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Balancing from top down doesnt work in DBD, stop mentioning it
Reason is that DBD is an asymmetric game. If you buff or nerf something in other games both sides get to take advantage of it. Thats not the case in DBD.
We all know that survivors are overwhelmingly favored in top level play. That doesnt mean game will suddenly be balanced if you nerf survivors to be balanced at top level play. It means survivors will be very weak at all levels below the top.
Killers are favored heavily at low levels, game is kinda balanced for average skill level and good survivors on comms can absolutely destroy around same skill level killers.
And there is probably no way to balance all skill levels. Just my two cents.
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It can work in certain aspects of the game. Perks can definitely balanced from top down but not killers (all though most killer perks dont really need to be touched as they have an earning requirement).
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What? There are PLENTY of buffs and nerfs in other multiplayer games that not everyone gets to take advantage of. That logic makes no sense.
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It can work in certain situations. If lets say a perk is op in top level play but is just average in average or low level play, nerfing that perk serves no purpose. Sorry thats wrong, nerfing that perk would be the opposite of what you should be doing.
Forced penance for example is really good in top level play because it stops coordinated teams from body blocking every 2 seconds. Does that mean we should be nerfing the perk? Absolutely not, the perk is fine for regular play and if anything needs a buff to be relevant.
You should only realistically be balancing around one of those situations, and thats hopefully the average play.
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For example?
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Buff: Little Mac's Aerial mobility increased tenfold
Ganondorf mains: Great, so how does this help Ganondorf?
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Can 2 players play as little mac at the same time? If you buff little mac to 1 hit ko from 0% game would still be balanced, there would only be only little macs in game. But this thread is about balancing around top level play to begin with, not exactly where this conversation is going.
Edit: Oh you meant the ''If you buff or nerf something in other games both sides get to take advantage of it.'' Yeah thats literally what i meant with this example. If you buff little mac, both sides get to play as little mac. Thats literally what i meant as both sides being able to take advantage of it.
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It doesn't actually work in any game, but you're right; you can't just react to the top tier of play while balancing a game like this.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out you have to care about all tiers of play, and balance for all of them at once.
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I agree 100%. Only balancing around the highest mmr would cause some serious issues.
Generally they should try to improve balancing for all ranks. I am not sure how heavily killer is actually favored at low ranks. But I would highly guess the biggest reason for that is camping and tunneling.
This is why I am very hopeful that DBD will receive some baseline changes that nerf camping and tunneling, and then some baseline buffs to make the average match go a bit slower, so killer feels less stressful. I think that would definitely help the balance difference between low and high ranks, because you kind of just nerf the least skillful gameplay of killers, while buffing the more skillful gameplay.
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Agreed. I think the biggest share, so to speak, should be given to average play but if something is obviously problematic to the point its a problem in other levels, its gotta be fixed. Though i doubt balance can actually be achieved at all levels of play in a game like dbd. Hope they get close though.
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People keep saying survivors are overwhelmingly favored at the top. I think they'd be surprised. It's much closer than people think
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I hope they tone down everything with their perk reworks.
The top perks don´t make that much of a difference at low levels.
At low to mid levels a lot of killers are already strong as the survs don´t know how to counter them perfectly. See Pinheads box.
You see the legion buffs may be good for higher levels but he now often destroys normal players.
Balancing from low to high is simply very difficult.
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This
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Just to be clear, there is no top level play in pubs no matter what your mmr is. Matchmaking doesnt care about your mmr after a certain bar, with the lowering of that bar further (which im not really sure they actually did after the tests) the game is even more far away from top level play, which is a good thing.
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That doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The game would not be balanced at all. The game would warp extremely heavily around the one character. The idea that "Well, both sides can prosper because both sides can play as one specific character" makes no sense at all because not everyone wants to play as one specific character. In a game where you have multiple characters/playstyles to choose from, you want as many different characters/playstyles to be viable as possible to promote variety.
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Which is why any killer not named Nurse gets 0-1 k against competitive teams, right? So balanced
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Here's the thing, you can absolutely balance for both high skill play and low skill play. I followed Riot and their LoL patch notes closely for a while (not really lately) and LoL devs do targeted changes for both bronze/silver players and for plat/diamond players.
