Chasing/patroling with most killers = insta loss
BHVR honestly do something about the overall balance of the game. Most killers cannot even patrol/chase anymore and are forced to camp to apply pressure. There is no gameplay anymore at high MMR.
- gens are flying
- loops and loops combination are too strong
- survivors meta perks are OP when all 4 have them
What is the killer supposed to do when :
- 2 CoH in the trial, one on one side and the other one on the other side of the map
- 2 to 3 DS/BT/DH
- 3 Toolboxes
- All survivors on a different gen
- 4 survivors that know their way at looping
What are the killer's options but camping and tunneling ? Do you really think you provide a great gameplay ?
Most of my trials with Tier A and lower killers end up being 3 hooks by the time one gen is left. 4 hooks, maybe 5 by the time the doors are at 99% - and this with proxy camping. Without proxy camp, you end up with 2 hooks when they all escape.
And when i'm playing survivor, most of the killers i face experience the same result.
Yesterday i have played soloQ 10 games, here are the results (DC/Suicides first hook removed - camp/tunnel trials recorded) :
The nurse camped and tunneled, same for the Blight, Legion played really well, Spirit as well, there was a trial against a Spirit with a DC that i removed and another one with a nurse with a suicide first hook that i removed as well. Then i have switched to duoQ with pretty much the same results but didn't record, one ghostface even did 0 hook...
- Average # of hooks = 4,7
- Average # of kills = 1,7 with a standard deviation of 1,5 (proof that most games are ending with 2k +/- 1,5 = really unbalanced, it's everything or nothing).
- My personal escape stat = 70%
And all this is in soloQ and it's pretty much the experience i have every time i soloQ. I don't imagine my stats with a SWF of 4 survivors with my skill level...
What are you thinking about when you balance the game seriously ? How is it possible to let the game in such a terrible state ?
To conclude i will give the terrible number :
An average of 4,7 hooks at high MMR in soloQ but everything is fine right ?
Comments
-
Well... Luckily you can camp and tunnel, in that case.
4 -
Well i don't know if it's a lucky situation. Camping and tunneling is playing like a bot, there is no involvement, it's totally brain dead and not fun but if you do not camp, with most killers you will end up with 3 hooks and 0 kill... which is not fu as well as there is again no brain cells involved.
The safe loops are designed to remove the skill/brain factor. It's mostly a question of timing, follow the survivor long enough to catch up 0, brain involved.
0 -
I had this game earlier today.
Not blurring names because these guys were super good, they actually made me tryhard to win. They were great players and were super nice after the game. Whatever the opposite of naming and shaming is what I'd like to do with these guys, they were just wonderful, honestly. They messaged me "GG <3" and that made my day.
However, this game was incredibly stressful. Afterwards, I spoke with two of them and they agreed. They had been "sweating their asses off" because I was ending chases so quickly. We decided it was really just a vicious cycle.
Moral of the story is, Killer is absolutely playable. It's just needlessly stressful and it can be very difficult. There's also little consistency. One match is like this with a really good 4-man, the next is versus a bunch of poor Solo Q players. I have no way to tell the difference except based off of memory. So I end up stomping a group of Solo's, who then go play SWF and the cycle continues.
It all comes back to the enormous disparity between Solo Q and SWF.
11 -
Taking one game out of a bunch doesn't make sense. I also have 4k with 32k BP with a PH sometimes but it's not because i have played better, it's because the other side made huge mistakes.
Being able to win on others mistakes is a thing but not being able to win because you cannot outplay them, you have to wait for their mistakes is not a good game design.
Maybe against another team you might have get 3 hooks.
It is also depending of the MMR you play at. Killer is really playable, even EZ at an average MMR or below but once you have reached the top, it's impossible to perform.
Or maybe you are a top 0,1% Oni player with 1000h with him and that's normal if you win most of your trials.
But look at the games i have listed, some got 4k playing fair. But globally, the average # of hooks is 4,7 lol...
I don't think you can keep the killer players playing if they do 4,7 hooks on average...
4 -
If it's only "playable" by incurring excessive stress on yourself then that's not really playable in my opinion. It's almost more like a chore at this point.
