Eh. For a game I play often, it's one of those games that you really just keep coming back to because you can't help yourself.

It's fun for a little bit and then it reminds you why it pisses you off, why the playerbase is toxic, and why you eventually uninstall it for a few months just to circle right back to it like an abusive ex.

Survivors spend so much time screwing around. They never actually run gens properly, unhook you, revive you. It's a lot of scatterbrained players just running around the map, directly into the killer, or directing the killer to you. There are some players who will see you crouching in grassy areas to avoid being seen, and utterly flip out because you aren't rushing. If you are trying to play with any sort of strategy that the other players don't approve of, you will find yourself a target. It's happened to me plenty of times. For example : I was playing a game this week with someone who was not happy that I was hiding in low grass in the western map. I was watching the killer's movements and trying to keep my distance so I could run gens without being disturbed. This was apparently not allowed and pissed off one of my teammates because he kept running into me, pointing the killer to me, and got the entire team downed as a result. After the match, he proceeded to type obscenities in the chat box in huge letters. Complete melt down. Meanwhile, I was the ONLY person on my team who managed to get 4 of the 5 generators completed MYSELF up until that point.

Killers are just as toxic and troll-ish. Will camp at hooks or gens. Will camp at exit gates once they're open, especially at maps where only one exit gate exists. They will down an entire team and let everyone bleed out, they will down the last remaining player and force them to wait 4 minutes until they bleed out or DC - which results in a penalty; and if you're sick of playing with these kinds of players like I am, you likely have DC's often enough to know that ONE DC at this point gets you a 75 hour ban so you better make sure whatever reason you DC for is worth it. Also, prepare to have the fanboys of this game take INSANE opposition to the right to DC when faced with this trash heap of a player base even the devs protect because "DC-ing is not sportsmanlike!" But the aforementioned nonsense somehow is? Because reporting them doesn't really do much and it doesn't change the fact that for every jar-head I report that does this, I run into the same kind of players nearly every match!

So I take a break. I decide that maybe it's just me. Give myself a month and maybe when I come back, things will be different.

But it's always the same since I bought this game in 2016. It's 2024. 8 years later and it's still the same garbage player base, the same garbage tactics, the same frustrations, the same unfair feedback, and the same warnings handed out by the forum mods every time I remind people who post whining about players disconnecting from matches that the above is why.

It's about player agency. I have the right to abandon any match I want to when crap like this is a constant in almost every match I play. It's not because "the match isn't going my way". It's because it's not fun to play with people who game this way. Who game like total pricks. Completely sucks the fun out of the game for me.

You can't fix a problem like this. You can't change how people are, unfortunately.

And DBD's playerbase is toxic as hell.

THAT is why I can't recommend this game. I may come back to it occasionally for a reminder as to why I abandon it each few months. But I will never recommend it.