The problem is the devs haven't done either. Their buffs/nerfs to perks/addons barely have an effect at low skill levels and new player experience is still bad. Meanwhile the devs have been largely neglecting issues at higher skill levels leading to the game becoming stale in higher skill levels. This bad since both new and veteran players don't have much reason to stick around.
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But if a perk is mediocre in low level play and extremely powerful in high level play, it's totally safe to nerf that perk because it wasn't getting good use in low level play anyway and the changes aren't going to affect that tier very much. Doubly so in a game like DBD where you will have several perks that perform a similar effect, and can be substituted fairly well for each other - so for the big example, if you nerf Dead Hard, all the average players who used it to dodge attacks and get hit 5 seconds later are just going to switch to Sprint Burst or Lithe and notice little difference in their playstyles. The change will mainly hit the top, which is the area that it was intended for. It's almost the perfect situation of a perk that can be precision nerfed, because Dead Hard in unskilled hands genuinely is not that great of a perk.
(Forced Penance isn't a great example when it's not a perk anyone has ever called for nerfs on - sure, it's good against bodyblockers, but that's not something you can tell from looking at a lobby, and Starstruck outclasses it in every way. It's a counter to a particular strategy and little else - if it's OP, Mad Grit is OP. So no, of course we shouldn't be nerfing Forced Penance. You virtually never see it run anyway.)
For killers, yeah, the balancing is very tricky, because different brackets of players have different playstyles and weaknesses. Perks, I'm less convinced. The only ones that look difficult to nerf, from where I'm standing, are the ones that patch some fundamental flaw or vulnerability with the game mechanics.
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That's not true at all. Not sure where you're getting that from. Are we talking actual competitive level play? I can pull multiple vods right now of killers not named Nurse 4k'ing in tournaments. Even Ghostface. My personal kill rate on Plague was north of 50% when I played comp.
If we're talking about public matches, I stress again, we're talking about matchmaking failures, not balance issues for the most part. Every killer on the roster can get at least a 2k in the sweatiest games if the match is well-made. But sometimes the survivors play better. Killers are supposed to lose when the survivors are better.
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My question: Are the killers who are 4king playing "normally," or are they camping/tunneling to hell and back?
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Depends on the killer, depends on the map, depends on the gen split, etc. It's all accepted and expected, so all of those things are calculated and come with risks in that setting. It's really not as simple as "camp and tunnel to victory".
I think the hang up for a lot of people is that DbD is 60-70% game sense/decision-making at the highest levels when mechanics are equal between both sides. You genuinely don't need a lot of that through 90% of the skill brackets because solo players hand out 4ks on a silver platter and so do most average SWFs. You can coast by on mechanics and whatnot.
The difficulty curve between solo/average SWF to good SWF can be brutal, but it's not insurmountable at all.
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I cannot hear that the game is overly or anyway survivorsided at high mmr anymore. Its not. The game is overly nurse and blight sided in all ranks.
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I know it's all expected and accepted; at high-level play, all bets are off (barring actual cheating/rule-breaking, obviously). I'm just wondering how often some of the Killers that one wouldn't necessarily think of when people discuss "viable" Killers can 4k in such an environment, and how they do so.
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Balancing around specifically around the top is an awful way to go it's why rainbow six siege has had ######### balancing for 5 years now
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Why would it cause any issues? That's what sbmm is for.
Are you trash at the game? that's fine, because sbmm will put an equally trash killer against you. Are you god tier at the game? that's fine, because bhvr did the correct thing and made killers viable for you to face and sbmm will put you against good killers.
What do we have now?
Nobody playing killer and long q time? oh well.. time over balance so here is a 5k hour killer against your trash solo squad.. can't get a game with your 30k hour swf? Been dodged 40 times in the last hour? Here is a 200 hour legion.
