Balance
As someone who's been playing both sides in the game, the argument for "who the game's in favor of" is kinda ridiculous.
Yes, some killers (and reworks) that came out are pretty strong, but that's coming off of years of killers getting either janky powers or heavy nerfs, half of which are still in play. Yes, a lot of popular survivor perks have been getting nerfs, but it's best not to forget what made them popular in the first place, or those that have been left untouched.
I don't think the game is survivor sided or killer sided, it seems more like the devs are working to balance a game which started with them overcompensating everything. So please, could we not have an argument over who's treated better in the game and talk more about what's good about the game, or at the very least what needs tweaked.
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The game is pretty fair for the most part.
The absolute extremes are still there, but honestly in a semi competitive game they will never go away. There will always be something that is stronger and something that is weaker.
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A DBD content creator actually went and tested if the game is sided with either team very recently and they came to the conclusion that it isn't. The conclusion that they made for what is screwing the balancing of the game is the use of 3rd party means to communicate for survivor SWFs. He did 2 matches in his video where all the survivors never played with each other before and he did the same killer, build, and map for both matches and he got a relatively easy 4k in the first match, but in the second match he barely got a 2k and the difference was that he allowed the survivors to use a 3rd party app to have comms with each other in the second match. He did that experiment to show that the underlying balancing issue in the game currently is not with either side being too strong, but rather that 3rd party comms are very powerful due to them allowing players to get more coordinated with each other.
This is why I feel like if BHVR just made 3rd party comms bannable or added in game chat for the survivors it would balance out the game more because with either of those two solutions it would make the behavior of the survivors more predictable at times since killers wouldn't have to go from multiple disorganized groups of survivors due to them not having comms to coordinated survivor SWFs with comms.
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Banning people for using Discord is not option and never will be.
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game is survivor sided, and it is rational decision cause you need four times more players playing as survivor. 70% of killers are destroyed if playing against equal skill survivor. But thats okay i guess because if you improve you will destroy most games as killer(although dont expect to win against 5k hours party as Michal)
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I feel like the balance of the game is heavy swayed with which ever side sweats the most. The problem is you never know who is sweating and who is chill until the match starts and it's too late by that point the sweat side will always conquer the chill side.
This is all clearly from personal experiences, I've been just loading into games with the sole purpose of practicing hatchets, some games are dead even and everyone is just chilling and vibing and others are let me bully this killer because they seem new and easy. Last I have matches where the survivors are clearly better than me and I'm ok with that.
I think a lot of the community lacks self reflection when it comes to losing on both sides.
While comms are an advantage they shouldn't be banned, some of my most intense fun games come from swfs. The better the coordination the better the team. For me there's no fun in stomping random solo q teams, I'd face only swfs if I could, if only for the sheer amount of skill and actual thought you have to put in to defeat them.
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Killers have a 60% kill rate, survivors have 40% escape rate. That means, if you as an average person click the "Play as survivor" button, you are reducing your chances of winning by 1.5x.
That is not balanced.
I'm sure you'll find a lot of reasons to explain why that's fine or you don't mind it, but stop pretending it's "balanced". Balance means 50-50. 60-40 is actually very imbalanced because of the way how percentages work.
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Technically it is a 3rd party means of getting a competitive advantage- Same reasoning for why subtle hackers getting banned-
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I mean theres a huge difference in comms and manipulating the games mechanics to walk, run, and generally do things faster ie cheating. Comms and subtle cheaters are not comparable.
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Yes, they aren't completely comparable, but voice chat isn't meant to be a part of the game so using 3rd party means of doing so for an advantage sorta is. If they'd at least make an in-game voice chat for DBD then it'd be completely impossible to be compared to cheating.
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Trying to understand whether Dead By Daylight is sided one way or another - a game with heavy rng, a MMR that offers a wide variety of opponent skills mixed in with each other, different builds, different powers, different everything - is practically impossible.
Overall, I'd say the game is okay overall in terms of "balance" and, considering the very nature of the game makes it impossible to be properly balanced, the devs have done well.
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If you really believe using Discord is equal to cheating, i have no words for you.
But non of online games will ban people for using Discord. So maybe online games are not your thing.
