The Devs Are Not Biased Against Killers
With each new patch comes a new batch of angry posts alleging (usually anti-killer) bias and claiming the Behaviour is ruining the game. I waste too much time replying to these comments individually and I'd like to see some community discussion around this, so I wanted to collect my thoughts into a single post. It's going to be a long one, but I'd appreciate if you'd read to the end before commenting so this can stay constructive.
I want to start by looking at kill rate. I know there are some vocal commenters on the forum who don't trust kill rate as a reflection of balance. They'll point to smurfs, hook suicides, sandbagging, farming, giving hatch, etc. as reasons why the kill rates may be artificially inflated/deflated. I'm sure these sorts of behaviors do bias the numbers to some extent, but then again there are factors that could push the numbers in each direction; I don't have data to back this up - only Behavior would - but my personal take is that these numbers probably aren't that far off what they would be if no one ever did those behaviors.
Still, whether or not you trust the percentage itself really isn't important; I'm just asking you to look at the trend. These various factors tugging on the overall kill rate should be at least reasonably consistent over time, so the trend line is likely pretty reliable for assessing balance changes even if the percentages themselves are more dubious.
In [late 2016], the overall kill rate was 55%. The devs didn't provide a red-rank kill rate at the time, but if you compare the following stats for Hag and Trapper, it's reasonable to conclude that red-rank kill rate was lower than (or at worst comparable to) kill rate at all ranks:
* Hag was chosen in 34% of rank 1 games and 14% of rank 20 games.
* Trapper was chosen at 19% of rank 1 games and 31% of rank 20 games.
* Hag and Trapper were extremely similar in kill rate overall, with Trapper even being a hair more deadly.
That to me says that skilled survivors were likely able to exploit all of the absurdly survivor-sided features that were still in the game back in 2016 (e.g. pallet dense maps with literal infinite loops), driving red rank kill rates down, while Trapper was simply able to noob stomp at lower rank. I think this is the most likely explanation for these stats; it wouldn't make much sense for rank 1 players to overwhelmingly prefer a weaker killer.
Red rank kill rate was ~60% in [late 2018] with an overall kill rate in the 60-65% ballpark.
Red rank kill rate was ~70% in [late 2019] with an overall kill rate in the 60-65% ballpark.
Red rank kill rate was ~68% in [late 2020] with an overall kill rate of 56%.
If we look at the trend here, we can see that red rank kill rates rose steadily from launch until probably right around the Ruin nerf. Since then we're down maybe a couple of points, but kill rates are still extremely high compared to where they were for the first year or two of the game. Overall kill ranks slowly until two plus years ago, then held steady until the Ruin nerf, and this year they've dropped down closer to where they were closer to launch. Now, the timing of the Ruin nerf could just be a coincidence, but I feel the drop at all ranks would be well explained by the Ruin nerf. Ruin was devastating for low-rank survivors and required no input from killers to be effective, so it would make sense to see low-rank kill rates drop quite a bit after its nerf. Meanwhile high-rank players were better at dealing with old Ruin, so it would make sense that they would see less of a benefit.
I'm sure many of you may have seen me claiming in "devs hate killer" comments sections that DBD has actually gotten steadily less survivor-sided over time. When I say this, I'm mostly talking about red ranks. Kill rate has gone steadily up at red rank over time, although it's plateaued off over the past year or so. High-skill matches certainly aren't all that matter for balance, but they are better for showing what is possible once players learn the game, so I feel they're more valuable when talking about game balance.
If you'd prefer to focus on the overall numbers, though, kill rates are still a tad bit higher now than they were in late 2016. Therefore, it certainly has not be a consistent downward trend. If the devs were biased against killers we would expect to see the kill rate decreasing over time and that simply isn't the case.
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One final argument I'd like to throw out there to counter all of the "survivor mains spend more so the devs care about them more" comments I've seen: If the game is not fun for one side, queue times will go through the roof and the player base will gradually dwindle until the game dies. Therefore, the devs have a clear economic incentive to make the game fun and balanced for both sides.
