So...why have y'all genuinely started believing that Killer should be the "Power Role"

Ina 1v4 the 1 should be stronger in every 1v1 and it should either take the whole team or a really skilled duo to overpower him.

The only thing that really bugs me to no end is when you have guys like trapper nemi or oni and the door gets blocked by a Feng or nea I mean how that makes me instantly feel #########

60% kill rate makes sense because survivor is a team role. Everyone needs to be working decently and accordingly to get good results. Everyone here knows already how a single weak link can give the killer a 4k even if the other 3 survivors are looping gods. 50/50 results are fit more into the symmetrical game, just look how Among Us, probably the most succesful assymetrical game ever, also gave impostors a 60% win rate.

The only thing that needs adjustment is how this 60% kill rate is achieved. Right now the problem is that camping and tunneling are way too powerful while going for hooks and skillful plays isn't rewarding at all.

Just to use some actual numbers for context, Nightlight's average kill rates were about 49% prior to the rework and are about 54% currently. I'm pretty sure its kill rates skew a bit lower than the overall stats over all games because the players using the site are going to tend to have more play experience than average players who won't be interested enough in the game to upload data. And the common consensus is that lower MMR matches have higher kill rates so it shouldn't be surprising if a site like this is a bit lower kill rate than the 60% or whatever the devs currently see overall.

What would be neat to see would be a kill rate by MMR chart similar to the ones the devs did in June for perk usage by MMR. Each line would be a killer and the plots would be kill rates by MMR rating. I'm pretty sure there'd be some trends like stealth killers doing well at average and low MMR but worse at high MMR and Nurse being not so great at average and low MMR but above average at high MMR because of her learning curve. It also would give a finer sense of where that 60% kill rate or whatever the game currently has is coming from.

4 escapes being the "outcome of least interaction" is kind of a lie, and that has been the basis for a lot of arguments against camping. You can get 6 hook states (2 kills, not spread out) and enter a tie with very minimal interaction, yet you can lose a match where you've tried to apply pressure and managed to spread all 8 hook states.

Killers having less information than survivors isn't meant to make killers work harder, but it's actually a side effect of being the power role. It's the entire reason why survivors play on third person while killers play on first person. For the sake of fairness, you cannot ask to be the power role and expect the same treatment as the team at a disadvantage.

4Ks and 4Es should be around equally as uncommon. An average killer should be able to get around 2 kills per match, and an average survivor should have roughly a 50% escape rate. Lowest and highest ranks should never go much further than a 45%~55% kill or escape rate. They will naturally have an imbalance in the extremes, but that should be what needs to be rebalanced to be kept in line to the 50%. Every single game does this, where the balancing adresses both ends of the player skill spectrum.

This is also the reason why some people advocate for things like base kit kindred. To push up the win rate of the lower end. In theory, giving the lower end (mostly solo-q) the same tools SWFs have should close the gap and make balancing easier. If doing this decreases the kill rate, follow-up buffs for killer should come into play.

Asking, like some people in previous comments (this part is mostly for those), to not balance for the 50% because "well, but what if high level killer is like 30% kill rate??? do you want to nerf them???" is like saying Sadako doesn't need any changes because Nurse and Blight exist. If there are outliers, you rebalance them to be put back in line. Saying "No, because what about high/low rank" is the lazy way out.

This is a bit too much idealism though. The game simply can't be balanced quite so perfectly that the range between the extremes at the highest and lowest skill levels are merely 5% apart.

Newbie survivors will always be at a disadvantage against newer killers, because the strength of a good survivor team is coordination, which comes from information and experience. These are not things you can account for via mechanical game balancing, they are player factors, not game factors. The lower end of the skill spectrum will always favour the killer, quite heavily, because inexperience simply hurts survivors more.

Which poses the question, at which point do you aim for balance? A median level? If you aimed for 50% average across all skills levels, you are accepting a killer-favoured skew at the lowest end, which means there must be a survivor-favoured skew at the higher end.

Should the highest skill level be survivors sided? Should the highest level killers resign themselves to a permanent disadvantage?

Its not an inevitability that the highest skill bracket should be survivor sided, not in the same way that the lowest skill bracket must be killer-sided simply due to the basic format of the game. Surely you would want to discount the fact that newbies will have tougher survivor games, and then balance the rest of the game around that conclusion. So lets say you discount the lowest 10%, aiming to balance the 'top' 90% of players to some sort of average. If the 'top 90%' have an average kill rate of 50%, then that same balance state, when factoring in the 10% you originally discounted, will skew to 55%.

