If Killer is easier than it's ever been, why aren't people playing them?
I agree Killer is easier than previous years. Yet we still have a queue problem and lots of Killer apathy.
Thoughts?
Comments
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Boredom?
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It isn't fun.
If you win, it's nice. You get a feeling of satisfaction.
If you lose, you get taunted for the entire game and likely get reminded of it post-game. It's mentally taxing to go through that for multiple games.
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I think that's the weird part of that argument
Sure, it might be more balanced than it used to be but that doesn't make it balanced.
But it's the real issue of this game; killers are overpowered in the lower ranks because survivors don't know how to really game the system. As you go up in ranks, you're running into survivors who know every little trick that makes it damn near impossible for a killer to have a real chance unless they play flawlessly (and even then it might not be enough against a coordinated SWF).
I don't really know how you'd fix it.
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For me, killer is exactly as easy as it was during 2016. Potatoe survivors plagued high ranks back then and they still do now and will do so forever, that's what makes killer seem easy as you don't rely on other 3 randomly (un)skilled strangers.
Put any of the best killer streamers out there against top level SWF of equall skill to theirs into 100 matches and watch how easy it is to play killer. Even as spirit or nurse they'll struggle if the survivors are on the same skill level as the killer and pressure him properly.
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Playing killer definitely requires more attention, planning, strategy, stuff to keep track of, etc. I'm not always up for that.
And then there's the fact that a lot of people, such as myself, enjoy playing games cooperatively. I love games like this and Apex Legends where you can team up with a couple other strangers on the internet.
As soon as they introduce a 2v8 mode I'll become a killer main lol
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Some good points were already made.
I just want to add that as survivor the Stress level is shared between 4 Players. A killer is on its own.
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IMO it goes like this:
Low skill killer: You mostly face brown, yellow and some green. Depending on how much experience the better survivor have in your game it's gonna be hit or miss. You'll either destroy noob survivor but you'll also waste so much time on survivor that are more optimize than you.
Mid skill killer: You face the raimbow. You destroy any survivor that still don't know how to properly run tiles & aren't optimized at all, you'll face some survivor of your skill and you'll have fun playing against them and you'll face some survivor that are above your league and you'll hate playing against them.
Good killer: You face some survivor that are weaker than you so even if you have the shittiest killer with the shittiest perk & add-on you don't have trouble against them, some survivor are on your skill and there are some mindgame and they'll fight for their death. Then you have those highly optimize survivor that you have to outplay or wait for their mistake to down them & not get genrush in the meantime.
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Playing killer is starting to become boring for me , I started as a killer and I've got over 5000 hrs into just the killer side , I'm not saying that it's boring because nothing is going on but more of no new killers have caught my attention , we haven't had any licensed killers since PH. Also everytime either side gets anything that's remotely considered strong it gets nerfed into the ground making for stale gameplay that's extremely repetitive. People are getting tired of the same ol same ol and BHVR having lackluster events and chapter releases with no maps or any good perks to shake the meta, but that goes back to even if they did people would cry and get it nerfed, this community complaining about every little thing is what's gonna kill the game
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Could be many things.
It's apparent from these forums that a significant portion of kills still find it too hard.
Bored (my reason, I just don't find it very fun anymore. They haven't innovated chases at all, no new mechanics for both sides. Just new, mediocre killer powers that are existing killer hybrids)
They don't like the pressure of being the 1 Vs the 4. This is pretty common, some players get performance anxiety when its all on them.
And finally, you can't play killer with your friends. That's a big one. Game are more fun with friends that why SWF is so popular.
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I think another point is that a lot of new/intermediate killers tend to get used to either a 3K+hatch or 4K/12 hooks. So when they reach the level where most games will end in a 2-3K at most it annoys them and makes them feel like they underperformed.
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because it doesn't matter how easy it is if people never actually get good at that role, there are many players of dbd who think they're gods at their respective roles and are actually awful, I would say this is actually the majority of players, honestly.
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I agree with your points.
I am curious to hear your response to this line: "You shouldn't play for kills, you should play for fun"
I hear this touted as a common reply to people on this forum. Doesn't make any sense to me.
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The feeling when you chase a red ranked survivor for a minute or two into a match, land a hit and then lose them pretty much ruins the game. 3 gens are done, you don't have a hook, and the game is essentially over unless you resort to camping and slugging which brings on the toxic responses. I also have thousands of killer hours at rank 1 and lately just have been playing survivor to not deal with it.
