Tru3Talent VS Oracle - Both POVs, Survivor & Killer

I know many people won't like to hear this, but tru3talent is not as good a killer player as Oracle are survivor players. I would even argue he is fairly far from. I don't even need to go into details of the many fairly basic and more advanced mistakes he made here, it suffices to look at the fact that he missed basic attacks multiple times. He's an above-average killer player, but also not too much more than that from all I've seen.

Oracle has been 2-4k'd in tournaments plenty of times. Nurse, Spirit and Blight (at least prior to the flick nerf) consistently 2-4k in tournaments, and even a variety of other killers are still viable enough given that they also usually can kill around 2 survivors, with 3 and 4ks not being impossible. It also has to be noted that while survivors in these tournaments have perk restrictions, there are also severe add-on restrictions for most killers.

At the very top level of tournament competition, the game is certainly more-so leaning toward still being survivor-sided, even despite the consistent, substantial balance shifts benefitting killer play that have been happening throughout the past years. That said, even at that very top level it is not nearly as survivor-sided as people make it out to be, whatsoever. Again, two to four kills happen frequently in tournaments, I have personally taken stats on more than 10 tournaments and the average was slightly above 2 kills in most of them. Map and killer selection as well as perk restrictions do obviously play into this, some of the killer characters are absolutely too weak and deserving of buffs, but the fact of the matter is that tournament DbD is being played at a level that is... almost non-existently rare to be seen in public matchmaking. A one-in-a-million-matches-type of situation, or something thereabouts. So for around 99% of actual gameplay happening in this game, this survivor-sidedness of top-level competition holds almost no meaning. So much so that the game is in fact considerably killer-sided in its main, public matchmaking mode. The stats clearly show that, it can also be seen by the fact that competent killer players almost never lose public matches (on the contrary, they can go on 4k killing sprees of hundreds of games in a row), and even top-level players themselves think the game in public matchmaking is laughably killer-sided. They play crossplay-off EU matchmaking if they play matchmaking at all, and even there where they queue into a decidedly more "competitive" pool of players, they win their killer matches most of the time.

Only around 5% of all public matches even have parties of 4 players, and of those 5%, an even smaller portion is actually even using voice communications - and of that smaller portion, an even smaller portion is actually even composed of 4 skilled players that play in ways even comparably as efficient and effective as those tournament teams, coordinating their loadouts and strategies, having practiced call-outs, and such. It's exceedingly rare.

And here's something else people usually don't recognize about tournament play: the performance ceiling for survivors in tournaments grows by a tremendous amount, whereas the killer perfomance ceiling does not really change whatsoever. What separates a killer playing in a tournament from one playing outside of it? Basically nothing. It is still 1 player playing a specific killer, with whatever perks he chooses to, making all his own decisions, applying all his own skills. Sometimes killers will be in voice chat with their teammates and that can obviously help, since they can brainstorm macro-game decisions and some micro-game plays, but that is not the norm in tournaments, most killers just play for themselves, and sometimes aren't even allowed to talk to teammates. What separates a usual survivor lobby from a tournament team? Basically everything. First of all their combined individual skill is something you will almost never see in public games, then they can coordinate their loadouts down to the last add-on, they practice together all the time and have prepared strategies and developed natural synergies, they use voice communications in highly efficient and effective manners, their teamplay is exponentially better than that of just any random matchmaking squad, they regularly even know beforehand what killer they will go up against and on which map. These are all things you will basically never find in a matchmaking match, it's not like these tournament teams actually go and queue into public matches and let alone then play like that. The killers on the other hand? You will get a tournament-level killer side in a match every time such an individual decides to queue into public matchmaking, and they will actually usually play to win.

More simply put, any individual player can in theory become a tournament-level killer player, but no individual player can even come close to presenting a tounament-level survivor side - for that you need 4 individual players coming together who all are not only tournament-level skilled individually, but also have that degree of practice and coordination and so on as a collective.

So the fact that killers can still compete in tournaments despite the fact that survivor teams gain so much more from the tournament setting in terms of performance potential is if anything impressive, and shows how strong killers can be if the player is really good at the game. And just to note, in tournaments, killer vs. survivor balance does not even matter all that much, because the real competition is in performing better than the opposing team's killer/survivors, it is not about killers performing better than survivors or vice versa in itself. For instance, if the killer is Wraith and one team manages to get 6 hook stages with one kill, that can still totally be enough for a victory if they manage to give the opponent's Wraith less than that.

@zarr

Nice and detailed posts man. I feel like I am falling down into the rabbit hole. It is like watching completely different game than I am used to. There is definitely a lot to learn from these guys.

This isn't about Tru3, it is about the game having a survivor side bias.

Regarding the discussion of tournaments, I assume you are referencing this: https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/comments/irx8cn/survivor_escape_rates_are_only_496_in_hexys_dbd/

My conclusion from this is that only a subset of killers are selected for tournament play because only a subset has a real chance to get 2+ kills. Sure, there is that odd 1 game for some of the killers for the surprise factor, but it is obvious that they are not competitive over many games. Additionally, this avoids the qualitative parts of the tournament (How many killers were camping hooks or no-ed? Especially in those 1 games).