4 -
people doesn't knowing own mmr
someone played 4k game and looked survivors tryharding but killer won
meaning his mmr range around potato or did pretty good with ability hitting killers
wm1 hits happen with survivor's mistake or rigged maps
2 -
You can guess your MMR. If you win most of your game (3k or escape), you rank up, if you keep ranking up for weeks, you are definitely high MMR.
0 -
It's clear the devs want us to camp camp camp.
I say let's stop fighting it an embrace it. Who's with me?
1 -
You clearly aren't playing the new meta.
Facecamp and get 2 kills as Bubba.
Any facecamps after that is just extra to show off your skill.
Deadlock and Corrupt and great stallers.
0 -
you can guess your MMR based on playtime of survivors / killer. Not really good way, but best we have now.
CoH is super good against hit&run and 3-gen. It is just close to impossible for killer to snowball. From our testing best is to have 2 survivors with CoH, you really don't wanna more, there is kinda wasted perk at that point and just 1 survivor CoH is not active all the time.
So killer has to play top 3 killer / Plague, or just tunnel / camp
3 -
Even plague is weak. When you face survivors that know that they have to not use fountains, you end up with a whole team of injured survivors with DH or Lithe, knowing how to loop, that will heal only when 1 gen is left.
As they didn't use fountains, you don't have your power and so you are just a simple standard speed M1 killer that can do nothing in chases...
Plague is good against average survivor but once you have reach a certain MMR level, it's also impossible to do anything.
The only viable killer is the Nurse atm, only killer that can really compete without camping.
Spirit is utter garbage now, easy to outplay, Blight is terrible as well, when i see Lilith struggling with him, i know he is a weak killer.
0 -
Why do you think Blight is weak?
He is probably second best killer now.
Spirit is still really good imo. There are loops where you are now forced to break pallet first, but that's it.
1 -
I think that Blight might be good in the hands of top 0,1% players and still they often loose their trials (check Lilith for exemple).
But at a standard level, let's say top 10%, he is terrible. Most Blight i face get 0k to 1k. When survivors know how to counter the Blight, he cannot do anything unless if you have 1000h with him of course.
Spirit is easily countered now, the phase is short, you can hear from where she comes etc... you can dodge chases against her when you hear her coming, just hide walking and she lost you even before finding you.
Yes she is considered as a top 3 killer, it doesn't mean she has a chance at high level. She is considered top 3 because PH, Ceno, Trapper or Clown are garbage at high Level but still she is not viable even though she is more viable than other killers.
In a world where everyone is blind, being a one eyed it is top tier 😂
0 -
Well, killer's strength should not be based on bad players. Same for perks.
Is Nurse bad killer for same reason? She is way harder than Blight imo, but Blight is still quite hard to get used to, but it's definetly worth it.
Isn't Phase duration exactly same as before? Yeah, you can hear her, but she is still way faster. You need good headset to play her tho.
Just because any killer is top3 doesn't mean they have a chance at high level. Even best Nurse players often get destroyed on tournaments...
0 -
How is blight terrible
1 -
I'm disputing your averages.
I had 9 hooks, I think. It was a stressful game and it easily could've gone either way. They were exceptional players and well, I don't really play Oni.
0 -
That much I will agree with.
The amount of stress required to do well is extremely high.
0 -
Lilith, top Blight player, loosing half his trials even more while he outplays 99,99% of Blight players. If Blight was so awesome, he would win way more than this.
A top 1% Nurse player will win most of his/her games in the MMR environment, and to my mind, Nurse is OP when mastered but well devs thought it was good to buff her...
0 -
Interesting post, quite a few things to unpack. 🙂
- I’m just assuming you’re a very high rated survivor player based on your experience and overall results that’s my impression but feel free to correct me if you think I’m wrong. One possible issue is if you are especially high skill at survivor then the matchmaking system is often going to be stuck having to pair you up with killer players not as highly rated as you. So when you look at your overall results over all matches I’d expect you to be escaping most of the time just based on that alone, since obviously your chances of escaping against a weaker player than you are going to be significantly better than 50/50. So a 1.7 average kill rate by the opposition in your matches could just be indicating that a non-negligible chunk of your matches are against killers who aren’t in your hidden rating bracket (within say 5% or 10% of your rating)
- Likewise a 70% escape rated to a top skill survivor is in line with averages I’ve seen posted from others. When Otz tracked a hundred of his games recently his escape rate was around there if I remember right, for instance. Again, as above that’s something I’d expect assuming there are a lot of matches where it’s ending up putting you against lower rated killers since there’s only so many people in your rating bracket.
