How do you define winning in dbd?
I would think for survivor, winning would be escaping. For killer it's different. Is it 2 kills? 3 or 4? Do we go by the emblem system?
For me either escaping or helping the majority of my team escape. For killer I think 3k is winning.
Just wondering what the line is between winning and losing.
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for me, getting 3 or 4 people to escape as survivor is a win, and getting 3 or 4 kills as killer is a win. I dont necessarily need to be one of the people who escapes as survivor, as long as everyone else can make it out. yes, even when im playing solo.
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Whatever the in-game rules says regarding declaring winners and losers.
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The in-game rules are very fuzzy, hence the question. Sometimes you die, but pip. Sometimes you sacrifice everyone, but only safety pip. So are pips a measure of failure or success? Some people don't care about pips or rank, some people don't care about Bloodpoints. I've seen plenty of face campers who defend their actions by saying "I got the kill, that's all I care about." So did they win?
It's all really subjective, and down to what an individual player chooses to value about the game -- pips, rank, BP, escaping, making sure their friends escape, sacrificing 2 survivors, sacrificing 3 survivors, sacrificing 4 survivors, letting the last survivor have the hatch, etc. etc.
There's arguably something interesting about this approach, but I think it's less intentional and more accidental due to unfocused design. I wish endgame rewards, pips, and the whole ranking system worked hand-in-hand with the most obvious and intuitive victory states (i.e. a player should always pip/rank up if they escape, or if they sacrifice everyone -- no matter what else happened in the match).
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2k and a pip is a win for me. 3ks and 4ks for me means I dominated >:D
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It depends, Kill Wise I think 2 is a Draw and 3+ is a Win.
In terms of the Overall Game, If I've had fun then I've won. As Killer I find it a lot harder to have fun just because of all the micromanaging you have to do but as survivor even If I end up dying I usually still end up having a fun.
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As long as I get a pip, that's all that matters to me
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Pipping.
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For me its keeping all my teammates alive, if 2 die I count it as a loss
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Just give me my pips.
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landing head on is my win condition, pips are nice too
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It's really not.
The game guide specifies a win. The only vagueness is the number of Kills required as a Killer.
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Having fun is the most important thing to me and I see it as a win if I have fun.
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Having fun.
I think if I can enjoy the game enough to play through the grind, that’s a victory.
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"The in-game rules are very fuzzy, hence the question."
That's exactly my point/problem.
I'd call that vague in the same way that I would call "To win a game of golf, you need to hit the golf ball into the hole" vague.
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I am not really a competitive person so If I die I don't mind really.
For me winning is saving my teammates, winning a chase against the killer, breaking THE totem and being able to escape by the exit gates or the hatch.
Or if I play as killer (rarely) winning is when I get survivors on the hook even if they don't die. Chasing a survivor for a short period of time and you know that this survivor is good so when you get that hit man it's a great feeling and if i get 2 kills i'm all good lol.
<3
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I play the Martyr when it comes to my friends, keeping them alive by rushing for saves in the most dire conditions. If they walk out alive, its a win in my book.
getting all 5 totems myself is also fun, successfully being chased as objectives are being done is pretty cool too
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I mean, sure, that does lay out a victory condition. I'm not trying to argue that. But that's just on paper.
In practice, we've all seen the kind of subjective player-by-player approach that I have described, and the actual game mechanics (by which I mostly mean the ranking system and the emblems) do not always back that up. You can accomplish exactly what is laid out in the screenshot you posted, but the emblem system communicates that you didn't actually win.
I know this is a lopsided analogy, but any professional sport, or chess, or even other competitive video games like Street Fighter have very clear win/loss states that cannot be readily disputed by pointing to a wonky rule that contradicts victory, and players can't just make up their own win conditions and ignore the parts they don't care about. You can't go "I win because I took both your knights, I don't really care about kings."
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escaping as survivor and at least a 3k as killer
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Yeah and ######### is up with "have fun = win".
Wins are a statistic that serve a vital purpose in game design. Specifically they are the metric that determines power and effectiveness, and thus also the metric that determines a players ability in the game. The better player is always the player that wins more often when trying.
Imagine playing league of legends. If you have fun but your base is destroyed then do you win? If so why does the screen say defeat? If not then why is DBD any different? They both have a defined goal and tools to achieve that goal and progression based rewards depending on arbitrary criteria that are technically related to that goal but aren't themselves the goal.
And wincons sometimes have real stakes behind them. If I'm hosting a DBD tournament then who moves up the bracket? The answer to that question is what the wincon is. If you say a win = fun then that means you are saying that if you were to host a tournament the team which has more fun is the team which advances.
