State of play is survivor sided
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I wouldn't say the game is survivor sided. I regularly stomp on SWFs, and most solo teams don't stand a chance.
Playing killer is just generally harder, because you have to juggle 4 people at once and don’t get any 80 second breaks where you're holding M1 on a gen. It's also more fun and you get more BP for doing it, especially if you bring BBQ into every match.
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"The average killer is better than the average survivor"
Assuming this is true, then that is very bad. I actually believe this is true. Killers are able to down survivors too quickly if they are not an expert looper and because of the perks killers can use, it can paralyze the others to not get the objective done. A perk like infectious freight also has a domino effect.
I don't think you should treat DBD like COD or some other tactical game where both sides are equal. It is asymmetrical and I don't think you should balance where the 4 plays totally perfect, because that leaves no room for everyone else. What if 3 survivors are like experts but one is average? As I understand, the four survivors have no knowledge of each other and they are not necessarily supposed to work as a team but they can as needed. If you balance so all four plays perfectly with no mistakes, then that automatically makes killer so powerful that nobody will ever win unless they are in a SWF purposely genrushing and ignoring everything else. Think of the casuals that only play occasionally or a few games a week, I don't think anybody would play a game if they know their individual experience doesn't matter because only the other side matters.
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Are you kidding me tunneling n camping solo survivor and crappy team mates I demolish with greedy how is this game survivor sided get good is all I can say unless your playing against swf it is not even close to survivor sided your brain is messed up have you ever actually played survivor your probably a one killer main either iris huntress or stupid fast oni that can instadown 3 survivors at the same time with one swing stupid fast billy who can cross map someone instally or my broken greedy with pop n surveillance I've want days at a time getting 4k after 4k find a killer your good with and stop lying to people this is not a survivor friendly game most of the killers are broken some are not balance your perks and get good
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You're failing to understand the issue. Bloodlust is much more valuable at lower skill levels than higher skill levels. Higher skilled killers know that if they are bloodusting against a survivor, they are losing, due to efficiency. Lower skilled killers do not need to concern themselves with efficiency, so bloodlust is much more valuable. The problem with this is that since the game is so poorly designed, bloodlust was needed to combat poor map design.
If 3 survivors are experts and one is not, they may die if the killer is good, but they won't die if the killer is not. The average survivor will die, then the 3 others will likely escape, which is what is expected.
Your argument about team cohesion is fallacious. You are assuming that the killer is also not trying, but this is false. Ideally, the survivors each should account for about 25% of the killer's power. Only by working together does the survivor team have a chance against the killer, as a 4v1 this is fair, do you not agree? Standing alone against the killer, the killer should be 4 times more powerful than an individual survivor.
If 4 good survivors fight 1 good killer, ideally each side should have about a 50% winrate. This means, as the devs have stated, 2 kills. This is not the case, the case is that a team of good survivors will average 0-1 kills against a similarly skilled killer.
This game is not CoD, and comparing it to CoD is just a waste of time. Since it is a PvP game, it is, by definition, a competitive game. There is a hunger for fairness in PvP games, and this game is not a fair game.
Ideally, if you are not a competitive player, you will be placed in ranks with similar players. This is also not the case with DBD, red ranks should ideally be reserved for the strongest players in the game, but this is not the case.
It is a colossal failure by the devs to not properly rank and gauge players' skill. This is the core issue of the game. The devs do not play the game at a competitive level and they do not listen to players that do, so we have what we have today.
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Tournaments are not useful for showing game balance. They all have different win conditions, they will ban maps/offerings/items/perks/add-ons/killers/cosmetics that would normally be used in the game. Hell, they often even ban certain playstyles to make the gameplay more fun, like camping or slugging for the killer, or repairing without healing for the survivor.
Bad matchmaking should also largely come out in the wash for overall numbers like this. For every match with a boosted killer playing against good survivors, you should also have matches with good survivors playing against a boosted killer.
If game balance really skews against the killer at high levels of play why is the kill rate at high rank substantially higher? Is the game just easy for survivors at low rank, hard at high rank, and easy again at the absolutely highest possible levels? That's certainly possible, but it doesn't seem likely. I'm willing to believe it with evidence, like if MMR goes live and all of a sudden the killers with the highest skill ratings are getting stomped, but that's not something I'll believe on anecdotal evidence.
