When I first played Dead by Daylight it was in 2018 last summer after getting advertisement of Dead by Daylight, so you could play the game for free! But it was only for a week.  It was on sale for 10$ and I brought it. When I first played Dead by Daylight I was addicted because it was so fun and exciting, I’d play it non-stop when I came home from school.  Back then I didn’t know what the rules were of what was acceptable and what was not in the Dead by Daylight community since I’d die a lot and thought well that’s what the games about, dying and never got attached to the random people I played with since I never saw them after that one round where we played together was over.  I only learned about the rules of what’s acceptable and what’s not from my friend Gilligan. I met Gilligan in one game where he saved me from the killer than we just so happened to appear in the same game lobby again which is extremely rare, after he saved me again in the second round I friended him. We started to play together ever since.  Gilligan got tired of typing to me and me typing back to him because it was difficult to communicate while your getting chased by the killer so than he used the Steam’s Voice Chat, but I didn’t have a microphone, so I just listened to him as he talked giving me information about what generator he was on and where the killer was. Once I got a microphone than we started to talk more, and he began to share his knowledge more with me after he got to know me better.  Ever since I met Gilligan it’s always been more fun to play with him than from that the two of us started to bring in more people who we liked after playing a game with them and invited them to play with us until we became a close group of friends who took time out of our day to play with each other than it developed into something more like a well working team of survivors. This past-experience gives me a lot of insight to the use of outside App communication and the understanding of how the use of communication can affect teamwork that can in-turn go a long way in surviving as a survivor in Dead by Daylight.  The privileges I get from owning this game means that I can spectate on my friends who have the same game as me with the addition of having an insider on the game. One challenge I face is that I’m a Survivor Main so it’s difficult for me to see the struggles of Killer Mains since I don’t play killer. So, I’m very bias when the developers try to “balance” the game, making updates that help Killer Mains and updates that make survivors weaker. I will acknowledge the power I have as a researcher and I won’t put in any of my own opinions about what I think are unfair to persuade/influence you, the reader. I will manage my power by just spectating/watching Gilligan’s game, while he is playing I will not talk/interfere with him because I don’t want to distract or influence him as he normally plays.  I will just be writing down what’s going on in the game.

        One critical policy issue affecting the Dead by Daylight community is the use of hacks and abusive play in the game Dead by Daylight.  All players were affected by the use of hacks, both survivors and killers were hacking the game files in Dead by Daylight giving themselves unfair advantages of speed and the ability to teleport anywhere on the map.  Hacking the game affected everyone in the Dead by Daylight community, survivors we’re furious that the killers could come out of nowhere and could grab, hit, and hook them even though they weren’t anywhere near the facility.  Killers were also outraged that a survivor could teleport around the map to avoid them with the addition of speed hacking which made them faster than the killer, so the killer couldn’t catch them, since the killers designed to be faster than the survivors.  I asked my friend Gilligan if he ever hacked the game or messed around with the game files, his response was “yes, I have. It’s easy.” But he told me that he only messed around in the game files to change the pictures of the survivors and killers nothing else.  After an update was made to ban hackers he was locked out of the game. I asked him “for how long?” making him say back to me “forever. Well until I made this new account.” (Gilligan). I asked him if he ever did it again and he told me “no, because when you load up the game script you’d automatically get banned because of Easy Anti-Cheat” (Gilligan).  So, Gilligan did get banned before. He only told me this because I’m one of his trusted friends. So, Yes, the new update to ban hackers works. There has been no change in the use of hacks policy since it has implemented and so far from what I can see, no one is using hacks in this game anymore. I still think that the policy of hacks should be improved on, to crack down on more experienced and skilled hackers since Gilligan told me that in some games that we played he believes they are using hacks and to report them.  Sometimes I think hacks are still being used and going undetected but the players who use hacks are now more clever and sneakier in when to active them. Abusive play is still going around, many players are still exploiting the game mechanics like body blocking where a survivor can trap another survivor in a corner and won’t let them go in addition to the killer doing the same to a survivor when they trap them in a corner and doesn’t let them go. “Now Dead by Daylight aims to be a much fairer experience for all players, with a range of offenses resulting in permanent or temporary bans for its playerbase.” (Jeffery).  Which I’m extremely happy to hear that the use of hacking and players that are hackers are being banned but still the use of abusive play is in almost every game I’ve encountered with my friend Gilligan.  “Harrassing other players in-game is enough to earn users a 24-hour ban, and griefing fellow survivors may end in a similar punishment. Exploiting broken aspects of the game is also no longer allowed, especially on streaming platforms, though it might prove difficult to say just what counts as exploitation.” (Jeffery).  I think Dead by Daylight employees who are paid to monitor abusive gameplay/harassment are not doing their job since players are still abusing the game mechanics or using abusive language to other players who type in the chat box that shows up at the end of the round for survivors and killers to type to each other about the game.  I propose that the developers should change the temporary ban from 24 hours to a week because if the penalty is more severe it is less likely for people to constantly keep doing it. 1 week may seem harsh but it’ll make a big difference in the game’s community and environment so the game doesn’t turn into a toxic environment of rage quitting/blaming each other for loosing so I say a temporary ban for 24-hours should be changed to a week for better game improvement.

Work CitedJeffery, Maxwell. “Dead by Daylight Has New Ways Players Can Get Banned.”  Game Rant, 5 April.  2019, https://gamerant.com/dead-by-daylight-ban/.