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Top-Down balance is the idea that balance should be focused around the highest level of play, all levels of play below will then receive a balanced meta through a trickle down system. Because everything will be fair and equal at the highest level, they all have the potential to be just as balanced. This is effective from the top down to the mid level of play, but the lowest level of play often undervalues mechanics and things that require teamwork to reach their full potential, leaving them feeling weak, while leaving some mechanics feeling unusually strong. This feeling of imbalance diminishes as players become more skilled and work with others, but it usually increases the learning curve by a small amount, which may be off-putting to newer players.
Bottom-Up balance is the idea is that balancing for the lowest levels of play is most important, since that is where the majority of players are, and that is where the most diversity of play is found. This lowers the learning curve and makes the game attractive to newcomers. The advantage of this is that all mechanics will feel equal in strength at the lowest level, where most players are. However, as players improve and become more competent at the game, mechanics that were once balanced will become either easily counterable, or broken and far too powerful when exploited properly. Any difference in skill between players becomes quickly realized as a slightly more skilled player may use mechanics in ways to become much more powerful, leading to one-sided gameplay.
Top-down balancing is generally preferred, since it provides fewer problems, and focuses on the potential of each mechanic and rather than the surface use. Balancing for the middle causes problems both for new and more experienced players.
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That was about both sides being able to take advantage of a buff/nerf. We have been over this.
Edit: Making it clear just so we can be over this conversation. From your example if you buff little Mac, both sides can take advantage of it. If its unbalanced, both sides can drop it and play some better character. No matter what a buff or nerf affects the balance less other than character viability. On a game like DBD there is no such thing. If you buff something, its buffed for all levels of play for one side and the other side gets nothing. Same for a nerf.
Please get it so we can move on. Well, im moving on in either case.
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Does not work in an asymmetric game because nerfs or buffs dont work the same way on a game like dbd vs whatever game you are trying to give an example of.
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The weird thing about DbD is how drastically the power level of many perks, add-ons, killers, and tactics/strategies change depending on the skill level of the lobby.
At low skill levels, Huntress' Lullaby is oppressively strong since no one can hit skill checks and no one can find hex totems. As skill increases, the perk functionally falls off the face of the earth in terms of usability.
At low levels, pre-dropping pallets to prevent mind games is one of the most effective ways to stall the killer. At mid levels, pre-dropping pallets instead of looping them is viewed as throwing the game. Then, it loops back around at extremely high levels where pre-dropping pallets against most killers guarantees victory.
We see this a lot in DbD. Some things are oppressive at low levels, but laughably weak at higher levels (such as infinite Tier 3 Myers, Overcharge, and face camping someone 100 to 0). Some things are terrible at low levels, but are game winningly decisive at high levels (such as Nurse, Dead Hard, and holding w).
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Most of the times when people in this forum say they want the game balanced for the highest level, they mean that they lost as killer and blame it entirely on the survivors being op and they did absolutely nothing wrong because they're clearly on the highest bracket of the MMR and it's just unplayable for them
Which, in other words, means "nerf survivors so I can have easy 4ks"
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"That was about both sides being able to take advantage of a buff/nerf. We have been over this."
And I'm telling you that that makes zero sense. Not only does it make zero sense, but it's straight-up backwards. The notion that people just pick a better character if it's unbalanced goes COMPLETELY AGAINST the goal of trying to have as many viable options to pick from at all because it suggests that as long as there is a best option to pick (which there always will be unless the two sides are 100% identical), it's okay if players who want to play competitively are just forced into that one option to survive because at least they have the option to do so.
In ANY game, when something is buffed or nerfed, it affects ANYONE who was actively using that thing, whether they are high-skill tourney player or a casual gamer who is playing for funsies. They can certainly attempt to target those buffs towards high or low end as best as possible, but the buff affects EVERYONE who is using that tool. This idea that "buffing one thing buffs it for all levels of play" is not a DBD thing. That's just fundamentally how game balance works.
