The Fallacy of Balancing toward the Highest Level of Play

I dunno, honestly I find her clunky cooldowns and difficulty of use the reason I don't play her much. I can deal with the bugs, except the one that removes your power entirely by hooking someone, but she's just so godawful hard to use it's impossible to use her if you don't main her.

nurse is ######### anyway so she doesnt really fit the description, and btw if you balance the game around casual players there is no chance for killer to win against very experienced survivors, and there are alot of them and that is also the current state of the game

I've misplaced the downvote button.

No but seriously, I really feel like this mindset was borne from the matchmaking system being broken. We shouldn't be seeing low rank players playing against high rank players. That's a huge issue, and confuses the problem at hand here.

Casual players shouldn't be under any requirement to run top-tier builds, because they're casual players, and even if they do, lower skilled players won't be able to take full advantage of those meta builds. So balancing to their skill level only ensures that gameplay will be unbalanced and unrewarding at the top-levels, and players won't invest time and commitment into playing the game to get to that skill level, because there's no reason to. That would result in the death of the game. Guaranteed.

Obviously you can't ignore the casuals either though. The trick is, the you just have make mechanics that aren't broken or unapproachable to casuals when balanced that way. Casuals still need a fun game experience to encourage them to put in the time and effort to become more skilled at the game.

But the thing is, all of this requires working skill-based matchmaking. It all goes right out the window if top-tier players are getting queued up against new players...

Some people can't accept that thoughts can be explained in any other ways then text.

You can't balance around top tier play. Nor can you balance around the noobs either. You need to balance around mid tier play as that's where the majority of your playerbase is. Then you need to look at high tier play and tweak things to make them as fair as you can for those players.

Yes once everyone has been placed appropriately we can see what the best survivors are like in their average game. Hopefully then if the games are so short they can't be ignored we'll see actual change!

I think time/money vested is the biggest problem this game faces in balance.. coupled with rank resets.

I've played on/off for a bit, and have only prestiged 3 survivors. I don't use or even have access to some of the meta perks and even as I lose, I'm constantly ranking up. I've played consistently for a week now and have moved from 20 -> 11 and my odds of winning diminish with every climb in rank. I feel that even survivors on my team are trolling me and giving me up to the killer at times(shining lights on me or popping my gens). By the end of game, I'm usually the only one that doesn't have rank 3 perks from multiple different characters.

How is the game ever going to be balanced or inviting to new players if the new players are playing side by side with others of similar level who have previously invested the time and money to acquire all the perks from the majority of the whole roster? I've faced rank 16-20 killers who have all tier 3 perks from multiple killers, and my Nea, for example isn't even lvl 15 for her 3rd perk. I understand the grind, but newcomers will not realize what is going on, or why they got destroyed, and either uninstall or research. Most people today would uninstall unless really drawn to the concept(which I was as a horror fan)

Overabundance of perks is only making it more and more difficult to balance as time goes by. I'd honestly prefer each killer/survivor with their own 3 perks(not shareable across) and then a pool of fewer universal perks to choose from. You might actually get a team of 4 different survivors to use their unique talents to aid the team as opposed to the same 4 survivors all just borrowing the best perks from other survivors. IDK... Obviously, I'm not as knowledgeable about the high level play and meta stuff, but I do know a smaller set of mechanics would be easier to balance. It would also be nice to not see 3 of the same survivor on a team.. how about locking a character out when selected by another.

Id be okay if they picked one or the other. However killers are balanced around high level play and survivors tend to he balanced around low level play. Ill admit i prefer high level balancing but right now one side is being balanced with a focus on veteran players and one side around players buying the game and their entertainment value

Oh boy, a SC2 reference. I used to play SC2 at low GM level and I can tell you the reason that people left the game wasn't due to it balancing around high levels of play, it was due to several factors. For players of BW who left, they left because the game was too casual SC2 compared to BW has much less importance of mechanical skill. It's a lot easier to micro, macro, and the skill ceiling is lower due to that. This turned off a lot of BW players including many pros. 

