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A Candid Discussion Regarding the Emblem System [KILLER PERSPECTIVE]
Introduction
The three pillars of my argument are the following:
- The Emblem System is a poor indicator of performance
- The Emblem System unsuccessfully strives to arbitrarily enforce certain play styles
- The Emblem System's purpose should be to assess skill
The Emblem system is not indicative of performance
Very frequently a killer can get 3 kills, have the 4th survivor dead on hook then still safety; fairly often, a killer can kill all 4 survivors and still safety. This is partly because Survivors, by misplaying, can punish the killer; by never attempting a save, a killer can only get four hooks, which will reward a very poor Devout Emblem.
Further, there is effectively no difference between your power facilitating two hits in rapid succession OR getting one instant down. However, one is rewarded twofold over the other, further exacerbated by the former issue of survivors gen rushing instead of attempting saves. You can consequently get four kills and be awarded nearly no Chaser as well as no Devout by no fault of your own.
Finally, it is ultimately irrelevant how one achieves four (or even three) kills, because if a killer is consistently cheesing four kills but isn't pipping, they will continue to get low rank survivors to exploit.
The Emblem System fails to enforce healthy play
The ultimate goal of the system with respect to killer is to encourage chases and hits as well as to discourage camping and tunneling. Unfortunately, it serves to the opposite end; if a killer consistently camps and tunnels, they won't pip and will continue to get low rank survivors whom will continue to fall for the Killer's toxic strategies.
Furthermore, Survivors are obliged to go for saves despite it being sub-optimal, further rewarding a toxic camping strategy.
Even further, the Emblem system has lost all legitimacy with regards to assessing skill, and because of a lack of rank reward, the sole purpose was bragging rights, which nobody even acknowledges anymore. Consequently, people now tend to completely ignore it, and any effacacy it could theoretically have is utterly lost. Even worse, it actively rewards camping by pitting you against worse survivors.
Finally, playing by the Emblem System's asinine rules will just extend your queue time because most survivors and killers are in the green/purple ranks because they disregard the rules and will bully legitimately green/purple players constantly. Therefore, the Emblem System exasperates the very issues it purports to address
The rank system's role is the assessment of skill
I am resolved in my position that the rank's system, first and foremost, should assess player skill to facilitate balanced match making, such that campers whom abuse low rank naivety will eventually face competent survivors to punish them for their toxicity.
Further, this alleviates the issue of rank bottle-necking, resulting in players abusing other players of lower skill level and the frustration of doing your job perfectly and still not being rewarded for it.
The objective rank system that should be adopted should be one that addresses solely whether or not you accomplished your objective, not the means by which you've accomplished it. Anything short of this is doomed to fall into the same pit of counterintuiton, impotence and frustration that the Emblem System has fallen into. The unfortunate reality is that the Emblem System accomplishes absolutely nothing and it is of utmost importance that it be replaced.
Comments
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The emblem system doesn't determine your ability to win, so much as your ability to do what it tells you to do. You can end a game fast, which is the rational thing to do, but the emblem system just wants you to complete certain tasks with no real reason why. It's a bad system that replaced another bad system and will likely someday be replaced by yet another bad system.
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No other game in the world does this arbitrary break-down. Everything in the world, from sports to video games, judges your performance based upon whether or not you accomplished your objective.
You don't end a football game and say "Well team A had 14 points and Team B had 7 points, but Team A had really bad rush defense and threw a couple interceptions, so Team B wins."
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Oh boy comparing sports to video games. Ok lets do this.
So you say "no other game in the world does this arbitrary break-down" But in sports are players stats not broken down, tracked, and judged? These stats determine how valuable a player was to the team effort of winning or losing the game.
Players in sports are also paid based on their skills. Yes the skills translate over to a W-L ratio, but it is their actual stats/skills at the game that make them valuable to obtaining the "objective" of winning or losing.
I don't necessarily disagree with you that the Emblem/Ranking system in DBD is poorly correlated, but your comparisons are just a poor example and don't actually address why the ranking system is bad.
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Way to miss the point entirely.
