Can a game like DBD be balanced?

FixDBDPls

Hello everyone, I am glad that you stopped by to see what's up with this post, first of all I would like to thank you for your time, second of all I am gonna hop right into the middle of the problem I have with DBD at this very moment. So as we all know the perk Ruin has been nerfed a few patches ago and it really made a very powerful and significant difference in the current playstyle. I have 1500 hours in this game and I really enjoyed playing it along this time. Right know I think the game is very unbalanced and there is a big gap between the survivors and the killers (even with the nerfed infinites). This month I started to play the game after a break and I pushed myself to go for the rank 1 on the both sides, killer and survivor and achieved this goal, but I observed a really big difference between killers and survivors. I want to evaluate the game from the killers perspective first and after that I will talk about the survivors.

1: I think that the killer is at the moment the role that involves the most amount of skill from players. As a killer you need to think about every aspect of the game, starting with preventing survivors from working on generators and ending with sacrificing them to the entity. All of these aspects are very strongly tied by the aspect of time, and as a killer you have a very limmited time period you can work with (if i remember corectly if every survivors works alone on a generator it would take them around 80 seconds to fully repair a generator without a debufff such as Thanatophobia being applied on them). This will make the game to go by in around 400 seconds which translates in 6.6 minutes. In that period of time you need to be as efficient as possible to get as many survivors sacrificed as possible. I had an encounter earlier with a pair of very good survivors and I could not catch any of them in the time that they made 4 generators (in approximately 5 minutes) because they all knew what they should do and had very strong environment to help them). I felt a very big frustration because of that and I did what a sad person would do, I left the game and didnt look back. I would like to say that looking back at that moment, I didnt leave because I was losing the game, but more like I felt like I could do nothing against those odds and that feeling is literally frightening.

2: As a survivor I climbed the ladder alone because my friends dont play as much DBD as they used to, so it was just me and a bunch of random guys starting from rank 20 until rank 1. I would like to say that the survivor gameplay feels pretty dull and boring to me and excepting the chasing moments there is actually nothing else fun to do as a survivor (an exception for me being searching in the chests with Ace in The Hole, Plunderers Instinct and Pharmacy). In this very morning I had actually two games in which I started chases with a Doc and an Oni, and I just did the casual looping and all of the sudden I find myself in the situation of being tunneled off the hook because they didnt like the fact that I looped them (I didnt T-bag or did anything else to them, just looped them for around 2mins). They did lost plenty of time chasing me and I think they saw me as sort of a prize to get. I dont mind that thing as much but the thing that I dont like at all at the moment is the capacity of the survivors to do very many generators in a very small amount of time. This situtation doesnt allow the killers to get the game into a stable state for them and pushes them to unsportsman like attitude like camping and tunneling situations that are not pleasant from a survivors perspective. It doesnt even matter if the killer starts slugging because in a good team of survivors which cooperate they manage to get themselves up very quickly.

In the conclusion I would like to say that I think the game happens to be in an unbalanced state and the survivors have the advantage over the killers nowadays (even tho this is a horror game and it is supposed to favour the killer a little bit). At the moment I would like to see more changes that would help the killers to get the upper hand over the survivors because I think they really need it.

For the persons that have spent their time reading this post I would like to say "Thank you" and I hope you are feeling well in this troubled times, this is just a game after all, but I feel that it really has a true potential to become greater and greater with much care from the developers and the community alike. Stay safe and see you in the fog guys...

xCarrie

simple answer - no.

any asymmetrical game will never be balanced because how different each side is. one side will be the “power role” while the others are supposed to be “helpless.” it’s basically impossible to balance and make everyone happy because someone on either side will always feel something is unfair.

sulaiman

Yes, it can be balanced, but not as long there is swf and solo survivors. Seperat lobbys would allow for seperate balancing, but swf players (which are about 50% of the surivor players) would feel punished if they had to play the game balanced instead of easy mode.

bangbison

I think it’s just gotta be balanced around swf. That way it’s fair with those little shits running around and for the killer. Though, solos would be hell from the randomness, it could still be fun if mm was up to par.