Why cant you tell people to get better? Over nerfing X instead

There are also bad killer players who think they get a SWAT SWF every match, think all maps are survivor sided, every surv perk is overpowered, etc because they lose "too much". I see it pretty frequently when I play solo Q - a killer player who DCs because someone ran them for 2 gens, because someone got a flashlight save, or whatever the reason may be and killer players who accuse SWF or cheating in the endgame chat.

And no, you can't assure me of that at all. Making that claim would require some serious backup.

Bad matchmaking helps exactly no one. I had played surv pretty exclusively until the first matchmaking redo and I was still fairly new to the game. Decided to try my first killer games and kept getting matched up against survs that were WAY out of my league. I did get matched against 3 4-man SWFs during that time (I knew this because I spoke with them in post game chat). I ended up putting down killer for a long time with the vague notion that I might try again after the new matchmaking settled or got reverted.

But....

Solo Q matches continued to be just as painful as the experience I had as killer and the 3-man SWF that I sometimes played with had 2 of the players seriously decrease playtime and eventually quit playing with any regularity at all because of the match making and I mainly popped up when events or chapters released. I kept getting matches with killers whose experience way outclassed the (at least for me) Solo Q teams I was on. Like the survs, the killers were by in large nice or at least silent about absolutely crushing us, but we got roundly crushed all the same. At some point, I don't remember when, either a different game got an update or maybe it was something new came out and I stopped playing at all for several months.

Those types of experiences do push people away and it doesn't matter if they mostly play killer, mostly play survivor, play hard to win hard, or play more relaxed.

Personally, I hate it when matchmaking puts me against a killer of obvious lower or higher skill. If it's a lower skilled killer, I get the chance to learn nothing. If significantly higher, it's the same thing only in reverse - I'm going to be out of the match long before I figure anything out. It's the same when I play killer and get survs either considerably lower or higher than my skill level. The lower skilled people generally aren't 'bad at the game', but they are inexperienced and being told that in a ~10ish minute match they need to 'git gud' with potentially 3 other strangers (since you keep bringing up survs) against an opponent they cannot possibly handle just isn't going to happen.

I fully understand the fact that nerfing things with no alternative leads to worse behavior, you're either incorrectly attributing arguments or not actually understanding what I'm saying. It has absolutely nothing to do with lopsided balance adjustments or targeting specific "unfun" strategies or anything like that, it has to do with normalizing extremes evenly.

Anyone who has ever seen fighting game balance patches understands this concept. Metas in fighting games happen for two reasons: A character is very strong overall, or they are give disproportionate output for minimal input. If a character has one tool that negates a vast majority of other characters inately, they will pretty much always be top tier. Elena was a perfect example in USF4, Krohnen in KoF 15, etc. People who can play better will still use them because they are consistent and have much more room for mistakes, but that doesn't mean the other characters ranked below them are necessarily worse: They are only underrated due to the simplicity of their superior alternative. This is why those types of characters get normalized, to bring them in line with the rest of the cast in regards to their effort vs reward ratio.

Fighting games also give another great example in recent years, auto combos and simplified input methods. They are purposely designed to be inefficient but easy to use, to allow casual/new players to have a foundation to start with, or stick with and be mediocre but servicible if they refuse to improve. The ones that do improve will still roll them almost every single time, but they are less useless in the game than they would be otherwise, so they stick with it longer. Meanwhile these types of mechanics offer absolutely no advantage or even incentive to good players.

How this would apply to DBD would be by normalizing the power dynamic in the game, and making better play both more incentivized and easier understood. Making loops more recognizable is one of the ways this could be improved, instead the devs went the oposite direction and made pallets blend more and added a ton of junk and crap tiles to the generation system. Solo queue players cry constantly for more information, and while I think a lot of what they ask for is a bit much, its certainly something that could be improved in terms of recognizing and understand things like tile generation and deadzones. Limiting extremes on many elements of the game like gen speeds, time to down, excessive snowball pressure (for either side) and the power dynamic would be another step, along with rewarding fair play more than efficient play (incentivizing hooks over kills, encouraging survivors to not hunker down on gens and ignore the game around them, etc) would be the next step to help discourage lowest common denominator play from either side.

Its not something as simple as "the meta shakeup" they tried, it would take a lot of work undoing the layers of bandaids they've been throwing on top of a festering wound in the game design. But as it stands the game is balanced by averages, the low level play is dictated by intuitive design while the high level play is dictated by advantage stacking. You can address both without needing to abandon one or the other. Its easy to blame things like matchmaking but giving worse players more room for forgiveness without punishing or giving indirect buffs to skilled players is the way to make those dead weight teammates able to pull their own weight a bit better. Even the devs didn't understand or intend looping until the community itself showed them how they could exploit collision box differences to buy time in chases, these things aren't exactly self evident.

A rescue is very difficult. But pushing the gens is doable.

