A point about statistics

bredbeddle

I know that I kind of missed the boat on statistics, but I did want to get this point out there: balancing around statistics isn't important if it ends up hurting the experience of the player. We can take an example from Apex Legends: Wraith and Pathfinder consistently place 1st and 2nd in terms of pick rate and kill rate. Does anyone care? No. From my experience, the player base gets mad whenever Respawn touch either of these legends. Wraith and Pathfinder are technically unbalanced, but the tangible result of nerfing them is that the players like the balance of the game less. And that's a bad result -- the only bad result. Why should it matter if the stats say one thing if the people playing the game say another? In the end, the player experience is the only meaningful measure of a game's balance and enjoyability.

Statistics are useful, for sure. They've got two very important functions. The first is making sure that player feedback isn't just coming from a vocal minority. Without any kind of accurate polling, shouting louder means getting heard better. In a pinch, statistics can act as a poll. Statistics can also find problems in the game that players might not have recognized. Players often think that a lack of enjoyment stems from one cause when really it's coming from another, more hidden one. Statistics can help find these misattributions and get rid of them. But, while these are useful, they are also fairly niche. They are the scalpel in comparison to the sledgehammer of traditional data-driven game design. Like most tools, data has a handful of particular uses that it accomplishes well. And, like most tools, trying use it out of its particular context ends up hurting you more than it helps.

MadLordJack

You're not wrong, and that is exactly what the Devs claim to do, but the problem is that the Devs worship the basic, end-result statistics and never take into account anything else ever in the history of DbD. Example: OoO isn't a problem perk, it's actually underpowered.

No-one in their right mind would ever think that. So why do the Devs? Well, they look at the escape rate for OoO users. Nothing else, just the escape rate. Not SWF status, not team escape rate, not player MMR (I know it's running in the background, gathering data, Devs), just the specific players escape rate. For a perk that gets you hardcore tunneled and facecamped as often as not, thus giving your teammates time to escape.

This is just one example of their insane desire to worship end-result, narrow-focus statistics. Which means that their idea of what need nerfed and what doesn't often has no correlation either to balance OR fun.