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Killer is the 'power role' so it needs to kill more
Title.
Help me understand this
I get that dbd is an asymmetrical game as in one strong player (killer) goes against four weaker players (survivors), but that does mean the killer needs to get kills easier and survivor escape less and less?
I truly dont get it, the balance of any game with players against players (even if 1v4) should try to be 50%-50%, or at least try to be close to that number if not if you lose a game as surv (or win as killer) how can you really tell is because you lack skill / items / perks and is not because of game design.
Comments
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Power role, many players aren't even able to use their power efficiently and they complain if they do not get the desired results.
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The game should be balanced for both sides it should never be survivor sided or killer sided but in an asymmetrical game like DBD it is really hard to make the game balanced and fair for both sides.
When people talk about "power role" they mean that the killer should be that big scary 9 ft tall Japanese demon that should strike fear into survivors and make them feel weak,thing is DBD stop being scary after like what 10-20 hours maybe even less the game is more of a 1V4 PvP game than a horror game,the horror aspect is nonexistent we dont even have the old fog that old maps used to have.
We should try going toward a balanced game with no power role or whatever people say,currently SoloQ is miserable for most people and something needs to be done about it our SoloQ enjoyers are in Pain rn.
so yeah no power role but then the question remains the same how do you balance an asymmetrical game such as DbD 1v4 PvP is really hard to balance.
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Power role is something that has dominance. It must not be in competitive game (otherwise who would want to play predefined weak role), so no power roles. Of course other thing that due to asymmetric nature and bazillion of variables and nuances makes it lopsided to one side, but that's the issue of balancing, not desired design.
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This is the first time i’ve heard someone use “competitive” for dbd
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That's exactly what i was thinking. Ever since the devs published the new stats i am constantly reading comments of people justifying the 61%-39% ratio with "killer must get more kills" "they are supposed to be strong and scary", "escape should not happen very often, "survs should be happy with losing".
And seeing the devs also state that it is intended that one side has more advantage over the other in a pvp enviroment escape my reasoning
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Why are competitive games expected to be a 50/50 win rate?
That’s often untrue of a lot of games especially asymmetric ones.
thematically you’d expect dbd to have a slight killer skew, the premise of the game is survivors try to flee from big monster in a nightmare realm.
That design requires an adequately threatening antagonist to be achieved.
Mechanically dbd is pretty bland it takes the threat of elimination to make the game interesting.
If the Killer was a really hard to beat AI people would relish the challenge but because it’s another player people can’t stand the thought of any imbalance that might make them lose.
Why because it’s not fair to lose to another player, but it’s not really meant to be fair in this case that’s the point.
It’s asymmetric survival horror this isn’t a setting where you’ll get 50/50 odds and that’s ok. Because it’s thematically appropriate for the game.
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Don't worry. The amount of people unable to comprehend that the devs want killer to feel threatening will almost assuredly result in a near complete reversal of the rebalance patch. Then we can go back to April player numbers and 10 minute survivor queues.
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This. The killer is supposed to be much more superior to the survivor.
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if there are 40,000 players online in a day, at least 8,000 of those players needs to take up the killer role in order to meet the demand of the 32,000 survivor players. That's 1/5th of the player base with the weight of having to take up the role the majority of the players oppose, generally punch down on, and despise because it's the 1 "powerful villain" against the 4 "good guys". For an Asymmetrical game to work, you have to make the role of the Villain appealing enough that at least 1/5th of the player base will actually WANT to play it.
Nobody is going to want to play the role of the villain if the role is too weak to do their job. New players especially need to be able to pick up on it fast and enjoy it until they get experienced enough to start competing against the mid-higher skilled survivor players, otherwise the game becomes what it what it was considered to be for a long time in 2016-2018... "a bully simulator" wherein 4 players gang up on and humiliate the 5th for their entertainment because of how unbalanced the game is in their favor.
Every Patch leading up to late 2018 were historically infamous for making the game easier for the survivors, and so much harder for the killers. Finally in late 2018, and throughout all of 2019, the devs decided to start making balance changes to the game mechanics to improve the Killer experience, while nerfing the survivors to a reasonable degree. This sprung new life and interest in the game, and lowered the survivor queue times, because the killer role could more comfortably compete in the mid-high end as they no longer felt like they were queuing up to be bullied.