For casual players who left, they were never going to stay. It's harsh to say, but they 100% would not stay in a competitive environment. They didn't want a competitive game where they seek to improve themselves and their play and get better. They wanted the ability to throw the game on once a week and do well, but that's not the kind of game an RTS is. No RTS is like that in the world, SC2 just has Blizzard's name behind it so they tried it out and found it wasn't for them. They'd be the same in a fighting game, they 'd try it for a bit and then likely uninstall it after learning they have to learn, improve, and work at it.

As for actual balance decisions in SC2 that turned people off, early on a lot of decisions were made to counter the immediate high level meta, but not taking into account the suggestions of high level players and instead devs did their own thing. This lead to a fair number of patches where something was majorly changed when high level players asked for something more moderate (Just like DBD!). People got disgruntled and left cause the balance was poor and the devs were thick headed (Just like DBD!). SC2 now is pretty great (other than Protoss vs Protoss), but it took them years to fire the main designers and get new people in who actually listened to the high level community.

As for Nurse, she was introduced specifically as the devs' answer to the community's outcry for them to remove infinite loops and balance their maps. They gave us a killer that removed them, and every other way to dodge that survivors have. Of course she's incredibly strong, she was designed to counter literal broken impossible to beat mechanics that no other killer, even in today's game, could counter if they went against it. Not even Spirit, who people cry about all day, could have dealt with the infinites at the time, but Nurse can so of course her power is the most broken. The only reason most people don't play Nurse is because she is a buggy mess. Even the best Nurse players can lose to the average survivor if Nurse bugs happen and for example you can't blink twice, or you can't attack after a blink, or you can't blink through certain terrains like you should be able to, etc etc. Nurse would see much much higher play if she wasn't a buggy mess and you didn't have a 50% chance of not being able to play her to her actual strength.

Games should be mostly balanced for high level play, not entirely, but mostly, because new players don't know how to play. They think actual garbage tactics and play styles are overpowered and unbalanced. A new casual player will tell you Trapper is an unstoppable unbeatable killer while everyone with some time under their belt knows Trapper is trash. Why would you EVER balance around someone like that? He'll learn what he knew was truth was wrong and learn a new truth after he plays more, that's why you balance around people who actually play the game and not the dude who's done 10 games.

tl;dr: SC2 lost players due to devs not listening to high players' desires and casuals being too casual for an RTS. Nurse isn't played due to bugs, not due to high skill floor, games should be balanced around high level play because casuals are awful and stupid when it comes to the game so why would you ever balance around them.

Your Nurse interpretation is the exact opposite of what happened. The devs balanced for the middle to low end of Nurse players and made casual Nurse play more difficult so that casual survivors could have an easier time while not touching what aspects of her allow for really good killers to 4k. And now basically no one likes playing Nurse.

How is this not a perfect example of why the developers should pay attention to what the extremes are when balancing a killer?

The devs just don't balance properly (cough Clown comment cough). What proper balancing toward high-level play would have been is as follows:

Nurse must travel the full length of her blink. The Nurse has a weapon raising animation once she reaches her blink destination that takes precedence before any attacks. The Nurse's lunge speed is decreased but her lunge duration is increased. The Nurse's red stain appears at her blink destination and does not remain on her body for the duration of the blink. Optional change: fatigue duration after a no-lunge blink has been increased to be the same as a post-blink lunge fatigue.

Those changes right there have toned down what some Nurse players can do, have given survivors of all skill levels more information, and have (probably) not affected casual Nurse play negatively. That outcome is what people mean by balancing for high-level play. Survivors who can use the additional red stain information can skillfully do so, and (if taking the optional change) Nurses that swing a lot after blinks and miss are not penalized in comparison to Nurses that know exactly when to swing and when not to swing.