The extreme difference in killer and survivor playernumbers is staggering
Usually I'd like to present some evidence on why only up to 10% of players in queue are playing killer but I fear the forum mods won't like it due to these statistics being extracted via third party tools. Those of you who follow certain content creators might have heard about the related twitter thread, though.
One thing's very clear however: there's a severe lack of killers playing this game nowadays, caused by them either reducing their playtime or outright quitting DbD. Those who bother to stick around have 2 options: either play Nurse/Blight or become a dedicated camper/tunneler to gain any progress in a simplified MMR system that heavily promotes kills over any other sort of interaction.
The reduced killerpool also makes any actual balanced matchmaking borderline impossible due to lack of diversity in the skillpool. There are far too many survivors who have learned to abuse their role to the fullest extent.
Perks like Circle of Healing and Dead Hard have made the killer experience extremely stale and repetitive. Simply hitting a survivor to spread "pressure" doesn't work anymore, healing as a mechanic is absolutely out of control. You're literally forced to commit to any chase while the other 3 survivors are finishing gens at alarming rates. And those chases can take VERY long if you're playing a simple m1 killer with no other way to down someone.
It's only going to get worse the longer BHVR neglects these issues. Nerfing these insane perks would be the first step to address the situation, the next step should be to buff 75% of the killer-roster, and finally killers should get an inherent BP multiplier to compensate for the extreme stress they have to endure.
Playing DbD as a killer feels like a chore, it's anything but fun. Survivors already make as much bp as the killer if they know what they're doing, this isn't really fair considering how their role is the much easier one.
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I guess it depends on what you consider fun. I'm not looking to get a 4k every game, so I'm not upset when I don't get it. However, if I can entertain myself by not letting one person do their objectives, preferably more, I'm good.
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The survivors bring it on themselves imo. I did not start off DbD playing "toxic" but I certainly do now. Almost every time I go out of my way to spread damage I just get BMd for it.
Now I just hard tunnel / camp entire lobbies with Bubba / Pyramid Head and call it a day usually. King of Camp and King of Tunnel, why play anyone else? Even the games I lose I made the game miserable for the people who died so it's still not a total loss.
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I just find it shocking that if you play Killer often at times where the least killers are playing and you decide to not play today, you are most likely increasing the queue time for survivors dramatically.
We could be one controversial change from disaster for some regions servers.
like base kit BT.
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The numbers don't look good but this is what happens when developers only care about buffing survivors and giving them more cosmetics and then releasing bad killers and nerfing already bad killers.
Adding boons was another step in lowering the killer players majorly.
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Ye you got it basicly on point and it is sadly the truth. However we all know BHVR, we may get any kind of band aid fix in the next year probably.
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I've said a long time all that needs to happen is to give the role that is deprived double bloodpoints for playing it.
Killer is already far too easy and needs nerfs. The issue is that killer is very unsatisfying for most if you don't 4K. Which should be "rare", but it is far too common.
As killers do well, they climb the ranks to face more and more really good SWF and may quit because they can't handle losing. It is psychological and not game balance. Killers are grossly overpowered.
It doesn't help matters when those SWF rub it in the killers face when they do win.
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new ptb should be up in days but I doubt there will be significant or useful changes.
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Bribery won't work.
Although I guess they could pay the killers in real money, that might work. They're basically acting as a daycare centre and DBD is more stressful than a real job.
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I am shocked, SHOCKED!
Well not that shocked
BHVR can just to just blow it off and/or ignore it but anybody who boots up the game can tell that there are way more survivors than there are killers. It's glaringly obvious that killers are either quitting completely or (possibly even worse for these imbalances), becoming just survivors instead.
I know personally I play way less than I used to just because the game has turned into a boring slog of misery and sadness. I curb stomp a bunch of noob survivors who couldn't hit a skill check if you made the entire circle a Good Zone or I get curb stomped by Seal Team SWF. I know this might shock some of you but EITHER of those happening 9 times out of 10 is not a fun game.
