Killrates are deceitful.
Do not balance the game around killrates. A lot of players die when they should not. Balance the game around the optimal players. Why?
Balancing for the casual players means in high level play it's insanely lopsided.
There are times a killer deserves to lose if they are playing poorly. Same goes for survivors.
Do not make people the game cater to bad decisions.
Add Tutorials, redesign things, but do not make it fair at the lowest level. We have been seeing a lot of this, and it just leads to SWF pubstomping all but A and S tier killers, and killers crushing new players that haven't been shown what to do.
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There is a very small amount of people in the top level of play, a game has to be more balanced for the majority - which is the mid range, balancing for the highest level would leave the majority of players in a pretty difficult spot.
Despite the rhetoric that everyone is at the soft cap, very very few actually are anywhere near it - it's not the "easy to get to" that people believe it is. we have to consider the game as a whole. And whilst we do think of how things could be used at the higher end of play, it cannot decide the balancing for the whole game.
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Even if the original comment is incorrect on that regard, a lot of the changes that have been proposed and discussed recently do seem to cater to low level play in a way that is detrimental overall.
A good example would be the way the slugging changes are laid out. Yes, stopping killers from slugging would be excellent, however there are many spots in the current game, where facing a mid tier to very good survivor team completely stops you from being able to grab a survivor. Pallet saves(which are abundant in the maps with the most amount of slugging for example) and flashlight saves make for situations where a killer literally cannot pick up a downed survivor without a guaranteed escape. And now that we'll get slugged survivors being able to get up you might actually be locked off getting any hook states when against a coordinated team, which will likely not be much of an issue at low level, but will absolutely be frustrating to every killer that faces even slightly coordinated teams with flashbangs, flashlights, or that stop inside pallets when when injured, so that they may be downed on the pallet to deny grabs.
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People only get better the more they play. Balancing from the middle-down draws a line in the sand and creates a scenario where if people play, become good enough and cross that line, the game goes into a monotonous downward spiral. This is because after the novelty of the game wears off, players will focus on the objective of all PvP games - trying to beat the other player.
You balance a game from the top-down (skill-wise) so that ridiculous events are less likely to happen. Take endurance for example: In matches with intermediate level players, endurance works fine because they'll probably make a lot of mistakes, but at the higher end it can easily become the only reason that people escape. It's the same for gen progression perks: fine in intermediate level matches, but allowing comically fast 2 and a half minute completion times at the higher end.
S-tier killers are no different: Blight, Nurse and Krasue are fine in novice to intermediate matches, but insanely broken past that. Just because things seem fine/fair at the intermediate level does not mean they're fine/fair globally. You end up creating an environment that starts to repel players as they progress past the intermediate skill level if you choose not to care that certain elements become game-breaking at the low end of advanced play.
If the company wants to sell more content, it has to aim for player retention, and the current model won't hit the mark if the game goes from frustrating to straight up busted the further you play into it. Also the overt bias demonstrated in the latest dev stream wasn't the wisest decision.
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What number? When you reach a certain ELO you have like 3 viable strategies.
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I've always found this talking point very interesting. Sadako, Pig and to a lesser extent Pinhead really struggle to fight Survivors the higher in MMR you go... yet they dominate at low MMR and have some the best kill rates in the game... If you buff them to compete at higher MMR... then they inevitably run over lower tiers even harder than they do now.
On the flip side, killers like Hillbilly, Nurse and to a lesser extent Blight have pretty darned bad/mediocre performances at low MMR, scoring some of the lowest killrates in the game, and yet are amongst the strongest killers in the game at high MMR.
Is always been a fascinating point of discussion for me. A skill floor represent the minimum level of skill required to play at a reasonably effective level, while a skill ceiling represents the max potential the character can reach when played perfectly.
- Low skill floor tends to be tempered by low skill ceiling, resulting in killers like Trapper, Pig, Legion, where killers are only good while Survivors make mistakes, so only function in low-mid MMR.
- High skill floor is often compensated by a high skill ceiling, resulting in killers like Blight, Huntress, Hillbilly, where killers making small mistakes costs them lots of time and get run over at lower levels, but played without mistakes cause lots of problems at higher levels.
- Low skill floor with high skill ceiling, you get situations like Ghoul and Krasue, where the opposing side despise these killers cause they have to play near-perfect to have just a chance, while the killer gets away with making mistakes way more than they should. Thrive at all levels of play, though disliked.
- High skill floor, low skill ceiling, hard to say who fits here, but offhand I'd say maybe Clown or Deathslinger? Produces killers who people find they have to put in a lot of work and make effectively no mistakes just to play to a passable level, and are punished very hard for every error. Struggle at pretty much every level of play, and thus have to tend to go hard every single game.
Is it OK that killers have different bands of skill that they excel in? Hard to say... cause fixing it seems a little impossible to resolve... and least without making killer powers quite homogenous.
Same rules kinda apply to perks really as well
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