http://dbd.game/killswitch
Is DBD's Balance Our Fault?
I know a lot of people are going to see this and instantly think that this question is stupid. "The game's balance is the hands of BHVR, so it is their fault clearly," but I think this is an interesting question to approach.
DBD's balance is based on statistics, which a lot of people pointed out as flawed, which it is, but those statistics can be influenced by us, most notably, killrates.
Ive seen a LOT of people complain that Killer as a role is weaker compared to (SWF) Survivor, and the developers have tried their best to shift things around to benefit Killer, but I often wonder if the game would have gone a different direction if the players played different.
Camping and tunneling are tactics that Killers often employ to try and bring more pressure to the game, to have an easier time securing hooks and kills, and I feel like most people in the community have accepted that these tactics are not going anywhere anytime soon.
Part of me wonders, if Killers did not camp and tunnel, and the Killrates were lower a result, would Killers receive more significant buffs? Better yet, if people did not camp 3-gens for entire hours, would certain regression perks remained in a strong state without changes?
Are these unreasonable questions to ask? Maybe, since obviously not everyone would follow what everyone else does, but I think it is still an interesting question nonetheless.
Comments
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The majority of people don’t play dbd at a high level which is where the balance problems come out. This in turn leaves the majority of people voicing balance opinions not actually understanding the games balance.
A second point is one that many already mention but it’s an asymmetrical game which means there will always be vastly more vocal people in favor of one side which can give a very skewed perception of the communities opinion on a change.
If you were having surgery done would you want “everyone’s” opinion on how the surgery should be done to matter? Or would you just want the people experienced and trained in surgery getting an opinion on your surgery? Something to think about as we put the “majorities” opinion into determining balance changes when the majority doesn’t understand the games balance and many have a bias view point.
When we’re on the topic of who to blame for balance problems, something else to consider is all the people suiciding on hook further skewing data. Something that is highly prevalent. While they say they don’t solely look at data for changes which there are a few examples to support this, their history tends to illustrate that the data does run their changes the vast, vast majority of the time to a detriment.
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Id also like to briefly mention:
- Yes, there are people who purposefully throw matches, this can lead to skewed killrates.
- This also does not consider people who farm or purposely let certain Survivors go, this can also lead to skewed killrates.
Also I disagree with the idea that the "majority" (casual) are influencing balance decisions when a lot of the changes being made are harmful to casual players; furthermore the new/less-experienced players' experience is being made further complicated and overwhelming.
The healing changes, for example, Ive seen a lot of high-level players disagree with, because it does not agree some of the actual issues with the game (such as toolboxes remaining untouched and Generator repair speed-up remaining untouched). It is something neither high-level nor casual players can get behind, at least from what Ive seen.
Meanwhile you have people spouting that "the next patch will kill the game" and "Killers are leaving the game (here is why)" but I seriously just cant help but wonder if this is a product of our creation, like, could we - as a community - prevented this from happening?
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-"Camping and tunneling are tactics that Killers often employ to try and bring more pressure to the game, to have an easier time securing hooks and kills, and I feel like most people in the community have accepted that these tactics are not going anywhere anytime soon."
This is the delusion of the unimaginative mind. We could very easy stop camping and tunneling. Let's imagine some base game kit changes:
- When the killer has exactly 1 player on the hook (and 4 players are alive) the generator with the most progress immediately becomes unable to be repaired and immediately begins regressing. The killer has 15 seconds to move 16m away from the hook or this effect ends. The survivors can end the effect if they unhook the hooked player. The 15 second timer is reset if the killer is in a chase around the hook.
- Whenever a killer hooks a survivor for the first time they debuff all survivor actions by 9% if no one has been killed yet. This debuff will remain until the trial ends. Where do we get the 9% number? If the debuff is 8% then it's just more efficient to tunnel the first player hooked out of the game.
- All maps will now be 9000m² or smaller. Until all maps are reworked to be that size killers without teleports or movement speed cannot play those maps unless the killer specifically uses a map offering. Survivors playing against a "no movement" killer using a map offering would have all maps with a surface area larger than 9000m² become invalid. In other words using a farm map offering would only be able to take Trapper to the abattoir map as all other maps in the tileset are too large. Blight and Nurse and any killer that can teleport or has a very fast movement power (Billy/Demo/ Freddy/Sadako/etc.) would be unaffected.
- No map will ever have more than 14 pallets. More pallets on every map will be "unsafe" meaning they have a long side and a short side so the killer can "mind game" the pallet. If the map includes a SWF then 2 pallets are removed from the map.
- DBD will rebalance all tiles to have less maximum linkage than is possible right now. Having lots of linked strong tiles allow players to loop those tiles without using resources.
-"Are these unreasonable questions to ask?"