Watching survivor streams confirms what I have posted earlier - the undying nerf really has hurt and totems are ignored now unless it's glowing. Devs need to give survivors another objective, or better yet, make all totems glow.
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For me it depend. If I get 2k vs survivor with meta perk that saved their ass multiples time while making many mistake I feel robbed, game get sweaty and I don't like this at all.
IMO relying on kills is not a good way to look at how balance the game is. As survivor I can get kill with over 160s worth of gen progression & doing a gen on my own, a combined total of 75s+ chase and some heals here and there and I feel like it's a win/I did my part even if I died.
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If you're chasing a single player for 2 minutes at game start you're doing it wrong. Drop the chase immediately if they make it to a strong central building or pallet farm and find a new chase.
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It's boring because if you go against solos it's usually a stomp and against SWF if they are just efficient at splitting up on gens you lose in minutes.
Plus if you win you are a tunneling, slugging camper even if you haven't done any of these. Also if you lose it's GG EZ baby killer git gud. I can deal with idiots like this but for a lot of people after a while it just becomes draining and not worth it when you can just chill on survivor instead.
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Dude bet you feel so smart now that you asked this question, you made it, you cracked the code, you uncovered the secret that bhvr is trying so hard to keep hidden from us, the truth is revealed
... or actually because survivor appeals more to casuals who just want to play with friends, instead of solo. Mindblowing right?
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Idk man even survivor is starting to become a snoozefest I really don't blame people for starting to leave the game
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Steam charts kinda show the opposite. According to steam's community hub, more than 49k players are online now. Thing is this is exactly what the casual playerbase is made of: people who come, people who go
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I've been here since release with over 9,000 hours and devotion 35 maybe it's just me starting to get burned out is why I have this opinion, most of the people I used to play with have quit this game and moved on to something different
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Yeah, to me killer games just split into 2 variations:
ezpz victory didn't sweat
or
there was literally nothing I could do no matter how did I play.
and since I don't play on spirit or nurse (first isn't just something I can pull off well and second is too frustrating), I usually play killers like Phead or Ghostface and these killers, well, they have certain limitations they can't surpass no matter how good you are.
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Killer is still TOUGH you literally need to be on your A game ALL of the time. And unfortunately you get teams of four consistently and it is near impossible to win or even catch someone with lower tier killers. So when you pick a stronger killer survivors just either DC or kill themselves first hook. So its a lose lose. you play a killer that can handle a full team and boom dcs. you play a killer of lower tier and you get bullied. So i can assume people dont enjoy that. I play killer ALOT i mean ALOT i choose this because it takes more effort than survivor does. Even with the recent state of the game survivor is SUPER lax compared to killer and rightfully so. Some people just cant do it.....
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I only dont play killer cuz i cant play with my buddys ):
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This is also a great point
I think there are survivors who really need to take a good long hard look in the mirror as they complain about their queues being so long. There are too many survivors out there who seem to not only want to beat you as the killer but make sure to make it as MISERABLE of an experience as they possibly can towards the killer. They purposefully go out of their way to maliciously attack the killer and make sure the killer experience as awful as they possibly can.
I myself had quit for about three weeks or so after one bad night of getting a few of these games in a row. I eventually did come back but next time I get that frustrated and decide to take a short break, there's a decent chance that my short break eventually becomes never coming back...
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The Killer role has a massive difficulty spike that Survivor simply doesn't.
Here's the thing. To a beginner, basic Killer gameplay is significantly easier to grasp than basic Survivor gameplay. Killer is find a guy, chase a guy, down a guy, hook a guy, repeat. Survivor has to balance doing gens, rescuing, healing, and a lot of them do way more steath than necessary; and then there's the whole looping thing that is not obvious how to do it. So... 1 beginner Killer vs 4 beginner Survivor is probably going to be a stomp in the Killer's favor.
Now... take a few steps forward on the progression path for both roles. Survivors are learning to be more efficient, Survivors have a much easier time getting nearly a fully meta loadout via leveling Bill then Meg or David, the existence of Windows and Pallets very much hints to the whole looping thing. New Survivors have a pretty smooth path to a lot of incredibly strong power spikes. Killer on the other hand, not so much. A Beginner Killer going for a very meta build is going to need like... 9k shards for Spirit, ~$5 for Bubba for BBQ, 9k shards for Hag for Ruin or Clown for pop, 9k shards for Blight for Undying or Plague for Corrupt, then a whole lot of BP for Spirit, Bubba, Hag/Clown, Blight/Plague, and Nurse for Stridor. Then as far as pure gameplay skills, they'll need to learn to accurately predict Survivor behavior and learn how to mindgame and moonwalk. None of those skills are super obvious.
