In balancing the game, gen-rushing ought to be rewarded equally to camping

forrest49

I see a lot of people saying that gen rushing isn't a valid criticism because it is the only objective available to survivors. While this is true, you could say that the only way to progress the game as a killer is by killing. This is essentially why the pip scoring system is important, it rewards players who play according to the role's metric of skill - light-bringer, chaser, devious, etc, and not just by focusing on the roles inherent goal. The problem herein is that survivors are currently able to get away with this to a larger degree than killers are.

To illustrate, a survivor can only do generators, hide in a bush, and barely if ever interact with the killer in a game. This player at the end of the game will likely have strong survival and lightbringer medals at the cost of altruism and chaser. The parallel is a killer who camps the survivors, refuses to chase them or patrol gens, will suffer in ALL of their medals. Both of these players are not playing in a way that the game recognizes as skillful and aren't being rewarded as such. In acknowledging here that gen-rushing exists and that it is something to be discouraged; we can consider how to address the problem.

While there are a few perks that are generator defence oriented, the current meta solution is Hex: Ruin. I don't think many people consider Hex: Ruin to be a fun or proper solution, but it is a necessary evil that killers allows killers to mitigate some of the gen-rushing, essentially in the same way that survivors can run borrowed time to mitigate camping. To this extent Hex:Ruin is the best perk in its class, it has a hugely polarizing effect on the ranking system, dominating lower rank games, and losing effectiveness considerably at higher ranks. If this point is to be argued, I will simply mention that Ruin is currently being run by all the top tier killer mains, is the top used perks at all ranks, and that survivors have an 80% survival rate at rank 1 (source: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/61114/data-sheets-community-requests). The takeaway here is that Ruin is mandatory in combating gen-rush however it eventually fails to do so. I also personally believe that it isn't fun for either role, so maybe there is a better solution.

Now, there are many ways to approach the gen-rushing issue, although many would have a huge cascading effect on the games balance and would require a lot of work and testing. My proposed solution is to simply redistribute the pip system to make gen-rushing to be on par with camping because as it stands gen-rushing allows for better medals on average than camping does. The reason for this is that we can see that camping is a non-viable strategy at high ranks, so therefore by reconciling the two strategies we can similarly see gen-rushing becoming a non-viable strategy as well.