Post 2019, the game slipped again down the path of making survivors more and more powerful, while the killers were getting weaker, culminating in a particularly egregious couple of patches (SBMM going online and hour of the witch DLC) that resulted in making the killer role less appealing to new players, caused a lot of killer players to drop the role, raised the survivor queue times and basically almost killed the game. This last mid-chapter patch however was a massive overhaul of balance improving the QoL of the Killer, while again reasonably nerfing the survivors back to a more balanced level.
That 8% rise in killers win rate? That's mostly factoring in all the New killer players at lower competitive levels of play due to how the killer role became a little easier to take up and enjoy, which resulted in enough players wanting to take up the role that we now have a surplus of killer players to meet the demand of survivors. So now, if there's 40k players online at a time, the amount of killers is above the minimum required 8k, resulting in lower queue times for survivors and killers in total, but also meaning that the demand for survivors is higher, which is why you hardly ever see the "BP bonus Incentive" switch over from survivor to killer.
What the Devs have been doing recently are GOOD things. Despite popular opinion/whining, They haven't actually nerfed survivors "into the ground" making the role completely unappealing to play (that's a gross overreaction), and have improved the QoL of killers to make it fun enough for new players to enjoy.
Basically what I'm saying is this: Powerful killers = more available to meet the demand of the rest of the player base. Powerful Survivors = Less killers wanting to play resulting in longer queue times.
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.....Yes. Also, 50-50 didn't mean you killed a few people every game. It meant you killed either 3 people, 4 people or NOBODY. Escaping shouldn't be something you can just expect after making blunders.
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It still comes out as a way less fun game. I am a long time killer main and I actually hated 6.1.0 because it made the bar so low for killer anyone can pick up a mid tier killer and kill survivors with thousands of hours. Survivor has slowly gone from superpowered to regular human over the past 4 years and it's an objectively more boring experience on both sides. Survivor was way more fun with things like exhaustion while running, the real iron will, etc etc with killers balanced around those power levels as well.
Now I can easily use perk combinations and killers that literally guarantee kills even if I play like an absolute dog and it's a lot less rewarding. Q times through the roof don't help either
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The thing about DBD is, it's a 1v4. If both sides were equally strong the 4 would still feel strength in numbers thus playing more reckless, finding new ways to win or make the game easier on them. The next phase of that is, how else could it be, bullying. Let's be honest. If a team of 4 managed to overpower one very strong individual, they would feel good about it (as they should). But because there is no real way for the survivors to express this in hunting the killer down and killing them instead they'll settle for the next best thing. My point is that killers need to feel powerful both to play as and go against to an extend where survivors don't take a risk in playing bold just to assert dominance. I think a kill rate of about 60%, while it may sound high, would serve this purpose.
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But the same thing could be said for the other side.
Nobody is going to want to play the role of the 'good guys' if the role is too weak and are being killed left and right. Imagine new players getting into the game with killers being like this. and this is not taking account of camping, tunneling, slugging, bleeding out purposely.
i didnt play dbd before last year so i dont know how the state of the game was before the first resident evil chapter(when i started) but while i totally agree that dbd must never be a bully simulator against killers, it also does not need to be a slaughter of soloQ players.
Maybe the devs made 6.1.0 to improve killer QoL but at the same time it made soloQ worse than ever.
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but why you seriouly need 61%kill rate to feel powerful to play killer?
I mean, kills rate could be 50% or 55% and still get 4k now and then. You dont need to constantly kill every surv to be able to play your role.
I dont enter every game expecting to get 4man escape
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And yet, you are wrong because the balance isn't toward a 50-50 is it?
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And yet, it is their desired design isn't it?
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Because your reasoning is wrong.
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So don't pick killers and perks that guarantee 4k.
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The generalised points in the article aren’t that relevant here, because we are talking theme vs function. The psychology of fairness is a different discussion.
My point is that thematically dbd isn’t really meant to be fair. No one would watch a horror film if the monster was no threat to the characters. We have super hero films for that and they are bland as drywall from a story perspective.
While a 50/50 escape rate may seem fair it’s not that interesting of a game. DBD is pretty mechanically bland, the game play isn’t that engaging.
It’s the threat of elimination that makes it interesting. The greater that threat the more interesting the game.
Most games are stacked against the player and in the general sense the player here is the survivor role. But we need a monster to play against, they could have gone the GTFO route and made an AI, but direct competition is more visceral.
So we have a pvp experience where you can be the monster but it’s only really effective if the monster is a threat. So the monster should mechanically be the equivalent of 4x survivors.