Evening queue times are certainly bad for survivor right now, but given the stats I've already gone through in this post I don't think balance has much to do with the queue times. If that were the case, we'd still need to find another explanation for why evening survivor queues weren't this horrible historically; anecdotally I've been playing for 3+ years, which spans the time periods with much lower kill rates at my rank, and this is the worst I've seen them. My queue times got substantially worse right when Crossplay went live, so my theory is that poor console performance plays a large part in this. Playing killer is stressful enough when you're not missing hits right and left due to poor frame rate.
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TL;DR (but please do read before commenting): The devs are not biased in favor of survivors. The overall kill rate has been reasonably stable over time; it was a bit higher in the middle and a bit lower after launch and this past year. The red rank kill rate climbed substantially over the first three years or so of the game and has leveled off over the past year plus. None of this is consistent with systematic pro-survivor bias. It also doesn't make sense for them to only cater to one side when you can't have a functional game (and therefore can't make money) without both sides wanting to play.
TL;DRTL;DR Before you complain about bias, please evaluate your own.
Thanks for reading!
Comments
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Kill rates can't be used as a valid metric with how skewed they are.They could be high for a variety of reasons, none of which are elaborated upon by the devs. One MASSIvE reason kill rates are not good data is the godawful matchmaking that funnels every skill level into red ranks.
I don't believe the devs are biased, I just think they make extremely questionable decisions regarding balance, and generally how they barely seem to listen to the community.
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Not killer biased, just designed against them. Devs implement things on the basis of survivors making many and multiple mistakes, something which only happens when you're first beginning to play. After that balance is with the survivors.
Post edited by DemonDaddy on30 -
I can understand not trusting
withthe percentages themselves, but why do you feel that the trend line is unreliable as well?Post edited by notstarboard on2 -
If killers require mistakes to do well and these mistakes only happen when you're learning to play, why are killers performing better at red ranks than at all ranks?
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Devs are not biased against killers, but they are biased towards survivors. Just compare their new UI for killers and UI for survivors.
Also look at their speed of fixing bugs for killers and survivors. How long grabs are bugged? More than a year? It is a ######### basic gameplay mechanic, and they can't fix it for a year. Do you need any more proofs?
And yes, killrates mean nothing because matchmaking is busted.
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New killer here with about 50-100h.
After reaching rank 9 all hell broke lose with lobbies filled with survivors with way more hours than me.
Until rank 9 I lost maybe 2 games, after I either 4k or get completely destroyed.
If I was a masochist I would just "grind it out" until my time was enough to reach red ranks.
Meanwhile survivors can reach red ranks on the back of their friends or with 1 or 2 team mates if not full squad so they are not skilled red ranks and they get by by doing generators and saves and holding W away from generators so they pip or safety.
And that is why many survivors reach red ranks fast and undeserving and why a killer doing the same is way more unlikely and thus there are not enough killers and the queues drag on. So to answer your question, survivors at red ranks are still far from being skilled but a killers that reached red ranks went through the hell I am facing right now and got over it by learning, so survivors make mistakes and killers are good enough to punish them hard for it.
Just tune in to a killer stream and you will see how some survivors look like new players and others can't even be touched and their decision making is on point.
Now if only there was a way to make sure the survivors were skilled enough for their rank you wouldn't have the cesspoll that is the matching for both sides.
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As Survivors players can do several severe mistakes and still win easiliy...
As a killer a minor mistake like bad movement in a chase, a missed hit or something like that can make you lose the entire game. not even starting to talk about the 59s ds etc... its very minor things that can turn a 4k into a 4man escape...
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How is the new UI evidence of pro-survivor bias?
There are tons of bugs with all facets of the game that haven't been fixed in years and you can really cherry pick whatever you'd like. Some people are bothered by Dead Hard triggering and then leaving you exhausted on the ground because it wasn't designed for dedicated servers. Some people are mad about grabs because they don't work well on dedicated servers.
Why do you feel the trend line is unreliable even if matchmaking has an impact on the actual percentages? It's the same matchmaking system that it's always been afaik
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The current ranking system is essentially based off of playtime. As time goes on, more and more people will be shuffled into red ranks regardless of their actual skill level.
A time based trend does not work well with that in mind.
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The game is arguably designed for the survivor experience first and foremost. The entire game design screams it out. Case in point is how much of the killer powers and perks have counterplay designed in them, like any normal videogame. Things on the survivor side however don't. The game is designed for the experience of, and from the point of view of survivors. It's also why you end up with killers like Plague where the survivors get to dictate how you're going to be using your power that game.