Dominating game after game after game then suddenly running face first into the Survivor's easy to aquire power spikes is not really a good time. I would suspect that a lot of killer players don't stick around long enough to get the skills and perks necessary to fight back.
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At a certain point, you realize you either have to play to win and not have fun, or play for fun and not win.
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the stress just isn't worth it, I don't even do killer dailies anymore, because I'm too tired of sweating every killer game, unlike survivor which I play (and escape) with half my attention diverted towards some tv show or youtube on the side.
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When I see T-bagging/Flashlight clicking I try to give them a bad experience by slugging the ######### out of them, tunneling and letting them bleed to death. My games haven't been sweaty at all lately so I had the chance to do it.
I got one game today on Rancid Abattoir and I tunneled the person (ate the new DS) & one game on Suffocation Pit and they left 3 gen on the same side so I was able to come back with STBFL and ended up keeping the flashlight clicker for the end and letting him bleed to death. When I do that I just open a video on my second monitor and watch a youtube video while keeping an eye so he doesn't heal or get the hatch.
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They've had years to add game-wide mechanics and in that time we've had breakable walls and totems. They only want to add new gameplay in the form of perks or specific killers, most of which suck.
It's stagnant, that's all.
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Survivor difficulty scales directly with killer players skill aswell as the killer itself. That's all. A good looper will destroy a killer who can't play tiles or red stain mindgame, against a killer who can they'll have to start taking risks and trying to figure out what the killer is more likely to do.
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Some map are still very strong for survivor who know how to loop properly. Take the middle of Suffocation Pit for example. Plenty of T&L + Jungle Gym right beside each other and if they have good window placement you can't do ######### as killer regardless of your skill. A survivor at the highest skill will beat a killer at the highest skill because there are so many things a survivor can do to waste a killer's time while killer have so little to slow down survivor.
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Sure, but unlike Survivors, it is near impossible for a Killer to get all their powerful stuff all at once.
Seriously, throwing ~2 mil BP at a fresh Survivor account can give you either DH, WGLF, BT, Unbreakable or SB, Adren, BT, Unbreakable which are both just a DS away from having a variant of the meta Survivor build... and both replaces DS with a near meta perk.
Killers can't even come close to that level of a power spike that early.
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Well that's a bit of a faulty conclusion to draw from there being a dearth of killers. Just remember that DBD is an asymmetrical game and some people will prefer one side over the other by nothing but natural tendency. Sometimes, I feel like playing survivor, but I'm just a natural born killer (main). Some people are going to enjoy the experience, some won't
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I can agree that playing killer has gotten to be an easier experience. My biggest gripe is having a ton of perks and still only some being useful. Many killers perks have no incentive to use them over better options and sure the devs are buffing other perks but its just not quick enough imo. There is no reason Monstrous Shrine has had no changes despite being a perk that barely anyone runs. Lots of perks can be good in theory if they had certain values buffed up, or cooldowns reduced to make them consistently usable throughout the match.
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Killer controls feel like crap on console, frames drop too often, and the fog makes the PS4's fans get so loud that it's really really distracting. If they implemented cross progression so I could bring my account to PC, I'd do it, but I'm not starting over, I'll just straight up quit playing before I do that.
I used to play to win in DbD, but console optimization never came, dedicated servers made things so much worse, and as killer it began to feel like the game itself was against me when it'd drop frames at the worst times, I'd lose chases because Bloodlust tiered up, aim dressing would have me hitting everything in the environment except the survivor, and grabs only work like one out of every ten times. That kills the competitive spirit. So, I'm now usually in a casual mindset, but the game's matchmaking is ass and it rarely puts me with other players who share my playstyle. I like doing challenges and earning achievements, trying out different perk builds. If I could burn an offering to remove hooks from the map to give survivors the hint that there's no need to rush for their 4e so I could goof off with whatever dumb thing I'm trying to do, I would. Instead, I get discouraged quickly that whatever I'm trying to do isn't going to happen and I just stand back and let them have the win because that's the only thing they want and stopping them was the very thing I never cared about, and I just hope the next match I get survivors who are slower at getting gens done. But like I said, matchmaking sucks, so I get burned out quickly and go back to playing other games, throwing cricket bats at zombies in Dying Light or something.
tldr I play for fun, not to get kills, but that's an alien concept to most survivors I get matched with so the match is no fun for anyone. I mean, maybe a 4e where they didn't have to put in effort is fun, I dunno, 11k and a depip as survivor doesn't seem like that great an outcome but I'm not them. However, it's definitely boring for me so I go play other games.
