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Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament
Comments
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You have a lot of free time, don't you?
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Yeah, I knew Compound 33 was overtuned, survivors make almost no distance after pallet breaks with that add-on, it's pretty nuts. It does seem like it's even more problematic than Ring, which I did not think prior to the tournament, but I still hold that the latter is also overtuned. I don't think Blighted Crow is overtuned, but I do think Blighted Crow + Blighted Rat is.
I also agree that 4 Commodious + BNP and brute-forcing your way through the game, injured if needed, is probably more effective than going for healing-focused builds. That said, it's kind of a "glass cannon" approach that is more vulnerable to snowball/3-gen scenarios and can be notably harder to recover with, and if you look at the per-round distributions you can see that a fair few teams actually went with a mix of BNPs and med-kits. But those are just casual observations - while I think that 30 matches are a good-enough sample size for some balance evaluations given that most of these are players that have been playing in tournaments for years and are very seasoned, I don't think it's enough to draw all too definite conclusions on the meta of the format. If more tournaments like this were to happen, I would expect it to still evolve in some ways.
I'm not saying "killer is balanced" period, such a statement can never really be made in this game anyway because there are too many variables, in and around the game. But it does show that the best killer characters in the game piloted by some of the best killer players can compete against some of the best survivor players using the best loadouts.
That a few killers like Legion and Ghostface, Demo and Wraith would stand almost no chance to win in this format is true, they would likely average somewhere around 1.5 kills, with 4-6 stages, i. e. actually having to tunnel one and camp another survivor endgame to try and consistently get to a 2k result. Various other killers like Pinhead, Pyramid Head, Doc would probably peak at 2ks indeed, with 3/4ks not being strictly impossible but rare exceptions. They would likely average around 2 kills, but with most of the matches actually being 1 or 2ks. Then there are a bunch of killers that I do expect could still perform well (meaning 3/4ks are not as much of a rarity), mostly due to some of their strong add-ons, such as Plague (Seal), Hag (Shackles), Clown (Pinky), Myers (Tombstone Piece), Huntress (Iri Head). Killers like Oni and Twins are also always dangerous even at this level.
But yeah, again, I'm not saying the game is perfectly balanced. Just significantly more balanced than many people take or make it out to be, and this is at the highest of levels, the average group of survivors you get in your killer matches even at high MMR is a world away from this, for pub play you can throw most of this balance talk out of the window anyway. I consistently 4k as perkless Legion, all of the killer players I watch win 80-90% of their pub matches, are rarely even truly challenged.
Well, stats of the past have shown that kill rates actually increased as ranks did every time, not the other way around, and while ranks didn't correlate very closely with skills and experience, they still correlated with those things somewhat, so at the very least we should have seen a slight decrease in kill rates, not a notable increase, if we are to assume survivors reach their skill ceiling earlier and are also favoured once a certain "skill threshold" is exceeded. We unfortunately don't have stats for different MMR brackets, but again, all the killers I watch are definitely high MMR, and they win much more often than not. I expect high MMR kill rates to be at least in the 60% realm that the global rates are too. Hope we will get more official stats on that at some point.
I don't think it's damningly big even just for raw kills. 1.29 means the deviation is still much closer to +/-1 kill/escape than to 2. I think if deviation were greater than 1.5 it would be fairly damning, but even then I would still account for stages, which are again completely reasonably distributed.
Absolutely. "Balance" in public matchmaking is pretty much pure chaos. And this goes for both sides. There are way too many variables and RNG aspects at play, starting of course even with the casino of matchmaking itself, i. e. who you get matched up with and against, which even with MMR is still a fair bit of a mess. When people say DbD is "not balanced", they are mostly right, only they are wrong in usually assuming it just means the game is "X or Y sided" and this would affect every single match in a deterministic manner. But the reality is that in public matchmaking matches (99% of matches people are actually having in this game), much of everything can happen at much of every point. "Not balanced" simply means that whenever you go into a pub match, as whatever role, you should not have any expectation as to how the game will or can go. Which can be frustrating, but we can also hold that due to this fact, the game actually rewards players for skills a lot, since they are a consistent aspect in otherwise fluctuating match circumstances. That this is true is easy to see when we look at the fact that good players win most of the time in pubs, and in fact even more so on the killer side (for survivors you obviously need 4 skilled players coming together to set the same premise).
The conclusion from tournaments like this for more casual and pub play is not that the next time you get blown out by an SWF with 4 BNP you should think "if I didn't suck and were playing Nurse I could have still won so this is okay", but indeed that in your 99 other matches in which you did not get a 4-SWF stacking BNPs but still didn't win every single time don't think "this game is completely imbalanced and nothing I could ever do could have helped me do even just a little bit better in this match".
I mean, what made this tournament particularly noteworthy and led to me creating this wordy thread evaluating it (as opposed to creating threads for the 20+ other tournaments I've taken stats on) in the first place is that there were no rules and limitations.
Wrecker's Yard, Rancid Abattoir and Gas Heaven are completely in line with the balance levels of a ton of other maps in this game. Are there completely ridiculous maps like Cowshed and Haddonfield that long should have been addressed? Of course, that is obvious. We cannot account for every last thing, but learning that even at the highest of levels with the most stacked of loadouts, a selection of the killer characters are perfectly able to compete doesn't get any less valuable just because we tack on "on a wide variety of maps but not necessarily all maps".
For one thing, Agony, one of the top most successful teams in DbD's tournament scene with dozens of tournament titles under their belt. Various Russian teams including many comp veterans (Russia has the biggest and most historied comp scene). Demise, composed of some of the better NA comp players. It isn't the absolutely most stacked tournament in the game's history, but these are still all players with thousands upon thousands of hours of playtime and tons of experience practicing and competing in tournament-level DbD all the time. These are absolutely some of the best there are.
Guess I'll reply to this too. My post count is not even a third of yours. Feel free to say that most of your posts are low-effort spam like this though, that will help your case!
I will say that talking this much about DbD is not something I think is worth the time, but I do like talking about it if there's actual and reasonable conversation to be had and some things to be learned.
Post edited by zarr on1 -
"which I did not think prior to the tournament, but I still hold that the latter is also overtuned. I don't think Blighted Crow is overtuned, but I do think Blighted Crow + Blighted Rat is."
I do not agree with this statement. If add-on was indeed so valuable and overtuned, than blight would be using Alchemist ring+C33. It is very obvious from pick rates that Blighted crow is indeed blight's most powerful add-on. I am not surprised as this is quite common for solo-queue. All good blights use Blighted crow.
In regards to nurse, Nurse's most popular add-on is Fragile wheeze. Nurses biggest weakness is holding W and cooldown on blink makes this more effective as she moves slower than survivors. Once again 100% of nurses used Fragile wheeze, again I am not surprised as every Nursed that I've ever played against in solo-queue uses this add-on. I think your overrating range add-ons.
Range and triple blink are ok secondary add-ons for gap-closing distances, otherwise as seen by one of nurses used double recovery(Dark cincture).
"they would likely average somewhere around 1.5 kills, with 4-6 stages"
I think you overestimate many of the weaker killers. I will concede with Myers, Tombstone piece is very powerful add-on. Straight moris are very powerful. See one player that was brave enough to play Oni. He got 1 kill. Most of other killers are likely to get 1 kill as well mostly from EGC facecamping and survivors being over altruistic. Otherwise 0 is most likely possible if the killer is bad at defending hooks. All other killers would suffer same fate as Oni. Just an expected result.
Poor Oni, his one good add-on topknot to give him anti-loop erased into oblivion. I wish he was a bit more competitive with less trash balancing :(
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Hmm, at that point the discussion would shift from what are the most overtuned add-ons, to what are the most overtuned add-on combinations. I don't actually think Blighted Crow is the problematic part of the mix in any of those combinations; Rush speed is great, but if it were the case that speed is the problem we would probably see stacked speed add-ons more commonly here. I simply think that base Rush speed is too slow for comp DbD for anyone to go without at least one speed add-on. I think Blight with Crow and nothing else is fine, problematic combinations like Crow + 33, Ring or Rat would stop being problematic if 33 and Ring were adjusted (and Crow were to not stack with Rat). On the other hand I don't think 33 and Ring in their current form would be much less problematic in combination with a lowered speed boost on Crow. But perhaps adjusting Crow from +6 to +4 and Rat from +4 to +2 is sensible either way.