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I don't have any data on what percentage of matches are played at what rank, but the thing is, neither trendline has been steadily downward since launch. The only downward trend has been the relatively small one around the Ruin nerf.
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I don't personally agree, but I see where you're coming from. This post is more targeted at the folks who keep spamming about how they have no chance because SWF is too strong, the devs keep nerfing killer, etc.
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Because of the way the devs determin "red ranks". To see if a game is red rank, they look at the killers rank. Nothing else. So a rank 1 killer vs 4 rank 2 survivors and a rank 1 killer vs 4 rank 18 survivors are both counted as red rank games. And with the matchmaking, we know what happens.
Its only an andecote, because i have just my experience, but when i played killer, i wasnt that good. At rank 12 i played mainly vs red rank swf. At rank 8, i played mainly vs red rank swf. At rank 4, i suddenly got paired against rank 12 - 16 solo survivors.(true story, but statisticly irrelevant. And yes, not every match was like that, but with a strong tendancy.). Time and again. So yeah, that explains at least my personal killrate was higher in red ranks than in green ones.
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The game is balanced around bad survivors having a chance. The better you are playiyng as survivor, the greater the overall advantage you have over the killer.
Lets say a rank 15 clown vs rank 15 survivors... games balance evolves around that and its kind of fair...
rank 1 clown vs rank 1 survivors... clown gets smashed into pieces, it doesnt matter how good you play, since you cant become better at some point. you can perfectly hit every bottle but will still lose...
lets say they finish the generators in 3 minutes... that means you need to hook a survivor every 15 seconds for the 12k. you usually need 10 seconds to walk to a hook. so the game becomes impossible to win at this point.
and that is why you can make so many mistakes as a survivor but not as the killer and still win. There are veteran players that don´t even see this, because they are to biased for survivors aswell.
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I definitely agree there are more survivor players - there are probably 3-4 times as many game hours played by survivors just because it's a 4v1 game, so that would have to be the case. My perspective is different on the perks, though; I wouldn't consider survivor meta perks "fundamentally game changing" and "unbeatable" compared to meta killer perks. I agree that DS needs a nerf, but I also see that DS has been nerfed three separate times since launch and the devs have said they're still thinking about it; it's definitely not as if they're just ignoring it.
If balance were driving away killers I agree they'd jump to shift the balance towards killer to bring them back, but that just doesn't seem to be the case given the kill rates over time. I really do think that focusing on performance and polish (e.g. not breaking the sounds every patch) would do more to keeping up a robust killer population, and I think MMR will help as well since it should help prevent people from getting discouraged.
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UI for survivor: individual hook counters, because it is too hard for them to count hooks for teammates.
UI for killers: killers already are counting hooks, will we free them from routine and make very intense killer gameplay a bit more comfortable? Nah, get this pointless counter for total hooks
Dude, it's not cherrypicking. It is a ######### elephant in the room. IT IS A BASIC GAMEPLAY MECHANIC. You can have bugged perks, you can have bugged killers, ok, we can pick something else, but we can't pick another basic gameplay unless we go to another game. It is not the same as bugged perk, and it ######### sucks. Imagine if generators were occasionally popping back to nothing after you fix them, would that be fine for you?
I think that trend line is unreliable, because in 2016 there were no players with 5000 hours in the game. It is unreliable because we don't know how the amount of players in each group and the amount of skilled and new players affects each other. Right now with crossplay and very long matchmaking queues for survivors in prime time survivors are just thrown at first killer loading in the game. How it affects kill rates? IDK How much moris did affect killrates? IDKx2
I agree still that right now game is better for killers than it was in 2016. But actual killrate in matches of equally skilled players, with no hook suicides, without moris, NOED and keys, which actually would be a measure of balance in the game, do we have it? No. It can be actual 70%, it can be 30%, but we don't know. So it is irrelewant to any discussions about sides.
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Kill rates are a bad metric for balance. For example, my very last game I was doctor; he's got strong anti-loop powers. Despite this, I was still struggling to down survivors quickly, and got 3 or 4 hooks before the endgame came. Then, the survivors swarmed the hooked survivor, and tried to body block, but they failed. They ran to a gate (99% open), and I managed to down both injured survivors. They tried to heal them, and what resulted was a little footsies with an open gate, the ones on the floor trying to crawl out while I picked them up, hooked them, and had to let them unhook so I could deal with the next survivor. I got 2 kills.
