Exploring Competitive Dead by Daylight

Should you play competitive DBD? Are you serious? Okay, I'll be real with you. I originally wrote this video months ago just to make fun of comp DBD. But after taking a dive down the rabbit hole, I have to admit that there are a lot of misconceptions that it gets unfairly criticized for. Don't worry, there's still plenty to make fun of, which we will get to. But to take a look at both sides, let's at least start with the dumb things the haters say. That really just comes from a lack of knowledge about the competitive scene. Like any esports scene, CompDBD consists of teams of players playing custom games against each other in order to win some kind of tournament. Sounds simple enough, right? But since DBD is an asymmetrical 4v1 game with heavy RNG elements, the immediate question for most players upon learning about competitive DBD is, why the f*** would you do that? To which most comp players have a pretty simple answer. They like the game. A lot. And optimizing and learning every part of it playing versus other people who really like DBD is the next step for them after they grow tired of the busted mechanics, bad matchmaking, and terrible teammates in public lobbies, things that I'm sure we've all experienced. So the most popular response to CompDBD, that is, laughing at the idea of it, or saying that there's no money in it, or calling it a waste of time, or for some reason claiming it doesn't exist, makes about as much sense as making fun of any other hobby. I play CompDbD because I like DbD is, in my opinion, a good enough reason to not be mocked relentlessly even if it is kind of funny since most DbD gameplay is such a shitshow. Which leads to the next question people ask. How can you possibly make a 4v1 game competitive with how much RNG and busted crap there is in it? And the answer is just as simple. You can't, but also, add a lot of extra rules. Banned perk lists for every killer and survivor, banned perks for every survivor team versus specific killers, banned addons, items, specific map picks per killer, banned RNG actions, the list goes on. The goal of all of these bans is to make the game as skill focused as possible, by limiting RNG or things deemed way too strong for the amount of effort you put in. And honestly, they do a pretty good job here. If you're a main of say, Doctor, and you could guarantee a decent map and no calm spirit players every time you queued up, at only the cost of your eerie addons, wouldn't you take it? Of course it's not perfect, for example maps still have RNG within their tiles and gen spawns, but tournament organizers do try to get as close as possible to a fair game. This is a really big point that most haters don't understand. Competitive DbD might as well be a totally different game when compared to normal public lobby DbD, which I'll refer to as pubs for the rest of this video. So if you are trying to make fun of Comp DbD by saying, this game isn't meant to be competitive, comp players would probably just agree with you. They're well aware of how many overpowered perks, add-ons, and items there are, as well as how much RNG, especially map RNG, can factor into a win or loss in public games. I'll let them explain this massive ruleset in their own words. With little to no restrictions, the amount of times the better team wins is decreased, the amount of RNG heavily increased, and skill expression decreased, all while significantly reducing the amount of fun playing the game. Side note, for a lot of players that last bit isn't true, but for comp players it definitely is. It's personal preference. But this brings us to the last common criticism, which can't really be mitigated because it comes from DbD's core design issues. The game's most efficient strategies are often considered the least skillful by a majority of the playerbase. On the survivor side, pre-dropping pallets while the rest of the team sits on generators. On the killer side, immediate tunneling and proxy camping of one survivor. Why would anyone want to watch this? Well, most don't, which is why the idea of comp DbD is still pretty unpopular among the majority of the playerbase going into year 9. However, this isn't the full story for a few reasons, and competitive DbD has actually been growing much faster than in years past. The first reason for that is DbD League, which is the main league I'm going to reference since it's the most popular, has gotten much better with balance simplification, killer variety, marketing, and finally started trying to push players away from camping too hard by making the tie-breaking win condition tied to unique hooks. This way, if both teams do all 5 gens, and they have the same amount of hooks, the killer player that hooked 2 different people, for 3 stages total, would win over the player that hooked 1 person and camped them to death, the former of which usually makes for a better viewing experience. Compare a modern tournament with killers like Oni, Wesker, Plague, Ghostface, and more, to the spirit and nurse snooze fests of old and you'll instantly see how much better it is to watch. The second reason it's growing is that popular content creators like Otz, He, Otofu, and Spooky Loops have been showcasing competitive play in a much better way than comp players have. More on that later. But the third reason it's growing is something that's hard for most DVD players to understand on first watch. When both sides accept that these boring tactics are going to be used, the games stay interesting. Yes, it sucks getting tunneled out in solo queue. Yes, it's boring to proxy camp as killer in pubs, but when a full four-man team knows and accepts that a tunnel out in camp will almost definitely happen, and comes together to prevent it instead of just complaining online, it's kind of fun to watch. Having a player pre-drop their first five pallets in a public match is boring to chase, but killers and comp have already planned for this and are setting up their dead zones, strategy, and build around it. If you have a lot of hours on killer, at some point you'll get annoyed at how easy the game can be. with just a bit of tunneling and proxy camping, especially when you go out of your way to avoid it and the survivors teabag you anyway. Comp DbD doesn't have this problem. Lastly, and most importantly, even with these low skill strategies, there is a ton of skill in competitive DbD. From patience, to communication, to knowledge, to mechanics, and to pretend it's all just camping, tunneling, and pre-dropping instantly signals that you've never actually watched any. I'll also use a common comp player argument here. If skill doesn't matter, Why do the same teams always dominate over multiple tournaments? So truthfully, I