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These stats have their limitations, but I don't think it's fair to call them meaningless. The kill rates are what they are. Some killers might seem deadly, but they really just have a low skill floor and low skill ceiling. So, most people who play them are closer to the skill ceiling than for other killers. You might also have killers like nurse with a high skill floor and high skill ceiling that clearly aren't being used to their full potential. On the aggregate, though, this sort of thing should mostly come out in the wash. I think these numbers are a lot more useful to show killer vs survivor balance than to showing killer vs. killer balance, then. They're certainly not perfect, but when the kill rate is 68% on average at red ranks, those numbers would have to be extremely and unrealistically (imo) inflated in order for the game to actually be survivor sided.
Who knows what the actual kill rate would be without things like 3ks at 5 gens, 3ks w/ a free hatch escape, hook suicides, farming, etc., but I doubt controlling for those factors swings the pendulum far enough to one side or the other to make the game seriously unbalanced. I personally think the game is reasonably balanced, as in, both sides have a decent chance to win when matched against opponents of similar skill. I think not having consistent matchmaking is a much bigger issue than overall game balance.
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The tournament had rules to keep it as fair as they could, and the rules were primarily for survivors to reduce abuse.
rank doesn't matter in this game. The difference between a rank 20 and a rank 1 is that the rank 1 seeks to achieve the objective, nothing more. Even the devs have proven this, stating that rank is more of a gauge of playtime than it is skill.
I'll keep posting this video as it is by far the best case as to why games should be balanced towards the highest levels of play. It has yet to be refuted.
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I think the kill rate is more likely around 50, due to the utter strength of moris and how common they are.
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When me and the boys get off CoD and try to play dbd in a nutshell.
"Yo Alpha 1 who is our enemy?"
"mike,india,charlie,hotel,alpha,echo,lima"
"Roger that prepare Bravo 6 for M.I.C.H.A.E.L. on your 6"
"Roger that I have had my tactical retreat route identified"
"Charile 3 did you finish 20% of our objective yet?"
"Yes I have"
"Roger that."
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And that's why they're thinking about putting killer bots on all the platforms.
It's just sad that people that want to genuinely have fun and make sure that the survivors have a good time too are going to quit because there is just TOO MUCH sweat nowadays.
That's why I think they at least need to simply make it into two modes - Causal and Competitive.
And give the people that play Competitive REALLY good cosmetics, BP, Shards even - stuff that MAKES the try hards want to play the mode.
But again, never gonna happen; and I'm too much of a jumpscare coward to play survivor so I guess I'm done with this game for the most part - might come back to play a little - definitely want the new Legion skin in the Rift; at least it's on the free track. I honestly really dislike this Rift. Not many good things imo.
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Rank doesn't matter person to person, as in, two players at rank 1 are very unlikely to have the same skill. Still, the quality of play at high rank is nonetheless going to be stronger than the quality of play at low ranks. If kill rate increases as players on average tend to play better, that doesn't indicate that the balance at high levels is in favor of survivors. It's certainly not impossible, but on average, that would mean that survivors overperform at low and extremely high rank and do poorly in between. That would be strange.
The video is fair, despite the somewhat ridiculous point is that balancing around the highest levels makes sense because it's the same principle behind trickle down economics. The only similarity between the two concepts is that you can draw them on a pyramid lol. Trickle down economics also clearly doesn't work, so I'm not sure what point he was trying to make there.
I definitely agree though that the correct thing to do is to balance around the high level, but without losing sight of the everyday players. If something is being exploited at the highest levels of play and you can essentially nerf the exploit, such that the average players would barely even notice a difference but the problem at high rank would be resolved, that's perfect.
The trouble is that you need to define what a "good" player is in DBD, and build a ranking system so that the developers can identify high-skill players in the first place. Without clearly defining what high level play even is it's not possible to balance around the top players. Does something appear to be "exploited" at rank 1 because matchmaking is atrocious and the better players can pretty much just abuse the weaker players in any of 100 ways, or is something being "exploited" because it's actually OP? There are additional problems in DBD too that make balancing it difficult, namely solo queue vs. SWF, and the RNG involved in map generation, so I think the devs should make it a priority to close the gap between solo queue and SWF and to either tone down the RNG, or to improve their tile strength algorithms such at the best and worst seeds of a given map aren't too different from one another.