Likewise for Nurse, I think the recharge add-on only exacerbates the true issue that is range. In most other tournaments range is banned and people use double recharge and it's mostly fine. Well, of course, Nurse is not simply "fine", in most other tournaments she actually averages closer to 3k, with the best Nurse players consistently getting 3/4ks, so recharge add-ons could also need adjustments. But I think range is the blatantly overtuned one.
Oni was honestly a poor pick given that the map for the round was Abattoir. You don't wanna be having to get an early M1 on a coldwind map, and corn also doesn't help with getting lots of Fury downs. But 1k 6 stages is not nearly as awful as one would expect, given this and the level of play/loadouts. We could also go into talking about the actual game, and I think it'd be obvious that the Oni player was not as on top of things as the survivor players in that match, I remember a fair few questionable plays or downright mistakes. Double duration add-ons was also kind of not the play, I think you need at least one speed add-on (or Top Knot, which is still good IMO), or an add-on to increase the frequency of orb drops so as to get your first Fury as soon as possible. Either way, I'm not sure that I overestimate some of those killers. Corrupt, Deadlock, No Way Out give even the middle of the pack killers enough opportunities to secure stages and kills, add some of the strong add-ons into the mix and games should be able to end in 2 kills with non-negligible frequency even in this heavy format, with more kills not being impossible (but less than 2 kills most likely indeed more frequent than more than 2 kills).
Anyway, the most stacked survivor loadouts are absolutely ridiculous and not something that should be in the game, vanishingly rare as it is to be seen in pubs. I'm for perk and item/add-on limitations for SWF groups, not least because the many other tournaments I've watched and taken stats on go to show that there's actually a neat variety of viable killers once the surv teams can only use 1 copy of most things between them.
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From all the people I associate they pretty much agree, you'll never get balance in a 4v1 game. Soloq will favor the 1, and the opposite will be true with teams, even more so on comms.
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Which is exactly why the core rules of the game need to change for solo and SWF, but the Devs have flat-out said that they will not be doing that.
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This is very cool and informative, but it doesn't fix the problem of there only being 3 Killers max that can deal with Survivors at high level
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So basically 20% of the killer roster on 20% of the maps have a chance at not gaining or losing pips.
Great.
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It is most definitely a win for survivors when 2 of them escape.
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Based on what criteria?
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I see extremely long posts just to try to justify what is impossible to justify lol...
The game is totally unbalanced, period.
Stats have been made with trials on the most balanced maps + Nurse/Spirit/Blight, the three best killers. And still, the average kill is 2.
- Spirit almost never get more than 1K.
- Nurse struggled to get 2K.
- Blight performed pretty well with almost constant 4k.
But what would have been the average kill with other killers ? It would have been <1k, it is pretty obvious.
The game is unbalanced and if you don't play Nurse/Spirit or Blight, you will loose every trials at high MMR.
And some interpretation are flawed here, especially when talking about the results obtained with Oni/Huntress/Pinhead... saying the game is really balanced there. First, there are only 3 trials...the population is too low to set conclusions.
However, if we admit that Spirit is not S tier anymore, let's take the results of all trials with Oni, Pinhead, Spirit and Huntress : average kills = 1,7; deviation is 1.16. It means that the result is pretty much stable with less than 2 kills most of the time.
So once again, imagine the results we would get with the Wraith, Trapper, Clown etc...
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So when you play killer and the survivors finish all of the generators and 2 of them t-bag you at the gate and escape, do you think to yourself "Hey I just won the game!!!"
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No, I think I drew. My 2nd grade math skills assist me in that assessment. And I'm usually unaware if they're tbagging, because I'm already tabbed out searching videos on Tube, not necessarily the YouOne though.
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"Anyway, the most stacked survivor loadouts are absolutely ridiculous and not something that should be in the game, vanishingly rare as it is to be seen in pubs."
I agree. The main issue is that if you weaken BNP parts, stacked toolbox and med-kits which are last really impactful items for survivor, why would a survivor spend BP if all their items are not very good? Keys are not longer instant escape buttons, flashlights are easily countered by looking away at walls and maps primary only use for totem hunting which killers have given up on using totems because their totems are weak because the totem defense perk(Undying) is too weak and their totems have no game lifespan(easy to disable from sound cue)+ map knowledge.
In regards to killers, add-on often work in pairs, though I'd say that add-on often need to be individual good effect to be used in first place. I was not saying that these killer add-on need to be worse. I was just stating that these are the best add-on for said killer.
Oni is overrated killer, He is not viable at highest level of play. I have nothing more to say about him.
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How about a tournament with a rotation of Coldwind, Badham I - V, Haddonfield, Ormond, Mother's Dwelling, the new one, The Game, Grim Pantry, Father Campbell's Chapel, Disturbed Ward, Groaning Storehouse, etc etc
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it actually does, no game has every viable option in tier S
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No, it doesn't. You have one unofficial tournament, with a small sample size in terms of games, which excludes nearly 90% of the roster. It's a bad balance argument on those grounds alone because we don't have the missing Killers to draw conclusions from because nobody actually tried them outside of, like, three games.
With regards to "no game has every viable option in tier S": the problem is that said games are pitting two options from multiple tiers against each other. But survivors are essentially always a top tier pick in this sort of analogy; the only hope for a non-top tier Killer is that the Survivors play badly and go for suboptimal loadouts, even if the Killer is specced correctly.
If one side is always an S Tier pick, the other side needs to be all S Tier. You do not have a functional balance if you tell people "90% of your choices always have the option of putting you in an unwinnable game regardless of your performance :)"
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Survivors are not a top tier pick always.
Just because survivors are just skins, as opposed to killers that possess individual abilities, survivors' strength is still impacted by what they bring into the trial. Going by extreme examples, the best survivor in the world is going to be very different in strenghts between different iterations of themselves, going from perkless, to full meta loadout, to soloq, to 4-man, etc.
Survivors are a top tier pick when there's 4 ceiling-skilled survivors, coordinating together on comms, bringing the most stacked loadouts. That's akin an omega blink Nurse with full slowdown. Outside of this example, every survivor team below that varies in strength, just like the other killer characters do.
Or are you telling me that the average teams you see in pubs are top tier? Because that's simply counterfactual.
That's why the whole argument of survivor/killer sided doesn't hold water without context. Why are we to consider survivors as if they were always playing with full nuclear firepower, but not killers? And that includes the choice of the specific killer characters. Which inevitably vary in viability, as it's literally the case in every game that always inevitably develops a meta at the top.
If anything, you outright contradict yourself. Killer is always a potential top tier pick because the single player has always the option of the best of the best meta. And that meta can actually contend with the survivors'.
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Whoa it's as if people have been saying S tier killers are the only killers that can compete at a high level. Very crazy findings.
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Survivors are an S-Tier pick the same way an S-Tier Killer is an S-Tier pick. Of course, it's dependent on the player and the perks and the addons. But there's only one tier of Survivor because they're all visually identical. Same way a Survivor could have a less optimal loadout or be a worse player or be playing in a suboptimal environment, a Killer can have a worse loadout and be worse. The only difference is the teamwork, which yeah, that's unique to the side that is actually a team.
You literally can't make a bad survivor choice if you're being matched against opponents of equal skill and perk selection, because there is no choice (hoping people don't spot you aside). There is such a thing as a bad killer choice. 90% of killer choices, in fact, once the idea of game balance is actually relevant.
Or: picking an s-tier choice against an f-tier choice doesn't guarantee victory in isolation, but once you have equal skill it probably does.
And it's a bad place for game balance when one side is always the s-tier choice and the person not picking an s-tier choice has to hope they screw up from the very, very beginning.
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I'm only going to add that this tournament put a scoring emphasis on hooks and not kills, which is not the emphasis in pub matches. I don't think a single player would class 8 hooks yet no kills a good result for a killer.