You are correct in saying that the majority of the public games are killer sided. The honest truth is that the average survivor player is not skilled and make many mistakes. You can see this in the game wide statistics that behavior releases from time to time. However, I have never seen behavior release these results stratified by rank or MMR, to get a sense of how games go with survivors who know what they are doing.

Why should we care about balancing at the high ranks? Because for the 4% of killers (check achievement stats) who get to rank 1, MMR puts you against these types of teams frequently. Are they as organized as oracle? or as efficient? Of course not. But, they do abuse the survivor sided loops and perks which the lower skilled survivors desperately need. There is a spectrum, and facing teams on this spectrum is annoying because optimal survivor play feels really bad for the killer player. The killer experience is unforgiving. If you make 1 small mistake (for example true missing hits he should have got), then you lose so much time. These top killers in this tournament have practiced for hours to avoid even making 1 small mistake with Blight, Nurse, and Spirit. What I am saying is that for the above average killer base, the top tier MMR/Rank 1 experience is not fun because of the imbalance.

When you say, "only 5% of public matches even have parties of 4 players," you don't acknowledge the power of a 2 man or 3 man playing together on voice. Skilled 2 mans are common at the higher levels, and skilled three man aren't as rare as you think. They don't call out like Oracle, but they sure do communicate. The number of players on voice chat is likely very high for this game. Sure, you might no have 4 mans, but you will have many 2 mans on voice, and some on 3. They create that spectrum I discussed above.

"The killer performance ceiling does not really change whatsoever." - That is just wrong. New survivor perks to adapt to (blast mine, flash bang, old DS) and new killer perks to incorporate into ever more efficient builds (Star struck), increase the killer ceiling as the game progresses. And I think you overstate the survivor ceiling. They need to practice the top meta killers, who all are forced to run a small subset of perks. Killers are more restricted in what they can run at the top levels simply due to the pressure. This lowers the survivor ceiling and does not leave an endless open sky.

Honestly, going back to the Oracle vs. Tru3 games - Oracle should (and did) win all 5 games. What frustrates me is how badly and easily they bullied the wraith, abused the many pallets and loops, and practically suffered no hooks. In my opinion, DBD should be a vibrant game with many killers that can consistently compete at the top levels. Survivors should have to make more reads at loops so that killers don't have to depend on abilities (like nurse, blight, and spirit) that force survivors to make difficult reads. I don't have all the answers, but I do think the survivor-sided imbalance at higher levels of skills is an issue to address in some form.

@themirrortwin

I'm not referring to that one specifically, that is just one of various tournaments the stats of which show that even at the top level the game is not nearly as survivor-sided as people either casually or vehemently believe it to be. But again, I did give a variety of caveats to that. One such caveat is that about half of the killer characters are clearly subpar and totally should be buffed, should have been buffed ages ago already, and that it indeed is only a subset of around 1/3rd of all killers that are "viable" in a tournament setting from the perspective of being able to consistently 2k and having the potential to 3-4k.

The "qualitative" argument is however less of a balance argument. Camping and NOED are simply part of the gameplay and totally affect the global playing experience too, so unless the game changes in a way that lessens their impact, it's not like a 2k achieved by camping and using NOED is any less of a 2k. Sure the gameplay experience is different, and arguably an undesirable one, but balance does not care about the gameplay experience, cannot.

I agree that most players in this game are not very good at it, to say the least. I have been playing since early 2017 and have been red rank for both roles for most of the seasons since then, and I have also watched a lot of DbD streams from all over the world, also red rank gameplay. I can confidently say that even in red ranks, the average player is actually pretty bad. However, why would we assume that this is only true for survivor players? Survivor and killer players are not different types of humans, in fact, many of them are one and the same because they play both roles. So if survivors are on average so much worse than killers that it leads to the lopsided stats as we have seen them time and again, that would have to mean that survivor is actually harder to play than killer. And while I personally always have to roll my eyes when people ignorantly say "survivor is easy" because there is actually a pretty tremendous amount of depth to the mechanical and mental skill ceiling of survivor gameplay, I have no reason not to admit that killer is absolutely harder to play. I mean, you are completely alone and have to manage all of your objectives, the strategical, tactical and mechanical things that go into that, whereas as survivor you will often simply sit on a gen and can relatively comfortably think about the round as well as about the world at large, lol.

