Playing killer seems to be not very attractive
Hello dear reader,
the following statements are my personal opinions of the game - feel free to agree or disagree.
I'm playing Dead by Daylight on my PS4 and 85% of my dbd time i play survivor. i've been a rank 3 survivor last season and was around rank 12 as killer... and it was almost never funny to play killer for several good reasons:
- "Winning"
What means "winning" a game? How pleased am i with which result and how easy is it to get a good result? It certainly is very god damn hard. It may vary from killer to killer and from build to build - but i don't want to be limited to 3-4 killers due to their kit to be very effective. You'll also probably have a hard time without some specific offerings or strong perks from other killers. But anyway - let's get a quick overview about results and my moods:
0 kills: this ######### sucks - and as a killer i suck too... i never want to play killer any time soon.
1 kill: wow... at least i got one... still - enough playing killer for today.
2 kills: I'm satisfied by like around 33%. Could have been better though...
3 kills: feels good and i'm pretty satisfied!
4 kills: GG! ...either i played really god damn well or they made some very critical mistakes^^
- "The challenge"
A lot of good killers will probably disagree with me on this point - but playing killer in general feels more like beeing cyber-bullyed by 4 cocky survivors then beeing a brutal threat. I feel more like beeing that movie-cliché fat guy from school that get's his lunch money stolen by some bullies then a ruthless killer. Maybe it will get a bit better if i study spawn locations a bit more or if I'll practise my exact maximum range with a fully charged slash... but i think i'm already pretty good at estimating that stuff and it's still a pain to play killer. Even though I'm not an elite killer with thousands of games on my back, I feel like it is just too hard and not very funny for the majority of people.
- "The mindset of a killer"
I've seen a lot of horror movies - and i want to facepalm myself if i see stupid decission making on either side. It just makes no sense for a group of survivors to split up in most situations. Neither does it feel right if a killer decides to just leave a victim and let him get a chance to escape. In dbd it's actually the other way around and it's just wrong and feels stupid - killer: "hang in there for a minute, I'll be right back!" (slow, sarcastic claps or moaning for this bad joke is advised).
- "That one annoying guy..."
I think that a lot of killers will get annoyed by that one guy which makes you look like a fool while chasing him. He seems to know where every single pallet is positioned, he knows exactly how to perfectly loop you and he can make the most out of his given time which you as a killer served to him on a silver tray. Give him the best flashlight with good add-ons, some perks like "Dead Hard" and your next 10 minutes will most likely be more tilting then any league of legends game you've ever played. 'AT LEAST HE DESERVES TO DIE!' - you're probably thinking while chasing him... but hey guess what? if you don't have mori, he'll probably escape because he get's unhooked during the endgame by someone with the perk "borrowed time" - and there is nothing you can do about it (+ you loose points for camping). Your whole day is ruined.
- Perks and other options
The choices are endless... for survivors. As are the threats from them to you as a killer. Survivors can take a specific combination of perks to finish one job perfectly or can even take a healthy mix-up. A Killer must have a well thought through build because he always has the same goal - and in addition to that he's alone. You suddenly have to worry about a total of 16 perks which could all be game-changing against your 4 perks... seems pretty unfair to me to be honest. And there is even more... a survivor can waste around 10 seconds to go to a guaranteed item-box-spot and get an item to be more relevant to a game... well i would like to find a game-changing mori in the closet too - but sadly i can't.
- Stress
As a killer you have to make choices 24/7 - and bad choices will very often and very easily get punished very hard. While you're having team mates as survivor who can probably make up for a bad chase, you're on your own while playing killer. Besides that... playing a killer is probably 4 times more stressful then playing a survivor since you are (besides skill-checks) as a single person the only source of stress for survivors. For all your efforts during a game it (to me) just doesn't feels rewarding enough.
- Why should you even listen to anything i've wrote?
Well if you're searching for a game you can wait up to 30 minutes to find a game, while you'll find a game as killer within 10 seconds (at least on PS4). What does that tell you? - Very few people like to play killer and there should be some change soons to make it a more attractive and less frustrating choice.
...There is a lot more to cover for example "How you are forced to make stupid decisions"... but i think that this is it for now. Feel free to laugh, agree, hate, comment or to do whatever you want to do.
Thanks for reading.
Comments
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You dont play Killer for Fun ^^
its a challenge (unless you play above rank 12)... but hard and straight up unfair is a difference and its the reason why so many avoid red ranks... the number of games you cant win even when you do everything right increases the more you rank up and this is the core problem... i dont mind having super stressful killer gameplay if i have a fair chance of winning (and unless you bring the strongest 3 Killer out of 18 you will not stand a chance).
Its rly simple .. the more you rank up the more hooks you need to win but generators go faster while chases take longer and more and more survivor use DS/BT times 4....
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I kinda understand what your saying, Ps4 player here. I'm survivor main though, I understand everything clearly. I used to play killer before all hell broke loose, I loved playing Spirit and plague my favorite.
I playing killer should be a bit more scarier and more easier due to (slashers) killers are meant to be powerful, but due to most perks like NOED, Hex perks and etc. The entity (the prick) gave killers more of a power boost. Which is fine, but addons like Mori and Over used meta is very...Boring to go up against.
