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Why People Think This Game is Killer Sided
I think that there is a misconception when it comes to the balance of this game. Often times I hear people saying that the game is killer sided, that survivors have no hope of survival if the killer plays well. I want to give my input on this, after thousands of hours playing this game.
I think the most important distinction, above all else, comes with the difference between solo q and SWF. I do not think that Survive With Friends is OP, I think that solo q is drastically underpowered. I say this with one important thing in mind, and that is the current ranking system, or realistically any one which is implemented. This is going to sound bad, but I'm going to put it as straight forward as I can: Killer is not too strong, the majority of survivors just aren't that good.
Allow me to explain and at least hear me out. I'm not saying that these players are bad, I am saying that survivor has such a steep learning curve that it will take more time than many people have dedicated in order to be an optimal survivor.
This should be fine, and should be reasonable, however there are two factors which I think create a problem here. The first is that killer is easier to reach a certain level of skill. I am not saying killer in general is easier by any means, simply that to reach an average skill level of killer takes less experience than survivor. My reasoning is that for the most part, survivors are the ones who have to make decisions in chase, and the killer can simply follow them and cut them off when necessary. Therefore, the survivor is the one who will make far more mistakes, as it takes time and experience to understand how to use your camera, how to loop tightly, how to know when to vault or drop a pallet. With all of these decisions a newer survivor is faced with, the killer often just has to follow the survivor until they inevitably screw up. My first point here being: Killer is easier to play at a low/average level, which in turn leads to survivors saying that killer is too strong, although in reality it is simply that they are unfortunately given the harder job at this point, and have much more learning to do to perform at the same level.
The second problem is the ranking system. It is far too easy for someone with only 100 hours in the game to reach red ranks. Sure, it's an accomplishment for some people, but what this leads to is these survivors being jumbled in with the genuinely good survivors and killers. As any good killer will tell you, 1 weak link can destroy a team's hope of winning. These survivors, being able to achieve a rank which realistically they shouldn't yet be able to reach, are understandably frustrated when they get killed by someone with 10x their experience. It's not that killer is too strong, it's that inexperienced survivors can rank up easily and as a result face players who have far more playtime.
I am not attacking anyone, I just want to make a point. At the top level of play (I'm talking high skilled players, not just red rank), you will find how weak m1 killers are. These are killers who rely on fundamental aspects of the game, and they will get destroyed every game if survivors play correctly. It is only when killers stray away from fundamentals (nurse, spirit, hag, etc.) that there is more competition.
My Point comes down to this. The fundamental looping aspect of DbD leads to potentially survivor sided games, but lack of survivors capable of looping effectively leads to seemingly killer sided matches, when in reality it comes down to inexperienced survivors.
Thoughts?
Comments
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IE lots of people being bad at the game and/or only playing survivors leads them to thinking the game's killer sided.
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I wouldn't say being bad, I would say inexperienced. But overall yes
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I've only ever seen newer players say that the game is killer sided, which is pretty telling.
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I agree, although my point is that these newer players are able to be matched up against experienced players due to a poor ranking system
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Well that'll be fixed the the new mmr system ;)
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Inexperience makes people bad because they don't know things that would make them better. I get your point though.
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I think your point about matchmaking is a good one as well which is a point I've been making for a very long time. I'd also add in the poor rank reset which exacerbates this even further.
This is a big part of what also skews their statistics tremendously.
The games poor matchmaking, poor ranking system and poor rank reset all artificially cover up how unbalanced the game is.
IE if the game had perfect matchmaking, ranking and a correct rank reset, it would seem ridiculously unbalanced. We don't see this because it throws bad players into the mix of good players against good killers.
But we have MMR coming to fix this right? Not quite.
MMR will either be bad and we'll still see all the nearly exact same issues. Except we won't see them because it will all be hidden...lol..because that makes total sense right?
OR
MMR hypothetically works amazing and now the games balance is on full dumpster fire display.
Now we could look at this optimistically that now we can see the balance better to improve it. I suppose this depends how optimistic you are about this happening based on the games previous years of track record..of which I would lean on pessimistic.
BTW, solo queue is not even remotely underpowered, it's overpowered, just not to the degree of swf. Even in solo queue I am still the power role by far. The reason you have this placebo of solo queue being underpowered is because of the issues I talked about above.
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Some of that is wrong.
