Why aren’t new killers allowed to be strong?

Spirit was released a year and a half later

Good logic but is very flawed. Survivors are needed true but the killer is also required. Without the 1 killer there is no game. Without the killers the game doesn't have anyone playing it because otherwise what would be the point. Basically put killers NEED to be strong because otherwise there is no point in playing this game to begin with.

I am interested in what you believe the alternative to be. Honestly I agree that they actually need to see over a period of time what people are complaining about when it comes to what makes killers oppressive regarding certain combinations, not annoying, not unfun, but oppressive combinations that can then be balanced appropriately and then tested before being updated.

For example, before the nerf to Cenobite it could have been something that was instituted in a safe environment under multiple combinations and additions and then tweaked before being updated. If only BHVR had the ability to allow these types of things to be tested by the players in some sort of public test build to iron these things out before updating them. We can only dream.

She is gonna be nerfed again soon as well I reckon

Strong = overpowered to Swoopie. Can't play a balanced match, killers have to be weak.

Just like Facebook, its all about the money. Everything else is just a distraction.

Of course a killer is required for a match. But imagine if all those survivors that only play survivor, because its the power role, suddenly switched to killer. Then we would have a situation like 2 or 3 years ago during the halloween event. At the beginning of the event people HAD to play both sides to earn the event currency. Which resulted in massive killer queues (talking about more than 30 minutes), because every single survivor main tried to play killer at the same time.

On regard of the testing environment, they should really launch the PTB as a secondary client thats permanently accessible without overwriting the main dbd client. The test times could last much longer and people should earn some kind of reward for testing and reporting new stuff thoroughly. But yes, we can only dream.

Agree 100%

The reason we have weaker killers being released isn't because bhvr is afraid of making a strong killer or because of whining survivors; it's because we keep getting killers whose powers focus on the 1v1 rather than the 1v4.

Well, Pinhead's chain hunt was, legitimately, a 4-player slowdown power and all the addons that actually made it function got nerfed. But you're right: we DO keep getting weaker killers whose powers focus on on 1v1. But then those powers also get nerfed anyway (Freddy, Wraith, Spirit, Pyramid Head, Deathslinger, Twins, and even Trickster's totally worthless Main Event).

The only new killers that haven't been nerfed are Blight (who is basically running Nurse: strong but extremely hard to play at first, so most killers just get a bunch of 0ks and give up, keeping the Stats low) and Nemesis (whose 1v4 power is a buggy AI mess and whose 1v1 power gives survivors a third health state and effectively reduces his downs-per-gen).

This is usually how it goes with competitive games that introduce a new character/traits. Everyone buys it and then they nerf it.

This is exactly why. In any business you need to cater to the majority. BHVR does this well. Survivors outnumber killers 4 to 1. Survivor players buy more cosmetics, they bring in their friends to play with them, in turn they buy cosmetics etc.. it's a snowball effect.

If the game is too hard for the survivors they will not want to play as much. They will not bring in friends. It just makes business sense.

They know people will play killer. They have too many good licensed killers. People will play them. They know that.

Swf is an advantage. People should not be punished for playing with friends. However it IS an advantage. Have they givin the killers anything to compensate for that? No they have not. I'm not sure what they could do but at least do something.

This game shows it favors one side over the other, but again it makes business sense. When your company is about making money it makes sense. It sucks, but what can we do?

If the typical Killer experience didn't consist of 95% lows and 5% soft highs, there would be too many Killer players, I guess.

Killers in this game don't really feel like killers. I mean look at the core gameplay mechanic; you're playing hide and seek and running in circles. Do you feel powerful when you play killer, like the survivors are afraid of you? I'd imagine not. That's a design philosophy in general, though. In my mind, if I think of a 1v4 asymmetrical horror game, I think the killer should be scary, overwhelming and escaping should be something that rarely happens. But that has never really been their design, and their focus on MMR in a 'survivor party game' shows that.

And that's all totally fine, it's just that their overall new killer design philosophy, their refusal to address issues like map design or perks, both useless and too strong, or creating a large emphasis lately on totems as a whole is simply a bad direction to take. The thing is there's this idea that, even if all 4 survivors escape, so long as you're playing an anti-loop killer and you don't really get outplayed in chases but can end them quickly due to being anti-loop, you get a sense of "I still played well"