agree with the original complaint. Optimal strategies are really boring to play with or against in public games where you either stomp a bunch of idiots or have so much less control over RNG. But in a tournament? It can definitely be more interesting to try it against a group of coordinated players who accept that it's part of the game and it allows players to push themselves to the limit without having to worry about either side's made up rulebook. So wait a minute, all of this just seems like a big misunderstanding. Why would so many people be annoyed at competitive DBD when they just innocently play custom games among themselves? Well, if you ask people in the comp community, they apparently have no idea. They're just happily minding their own business while insecure pub players attack them for no reason. But this in itself is the problem. After watching the comp community for a while now, a lot of their players and viewers are very much living inside a bubble. And when you're in a bubble, you don't understand how you look and sound from outside of it. First of all, the most outspoken people either in comp... or associated with the comp community are all extremely annoying. If you go to DbD twitter, which is kind of the only place comp DbD exists outside of discord, you'll instantly be able to tell a comp player from the incredibly smug aura of their tweets. They will often put down pub players, you know 99.9% of the player base, as bots and say they crutch on broken items and mechanics. They will call any complaint or loss in public matches a skill issue. They'll have non-stop drama within their own community. Probably due to the fact that most of the people who actually have time for comp dbd are teenagers. The easiest way to get every comp player to respond to your tweet is to post the most obvious bait ever of you sucking at the game, because they will absolutely eat it up. They literally can't help themselves. The comp community is looking for any reason to show off their thousands of hours of knowledge and skill in dbd, usually in a way that's meant to make you feel like a dumbass. They're wildly confused that people just like to play DBD for fun instead of trying to improve, putting down any perk or build that they think will interrupt this quest for maximum skill expression. I don't think it's a hot take to say that people don't really like when others are condescending, and the comp community really doesn't seem to know or care how often they come across this way. But hey, there are smug elitists in every hobby. What makes DBD different? The first issue is that truthfully, DBD is a pretty mechanically simple game. Yes it has a massive skill ceiling, but but most of this is from game knowledge and experience rather than being physically demanding. There are some difficult things you can do, but you can win 99% of your games without ever learning these. I'll be honest, I've sucked at multiplayer games most of my life. No matter what I did, my KD was usually barely over 1 when I used to play shooters. But in DBD, I can win most of my games with mostly just knowledge and experience. which is what drew me toward it in the first place. So when a bunch of players start talking about skill expression so often in a game where you can probably win most matches after like 500 hours if you have decent video game experience and don't follow the other side's rulebook, of course it seems really silly. In most games and sports, the top players have 10,000 plus hours and extremely precise mechanics. In DbD, you could probably get there in a thousand if you actually practiced correctly and just watched videos to gain the necessary knowledge. The second reason is that most DbD players are kinda bad at the game from an objective standpoint. I would say the main reason for this is that there's no way to practice mechanics of any kind on your own, and 95% of the playerbase is not going to waste time working on flashlight save timing with a friend in a custom game. All the experience most people have is from pubs where you might get 4 games an hour if you're lucky, and most players are totally fine with this. When everyone is bad, it all evens out and makes for exciting games. Unfortunately, the players that aren't fine with this are either the ones who are extra bad and will blame everything but themselves while demanding balance changes that would benefit them, or the players who have practiced dbd mechanics way too much and are now better than 99.9% of players, not realizing that there's a lot of reasons that almost no one else does this. I'll let you figure out which category comp players belong to. So I'll summarize the first issue with a metaphor. Have you ever started up a co-op game with friends, but you have that one guy who rushes end game content as fast as possible to get ahead of everyone else? It kind of sucks the fun out of it for the people who have to play with them. And that's kind of how people feel about competitive DbD players. Most of us can agree that playing against a killer or survivor team that is way better than you is really unfun in this game. Is this fair to complain about? In my opinion, not really. Do I understand why people complain about it? Absolutely. But I think what really annoys most people about Comp DbD in particular is the fact that comp players seem to be unaware of how funny their bubble really is. Like they made up a game mode with their own made-up rules, and somehow that makes them better than everyone who just plays this game normally. Reminder, pubs is literally the only game mode in DbD with progression, rewards, achievements, and the only game mode that developers care about, as shown by them leaving tons of spectator bugs in custom games for months now. Everything you do in customs is just something you made up, just like every tournament win that you notch on your Twitch about page is made up by someone else. So even if you are technically right about your opinions on pub players, even if it technically is a skill issue that someone's complaining about, no one cares. What people do care about is results. Let me explain. Let's say you have a pub killer or a pub swif who brings the most disgusting, broken builds and wins every public game, and a comp killer or comp team that brings whatever and wins every public game. No one really cares about the fake skill of the former. They're both winning every game in the only game mode that the developers made. End of story. The players on the other side of those games got shit on equally. But I really think that bothers comp players because they're constantly talking about the ego of pub players who are crutching on things that comp players think are OP. This leads them to constantly