Compare that to a game where I'm dominating chases, applying a lot of gen pressure. I'm getting a hook about every 10 seconds, so bad I get DS'd 3 times in a row without hooking anyone in between. I get 10 hooks, with only 2 generators going down, 2 survivors each on last hook. Then, both survivors find the hatch, and open it with a key. I got 2 kills.
These look the same in the statistics, but they're not similar at all in terms of power balance. And I agree this isn't entirely a bias vs killers, but rather an issue with equal skill levels between killer and survivor having dramatically different outcomes depending on what that skill level is (e.g. 0% skill killer and survivors would go to killer, 100% skill killer and survivors would go to survivors)
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If you have more of an advantage over the killer as a better survivor player, why are red rank kill rates higher than overall kill rates?
Clown's kill rate is only 2% below average and he's about to get a buff; he'll be just fine.
Survivors simply don't finish the gens in 3 minutes unless the killer is afk, so that's not a useful hypothetical. The game starts with four survivors doing gens (assuming no CI and such). The killer's job is to get a quick down, because that quickly drops the number of people on gens to one; you have one on gens, one saving, one on the hook, and one a chase. That buys them a ton of time, and when they finally remove a survivor from the game they can even keep survivors off gens entirely by chasing well.
Survivor mistakes are every bit as important as killer mistakes. The difference is just that one survivor messing up is only wasting 1/4 of their team's time. The killer making a mistake is more equivalent to all four survivors messing up at once.
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They've literally helped killers so much that its so rude to say that. Nerfed everything strong on survivor that wasn't perks. Of course it was the right choice but ask they did was nerf ruin and undying and some other perks and they forget all the help they received.
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They're probably worried that giving the killer that information would lead to tunneling. Survivors also aren't directly interacting with everyone that gets hooked, so it is harder for survivors to keep track of who has been hooked. The portraits next to the names would admittedly already solve a lot of that though.
That certainly is cherry picking. You could say the same thing about how long it's taken to get hit validation working, because it has long been making survivors take unfair hits because of bad killer ping. This happens far more frequently than failed grabs.
If the trend line is unreliable due to lack of experience back in 2016, when does it become usable? 2018? Kill rates still rose at red ranks and all ranks from late 2018 to late 2019. Again, you can dispute the percentage all you'd like, but if the trend line is usable, it doesn't matter. The trend line should reflect changes to game balance, and therefore that should be enough to evaluate whether devs are pushing the need towards survivor-sidedness.
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Ah, I see what you're getting at. I agree with the killer side for all of the killers who are actually getting full reworks, and I'm sure that's a factor in why they're taking so long for things like reworking DS.
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Well thought out post OP.
I do agree with you. It is only reasonable that the devs want the game as balanced and as fun as possible. And a good point on the trends. I know some folks don't like the math, however it would take significant dc, suicides, etc. to completely invalid the data.
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All of these permutations should be included in kill rate. There will be games the survivors make dumb plays to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and games where the killer makes a terrible error and lets a few survivors out that should have died. And moreover, all of the permutations will have been included in the kill rate since launch, so that's not a reason not to trust the trend.
As for the parenthetical, I agree with the general point, but I'd switch the percentages around; the narrative on the forum is that survivors are OP and killers have no chance at red rank unless survivors mess up, but that doesn't really fit with red rank kill rates being a lot higher.
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Thanks bro, I appreciate it :)
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You ever consider Kill rates at certain ranks will be higher due to the fact their are probably more players at that specific rank right? For example if 10% of your playerbase is yellow rank and 40% of your Playerbase is purple then of course kill rates will seem higher at the particular rank with the greater number of survivors and killers.
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Well, the amount of players at a given rank wouldn't change the kill rate at that rank; it'd just increase the influence that specific rank's kill rate would have on the "all ranks" kill rate.
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"The devs are not bias against killers"
I've had the game for 4 years and you could have fooled me. There have been some major nerfs/reworks to survivors that greatly helped the game as a whole but those were only brought about because the amount of killer players was dangerously low. Even then it took a year or two of complaining to get survivors nerfed. Meanwhile killers get nerfed in just a few months. Forgive me if I disagree with you OP but I feel the devs are survivor mains.