Which will likely create a natural skew toward the killer in game outcome given a lot of interactions in game are 1v1 where survivors are kinda screwed.
So 50/50 being the goal of fairness in this scenario is a bit off. You’re probably looking more akin to 60/40 power of mechanics fixed, weighted against team coordination, highly variable.
That’s ok in an asymmetric setting where fairness is inevitably going to be skewed somewhat.
This is DBD not pong there a greater caveats to outcome beyond just the idea that everyone is on an equal playing field. Because they really aren’t and attempts to make them so water down the game experience thematically.
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Soloq better than ever*
Fixed it for you.
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Of course I agree that killers shouldn't expect a 4k every game. But killers need to be noticable stronger than survivors. Else it wouldn't feel like an accomplishment to escape or fun to play as killer because one might feel powerless. I'm not certain how high the kill rate needs to be exactly to achieve what I stated before. But I would argue that a 50-55% ratio would not suffice, since you most certainly can't tell the difference between 50% and 55% without official data. I also don't like the fact that it's almost always a 4k or a 0-1k (depending on if the killer tries to secure a kill). It would probably feel fairer, if they found a way to decrease the amounts of those extrems and instead increase the amount of 2k's. However I have no idea how that would be accomplishable.
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I'm not sure either of you grasp a good part of what I was getting at, so, I hate to do this, but let me "spell it out" for you (ugh, putting it like that makes me feel so dirty... I don't mean to be an ass here so understand that in this response I don't mean to sound hostile, and no condescension is indented):
40k players, 1/5th of which needs to be Killer in order to make this game work, and any less than that means that survivors experience higher queue times, and if killers aren't appealing means that at worse, less players will want to play the role that makes this game work. Despite everything you may believe, the reality of this game is that the MINORITY of players choose to play killer, and the MAJORITY play survivor.
Making the game slightly less appealing to the MAJORITY, has much less impact on the function of this game than making it unappealing to the MINORITY since without anyone wanting to play that role, the game doesn't work.
For the longest time, the devs appealed heavily to the MAJORITY (survivors) to the point that it left the MINORITY (Killers) starting to wonder why they even played in the first place. The recent mid chapter patch Changed all of that, not just for the veterans, but also for the new players interested in taking up the minority role.
While you may THINK the survivor role, especially the solo queue is "Worse than ever", honestly, it's not so bad that it's unplayable, a far cry from being a bully simulator for them, and the killers aren't in fact "Guaranteed" a win just because they chose to play that role, no matter how bad they are at it!
TBH, as someone who plays both roles relatively equally for the past 4 years, I haven't noticed too much of a difference in my survivor win rate to think that it's unplayable. In fact, I also haven't noticed that much of a difference in my wins vs losses as Killer either, but maybe that's because I've been playing this game since it was released, and have thousands of hours of experience, and thus am only playing on the mid-high SBMM.
Honestly, while your rebuttals to what I've said do have merit, at the same time, I just haven't experienced anything anywhere near the "solo queue survivor experience hell hole" that you are emphasizing in your responses. In fact, I find that the survivor experience, while getting a bit more difficult, is still very manageable, and killer is only a slightly better experience. Something tells me that this may be very different for me if I took a few months off to reduce my SBMM level to a noob rating, and then picked it back up, but I'm not gonna do that, because I've earned my place in this game, and I'd hate to purposely make myself weak just to prove a point.
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I’m curious…
Do you suspect the players describing poor solo queue experiences are lying?
Near the end of your comment you typed you don’t want to drop your own ranking to test the quality of lower solo queue matches. But that bewilders me because if you’re certain people are hyperbolizing their experiences, which appear quite contrary to your own, it stands to reason you would think you wouldn’t face much or any difficulty if you entered similar match conditions (low to mid rank solo queue).
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I always thought 'Power role' in assym terms meant that they couldn't 'die'
Like in HSH, VHS, FF13, Evil Dead etc - the monsters can die in those games but in DBD they can only 'lose' but they can't lose by being killed/banished.
More to it than that I'm sure, but DBD has at least always stayed true to the idea that the monster is unstoppable in the sense that they cannot be killed; only halted/escaped from.
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People are really losing their heads over the ~60% kill rate. It largely just means most games that would have ended in a 0K before are now ending in a 1K. It would be far more concerning if the kill rate was 75% as that would actually mean that killers are winning a majority of games.
