Perks and addons are not skills

Sadsnacks

I recently made a post in another thread on MMR and I thought this deserved its own thread.

So currently this is what the difficulty progression looks like for both sides in a graph

When this is what most of us THINK we're hoping to achieve

But when you take into account that both sides have opposing objectives it seems less and less likely we'll ever get to that point.

How can both sides start out and progress along the same trajectory when they are in opposition to each other, objective wise?

You can't have both sides winning and losing in equal amounts across the time progression. In theory you would think you can if they're always being pitted against equally skilled opponents but this doesn't take into account where the current skill ceilings are for both survivor and killer.

Something has to be done to address the skill ceilings for both survivor and killer to make the second graph possible.

Right now this is what the skill ceilings look like for both sides in a graph

And this is what we'd think would create a sense of balance in the game

I think the original idea was that as you unlock perks and perk slots and add addons and offerings to your inventory that this would create the second skill trajectory, the ideal trajectory we'd all want.

However, this doesn't take into account that there's one killer and they have 4 perk slots, 2 addon slots, and 1 offering slot and they play against 4 survivors who each have the same number of slots for each as well.

In the early stages of a player's progression the killer's power and abilities are intended to offset the survivors lack thereof and create the atmosphere of suspense and horror.

Also in the early stages of player progression survivors have a TON of skills to learn and become effective at in order to overcome this difficulty the killer represents.

As the survivors learn these skills the killer also has a certain degree of skills to learn and become more effective as well, however after a certain point there becomes no new skills for either side to learn.

At this point the killers power, perks, addons, offering and skills and the survivors collective perks, powers, addons, offerings, and skills become more and more decided by RNG factors than anything else. I think this is why there's a lot of talk about changes to maps and buffs/nerfs to either side.

None of this addresses the real issue which is the unbalanced degree of the skill ceilings to either side and the apparent peaks or plateaus in both side skill ceiling after a certain amount of progression on either side. This is why survivors complain about holding M1 for 5 minutes and why killers complain so badly about the stress of chasing 4 "tryhards" around the map.

This skill ceiling is also why you see facecamping/tunneling killers so much in the early parts of player progression and so much "toxic swf" behavior in the later parts of player progression.

I don't have a solution, but I think this points out the issues clearly.

Thanks for joining my TED talk.

Sadsnacks

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1499647#Comment_1499647

Problem with having a graph like that you need 4 blue lines not one. 1 blue will find it a bit more difficult, while the other 3 if playing correctly (which they will) would be basically afk m1 on a gen each. As well as they will rotate who's doing gens, so realistically in a game that is equally matched 2 players will always be on Gens. 1 player will be chased/ kiting. 1 player swapping when the killer applies pressure with the chases. The difficulty curve will skyrocket for killers, unless the survivors get that BORED of playing well they just start memeing.