- Unfortunately we obviously don’t know the ratings of the specific killer players in that table. The closest we have would be their Grades which aren’t listed here, which to use those we’d have to assume there is a strong correlation between top Grade and top rating. They might be correlated, but it’s hard to say since Grades are designed to go up over time the more you play on average so they measure number of games that month as much or more than kill rates. You made some anecdotal commentary of how well you thought a couple of them played, but really I think if we wanted to extend this to make results more objective you might want to track the Grades so at least there’s some skill-correlated, albeit maybe not strongly, variable to examine.
- Tracking hooks was a good idea, the only caution there is number of hooks probably won’t be uniformly distributed over matches since they’re not independent events. The more hooks you get the greater the chances you get another hook that match. So games with 0-2 kills for instance don’t necessarily have a linearly connected number of hooks to games with 2-4 kills, i.e. I’d expect the latter to have more than twice the hooks of the former. Therefore even if the matches are coming out as intended with the most common results being 1-3 kills, there is probably a high variance in the numbers of hooks since they have that snowballing property.
- On a side note I’m not sure why you think “proxy camping” is an issue. I understand why actual “face camping” where the killer stands around doing nothing at a hook is something the designers should try and avoid, but “proxy camping” is just zone defense where the killer is patroling generators and the hook in a wider area of the map. Seems to me that’s a perfectly reasonable and fair way to play the game and not something of concern from a design or balance perspective. After all, the killer’s main strategy is to defend various targets including generators and hooked or slugged survivors, so how is patroling a section of the map that contains them a problem?
- You mentioned perk loadouts being an issue but didn’t track the perks in the matches. If you try this again it might be worth jotting down the perk usage for the matches, that could help illuminate how much meta perks are correlate with escape rates. Same for killer perks if you wanted to look at that as well.
All in all it’s an interesting read. If you do this again with some additional tracking data and a bit of a larger sample size it could be a nice follow up experiment. I’m hesitant to really draw much from this data above simply because it’s difficult to how much factors I mentioned above can cloud what may or may not be actual balance issues.
1 -
Nice post, i will try to answer some of your points as good as i can.
- i guess i'm a highly rated survivor and i'm globally high skilled however, i think that at some point, once a certain skill gap is reached, the killer cannot win chases fast enough. When both sides have the same level at "looping", the killer is forced to loose a certain amount of time to catch the survivor, there is nothing the killer can do to make it shorter. It's due to the overall maps and loops design. A safe loop being what it is, you have to turn, to force the pallet throw and to break the pallet.
- yes maybe i'm facing killer players that are not that strong. I cannot know anymore as the teammates i'm matched with are often pretty good so the pressure is huge. If i loop, gens are popping like crazy, if someone else is looping same.As i have said, there is not much a killer can do. If the killer doesn't camp/tunnel, the game will force a loss.
- you are right, i don't really know their rank. But all had thousands of hours on DbD.
- agree. The game should be balanced around hooks and not kill. It's really frustrating to play an entire trial and to only get 3 hooks 😂
- to my mind proxy camping is an issue as it grants the killer the opportunity to have free hit during the save. Also, proxy camping is not really playing, you are kind of "static" waiting for something to happen. I would highly prefer a game where you hook a survivor and go away to chase.
- for perks, most killers and survivor had META perks. CoH has been tracked but the reste of the survivors'perks were DH,Lithe, IW, DS, BT. For killers corrupt/Pop or ruin/undying every time. The some Devour Hope, Haunted ground, Agitation, BBQ etc...
I will continue to do so with more datas. I would also like to track the trials' duration but it's kind of boring to do. But i'm sure the trial duration is tightly linked to the number of hooks/kills. At high MMR, the trials lasting around 10 minutes top, killers don't have the time to play and to impose their gameplay/pressure.