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I never said it was balanced, nor am I pretending it is. I'm more expressing how the argument for the game being one sided isn't necessarily true
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That data will never matter that much. Too many people on survivor side skew the survival rate negatively unintentionally. One person playing for totems/chests/charms/rift or the big one FUN will skew the win rate. Even a squad who's sole purpose is to **** with killer for 20 min will end up losing. The game was not balanced at a 48% survival rate a couple years back, in fact it's probably much closer to balanced now at probably 58-60% survival rate. You cannot tell me that in 15% of all games one survivor is not actively doing the random side quests or messing with the killer, that would just be not genuine. This is the only game(WITH THE CURRENT PLAYER BASE AND SET UP OF BOTH IN-GAME AND OUT) where 60% is likely balanced. Not because of some garbage notion of fearing the killer, but because of the nature of survivor.
That's a cold take I just said, please discount yourself by disagreeing.
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discord shouldnt get a pass. Its a 3rd party program used to gain an advantage in game. Just because its not cheating doesnt make it fair play. Either build it into the game or denounce it entirely.
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Finally... a post I can get behind LOL. I also play both sides, and agree with everything you said. There are just too many people claiming the game is killer-sided and just as many people claiming the game is survivor-sided to not verify people are just biased to the side they play. Well they're both right I guess in a way LOL.
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I'd rather talk about what makes it fair for both sides and tackle the oppressive and problematic things we all suffer from instead of one-sided nonsense. We should be able to explain our points of view and accept what others are experiencing with an open mind and consideration that the game is a 1v4 and should be balanced as such, or at least as close as possible with a game like this.
Unfortunately the loudest majority of either end probably doesn't play both roles enough to understand it, or just wants to see their favored side be the better one.
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Imagine thinking a game that wasn't meant to be competitive becomes popular, and the company tries to balance it.
Then it falls to the fact a voice chat program is the sole reason it will never be balanced.
Balance will never be achieved here guys. It's really just a place to play some motion picture icons.
Come for the Licensed characters, stay for the game if you can get past the rage and toxicity.
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Or quit. You have that option, as discord isn't going anywhere.
Even if they did say 3rd party is not allowed, its not enforceable.
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I am saying it again.
There is no online game will ban you for using Discord. So DbD won't ban you either for that.
You can make countless posts about that but nothing will change.
Banning people for Discord is not gonna happen.
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I think trying to achieve balance in a game like DBD is mostly impossible, frankly. It seems to me that whenever BHVR makes changes to nerf an emergent meta, players will always gravitate towards the next busted combo of perks and add-on that will give them an advantage over their opponents. Healing was nerfed, so Killers gravitated towards Sloppy Butcher and other anti healing perks, for example. So Survivors used perks that meant they could play more efficiently injured. That cycle will probably always be a part of DBD.
I think maybe the focus should be more on fun. Some powers / perks / combos are fun to use, but I guess they have to consider if this power, perk or combo is also fun to face for the opponent. And if not, is it so oppressive and unpleasant that it drives people away from the game. That's probably the kind of balance I think they are trying to achieve.
That said, being an Asymm, the balance of power should probably be slightly tipped in the Killer's favour. It's 1 Vs 4 after all and as a Survivor, you should feel like you signed up to be the underdog and that the odds are against you. But it shouldn't feel so utterly hopeless, either. Getting two out the gate should feel achievable in most games, if not very probable.
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Most online games aren't built around a lack of information, and choosing not to use comms is competely voluntary. DBD is designed for limited info. Thats why there isnt a voice chat, a ping system or anything. I don't really want swfs banned for playing a team game with friends. But if they arent going to build the game around it then they are choosing to make their game wildly unbalanced.
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Well like i said, people won't be banned for using Discord. This is never gonna happen. If you are not happy about that, there is nothing i can do. It's just the fact i said.
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He isn't arguing that its cheating, but riding on a technicality. Thats how courts work all over the world, you have a ruleset and then people try to argue within the ruleset if someone broke the rules, bend them or if the rules were ambigious and need to be modified or ammended.
TECHNICALLY Discord is a third party programm that gives you a rather sizable advantage in game, but like you said, claiming that this is something like cheating is bogus. The big discrepancy between soloQ players and even casual SWFs with coms is staggering, though, and IS something that BHVR should work on in one way or another. And its not banning players who wanna talk to each other in game.