respond to people who don't really care what the comp community thinks, and it always follows the logic of, if you lost, skill issue. If you won, you were using broken shit, and it's still a skill issue. The best example of this is when a comp player loses in pubs. Let's look at Momo7Th7th, a player for the comp team Petroleum, after losing his 1947 win streak with Nightlight in public games. Despite being understandably upset after having such a long streak broken, once the end game chat starts he immediately says, scrim? Which to me might as well say, well you beat me in the unbalanced luck based game, now come prove it in a real game. To which one player hilariously responds, nah I'm good. Comp players really don't understand how funny it is to challenge random pub players to scrims and 1v1s, but the truth is that no one really cares about how skilled you are in a balanced version of the game that you made up. And to accept this truth, that would mean admitting that you spent thousands of hours obtaining skills that even the developers don't care about. But here, any comp player might be pulling the, they aren't a real comp player card, similar to the no true scotsman fallacy. The implication is that only the lower tier comp players go around stomping pubs and challenging randoms and annoying everyone on twitter, and the top comp players would never do that. I'll let Nightlight, one of the best comp players in the scene, explain it himself. just trying to have an ego from winning public matches. And they are bringing the sweatiest shit, shit-talking everyone. It's always the bad players from comp that shit, that talk the most. You will never see any of us, for example, go in the pub game and, like, full-on shit on someone. Never. The problem I have with this is that, one, You admit that lower tier comp players have yapping issues that give everyone else a bad reputation, so it's still a problem that you should look to fix in the community if you're trying to grow it in a positive way. The other part of this is that only like 2-3 teams win consistently and Nightlight is on one of them, so to him, anyone under him, which is like 99% of the comp community, is probably a yapper. But two, he implies that top players would never get ego from pubs like these lower tier players do. Okay, let's take a look at Team Eternal, which Nightlight plays for, doing a 4-man escape streak in public games. Now they played this really fair, no repeated perks and trying to get all four players out with some amazing games. But in came an ultra meta nurse to stomp on them and you can hear how upset it makes him, presumably because it's someone ego-ing in pubs. I'm playing as a Eternal, oh my god! King Moron's bro. Guys, I'll get ego from pups because I can make it-Why is Kayle tilting? I 4k'd a Eternal off my Donus, look at me! Alright, fair enough. I mean, a meta Nurse stomps like 99.99% of public lobbies. So, like Momo7Th7th, they challenge the Nurse to a DBD League ruleset match, where the Nurse still gets a respectable 2k with 9 hookstages against the best team in comp DBD history, after which Nightlight deleted the VOD, which is always a funny move when you accuse others of having an ego. I've watched a good amount of comp players play public games now and the general feeling I get is that a lot of them are terrified to lose to a random pub player, which if they really believe DBD was just a big RNG fest, they wouldn't even care about. Even in solo queue, where everyone knows you can lose to things completely out of your control, he gets mad at pub players egoing, nodding at the killer right here, but when the killer nods back... So this guy just aimed into the fucking ground. Like, you have a guy DC on 5 gens. Why do you have an ego? Why do you have an ego? Unlucky. Why is he not an ego? He is literally the worst fucking slinger player of all time. I'm playing with three fucking monkeys on my- So yeah, I don't know if I buy the idea that it's only the lower tier comp players and pub players who have an ego. Back when the infamous 3 gen skull merchant match happened, you could tell Nightlight was taking it much more seriously than the troll merchant player CM9i was, even after they won. I mean the dude backed out of his bet to go bald if X9 won the latest big tournament. That's pure frontrunner ego right there. And you know what's the funniest thing about both Momo7Th and Eternal's pub game losses? They were both from other comp players stream sniping them. So it literally is just There's comp players egoing each other in pubs over nothing. Yeah, I can see why casual players don't think too highly of the competitive scene. Okay, but enough pseudo-psycho-analysis on the comp player ego. Let's talk about another reason a lot of people don't like comp DbD. They worry that comp players'very optimal gameplay tactics, that is, tunneling, camping, and taking every advantage, are spreading to public matches as comp gets more popular. Say someone watches a tournament and notices how every killer immediately goes for the tunnel out as fast as possible. Is it not a reasonable expectation that they might take this energy to public games that they want to win in? If comp keeps growing like it is, more and more players will play like this in public lobbies. And like I said earlier, it's pretty clear that the public player base is just not prepared for this type of gameplay. You can try it out for yourself to see what I mean. But here I actually kind of take the side of the competitive players. It's not their fault for optimizing the game that they were given. Tunneling has been the best strategy for 8 years and counting. If people do it in public games, that's a developer problem for incentivizing it. not the competitive players. I tend to agree that a lot of players have an idea of what DbD should be that doesn't match up at all with what it is. And here, comp players have done a much better job of accepting what it is, at least its core design. Does that go as far as having filters for every map in the game to give yourself every possible advantage? No, I still think they're huge nerds for that. Now this links up to the final bit of why Nightlight thinks people don't like comps, so let's recap a bit. He says that low tier comp players both have an ego and run around stomping pubs. We both agree on that. This implies that high tier comp players don't have an ego in pubs, on which I disagree. But finally he says that top comp players themselves are being accused of stomping pub games like this, which will always be vehemently denied by them. But top comp players do stream pubs every once in a while, so let's take a look. Here's Nightlight obliterating 34 public lobbies with one of the best builds there