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Tune into a survivor stream and you'll also see plenty of rank 1 killers that seem like they're rank 20. It's the same for both roles.
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This is not mathematically true. The overall numbers would indeed be higher. However, the percentage is still a representation of the whole. As such 5 out of 10 is the same rate as 500 out of 1000.
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I know why they are doing this, but they are still doing this. I don't really think that it will actually make people tunnel more. If you are tunneling - it is way more easy to track hooks on your single victim. This counter would actually help killers who don't tunnel since they hook multiple people.
Hit validation is a valid argument, but it is not a bug and it is working as intended. There are reasons why it is working as it does. You can disagree with them, but it is not the case when something is just ######### up.
Why do you think that it isn't important where we are now, in good balance for killer, or bad balance for killer? Do we even have killrates for time after mori nerf? Why don't consider that killrate drop in total ranks in 2020? Like, if the game is still the same for top killers, but becomes worse for regular killer players, that actually means that the game is worse for killers in general, if only skilled players are able to sustain their performance level.
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I wouldn't be opposed to the killer getting the same hook counter. They could also just give it the ol' weekend test and see how it impacts things.
You make a good point about the mori nerf - I wouldn't be surprised if that has an impact - but we simply don't have numbers that are any newer. If we get numbers in late 2021 showing that kill rates dropped again, I still wouldn't be alleging pro-survivor bias given the game's history, but I'd absolutely agree that game balance was swinging back towards survivor again.
I'm not ignoring the drop in overall kill rate in 2020; I'm just trying to keep it in context. In the data I was able to find, 2019 to 2020 was the only drop in kill rates we've since since the game launched. That's definitely not enough to allege bias, especially if it was indeed mostly caused by the Ruin change.
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Streamers always face the wrong ranks due to hours played. It would be very bad if you played 3-6h a day a game for months on end and not be above average. I mentioned killer since those are the ones I watch enough to make an educated statement.
In "normal people" ranks though killers are better prepared than survivors because they have to play the game alone, as a survivors I can play matches where I just do gens, save and heal and escape and crawl up, I got to red ranks with survivor and I can't run so anyone can do it.
Maybe crossplay boosted killers? Idk, I've faced console players that destroyed me and it happens alot but I can't tell how experienced they are, PC survivors trash me by experience alone. Haven't payed attention if I win more vs consoles or if it is unrelated
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Because killers have to be the better skill to account for the lack of info the devs think survivors make abundant. Survivors don't enter a match and have to counter play against their own base kit.
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Well, Ruin nerf is something that can still be included in the conversation, because it was a crucial perk for killers. There actually shouldn't be any perks having THAT amount of influence on gameplay, but it is as it is. It was removed from the game, then they create Ruin 2.0, then nerf it again, so no Ruin soon.
I really want them to nerf NOED into oblivion next so we'll have the real kill rate and then the core of the game could be balanced around that.
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This is getting a little afield from balance, but still, I'm not sure how killers need to be more skilled than survivors or lack info compared to survivors. The real difference imo is just that the killer has all of the responsibility on their own shoulders, while the actions of one survivor out of four are less directly responsible for their team's success. That's a big reason why playing killer is more stressful, but this would hold regardless of game balance or bias/lack thereof from the devs.
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Yep, I'm sure that influence is exactly why they nerfed it. When a perk is being used in ~80% of killer games (I think that's what they said), that's the point where you should probably nerf it and make other balance changes as needed to compensate.
I'm sure the devs pay attention to how NOED is performing too; we just don't have stats that granular.
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First off, kill rates shouldn't be used as evidence. They're given as lump sum, not broken down into parts as they should. Lets say 80% of Clowns kill rate comes from low rank matches, 15% from mid, 5% from high. There's a disparity there, but because all they show is 100% of his kill rates without it being broken down, you may assume he's doing pretty good. Nor do the stats show dcing, suiciding on first hook, trolling, farming, etc etc. There's a lot that can happen, but it's all shoved into the stats. Lastly, just think how bad the emblem system is. Spend long enough, and you can reach red ranks, without actually being red ranked skilled.