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Thing is voice chat being added in is an absolutely terrible idea, everytime i hear this I immediately think of TCM I literally can't count how many times I was called a racial slur while playing as sonny. No to mention the other crazy toxic things being said. I don't play survivor a lot but I don't need to hear Dwight yelling from a locker for Claude to stop self caring in a bush in a corner of the map, while Mikaela is blessing a totem and meg pre dropping every pallet we have in chase.
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This also comes from someone who plays both sides and on survivor solo and group.
DBD changed from very survivors sided back in 2016 to now killer sided - on all levels of skill. The numbers (K/D ratio, winstreaks and even pro scene) speak a very clear language to the point that killer mains can only justify those facts with "Yea but the killer should be more powerful" statements.
Talking about what is good in the game is a nice thing, and there is plenty of that. But as the devs have already made clear: Critical feedback helps more then praise and only positive feedback.
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60% kill rate means the killer does not win the majority of their matches. Just making sure you aren't confusing 60% kill rate with a 60% win rate. If that doesn't make sense to you, a 50% kill rate means a 2k. A 75% kill rate is a 3k. If you split that in half then a 62.5% kill rate would put killers at winning half their matches on average. However, since it's balanced around 60%, it means killers on average are actually somewhat shy of winning half their matches meaning they only win around 47.5% of their matches. The 40% on the survivors side you have to keep in mind that it is at an individual level and in reality there are 4 times the amount of survivors, so 40% is somewhat of a misnomer. If each survivor has a 40% chance at escaping, that's a fairly good chance at at least two survivors escaping preventing the killer from getting a win (3k). You also have to consider that many killers are actually under even the lowballed 60%, so it's actually worst for them than it would appear.
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Well that would be nice but unfortunately too many people enjoy the us vs them drama and not many people actually care about the game as whole, only the the parts that are relevant to them.
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This is quite honestly, and I'm sorry to say, a very dishonest attempt to manipulate math.
Yes, win rate is not exactly kill rate, depending on how you count draws, but in the context of a balance discussion the difference is just cosmetic and will disappear in the averages. In fact, in your very own example (half 2k, half 3k) killers only win 47.5% of the time, that's true. But survivors win literally 0% of the time. So now they go from 1.5x less chance of winning, to INFINTE less chance, so the game would appear to be even more killer-sided, not less.
The point remains, a survivor is on average 1.5x less likely to survive, than the killer is likely to kill them. I am baffled that you believe that even with a 60% killrate there is still a way to make it sound like killers and survivors have roughly the same odds. They do not. They are, by most game standards, on a very uneven footing.
Post edited by Saiph on3 -
You may need to recheck your math. Claiming survivors win 0% of the time is, well frankly I just assume you're trolling here.
As for my numbers, they are accurate. Bear in mind, a killer winning means 0-1 survivors won that match. A killer not winning means 2-4 survivors won that match. That means 47.5% of the time on average, 0-1 survivors are winning their match. The other 52.5% of the time, 2-4 survivors are winning their matches.
Bear in mind, the game is not 1 killer vs survivor team. It's 1 killer vs 4 individual survivors each with their own win condition per the devs statement. For example, a 2k means the killer did not win (they need 3 or more to win), and the survivors had 2 winners amongst them. Alternatively, if the killer wins with a 3k, that means 1 survivor won, as well. It's a weird way to balance the game, but that's just how they do it. I think it would make more sense for it to literally be team vs team. I suppose they don't want someone to feel it's pointless to escape if they already lost 2 survivors. That being said, all it matters to survivors is if they escaped or not regardless of other survivors escaping or getting sacrificed.
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The overall kill rate was 53% in Prime DH/IW/CoH meta. The killer meta only favored mobility/high tier killers at the time with ruin/undying. The kill rate should have been lower, but on average survivors don't try as hard to win as killers do. Every time you queue up as survivor there is a solid chance someone is just following the killer around looking for chase, doing the rift or just doing whatever. I've gone against and played with swfs who's sole intention is to interact with the killer as much as possible before dying doing 2 gens in 8 min and I don't blame them, that's the most fun you can have on survivor, that's literally every survivor youtube video.