In fact, wincons are so important to how a game functions that if you showed me 2 games with identical mechanics but different wincons I'd say that they are distinct games and should be evaluated independently of each other and one would need to be balanced in completely different ways than the other.
For example lets say the Survivors wincon was instead of escaping:
"Get the most Bloodpoints"
Suddenly:
WGLF is a must take perk due to being able to double your score and put it above what would otherwise be the best possible score (and thus give you a MASSIVE advantage).
Using Bond in order to sandbag would be a critical part of the gameplay.
Deadhard would be outclassed by Sprint Burst due to SB letting you get to a Hook faster thus giving you the unhook points before the other Survivors would be able to.
Hook farming becomes a dominant strategy due to removing other Survivors also preventing them from getting BP and potentially beating you.
All Killers would suddenly become busted due to Survivors actively sabotaging themselves and would need to be rebalanced.
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As killer 2+ kills, depends. Often 3 kills.
As survivors multiple things: escaping myself against a really good killer with ######### team mates, or beeing the martyr so all my other team mates can escape. Sometimes it's also having 3+ head on stuns. Or outplaying and pissing off a killer to the point where he gets so butthurt about dominating him on mindgames that he facecamps me for the whole 2 minutes.
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Fun. That ties into my next question. How do you have fun? Fun i would say is tied to winning and i think the biggest problem between survivors and killers is that both sides can't win together so for the most part, they can't both be having fun.
I've heard that the killer determines whether the survivors have a good time. Even heard people say it's one of the killers jobs to make sure that survivors have fun. But im pretty sure the only way to ensure that survivors are happy is for the killer to not win or have fun.
As a killer, still relatively new and pretty much a yellow ranked killer, although i could be green if i could not go up against red and purple ranked players more often than not, i find the survivors dictate my enjoyment level a pretty good bit.
Especially when im chasing someone and they vault a window and tbag. Or drop a pallet and tbag. Or spin in circles as i break a pallet before running. Amd basically point and emote in hopes of making me chase them so everyone else has an easy game. Im sure that survivor is having fun. Im not. I don't tunnel purposely, i go after the unhooker, and i dont camp unless its the end and ive gotten my ass kicked and im frustrated. But still im inundated with stupid messages calling me names or to 'git gud 2 ez' when im 7 ranks lower.
Just wondering is it even possible outside of kill your friends for both sides to have fun?
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I feel like a winner every time I get hate messages.
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Winning is a statistic. It only exists on paper. The victory condition on paper is the victory condition. Period.
The ranking system is not one of the game mechanics (since it exists outside gameplay) and also isn't used to signify winning.
Pips mean that you rank up and ONLY mean that you rank up.
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Would you make this same argument to, say, professional tennis players, or chess leagues, or those who play ranked online matches in League of Legends or Street Fighter V? All of those games have a ranking system that is meant to reflect players' wins and losses, and place them in ranks and brackets that are appropriate to their skill.
Again, I know that this is not a perfect 1:1 comparison, but you cannot say that the ranking system isn't a game mechanic in Dead by Daylight, or that players don't bear it in mind as they decide their course of action in a match. The ranking system is not always an accurate reflection of what a player accomplished in the game (as far as the win/loss state that the game's tutorial provides to the player). It leaves room for subjective "Did I win?" interpretation that those other examples do not; if that were not the case, then this thread would not exist.
And, if I were playing a League of Legends match, but my only goal was to, like, finish a certain item build, I would not be able to claim (even in my own mind) that I won if my base got destroyed. In DBD, I can die and rank up, which feels like a (very counter-intuitive) victory to me.
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Yes I would make the same argument. If somehow in league you were to rank up in-spite of your base being destroyed then you still lost.
Rank/Emblems is just one of the games progression system. It isn't part of the actual gameplay and can be ignored when talking about balance.
Win-conditions are also not a mechanic, but are the basis for all of balance. When you say something is better than something else in a game it is achieving the wincon which the thing is better AT.
In anycase, while most games do use wins or loses to determine movement along ranks. Not all games do that. For example Overwatch's ranking system is not determined by wins despite it's competitive focus.
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Game mechanics are the things you do in gameplay. So menues are not game mechanics and progression systems are not game mechanics (Usually. Sometimes there is mid-match progression and that qualifies as a game mechanic).
They are the pieces that make up the gameplay loop and are what you are literally doing on a moment to moment basis as well as the statistics surrounding those actions.
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Show me one discussion where a Street Fighter or chess player ponders what might constitute the definition of winning or losing in their game of choice.
It's vague in practice, because the ranking system is not consistent with actions that a player would intuitively categorize as "win" or "loss." Overwatch may be an outlier as well, but that game definitively gives each team a "Victory" and "Defeat" screen at the end of every match. It isn't vague in the least.
