Whats your feelings on killer state vs survivor state?

I feel that overall the game is currently survivor sided. At the top level, its SWF sided. in the middle, its kinda even, since it only takes 1 good survivor to really turn the tide of a game sometimes. At the lowest level, killers absolutely dominate though.

The biggest problem I have with balancing the game, and especially with the "feedback" that often gets given, is that too little of it actually takes things into account, and instead relies on knee jerk reactions. "Killer camped/tunnelled? Killer OP." "Survivor chained 2 loops and I refused to break the pallet? Survivor OP" People would rather get directly angry about a play not going their way, rather than try to learn from it.

And I get it. At all skill levels, and on both sides, there will be situations you can do absolutely nothing about. Be it from bad RNG, bad teammates, incredibly strong situational advantages, it can be extremely frustrating to be put in situations you simply can't win. Unfortunately the only time those situations are important to game balance is when they are constructively addressed, and not many people offer reasonable answers.

Here's an example: Scourge hooks. There are 4 of them regardless of how many scourge perks you have, which is consistent enough and kinda makes sense (since the hook can proc multiple perks, there's no reason to increase the amount.) Unfortunately, there is no system in place for determining scourge hook distribution, so they can spawn in such a way that makes them entirely useless for most (if not all) of a match.

This dilemma itself technically isn't new, since killers had the same problem with hex spawns, but it raises an interesting balance discussion: How can scourge hooks be made more consistent, without removing their limitation of requiring specific hooks? Do you make it so they have to be a certain distance from each other? maybe require at least 1 normal hook in between? Have them focus on corners of the map? Increase the number to 6? Maybe a combination of some of the potential fixes?

The hamfisted argument would be to make them all scourge hooks. While this would certainly make the perks using them more consistent, its not what is necessary to fix the issue: It essentially pushes the needle too far in the opposite direction, and defeats the point of scourge hooks in the first place. While one could argue that the system of Scourge Hooks is too limiting vs a perk's strength in general, that becomes a different topic altogether.

That same type of feedback issue gets applied to many things in the game, and a lot of times it does more harm than good. Unfortunately this tends to be fostered by how ignored many constructive feedback posts can feel, especially when they get banished to the graveyard containment board for them. Topics with constant complaining about X or Y will get dozens of pages of responses with maybe a handful of well thought out posts, but the sea of responses will be MAKE X BASEKIT or Y NEEDS TO BE NERFED while the suggestions given are extremes that suit people's personal tastes rather than actual balance.

So I guess TL;DR is high skill favors survivor, low skill favors killer, everything in between is a mixed bag, 99% of complaints are non-constructive.

It is really hard because I feel like this is a casual game where most people are not playing to win. So arguing about balance is so silly when the vast majority of players hard throw their games and do not even understand the meta. It is fine for some goofy fun for both sides.

Competitively? Oh lawd have mercy aint nobody got time for the novel about how survivor sided the game is and most of them aren't really at a level to vaguely understand why that is to begin with making the entire discussion so utterly pointless. They genuinely believe the game is killer sided because Otz tunneled and camped some casuals at semi high mmr.

Generally speaking I think most of my matches are in the 1-3 kill range? Which indicates the game is working as intended for me as a killer main. The 3ks are basically 4 kills but the last person found hatch before I did, and the 1-2 kills are the rest of the games. No kills isn’t that common because usually I’ll get enough hooks to at least have a decent chance of downing the same person three times, but if the survivors are all solid runners and I’m a little unlucky it happens. 🤷‍♂️

I think there are some killers who incorrectly think the gens should only be finished in half the games but don’t realize that would mean 3-4 kills would be the majority result versus 1-3 kills. So they get frustrated when they play well but the gens are still finished. Once you understand that the devs intentionally have things set up so that someone escaping out the doors happens most of the time if the survivors play as well as you do then you can go into a game knowing the doors opening isn’t a “loss” or a sign the game is “easy survivor mode” or whatever. If most of your matches are in that 1-3 kill range then that’s where it’s supposed to be.

Absolutely.