is. And no, it's not enough to just win, he has to make sure they have no pub ego. Here's V1 crushing 44 lobbies in a row with a quad slowdown wraith build. One of the top teams, Elysium, played a bunch of pubs with some of the most broken builds available. Although I admit, this didn't go like they planned. Here's Zeno, considered by many to be one of the best all-around players in competitive DbD right now. destroying a lobby with one of the best killers in the game and bleeding everyone out while throwing snowballs at them on day one of the winter event while a chat filled with the comp community cheers him on across multiple games these players are all indisputably top comp players is it their right to do this sure i guess it's all within the confines of the game should they keep claiming they never do this yeah yeah yeah cry probably not Again, comp players get very defensive at the prospect of losing in pubs and will often accuse anyone who beats them or even wins a chase against them of egoing in an unbalanced game or crutching on broken mechanics. And I'll throw them a bone, they're technically correct that they would win in a pure skill game, but to everyone looking in from the outside, this just reeks of insecurity. The public relations from the players on social media aren't much better. Ultimately they are allowed to say whatever they want on personal accounts, but as someone who works in marketing it does hurt a bit to see them consistently make polarizing, rude, or aggressive tweets that people will obviously associate with comp, whether that's fair or not. Watch any DBD League livestream or comp player chat and people will make the same jokes over and over about no skill, tunneling, camping, etc. All of which boil down to, this is what the average person would say watching this, isn't that so funny? Turn on any comp player's stream for 5 minutes. I guarantee you will see jokes in the chat about TrueTalent or Zeb89, who they consider high ego pub players for lack of a better term. Mentioning these guys is the comp player's version of Nerf Pig. to be spammed at any moment for maximum hilarious impact. You could look at this two ways. One is that it's good to gatekeep and keep your community only full of people who take the time to actually understand it. Or two, that it's maybe better to be friendly and helpful to newcomers who justifiably don't see why someone would want to watch what looks like just camping, tunneling, and pre-dropping pallets. Honestly, I understand both, because you don't owe rude first-time chatters anything, but I do wish that at the very least tournament staff wouldn't actively encourage it and just ban them instead. If anything, recent videos and tournaments from big creators should prove that there is a ton of potential interest if comp is explained well enough to cynical first-time viewers. And let's be real, even comp enjoyers can admit that a lot of different parts of it are pretty boring. But just like the killers and survivors in DBD, the hate from pub players makes comp players defensive, which makes them hate on pub players, which makes pub players hate them, and the cycle continues. Of course, there are plenty of down-to-earth comp players who don't do all the stuff I just described, and you don't see their annoying posts because they aren't making them. Zaka and Dan from Team Eternal, the same team with Nightlight earlier, are very chill even in pubs. Laser, Ivan, Pedro, and Xyz are some more great players that don't cause trouble as far as I'm aware. Multiple comp players don't play pubs at all, just 1v1 ladder and scrims, although apparently the 1v1 ladder has its own whole drama, beef, and egoing going on as well, I don't know. They recognize that DbD is just a game, and they don't get combative when people don't understand why they would play it this way. But as with literally everything ever, the loudest parts of the community at the tone for how the world sees them, and they are unfortunately quite loud. So what's my opinion of competitive dbd? Well I do watch the big tournaments and follow a few players so I definitely find it interesting overall, but I still think the overall scene has a lot of growing and growing up to do if they want to be respected by the majority of players. I will say that despite playing a game that doesn't really resemble live service dbd at this point, comp players are a lot better than the average player in terms of general gameplay. In my opinion, if the comp scene wants to continue to grow, I think league and tournament organizers should heavily focus on a seamless and beginner-friendly viewing experience, which so far they have been improving. And I think the top-level players should try to set a bit better example of not annoying everyone online and giving comp a bad rap, as well as condemning lower-tier players who try to do the same thing. Whether you play comp or not, or even if you've never heard of it before, I hope you felt this was a fair look at the scene and gave you some better understanding of why there's so much arguing about it. For what it's worth, all personal DMs, messages, and chats I've had with comp players were very helpful and friendly, and if you're looking to get into the community with an open mind, they will be more than welcoming. If you're just looking to watch comp, I recommend you check out CompDbD's YouTube channel, which features the best games, tutorials, and highlights from the top players. If you're looking to actually play, V1 has a video that shows you the basics of joining that I'll link in the description, and the 1v1 ladder in the DbD League Discord has plenty of help and tutorials available to get started. I've played it a bit myself and everyone was really friendly, including one player even playing extra rounds just to help me learn more. Although they may be smug and annoying about it, I see no lies when comp players tell you that the fastest way to improve is to play 1v1s and scrims against people that will actually push you as a player. Whether this is actually worth doing for an asymmetrical horror game? That's still up for debate. And unapologetic comp haters should be aware that comp is growing rapidly on YouTube, Twitch, and Discord. as well as having behavior devs donating eerie shards to the latest dbd league prize pool in big tournaments. After eight years of dbd, people are looking for more ways to play, and to lose out on all the fun potential just to keep stubbornly hating seems like a waste of time to me. As with most arguments, both pub players and comp players could definitely do more to understand the other's point of view, instead of just spamming insults at each other over Twitter. But I mean, come on. That's no fun at all.