The game design must be reworked to require more brain and less standard timed loops. The time duration of a looping interaction between the best killer vs the best survivor on a given loop will always be the same, no matter what the killer does. That's the huge problem here. The killers cannot "break" loops with mindgame or power. Same on unsafe loops, the survivor cannot escape without a hit... game design is broken.
0 -
My experience playing at high MMR (highly efficient survivors, everyone running full meta with 1 - 2 boons) is that I'll get 3 - 4 hooks max before the gens are done and maybe one kill if I'm fortunate. I've started just hard tunneling out the first guy I've downed. I end up with the same amount of hooks before the gens are done but I can almost guarantee 2 kills this way and sometimes even a 4k depending on how hard they throw themselves at me to save their buddy.
It's basically the best outcome for me. 2k - 4k, same amount of chases, get BMed as opposed to playing fair and bouncing around from survivor to survivor which produces 0k - 1k, same amount of hooks/chases, and get BMed
3 -
Yup, when playing killer i have exactly the same experience.
BHVR doesn't want us to "spread" the chases and thus the enjoyment of the game as what is fun is to interact with the killer.
0 -
I still try to 12 hook best I can but yesterday I hit my tipping point. My first game was hackers, 2nd I was slaughtered (Had 3 hooks in a 5 minute game) my worst performance in quite some time (Both of these on Haddonfield), 3rd was a SWF (95% Sure) and they played a Ormond Offering.....I hooked and proxy camped from there, swapping out the hooks and ended with a 3k and hate mail.
Switched to survivor after that.
0 -
Thanks! Quick additional thoughts
- You brought up a data point I didn’t think of that also might be worth tracking, hours played. If you jot down hours played that also probably has a correlation with skill. Again, not perfect, but maybe combining hours and Grades narrows it a bit. (Those two are correlated with each other of course too, but still better than nothing. 🤷♂️)
- I think we might be using a different definition of proxy camping (the problem with some of these ambiguous terms). I’m thinking of proxy camping as zone patrol, so hook someone, go check a nearby gen, if you don’t get in a chase double check for a rescue (just need to get close enough to see if a rescue is incoming), if not check a different gen, etc. It sounds like you have a more passive tactic in mind though?
P.S. I certainly don’t claim to be a great chaser myself. I like to think I’m good at analysis but my twitch skills are lackluster, I still have trouble hitting juking survivors at times. 🤷♂️ I’m good at knowing where to go though, and I think my routing and looping is usually correct since I do catch high Grade survivors at mindgamable positions. My own stats aren’t worth tracking, though, for this purpose since I do mess up hits enough that I’m sure it hurts my overall results. (Stupid old person reflexes!) So I’d offer to help pitch in but I don’t think my data is worth much here.
1 -
SBMM has destroyed killer for me. I feel like i have to play 2-3 matches where it's clear from the beginning that i don't have a chance but to try and get at least a kill in end game. Then my value seems to be low enough that i get a match where i dominate, which leads to survivors killing themselves on hook or DC, which isn't really fun for me as well. Then the circle repeats. They should have just made the rules for matchmaking stricter (only players +/-4 of your rank), but this constantly-on-the-edge gameplay isn't for me
1 -
I've given up on my old play styles. My philosophy is run Lethal Pursuer in conjunction with end game perks and try to kill survivors faster than they can escape.
No Way Out is a staple and a mainstay imo, and what better perk to pair it with than Noed? Anybody who is on death hook gets obliterated.
Ruin is merely a means to help me build No Way Out stacks
0 -
This person gets it.
1 -
Here we go for some updated survivor soloQ stats 😊.
Removed DC and cheater trials (1 survivor was cheating).
Average # of gens done at the end of the 1st chase (1st survivor on hook) = 3,58
Average # of hooks = 2,3
Average # of kills = 0,67; kill rate = 16,75%
Personal escape rate = 83%
Would have liked to do more games but queue times were long, had 1 trial with a cheater, 2 trials with DC and now playing in duoQ.
6 games in roughly 2 hours... it's a total of almost 1 hour queue time... so bullshit
0
