Dead by Daylight

Reviewers describe slurs and "kill yourself" messages in end-game chat, hate comments on their Steam profiles, doxxing threats, and teammates who sabotage or report each other. 15% of longer reviews complain about the community. Both sides describe the same pattern: win and you're called a sweat or tryhard, lose and you're called trash. Playing a disliked killer, using Lightborn, or tunneling brings abuse. A few reviewers, including some who recommend the game, advise turning chat off ("you can simply turn off endgame chat"). Several also say reporting does nothing.

Matchmaking complaints appear in about 5% of longer reviews, more often from players with hundreds of hours than from newcomers. Reviewers describe lobbies that swing wildly: one game against first-timers, the next against a four-person squad with "10k hours each," and after a few wins killers get fed Prestige 100 teams. A few tie this to the recent MMR reset. Even some positive reviews mention "questionable matchmaking."

Beyond the survivor-versus-killer argument, some reviewers on both sides say the developers don't play their own game. They point to new killers released overtuned and nerfed only after DLC sales, older killers (Trapper, Wraith, Myers after his rework) left behind, the same meta perks every match, and diminishing-returns changes that killed fun builds but not strong ones. Jason, the Ghoul, Nurse and Blight come up by name as frustrating to face. "Each new killer is stronger than the last," one negative review says.

The community-designed killer from the Chorus of Sin chapter, released in late August, drew far more complaints than praise, including from reviewers who still recommend the game. Survivors describe a beam that hits through walls and floors from across the map with almost no cooldown, a Heresy effect that regresses generators on good skill checks, and an exile mechanic that bypasses hook perks. Other reviewers object to a pre-release nerf and its stated reason, that streamers reading chat were getting hit; they read it as balancing the game around players who aren't paying attention. One says the nerf was taken back after the backlash. A minority like her design and her high skill ceiling.

Cheating comes up mostly in reviews from players with hundreds of hours. They describe speed hacks, wallhacks and lag switching, and one describes a cheater holding a match hostage and getting a ban himself for leaving it. A few believe most cheaters play on Epic, where, one says, free-to-keep weekends supplied throwaway accounts.

Veterans describe "spaghetti code": every patch adds new bugs, hits land through pallets and windows, high-ping killers get favored hit registration, killers get stuck on invisible walls, and licensed characters and skins break (a paid Springtrap skin lost its head for weeks). Players in South Asia, the Middle East and South Africa describe routine 150 to 200 ms ping with no nearby servers. A few ask the developers to fix bugs before adding new content.

Crashes, "Dedicated server is not responding" errors and anti-cheat validation failures kick players out, and the game follows up with matchmaking bans of 5 to 30 minutes, sometimes hours. There is no way to rejoin a match after a short drop, and reviewers on unstable home internet say they can't play at all. Even the handful of reviews that mention these bans and still recommend the game complain about them.

In early September a Steam-only Denuvo anti-cheat trial rolled out, and 4% of all reviews written from 2 to 14 September mention it or the anti-cheat. Players report stutter, doubled ping, whole-PC freezes that needed a hard reset, crashes that then triggered disconnect bans, broken Linux play, and conflicts with Razer software. They also object to the anti-cheat being added without any notice on the store page, and to testing it only on Steam when, as they see it, the cheaters are on Epic. The few reviews that name Denuvo and still recommend the game complain about it too. About a week in, one reviewer reported it was no longer running; others had said they would not play, or told people not to buy, until it was removed.

Some players call the game pay-to-win, or "pay to have fun": the strongest perks sit on licensed characters that can only be bought with money, the Shrine of Secrets offers four random perks a week out of roughly 300, and prestiging characters to share their perks takes hundreds of hours. A few put the cost of owning everything at $200 to $300, and others complain about expensive skins and recolors in the Rift pass. A minority defend the model: original characters can be earned for free, and paying for licensed content is "fair."

Solo survivors describe teammates who hide all game, give away positions, rush to unhook in front of the killer, or quit on first hook and get replaced by bots. With no voice chat or visible teammate perks, they feel outmatched by killers tuned to beat coordinated squads. A few advise never playing survivor solo.

Killer players report 10 to 30 minute waits for normal matches, and longer for 2v8, while survivor queues take seconds. The August UI update removed the estimated wait time, so players no longer know how long they'll be waiting. Some like the option to play a survivor match while they wait. Others say it throws off their killer play.

After enough hours, reviewers find holding M1 on generators and running the same loops stale. They call it a "generator repair simulator" and ask for new objectives or permanent modes. New players raise this about as often as veterans.

Killer players criticized the 10th anniversary event, saying survivors got invincibility and invisibility modifiers while killers got a slowing projectile. Reviewers also objected to cuts in anniversary cake rewards, which one says the developers partly reversed. Lights Out drew similar complaints. A few survivor players described the same events as killer-sided.

A smaller group describes support tickets that took weeks to get an answer, permanent bans they say came without explanation, lost progress when linking PlayStation or Epic accounts to Steam, and, in one case, premium currency deleted after logging in from another country.