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Statements like this are misleading because most people will read "high level" and think it refers to their average pub match whenever they think the survivors are not all that bad in it. To be clear: the level we are talking about here is something 99% of players never have and never will face in public matchmaking. Tournament teams with years of competitive practice, team cohesion, coordination of builds, strats and tactics, game knowledge, individually some of the most skilled and experienced players in the game playing and practicing as a collective, trying their absolute hardest, playing for money, with disciplined, efficient callouts. These teams almost never play pubs as 4-SWF, and in the vanshingly rare cases where they do they almost always mess around.
Dowsey, Otz and TrU3Ta1ent are veterans of the game that have been playing for years and thousands of hours and they win most of their killer matches and have for years as well. They all faced a tournament team (Oracle) for fun at some point, in custom matches. Each of them professed that this level is something they basically never play against and never have played against. That just as an example that goes to show how much beyond the pub experience comp DbD is. In all likeliness, you won't encounter it even just once in years of gameplay.
That killer players can compete with these teams on the most stacked loadouts is crazy, and that they use the strongest killer characters to do so takes nothing away from it. After all, we could reverse this frankly dismissive argument and say, survivors have to team up in 4-SWFs, use voice communications, use 16 of the strongest perks, 4 of the strongest items with 8 of the strongest add-ons, just to stand a chance against these killers at a high level, and then they still are not even surviving half the time!
In reality, 99% of public matchmaking matches are nowhere near "high level" when by high level we are talking about tournament matches like this. If you think these players (or any competent and above player) need to play Nurse, Spirit or Blight to perform well in "high MMR", I'm sorry, you are wrong. While it is completely possible for these players to only play those three in pubs and get win streaks of hundreds of matches in a row, they win decisively and comfortably in pubs with much of any killer they play. Pubs are a literal joke among comp players.
To note: I would want for more killers to join these three in the toppest of top tiers, but it is not necessary for "balance", let alone that every killer should be at that tier like people apparently think.
Another tired, dismissive non-argument. If we look at the very specific loadouts used on the survivor side here that allowed for them to compete, we can just as well say "only 20% of the survivor roster have a chance to escape, and they are still less likely to escape than the killers are to kill". Players only use the best things at the highest level on both sides. That's a basic balance premise.
If your argument is about diversity, well, then likewise it should be equally bad to you that survivors can only use a handful of perks, items and add-ons if they want to have a chance to compete at this level. Oh, and of course they need to be teams of 4 players practicing, coordinating and communicating together.
Besides, these stats only prove that these killers are able to compete at the highest level, not that all other killers are absolutely unable to. People simply did not play other killers here, so we have no stats to go on, it would be baseless conjecture. (Well, 3 times it did happen, one of which the killer still won.)
Unfortunately they did not play on every single map in the game for us to make factual balance statements regarding them, but the maps they did play on are comparable in balance to much more than 20% of maps overall.
Not sure how pips factor into any of this, I hope you don't actually think this level of play has any significance in public matches, these survivor teams would win (or pip in, if you prefer) the vast majority of their pub matches without perks and items; these killer players would win the vast majority of their pub matches with Legion. Skill and experience are a much more significant factor and predictor for outcomes of public matches than the state of base game balance at the highest level or the characters, items, etc. used at that level - skilled players have no issue frequently winning (and pipping) with 100% of the killer roster in pubs.
I don't think you should be throwing around accusations of "flawed interpretation" when you are saying things like "game is totally unbalanced, period" and "It would have been <1k, it is pretty obvious" and "if you don't play Nurse/Spirit or Blight, you will lose every trial at high MMR" based on nothing whatsoever but you thinking those things are true.
Do we have stats on how all the other killers perform in this setting? No. Your opinion that it's obvious all of them would average below 1k is speculation. And I mean, we did in fact have 3 other killers in this tourney, and they averaged 1.6 kills and 7 stages. I do agree that 3 matches is too small a sample size to draw any valuable conclusions from (and I did not do so, I actually even argued to exclude those matches altogether, you must be referring to someone else here), but certainly, 0 matches for all the other killers is even harder to draw conclusions from, yet for you this is obvious.
And hyperbolic statements like claiming one will lose every trial at high MMR playing any killer but one of those three are just hard to describe as anything but delusional, and make it difficult for me to even want to engage in discussion with you, sorry.
I don't know why you keep bringing up deviation as if it would be an argument somehow favouring survivors. Deviation extends into both directions, meaning the results deviate both in and against the favour of either side. High deviation from a balanced average doesn't mean a game is unbalanced in either direction, it just means the average balance is achieved in a way of victories for either side being overwhelming and ties being relatively rare, which one might argue is not a good way for a game to be balanced, but it's still balanced (on average). Either way, while I agree that a low deviation is preferable, the deviation we have here is not even all that high - having a deviation of close to 1 kill is actually fairly good, because it means both sides can beat the 2k average and win, but not usually by an overwhelming amount. And again, that this is true is obvious by looking at the individual results, where we have a 40 - 20 - 40 split in percentage of wins for one side, draws, and wins for the other side. A perfect split would obviously be 33 - 33 - 33, which we are not far away from. In fact, if you look at the standard deviation of data sets consisting of numbers 0-4 that do fall into an even 33 - 33 - 33 split, it is around 1.4 - higher than the deviation we have here. And the deviation we have is not only lower, but lower in a way of favouring killers, since in DbD we are looking at results ranging from 1-4 most of the time, as 0ks are much more uncommon than 4ks. That killers are much more likely to still at least kill one survivor if they lose than survivors are to have at least still 1 escape if they lose obviously is an aspect of this game that favours killers.
I agree with the issue you point out with weakening these survivor items/add-ons, in fact I think if only 1-2 of them are in play they actually are just strong enough in their current form to be impactful enough to be worthwhile, especially if we consider them being used by a group of randoms. That's why rather than change them, I want to restrict SWF groups' ability to use them. Not only do random groups almost never bring 3-4 of the most busted items/add-ons (even 2 is fairly rare), but even in the rare case where they do I don't actually think it's all too problematic - we know that the best killer players can even compete against the best most coordinated teams on voice comms using the most busted stuff, so certainly it is possible to compete against randoms without coordination or communcation using these things. I think SWFs should only be able to use 1 instance of any item/add-on (and perk) between them.
I guess I get what you're saying with regards to the killer add-ons. I think you're probably right, in as much as, if only 1 add-on were to be allowed, people might very well prefer Crow on Blight over 33 or Ring, or recharge on Nurse over range, even though the respectively latter add-ons are the problematic ones. They (33, Ring, range, etc.) only get to be really problematic in combinations, while the add-ons they are combined with (Crow, recharge) might be better on their own but not necessarily problematic even in combination with other stuff.
As an Oni main of sorts, those words hurt. Well, not really, I know perfectly well that needing to get an early M1 as a killer without any ability sort of categorically excludes Oni from highest-level viability, in concept. However, not only is the reality of even the highest level of play in this game (and any game) still prone to mistakes and random events (and DbD if anything more so than various other competitive games) that allow for Onis to still perform well even in tournaments, but there also exist perks like PWYF and Spirit Fury that can more or less reliably work around that downside. But yeah, if Oni deserves a buff, it's making it so passive charge of the Fury meter does not stop at 99% but allows for the power to become available. And it should also be faster - they could make it so passive charge rate is in relation to amount of blood orbs on the map, with 0 orbs being 100% passive charge rate and 100 orbs (which is the limit) being 0%.
Campbell's and Storehouse are not seldomly used in tournaments. Results are usually pretty even, Campbell's is perfectly alright for killers, Storehouse is big and has a main building that always spawns its fairly busted windows, but on the flipside it tends to spawn good gen cluster setups the area around which can often quickly be turned into deadzones. They used Rancid Abattoir in this tournament, which is a strong Coldwind map for survivors. Thompson House is often used in tournaments.
Either way, if your point is that there are maps in this game that are not balanced at the highest level and should be further adjusted, you are right. I also do think that there are more survivor than killer-favouring maps in the game, and have pointed out as much in the OP, but there's still a whole bunch of reasonably well-balanced maps, with a few favouring killers.