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Perks like Circle of Healing and Dead Hard have made the killer experience extremely stale and repetitive.
I think it's a bit more than just CoH and DH. Killer gameplay is just, by default, really flat.
Survivors have to do their gens, hunt totems, heal allies, go for unhooks, hide from the killer, loop the killer, and can fish items out of boxes or do glyph challenges.
Killers have to find players, chase players, and can do glyph challenges. There's just considerably less substance to their gameplay loop. The only thing that spices it up is killer powers.
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Playing killer might not be for everyone. I still don't think it is as bad as killers make it out to be. At certain times of the day, it takes a very long time to find a match as killer. I think the double bloodpoints is a good idea for the role that is needing players at the moment.
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There have already been leaks that Artist is being nerfed on the PTB.
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Can you send me the link to said thread?
I'd like to see that information.
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I'd just like to point out the program they use is for each server so NA east and west arent mixed but even for split servers the numbers are embarrassingly low.
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So this is where that 10% becomes Iffy, what you're seeing is good, actually, its meaning more killers are getting games quicker, meaning they're not sitting in queue. What is bad is actually the survivor queue it means the ratio to killers and survivors is bad I know what you're quoting, and even the person who posted it all has admitted to it not being a bad thing. When you use that program, it's not showing you players in games; it's showing you players waiting on games, meaning that's not the full picture.
It's dangerous to quote stats that you don't have a good idea of what they represent. It can lead to false narratives being made which are currently happening on twitter; they don't understand how to read nerd and because of that they're taking a % that isn't the full picture and using it as proof it's just like those who continue to quote steam charts as gospel.
If people only knew how Iffy the data was because it's showing people on queue not in games they'd be shocked to see how fast that % changes
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Can you give me a hint on where to find this?
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No problem, the OP who posted it on Twitter, his friend who showed him it all had to point all this out. Twitter was ripping Behavior apart with narratives.
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Playing killer should net you significantly more BP as survivor. Survivors basically play a handful of perks and can easily unlock them on any character they like the look of. Killer on the other hand has to rely on specific perks for almost every killer to play it at it's full potential. The more killers you want to play the bigger the grind gets. I have all killers now and almost all unlockable perks, but I generally stick to my pool of 6 or so killers because I'm still trying to unlock more perks on them.
Maybe it's time to rework the prestige system and have p1, p2, p3 award only the relevant levels of perks depending on what prestige level you are. I.e p3 would only give you tier 3 perks. Might encourage more people to play and try out other killers and builds.
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Killers are also heavily reliant on addons which means you either have to dedicate yourself to one main or grind multiple killers all the time.
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This article is kind of misleading
- The times they looked at in the whole first half of the article are, frankly, bizarre. The main highlighted chart is from 3 AM to 7 AM, and the whole first half of the article is talking specifically about numbers at 3 AM. Why in the world would you focus on such an off-peak hour?
- Only once you get down toward the bottom does it talk about how killers outnumber survivors from about 9 AM to early afternoon. Because, not surprisingly, during the day the people who play tend to be playing solo and not with friends who are probably at work or school. Then when 4-5 PM rolls around everybody who wants to play with their friends logs in and suddenly the survivor numbers skyrocket.
- Finally you can't look at the ratio of people in queue and conclude that it's the ratio of people in the game because the queue numbers aren't counting anybody that's already in a match. Every single match has a 4-1 ratio of survivors to killers, so however many matches are going on at a given moment you have to add that many people in to the numbers shown for players in lobbies. If 400 players total are in lobbies and 4000 players total are playing the game at that moment then the "ratio of survivors to killers in the lobby" is only 10% of the people actually playing the game at that second, meaning the actual ratio of players would be very close to 4-1 in that scenario. And if everybody on one side gets into matches instantly, for example, then obviously that side's number in the lobby will be close to zero, even though there could be thousands of people playing that side at that moment.