I tend to lean on the side that the devs really are survivor sided, for two reasons. The first is SWF. We all know how imbalanced it is at higher levels of play. The standard 'they just want to play with their friends' argument does nothing to invalidate that. The devs refuse to make any meaningful changes, consistently. They ignore it, so the problem continues.
Second is meta. When was the last time survivor meta perks were adjusted? We've gotten changes to killer meta perks, as 'they can be too overwhelming.' Yet it's okay for multiple second chances perks on multiple survivors to be okay. Years of this, yet they won't make any changes.
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If we wanna pretend there is no bias then lets get this out of the way
The most common perks used by surviors is BT and DS..By this logic they should be "nerf" to make way for a new meta..But,they have not been properly looked at since the time the One Dev got SWFed on live.
Undying which had a ######### basic abtitiy got nerfed..Multiple things got nerfed..The gen kicking perk got nerfed for the same reason why DS is Bull "Too much time to do things"
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I'm not trying to use kill rates to talk about the balance of specific killers; I'm just using them to look at overall game balance over time.
1) Regarding SWF, I don't think it's fair to say that it's imbalanced without data to back that up. Kill rates have been close to 70% at red rank for like two years; if SWF is OP, does this mean that solos are dying like 80-90% of the time at red rank in a world where the hatch automatically opens for the last survivor? Maybe, but that seems like a bit of a stretch. The other thing we need to reconcile if SWF is OP is why killers perform better at red rank. You'd think that the strongest SWFs would play at red rank.
Personally, I feel that SWF is extremely powerful when played optimally, but in practice it usually isn't. SWFs often throw games by playing too boldly and altruistically and the skill gap between the best and worst survivors is often higher in SWFs. Since eliminating a survivor early is a huge advantage for the killer, I'm sure that helps out. Not everyone in a SWF is going to be sharing information on comms either. Either they don't know enough to communicate effectively or they choose not to because they find the game more immersive that way (I have a few friends like that). I'm not sure how that'd translate into kill rate, but I wouldn't be surprised if it doesn't come out as far ahead as people assume.
2) Regarding meta perks, we can't ignore that killers have had a number of meta perks added since the last survivor meta perk (Dead Hard, July 2017) was added. Pop and BBQ are meta. Infectious Fright is meta on a few killers, namely Plague and Oni. Corrupt Intervention is meta on slow starting killers like Trapper and Hag. Undying and New Tinkerer were just added a few months back, and both will very likely still be meta on high mobility killers like Blight even after the upcoming nerf. Nemesis was meta on Bubba for a while. Discordance is meta on Legion and is strong on many killers. Spirit Fury was the basic M1 killer meta (along with Enduring) for quite a while, and it still gets a decent amount of use today. Survivors haven't had a single meta perk added during that time (almost MoM, but it was meme tier by launch), but they definitely have had nerfs. DS was nerfed a few times, for example, and Dead Hard and Sprint Burst were both nerfed with the change to prevent the exhaustion timer from moving while sprinting.
When I see the Undying nerf, for example, I see a perk that is still very strong and that will be much more useful with all token-based hexes, like Devour. I'm actually expecting an Undying/Devour meta to emerge, especially on killers like Hag who are good at defending their totems. I don't have a "side", but I'd prefer having several new meta perks, a few of which end up getting nerfed, to getting no new meta perks and still having a few of my existing meta perks get nerfed.
DS does need another nerf though.
Edit: The fact that the survivor meta is still quite strong after three and a half years of no additions, no buffs (unless you count a DS tweak right after one of the nerfs), and a few nerfs should also say a lot about the advantages survivors had back in the first year or two after launch. That just gets back to my main point.
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I think this game is like pendulum
The "balance" can seem to swing one way or the other
I'm sure the more the post Kill rates and Pick rates we'll see something (or at least I hope we do)
They told us not to read anything into what they showed us (cause I think there're to general -the stats I mean-)
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I don't think the stats alone tell the real story. But, even if they did, let's look what has happened since the Ruin nerf, alone. There has been a huge increase in slugging, camping, mori's, and NOED use. Maybe the kill rates are close to the same, but killers have to play more sweaty and ruthless in order to do it, which nobody likes.
Also, those stats don't cover how many killers have quit the game or switched to playing only survivor. The numbers are probably still the same because only the more hardcore killers have kept playing, while survivor queue times have increased.