While I won't go and argue this one tournament proves without the shadow of any doubt that the game is balanced at the top end, it's infinitely better an argument than most of what you can read on here proclaiming the opposite. People say the game is hopelessly survivor-sided, unwinnable as killer, you can't get any kills, it's tremendously difficult to play killer, and more such asinine stuff, and they base it on exactly nothing of substance. Official stats showcasing 60+% kill rates for years, including recent MMR stats? Obviously don't mean anything whatsoever. Streamers combining for years worth of video evidence showcasing that good players win most of the time as killer, and do so pretty decisively at that? Of course those are literal beyond-human gods and they are also all low MMR and their opponents are paid actors. Tournaments almost always averaging out to slightly above 2 kills, with 3/4ks being common occurrences, even when everything is allowed? Just read this thread, you'll find your share of "arguments" as to why this too shows nothing meaningful whatsoever.
If I'm trying to convince anyone that the game is not hellishly skewed against killers, it's because I prefer that people would see that it is possible to become good enough to perform well as killer, even at heights they will likely never play at, and as a result, for them to be more positive about the game and their experience of it, to more embrace the idea of practicing and improving, thinking about the game and their gameplay, rather than succumbing to the idea that they never stand a chance anyway. I find precisely the notion of improving and being rewarded for it is what makes competitive games worthwhile, it's weird to see so many people seemingly just give up on themselves and the idea that they can become a better player that doesn't struggle and lose all the time.
Bwsted's reply already addressed your concern regarding the S tier stuff, and I also explained it in other parts of this post. Do you think survivor sides would stand a chance against these killers without the specific powerful perks, items and add-ons they used here, or without voice comms and practicing together? I mean, we can see that even with all that stuff they already average below 2 escapes, so I would wager they would not be able to compete. Are they thus not also forced to pick very specific and limited options in order to stand a chance at competing?
And in tournaments where survivors are not allowed the best most stacked loadouts, these killers in fact do average even higher kill rates, with the best players consistently getting 3/4ks with them - and that despite killers too having pretty severe add-on restrictions in those tournaments.
This is a pretty disingenuous argument. Survivors have different items they can only at most choose one of, which is akin to different abilities on the killer side. S-tier pick means only the best of what you can bring. So already we have survivors only being an S-tier pick if they each bring S-tier items. You also need to have the best perks equipped on everyone. Not on the same page about that with 3 other players? Not S-tier. Survivors can have teamwork or not, and they are only an S-tier pick if they do. No 4-SWF? Not an S-tier pick. No practice together? Let alone no voice comms, including a callout system? Not an S-tier pick. These are all criteria tournament teams have to fulfil in order to present the best survivor side possible and be able to compete with S-tier killer sides in them.
It's actually more the opposite, like Bwsted has already pointed out: For a survivor side to represent an S-tier pick, a ton of criteria have to be met and four people have to come together to meet them, each and as a collective. That is vanishingly rare in public matchmaking. Want to present an S-tier killer pick? Any one person can do so at any time whenever they feel like it - just select an S-tier killer in the game menu and equip the best perks, add-ons and offerings and there you are. This happens in public matchmaking all the time.
And yeah, another crucial thing is that you say "once the idea of game balance is actually relevant", which in public matchmaking it all too often isn't because of skill and experience disparities, survivors not being SWF, people not using the best stuff, etc. I mean, I'm sure it's annoying that I'm repeating myself saying this, but good players win more often than not even with Legion in pubs, and that's the farthest thing from an S-tier killer pick. I'm 30 - 4 in perkless Legion 4ks (meaning I 4k'd 30 times and did not 4k 4 times, but I didn't 0k once) just in recent days.
This is not the argument you think it is. If killers in these tournaments are encouraged to go for hook stages rather than merely kills, it is only even more telling that they are still performing well in terms of kills too.
Besides, while the scoring system does encourage killers to go for hook stages, that doesn't mean they don't still concentrate on kills too - after all, if you can kill one survivor before the endgame, your chances of killing all survivors increase significantly, thus likewise your chances of maxing out stages do. This is also why tunnelling and camping even early in the game are still completely common strategies here.
Oh, and personally, I actually think 8 stages can be a great result against a worthy opponent, even if it ends in 0 kills.
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CoH is not that good for tournaments, because those games are just done faster and you can bring 4x medkit each game, that's just not possible for normal games.
That's why CoH is so good for normal games, you give your all teammates free infinite medkits. Also CoH is not any issue for those killers, they just commit anyway to most of their chases, lower tier killers just can't do that.
and I don't think 2,16 is killer sided. Thing is, that results are not really between 0 and 4. Even when they got stomped, they were able to secure at least 1 kill except one game, so it's actually between 1-4, so avarage should be around 2,5 with that logic.
Hook stages mean nothing, if it was from first hook, it still counts as 3 hook stages.
I don't really wanna nerf survivors overall, except spawns those are broken and CoH. That's it for survivors in terms of nerfs, then just tons of buffs to weak perks.
I don't think top killers (S-A) need changes, I would just buff lower tier killers so they have some chance too.
You can't really use only top 3 killers and say it's balanced game, you it's kinda balanced for few killers, but I wanna see those results for Legion, Clown, Ghostface etc.
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Nurse Blight Nurse Nurse Blight Nurse Blight Blight Nurse
2 useable out of 26 killers is an indicator of a very well balanced game. I sure as hell want to stick playing only 2 killers in the game to be on equal footing with survivors running 4 meta perks(which is really common in pubs, as well as bringing medkits with Styptics)
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Tell me more about CUSTOM matchmaking. LOL
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I'm Japanese, and this is a very interesting discussion, the likes of which you don't see on Japanese forums!
I would also like to know the result if we use the same rules but exclude Nurse, Bright and Spirit. The only thing I can tell about the killer side from these results is that "if you master Nurse or Blight, you can 4k against any survivor".(A lot of people have mentioned killers other than Nurse, Bright and Spirit, but that's probably not the purpose here: they may be able to do 4k or only 0k.)
I was surprised to see the combination of No way out and None escapes death used in a top level match. It's a unique build of the nurse, who doesn't gather the generators in one place and hunt down the survivor while calculating the situation of the board, but just attacks and breaks it down at once.
Nurse, Blight, and Spirit are tactically "offensive" killers, not "defensive" killers. What are the tactics of defensive killers like Hag and Cannibal? "Dead lock" will be used to force the camp as it has to be 1k by the middle of the game. "Corrupt Intervention" will also be used to prevent the game from being settled in the first a hundred seconds. Will they use "Starstruck" or "Bamboozle" to supplement your offensive capabilities, or "Pop Goes the Weasel" or "Eruption" to further strengthen your defensive capabilities? We'd love to see the next tournament held with something other than the Top 3 killers.
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In conclusion. 3 out of 26 killers are viable to compete against high skill survivors. With a slightly survivor sided outcome.
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I have two questions.
One, how do you account for Survivors not being able to choose their own maps? I'm fairly confident these results would change if the Survivors could send themselves to Badham or RPD. If we are meant to be comparing the best of the best with the best possible set-ups, why not allow Survivors access to their strongest offerings? Does that not unfairly skew the results?
Secondly, were you counting hook states using the "hook wheel" on the left-side of the Killer's screen?
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...with 4 BNPs, 4 DS, 4 UB, 4 DH. The last tournament by DBDLeague also had similar results except there were no Spirits or Blights and Nurse was used a single time. Here is the data https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X3rdzkKtTY-CPw9OjieWdTWrHCIFkSYhMdiKTZOyTlM/edit?usp=sharing
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This is too long for me to read but I will sum it up, if everyone is using busted combinations the game is balanced, if one side isn't then it is unbalanced.
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GF outperforming Nurse. I see a nerf incoming.
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The argument that as long as killer players have at least one option that can compete is terrible. While it may be true it is terrible to say 'yeah 90% of x is garbage, but at least 1 x can do well therefore all x's are fine as it as on you to select the 10% of good x's. Otherwise you can't complain, x is fine.".
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The licensed maps are a mess. They're in the game basically because they have to, not because they fit the gameplay.