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Making too much sense buddy
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a 50% overall kill rate doesn't work because low skill survivors, which is the majority, die way too much.
This is why the stats always show killers like Pig and Pinhead with super high kill rates.
So unless you want to have killer be unplayable at anything resembling skilled play, no we should not have a 50% overall Kill rate. It should be higher.
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More like power bottom role.
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I don't suspect they are lying, only that they are heavily exaggerating, so yeah, Hyperbolizing their experiences. They may have found the game more challenging as survivor, and easier as killer, but to be frank, I just don't believe it's as bad as they are claiming due to my own experiences.
I'm not trying to "gatekeep" or flaunt my excessive experience either. Just point out that what the devs have done recently isn't as bad a thing as they are saying.
As for lowering my SBMM to "noob" levels, there's no point in it for me, as while I can admit that doing so, the solo queue vs killer experience will probably be very different from where I currently am, and having taken multiple months off to re-experience this, I'd probably get a glimpse of where the majority of those complaining about the experience, namely the newer players, are coming from... yet, because I know how to play this game better than any new player would, and have much previous experience, that change in my opinion wouldn't last very long.
I don't want to drop where I am in DbD, because honestly, I feel that it would be the same as if I created a new account and "Smurfed" despite having been absent from the game for a few months, and while that may give me a few rounds in the beginning wherein I get the new player experience, ultimately, I'd still have years of knowledge beyond the normal new player, and ultimately just win too easily, regardless of which role I Play. You're damn right I wouldn't experience the same difficulty as an actual new player, so there's no point in trying to.
Overall, to do that would be asinine, disingenuous, and a heavy waste of my time. As far as what I believe about them, and this will sound cruel: they are overblowing the situation, and doing so because either they don't have enough experience in this game to be at the mid-high level of players, they are noobs that hate losing to killers and refuse to improve their tactics, or they just want to whine about it in hopes that the devs will change their minds and undo the aforementioned "reasonable nerfs" survivors have recently received because they simply had more "fun" in the previous patches due to the lack of challenge in their opposition. An opposition that was, and always has been the minority of the player base.
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so you are telling me that it's suppose to be a 50~50
while its a 4 v 1?
yea no chief
and quick reminder 80% of the killers suck
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The devs wanted higher kill rates and so they made changes to assist that.
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people need to stop think of this game as competitive, I mean it is and it really isn't to random how each match turn out don't get me started on the bugs and hacker in this game.
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Killers' "power-role" regarding killrate is bs. It wouldn't even work if killers were be AI controlled. And in a game where you play vs other humans this is just perceived as unfair.
What does the game gain from giving killers killrate higher than 50%? There won't be enough killers? This is bs again, even in the days of infinities, when survivors were overpowered and when they could self-care during chases and activate sprint burst without exhaustion, there were enough killers.
To accentuate the horror nature of the game? DBD is not perceived as a horror game by anyone who has played it for more than 5 games already. There's not a single reason for killers to have a killrate higher than 45-55%, apart from some biased killer-main who just want easy wins.
Killers having high escape rate is just unfair to survivors and they are the majority in the game. If making the majority of your playerbase frustrated from playing their game is what DEVs want then they have no idea how game balance and game design work whatsoever.
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In context of asymmetrical games, theres the "power" role and the "numbers" role. It means that 1 powerful character is pitted versus numerous weaker characters. Power role just means that its the role with the "fewer but stronger" characters vs the role with the "weakish but numerous" charascters.
If theyre able to die is irrelevant to the naming of the power role.In Evolve it was the hunters that only die if all 4 were incapacitated at once.
Personally i cringe whenever someone in this forum wrongly mocks killers with the " mah powerrole muwst be OP" fake argument. The power role by default must be able to keep up with all number role players. Thats why it has to be stronger. But some people dont seem to understand the power vs number concept.
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Why should one person have an inherent winning advantage in a video game?
Survivors shouldn't be oppressed fodder for a single person wanting to role play a power fantasy.
There is a reason people are quitting survivor because the game is unfair and unfun.
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This
I find horror subjective amniesa and outlast scary but games like deadspace and resident evil have spook elements but never make me scared
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Thanks Google.
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Thankfully noone is saying either one of those things. It's widely understood that Killer is already the power role.
Now gameplay is simply reflecting that a little more accurately.
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let me get this straight a 4 v 1 AND SOMEHOW THAT"S UNFAIR?