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Yeah, I think they just don't want people to draw bad conclusions from them. Like, you could imagine someone seeing Nurse and Blight with the two lowest kill rates and going "they must be the two worst killers" without considering that both are a bit tricky to control and Blight was only out for like a 6 weeks when those stats dropped.
When you're looking at overall kill rate trending over time, though, the trend line is very likely still useful. You might not be able to say what the actual kill rate would be in a match with no farming/sandbagging/hook suicides/bugs/etc., but you should at least be able to say which way the game balance was swinging. There would need to be a big change in one or more of these factors to make the trend line useless and I haven't seen anything that would make me think that.
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Just a distinction, grabs rely on latency. This makes it difficult to fix since dead by daylight has many players around the world and their connection to the server can vary immensely.
Also kill rates do have some meaning since they have the ability to filter out bad matchmaking results and isolate variables they are curious about. A good example of them doing this is when they disabled bloodlust for a weekend. People complained about survivor exhaustion perks not being nerfed for a weekend to test as well. The difference which is why I brought it up is they can already filter games to see the result of survivors with and without exhaustion perks.
tldr; They have more variables they can use when examining stats so kill rates do matter
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I like where you're going with both of those points, but I'd like to see some more data on the trends you're calling out.
Like even if someone just documented like 250 matches of their matches in January and 250 matches in October to get a sort of noisy approximation of things, I would be curious to see if there really has been an increase in NOED, slugging, etc. I haven't personally noticed it, but it could be. I think that killers and survivors will both tend to play in the way that they feel gives them the biggest advantage, so if nerfing Undying just pushed people to less "fun" play styles, that would obviously not be good. Balance definitely isn't everything; the game also needs to be fun.
I'd be curious to know if more inexperienced killers are leaving the game too. Kill rate at lower ranks definitely seems to have dropped a good bit in 2020, potentially because of the Ruin nerf like I said. It's not necessarily a problem for the kill rate to go down, but it shouldn't be hopeless either. I put way less trust in the actual percentages than the trend line, so something like 56% might be a bit inflated and not exactly ideal.
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If anything, they favor killers.
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Lol I think I'm the only one who thinks they've been reasonably fair with their changes
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please list EVERYTHING that has been nerfed for survivors in the past 2 years and everything that has been buffed for killers in the past 2 years. let's keep it from spirit's dlc onward. we know in 2016 and 2017 there was a lot of changes because the game was not fully functional at that point. and 2017 and 2018 they got a hold of the hex perks they put in. so now we work from oct 2018 to now to compare. please tell me what is what. your comment carries no weight without the data.
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they have been reasonably fair with their changes if you are looking for one side loosing functionality and the otherside isn't even touched. and it's not about equivalency what so ever. but it's more what side is being changed and how much.
lets look at moris and keys. both of them the devs have said they would change up. moris originally allowed killing people without a hook, keys function now as they did back then. mori's get changed devs say they will change keys. now 3-4 years later mori's get another change (nerf) and devs say they will change keys. keys have not been changed even when they said they would. Devs tell survivors they are changing up the med kits on X day and every survivor grabs their syringes and what not and use them. Devs learn from that mistake and just jump on and change mori's without any warning but keys "We are working on this" is still there. Radio silence about keys otherwise. This gives the impression of bias towards survivors. and it is something that has happened over time and not just once. Oh yes mori's needed to be worked on I agree but the way it was done pushes the appearance towards survivor bias.
Now lets look at undying/ruin/tink vs BT/DS/UB. so in order to get a comparable reading you have to look at combinations of perks. and the synergy between them and this still is not a good thing as they've done: first look at undying and DS: if these perks were the only perks chosen, then DS wins out hands down as the winner here because it's utility is great, undying only lets you see auras if you're looking and it's a 2 second window with no alert so it's not as if you know the aura is visibile. so now that we see that BT is protection against being re-hooked and the survivor can trigger it and use it at any time. Now add in Ruin (or any hex that has no tokens as it hasn't hit live servers yet) this provides utility and lets undying's real power work to save the ruin if ruin is cleansed. How ever both are hex perks, and can be shut down by the survivors and thus the power is all passive. add in unbreakable with DS, you get a 1 minute window that you can do things and if you're downed, you can get back up if left there. again the survivor can CHOOSE to do this or another survivor can do it. so you're able to do things without worry the killer will because they leave you down. The BT/UB combo has been very powerful for at minimum 1 year if not since the DS rework. undying isn't that powerful and in 3 months it's nerfed. There is NO talk about BT/UB changes what so ever, actually quite the opposite they say that it's all good. this shows a survivor side bias as well.