Should you play competitive DBD? Are you serious? Okay, I'll be real with you. I originally wrote this video months ago just to make fun of comp DBD.

But after taking a dive down the rabbit hole, I have to admit that there are a lot of misconceptions that it gets unfairly criticized for. Don't worry, there's still plenty to make fun of, which we will get to. But to take a look at both sides, let's at least start with the dumb things the haters say. That really just comes from a lack of knowledge about the competitive scene.

Like any esports scene, CompDBD consists of teams of players playing custom games against each other in order to win some kind of tournament. Sounds simple enough, right? But since DBD is an asymmetrical 4v1 game with heavy RNG elements, the immediate question for most players upon learning about competitive DBD is, why the f*** would you do that? To which most comp players have a pretty simple answer.

They like the game. A lot. And optimizing and learning every part of it playing versus other people who really like DBD is the next step for them after they grow tired of the busted mechanics, bad matchmaking, and terrible teammates in public lobbies, things that I'm sure we've all experienced. So the most popular response to CompDBD, that is, laughing at the idea of it, or saying that there's no money in it, or calling it a waste of time, or for some reason claiming it doesn't exist, makes about as much sense as making fun of any other hobby. I play CompDbD because I like DbD is, in my opinion, a good enough reason to not be mocked relentlessly even if it is kind of funny since most DbD gameplay is such a shitshow.

Which leads to the next question people ask. How can you possibly make a 4v1 game competitive with how much RNG and busted crap there is in it? And the answer is just as simple.

You can't, but also, add a lot of extra rules. Banned perk lists for every killer and survivor, banned perks for every survivor team versus specific killers, banned addons, items, specific map picks per killer, banned RNG actions, the list goes on. The goal of all of these bans is to make the game as skill focused as possible, by limiting RNG or things deemed way too strong for the amount of effort you put in.

And honestly, they do a pretty good job here. If you're a main of say, Doctor, and you could guarantee a decent map and no calm spirit players every time you queued up, at only the cost of your eerie addons, wouldn't you take it? Of course it's not perfect, for example maps still have RNG within their tiles and gen spawns, but tournament organizers do try to get as close as possible to a fair game. This is a really big point that most haters don't understand. Competitive DbD might as well be a totally different game when compared to normal public lobby DbD, which I'll refer to as pubs for the rest of this video.

So if you are trying to make fun of Comp DbD by saying, this game isn't meant to be competitive, comp players would probably just agree with you. They're well aware of how many overpowered perks, add-ons, and items there are, as well as how much RNG, especially map RNG, can factor into a win or loss in public games. I'll let them explain this massive ruleset in their own words. With little to no restrictions, the amount of times the better team wins is decreased, the amount of RNG heavily increased, and skill expression decreased, all while significantly reducing the amount of fun playing the game.

Side note, for a lot of players that last bit isn't true, but for comp players it definitely is. It's personal preference. But this brings us to the last common criticism, which can't really be mitigated because it comes from DbD's core design issues.

The game's most efficient strategies are often considered the least skillful by a majority of the playerbase. On the survivor side, pre-dropping pallets while the rest of the team sits on generators. On the killer side, immediate tunneling and proxy camping of one survivor. Why would anyone want to watch this?

Well, most don't, which is why the idea of comp DbD is still pretty unpopular among the majority of the playerbase going into year 9. However, this isn't the full story for a few reasons, and competitive DbD has actually been growing much faster than in years past. The first reason for that is DbD League, which is the main league I'm going to reference since it's the most popular, has gotten much better with balance simplification, killer variety, marketing, and finally started trying to push players away from camping too hard by making the tie-breaking win condition tied to unique hooks. This way, if both teams do all 5 gens, and they have the same amount of hooks, the killer player that hooked 2 different people, for 3 stages total, would win over the player that hooked 1 person and camped them to death, the former of which usually makes for a better viewing experience. Compare a modern tournament with killers like Oni, Wesker, Plague, Ghostface, and more, to the spirit and nurse snooze fests of old and you'll instantly see how much better it is to watch. The second reason it's growing is that popular content creators like Otz, He, Otofu, and Spooky Loops have been showcasing competitive play in a much better way than comp players have.

More on that later. But the third reason it's growing is something that's hard for most DVD players to understand on first watch. When both sides accept that these boring tactics are going to be used, the games stay interesting. Yes, it sucks getting tunneled out in solo queue.

Yes, it's boring to proxy camp as killer in pubs, but when a full four-man team knows and accepts that a tunnel out in camp will almost definitely happen, and comes together to prevent it instead of just complaining online, it's kind of fun to watch. Having a player pre-drop their first five pallets in a public match is boring to chase, but killers and comp have already planned for this and are setting up their dead zones, strategy, and build around it. If you have a lot of hours on killer, at some point you'll get annoyed at how easy the game can be. with just a bit of tunneling and proxy camping, especially when you go out of your way to avoid it and the survivors teabag you anyway.

Comp DbD doesn't have this problem. Lastly, and most importantly, even with these low skill strategies, there is a ton of skill in competitive DbD. From patience, to communication, to knowledge, to mechanics, and to pretend it's all just camping, tunneling, and pre-dropping instantly signals that you've never actually watched any.

I'll also use a common comp player argument here. If skill doesn't matter, Why do the same teams always dominate over multiple tournaments? So truthfully, I agree with the original complaint.