So TLDR, it's certainly possible that overall on average fewer people play killer than survivor, but it's impossible to extract that from this article. And it's also obvious that the ratio of survivors to killers varies dramatically depending on the time of day you take the snapshot.
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Some may call him a well known lore man.
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Correct me if I’m wrong, it’s 5:20am and I’m tired, but surely the ratios are still incredibly bad even if you could count the killers in a match, because there have to be 4 times as many survivors in a match too?
nvm it sort of works out actually.
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Makes sense. I keep getting Killers who are literally new to the game with 1-2 perks tops.
All the good Killers gave up and are playing survivor/swfs.
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This is just sad, how could you type this and think, "yep, this is totally normal"?
Wasting your finite life by playing a game with the sole intent of ruining the experience for other players.
You're a better person than this.
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This is not surprising in the least. Only a matter of time. WHEN (not IF) 99% of the Killer players leave I really want to see these developers change something meaningful on the Killer side. Something big. Something that will make everyone try Killer. What that is...I expect them to figure out.
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The numbers don’t seem as bad as they first appear when you consider that you need four times as many survivors as killers in each game. A surplus of killers and survivors is ideal, especially with MMR, however we only have a surplus of survivors, which is less than ideal, but it’s not as doom and gloom as the available numbers can make it seem.
Having said that, I agree that playing killer can be a miserable experience, and that the game is balanced in favour of survivors.
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We can't talk about leaks on the forums that is a big no no to the mods lol
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its been 6 straight months of negative killers changes.
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One image says more than a thousand words.
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So the article even says that the killer numbers are not as they seem because when you queue up for killer you're essentially getting taken into a game immediately so they can't get a good read on it. The numbers are deceptive because there are more killer players than are shown. The numbers that are seen are just the surplus of players, the ones in queues, not the ones in games or lobbies.
There is practically no reason to extrapolate anything from this data because this is only the SURPLUS of players, not the actual amount of people playing the game. Realistically what this means is that there are a lot of games being played which allow a ton of people to play at once and not be queued.
Also am I the only one who thinks that a 5 min survivor queue is not bad? I remember when I played League of Legends in the middle of the night I could be in queue for like 15 minutes.
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Won't happen. Duo player will unavoidably switch back to killer due to queue times and ease the problem for a time by reducing survivor and increasing killer numbers at the same time. And only once their numbers also run dry it will be only survivor-only players and even they would maybe switch to killer given the circumstances.
It won't be an abrupt but a gradual process of the whole playerbase bleeding out over time. And from both sides, one side stronger than the other but still both.
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Well then it is dependent on the lobby to active trial ratio. We know that the survivor/killer-ratio in-game must be 4:1 and out of game during prime time (?) It's closer to 9:1.
So the percentage of killers from the whole player population ranges between 10-20%.
But it should complicated to get the true queue to trial ratio as the state is in constant motion of ending and starting games.
And another point would be dcing/dead survivor that leave an active trial and go back into queue.
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It is enough if it convinces 20 percent of the queueing survivors. You may not be in these 20 percent, but I am sure there will be others.
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From the link:
What the above table suggests is that around 3 am on NA East servers
It sucks for 3am gamers, but maybe not exactly the most representative sample, if I'd have to be totally frank....
Meanwhile, today, EU central 11:20 am
Killer ~ 1m10s
Survivor ~ 20s
In the end, no conclusions can be taken, as experience varies wildly between regions, time of the day and mmr brackets, plus all the implicit limits in the data mining method, that are actually explained in the article for those who cared to actually read it.
Actually, one conclusion is certain. Given all the knee-jerk reactions itt, it's quite clear a lot of people are eager to jump on the first wagon that fits their narrative.
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Can you... repeat this test during prime time? Lets say 19:00?