So, what I think contributes most of all to the fact that the game is so significantly killer-sided in public matchmaking is the fact that player skill is much more rewarding for the killer side. Precisely because they are only one player, all skills they bring to the game are 100% translated into their performance and constitute the entire killer side of the balance equation. Whereas on the survivor side, you get 4 more or less random players thrown together and their skill disparity can be and regularly is huge. A weaker survivor player can lead to entire rounds falling apart even very early into the game (just imagine the extreme of this, with one player disconnecting - even if the other 3 players are highly skilled, they are instantly at a huge disadvantage and likely to lose the game). A stronger player however cannot regularly convert all of their skills into their side's performance, in theory only at best 25%. And especially if the killer abuses weaker links in the survivor group, the stronger survivors' contribution to a round can even be almost negligible. This could in fact be one reason why the game at its core might even have to be survivor-sided in order for it to yield a more balanced "live" experience in the public matchmaking mode, because it inherently favours a killer's skill to have a lot more impact on the rounds than any single survivor's skill.

Now to begin with, I for one would disagree on a personal level, not necessarily on a principal level however. That is to say, personally I don't even care all that much to "win" as killer in terms of getting 3 or 4 kills. If I'm paired against actually good survivor players, I will enjoy my chases and any hooks I get, I really don't mind if 2+ people end up escaping or not. But of course, this is not true for everyone, some - or even most - people want to "win" above everything. For that I'd say two things: 1. Good and even just competent killers will most likely keep winning more often than they lose even in MMR. Take tru3talent, an above-average killer player that usually wins his games. Sure he loses sometimes, but his kill rate overall is comfortably above 2 (I actually took stats on this before too, from one stream session of his anyway). Even during the MMR tests, this did not change. Pretty much any of the killers that I usually watch and who usually win almost every single of their public matches still did so during MMR tests, only they tended to have more challenging matches, which I would however argue is in fact more fun for everyone involved (including the viewer). I can attest to that from my personal playing experience too. I also win decidedly more often than I lose, as killer, and my MMR experience was overall pleasant. And 2. Yes, if in the MMR system it turns out that the higher MMR levels are then actually favouring survivors much more so than (certain) killers as opposed to how it is in the current ranking system, I would also hope that BHVR uses those stats to make larger pro-killer balancing changes. Such as buffing a whole bunch of the weaker killers, or even implementing MMR-level-specific balancing measures, such as perk limitations for survivors or extra perk slots for killers, or any of a hundred different things that could be done to balance the game more at the different skill levels. (However, it is also completely possible that some select killers - primarily Nurse and Spirit - might if anything prove to be too strong in that MMR environment and will be nerfed based on that).

To be fair, I was specifically contrasting the performance potential of these tournament teams to that of public groups, and those tournament teams are obviously always 4-SWF. That said, yeah, I'm not trying to say only those 5% of players that are 4-SWF groups in public matches actually have the chance to perform really well, duo and trio SWF can totally already put a very strong survivor side on the board that is challenging to deal with for much of everyone, and so can a team of 4 solos for that matter. Just of course, they will never be quite as (or even close to) those tournament teams at their peak, and so that there are killer players that can still compete even with those tournament teams makes it more understandable why good killers can have a "laughably" easy time winning in public matchmaking.

For the "performance ceiling" point, I think you misunderstood. I'm not saying the skill ceiling for survivors is actually higher than for killers, my argument there is that the survivor side gains much more from the tournament setting than the killer does. The killer is still just that one player just like they would be in any match where they play killer, public or tournament. The survivor players however in tournaments get 3 other players at their side that are all individually highly skilled as well, that they can practice with all the time, coordinate and communicate with, develop natural harmonies with, and so on. This "tournament team" format makes the survivor side exponentially stronger as compared to the average public mode setting where most of the time players are not in teams, let alone practicing and communicating and coordinating. Whereas the tournament killer obviously does not benefit from the "team" aspect of tournaments much at all, they have about the same performance potential as the "killer side" as they would have in any match.

I agree. For one thing that I have stated multiple times now, I think it should be completely apparent to anyone that is decently in the know about this game that there are a whole bunch of killers that are objectively weaker than others, and there is no reason why those weaker killers cannot and should not be buffed to at least be A tier. Legion, Billy (;_;), Trapper, Myers, Pig, Clown, Ghostface, Plague, Doctor, Trickster, Nemesis(!) - Please buff them.

That said, Wraith specifically is not even all that bad, given the right add-ons. I think what we see in these games does not only have to do with Wraith's strength, but also the skill and experience disparity between tru3 and Oracle. I mean, this is the first time ever that tru3 has faced a team of this caliber playing in this way, to an extent that he himself was even surprised and impressed by just how hopeless it felt. And is this not interesting and worth considering in its own right? Tru3, a veteran player with thousands of hours in this game that has been playing since what, 2016 even? - even he has not once faced a team like this in his entire playing career. That should about settle whether this is common enough an occurrence to be something that should be balanced for.

A tournament player could perform better with Wraith in this scenario. Hell, tru3 himself would certainly also perform better if he were to actually play against teams of this caliber frequently. However, I think there was actually one round where he got like 6 or 7 stages with a 1k? That's honestly a totally respectable result against Oracle as Wraith. Which goes to show that yeah, Wraith is a pretty solid killer, but also could still do with some buffs too.