Should DBD be balanced around the highest level players?

In my opinion you can't balance DBD as long as there's no better way of tracking competency.

Ideally, the matches to take statistics from would have all players as equally competent as possible. This should filter imbalances related to play time.

In some other games yes, but in DBD high level is different for solo, Killer and SWF, it's even different for different Killers, as long as the gaps between solo/SWF/Killer are so big, it's not gonna work well. Solo survivors are already struggling, because DBD is being balanced around SWF now.

Spirit - Mostly QoL changes, giving the survivors information and meaningful counterplay, wouldn't necessarily be a nerf but more just increasing the fun factor

Because i play more casually and for fun.

Nurse - I have no idea, i feel like she is really outdated so i guess a full rework? But i have no suggestions, and im not that passionate about the nurse topic.

Overall its fine to have strong killers in the game, i just want them to be fun to play as and against.

Technically it would be a nerf, but the point isn't to make her weaker, but to make her more fun.

Also, spirit is strong in the hands of "average" killers, it doesnt take the top 0.01% of players to get a 4k with spirit.

There are multiple issues with balancing approaches to DbD.

To start with, the game is asymmetrical, so balancing it for high-level play is difficult. "Balance" in symmetrical competitions actually scales with skill levels pretty linearly, but in an asymmetrical format what would be balanced in a high-skill setting might be completely skewed once you have varying levels of skills involved. Particularly, the killer side benefits much more from player skill because the skill of the player constitutes the entire killer side of the balance equation, whereas any single survivor player cannot possibly do everything alone, they constitute in theory only 25% of the survivors' side of that equation. Simply put, if a survivor player is more skilled than a killer player, that does not necessarily put the survivor side at an advantage in the match; on the contrary, if a killer player is more skilled than a survivor player, that should usually have a lot more of an impact on the outcome of the round. Again, the impact the killer player's skill can have on a match is four-fold that of any individual survivor player's, in theory. I think this is a major reason why the game in its current and past state (that is, with a matchmaking system that throws players together more or less willy-nilly) is notably killer-sided, in the public game mode.

Then there is the fact that every single match has different competitive starting conditions: map, killer, items, add-ons, perks, offerings - they all affect balance in different significant ways, and you cannot achieve a global balance for all of these things. Clown is a relatively weak killer, but use Redhead's Pinky Finger and you are a much greater threat. In order to account for these things, a balance approach would end up getting impractically complicated, such as... different generator repair times based on which killers, add-ons, items and such are in play. It's just not feasible.

And then there is the fact that the performance potential differences between solo, duo, trio and quad SWF survivor groups are tremendous. Balancing for the "highest level" would mean balancing for the idea of a team of 4 highly-skilled survivors that know each other, play together frequently, therefore have natural and tactical teamwork, coordinate their loadouts and strategies down to a T, and communicate constantly in practiced and efficient manners via voice chat. This is just factually a possibility of something that can happen in the game, it constitutes the highest level of performance a survivor side can reach. Yet in the actual game, we know that groups of 4 players queueing together only make up roughly 5% of the global player pool. Of those 5%, an even significantly smaller portion is comprised of 4 highly-skilled players. And of that tiny portion, even less are then also groups that play together all the time and have those coordinated loadouts, strategies and communication. It's simply vanishingly rare. You will basically never face a survivor team performing at the highest possible level in public matchmaking, even in years of gameplay.

This is not to say there isn't balancing possible in DbD. The game has of course become increasingly more balanced throughout the years, and there are still balance-relevant things left to be changed. For example, some killer characters are clearly weaker than others and there is no reason why they couldn't all be buffed to sit more toward the level of lethality that currently makes for the higher tier (with add-ons). But not Nurse or Spirit level. Basekit Blight level (or maybe Blight with Blighted Rat level, to be more precise). Other killers (such as Nurse and Spirit) and/or add-ons (such as Alchemist's Ring and Mother-Daughter Ring) could be adjusted downward to fit in with that level of lethality. Not only are there no issues associated with all killers being more equal in strength, but once they are, balancing base-game mechanics and specifics becomes much easier since you don't have to account for such a wide variety of killer performance potentials. For instance, I believe that basekit versions of Ruin and even NOED could be feasible for some killers... but that would obviously be insane to consider that for a killer like Nurse.