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No, it's even worse than it looks at first glance because of mmr. If killers are getting immediately picked, then chances are they aren't getting fairly matched. The system will only allow a queued party to sit in queue for so long before giving up and matching them with the first killer available. So that SWF bully party with 7K hours each has been waiting for 5 minutes? Nonono can't have that. Here, have fun this Freddy with two perks and 20 hours playtime.
Now after the awful match, how likely will that Freddy be to keep queuing killer? Or playing at all? Or maybe he'll give up on playing Freddy and wipe out the ol Basement Bubba instead. See where I'm getting at?
There are 10x less killers playing than it should be in order for the matchmaking to be healthy. That is so for a reason, because more often than not playing killer feels like pulling teeth. Pulling teeth while a gaggle of idiots tbag around you and mock you. And unless something drastic changes, the issue is only gonna get worse since MMR/SBMM is exarcebating it all. Considering how little the nerfed Samako and how little the nerfed CoH, I'm not saying what about the chances of BHVR getting the memo in time.
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Honestly i hope bhvr keeps driving away killers. The fact it got this bad is baffling. I hope bhvr does some patch that screws things up so much, that they will have to literally overhaul the entire game to get killers to come back. All their "listen to the majority" decisions led to this. Let them reap what they have sown.
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Well then it is dependent on the lobby to active trial ratio. We know that the survivor/killer-ratio in-game must be 4:1 and out of game during prime time (?) It's closer to 9:1
It's actually closer to 36:1.
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Did you even read the thread about the numbers, at all?
The person that released the numbers said they can actually be indicative of a good thing because that's only who is in Queue, as soon as a match starts they're removed from those numbers, so if there's like 50K people in a region and only 5K players left in the queue pool you still have 45 thousand people in match.
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You say cringe a lot, it's very...
cringe
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You literally have people here advocating for spending their entire day making survivors lobbies longer, if people on the forums weren't full of people doing cringe ######### like this i wouldn't use the word so often.
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Aren't you the one that wanted a cut of the profits of streamers for being in a match with them?
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It's still really early here, so I may be reading this wrong, but that doesn't make it better.
If it's just active queue, and not seeing people in matches, that still means there are over 3k survivors in the queue waiting to match with one of 26 killers. There's no chance of any reasonable level of "matchmaking" at that point, be it rank or kill based. You want a 1:4 ratio, not 1:36.
At best you're going to have the majority of your player base in queue waiting for matches with killers who will either be so new that there is no challenge at all in winning, or so experienced that they've got their meta locked down and you don't feel like you have a chance. Meanwhile the killer gets faster matches, but with the same level of variance, which, if they are new players, isn't super likely to make them want to keep playing, which just makes the imbalance worse. I don't know what the solution is, but let's not pretend there isn't a clear issue.
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If you read the thread you'd have a better understanding of it all as the person who exposed the info went into depth about it, unfortunately I can't link it because the info comes from BHVR servers and I doubt they realistically want this info being talked about, it's easily findable on twitter though.
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I read the thread, it's got enough caveats to make the information damn near useless as a measure of overall health (though I will maintain you should never have any sustained period of time where there are 36 survivors for every 1 killer). I would love to see more results of similar tests during different times and using different servers. Could be a time of day/regional thing, in which case bribing with bp (or better, shards) would be worth trying, but if it isn't, there would probably need to be some massive balancing/mechanic changes.
I'm not a game designer, I'm a network tech, so while I can speak intelligently on some things, I am not going to pretend I'd know where to begin the changes needed to fix an issue of that scale.
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Not exactly, I have no obligation to obey some 3rd party platform's TOS for a game I bought, and I couldn't care less about the opinions from said users of the 3rd party platform. They'd have to pay me.
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If you are referring to stream sniping, you have to use twitch to do that, which means agreeing to their tos. At that point it's hardly some third party, it's a service you're using under terms you agreed to.
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Well BHVR said that they're fixing that so it's a non issue.
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Did they say they are fixing mmr or fixing the part where it's thrown out the window to manage queue times?
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