I would like to see it happen, though. My money would be on rpd being a problem for any killer. The top 3 S-tier without loadout restrictions could probably handle the other maps just fine. At least, in my experience they already can.
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Circle is not quite free infinite med-kits (fairly far from in fact, there's a reason med-kits are a much more popular pick here), but it is indeed an amazingly powerful perk and this tournament's meta doesn't negate that. I do still think a nerf is in order, primarily that Circle should not affect the action speed of any healing action other than its own, meaning of course that healing other survivors and healing with a med-kit would not get the 100% boost, which in my opinion is the actual ridiculously overtuned thing about Circle. Maybe those other healing actions could still get a boost somewhere between 30-50% though.
The argument that due to looking at results mostly ranging from 1-4 kills we should not consider 2 kills a draw is flawed. That the nature of the game favours killers to still kill 1 survivor even in bad losses is not something that can reasonably be used to then shift the point of balance to even further favour killers - that's actually the opposite of the conclusion that would have to be drawn from this from a balance perspective: to instate balance with regards to this, a 1-3 kill range would have to be sought for, changing the game such that survivors also stand a much greater chance to still have 1 escape in bad losses, likely of course achieved through changes of the hatch and gate mechanics in 1V1 scenarios that tilt those scenarios much more in the survivor's favour.
Hook stages mean quite a lot. You might want the game to be balanced around actual hooking events, such that a killer can win by getting 12 hooks rather than 12 hook stages, and that might be a noble and desirable wish for the game (I'd mostly agree), but the reality of the game of course is not balanced around that. Camping and slugging exist, and they allow for killers to win decisively without hooking everyone 3 times. The existence of these things is completely balance-relevant unless you want to balance for wishful fantasies, and hook stages tell us pretty clear things about the state of real balance that includes these strategies.
Survivor spawns are definitely something that could be looked at. Spawning all survivors together every time could be an easy and healthy change for the game. As I've mentioned, Circle could do with a nerf. Then there are a variety of map adjustments I'd like to see, as well as restricting the ability of SWF groups to stack perks and items/add-ons. On the flipside, there's various killer add-ons I'd tone down, and some adjustments of maps that can be pretty oppressive for survivors (such as Azarov's Resting Place, to which I'd add an alternate route between the map halves, or Sanctum of Wrath, where I'd like to see a tunnel through the shrine). Beyond that, I would actually want to experiment with nerfs for camping, tunnelling and slugging, compensated for by buffs to other aspects of killer play, such as chase strength, map and gen control, snowball potential... Albeit only to a certain extent, since I think camping, tunnelling and slugging do have a valid and even important place in the game. And yeah, a bunch of killers and a whole bunch of perks on both sides could very much do with buffs. Some survivor items too for that matter, especially once SWFs would be restricted in their use of them.
As for your last argument, that's been addressed multiple times now. For one thing, the blanket satement of "game balanced" cannot and is not being made, however keep in mind that "game not balanced" does not equal "game X or Y-sided" - there are way too many variables and RNG aspects and skill/experience/loadout disparities at play in the game's actual mode that players are actually playing (public matchmaking), and even disparities in levels of "sweat", i. e. how hard players are even trying to win... and then 4-player SWF teams that practice together and use voice communications that are inherent to the balance of these tournaments are awfully rare. The competitive balance premise is almost never met in pubs, and this skews "balance" in both directions (and in fact, as global stats go to show, overall more often does so in favour of killers). And for another thing, you cannot compare a killer side choosing Legion, Clown etc. to a survivor side choosing the best of the best stuff, that would not be meeting a competitively balanced premise either. In tournaments with restrictions for both sides, many of the other killers do actually perform perfectly reasonably well. At the very top end with everything allowed there may be argued to be a lack of diversity, but it's not a lack of balance - and while I would like to have around 2-3 more S-tier killers, I mean, I would also like for flashlights to be viable at the top end, or saboboxes, or any of the many other things that are currently not equally as viable at that level. So yeah, both sides suffer from the lack of diversity in top-end viability as well.
A correction: To be on equal footing with 4 survivors equally as skilled and experienced as you, teaming up together in SWF, practicing together regularly to have refined strats and cohesive tactics, using voice communcations and doing so in efficient, trained ways, coordinating their builds to all use only the very best perks and items/add-ons. If you show me you meeting this in pubs even just once, I'll give you the new DLC for Christmas.
Exactly right!
We should rather talk about the game reality that 99% of players are actually experiencing in 99% of matches, and the game reality that people on forums such as these actually refer to when they discuss balance, the reality namely of public matches... and that reality is seeing global kill rates of above-50% with just about every killer on every map and seeing good players win 80+% of their killer matches with much of every killer (as evidenced by countless streamers). That doesn't mean there aren't balance issues in the game remedying which would help improve the gameplay experience in pubs as well, but it does mean that most of the concerns about balance (and specifically a supposed survivor-sidedness of the game) are much less pressing in that environment than it is being made out to.
Always cool to see engagement of players from the Asian region with the "Western" playerbase and discussions. I'm fairly familiar with the Asian playerbase actually, since I watch a lot of Korean as well as some Japanese and Chinese streamers, including tournament play (primarily DFC of course). I find the Asian meta pretty fascinating, and it is unfortunate that the latencies more or less prohibit the participation of players from all regions in the same tournaments. I would love to see KDBD and some of the top Japanese teams compete against the top Russian/European/North-American teams.
And I completely agree, it would be great to see various other killer characters compete in this environment. I do suspect a fair few of them would be hard-pressed to average more than 1.5 kills, but I also suspect a fair few others would be surprisingly successful still. And yes, the meta for some of those other killers would likely be very different, which would make it all the more interesting to see. Maybe Wispy will hold a similar tournament again, or perhaps other people will be inspired by this to try more adventurous formats for their tournaments themselves. There are actually a lot of tournaments being held for this game, and in many of them people are forced to play other killers, it's just that the majority of them have a restricted format of course. Either way, if you are interested I could share info about those other tournaments as well.
No Way Out's rise to popularity (and even ubiquity) in tournament play was a bit surprising to me at first too, but it has been a popular pick in tournament circles for quite some time now and it isn't surprising anymore. In general a shift in the top-level meta can be observed to guaranteed game delay perks, most of all of course Corrupt Intervention and Deadlock. And like them, No Way Out is not only guaranteed delay that creates more possibilities for killers, but it is passive delay that the killers can therefore make use of in any way they like (such as using it to camp and secure a hook stage or kill as you point out). No Way Out can often secure an entire additional kill just on its own, and that's obviously a massive impact. Rancor is actually not seldomly banned in tournaments due to having a similar effect.
Against high skill survivor teams using 1-3 different items out of a total of 28, and voice comms, yeah. With a slightly killer-sided outcome in terms of average kills, and a significantly killer-sided outcome in terms of average stages.
This tournament does not account for being able to choose maps. Of course, therefore it also does not account for the killer being able to do so, or being able to deny any map choice with the Sacrifical Ward. As I've stated though, the maps play did take place on are completely in line with the state of balance of a large quantity of maps in the global pool, and while I do think there are more survivor-favouring maps in that pool than killer-favouring ones, there still are some of the latter too.
But yes, to reiterate, I think a bunch of maps need adjustments and are not fit for top-level competition. I don't think every map should be perfectly "balanced", even if that were possible, I think maps having a certain "flavour" of balance is preferable, and certainly I don't think map balance is a huge concern in pubs where stats show that even the most survivor-sided maps average below 50% escape rates, but I do obviously agree that some maps are in a completely unreasonable state, such as Cowshed and Haddonfield. I don't actually think Badham and RPD specifically are terribly imbalanced - that doesn't mean I think they're super good maps, just saying I'd be cautious to assume they would favour survivors significantly in an environment such as this. They might, but I would be less surprised if they didn't than with some of the other maps.
I did count hook stages using the hook wheel, as I've pointed out I did not count individual hooks. Doing so would be an interesting additional stat, but hook stages is objectively the more balance-relevant stat because as much as we may wish for them not to be, camping and slugging are integral elements of this game and therefore obviously its balancing.