Clown rework: lets call this a buff where you can move faster by choosing to throw a tonic that speeds you up, but lets let the survivors enjoy this speed buff too if they run through the cloud. that's a GREAT buff, and it's supposed to be an awesome thing but yet why are survivors affected by it? that's a buff for the survivors. no other killer has any abilities that buff the survivor, but now clown will. This shows a bias slightly towards survivors because now they benefit from the killer's power instead of having it as a detriment. I'm not saying it's not a good thing for clown, it certainly has a cool idea behind it so i'd say only a slight survivor bias here.
Look at billy: with no provocations billy and bubba get changed... billy has a new mechanic called overheat and his add ons totally separated from bubba. this mechanic is to stop people from holding others hostage by a reved chainsaw.... well that is bad but why did they do it without any communication like they did with nurse where they said they were going to re-work her add-ons but barely touch her base kit. so what is this? a slight survivor bias here but bubba did get buffed and billy a minor nerf.
that's some of the big things lately, the only one that is really close to being a killer buff over all is the billy/bubba changes and that's debatable. Take this with what you can, but these are the big things I could think of without even trying. :)
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Also I was going to say that your OP was well put together
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Well, I can only go by my own experiences, what I see in streamer videos, and what is posted on the forums.
With the nerf to ruin, gen times increased and killers had to start using methods to create extra time for themselves. Slugging buys more time. Because gens get done so much quicker NOED becomes more necessary, and more useful. Mori's also help slow the game down by removing survivors earlier. I imagine that is also why some killers have also resorted to deliberate tunneling. All these things that survivors hate are the result of increased gen speeds. If you were on the forums back during the Ruin nerf on PTB, killers were saying that this would happen if Ruin went through in that state, and that is exactly what happened.
I started as a survivor main. I never even saw a mori until after the Ruin nerf. Slugging was extremely rare, and I never felt like I was being tunneled. In fact, a lot of killers were pretty laid back, especially with inexperienced survivors. A little before the Ruin nerf I started playing killer, and I was emulating those laid back killers. Just having fun and trying to make sure the survivors did too. After the Ruin nerf, the gen times were ridiculous. On the larger maps you couldn't even sprint across to the opposite side of the map before gens started popping. What's worse is that survivors who survive mock the killer in endgame chat. Also, because it is so much easier for killers to depip, this caused an even bigger problem. The more moderate killers started quitting, including myself, while the more hardcore killers became more ruthless. I'm sure that everyone has seen the survivor queue time go up. Fewer killers = Longer queues. It used to be the other way around. Killers had longer queues.
Making the game less fun for killers, has made the game less fun for survivors too. Look at all the complaints about those tactics killers are now using. Look at all of the calls for nerfs to these tactics. Survivors don't see the correlation between gen times and these tactics. Now I even see killers going for 4 slug strategies, right from the start, especially on slower killers. I never saw that before.
The funny part is that killers didn't even like using ruin. Many felt it was a wasted slot, but they needed to use it to slow gen progress, even though it could easily cleansed early in the game. Players didn't like gens taking so long to repair, but also didn't like looking for totems, so nerf to Ruin (now undying too). Killers weren't even opposed to changes to Ruin, it's the way they changed it that was the problem. Other suggested solutions were ignored. I had no problem with the old ruin, it took longer, but wasn't any harder. The devs said that they are opposed to increasing gen times because it is no fun holding M1 for long periods of time (I get that), but they are also opposed to adding any additional objectives. I just saw a video the other day, from a prominent streamer, that said that survivors should not even waste time cleansing totems, lit or not, because it is a waste of time. What does that say about the nature of perks that are supposed to be the strongest in the killers arsenal? It was already bad enough that so many totems are right out in the open, but then they nerf the hex perks because players can't be bothered looking for the ones that aren't out in the open....despite having multiple tools to locate totems.
It's hard not to see that as them favoring survivors. Though, it could easily be that they just don't understand the real problems.
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