I don't think looking at tournaments is a good place to start, because this game doesn't have enough of a competitive scene with consistent victory conditions in order to really evaluate skill. Is survivor team A winning because killer B is actually pretty weak, because that particular killer is underpowered, because that particular map seed is survivor-sided, because the survivors' loadouts contained OP elements, because the tournament banned behavior that would have allowed them to perform better, because one side or the other hasn't pushed the meta to its fullest yet because they've mostly been playing against potatoes, etc.? The only way we're going to answer these sorts of questions is to make at least a reasonably good algorithm to determine player skill, and then to pay close attention to results and usage, especially at the highest ranks.
At this point, though, DBD still has enough low hanging fruit as far as balance is concerned that I don't think this is entirely necessary yet. Some of it just takes time... like, that video is about TF2, which still has its share of balance issues per the video maker, despite that it came out nine years before DBD, is not RNG-based, and is not asymmetrical.
TL;DR By all means, let's balance around high rank (with a bit of compromise for the average players). First we need to evaluate which players actually are high rank and pit them against each other in order to evaluate balance. We're not going to get there by looking at tournament results. We also certainly don't have enough information to say survivors are OP at this point.
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I'm sure you're right that Moris are one big factor driving up kill rate. Since they're in the game, though, I also do think we have to consider them when evaluating overall game balance. If Moris were removed, I would certainly think that the game balance would move back towards survivors. Or to put it differently, I don't treat throw out those matches as unbalanced one-offs and only consider non-Mori matches when I think about balance. There are enough extremely powerful inventory elements in the game that it feels kind of arbitrary to not consider some of them when thinking about overall balance.
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Yeah, no idea what they were thinking with this one. Rather than a perk that gives the killer a guaranteed benefit, let's make it even more rewarding for survivors who are injured to heal themselves. Because, y'know, it's so rare that survivors who are wounded heal.
Besides, who the **** actually ran that perk anyway? I'm legitimately sad for like the 3 killers in a cabin in Canada who regularly ran Thana and hadn't yet heard there were like 20+ better choices already.
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Exactly what I was going to say. I play solo rank 1 games and I’d say over 80% of the time the killer gets a 4k. Good teammates are few and far between.
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The only thing that's lopsided is a rank 14 killer being paired with a survivor team of a rank 2, a pair of 4s and a 17 lol. And that's called intensive learning curves
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Was bloodlust actually added because of map design or to give a helping hand to new killers? Given by your assertion and from my own experience, rank 1 killers never seem to need or use bloodlust so this means maps are fine. Now, this brings me to my point previously, new and for the most part average casual survivors don't have much to lean on. They don't have anything to give a little rush of adrenaline during a chase to extend it (the opposite of bloodlust). Most of the so-called god loops have been removed so if you are not an expert looper then you are going down fast and depending on the killer you might be going down regardless.
The tournament example doesn't match up to how a typical match plays, where camping was not allowed, certain perks not allowed, etc. You get my point, tournaments are fun but it shouldn't be balanced around that because nobody will ever live because 99% of the time 4 is not on comms with a mission to genrush and leave.
I think the devs made a change around 2017 that drastically caused this discussion - killers don't seem to rank up in red ranks unless they play an amazing game and get 3-4 kills. Is it even possible to rank up with 2 kills, which IS and SHOULD BE the balance target? This might be why killers are so stressed, feeling the need to 4K when in reality it should be a rarity. Unfortunately, it is a common ending.
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thats dumb asfff
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At higher levels of play, if you are not kicking a pallet or hitting a survivor within 15 seconds of a chase, you are losing. After you hit them, if they run in a straight line, it takes about 23 seconds to catch up to them, although most don't do this, but let's assume they do. That means you only get about 8 seconds of bloodlusting if you do this every time, 5% movespeed for 8 seconds isn't that much. At 15 seconds to hit, then 23 seconds to down, thats 114 seconds total to down a survivor, enough for 1 gen to be popped, you have to do this 12 times. Good survivors will use the speed boost from getting hit to get to a strong tile, so a lot of the time it's useless to even continue chasing. Bad survivors generally don't do this, so the bloodlust becomes more valuable. The lower the level that survivors play at, the more time they give the killer to down them, this means that bloodlusting can be a valid strategy at lower levels of play, but it is not a valid strategy at higher levels of play, as 5% movespeed is not enough to catch good survivors fast enough after 15 seconds of a chase.