Thumbs up. I can provide stats for at least 10 other restricted tournaments in which various killers were played and in which kills averaged out to slightly above 2 as well, with outright wins entirely commonplace. And I would argue restricted tournaments are actually much closer to the public matchmaking experience than this tournament in terms of the loadouts you will see most of the time.
By the way: Cool to see that you covered this tournament and some of my evaluations of it in a video. Your conclusions seem mostly correct and reasonable, as I dare say is usually the case. I would have liked for you to perhaps highlight more that seeing survivor sides like these is vanishingly rare in pubs to the point of basically never encountering it (when have you last seen even just 4 BNPs in one of your matches, how often did that happen in your last 1000 matches? Certainly not often for me), but you did make the more essential point that pub matches are almost never actually meeting a "balance premise" like these tournaments do, and as such can obviously be notably imbalanced even in cases where all 5 players in them are roughly equally skilled and experienced (which itself is already very rare of course).
I think the proper conclusion from the fact that matches are often imbalanced in terms of the stuff people bring in is not that skill and experience often don't matter like people usually argue, on the contrary it's that they matter even more, because in order to overcome those imbalances consistently, you need to be even better at the game. Players are rewarded a lot for their skills and experience in this game particularly because they are tools with which to overcome base game imbalances, and if anything this is even more true on the killer side where one's skills and experience constitute 100% of the impact one's performance can have on a match, as opposed to the survivor side where any singular player's impact potential is obviously limited. A player's skill and experience are also the only consistent elements in the otherwise wildly fluctuating balance-relevant circumstances of matches with their many variables, which further adds to the importance they carry. Skilled and experienced players such as yourself will find this easy to agree with given that even now with MMR in place, good players still win most of their killer matches even with some of the weakest killers and on some of the most imbalanced maps.
That doesn't mean those imbalances are fine, but it does encourage a change in mentality wherein people stop looking to the devs so much for help with improving their experience of the game, and instead look to themselves, and the realization that practicing and thinking more about the game in order to become a better player can make for a tremendous improvement of one's experience with the game. Things are not nearly as hopeless as not few people seemingly believe, and if there's a change in mentality I want to effect with threads and posts like this, it's most of all that one. Some of those people for one reason or another choose or want to believe that the game is hopelessly imbalanced as you point out in your video as well, but I think there are also a lot of people that more or less blindly believe that the odds are stacked against them impossibly much, partially because that's a lot of what they read online, and as a result they never really even conceive of the possibility of becoming better and beating the odds.
I don't take real issue with this statement, but you do make a mistake various people here already have: these stats show what they do, they don't show what they don't. Just because everybody was using the strongest stuff here and the results were fairly balanced, doesn't mean that every other scenario has to have unbalanced results. It could be true, but it isn't automatically true.
And we know from many other tournaments that the game trends toward similarly balanced results without using the strongest stuff too.
There is an actual point to be made in this regard though: Obviously GF performed well here because it was on an indoor map; some maps benefit some killers particularly, so much so that even some of the weakest killers like GF can perform exceptionally well on them even at a very high level. Not everything that skews balance does so in a linear fashion that would always benefit the strongest side or character the most. With regards to indoor maps specifically, there's a reason why they are the statistically most killer-sided maps in public matchmaking. Even RPD is a map that I would say while it does have potential to be notably survivor-sided if the survivors actually know the map very well individually and play to its strengths in a coordinated manner collectively, it is notably killer-sided if the survivors don't know the map very well and are not coordinated (read: most survivors you will actually face in pubs). So that quality of maps changing their "sidedness" between coordinated SWF and non-coordinated SWF/non-SWF is also noteworthy.
- This is not about competing period, it's about competing against the highest level of opponents with the highest level of stacked loadouts. Please don't take or make this out to mean in your pub matches you can't compete with any of the other killers - in average pub matches even the weakest killers can compete, and even dominate if piloted by players of this caliber.
- Survivors also only have very limited options if they want to compete at this level. In fact, survivors are much more limited once we take into consideration that they need to be 4 players that practice together frequently as a team and coordinate their builds and plays. That's a much more difficult premise to fulfil than the killer equivalent of simply picking the best stuff.
- This tournament only shows what the top-end balance of everyone using the best stuff is like, it does not show whether everything else would be "garbage" in this environment. Maybe kill rates would not go through the roof if survivors started using flashlights or saboboxes instead of BNPs and med-kits; maybe kill rates would not plummet if people started using Huntress, Twins, Oni, Pyramid, etc. - in other tournaments other killers are able to compete perfectly well, with some of the strongest add-ons that are banned in those tournaments it would not be impossible to see them still be able to compete in this tournament as well, and of course, even if they wouldn't average 2 or more kills, there's still a lot of room between "able to compete" and "garbage", especially if we include hook stages. I wouldn't say Oni's and Pinhead's 6 stages here were garbage, for instance; 12 stages are obviously the maximum achievable, so 6 stages would be the equivalent of a 2k if we were to look at balance from that perspective. Not saying 1k 6 stages is necessarily actually a balanced result, but really not garbage either.
To reiterate: I for one don't use these stats (or the ones from the 20+ other tournaments I've looked at in the past) to say that things are simply fine, as if the game would be in a perfect spot and there's no need to complain. Things are certainly vastly more fine than people here and elsewhere not seldomly make them out to be ("killer impossible, can't get a single kill if survivors have more than a single brain cell", and more such ridiculous nonsense), but they are not simply fine either. There's a very blatant disparity in the strength of different killers, and I do think all the weaker ones should be buffed to be at least A tier with add-ons, and that more S tier contenders would be good for the game. There's some blatantly imbalanced maps that should have long been adjusted. 3/4-player SWF with voice comms and stacking the best perks and items is problematic. But yeah, the ceiling for survivors is not nearly as astronomical as some people believe, and this realization should be something positive: if it's possible for killer players to become good enough to compete even with the best survivor players using the most ridiculous ######### that you will basically never see in your pub matches, then surely it is possible for you to become good enough to do well in those pub matches more often than not. It should be a realization that breaks with the timidity of killer players that don't believe in their chances and stirs ambitions to become better and overcome imbalances, perceived or real.
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Didn't know the next tome was already out O_O
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the only thing that i learned from that toruney is what i already knew that blight addons are busted and still untouched, getting consistently 4ks even when survivors bring that much crap is actually interesting, way ahead nurse... nurse and spirit got their nerfs but blight addon pass still didnt happen.
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I do not believe using hook states is a good measurement. For example, if a Leatherface attempted to play the game normally, but only got 4 hooks by the time 4 gens were done and he downs someone else and facecamps them, that's 7 hook states. I'd also like to know how many of those hook states occurred after the gens were done. I know a lot of Killers are good at forcing trades, especially if the area's are far from the gates.
Also, I'd like to see the hook/kill distribution on the maps. I only find one of those maps to be "Killer-sided" and I see 1 being neutral and the others being somewhat "Survivor-favored." My point with bringing up maps is that the tournament was limiting Survivors best offerings, but not the Killer. You mention the strength of mori's and how they allow Killer's to ignore DS and possible rescue attempts on the final hook. However, if Survivors were allowed to bring their best offering, Killers would either have to run a Sacrificial Ward or deal with Cowshed, which I doubt many would choose willingly. Ergo, the power of mori's would be nonexistent.
I am not a competitive player, but these are things from my perspective that either do not make sense or that I take issue with.
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Your points regarding hook states don't really change anything about the fact that they're the objectively better measure. Bubba was not being played here so that's a pretty irrelevant argument in this context, but even if we do entertain it, it's a rather specific example because Bubba can defend hooks like practically no second killer - and even then, the fact that he can do that is entirely balance-relevant and an obvious strength of this killer; if he gets a guaranteed +2 stages simply by standing in front of a fresh hook, why should we take that to somehow unfairly be skewing hook stages, rather than affecting them in a completely balance-relevant way. Again, camping is precisely one major reason why hook stages tell a better story of the real balance, as they account for this and many other scenarios where survivors go through multiple stages on hooks. Why would we look to actual hooking events to gauge balance with if the game reality is not actually balanced for that? If we were to try to balance the game for the ability of winning by hooking every survivor 3 times without accounting for the reality that camping and slugging can lead to survivors dying after only being hooked once, we would likely end up with a scenario where Bubba could facecamp every single hook and consistently 4k doing so. The fact that he cannot do that currently (not at this level anyway) goes to show that the game is balanced with camping in mind, and hook stages are a great measure for the balance of that reality.