Other balancing that is possible is closing the performance potential gap between solo and SWF groups. The easiest way to get a good chunk of the way there would be to give survivors in-game voice communcation. Everything else is a much more complicated and convoluted undertaking, though I do believe that limiting SWF performance potential is much easier than improving that of solo groups, not least because killers would not have to be buffed to compensate. Things like limiting perks and items or decreasing generator repair speeds based on the number of players in an SWF group would be simple and effective ways to get more level playing fields.

And for something that BHVR is thankfully working on already (even though it took and still takes way too long to actually be implemented): The matchmaking system is one of the main leverage points to achieve a better live experience balancing. In the current rank-based matchmaking system, the skill disparity at any rank can be and regularly is huge. Players with 100 hours are treated no differently from players with 4000 hours. A "skill-based" matchmaking system that actually more consistently matches players with similar levels of skill, experience and success will make for a much more balanced global game experience, and also one that provides much better statistics for BHVR to then use in further balancing decisions.

You seem to not really have any knowledge on the subject despite being arrogant about it, so I'll explain why Evolve died:

1.) You couldn't always play the role you wanted to play. This created a huge issue immediately. Its like if you wanted to play killer but the game said no, you're playing Survivor now.

2.) Microtransactions that make Behavior look like saints.

3.) Ironically, they massively pushed e-sports for the game despite the fact it does not at all work in these types of games.

4.) The monster basically had no way to do anything until they hit Stage 3, which created an incredibly bland early game where the much stronger hunters would just beat the hell out of the monster until they got Stage 3 .

5.) Much like DBD, very high level coordinated teams would usually defeat the monster. This I agree with. And yet, Evolve died in less than a year and DBD is still going strong after 5 years, so obviously that's not a mitigating factor whatsoever.

This seems relatively obvious to me. That entire realm of those "varying degrees" between the two extremes of survivor skill levels would suffer a lot from changes aimed to decrease the overall survivor performance ceiling. Using your example, say you have a performance potential spectrum ranging from really bad players that last 10 seconds in chases to really good ones that last 2 minutes. The average performance that would make for the majority playing experience in that environment is survivors roughly lasting a minute. Now if you decrease the ceiling to 1 minute for the best players, average players will only be expected to last around 30 seconds. By limiting the spectrum you are hampering the average performance significantly. And in the current environment the average survivor performance is already not enough for them to survive 50% of the time.

To note: I'm not saying there aren't busted setups that can spawn, or maps that are busted altogether. Absolutely there are, not like I think Cowshed is totally fine, the "peak performance potential" of a highly-killed survivor on that map against much of the killer line-up is just oppressively high. Like I said, there are still absolutely balance-relevant changes left to ideally be made to the game, for both roles. I hope MMR will be enabled for good sooner rather than later - I believe it will highlight for the devs very clearly some of the glaring balance issues in the game. I mean, just look at the fact that in the current willy-nilly matchmaking system, even the least-deadly killer on the most survivor-favoured map still averages more than 2 kills per match, even in red ranks. Likewise the fact that Nurse has one of the lowest kill rates, also even in red ranks. This would change significantly in the statistics of an MMR environment. And BHVR really does look at stats a lot. So I think the eventual activation of MMR will be the first step to larger balance adjustments. Hopefully.

because there is an entire mental game behind poker that even outclasses the RNG aspect.

DbD doesnt have any of that. if DbD decides you go to Fractured Cowshed and spawns some really strong tiles really close together, your skill hardly matters.

Balancing a game around high level players is a bad idea and can be almost pointless.

League of legends

there hasn't been many competitive games that lasted more than 10 years, wich most where balanced around high level players

i am saying that the mental aspects this game has can not outclass the RNG, as is the case in Poker.

