How is the dbd experience so one sided?
On the forums and in playerbases I've noticed that most people have one sided games when playing dbd. Survivors have a streak of killers who get 4k and killers have games where survivors sweat into a 4 man escape and I'm curious as to how this happens in the same game we are all playing. Is there any actual "fixes" to this? Is there really an issue to begin with? I'm curious to hear what anyone else has to say about this topic.
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Because there's a massive chasum of balance between bad solos and a 4 man sweat squad on coms.
There can be ridiculous levels of imbalance one match to the next with the amount of variables that exist. Like is the killer streak going for 12 hooks or camping and tunneling hard? Are they playing Myers or Nurse? Grey addons or ultra rares? 4 medkits/toolboxes or no items? Coal Tower or Garden of Pain? Completely different levels of results here.
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Just the nature of the game. It's impossible for bhvr to balance every match when one game you can be up against a no addon clown with a mix of green and yellow perks while the next could be blight with 3 slowdowns running crow and com33. Even just mentality going into the match makes a huge diff on the pacing of it, playing vs survivors who are looting boxes and hovering for flashbang saves is going to be a much much different match than survivors who just sit on gens.
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Its all confirmation bias.
Survivors will specifically remember the bad matches where the killer slugs for four minutes or tunnels everyone out.
Killers will remember the 4 BNP matches which go by in five minutes.
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Because confirmation bias and a very whiny community.
They only keep in mind the games they lost, not the ones which were close or they won. When I play Killer, I rarely get outplayed so hard that it is frustrating. And when I play Survivor, I dont get tunneled every game either.
And I highly doubt I am the odd exception. Let alone that those players always claim to lose most of their games, but also claim that they are high MMR. Does not really add up.
So if someone is saying that they get tunneled every game or that they go against 4 man SWFs every game or that every game has full Meta-Builds with Toolboxes and BNPs... Take it with a grain of salt.
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First rule of the DbD forums: you're only high MMR if you lose a lot. After all, that's how you gain MMR. By losing.
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Because with the randomness of matchmaking (primarily) as well as stuff like map pick, map generation and more, basically every single take on balance or health of the game can seem completely real simultaneously if you ask different players.
Throw in a not so healthy dose of negativity bias at the very least and maybe sprinkle in spicier ingredients like genuine us vs them brain rot or "my experience is the only real one" and you have a spicy meatball.
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The biggest problem there is matchmaking. Everyone generally agrees that at the tippy top of this game, best players in the world, this game is heavily survivor sided. There is a reason that most tournaments impose rules against the SURVIVORS such as perk and item limitations. Killers on the other side, tend to only have addon limitations (no reds, for example) or like, no tombstone myers, simply due to how dumb they can be, but perks are all fair game.
Now, when you look at that, you'd think that killers at top mmr would never win. But now you look at the matchmaking itself and you realize the problem. Lets say someone is 2k MMR (really really good, by default players in an elo system, which mmr is typically based on, start at 1200). Matchmaking caps your MMR to 1400 for matchmaking purposes. This means that players (on both sides) could be 2k rating, but be matched with teammates or opponents who are 1400, or vice versa, be a 1400 player, matched with 2k mmr players.
The reality is, very few players are at that top level, but the ones that are, generally don't play each other, they play "randoms". That is why as a killer, 1 out of every 10-20 games or so, you'll get that SWF kill squad that people talk about. And survivors will run into that "God nurse".
For context, the point of elo and mmr systems, is to match people with similar ranking, because at the end, the system is a probability calculation. The idea is, looking at 2 people with ratings, what are their odds of winning? Well, you can imagine if a 2k killer went against 4 2k survivors they would (in theory, assuming game is perfectly balanced) win 50% of the time. But, since you can be matched with people as low as 1400, what is their probability of winning?
Well, a 2k player, will have a 98.2% chance of winning against a 1400 player. And therein lies the problem. If you are on the upper end of the spectrum, say, a 2k rated player, you are probably going to win 90% of your games, and the game is going to seem like a joke. If you are a 1400 rated player, now you will see because you can be matched against 1400 players, but also 2k players, your win rate will not 50%, but somewhere much lower than that.
This is most obvious as a killer, because survivors have teammates to deal with. If you queue up in solo queue as a 2k mmr survivor for example. You could get matched with 1400 mmr teammates, and a 2k mmr killer. And that match will be a complete slaughter. So because survivors tend to need to play as a team, a single 2k mmr survivor can't carry the team.
This results in the following for most matches:
High skill killers win 90% of their games
High skill survivors in SWF win 90% of their games
High skill survivors in solo queue win less than 50% of their games
Low(er) skill killers (1400 mmr range) win less than 50% of their games.
Low(er) skill survivors (1400 mmr range) win less than 50% of their games.
This is why the game seems like a complete crapshoot most of the time and why you see these one sided (killer always beats me, or survivor always beats me) posts. Because they are coming from the players who are on that lower bound of 1400 mmr. Similarly, you'll see really good content creators like Otz and Scott Jund (although lately even otz is speaking about the games imbalance, probably because he is getting more into the comp scene with hens and ayrun and such). You'll see them win basically every game they play as killer, because they are at the top end of that scale. And then they will talk about how the game is "fine" for killers because those really good survivors are rare (which, their rarity is true.)
Then you have other content creators like tru3ta1ent who generally recognize this type of thing, and point out these things, but then the community will call them out or talk about how the game is balanced, or how "it should be balanced around average players" and say how dumb or OP "X" thing is, because they are on that lower end of the spectrum.