You're getting semantic about what constitutes a game mechanic, or not. Call it bad UX, if we don't agree on the former terminology. Whatever it is, it's what creates the kind of subjective wiggle room that leads to threads like this.
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4 BBQ stacks
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While I personally feel happy with a match if it was fun/exciting and especially if I got a lot of points, I recognize that's not a very quantifiable metric at all. Some have fun feeling like they spooked people as mirror Myers, some have fun by doing stuff that'd be considered "toxic" by a lot of people. It's too subjective.
If I had to pick a more "objective" thing to define as a win it would be something in the realm of 2-3 kills as killer, similar to what gave killers a pip when that was what the "killer cube" measured.
As survivor the obvious choice is escaping as an individual, beyond that I don't have any "hard" definitions at all.
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As long as you had fun...you're always a winner.
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Confusion means that the game doesn't present the wincon well. That doesn't mean the wincon is subjective.
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The people that say having fun is winning are flat out wrong.
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As a Killer I win if I get at least 2 kills
As a Survivor, I win if I escape regardless of whether or not my teammates make it.
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Tell that to my perfect streak of games from the moment I launched my first game to today. I had fun every time!
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I agree with you 100%, but I think the way that players are scored contributes heavily to that confusion.
Presentation, as you would point out, is not a game mechanic -- but it's still key for reinforcing things like whether a player won or lost. If the way that players are rewarded for their actions (via emblems and Bloodpoints) were applied more consistently according to whether they won or not, we would not have this kind of confusion.
EDIT: Also, if there were monthly rank-based incentive rewards like normal games have (Hearthstone etc.), it would leave far less grey area for players to wonder if they are playing correctly/winning (the "I don't care about rank" people).
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For me personally as a killer if I kill two survivors and two escape it's a draw game. Three kills is a win, and 4 is a huge victory. I don't really go by pips, as I can go full meme and use Infinite tier 3 Tombstone Myers, kill all 4 survivors and then de-pip.
As for survivor, it depends really on the individual. If you are focused on the team, 3 escaping is a win. If you are just focused on you, obviously you surviving counts as the win, regardless of what happens with the other survivors.
Basically the magic number for me is 3, 3 survivors escaping = win for survivors, 3 survivors killed = win for the killer.
Though it won't stop some salty survivor from saying you got outplayed and how garbage you are despite you killing 3 of them, them included and the other guy only escaped through the hatch with a key. lol
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Wut?
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Was I not clear?
Win conditions are vital to a game. Just pretending the wincon is something it isn't just undermines all of balance, prediction, skill ect.
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In order of "feeling like I won"
4k v skilled survs
3k w/ dc for hatch (but feeling robbed of 4k)
3k w/ hatch (but feeling salty)
4k w/ dc or death by 1-hook (survs robbed of a good match)
4k v unskilled survs (thanks matchmaking)
Don't DC v skilled survs/swf using overpowered combinations of items, addons, and perks.
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Winning is just not losing backwards.
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For me it's if i pipped, survivors have a weird one where they can die and gain a pip but killers have to play "nice" is the only way i can describe it. I like long matches anyway but survivors rushing there objective will pip if they escape but killers with black pip if they play "mean" it's a weird thing I've noticed.
Kills dont mean much to me but i think hooks and chases should score heavier than they do now, or they should change gatekeeper cause you're only 1 person as killer you can only chase 1 at a time. :/
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This sounds so lame but FUN! Did I have FUN? Did the survivors get a FAIR game? Did I get a decent amount of bps?
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Survivor: escape
Killer: kill 3 or 4 survivors
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Can have fun even when you lost.
It's called sportsmanship.
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sportsmanship-fair and generous behavior or treatment of others, especially in a sports contest.
You can have great sportsmanship and still not have fun if you lose. When i play killer and have a bad game I'll say gg when the match is over but it still sucked.
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👍️
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For winning I think if it's I get 2+ kills or 2+ escapes. Pipping should not be considered winning imo because it's a match making tool and nothing more. It's very inaccurate and you get no rewards for it. Then you look at the definition of winning by getting more than 2 kills or escapes and it's easy to tell that this is more likely to be considered a "win" because you get rewarded for it as well.
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One of the things I deal with design-side is the emblems. So I have a tendency to focus on my total emblem score.
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"Show me one discussion where a Street Fighter or chess player ponders what might constitute the definition of winning or losing in their game of choice."
I have had people tell me that my SF victories are not "valid." I like to win by 1 pixel of health when the time runs out by playing defensively.
That's not the same thing, I know. But it does show that even in a game with very clear win conditions that a some players still don't accept them. :)
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Having fun=winning in my book, right @NuclearBurrito?
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