Poker essentially makes the game itself secondary. people play with each others minds, each others thoughts. in poker you can either win by having a good hand (RNG) or by making everyone else believe you got one that, at least, is better than theirs. if everyone else quits, you can win even with the worst possible cards.

and DbD does not have that.

EDIT: your example with the rank 20s is still RNG, as the game randomly decided to give you rank 20s as opponents. you will not be able to consistantly pull that off, because you have no controll over it. thats literally just proving the point im making.

Oh please, don't even try to lump CS:GO and R6S in the same category of asymmetrical that Dead by Daylight is.

Don't wanna intrude on your larger discussion with Scott Jund (though I do believe he has a point with DbD's asymmetrical nature posing unique problems for the balancing approach, as I've stated myself before), but this argument doesn't hold. In CS you change sides at the half-time point, both teams play both sides and have equal opportunities of performing on both sides. There is no asymmetry in the competitive premise (similar to how DbD tournaments do it, though obviously DbD has a bunch of RNG aspects CS has none of, so CS is definitely still more competitively viable).

In literally none of these examples are the the 1v4 nature of DBD, which is why the comparisons make no sense. In CS, if one of your teammates gets AWP'd through the dust2 doors within the first 5 seconds of the match, your side can still easily win the round. In DBD, if one of your teammates dies with 5 gens up, you cannot win in any possible way. You keep ignoring the 1v4 aspect that separates DBD from every single thing you are talking about.

My point isn't that it doesn't matter because it's rare, but an overall balancing approach affecting the entire game should not be based upon high-level matches because they are (vanishingly) rare. As I said, there are definitely specific issues with high-level DbD that can and should be addressed, but it's more complicated than saying that because high-level DbD is this or that survivor-sided, we need this or that amount of survivor nerfs. Which you aren't even necessarily doing, I don't know. But lots of people have pretty unreasonable suggestions for such "balance" changes based on their (much of the time very limited and otherwise skewed) understanding of high-level DbD.

For MMR, like I said, I expect the playing experience to change with it (if the system actually functions well), and as such also a different balance approach to go alongside with it, with time. But it's not as dramatic as you make it out to be either. Using Scott as an example, this last round of MMR tests he himself said he had mostly more pleasantly challenging experiences. And he still won most of his matches pretty decisively, as usual.

I would not defend that offering. It would be a specific example of an indeed problematic mechanic in the game - again, I'm not denying there are still such mechanics on the survivor side too (and on the killer side, for that matter). Specific problematic things, not sweeping, profound balance concerns.

No, sorry, you are wrong about this. If team A won 15 rounds on their CT side, including the pistol round, then team B also has to do so on their CT side after the switch if they want to match that performance. If they cannot, team A has simply performed better on their CT side than team B. You can also reverse it to see that it is a symmetrical affair: team B did not manage to win a single of their T rounds, including the pistol round; if team A manages to win even a single of their T rounds, including the pistol round, they have performed better on the T side than team B.

There is absolute symmetry in the competitive premise of CS. The only asymmetry there can be found is a purely psychological or emotional one, albeit for that it is very subjective whether things are actually a detriment or benefit. Some players break under the pressure of trying to fight back from a 15-0 half, some strive in that environment. Some players fly on the back of a 15-0 half to end the game 16-0 in dominating fashion, some people start to get complacent or otherwise sloppy and give away the entire lead. All of these things can and have happened, probably in equal amounts in competitive CS history.

But you are right that asymmetry is not fundamentally exclusive to balance. It's definitely a rather different balance approach however, I believe.

You should always balance around the highest level of play, that ensures that the game is truly balanced or as close to it, as possible. When you balance around anything else, the game falls apart. It becomes "did I lose because I played poorly, or did I lose because I've exceeded the balance threshold and there was nothing I could do?" Competition should be as fair as possible and the answer to losing should always come down to either "I played poorly," or "they played better than me."

Why anyone would want a game that's fundamentally broken and imbalanced, is beyond me, unless they just want to be rewarded for mediocrity and feel good without putting the work in. In that case, I still don't know how you can feel good about yourself, the game is basically holding your hand. I don't feel good when I bowl a strike if my ball bounced off the gutter bumpers to get it.