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Matchmaking turns off killers for a long time too. Say you are green rank and have been having fun as Killer, you’re learning and getting better. Then all of the sudden you start getting matched with red ranks and purple ranks and you’re only 13 or 12 rank. You start losing, horribly. Match after match. You feel like you just barely learned how to swim and your dad, being a dickweasel, throws you into the deep end of the pool and expecting you to swim like a professional. Instead you start drowning and the people who are swimming like professionals( aka the red rank and purple rank survivors) are pointing and laughing at you. That is what makes Killer player just quit and either become survivors or just leave the game. I admit I’m one of those Killers, green rank killer getting red ranks constantly. I’m slowly playing Killer less and less. I may play a killer match once a gaming session, maybe even less now. Won’t be long now till I stop completely.
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I honestly just play whatever role my Lord and Master, THC, tells me to play.
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Because survivor will always be more popular due to its team factor, and ability to play with friends. The game needs to have a larger survivor population after all.
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Playing killer is too much energy for not enough reward / fun.
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You're punished with teabagging and insults for losing so you play to win which is very stressful
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When you lose as killer, you lose by yourself. When you lose as survivor, you have 3 others to share the pain? LOL!!
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Ohhh, you have to admit there are a lot more survivors with god complex than killers though.
People can think and say what they want, it doesn't change the reality that there are way too many survivors and not enough killers for whatever reasons, which is something that even the devs admitted.
If all the "killer is so easy" people would actually queue up to play killer, survivor queues at night wouldn't be as bad.
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When playing as killer I always try to play nice cause I play both sides so I know how killer tactics can be unfum to play against. But oh boy, if during my first chase and first down I notice all remaining survivors running towards me I know something will go down...yeah SFW groups, protecting their fellow survivor by any means...which means breaking hooks, bodyblocking etc...I immediately know this will be a long match but if they decided to play this way, I'm going to play this way too.
I'm rank 10 BTW and facing red ranks is just pain, even purple ones.
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Because killer honestly takes much more skill and strategy to win than survivor. Not only is there base killer learning, there is also individual killer skill, map skill, map knowledge, etc. A survivor doesnt have to do a lot to be optimized in all honesty. A killer takes a lot to become optimized.
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I like it, but the toxic survivors saying vulgar stuff in post chat makes me take 3 month long breaks every once in a while.
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The biggest reason is survivor players (and I say this as a red rank survivor main). I'm a new rank 10 killer and get purples and reds as my opponents all the time. It's not uncommon to get totally crushed by them and way too common that they are jerks about their win. Refuse to leave the trial and start making noise at the gates if I don't show up to watch their tbagging. Those people are simply not fun to play with.
Killer is not easy, but getting to green ranks as killer is way too easy. I've ranked up from horrible matches, and then the game thinks I'm good and ready to face high rank survivors, which is not the case.
As a survivor, there's time to chill a little bit. As a killer, no way.
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Kill is easier and less stressful,
But basically killer has gone from wanting to have all your fingernails removed to only wanting to pull your hair out sometimes.
Yeah its better, that doesn't make it good.
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This tendency has been getting clearer during the last year. First we had a severe lack of red rank killers. Then the matchmaking tried to compensate this by matching lower rank killers with red rank survivors. A few months ago we even reached the point of rank 17 killers getting matched against red ranks.
Now add to this new player experience that:
If you lose, survivors bully you and mock you in the endgame chat.
If you win, survivors haunt your profile for days, leaving nasty accusations and demanding that you uninstall.
Do people really wonder that killers stop playing when they get either bullied or harassed?
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The culture of killer hate and a generally low QoL bought on by jank movement, lack of tracking tools and a general increase in holding W to counter non-mobile killers.
Also, though killer is the easiest it's ever been, that doesn't mean it's easier than survivor. And it shouldn't be, because you are going against 4 people.
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Stomping is boring.
Soloq might be really stacked against you but that just means you have always room to play better to have a chance to win.
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