Optimal strategies are really boring to play with or against in public games where you either stomp a bunch of idiots or have so much less control over RNG. But in a tournament? It can definitely be more interesting to try it against a group of coordinated players who accept that it's part of the game and it allows players to push themselves to the limit without having to worry about either side's made up rulebook.

So wait a minute, all of this just seems like a big misunderstanding. Why would so many people be annoyed at competitive DBD when they just innocently play custom games among themselves? Well, if you ask people in the comp community, they apparently have no idea. They're just happily minding their own business while insecure pub players attack them for no reason. But this in itself is the problem.

After watching the comp community for a while now, a lot of their players and viewers are very much living inside a bubble. And when you're in a bubble, you don't understand how you look and sound from outside of it. First of all, the most outspoken people either in comp... or associated with the comp community are all extremely annoying.

If you go to DbD twitter, which is kind of the only place comp DbD exists outside of discord, you'll instantly be able to tell a comp player from the incredibly smug aura of their tweets. They will often put down pub players, you know 99.9% of the player base, as bots and say they crutch on broken items and mechanics. They will call any complaint or loss in public matches a skill issue.

They'll have non-stop drama within their own community. Probably due to the fact that most of the people who actually have time for comp dbd are teenagers. The easiest way to get every comp player to respond to your tweet is to post the most obvious bait ever of you sucking at the game, because they will absolutely eat it up. They literally can't help themselves. The comp community is looking for any reason to show off their thousands of hours of knowledge and skill in dbd, usually in a way that's meant to make you feel like a dumbass.

They're wildly confused that people just like to play DBD for fun instead of trying to improve, putting down any perk or build that they think will interrupt this quest for maximum skill expression. I don't think it's a hot take to say that people don't really like when others are condescending, and the comp community really doesn't seem to know or care how often they come across this way. But hey, there are smug elitists in every hobby.

What makes DBD different? The first issue is that truthfully, DBD is a pretty mechanically simple game. Yes it has a massive skill ceiling, but but most of this is from game knowledge and experience rather than being physically demanding. There are some difficult things you can do, but you can win 99% of your games without ever learning these. I'll be honest, I've sucked at multiplayer games most of my life.

No matter what I did, my KD was usually barely over 1 when I used to play shooters. But in DBD, I can win most of my games with mostly just knowledge and experience. which is what drew me toward it in the first place.

So when a bunch of players start talking about skill expression so often in a game where you can probably win most matches after like 500 hours if you have decent video game experience and don't follow the other side's rulebook, of course it seems really silly. In most games and sports, the top players have 10,000 plus hours and extremely precise mechanics. In DbD, you could probably get there in a thousand if you actually practiced correctly and just watched videos to gain the necessary knowledge. The second reason is that most DbD players are kinda bad at the game from an objective standpoint. I would say the main reason for this is that there's no way to practice mechanics of any kind on your own, and 95% of the playerbase is not going to waste time working on flashlight save timing with a friend in a custom game.

All the experience most people have is from pubs where you might get 4 games an hour if you're lucky, and most players are totally fine with this. When everyone is bad, it all evens out and makes for exciting games. Unfortunately, the players that aren't fine with this are either the ones who are extra bad and will blame everything but themselves while demanding balance changes that would benefit them, or the players who have practiced dbd mechanics way too much and are now better than 99.9% of players, not realizing that there's a lot of reasons that almost no one else does this.

I'll let you figure out which category comp players belong to. So I'll summarize the first issue with a metaphor. Have you ever started up a co-op game with friends, but you have that one guy who rushes end game content as fast as possible to get ahead of everyone else? It kind of sucks the fun out of it for the people who have to play with them.

And that's kind of how people feel about competitive DbD players. Most of us can agree that playing against a killer or survivor team that is way better than you is really unfun in this game. Is this fair to complain about?

In my opinion, not really. Do I understand why people complain about it? Absolutely.

But I think what really annoys most people about Comp DbD in particular is the fact that comp players seem to be unaware of how funny their bubble really is. Like they made up a game mode with their own made-up rules, and somehow that makes them better than everyone who just plays this game normally. Reminder, pubs is literally the only game mode in DbD with progression, rewards, achievements, and the only game mode that developers care about, as shown by them leaving tons of spectator bugs in custom games for months now. Everything you do in customs is just something you made up, just like every tournament win that you notch on your Twitch about page is made up by someone else. So even if you are technically right about your opinions on pub players, even if it technically is a skill issue that someone's complaining about, no one cares.

What people do care about is results. Let me explain. Let's say you have a pub killer or a pub swif who brings the most disgusting, broken builds and wins every public game, and a comp killer or comp team that brings whatever and wins every public game.

No one really cares about the fake skill of the former. They're both winning every game in the only game mode that the developers made. End of story.

The players on the other side of those games got shit on equally. But I really think that bothers comp players because they're constantly talking about the ego of pub players who are crutching on things that comp players think are OP. This leads them to constantly respond to people who don't really care what the comp community thinks, and it always follows the logic of, if you lost, skill issue.

If you won, you were using broken shit, and it's still a skill issue. The best example of this is when a comp player loses in pubs. Let's look at Momo7Th7th, a player for the comp team Petroleum, after losing his 1947 win streak with Nightlight in public games. Despite being understandably upset after having such a long streak broken, once the end game chat starts he immediately says, scrim?

