunately, it appears that Behavior has been overrun with Convergence and is unable to perform their primary duties anymore. It started back in June of 2021 when they offered a Pride charm for all characters. This charm could be obtained through a redemption code and doesn’t expire.
Next, their more recent original character additions have quite the cringe backstories. The new killer, the Artist, was originally a communist poet and painter in South America somewhere. The country isn’t specified, but I’m thinking it's supposed to be Chile and that she had her hands and tongue cut out by Pinochet’s goons. I guess the helicopters were out of order that day.
Jonah, a new survivor, was a Deep State operative who fought for the poor in his off-hours.
Mikaela is a witch survivor who worked as a barista when she wasn’t casting spells and who came with serious game-changing, overpowered perks. They may as well have named her “Snowflake” and given her the ability to open all escape gates before all the generators are repaired.
And now we come to another indication of the convergence infection: they’ve decided to remove Leatherface’s masks because one of them is for a black woman and that would be racist. It’s not that he’s a cannibal killer who uses a chainsaw to murder people, it’s that he’s a racist because he skins a black person and puts that skin on his face.
The fact is, Behavior has full-blown Convergence AIDS right now. They have a ton of technical debt in their code, a lot of broken mechanics, and they’re more concerned with racism and Pride than providing a good and enjoyable experience for all players.
This is usually what happens with many companies, though. As they get comfortable, they get lazy and they let a lot of things slide. In the end, they find themselves with an inferior product and not a lot of support from their customers.
So they virtue signal instead to compensate and try to keep idiots happy. But that only works for so long before even the idiots notice things are off.