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The real kill rate is 70-80%
I've been keeping track of my own games as survivor, and my escape rate is 38%. BHVR may consider that number fine because it fits in with their 60/40 target, but it doesn't tell the whole story.
I put the escapes in two categories, when the killer is trying to win or when the killer is messing around/trolling/afk/or lets me escape on purpose out of pity. 43% of my escapes fall into the latter category, and I wouldn't consider those real escapes.
When I exclude those false escapes my effective escape rate when the killer is trying to win is only 26%. It's extremely discouraging knowing the odds are so stacked survivors, and I'm unsure if I want to keep playing this game if things stay as they are. Personally I think they should go back to aiming for a 50% kill rate. It doesn't make sense to design the game to be miserable for survivors when they're 80% of your playerbase.
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Your want them to base their kill rate stats on just your games?
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And how many matches did you play for these stats, versus the many thousands, if not tens of thousands of matches played every day worldwide? Surely you don't think your own bubble is even remotely representative?
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The main point remains though: an escape that is handed to you out of pity, lack of caring or whatever, doesn't feel like a win at all, so you don't even register it. Motivation is a huge factor in these games and if players only consider the games where they "actually won" (aka where they managed to escape because of how they and the other survivors on their team acted) the escape rate is much lower. -- Also, it to some degree articificially inflates escape rates (idk if it's significant tho). --- And playing with a "corrected" escape rate of 15-25% is kinda really not motivational.
--- It's kinda the counterpart to "why do survs 4% all the time or flat out give up fifteen seconds into a match?" ... just that those matches are quite likely to come with at least one dc on the surv side, so they don't get counted in the stats, which means they're less likely to artificially inflate the killrates (granted, the dc part is based on my and my friends' experiences but given that dc complaints are quite common I suppose it's not too far fetched).
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That's quite the bold take. Let's ignore collected data from millions of matches, surely this 1 guy's personal survival is reflective of the survival of all players of all skill levels.
My own survival isn't that great either, but I'll openly admit I suck at chases. I'm not going to pretend I represent EVERYONE.
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This is over many games. If you think the game is fine and balanced right now, I'm just wondering have you played survivor lately? Because the odds feel so stacked against you as survivor, especially with the bad matchmaking. I don't enjoy playing killer either for the simple reason that it feels too easy, to the point it feels like bullying.
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By that logic my real escape rate is also 70 to 80 percent, I like the way you think bro.
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Your personal experience is not necessarily reflective of the whole game.
Not to mention that Escape Rate != Win Rate. For example, you can die in most of your games, but the outcome can still be a 3 man escape, because you altruistically sacrificed yourself in the end game. You can also have an 80% escape rate, because you just hide for hatch.
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The real escape rate is 600%. No, I won’t provide evidence, just trust me bro.
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Of course there's no way of knowing the true overall false escape rate because I doubt BHVR even has a way of measuring it. I would encourage you to do your own experiement. Over the next 50 games as survival, count how many escapes you had and how many of those escapes were false escapes (killer memeing/afk/pity escapes). I don't think it's extremely rare like 1% like you seem to imply, I think it's significantly deflating official kill rates and that needs to be taken into consideration when balancing the game. It feels almost impossible to escape against a killer who knows what they're doing and is trying to win as hard as possible. It shouldn't be like that. I'm of the opinion that if both sides are trying, there should be a roughly equal chance of dying or escaping.
I truly believe the overall effective kill rate is at least 70% when false escapes and games with a dc are taken into consideration. Otherwise it would not be possible for killers to go on multi-hundred game win streaks like some streamers are doing.
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delete
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My escape rate is ~72%. Anecdotal stats are anecdotal. No, I'm not a god tier survivor, I'm solo queue and I run Sole Survivor + Clairvoyance + Windows + Red Herring.
I call this build: Bad Teammate Insurance. If my teammates are good, I don't really need any strong perks to escape, I either sit on gens, or run the killer for a gen each time I'm chased. If my teammates are bad and/or throwing, I look for a totem, set up Red Herring, and wait it out.
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my escape rate is 10% when I am playing SWF (all of them > 800 hours) during EU evening hours (CET) after 9 pm. I hate this unbalanced killer sided game so much!
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Skullmerchant has a 70% killrate. How many of those are people giving up on hook or games getting ruined because someone DC'd. Don't take those stats too seriously, there's BHVR stats
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even tens of thousands matches doesn't really come close to the amount of matches per day...hundreds of thousands might be better but it's closer to a million or more
That's why individual data is subjective, one persons experience is not going to be the same as another persons.
We use data plus feedback, neither are used on their own when we make decisions.
The balance between escape rates and kill rates is carefully monitored - right now it's in a pretty good spot across the board, it doesn't mean that we're not making changes to certain things, the wonders of a Live game is that there will always be adjustment to things as you've been able to see on our Live roadmap, but I can definitely confirm we have no plans to move away from the 60/40 split, this is what we're aiming for.
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Games with a dc are not counted in the stats
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Will the team consider releasing the stats with DC's factored in?