Contrary to what is generally said, the aim is not "balancing the Survivor against the Killer." It is "balancing the Survivor against EACH different Killer." Survivor is one character, like Trapper, Wraith, Hillbilly, etc. The difference in this game is that every single Killer goes up against the same opposing core characters: Four Survivors. Meanwhile, the four Survivors go up against a single Killer, but the Killer character changes from game to game. That means that the goal, in both casual and competitive, is to tailor each matchup to be as relatively balanced as possible. At the high end, that's making sure that the Survivors have a fair chance of winning vs. each different Killer and as few Killers as possible are too favored to win or lose vs. the Survivors (and also to make sure that not too many maps favor one side over the other). At the low end, the goal is more to make sure that there isn't any noobstompy strategy (that wouldn't otherwise work in highlevel play) that can't be overcome by one side if they aren't super skilled at the game. These two goals are not mutually exclusive, and the fact that the two teams are not equal in design does not make that an impossible goal to reach (even if it admittedly might be more difficult than if the teams were even). At the very least, balance absolutely does not function the way you claim it does.
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The individual power level of the killer and ways of movement makes simultaneous balancing quite awkward. I just wonder if it would make more sense to balance for each killer individually talking about possible adjusted objective time and available maps, maybe some maps should be banned for specific killers if its obnoxious for them to play on them. Like what is a huntress doing on Lerrys, its awful gameplay for both sides each time. Maybe its perfectly fine to keep some of these huge maps if they only appear for high mobility killers. We can never expect the same results of a pig then from a nurse but both are pressured in the same meassurement system and we possible have to nerf cool characteristic to squeeze them in the same condition. But of course this take shouldnt take away from the fact that there are still design issues that needs to be adressed.
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A lot of this could be solved with simple comeback mechanics. With triggers dependent on how hard one side is winning the game. I outlined a basic example of this with hook x/unique survivors 4 survivors in play then killer acquires a mori. This guarantees if the killer was decent they get a mori to assist them but only if they spread out there hooks. If the survivor lose a player they get a stacking buff to healing and repairs speeds. So losing a player early doesn't lose you the game. Dbd has games with forgone conclusions arriving far too early. A game should strive to be way more dynamic. Being an asymetrical game doesn't make you exempt to every god damn rule in good game design and I'm pretty confident a lot of dbds frustration is the losing spiral both sides find them in the minute a mistake is made.
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I'm not sure about the details, but I agree that too many DBD games lead to inevitable conclusions too quickly. Perhaps some sort of context-dependent comeback mechanic could help with that, idk.
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Keep in mind that it's tough to draw a 1:1 comparison between comp and public matches, because balancing rules exist in comp and teams are absurdly coordinated.
Billy players for example often 4k by virtue of being insanely good at Billy. A good Billy with green engravings/LoPro Chains means survivors either drop a pallet and take a hit or take a curve and die.
In more general terms, perks exist to deal pub SWFs that utilize comp-lite strats. Forced Penance takes care of bodyblocking/CoH pretty easily. And those SWFs tend to crumble pretty quickly against a killer who knows how to play against them.
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There are simply to many variables in this game for it to be balanced.
Until the dev's decide on what their core market is there will never be balance.
Take World of Warcraft for instance, for a long time many pve talents were nerfed because in pvp they were op, so pve players had their talents gutted because of hardcore pvp. Now WoW has separate talents that are specifically for pvp and only work during pvp.
Until the dev's decide on solo vs swf and pro vs average we won't find balance. Nerfing X,y,z because the top 5% of the dbd population find it stale is just stupid, the other 95% can just cry?
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The obvious and most straightforward solution would be add voice comms for everyone, balance around everyone being able to communicate; and punish any toxicity with bans like every other game with a team does.
Not only would it be great from a balance standpoint but it would do wonders for the negative side of the community.
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That’s just wrong. The game would be better balanced from the top down. All that happens to worse players is the invisible mmr number next to their name goes down until they are winning/losing exactly as much as they were before, aka no real impact on them, except now the top level is actually balanced.
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truly good take. Something like taking the statistics of a killers top 3 lowest kill rate maps and top 3 highest kill rate maps, and making those maps impossible to get as that particular killer. Then, the top 3 and bottom 3 banned maps can rotate based on changing statistics.
e.g. if a given killer had a kill rate of 1.64 on Gideon's, 1.75 on Ormand, and 1.81 on Fractured Cowshed, and on rank reset the kill rate on Eyrie of Crows is 1.79, then Fractured Cowshed rotates in and Eyrie of Crows rotates out.
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