Which to me might as well say, well you beat me in the unbalanced luck based game, now come prove it in a real game. To which one player hilariously responds, nah I'm good. Comp players really don't understand how funny it is to challenge random pub players to scrims and 1v1s, but the truth is that no one really cares about how skilled you are in a balanced version of the game that you made up. And to accept this truth, that would mean admitting that you spent thousands of hours obtaining skills that even the developers don't care about.

But here, any comp player might be pulling the, they aren't a real comp player card, similar to the no true scotsman fallacy. The implication is that only the lower tier comp players go around stomping pubs and challenging randoms and annoying everyone on twitter, and the top comp players would never do that. I'll let Nightlight, one of the best comp players in the scene, explain it himself. just trying to have an ego from winning public matches. And they are bringing the sweatiest shit, shit-talking everyone.

It's always the bad players from comp that shit, that talk the most. You will never see any of us, for example, go in the pub game and, like, full-on shit on someone. Never.

The problem I have with this is that, one, You admit that lower tier comp players have yapping issues that give everyone else a bad reputation, so it's still a problem that you should look to fix in the community if you're trying to grow it in a positive way. The other part of this is that only like 2-3 teams win consistently and Nightlight is on one of them, so to him, anyone under him, which is like 99% of the comp community, is probably a yapper. But two, he implies that top players would never get ego from pubs like these lower tier players do. Okay, let's take a look at Team Eternal, which Nightlight plays for, doing a 4-man escape streak in public games. Now they played this really fair, no repeated perks and trying to get all four players out with some amazing games.

But in came an ultra meta nurse to stomp on them and you can hear how upset it makes him, presumably because it's someone ego-ing in pubs. I'm playing as a Eternal, oh my god! King Moron's bro.

Guys, I'll get ego from pups because I can make it-Why is Kayle tilting? I 4k'd a Eternal off my Donus, look at me! Alright, fair enough. I mean, a meta Nurse stomps like 99.99% of public lobbies. So, like Momo7Th7th, they challenge the Nurse to a DBD League ruleset match, where the Nurse still gets a respectable 2k with 9 hookstages against the best team in comp DBD history, after which Nightlight deleted the VOD, which is always a funny move when you accuse others of having an ego.

I've watched a good amount of comp players play public games now and the general feeling I get is that a lot of them are terrified to lose to a random pub player, which if they really believe DBD was just a big RNG fest, they wouldn't even care about. Even in solo queue, where everyone knows you can lose to things completely out of your control, he gets mad at pub players egoing, nodding at the killer right here, but when the killer nods back... So this guy just aimed into the fucking ground. Like, you have a guy DC on 5 gens. Why do you have an ego?

Why do you have an ego? Unlucky. Why is he not an ego? He is literally the worst fucking slinger player of all time.

I'm playing with three fucking monkeys on my- So yeah, I don't know if I buy the idea that it's only the lower tier comp players and pub players who have an ego. Back when the infamous 3 gen skull merchant match happened, you could tell Nightlight was taking it much more seriously than the troll merchant player CM9i was, even after they won. I mean the dude backed out of his bet to go bald if X9 won the latest big tournament.

That's pure frontrunner ego right there. And you know what's the funniest thing about both Momo7Th and Eternal's pub game losses? They were both from other comp players stream sniping them. So it literally is just There's comp players egoing each other in pubs over nothing. Yeah, I can see why casual players don't think too highly of the competitive scene.

Okay, but enough pseudo-psycho-analysis on the comp player ego. Let's talk about another reason a lot of people don't like comp DbD. They worry that comp players'very optimal gameplay tactics, that is, tunneling, camping, and taking every advantage, are spreading to public matches as comp gets more popular. Say someone watches a tournament and notices how every killer immediately goes for the tunnel out as fast as possible.

Is it not a reasonable expectation that they might take this energy to public games that they want to win in? If comp keeps growing like it is, more and more players will play like this in public lobbies. And like I said earlier, it's pretty clear that the public player base is just not prepared for this type of gameplay.

You can try it out for yourself to see what I mean. But here I actually kind of take the side of the competitive players. It's not their fault for optimizing the game that they were given.

Tunneling has been the best strategy for 8 years and counting. If people do it in public games, that's a developer problem for incentivizing it. not the competitive players. I tend to agree that a lot of players have an idea of what DbD should be that doesn't match up at all with what it is.

And here, comp players have done a much better job of accepting what it is, at least its core design. Does that go as far as having filters for every map in the game to give yourself every possible advantage? No, I still think they're huge nerds for that. Now this links up to the final bit of why Nightlight thinks people don't like comps, so let's recap a bit.

He says that low tier comp players both have an ego and run around stomping pubs. We both agree on that. This implies that high tier comp players don't have an ego in pubs, on which I disagree. But finally he says that top comp players themselves are being accused of stomping pub games like this, which will always be vehemently denied by them.

But top comp players do stream pubs every once in a while, so let's take a look. Here's Nightlight obliterating 34 public lobbies with one of the best builds there is. And no, it's not enough to just win, he has to make sure they have no pub ego. Here's V1 crushing 44 lobbies in a row with a quad slowdown wraith build. One of the top teams, Elysium, played a bunch of pubs with some of the most broken builds available.