Likewise, stages being racked up in the endgame also doesn't affect things in any way that is somehow not balance-relevant. Mind you, in tournament play it is actually very rare for survivors to try and rescue a teammate in the endgame, in the vast majority of cases they will just leave. But even if that weren't the case, survivors contesting hooks in the endgame are still playing to try and survive with more players alive, so if they end up giving up more stages for that it's not like they gave them up for no reason.
While your point regarding map offering restrictions still being a restriction is valid, it is again not only a restriction for survivors. Killers can bring map offerings for killer-sided maps too, and they have the same chances of ending up on that map. Of course, survivors could be burning map offerings for 4 different maps each of which they consider favourable for them, thus skewing the odds 4 to 1 against the killer, but not only are they also forgoing other offerings for it, but it has to be kept in mind that "map" offerings are really realm offerings, which for various realms means they don't actually guarantee ending up on a specific map. There is no Cowshed offering for instance, maybe they would end up on Rotten Fields. And yeah, a Sacrificial Ward being played would make it a crapshoot entirely.
I really don't think people are making a strong point by attacking this tournament's map pool. Rancid Abattoir is a super strong map for survivors, Gas Heaven is in line with the state of balance of a wide variety of maps. Sure Cowshed is ridiculous, but we could also go to Resting Place, Shelter Woods or Coal Tower, which are more favourable for killers than any of the maps in this pool. Besides, Nurse, Blight and Spirit really don't care so much about the maps they're on - obviously there are exceptions, but I wouldn't expect very different results for these killers on most maps.
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Here we are not discussing how interesting the game is, but rather which side has the advantage when both the killer and survivor sides are trying to "win".
A hook counter of 12 is a complete victory for the killer side, and a hook counter of 0 is a complete victory for the survivor side. So, from the point of view of victory, it is desirable that the average hook counter is 6 or 7. Of course, just repeating camp might get the hook counter to 6, and that might not make for an interesting game, but that's another discussion.
There are two types of DbD players: those who seek to win and those who seek to have fun. Normally, there would be a division between casual and ranked matches, and these would be separated from each other, but DbD doesn't have such a system, so they exist in the same place at the same time. This is the biggest problem when it comes to game balance in this game.
Many of the maps and killers are very well done if you take balance out of the equation. (R.P.D. is the best map for me because I like Resident Evil. I think the balance is terrible...)
Winning is not always the same as having fun.
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Accurate. In terms of competitive viability of a game, we have to look at objective win and loss criteria, we cannot consider subjective elements of how fun the gameplay is in that context. And I mean, many of the people competing in these tournaments actually find it very fun to play like this, that's the main reason why they do compete.
And while I actually do think the game could be improved in terms of "fun" and "health" by changing it such that getting as many hooks as possible is encouraged and feasible and camping and slugging not as effective as they are now, I am also convinced that camping and slugging and other such strategies that aim to win by doing other things than merely chasing and hooking constantly also give the game a lot, even in terms of the fun factor. The fact that camping and slugging can end games in a very short period adds a danger quality to the game that can make things much more exciting for both sides, and every trial is much more unique due to not following a set pattern of chases and hookings but being able to spiral in and out of control within seconds, a few decisions and plays snowballing into immense pressure or losses of pressure. Hell, even 3-gen games where it can take ages for progress to be made and it becomes a war of attrition with nobody wanting to make the first over-commitment can be interesting and fun. So yeah, while I do think chase-heavy matches with many hooks happening are the most fun and healthiest gameplay DbD can yield, the existence of the many other strategies and ways for matches to unfold are still very important, for its fun and health included. Likely very important for its popularity too.
There's definitely some adjustments I would still want to see happen, with regards to camping especially, and I would not even be opposed to separating "casual" from "competitive" play with different queues, but yeah, none of that is really relevant for the premise of balance here.
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"
- This is not about competing period, it's about competing against the highest level of opponents with the highest level of stacked loadouts. Please don't take or make this out to mean in your pub matches you can't compete with any of the other killers - in average pub matches even the weakest killers can compete, and even dominate if piloted by players of this caliber.
- Survivors also only have very limited options if they want to compete at this level. In fact, survivors are much more limited once we take into consideration that they need to be 4 players that practice together frequently as a team and coordinate their builds and plays. That's a much more difficult premise to fulfil than the killer equivalent of simply picking the best stuff.
- This tournament only shows what the top-end balance of everyone using the best stuff is like, it does not show whether everything else would be "garbage" in this environment. Maybe kill rates would not go through the roof if survivors started using flashlights or saboboxes instead of BNPs and med-kits; maybe kill rates would not plummet if people started using Huntress, Twins, Oni, Pyramid, etc. - in other tournaments other killers are able to compete perfectly well, with some of the strongest add-ons that are banned in those tournaments it would not be impossible to see them still be able to compete in this tournament as well, and of course, even if they wouldn't average 2 or more kills, there's still a lot of room between "able to compete" and "garbage", especially if we include hook stages. I wouldn't say Oni's and Pinhead's 6 stages here were garbage, for instance; 12 stages are obviously the maximum achievable, so 6 stages would be the equivalent of a 2k if we were to look at balance from that perspective. Not saying 1k 6 stages is necessarily actually a balanced result, but really not garbage either.
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@zarr Why is this argument made(re point 1) that the survivors are brand new players and the killer they vs is a pro? I agree with your point but this argument that one side is brand new and the other side pro can be argued without proving a point either way(de-pip squad vs pub killers).
I would also argue that tournament results do not dictate an ideal state of the game or where we want to go balance wise. Sure the games followed the 2E2K path that the devs desire but watching some gameplay I saw tons of proxy camping + tunneling going on. Yeah the end result maybe was 8 hook states but most players(survivors in particular) scream bloody murder if killers play in this style. So should we only look at post game stats in a vacuum and make the claim that the game is balanced because there were 2 escapes/2 kills and 8 hook states? Even if the killer camped/tunneled and just traded to get most of those states? I'm not trying to take one side or the other here but point out that just analyzing the result independent of the path taken to get that result can give misleading results or support results that most of the players do not like. I do not like using 'hook states' as 1 hook + camping can equal 3 hook states. We should not be disingenuous and call out the delta between a 'hook' and a 'hook state'. Re point 2 and 3 I agree.
Also thank you for the in depth write up and responses, it's been nice to read the responses and see peoples feedback based on your data.
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And thank you for reading and engaging with my lengthy replies and the thread in general. Fair warning: another novel incoming, totally understandable if you won't feel like reading it all of course.
It's not even about pros vs. newbies, average pub lobbies are a wild mix of players, many of them ranging from bad to mediocre even if they have hundreds and thousands of hours in the game. Sure there are better players and SWFs too, but even then, the majority of pub games are full of skill and experience disparities, people playing far from efficiently, gimmicky loadouts, disconcerted decisions and plays and tons of downright mistakes, and even stark differences in how much people care about winning and/or play to win to begin with. And this chaos more often than not benefits the killer player because their skills, experience, decisions and plays will have a greater impact on how rounds develop the greater the degree of messiness in them.