I play in SWF and also sometime solo Q. I can tell you for a fact right now SWF is 100x stronger than solo Q. Solo Q isn't underpowered, SWF is over powered. This game wasn't meant to be used with comms but it's used with mics.
Survivors and killer on PC are 100X better than consoles players. It's fact. What PC players can do compared to console players is god like.
Killer gets ranked up way to fast to red ranks and doesn't derank fast enough so you're always put in with highly skilled survivors who can loop you for 5 gens.
Survivor ranks up to fast and then again your in the same boat as before. You're put in with really good killers who down you in 2 shots.
This is how this game does matchmaking
Rank 20 killer will get a rank 3 survivor in their lobby.
Rank 20 survivor will get a rank 3 killer in their lobby.
To be honest it's SWF that are to overpowered and it's SWF that need the nerf to bring them inline with the solo Q, Using comms in this game is like having every perk attached to each survivor. I for one would like the SWF to be nerfed so that players can have a descent balanced game.
Personally I'd rather have pc survivors join me but not go up against a PC killer when enabling cross play.
I've never heard anyone say this game is killer side. I don't think anybody thinks that. Every body knows this game is survivors sided.
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Well written out, and I agree. If both parties are very skilled, "M1" gameplay is tremendously in the Survivors favor. This has to do with tile strength, tile pacing, the miniscule speed advantage Killers have when running in a straight line (with obvious exceptions) and the fact that getting hit is a hard reset of a chase.
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Unlikely and I imagine if you have crossplay off you will still have bad matchmaking considering it won't pull in people who have crossplay on from your platform into the lobby pool.
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What you are saying about console vs PC is not completely true. I agree that killer is somewhat limited by console frames and sometimes a controller, however survivor can be played at just as high a level on console. 30 fps is more than enough to play survivor, and a controller still allows you to do everything that is necessary as a survivor. The fact of the matter is that survivor is so much based around decision making that a worse frame rate and slightly inferior controls won't have a significant impact if there is a good survivor playing. I do acknowledge the PC has a distinct advantage though, I would be stupid to disagree with that.
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It does not work like that....
player-skill works more like a normal distribution chart in statistics. Bad survivors think the game is killer sided because their lack of skill. There are more survivors that are average/below average than there are high average. Bad survivors will complain about strong killers that are above their skill-level floor. The matchmaking is the the pool of players. If the average pool of player is very low in skill level, than killers kill-rates will be high. Since there are a lot more bad survivors, that voice gets heard more where as more experienced kinda just laugh at the changes because they were not affected by it and did not think they were a problem in the first place. e.g Ruin/Undying, Billy, pop/thano etc. Its real same for killers. Its why most of them are push over but not for everyone because the skill-level is not high enough for them to be a push over for them yet. I made rough paint sketch of what i mean by that. Its just that ranking/emblem system does not track skill properly so it makes all the killers playable at rank 1 as you face a lot "average performers" most of the time.
I am not sure what the effect of MMR will be. I think rank going from rank 1 to rank 20 will do a lot more than people realize because better players will just be 2 piping from rank 20 to rank 5 and will get there in like few days where as worse players will have worse win rates so they'll get to rank 1 a lot later, but by the time they hit rank 1, rank reset will occur meaning in theory, you should not face bad survivors if MMR works properly. Its just that.... their emblem system makes it very hard for anyone depip and its easier to pip so I'd say that by the end of 3rd week of rank reset. you will be facing worse survivors like it is now so it will be like short-lived competitive season.
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If you're playing against Nurse or OP add-ons, then it is killer sided. But everything else is survivor sided to the max.
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In the end, Killer is still the one who decide how the game should be. He can tunnel one to dead. Camp to dead. Camp to Noed.
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Killer is easy compared to survivor as long as you’re not facing a very well coordinated SWF 4 man
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I'd where you hang out but I really rarely see "people" claim that
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i dont think it supports any side, as a killer you cant get consistent 4k's, like 30% of the time and as a survivor you escape like 25% of the time
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You say you disagree, yet everything you posted agrees with what I've said. I think you may have misunderstood my original point as most of what you said reiterated everything that I said.
We are both in agreement.
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Wether or not the game is killer sided is almost entirely based on the survivors skill vs killer skill + killer picked.
A god tier killer will still lose to a good survivor team if he picks a low tier killer. But crush them if he plays a top tier.
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oof
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