Unfun ≠ Unbalanced

So I should have reported so many people for trapping me in corners over the years? I never knew that was a bannable offense. That makes the map design in this game look horrendous because there are so many spots to get cornered into.

This game is literally ridiculous. DBD should be ashamed of itself for existing. Its a never ending oxymoron.

Fun is a lot more important than balance, by a significant margin. Balance is generally a complete non-issue in game design until you start running into issues where a handful of strategies are overwhelmingly dominant over all other strategies. Even then, it can still be a relatively small issue as long as there is not total strategic collapse of the game.

For example, in Smash Bros. Melee, there is a very small number of viable characters. However, this is a non-issue in Melee. Among those characters, none of them are so strong that playing one particular character guarantees victory. The top 8 characters are all capable of beating each other. (this is common in high level play in many games: the number of viable choices goes down as skill increases)

The problem isn't always the strength of the dominant strategies either, but rather the fact that it artificially reduces the number of viable choices that a player can make. Although Nurse and Blight are objectively the best killers in the game because they are so strong, we do not see strategic collapse among the killer population.

Even relatively low-tier killers see plenty of play and are capable of beating strong survivor teams if the player makes good gameplay decisions. If survivors were so strong that ONLY Nurse and Blight could win, then we would see collapse at that level. Nurse and Blight are common due to their strength, but are not the only viable way to win as killer.

We did see strategic collapse occur on the survivor side prior to 6.1.0, however. We all know the four meta perks of the apocalypse: BT, Dead Hard, DS, Unbreakable. These four perks were so overwhelmingly better than the other 200~ perks in the game, that they were the only four worth running. This is true strategic collapse: no other strategy was as viable as "run the best perks in the game." (We saw this a little bit in the killer meta with "Ruin, Undying, Tinkerer, Corrupt Intervention", but not anywhere to the same degree as the survivor meta.)

In addition to being strong, the metapocalypse perks were extremely unfun to play against. DS + Unbreakable made survivors effectively invincible for a a full minute. Add BT + DH into that, and a recently unhooked survivor can make suicidal plays to protect their teammates with zero risk of any kind. The end result is that killer players generally felt helpless against this kind of gameplay. Because they were.

So, I hope you have a decent understanding of what truly poor balancing looks like compared to acceptable balance. Truly poor balancing looks like "if you want to win, use this strategy. Otherwise, you will lose because your opponent is already using it." Acceptable balance is "This strategy is much stronger than the others, but can still be beaten by many other strategies."

Which brings us to unfun vs unbalanced. As long as the game isn't completely revolving around a particular strategy/character/perk, we are in an ok balancing position. This means keeping things balanced is actually pretty easy, and making things fun should take a much higher priority since it is much more difficult and time consuming to get right.

Fun is subjective and nebulous, and varies from person to person. One person will think your game is very fun because you must sit around and balance spreadsheets for hours, and another will think your game is horrible for the exact same reason (one person finds tactically doing gens very fun, another finds it grueling and miserable). However, if players are at least playing your game, you can assume that they all like it for one reason or another. The matter is finding what the majority of people enjoy about the game, and leaning into it. HARD.

Finding unfun parts of your game is relatively similar. You look for pressure points that make players want to stop playing, and address them. No one finds mending twenty times against Legion fun or entertaining in any way. No one like getting slugged on the ground for 4 minutes because the killer is gloating that they won. No one liked waiting out old Dead Hard. No one likes having their chases go to waste because players can reset indefinitely at Circle of Healing.

Games need to have some kind of stress or frustration to them in order to receive an emotional payoff when you succeed at your objective. However, excess stress will cause players to find that the payoff is not worth the effort. Finding "fun" is about balancing effort vs reward. High effort and extremely low rewards leads to players not wanting to play (e.g. solo queue survivor post 6.1.0, and killer before 6.1.0). Finding and alleviating the pressure points that make players want to quit playing makes the other stress sources more bearable, since putting up with them is now worth the effort with the more intense stress sources no longer piling on top of that.

I'll stop now lol

TL;DR:

Balance is secondary to fun, as balancing issues must be VERY extreme before they start to impact fun in a meaningful way. Fun, however, is far more difficult to manage as it is a highly complex equation of effort to reward.

That's not really playing devils advocate.

You can't take an extreme example of holding someone hostage, which is against game rules, and use it as a counter point to whether legitimate play is fun or unfun.

While fun is the point of the game it often leads to highly biased requests touted as balance because a large part of the community equate fun to winning. But having the game feel like you won every match is hardly balanced.

While the OP is taking the idea of "its not fun" as an illegitimate argument to the extreme they aren't far off given the very subjective nature of fun.

The fun of asymmetric play is that it can be very one sided, this isn't a fair game its weighted by strong solo mechanics vs teamwork. This is why you see swings in outcome between solo Q survivors and SWF teams.

Trying to balance that often creates a bland and generic game experience where outcome is dictated by RNG and nothing more, because everyone is equal. You can argue the skill angle but people always overestimate their own skill and success is driven by chance instead of capability in most cases.

People get hung up on balance and fairness equating to fun when the reality is, its the unfairness and imbalance of this game that usually results in the most fun for one side. i.e. Its fun outplaying a killer and repeatedly escaping a chase... its fun catching someone and mori'ng them out of the game.

If you go in with the expectation than any game can be fun even when it falls against you then you'll likely find even the unbalanced elements enjoyable, especially given the theme of DBD. If you expect your wants to be met every game in a balanced nature then DBD probably isn't the game for you.