In recent weeks, popular streamers of the game Dead By Daylight have been openly criticizing the game and its company Behaviour Interactive for what appears to be a growing cheating problem. While cheating players affect the entire community, streamers in particular are vulnerable to cheaters and hackers in Dead By Daylight.
For those who don’t know, Dead By Daylight is an “asymmetrical” horror game where one killer is tasked with hunting down and killing four survivors. Meanwhile the four survivors are tasked with repairing five generators and escaping the map before their untimely death. Players can give themselves an edge by equipping perks, items, and add-ons that influence in-game powers and mechanics.
This modular perk and equipment system leaves the game open to being modified by tweaking these perks, on top of more conventional direct cheats. But cheating in the game has gone beyond just gameplay advantages for personal gain, players are going out of their way to target and inconvenience other users.
A popular tactic for cheaters has been to hold a game “hostage”, particular if their target is a streamer. How this happens is that cheaters have the tools to intentionally join a streamer’s lobby, exploiting the game’s native matchmaking service. Once inside the game, cheaters will mess around and toy with the streamer (who’s generally playing killer) until the game nears the end.
Cheaters are able to trigger their character into a state where the game treats them as if they were dying but they never actually die. This forces the game to persist beyond the game’s “End Game Collapse” mechanic and ultimately keeps the streamer and the cheater in an empty match until the lobby ultimately times out after two hours.
For many streamers, this can be devastating by either derailing an entire stream for two hours to wait it out, or by forcing the streamer to disconnect and take a disconnect penalty on their account.
After the outcry against cheaters has grown in recent weeks, Behaviour Interactive released a roadmap detailing their plans to curb cheating and hacking in Dead By Daylight.
Due to the nature of cheating, Behaviour is forced to be vague and tight-lipped about the details. But just the acknowledgement of the problem is already more than some players hoped for. Changes include structural changes to the game which should curtail existing cheats, alongside a push for more server-validation instead of relying on client-side validation, something that makes cheats easier to implement.
One of the biggest takeaways in the immediate future is a change to the game to end matches that persist five minutes after the “End Game Collapse”. While five minutes is still an annoyingly long time to wait, it’s much better than waiting two hours.