That's not to say that the lower end of that spectrum of 1400 mmr is some kind of bad thing and the players are bad or something, far from it. Even 1400 elo in chess for example puts you in the top 72% of all players, which is way above average. For comparison though, 2k rating would put you at better than 96.94% of the players. But the point is, you wouldn't pit a 1400 elo chess player against say, Magnus Carlsen (the highest rated chess player at 2882), and expect them to have a good time or even think that the game is fair at that point
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Imbalance. Be it the match making, the abilities, the players, every aspect that is imbalanced contributes to this.
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i wanted to write a text but then i saw reinami's post. so i can just agree
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From a survivor standpoint solo queue exists. What people need to understand is that not every survivor is playing in a sweaty SWF where everyone has 5000 hours minimum. People who play solo are mostly playing with duos and other solo players. In solo you are completely at the mercy of teammate RNG. There is a huge amount of variability in the skill of your teammates. My issue isn't that I get tunneled or die early. It's that my teammates get absolutely destroyed or just don't play efficiently. There's nothing I can do as an experienced player to make them play better. One person not pulling their weight leads to the killer steamrolling which is more common than not when you play solo queue exclusively. You absolutely do go on massive losing streaks when you play solo unless you are always playing for the hatch.
I don't complain about killer because I am a 3500+ hour player who destroys most teams I go up against. Big losing streaks are not a thing for me on killer and I very rarely feel like a game is "impossible". It's all because I don't have to deal with bad teammates. I'm not even an incredible killer. It's more that most survivors are awful.
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Exaggeration, confirmation bias, and vocal minority.
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Negativity bias put short. When I lose a match in soloq, there can be many reasons. It could be I misplayed, or it could be a Mikaela or Feng screwed the team over. It could be the Killer facecamped then that Feng/Mikaela rescued at 62s, enabling the Killer to then tunnel and instantly kill the person being facecamped. As Killer, I could bring a meme loadout only to run into 2 Syringes and 2 (before this patch) BNPs. It could be a Plague when you got a healing tome, or a Nurse when you got an escape/pallet stun tome. Each of those problems makes the next match more painful, unless you bring your best in the next match.
All that leads to is an arms race on both sides. An arms race means whoever brings the best tools, wins. This can be Syringes or Nurses, genb4fren or camping/tunneling. Skill is also a tool, but a tool forged through adversity. Why toil at a smelter when you can just slap on a Stypic or pick Blight? Many people are casual players of the game, and by that I mean they want to log on at the end of a day to win. They don't want to exercise their strategies and methodology, they just want a dopamine hit. You can tell the truly skilled Killers when they throw the game to figure out how to outplay a specific loop, because they truly want to improve. That Huntress taking 25 top shots, or the Billy curving and bumping 10 times, are the ones who 'win' in the long run.
Since such a large percentage of the population are addicts (to dopamine), this causes them to only remember the losses. You aren't gunna hop on to the forums to complain about winning your match. I myself had one of those kneejerk reaction posts, but it was about lockers on Temple of Purgation, how if the main gen is not yet completed, you can be locked in the center spot as Dredge until the cooldown. After cooling off, I still think that was a valid complaint, especially since often the locker priority when aiming doesn't quite work. But I've won against plenty of (insert 'nerf nao' thing here) users, as well as lost against plenty. It feels better to ragepost about it being busted than to use it and find what counters it. Essentially, if you won 9 matches, you can only complain about the 10th that you lost.
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2 points
First confirmation bias.
People read how bad their side is, and then when a good swf or good blight beats them they fixate on that and completely forget the 3 matches they had before where they did stand a chance.
That said there is evidence of people going on long winstreaks. So obviously it's not all confirmation bias. So what is it then in those cases?
Momentum and snowball.
This game is extremely momentum based.
Once one side gets their ball rolling it's extremely difficult for the other side to turn it around.
Did you chase your first survivor into a strong zone or you simple got outplayed? Expect to lose 3 gens and play on the backfoot the entire game.
Did you down a survivor 20 seconds into the game with Lethal Pursuer Blight? As long as you don't make to many mistakes you're probably going to have a breeze of a game as survivors have to be more focused on resquing eachother then doing gens. Especially if that blight chooses to tunnel his first victim out.
Mistakes can be extremely harshly punished and people who know how to seek out those mistakes can really dominate this game
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Wow, I'm surprised reinami's post isn't getting more love. That is a significant element. Especially since it may well come from the "vocal minority" that is actually experiencing a problem, and voicing their concerns. So called "ELO hell" is an established experience in a lot of games that mask their matchmaking rating. Not to say that things like confirmation bias and sore losers don't exist, but inappropriate matchmaking without an explanation can be a valid concern.
Imagine people playing tennis or chess, but hiding their ELO or surface adjusted elo. Nadal and Federer would be the greatest mysteries of all time ;)
Quick edit: worth noting, I'd be/I am happy to go against way more experienced people than me, but it'd be nice at the end of the match to know what I was going up against. Maybe a community average deaths for killer/map, or an expected deaths based on an indoor/outdoor matchup ELO. I know the individual/team ELO assessment each create some bias, but I think it's livable and provides more context for a match.
Otherwise, I spend 2/3 of my killer matches going against double digits prestige survivors, and I might have one killer at prestige 3. Then I'm just left with math to guess that they have 2+ years experience on me. But hey, getting 0-2 kills against them and getting 3-4 kills against the other 1/3 should keep me at bhvrs target kills/survival rate, right? ;)
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