Do you have many matches where survivor play that way instead of wasting time trying to save?

Yeah, I agree that at base, entry potato-level, killer is easily stronger. But I think that power balance pretty quickly turns, well before you even get to the "average" tier of players. At the stage where all players are of average skill, I think the survivor side is easier, and this only increases as the skill of all players increases. At "top level" (in cases where all players are actually top level), surv is the power role, for sure.

A team of four legitimately good survs, even in solo, is quite strong, I would argue stronger than a similarly skilled killer. A team of four really good killer in SWF are bringing a gun to a knife fight.

And speaking for myself, I reached a place of competence on the survivor side far more easily than I did with killer (even accounting for the fact I started with killer and already had a fair base of game sense before I picked up survivor). And survivor is far, far and away the less stressful role. I don't feel that latter point is even remotely arguable.

And even though I think killer has the advantage at nascent levels, this isn't always the case. My wife (who is not much of a gamer), started playing as survivor and became passable pretty quickly, but struggled immediately (and mightily) as a killer, to the point where she gave it up.

"A team of four really good killer in SWF are bringing a gun to a knife fight."

Looking back at DBD somewhere around 2018 I had 3 friends who were amazing loopers. At the time I was not able to loop worth a damn compared to them but I was not a potato.

What I was able to do was be invisible. Some nights I could only be seen by a killer in one out of 4-5 games. Bear in mind that I was always the one doing most of the gens as they preferred to save and lead the killer on chases.

They were however stumped by Nurse (and later spirit). The funny thing is that I was able to loop both of those killers and they would watch me and repeatedly ask "HOW?"

I knew how to play Spirit and Nurse so I knew their weaknesses. One of them was Spine Chill before the 6.0 nerf. Spinechill was literally the Nurse's cryptonite as you knew instantly if she had the right angle for her blink by when your "cat" lit up. They didn't understand how I didn't look behind me in chases and I just gave up trying to explain how you could use Spinechill to tell you everything the killer was doing in a chase.

They kept me around to be the guy to do gens and get unhooks without ever being seen (back when the game had thick fog that prevented vision beyond about 20m).

I guess I was always a "natural born killer". That's the role I mastered first. I learned to be a survivor by chasing good survivors. I learned how to be invisible mid chase from playing against good survivors back in 2016 when we had the old Shelter Woods map. It featured a 76% kill rate even when infinite windows were discovered because there really weren't any windows besides the Shack. Largely speaking that map was hide or die.

DBD is a casual game at its core, if the gameplay stopped being enjoyable to the casual audience the game would suffer.

Just make sure the things that are super broken in top levels of play is handled, and we're good. Like maxed out items/Nurse/Blight, stacked powerful regression.

No, maxed out items. I mean strong medkits, and I also mean Dead Hard. Killrate is 60% right now, sure. But I don't think killers should be nerfed without nerfing the most powerful survivor items and perks.

Besides, Nurse and Blight are not a problem to casuals/new players/bad players because they never face good Nurses and Blights. My opinion is, if something is broken in high levels of play, even it out a bit while still keeping it as fair and fun as possible. It's okay if Nurse is too hard to be viable in low mmr games. Or Blight. Or that items aren't insane value, just "decent" value as they probably should be.

Yes and that's 2K for me always as long first chase is not too long. 3-4K is possible with noed/deadlock. But if they manage to do the save im getting 1K mostly and if I succeed preventing save and get extra down im getting 2-4K.

For save I would try it like 10-20s before survivor is about to die if he went down quickly so 3 gens are most likely done. If save is succesful at that point bubba is getting 1K if he does not go after unhooked. And if he manages to prevent save still he is mostly getting 2K in that situation.

It's not so much a bad thing to say people need to improve, but within reason. There are areas of the game which can only be improved by change to how the game works.

Other changes are very dependent on luck. E.g I've been trying to get better at looping in recent weeks and I have got a bit better - but it's very dependent on which killer is there and what perks they have. Some killers are great at guessing what you'll do to mind game them and countering it, some killers bring perks that make looping harder than it already is given the killer is naturally faster anyway and gets faster the more they chase with blood lust. Other than that, what is there to actually be able to get better at?

You cannot get better at countering tunneling unless your team is heavily dedicated - again that depends on your team and even then that isn't always successful. You can't get better at countering camping because if a killer wants to camp they will. You can go off and do gens, but that depends on your hooked team mate not suiciding and giving you the time to do it. It's also not a viable counter to camping because the natural successful solution is to save your teammate. Ignoring them and letting 'x' amount of them die so 2 or 1 of you can escape doesn't feel rewarding. Similarly, you can't get better at doing gens because it's so straight forward and if a killer brings 350+ regression it's a nightmare.

My other gripe this attitude is it mainly seems to come from one side more than the other.

They aren't asymmetrical.

You have no way of proving the game would be fine if we balanced for comp players.