Call of Duty: You don't lose Team Deathmatch because your accuracy was too poor but you managed to kill the other team anyways.
League of Legends: You destroyed the enemy Nexus? Doesn't matter if your CS sucked, you still win.
Mortal Kombat: You killed the other player but screwed up a couple combos? You still win, because they still died.
Need For Speed: You cross the finish line first? You win, even if you didn't drift well and hit an obstacle.
Team Fortress 2: You captured every control point? Doesn't matter if your KDA was low, you still win.
Dead By Daylight: You killed all of them, but didn't get 9 hooks and didn't get an arbitrary number of hits. You lose, and so does every survivor in the game. Nobody wins, everyone lost.
What is the point of a rank system if it doesn't accurately judge your skill level in any way?
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Do player's stats directly determine whether a team wins or loses while a match is in motion?
If a player's score says they throw a ball 5 times, but throw it 3 times are they punished for it in the score of a game?
Your rebuttal doesn't really fit the topic. It's kind of a stretch.
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Whoa no need to get defensive. I am merely trying to have a discussion.
I did not miss the point. I even say at the end of my post I don't disagree with you and I don't think the 'emblem = rank' system is well designed. I was merely pointing out your comparisons are not supporting the complaint very well since in sports players stats are tracked and there is a reward for them to be good.
Overall I think you are trying to say "Rank = W-L ratio" (feel free to correct me if i'm wrong)
W-L ratio is definitely a viable way to create a ranking system as pointed out by you by the examples above. It would be interesting to see how that played out if implemented to DBD, but I think why they have not implemented it this way is because it segments the community as you cannot have people who have high W-L ratios without those that have low W-L ratios. Whereas the current ranking system everyone could technically get to rank 1 because it is possible to "lose" the game but still pip.
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I don't think it is a stretch to say a team of players who all have bad stats will lose the game over a team of players who have all good stats. So do theirs stats/skills determine the outcome of a match? Yes they do.
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If a player is bad they'll lose the match, and if a player is consistently bad their W/L will reflect it. Picking and enforcing arbitrary criteria doesn't judge skill, it pigeon holes playstyles and selects for very specific powers over others.
That's another issue I didn't even touch yet, win because you got 4 traps as Trapper or 3 instant downs as LF? Enjoy your minimal Chaser. Does it mean you deserve your win less than a Nurse who just farmed 2 hits per down? No, and yet your rank will be artificially lower than the Nurse's for the exact same results.
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I agree that if a player is bad at a game they'll most likely lose or negatively contribute to the team effort. Skill at a game clearly correlates to "winning or losing" and therefore to their W-L ratio.
The main problem this presents for DBD when talking about rank is: not every game has 1 side that "wins" and one side that "loses." The example games you provided all have very defined Win/Loss conditions.
I think DBD could potentially correlate rank to a 'Killed Vs. Escaped' ratio for killers and a 'Survived vs. Dies' ratio for survivors, but like I said before it would segment the community which is something I don't think BHVR wants to do since they say it is a "party game" and not a competitive game.
EDIT: Also I kind of think we went a little bit far down the rabbit hole discussing the semantics of Skill/Stats/W-L and how they affect each other, but let me just end (since I am going to sleep) by saying:
I think the current ranking system being based on emblems is bad, because like you have pointed out: there are scenarios in DBD where you feel like you did very well, but are not ranked appropriately. In a game where Win/Loss is not specifically defined it makes it very hard to determine a rank.
Post edited by Vlieger on2 -
It's worse than just judging what we think SHOULD and shouldn't affect rank, pipping as killer is often impossible. If at any point a survivor ragequits, or God help you two, it's impossible to get an Iridescent even if you kill their entire team.
Now on top of that, my chainsaw's instant downs cucks my Chaser emblem and if I just go ahead and kill people, I'll get Gold/Gold/Gold/Bronze, Safety.
Just to really emphasize this, this is the game saying that killing their entire team wasn't good enough for a pip. Often happens with Tombstone Myers as well though that one is because of arbitrary and ridiculous criteria.