No they are completely valid. Most of the balancing feedback comes from people who do not understand the game and "feel bad" when they lose a match without even knowing why they lost.
-"DBD's balance is based on statistics, which a lot of people pointed out as flawed,"
DBD looks at the end result without considering how we got there. This is problematic if you are familiar with rigged wins/losses in sumo wrestling. In short some Sumo matches are arranged losses so certain wrestlers preserve their rank. If you didn't know what was going on it might look genuine. But people have figured out that there is clearly cheating in sumo wrestling just to help other fellow wrestlers out.
How does that relate to DBD? If you don't measure a statistic then you can't measure how it influenced the match. If you just look at the outcome you will miss how everything came together for either a survivor to win a match or for the killer to lose.
DBD does not track when hook events happen vs when generators are completed. This is a big problem because if people mess up at the end the killer might get two kills that should have been easy escapes. Does anyone really think DBD is a fun/fair game if there is one to three hooks before the gates are powered? The DBD stats suggest that's not a problem.
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To better clarify.
I am not saying "there is nothing that can be done about camping and tunneling". I just personally believe that BHVR is going to nothing (or bare minimum) to actually handle it.
To me, personally, it feels like any suggestion I give just goes nowhere, and even with accessibility, I had to fight tooth and nail only to get bare minimum features that almost every other game has, and even then, I was not alone while doing it, it took me fueling an entire movement on DBD Forums and Twitter to get it actually going somewhere.
And my question is regarding how they make changes, if BHVR is so keen on using data, what would happen if we skewed the data?
Idk, I just do not have the same hope that I use to, DBD has taken what hope I had for the game improving and thrown it into a meat grinder.
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There are way, way, way less farming killers than suicides, so definitely not a close comparison at all. The suicides are a multiple times on a daily basis whereas I can’t even remember the last farm match I saw. The skews are definitely much more in one direction.
Also I completely disagree on balancing against casuals. There are some changes that are worse for casuals but the games casual player base is extremely catered to and balanced for to an extremely larger extent, like it’s not even close. Way too much for that matter. By and large the game is balanced around players with sub 100 hours.
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What about giving Survivors hatch though?
I know a lot of people who do that, even I do it a lot. I mean you definitely do not see it as much as you use to but people still definitely do it nonetheless.
Also I never said we should balance around casual players, I just said that I do not agree with the idea that BHVR is balancing around casual players, especially when the changes they make are directly harmful to casual players. BHVR uses statistics to make changes, the issue is that BHVR does not know why those statistics are the way that they are.
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"The majority of people don’t play dbd at a high level which is where the balance problems come out. This in turn leaves the majority of people voicing balance opinions not actually understanding the games balance."
To be fair, if 90% of players have a 20% win rate against X specific strategy, just because the remaining 10% manage to get said strategy to around 50% win rate doesn't mean the strategy doesn't require balancing.
If a strategy requires 3000 hours of play and an extensive youtube guide with several matches on a curated environment to train how to counter it, you have to accept that perhaps the counter is a little bit inaccessible for a normal person and, for the sake of the game's health, requires some rebalancing.
And I'm not even talking specifically about this game. This is game balancing 101. Other games constantly try to tune up strategies in such a way that the difference in success between common play and high level play isn't too big, and will always lean towards strategies being useless in common play and balanced in pro instead of oppressive in common and balanced in pro for the sake of the game's health and the playerbase's happiness.
Under no circumstances should a strategy be deemed "balanced" if only tournament level players are able to counter it. That's ignoring the vast majority of your player base that are making the strategy more likely to succeed than to fail on average. You know... unbalanced.
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-"I just personally believe that BHVR is going to nothing (or bare minimum) to actually handle it."
Then I would 100% agree with you. The devs rely on camping and tunneling to win. They do not play at a level where they have a good understanding of the game.
Furthermore they are highly reluctant to make changes to DBD where killer is better balanced by Survivor feels "bad" to play.
-"Also I completely disagree on balancing against casuals. There are some changes that are worse for casuals but the games casual player base is extremely catered to and balanced for to an extremely larger extent, like it’s not even close."
Games that are actually balanced make the experience fun for low/medium/high skill play. They make it so that the highest skill players are limited and make sure the people with no skill are still having a decent experience.
DBD basically has no balancing at the upper end of the skill limit. This is a problem because it lets survivor walk all over every killer except Blight/Nurse.
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It is worth the thought though...
If we played the game as intended we would have to deal with "meta" perks
We wouldn't have to deal with OP Killers cause we would play different Killers
If we didn't care about MMR or 4K's and 4E's then things would be different
But we are the kind of people whom will find the easiest way to win or come as close as they can
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Balancing around top tier play is not a good way to balance a game. The entire point to balancing is to make the game as fair and fun as possible for the most people possible. Only looking at high tier play which covers a tiny percentage of players will not achieve that.