If you discount the bottom 20%, then the 'balanced state' of the 'top 80%' of players will look like a 60% kill rate when applied to the entire playerbase.

TLDR: The top skill bracket shouldn't have to be survivor sided, but the bottom skill bracket will inevitably be killer sided. This means in a balanced state, when averaging the entire playerbase into one single figure average, it will look like a killer-favoured state.

This is merely a symptom of trying to boil game balance down into one single figure. Having one single 'average kill rate' for the entire game, is simply bad statistics. But when you don't have any defined ranking system or even a decent way of measuring skill, that's all you have to go on. You need to play mathematical 'tricks' to account for all these variables that you know will skew the data, and then you eventually end up with a figure that, while it does represent a fair state for the game, doesn't look all that pretty, and that's how we get to "a 60% kill rate is balanced".

Yeah I agree some sort of communication is a necessity at this point, imo they should add a dialogue wheel with premade text like "I'm doing a gen", "the killer is chasing me" etc.

Camping is an interaction so its already more interactions than zero, and you're ignoring what the description means: You can't get a 4k unless there is interaction, but you can certainly get a 4E if the killer is afk in the basement and does nothing. Its not a "lie," its a lopsided possibility that one outcome can have over the other, which is important for statistical relevance. I've already covered the ranges of interaction potential between the two, and never implied that all 4Es mean the killer did nothing to interact, I simply presented that the opposite outcome of 4E DOESN'T require interaction, thus making it less statistically ideal (as you will want the sample set to offset that possibility at least enough to negate it, while wanting more to offset any unaccounted for affect it can have on the rest of your set.)

Killers having less information than survivors isn't meant to make killers work harder, but it's actually a side effect of being the power role.

Being the power role is supposed to make you have to track considerably more information with little visual or auditory asistance, while fighting with chase music so loud that it prevents footsteps from being heard depending on literally what cosmetics they're using paired with whether the sound attenuation bug that has been in then game for ages decides to play nice? I understand your point as to why its designed that way, but you are being pretty bold to assume everything works properly enough to match. Meanwhile the next big thing survivors want basekit is either kindred, or icons for every single action that any other survivor is doing at any given time. There is an absolutely massive information disparity well beyond the normal hunter/hider dichotomy, and the proposed UB basekit situation would create another big one: Accounting for 45 second basekit UB is completely different from accounting for 22.5s, and the killer has zero idea which they would have until its too late to adapt. That type of scenario is just like the slug-or-risk-ds one in the past, having to listen for sound after an unhook to know if they have OTR on top of the free basekit BT, having zero way of knowing if they're hiding DS in order to reset their deep wounds to use multiple endurance effects, etc. And keep in mind, these are all just 1v1 scenarios, you have to also keep track of the other 3 survivors simultaneously with absolutely no assistance outside of perks that provide auras at specific times. As someone with ADHD I literally cannot track the amount of metadata that is necessary to play the role effectively due to how important that information gets the higher you climb, and I don't fault anyone who has similar issues.

TL:DR, its not that you're wrong, its that BHVR doesn't understand how to handle that type of advantage/disadvantage in a way that doesn't turn the "stronger role" into a "weaker" one. Until this game is bug free and every mechanic works how it is supposed to, killers will always have a much higher amount of information they need to track mentally, well beyond what should be normal for the role division.

4Ks and 4Es should be around equally as uncommon. An average killer should be able to get around 2 kills per match, and an average survivor should have roughly a 50% escape rate.

What do you actually base this on? In an asymmetrical game, the two opposing sides have different objectives, different time to completes, different degrees of individual agency, and different tools to work toward their objective while denying the opponent theirs. All of these facts mean that if skill is equal, the 1 will always have to work considerably harder than the 4, with the only exception being when the skill quotient is so low that it is statistically irreverent (at which point, it is determined almost solely based on how self-evident and/or intuitive each role is toward their objective.) 1v4 by nature means that the 1 is always supposed to be equal to the 4 in order to have a good game, which begs the question of how you would possibly hope to design a 50% win rate when 4/5 players have to both work together to maintain efficiency equal to the 1 opponent, but also not be able to use their individual agency to provide a disproportionate amount of progress for their teammates who provided much less. This isn't a fighting game or a FPS where the rules are tailored specifically to making every match as fair as possible, this is a game where someone can ragequit because a nurse tagged them in the first 30 seconds and now you're trying to win a 1v3 vs nurse at 5 gens (which is still possible, but it would certainly deviate from a 50% win rate.) Its far too random to make that kind of assumption, a game can be over before it even loads. That example goes both ways btw, and there can also be games where the killer wants to farm or uses an extremely meme build and underperforms despite being skilled enough to roll with a 4k.