Although I admit, this didn't go like they planned. Here's Zeno, considered by many to be one of the best all-around players in competitive DbD right now. destroying a lobby with one of the best killers in the game and bleeding everyone out while throwing snowballs at them on day one of the winter event while a chat filled with the comp community cheers him on across multiple games these players are all indisputably top comp players is it their right to do this sure i guess it's all within the confines of the game should they keep claiming they never do this yeah yeah yeah cry probably not Again, comp players get very defensive at the prospect of losing in pubs and will often accuse anyone who beats them or even wins a chase against them of egoing in an unbalanced game or crutching on broken mechanics. And I'll throw them a bone, they're technically correct that they would win in a pure skill game, but to everyone looking in from the outside, this just reeks of insecurity. The public relations from the players on social media aren't much better.

Ultimately they are allowed to say whatever they want on personal accounts, but as someone who works in marketing it does hurt a bit to see them consistently make polarizing, rude, or aggressive tweets that people will obviously associate with comp, whether that's fair or not. Watch any DBD League livestream or comp player chat and people will make the same jokes over and over about no skill, tunneling, camping, etc. All of which boil down to, this is what the average person would say watching this, isn't that so funny?

Turn on any comp player's stream for 5 minutes. I guarantee you will see jokes in the chat about TrueTalent or Zeb89, who they consider high ego pub players for lack of a better term. Mentioning these guys is the comp player's version of Nerf Pig.

to be spammed at any moment for maximum hilarious impact. You could look at this two ways. One is that it's good to gatekeep and keep your community only full of people who take the time to actually understand it.

Or two, that it's maybe better to be friendly and helpful to newcomers who justifiably don't see why someone would want to watch what looks like just camping, tunneling, and pre-dropping pallets. Honestly, I understand both, because you don't owe rude first-time chatters anything, but I do wish that at the very least tournament staff wouldn't actively encourage it and just ban them instead. If anything, recent videos and tournaments from big creators should prove that there is a ton of potential interest if comp is explained well enough to cynical first-time viewers.

And let's be real, even comp enjoyers can admit that a lot of different parts of it are pretty boring. But just like the killers and survivors in DBD, the hate from pub players makes comp players defensive, which makes them hate on pub players, which makes pub players hate them, and the cycle continues. Of course, there are plenty of down-to-earth comp players who don't do all the stuff I just described, and you don't see their annoying posts because they aren't making them.

Zaka and Dan from Team Eternal, the same team with Nightlight earlier, are very chill even in pubs. Laser, Ivan, Pedro, and Xyz are some more great players that don't cause trouble as far as I'm aware. Multiple comp players don't play pubs at all, just 1v1 ladder and scrims, although apparently the 1v1 ladder has its own whole drama, beef, and egoing going on as well, I don't know. They recognize that DbD is just a game, and they don't get combative when people don't understand why they would play it this way. But as with literally everything ever, the loudest parts of the community at the tone for how the world sees them, and they are unfortunately quite loud.

So what's my opinion of competitive dbd? Well I do watch the big tournaments and follow a few players so I definitely find it interesting overall, but I still think the overall scene has a lot of growing and growing up to do if they want to be respected by the majority of players. I will say that despite playing a game that doesn't really resemble live service dbd at this point, comp players are a lot better than the average player in terms of general gameplay.

In my opinion, if the comp scene wants to continue to grow, I think league and tournament organizers should heavily focus on a seamless and beginner-friendly viewing experience, which so far they have been improving. And I think the top-level players should try to set a bit better example of not annoying everyone online and giving comp a bad rap, as well as condemning lower-tier players who try to do the same thing. Whether you play comp or not, or even if you've never heard of it before, I hope you felt this was a fair look at the scene and gave you some better understanding of why there's so much arguing about it. For what it's worth, all personal DMs, messages, and chats I've had with comp players were very helpful and friendly, and if you're looking to get into the community with an open mind, they will be more than welcoming.

If you're just looking to watch comp, I recommend you check out CompDbD's YouTube channel, which features the best games, tutorials, and highlights from the top players. If you're looking to actually play, V1 has a video that shows you the basics of joining that I'll link in the description, and the 1v1 ladder in the DbD League Discord has plenty of help and tutorials available to get started. I've played it a bit myself and everyone was really friendly, including one player even playing extra rounds just to help me learn more.

Although they may be smug and annoying about it, I see no lies when comp players tell you that the fastest way to improve is to play 1v1s and scrims against people that will actually push you as a player. Whether this is actually worth doing for an asymmetrical horror game? That's still up for debate. And unapologetic comp haters should be aware that comp is growing rapidly on YouTube, Twitch, and Discord.

as well as having behavior devs donating eerie shards to the latest dbd league prize pool in big tournaments. After eight years of dbd, people are looking for more ways to play, and to lose out on all the fun potential just to keep stubbornly hating seems like a waste of time to me. As with most arguments, both pub players and comp players could definitely do more to understand the other's point of view, instead of just spamming insults at each other over Twitter. But I mean, come on. That's no fun at all.

Transcript for:Exploring Competitive Dead by Daylight

Transcript for:
Exploring Competitive Dead by Daylight