It wasn'perfect, obviously, and one or two things still needed adjustments.

But still a thousand times better than the ugly mess we currently have.

In my opinion many complains today can be boiled down to "I cry because I refuse to adapt". Survivors cry about "anti-loop" Killers and refuse to try different approaches of counterplay. They try the same stuff against Artists that they try against a Ghostface and then complain when they go down. Killers cry about boons being unfair while mostly only complaining about 1 specific boon and refusing to adapt to that as well or they complain about things like Dead Hard and Deceisive Strike while refusing to play around those perks...

Overall the stats are pretty good. Killers overall are not in a bad spot and BHVR is slowly addressing the "bad" Killers to make them feel better. However they are bad at communication and make some questionable decisions by nerfing things like Twins and Clown.

Survivors suffer from camping and tunneling without a way around some of that. SoloQ is especially in a rough spot because the lack of communication makes them suffer even more from certain perks (Hex: Ruin) or certain Killers. However at the same time those Killers (Myers, Cenobite and Ghostface as example) are no problem for people with a little bit of coordination (and I am not talking about sweaty 4-person SWFs, Ghostface can get hell from three people just calling out his position).

Both sides suffer from a stale meta. Dead Hard, Decisive Strike, Hex: Ruin, Corrupt Intervention...you see the same perks over and over again without much difference in the builds. This gets boring for both sides and leads to complains. Sure, Dead Hard can be frustrating, but I despise that perk more because I rarely see any other Exhaustion perk.

So overall...

People cry about changes all the time, few complains are valid here. SoloQ survivors are at a bad spot and need some love, as do Killers without mobility. SWF survivors (3 people or 4) are a bit too strong, 2-2 lobbies are mostly fine but a bit on the weaker side. Killers like Blight, Nurse, Spirit and Pyramide Head are in a good spot thou. All of them suffer from a stale meta, survivors have a cookie cutter build and Killer rely too much on regression.

The fact that, within the past few months, I can nearly consistently get an insta-queue as killer, no matter what killer I'm playing, relatively any time of the day when this never happened before...

Whereas my 3 friends and I who queue as survivor have to wait sometimes 10-15 minutes to get matched with a killer during peak hours at night...

It just demonstrates that people just don't want to play killer anymore. They're sick of Boil Over, Boon perks, nerfing of powers like Hillbilly's chainsaw for no apparent reason, etc.

The game is easier for good swf teams i feel but worse for solo q generally speaking. While survivor meta perks added COH to the list but no changes to general playstyle, killer meta perks and playstyle have changed. For the worse i would say in general.

There are definitely less killers playing since boons. I play in the US and usually in the late evening. Survivor wait time was always a few minutes. But in the past several months my que time doubled. it's 5-10 minutes for a game. So i would say killer population has dropped. At least in US servers. Sadly this means most killers that remain are above average to top MMR. So we get sweaty killers most of the time. It makes solo q a nightmare and swf games harder(which is fine b/c swf is a ton stronger). Most games i see killers camping and tunneling. Which to my first point, is worse for solo q (b/c for some reason most solo q players don't run kindred. ######### run kindred you morons), but swf can handle it.

Survivor games in my experience can spiral pretty quick in solo q. what i mean is, if i die b/c of a teammate, my MMR lowers. if this happens several games in a row, my lower MMR continues to give me trash teammates. So yeah, at that low MMR i can loop a killer better and escape chases. However if i get hit by NOED at the end and 1 hooked then the cycle continues. I only start to crawl out of this cycle when i play swf.

When i play killer, even though i'm probably average to below average, i do end up facing high MMR survivors both solo and swf. This is b/c the game just says "team A has been waiting X minutes. Match them with whomever". idk how to best deal with this besides changing the MMR points.

This isn't to say i hate the MMR system. I think it's working. However BHVR needs to add more categories to the MMR. so kills/escapes plus chase time, hooks/unhooks, hits/heals, etc. These are already tracked in game. They just need to decide how to assign point values. Then we might actually have a more skill based MMR.

A most respectable opinion :)