I see killer time and time, most enjoyable matches, most are down right cruel to be in. I wait up to 30+ minutes to get the "right" match. But this game as a weird tone that says, "Play us, were fun"
Um no you aren't most of the time, this is like a competitive game to be more exact. Competitive games aren't fun depending on either side of the team...
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I like the spirit as well. it's just hilarious if you manage to outplay a survivor by making him slide over a pallet due to a phasewalk-fake :D. But the spirit & the nurse (maybe freddy & the doctor too) are probably the only ones to do such kind of outplays.
Mori sucks - I totaly agree on that. But it's currently one of the only things that creates some kind of "fear" among the survivors. It's one of the only things that makes the survivors play more of a stealthy game than beeing like - "'klick klick' here i am - chase me!". Imagine having a nurse blink with a cooldown of 100 seconds as a killer. Imagine having an activatable meg thomas like sprint burst with the same cooldown. Imagine beeing able to block a pallet or window with the help of the entity. Or making survivors a lot slower on passing them twice. I think those ideas for example would create a lot more outplay/fear potential and they could make chases a lot more interesting. If I'm playing survivor i can pretty much tell you if i can make it to the next pallet and the killer can do so too. At least the next 10 seconds are a walk in the park for a survivor and he knows he's safe. Now imagine a diabolic 3 myers with "Dead Hard" that all of a sudden says: "No, you don't!". Forget Mori and fear my teleporting trapper which leads you right into my traps :D.
I could also imagine limiting the survivor perks to only 3 or 2 perks. "Borrowed Time", "Dead Hard", "Decisive Strike" and a fourth perk of your choice just gives you in combination of your items just way too many options on how to play the game. Imagine having some kind of role-system for a match - you could choose if you're a mechanic, healer, daredevil or manipulator and you get bonuses on actions of your type. Sure - you could choose to only repair gens as a healer, but you would not be as fast as a mechanic. Or you could go for killer distractions as a mechanic but you don't have certain tools or stats that the daredevil has to make a chase longer. You could also make a main & subclass system for more options and playstyles like a daredevil-healer and so on...
That brings me to the rank system and how you for example can't just be a simple mechanic that fulfills his job and never get's chased... but that's a topic on it's own^^.
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Your post is very detailed, that's very good.
You outline some problems which are at the Core of Dead by Daylight currently:
- Killer aesthetics, The problem of a Lower Skilled Killer seems like a joke to Higher Skilled Survivors. Hopefully the new Player Skill System soon to be implemented will take a huge chunk out of that problem.
That should also make games feel more fair too, We are all looking forward to that. It could solve a lot of your problems I think. But there is also healthy advice to take, Don't try to run around after THAT ONE GUY all the time. I don't know why that's not a game hint in the loading screens.
Please BHVR we need some more Killer tips into the loading screen as well.
Like : Spending your time hunting only one Survivor, leaves the three others open to fix generators, Hunt with Vigilance, Killer.
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The story about "That one guy"... yes i know it's not a good thing to just focus one guy and it was a mistake to hunt him all the time. I've heard other survivors doing gens and i still went after the guy i was chasing all along... but i wanted to do that to finally finish a mission in the archive where i have to kill 10 survivors. I didn't even care if it's going to be a bad game point wise - all i wanted was one single kill to make some progress on my mission... and i even failed hard on doing that.
I'm looking forward to your mentioned change, but i still think that there needs to be done a lot more... i mean it didn't matter which survivor rank i've been at - finding a killer (no matter his rank) always took like forever. Looking at a regular 5 man lobby and the frequency of finding a match tells me that not even 20% of the people want to play killer... And some of them sadly only do it for archive missions.
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I'll be honest, I agree. I've stopped playing completely recently, just because I have a choice between sweating 100% every game against red rank survivors and being super rude just for a chance of a 1k, or going survivor and basically being able to turn my brain off and still walk out the gate without even a real chance of loss. But hey, at least Last Year is having a free weekend on Steam right now, so I have something to play at the moment.
The difficulty of the two roles are basically completely reversed. It shouldn't be easy to play killer, but it shouldn't take perfect play without the chance for mistakes. Meanwhile, survivor shouldn't be so easy that you can completely ignore hooked survivors until the gens are done, just to unhook them and hop on out the gate that one of your buddies primed to 99%, just tanking hits the entire time due to at least one hit soaking perk per survivor.
I say all of this as an (apparently) rank 4 killer, and a rank 10 survivor. I'm not amazing on either side, and I'm nowhere near good enough to be matched up against the people I'm forced to play against as killer, but nothing about this situation feels right.
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For me playng kilker is always very fun. Is challanging vs good survivor and gave a powerful sensation (also playng coordinate good surv and looping nice is, tension making and giving also the sensation of strengh of the team with good players). However some unbalanced things make the game not fun and stressful. Mori, keys, big maps and design (both strong loops and dead zones), genrush and tunneling (hope balnace decisive to make more untitunnel and less 60 sec immunity).Hope devs fix all. Higher goes on rank better players probably found and make it more difficult sure, but also satisfiyng.it's a pvp game.
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