@topic While I can see an argument for this I feel the core issue still revolves around BHVR. Specifically their inability to create balanced maps. Maps cause the biggest swing imo.
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What would you consider high tier play? Games are typically doing general balance around the top 5-10% of players.
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People getting close to the soft cap.
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So soft cap should be around 5%. They showed kill rates which are 60% overall and top 5% at 60% as well. 60% in dbd should be what 50% is in other games.
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Balancing for the top does not hurt the lower players as we have an mmr system that would change their number until they were back to winning and losing exactly as much as they were before. So it doesn’t really hurt them but now the top is actually balanced. Balancing for the top also gives all players agency in the outcome of a match as they can always improve at the game. Balancing for the bottom leaves higher end players with no agency and at the mercy of bad balance. All players need agency in games.
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Your post is asking killer to voluntary lose on purpose to appease survivor players. that is ok for killer player who not competitive and do not care too much about end game result but competitive players that want to win do not like losing.
i think dbd balances killers among highest standard of skill but balances survivor around average standard of skill. that is my opinion to why killer struggle vs higher level survivors. the killer powers are watered down for average players to do well that when the killer player faces experienced survivor that understand nuance of looping and the killer power, the killer is ineffective because the power is balanced around not so good players.
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You already mentioned it but that’s not exactly an accurate comparison.
Fashion is subjective, hence asking most people and not relying on a fashion designer makes sense.
A lot of issues in DBD are objective as we can look at the numbers in objective times, average chases ect. Yes before we go there, not ALL are objective, just many. Objective things you would want the “experts” rather than popular opinion, even if it’s not something as extreme as surgery.
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You’re taking everything to the extremes and being hyperbolic with your examples. I never said or implied something crazy like tournament play. All I referenced was from the top down balancing. Top down is more like the top 25% of players, not tournament which is like top 1%.
You also don’t need all those crazy hours or guides to perform well when balanced top down. This is again exaggerating tremendously. They simply need to keep practicing and improve at the game. It gives everyone agency.
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Where did I ever say people should voluntarily lose on purpose?
This entire post is a hypothetical question, could we, as a community, alter the outcome of the game? People like to throw around the idea that balance is entirely in BHVR's hands, but what if we had more influence than we give ourselves credit for?
That's it, that is all this post is about. Im not asking people to throw matches. Im not asking people to play every match like it is a tournament. Im just asking a question.
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All games balance around top tier play. The fact is that it is unfair to people who have put in time to balance the game around people who don’t. Why play if my effort doesn’t matter?
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I'd say it's probably equal parts our interference and BHVR's odd balance ideas.
Nobody wanted or asked for the original Billy changes. Everyone gave very negative feedback, most of it constructive. BHVR pushed it to live. Same thing is probably going to happen with Billy again.
On the other hand, Freddy rework. Everyone wanted it because Freddy was a bottom-tier Killer for years.
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Yes. a Game is shaped by its players, the statistics will reflect us. But it does not reflect what a healthy way to make the game work is, that is the designers at bHVR's job to figure out. Make a theory and implement, see the evolution and result. If Killers avoid tunneling/camping then they might change the kill rates, but I think they might just drop in MMR.
bHVR can also see what we care about the most, from comments and feedback so that helps then push the game is what direction is healthy. Now the number 1 complaint from Killers have always been its stressful, there isn't enough time and Killers seek out the best strategies as hard they can too, they camp and tunnel. (presumably, I don't do that often.) So then you have a goal which you can develop changes to the game to achieve.
If we had a time machine to visit another time line and steal a copy of the game we would know :D
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Part of me wonders, if Killers did not camp and tunnel, and the Killrates were lower a result, would Killers receive more significant buffs?
As much as I hate going against this playstyle, it's not the player's fault that these tactics work. That's BHVR's fault. The best built-in way (so not including perks) to slow down generator repair and keep the match from ending so you have more time to get kills is to take out a survivor as fast as possible. People's repair speeds aren't slower after being hooked. Survivors aren't really penalized for being hooked other than being one step closer to death, but it doesn't matter at all until they are actually dead.
Killers aren't rewarded for "spreading the love." If anything, they're penalized, because like I said, hook states don't matter, only deaths.
It doesn't help that tunneling and camping are the most intuitive ways to play. There's no tutorial that teaches to pressure gens. This game is not beginner friendly. A few weeks ago I went against a killer who did really poorly and he happened to be streaming. Turned out he was brand new and after a few games of camping hooks his chat had convinced him to spread out hooks, go after multiple survivors. Well, he not only got stomped but he earned fewer Bloodpoints than he did when he was camping. So the streamer said, "Yeah, I'm going back to camping the hook." Who's surprised by that? Who can blame him?