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It was never intended to primarily reflect performance. Instead of tweaking gameplay mechanics, they tweaked the ranking and emblem system to try and force "fun" playstyles on players. It's also completely devoid of context regarding individual killer abilities, so Plague, Myers, Billy, and LF get screwed. It's a pvp game. I would wager that winning is fun to the vast majority of players. What has instead happened is that many players are just ignoring the silly ranking system altogether, so players with red rank skill are stuck in purple ranks and beating up on green and yellow rank players due to odd matchmaking. Literally the opposite of the intended effect. It's the same on the survivor side. I'd say a 4 out means everyone played fairly optimal, but because nobody made saves, nobody pips.
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Of course nobody makes saves, over-altruism is a great way to lose a trial. So I suspect some of the best survivors are stuck in green/purple to bully actually green/purple killers.
Whole thing is just asinine. If a play style isn't fun, fix the mechanic. Rank's only role is to pit players of equal skill against one another and this arbitrary criteria of the emblems needs to go.
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Exactly. I'm pretty much in the same boat. My most competitive games are when it matches me against rank 3 and 4s. Most of the time I get rank 9-13, one or two d/c when I start to steamroll them, and I safety.
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That's the worst part. If you start to snowball and someone DCs, your chances of pipping plummet, especially because of the ridiculous 9-hook clause on Iridescent.
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Perhaps the worst part is that it doesn't even address what it was meant to (camping and tunneling). Players who rely on that won't just stop doing. They'll just not rank up and continue to do it against survivors who won't know how to counter it or won't be equipped to counter it. It just amplified the problem it was supposed to address, and it's arguable whether it was even a problem in the first place.
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The problem is perceiving 'pipping' or 'not pipping' as winning or losing, instead of simply 'surviving' 'not surviving' / 'killing 3-4' 'killing only 0-2.' All of this frustration would cease to exist if the Emblem system / Ranking are made invisible to the players.
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People told the devs this since the very beginning they introduced the emblems. People told them when they made ranks harder to rank up. The devs don't give a #########.
They much rather everyone hold hands and farm each other. The emblems are a decent idea but much like everything that gets implemented in this game, turns out pathetic.
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It actually just made it worse. Whereas before if the low rank survivors fall for the camping trick, the camper would rank up until they face survivors who will just genrush while they stare at an empty screen all trial, resulting in a depip.
Now, they stay low rank against survivors whom will continue to fall for it. Doesn't help that the stringent pip system now obliges survivors to go for saves which just feeds into what the camper wants even more.
For both of these reasons it just served to exasperate, not alleviate, the issue; if you could even label it one in the first place.
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For survivors (barring the update that artificially inflated the difficulty of pipping at high ranks), it makes *more* sense than the Killer's emblems, considering the survivor doesn't have total agency of how their Trial goes; they're in a team of four people, all of whom impact their chances of surviving.
Moreover, even if the survivor individually fails to survive, they could have carried the survival of their up to three teammates that survived, which could warrant a pip if not at least a safety.
However, with killer it's cut and dry; you either killed them or you didn't, and it was entirely on you either way.
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They're not asking whether a team with bad stats is likely to lose the game versus a team with good stats. They're asking if the game tallies up the players' stats to determine which side won.
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To further confirm this: I just got a 3k and negative pip'd. I get that killers shouldn't get rewarded for poor play, but being able to turn a terrible situation into a 3k should at least net a safety pip.
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Survivor pip system is pretty trashy too. I literally have to sandbag my teammates to slow down gen progression so I can get some lightbringer points when i'm not farming them for benevolence points. As for killer, I stopped playing when I realized i'd never get adept plague. According to the devs I'm not skilled enough to keep my opponents from dc'n/suiciding on hook and don't deserve a double pip/achievement for that reason.
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They might have reworked the generator points for Endgame collapse, I mean you can keep fixing generators after the timer started for extra points maybe it contributes to lightbringer.
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My indicator of performance is measured in how many of the survivors leave me insults and/or report threats in the chat post game and/or on my Steam profile. If I get those it means I did great. If I get all survivors to leave me just a "gg" it means I played poorly
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Updated with an extensive write-up on the failures of the system and the dire imperative of its replacement.
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