I think this is a good way to highlight why a chaotic environment favours killers strictly: There is nothing a killer can do at any point that will immediately result in a match being lost and over. Even the biggest of mistakes or even literally being AFK won't result in all gens popping instantly and every survivor instantly escaping, there will always be more to play for. Survivors on the other hand can in theory at any point end up in a scenario that is a foregone conclusion, such as ending up being slugged around a hook within a short period. Of course, this is not the norm and as such this fact does not mean the game favours killers per se, but the more "messy" the survivor side (bad players and plays, bad builds, bad attitudes, etc.), the likelier and more common it is that it can happen, and things like NOED turning 0 into 4 kills go to show that even in endgame scenarios where survivors should be even more secure it can and does happen. Just go to the extreme of this and it will be pretty clear: If a survivor disconnects early on in a round, most of anyone understands that the round is pretty much over and the killer will win 9.99 times out of 10 if they aren't completely outmatched. Now apply this strikingly obvious logic to the idea that survivors can (and not seldomly do) behave in ways that are akin to them being disconnected from the round - playing so bad they get taken out of a round very early, killing themselves on hook, not progressing objectives with any dilligence or at all, making various mistakes, even ones that cost other survivors' lives, hell, intentionally sabotaging rounds. If even just one survivor is a weak link like that or let alone refusing to play or play in earnest, the round can quickly turn into a non-round just like a round in which a survivor disconnected early on, and often it just takes the killer abusing this weak link in order for it to happen.
Of course, even having blatant weak links like that or bad attitude players is not the absolute norm in pubs, and less so still now that MMR is in place, but these are also just the most extreme examples that highlight how rounds can quickly fall apart due to them particularly if the killer abuses them - there are way more subtle and less extreme things that can and do happen all the time even if the survivors are competent that while not having the ability to outright end games, still shift them in the killer's favour due to still increasing the impact the killer's decisions and plays will have on the round. And as the sole player constituting their side's performance and making their side's decisions on loadout, strategy, tactics, plays, etc., the killer of course by definition has a completely concerted approach to the game. That approach is not necessarily a good one, but either way, as opposed to survivors it is still completely concerted and not "messy" since one person will be making all the decisions and plays based on their observations and conclusions, their strategies, knowledge and experience, executed as well as their skills allow for. And so yeah, the messier the survivor side, the higher their degree of disconcertedness, and the heavier the impact the killer's concerted effort in terms of all of those things can and will more often than not have.
For random survivors "teaming" up in pub games, the stars kind of have to align in order to present a competitive side for even just an equally experienced and skilled killer opponent. If anything, personally I am surprised that escape rates even are between 40-50% in pubs overall given how much the asymmetric format favours the one player in that chaotic environment. Funnily enough, I think the fact that escape rates are that "high" goes to show that the base game in many constellations (various killers and maps, some perks) is favouring survivors. Of course, at the same time the conclusion then is that the base game has to favour survivors in order for a "live balance" to be even approachingly achievable, if a ~50% escape rate is the goal. Either way, I think the aspect of "skill" (and experience) is most of all the one making the difference, i. e. the fact that the killer player's skill has much more impact potential on a given round than any singular survivor player's skill, that this impact potential increases even more the "messier" the round is, and that the skill disparities that are the norm in pub matches are therefore much more to the detriment of the survivor side.
Sorry for the lengthy and perhaps unnecessarily lengthy explanations for my point. But yeah, the point boils down to my view that skill and experience are the strongest factors and predictors for outcomes of pub matches, and that this is even more true on the killer side, and as such that players are even more rewarded for their skills and experience on the killer side.
And there are many degrees to which this is true. One doesn't have to be a pro killer in order to perform well in pubs, and one doesn't need opponents to be new at the game to do so either. This will be a bit of an oversimplificaion, but it's probably mostly accurate: In pubs, average killer players will average 50% kill rates, competent players 60%, good players 70%, and really good players 80% and more. 50% is in line with the global average, 60% with the top end of the global average, 70% is around the kill rates most veteran killer streamers have, and 80+% are what the best players that try hard to win consistently have (also evidenced by streams, although most of these players are not "streamers", many of them at most stream on an on-and-off basis). For survivor players, their level of skill and experience of course also affects their survival rates, but I guarantee that it does not scale nearly as significantly as it does for killer players. In solo queue, even the best survivors do not have 80+% survival rates. Beyond that, a really good player using the best killer with the best loadout will 4k much more consistently and decisively than even an SWF composed of 4 really good players with the best loadouts using voice communcations will 4-escape. Sure, these tournament teams playing like that in pubs will still win the vast majority of their matches pretty comfortably, but they will not only more regularly have at least 1 person die than the killer will have 1 person escape, but over a large enough sample they will also have notably more matches in which they draw or even lose than the killer. There are Nurse 4k streaks of 300-500 rounds in a row; 4-escape streaks of even just 100 rounds in a row are and always have been unimaginable, and I can't even see survivor "win" streaks (4 or 3 escapes) of 300+ rounds ever happening. Partly because killers can secure at least 1 kill fairly reliably, and partly because meeting strong killer players using the strongest killers and loadouts is much more common an occurrence than meeting strong 4-player SWFs using the strongest loadouts (because the killer is only 1 person having to make this decision, for a survivor side 4 strong players have to come together to do so).
This is how I explain why pubs are statistically killer-sided despite the game in many ways not being killer-sided, and if anything I for one am surprised that pubs are not even more killer-sided than they are. And this is also why I want to encourage people particularly with regards to playing killer to believe that if they spend time learning more about and improving at the game, getting more experience, knowledge and skill, they can actually become able to perform perfectly well in this game. More than that, it is possible to perform more well in this game than in many other competitively more viable games - even the best players in games such as Starcraft don't post win rates of 80+% at the highest MMR; looking at the top 10 players in the highest rank in the Asian (most competitive) region for Starcraft II, their win rates average out to 68%, and these are the top of the top, many of them are tournament players, and they are much better at SC than people that can have 80+% killer win rates in DbD are at DbD.
It's not likely you are still reading this, but to still address the thing about camping and tunnelling: Like I've said before, I do actually think the game would be better if it was changed such that camping, tunnelling and slugging are less effective killing strategies and the game concentrates more on alternating chases and hooks. But for one thing I would not want for them to be removed from the game completely (they have a valid place in the game for various reasons and are even desirable in some ways), and for another we cannot look at balance in any other way than without ignoring the "path" to get there, because as long as these paths exist, players can and will abuse them. Like I've mentioned before, however noble the idea to balance for a reality in which killers even at this level could feasibly win by hooking every survivor 3 times, if we do so without changing the actual reality of the game in which it is possible to camp, tunnel and slug, players that camp, tunnel and slug would win even more reliably and decisively than they already do. And mind you, these strategies even work at the highest level against the most coordinated teams - in pub matches they regularly demolish most survivor groups, and often it is laughably easy to win abusing them not least because survivors in them are not in a tournament mentality but simply feel bad for letting people die on hook or want to save their friends, or are frustrated getting tunnelled and camped and throw their lives away. For anyone that doesn't usually camp or tunnel, I encourage you to try it out - your primary goal should be to get the first survivor out of the round as soon as possible. I think you will find the difficulty and entire dynamic of your matches will change significantly, and if nothing else this might lead to a change in your perspective on the game's "balance". And so yeah, we cannot ignore or let alone balance the game without the realities of camping, tunnelling and slugging in mind, no matter how unfun they may be, and precisely because they can be unfun.
To note: That doesn't mean camping, tunnelling and slugging are necessary to perform well in pubs, I and many other players do perfectly well all the time without "abusing" those strategies, but they are definitely the most effective strategies if you're trying to kill as many survivors as possible as consistently as possible, and they can even carry players to punch well above their weight against more skilled and experienced opponents, if even sometimes just because many players in pubs won't play optimally against them even if they know how and are able to. I have been getting tons of perkless Legion 4ks in Central EU high MMR by tunnelling and camping hard, something I usually don't do anymore because I feel fairly bad about it and don't even have enough fun doing so to justify it, I have more fun going for as many fair and proper chases as possible, but with the weakest killer in the game and no perks it can actually be a pretty fun challenge to try and win by any means necessary, and it goes to show that the game in its current state (of balance and matchmaking) is still decidedly in favour of killers in pubs if you are at least competent and have no qualms abusing those strats.
Post edited by zarr on1 -
Thanks for the interesting thread and the engaging replies, it was really nice to read
Quite a sarcastic remark but I felt it under my skin like a sort of itch that while reading this thread I'd come across some well known forum faces negating even this kind of evidence because if doesn't fit their "killer is inexorably weak" mindset :/
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Nah just get worse and you get better. The magic of MMR.
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