In league 53% win rate is broken, in dbd there are far too many factors that make these numbers lose their meaning. Also survivor takes longer to be good at and as a result bad players being paired up together is always killer sided.
Point is kill rates are very misleading due to the nature of the game and the playbase especially.
I'm not saying killer is weak by any means at the moment, the games only been in a better spot for killers once.
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Fair statement. Some survivors give up on hook giving killers a higher kill rate than they would have, and other survivors as you mentioned just follow the killer around looking for silly chases or get obsessed with having to try to do flashlight saves instead of objectives. This essentially inflates kills meaning killers are actually weaker than they even appear on their kill rates since many of their kills are because of throwing survivors.
On the flipside, there are some killers who like to just farm meaning survivors get undeserved escapes inflating their numbers, as well. However, I feel farming killers are far more rarer then survivors who give up on first hook or throw matches for silly killer interactions.
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I would agree, farming killers are probably like 1-2% of games. Whereas intentional game throwing survivors(not out of malice) is a average Tuesday.
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Your number are accurate, they are just extremely misleading. Your math leads to 47% killer winrate because you count draws as 0 for killer, but 0.5 for survivors, so draws increase the survivor winrate, but not the killer winrate. Of course you are free to define a win as you want (and so am I). Regardless the underlying killrate is still 60% and what you're omitting to say is that even under your definition killers and survivors are still on a very uneven playing field.
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I have serious doubts that the game is killed sided at every level of play, considering how fast gens go. At the highest level of play, survivors are still very strong.
Unless you only count Blight and Nurse and a few others, then maybe the game is killer sided.
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I'm not defining a win, BHVR is. They said each individual survivor has their own win condition. They either escape, or they don't. There is no draw scenario. As for killer, BHVR has never declared a killers win condition, but the majority of the playerbsse agrees that 3+ kills is considered a killer win. 0-2 the killer did not win. Bear in mind, draws require both sides to neither win or lose, and that is impossible in a game where its 1 player vs 4 individuals with their own win condition. That means there is no such thing as a draw in dbd. However, for the purposes of MMR modifications in a match, BHVR DOES treat a 2k as MMR neutral, with 0-1 being negative and 3+ being positive.
And yes, as I already said, killers and survivors are at an uneven balance. Killers have a subpar kill rate by a few percent, and that's not even including extra kills from survivors giving up on first hook. The killers are balanced around them not winning the majority of their matches (getting 0-2k). If they balanced around 62.5%, then killers would roughly win half their matches (IF we were disregarding the fact on how common survivors just give up on first hook and inflating killer kill counts).
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IIRC, at least one dev (Peanits?) stated the killer is essentially playing a (1v1v1v1) v 1. Each kill counts as a win for that individual game the killer is playing and a loss for that particular survivor.
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If the killer got only 1 kill, he definitely didn't win, lol. He also goes down in MMR in the process...though MMR doesn't necessarily have any correlation to wins or losses. It would be a disaster on balance if the devs were actually declaring a single survivor kill is a win. He'd need a 12.5% kill rate to give the killer a 50% win rate. Pretty much every game would be a killer win with their expected 60% kill rate, and it would be terrible balancing around the expectation to kill 1 survivor only half the time. Consider now, every time you play killer, if 3 survivors kept escaping every match, if BHVR said "but you won!", you'd tell them to go kick rocks. Would be very unsatisfying to play killer this way, not to mention tunneling would be even more powerful if all they had to do was tunnel one person out at the beginning and they "win". There's a reason why pretty much everyone agrees that a 3k is a killer win. They get the majority of the survivors sacrificed. Competitions also don't consider a single kill a killer win. More than likely, the dev who said that was just trying to make someone feel better about someone going through a string of losses. Doing anything BUT tunneling someone out would be shooting yourself in the foot. Playing more "fair" and spreading hooks out more would simply encourage losing. BHVR has been trying to protect people from getting tunneled out with basekit borrowed time and off the record. Claiming that singling someone out and eliminating them to lock in a win for the match would be entirely counter-intuitive to their work to prevent tunneling.
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I try to be unbiased with this opinion and mainly focus on facts and statistics. According to that, Killer has definitly the upper hand in any regard. Some argue that killer should win more often and be the power role, which is subjective.
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