New survivors have very strong safe pallets spread out every map to figure out how to use effectively. This is the beauty of skill based balancing, they get better at the game, they don't need to rely on perks or any crutches, they just need to get better at the game to be more effective.
The tournament lays out why survivors are so strong in the first place, especially if killers abide by the survivor rulebook and don't camp or tunnel. The point system and the rules of the tournament was to make it as fair as possible for both sides, which resulted in most matches ending with 0-1 kills. When everyone is playing fairly, the game is skewed heavily in survivors' favor.
The counter to camping and tunneling is rushing gens. If bad survivors are going against a good killer, that good killer should win. If a bad killer is going up against a team of good survivors, those survivors should win.
The reason why killers have to get 3-4k to rank up is due to the game being survivor sided. If you kill survivors too hard, you will depip, the game actively punishes killers that kill survivors, you are not supposed to kill them to get maximum points and pips, you are supposed to let them go.
There are ways to balance the game that will barely affect low skill play, as low level survivors don't play efficiently. If you lower the relative safety of all tiles in the game, you won't affect low level survivor play much because low level survivors don't loop around tiles efficiently to begin with, and for the killer side it's the same thing, low level killers aren't going to be mind gaming or backstepping to reduce the amount of times a survivor can loop a particular pallet. Low level survivors aren't using DS BT and unbreakable offensively to buy more time in the game, if you keep these perks in the game but remove the ability to offensively use these perks against the killer, you reduce high skill survivor efficiency without hurting low level survivor efficiency because they simply aren't making those plays to begin with.
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How did you time all that?? lol and i wish they would add more moris to begin with but thats a different topic
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Take it from a Pig main, I agree. Competent survivors on any map can loop you forever. Too many strong pallets and tiles. Enduring is a must on Pig, along with Brutal or Bamboozle because of how weak her chase can be. Survivors complain a lot, but maps are being darkened and having grass put in for the Blendettes. I hate Yamaoka because the visibility sucks and some tiles are too good... Now they keep changing maps to be the same. It's like the devs are forcing killers to play Doctor, Slinger, and Pyramid Head because they keep ignoring the current issues and are making it harder to track survivors.
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Money, money, money. There are sooo many survivor only players. If they balanced the game more fairly it could jeopardize their largest part of the player base and lose money. They make these changes and hide the reasoning for it behind the word "unfun". Granted some changes are nice, but the ones that raise eyebrows are always justified with the "unfun" word. You'll start to notice that posts made by anyone will use the "unfun" word to try and get the devs attention.
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Every killers have a kill rate above 60% in red ranks. Most of them has a killrate higher than 70%.
Stats take in account console killers that are terrible.
What are you talking about exactly ?
I see some guys answered that stats are irrevelant lol... How is it possible to deny the validity of those stats, it's beyond me... You know it's like ######### that say the covid is like a flue, you guys have exactly the same IQ.
Stats are stats. If the game was balanced, it should be 2k/2e per game, based on thousands of matches. It's not the case, the game is killer sided by a fair amount. If you don't know how stats can reveal such a thing, go back to school and do maths to understand how accurate are the stats when the population studied is big.
In our case, the population studied is really, really big.
Let's say that the stats showed above must represents 10 million games and that we gathered datas from 5000 games, the error margin is 1%. If the datas are gathered from more than 5000 games, the error margin is under 1%.
So stop it with spamming "stats mean nothing".
When the population is big enough, stats mean everything whatever the study theme. PERIOD
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Have you considering learning and being a better player?
I'm a killer main myself in red ranks and I can easily pull 3 and 4 kill games. It all comes down to your ability as a player. Sure you will lose some games and that's completely okay. You're not supposed to stomp every survivor each game. That wouldn't be fair.
The game (outside of a few things) is very balanced and honestly in its best state.
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yeah when i have tried pig out for myself she isn't always my first choice because of how weak her chase is. However her traps are still somewhat fun
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