If nothing else, the kill ratio should be higher than 50% exactly because the killer needs to do considerably more work than any individual on the opposite side in any match that plays out as designed.

This is also the reason why some people advocate for things like base kit kindred. To push up the win rate of the lower end.

And Kindred is a perk that gains more value the more you understand it, which is why its a terrible idea. The only realistic thing that will fix low level players is to stop pampering them when they knowingly make bad plays. They need to learn the difference between a killer facecamping and one who was trying to leave the hook before they ran right past and tried to unhook in their face. The more they baby people with basekit BT (which they even had to buff because they STILL didn't understand how to use the tool they were given) the more they let them justify their own objectively bad plays (and in some cases, even turn them into lose/lose ones for the killer because why not?) the less reason they have to think they need to improve, and all it ends up doing is giving better players more tools to abuse.

Asking, like some people in previous comments (this part is mostly for those), to not balance for the 50% because "well, but what if high level killer is like 30% kill rate??? do you want to nerf them???"

Thank you for clarifying you werent conflating me with similar arguments, but for my actual input on that situation: Kills should be in the upper 50's to mid 60's, enough to be within 2k/2e without being enough to round up to 3k/1e. It should also be within that range for all killers, which means that a lot of killers would need a lot of work in viability at different skill levels. Killers that are outliers due to high/low skill requirements or other important variables should have their value weighted to account for those (for example, a 40% nurse is still perfectly fine since her high skill floor means her performance will be weighed down considerably by people learning how to use her) and the long overdue practice mode where you can load into a custom game without a friend would do wonders for a lot of these statistics. Just like removing the corrupting elements like suicide on hook would (which is a topic I completely avoided, but is certainly relevant to anything talking kill%'s.)

Think it would help with their stats more if they added PTB to consoles? I ask because when they run PTB it's only on the computer and they will always have different results than those of us who play on console?

Sadly not, the PTBs are a bit of a ****show for getting actual data. There is generally no MMR and no progression/consequences so people just mess around to learn things then either go back to live or try to do sanity/smoke tests. Or just take advantage of broken stuff like during the boon one or the boil over one and just try to make the other side miserable while they're trying to test things on their own. The PTBs only statistical functions are as smoke tests at this point: aside from the obvious introduction to new content, people are trying to find out how broken they are and if they are ok to hit live without changes. Everything else is pretty much pointless unless you are only doing custom games with likeminded people.

They really need to do occasional closed beta PTBs with fog whisperers and other detail oriented content creators. They have a massive pool of playtesting at their fingertips but don't understand how to coordinate it for that end. Otherwise it feels like they truly use the PTBs more to advertise the content thats coming out and to give a preview of it, but not much else.

Because you should have 4 survivors = 1 killer in strength, a single survivors shouldn’t be on par with a single killer, its always been this way since 1.0.0

I mean thats cool and all, but its so unfocused you're probably not going to achieve what youre going for. The killer is supposed to be the power role, but that doesn't mean that they should get 3-4k's every game. You're mixing two arguments that arent mutually exclusive.

The killer needs to be the power role because they need to consistently be able to have the advantage in at least 1v1 situations, as they are also balancing the other 1v3 simultaneously. They are doing the work of multiple people and their role needs to reflect that increased requirement. When people can 1v1 at high level and force lose/lose situations on the killer, it diminishes their standing as the "power role" while doubling down on how outnumbered they are. Its a discussion about agency denial and disproportionate potential in each of the 4 survivors more than anything.

People keep talking about adrenaline vial like it's even a top 3 add-on for blight, It's simply over rated without c33 and even then it's downsides are extreme. You wanna talk alch ring, iri tag and c33 go for it. But adrenaline vials downside isn't just lower turn rate.

The power role is not the one who "wins more" but the one who has the ability to lead the course of the game. Like if the killer wants to stop from repairing this Gen he can force you to, but if you want to make the killer move or anything really, well you can't.