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In my honest opinion, a lot of people that I see complain about X Y or Z tend to sound as though they haven't bothered to "git gud" first and complain later.
In other words, a lot of people seem to be very quick to open their mouths, take other's people feedback as facts before trying something out themselves and have focused way too much on perks and builds to the point they can't even properly play a role anymore without crutches (examples of this are killers on 4 slowdowns, camping and tunneling 24/7 that then complain they're facing comp SWF's and that the game is 100% survivor sided when they have boosted themselves to that "skill" level, or a Survivor only player exclusively queuing with a premade group and then complaining they can't cope/survive for more than a minute when solo).
I have to say though, some update changes seem to come out of nowhere, like with the Billy's add-ons, so I wouldn't say it's "our fault" (because of that, and because not everyone is a whiny mosquito).
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I personally do not mind tunneling and camping, I have accepted it as part of the game, and I do think it will never leave this game truly unless BHVR actually does something about it. So I do agree with the "blame the game, blame the developers, do not blame not the players" mindset, since often a player's actions are a reflection of the environment around them.
DBD has created an environment where the most skillful play (12 hooks) is less rewarding than the smarter play (tunneling and camping). Why spread 1 hook between 3 Survivors when you can hook the same Survivor 3 times? You make the game a 3v1, which is infinitely easier, and you make roughly the same amount of bloodpoints anyways. I dont blame people for doing it, it is the path of least resistance and it ends with almost the same (if not better) outcome.
The mere question I asked in the first place is a hypothetical, if there were some way to really influence BHVR's decision making in a meaningful way. Realistically, you cannot control everyone, so recreating any situation I mentioned in the original post is impossible, but it is still an interesting question nonetheless.
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my experience with trying to not tunnel or camp is getting 3-4 kills against inexperienced survivor players which I can only assume to be soloq players(?) and 1-2 kills vs good teams. 0 kills if the team is actually playing to win and is genuinely talented although this is extremely rare. I do not see killers playing the game where they win 60% of the time because their opponent cannot play the video game correctly, lose 35% of the time because their opponent is good and get omega obliterated 5% of the time because their opponent is amazing.
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Kind of. This community can and have cried because something took some sort of brain to counter while hiding behind some reasoning that's usually invalid due to logic. I still think pop and ruin should be reverted because it at least encouraged someone to not sit near a hook for long periods of time unless they went down near a highly progressed gen.
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I agree with this. I've seen a few people play this game for the first time on stream and a lot of them think the intended strategy is to camp the first person they hook (it makes sense).
It's a flaw in the game design that the most effective and obvious strategies lead to one or more players having a boring, unfun match with no real opportunities to score points. And, TBH, I'm not sure continuously changing the perks will do much about it.
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I had the idea of Pop Goes just being changed to 20% total progress instead of 20% current progress; since ya know, it still gets the benefit of the 5% on basekit kicks.
Though for Hex: Ruin, I had the idea that if a Generator is blocked while Hex: Ruin is still active, the blocked Generator still regresses (this applies on top of it's current effect of course). It would have some new utility to it and make it have synergy with Dead Man's Switch and Thrilling Tremors. Plus it would probably be the most unique regression effect considering it would be the only thing that can regress a blocked Generator.
I think BHVR just needs to think outside of the box. You can buff regression perks and make them unique without necessarily having to change the regression %.
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When I first started playing the game in 2018, the first thing I ever did was hook a Survivor and camp them on hook, because my dumb brain saw the timer moving down and thought me being near the hooked Survivor was causing it... as you might have expected, the Survivors were definitely not happy about it, I got cussed out and took a 2 week break before picking up the game again.
The game throws you in and does bare minimum to teach you the game, and Id imagine that I am not the only person to have done this.
For people learning the game, once you pick up on the fact that you can win much easier by getting the first Survivor out, I think a lot of people did it. When I was learning, I did it a lot, but it came at the downside of me being paired against people that were vastly more skilled than me, and had meta perks whilst I was still leveling up my first character. And it felt crushing, so yet again, I was turned away from the game and waited a few weeks before playing again.
This was 2018, when we still had Ranks, mind you, and the game was significantly less sweaty and more casual. Nowadays Id imagine the new/less-experienced players' experience is far more frustrating and overwhelming than it was back then, and will continue to worsen as time progresses.
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DBD most definitely does not balance around top tier play. The problem with a game where you have super skilled people who are way better than everyone else is that it ruins the game.
You can't have the very best people able to loop a killer for 2 minutes and then the next category of player lasts 25-35 seconds between hits. DBD used to be that bad when we had ultra broken maps. The maps are overall somewhat better as they are *less abusive" but overall they still massively favor survivors.
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