6 years those 4 players have been a power role and now that killers are being actual killers and not play things, that's unfair and unbalanced
and let me remind you of something
killers have to do : gen pressure, chasing survivors, mindgaming, dealing with boons, dealing with bad maps, dealing with shack, hitting gens and dying inside when the survivors pats the gen and removes the regression, dealing with body blocking, aim their power if they have any
Survivors have to do : Do gens, rescue, heal, do a 360 and think u are good when in realize auto aim is what's causing the killer to miss and optionally cleanse a dull totem or boon it, find a chest IF THEY WANT, and open the door, escape a chase which in some maps is easy, hexes which are suppose to punish those 4 players have the worst spawns so nobody even uses them, even noed is rare these days
and don't even get me started on every killer powers, i mean what's ghostfaces gonna do in a chase to catch up to lithe or sprint burst NOTHING
but no clearly that's so unfair and unfun and so unbalanced
if this was a 4v 4 it would make sense but a 4 v 1 don't even tell me one side shouldn't have a bit more advantage
not everyone is a nurse and not everyone is blight, and a lot of killers suffer thanks to maps, and people dc because they are sore losers, i had people dc while im playing trapper on Yamaoka estate, one of the biggest map and i was playing nicely, BUT CLEARLY THAT"S TOO OP to even PREDICT where survivors run and put traps in there RIGHT?
Post edited by AcelynnBen on0 -
I want touch on your points of theme and the threat of elimination making the game interesting.
As a goal, that's absolutely true (I agree its something the game should shoot for). The problem is that DBD doesn't actually accomplish it that frequently and the kill rates are a bad indicator.
No horror movie would be interesting if at the 40 minutes mark all the heroes were dead. Horror grabs its excitement from the prospect that a character may or may not escape. Both have to remain true to keep the tension up. When a survivor is out before a gen is even done, a killer is just face camping a hook, or the survivors are just getting stomped, the mood isn't 'oh my god, we might get eliminated' like in a horror movie its 'yeah, this match is done'.
Part of the issue is that if this was mirroring the horror theme 4k and 4 escapes would both be rare events, with the middle being much more common. Except its usually 4k, 1k, or 0k. Now as a purely competitive game, having either side completely win or lose, with middling results being rare, is perfectly acceptable, but it doesn't actually match the theme.
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I can live with a kill rate of 60%. It could be higher even. I do wish in forum conversations when Survivors complain about the difficulty, killer mains would start with 'I realize I have the easier role...'
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I'm gonna play devils advocate here for 1 part of your statement ps I agree Boons are bs
Surivors also have to deal with bad rng
mindgames
bad teammates
(Sometimes) sandbags
Stop their actions to help their teammates
Hexes "which are boons bs just better Hexes with no rng to it"
And variety of killer powers
So the average swf of 3 or 4 have it better but it's unfair to say they have it easy
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I wonder what the number would look like if the spike in losers who suicide on the hook early/Dc didn't happen.
Or if survivors just stopped doing that and always tried in general.
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Killer is the power role and survivors should find the game somewhat difficult unless they work well as a team
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i never said any side has it easy, but killers have to put up with so much as one person, i mean one person could be rescuing and healing while the others are 2 doing gens
mindgames go both ways, both survivors and killers have to deal with those
bad teammates, thank MMR For that (cries in piggy)
sandbags, i don't even know what that means lol
Hexes aren't even a threat anymore unless u get like some amazing spawn
and killer powers well again that's part of the gameplay
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People forget that these numbers are accumulated from all the player base of the game. It's not just high mmr or low, the kill and escape rates are brought from the entire player base. So taking that into consideration, I think you can see that its actually good numbers.
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Very true, I had good games against Blight on Midwich with Pain Res and DMS, escaping isn't a guaranteed thing but it's not literally impossible.
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Never had longer survivor queues than 1-2 minute and that was at night, was always instant during the day even with crossplay off.
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Well, then you will be ok if those numbers were reversed. 39% killrate and 61% escape rate. Those numbers would be across all ranks, so they would be good numbers.
Oh wait, actually we had similar numbers after DBD was released and killers were complaining every day and were even doing several strikes for days, refusing to play DBD. But if Devs brings that balance back, I'm fine with it I guess.
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"Dead By Daylight is a multiplayer (4v1) horror game."
Popular user defined tags : Horror / Survival Horror.
Being competitive does not change the theme of the game. Though sure, change it to fit your narrative because you are crying about not surviving most of your matches.
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