I understand it's likely not used for balancing, but I do think it could help people see the average state of the game since DC's likely change how things look.
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So if I play killer and purposefully let every survivor go the escape rate will be 100%?
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Oh the whole game doesn't count? Fair enough thanks for informing me
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Does BHVR have stats that show if the DC rate went up or down, after survivor bots were released?
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My read of the OP's message is more of "Don't blindly follow the stats, ask the 'why'". While the kill rates may be accurately in the 60% range, how many of those kills/escapes were because the Killer let the Survivors go/Survivors refused to leave and died to endgame collapse, and does the system account for that? (rhetorical)
Also with DCs not being counted towards the stats, that creates another mismatch of player experience and data. The 3 remaining Survivor players have to finish playing out the doomed match, and hate every moment of it. When we are told "DCs aren't tracked" along these other (varying levels of) common player experiences, we instead interpret the message as something like "LOL sucks to be you, because that isn't real". Having a 'with' and 'without' for something like DCs helps that significantly more.
DCs are also a clear player experience message (in the current system). If someone is willing to soak an escalating penalty and still play, that means that particular experience was so bad and the game at large isn't at fault. If they stop playing after the DC though, they might just be going to bed. If Joe-Schmoe DCs against every Nurse, they are sending player feedback that Nurse is the problem, not the game. If we are told DCs aren't tracked, we are told (some level of) player feedback is ignored.
When someone says "I feel like the 'true' escape rate is 20-35% because I include when the Killer farms us (2-hook release) and matches with DCs", the 'why' is clearly stated. When there is such an extreme mismatch of player experience and data (like OP's 'true' 26% escape rate), it lowers faith in the game's integrity. Player experience shouldn't be this far divorced from the data, or that causes people to believe the dev team to be out of touch. The targeted 60/40 feels much different for the 3 Survivors with a DC, as they can't just toss their experience to the wind, unless there is a system implemented to allow for unpunished DCs in matches where a DC already happened. In other words, data collection should as closely match player experience as possible. (So either count DCs, or let us quit after someone else does please.)
Side tangent, feel free to ignore, its more for the thread in general
{
I have seen 3 major DCs: Killer recognition, tilt-ragequit, and stop wasting my time. Killer recognition is simple, see the Nurse example above. Tilt-ragequit and stop wasting my time both have some overlap though. A turbo-tunnel off hook is a bit of both for example, as the Killer clearly didn't want the Survivor to play the game, so they go out on their own terms. An exclusive tilt-ragequit is failing a vault or mindgame or stun mid-chase. An exclusive stop wasting my time is bleeding out/slugging for the 4k.
Before MMR, I near exclusively 2-hook tango'd, or hooked each Survivor twice then let them go. I quit the game (in the hopes that it will get better in the future), but if I return, I will refuse to kill Survivors as long as MMR is as sweaty as it still is at this point. If I return, I will be 'stacking the deck' in terms of kill rates, where the Killer wins in reality, but the Survivors win on paper. If everyone learns this is the only way to have fun, then no stats will have meaning, and MMR will fail at its intended goal.
Similarly Ghostface is low in kill rates, but the 'why' is likely people play him as an M1 Killer instead of a macro 99 stalk all players style. (At least that's how I had significantly above average kill rates with him as my main.) If players start to play Ghosty 'right', would his kill rates raise significantly? Probably not, because too many newer players will still think "Ah cool Ghostface", and still play him as an M1 Killer.
}
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This quote alone hurts alot of killers..
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So that's confirms SM will be looked again? For whatever reason, she is at 70%.
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Invalidating matches with a DC likely brings kill rates down, as a killer can be wiping the floor with survivors, someone DC's part way through and that data gets discarded. We all know that most DC's don't happen at the start of a match. It's usually after someone gets tunneled and leaves before they get hooked a second or third time.
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What about hook suicides? Or survivors that are trolling? Do they influence the escape rates as well?
If you're gonna eliminate factors that affect the legitimacy of your escape rates, then you need to do it for both sides. But you can't always do that as a survivor because you don't see when your team mate stops in their tracks to get killed. As a killer it doesn't work either because you don't see what survivors do outside of chase.
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My experience is subjective but I consider myself an average player, not good and not bad. When I switch from survivor to killer it's very notable how much easier the game feels. I can get 4ks with ease and it doesn't even feel fair. I actually would enjoy playing killer more if it had some challenge, but it feels unfair and like I'm bullying the survivors by having so much of an advantage that I don't find it enjoyable. I can understand why a lot of killers let survivors escape out of pity, and that must have some effect on the overall kill rates.
It's kind of disappointing because I think DBD is an amazing game, but the balance feels off.
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You're saying this as if letting the last survivor go wasn't that common.
A killer taking pity on the last player, a killer being friendly, a killer being AFK farming... there's a lot of instances where survivors can get extra escapes where they shouldn't have, and with enough of these, it's pretty easy to skew the data. Maybe not a 15%, but a 5 to 10 extra percentage of escapes can easily be achieved.
I don't think the OP is that far off. 26% might be an unlucky streak, but I've been paying extra attention on my escapes last couple of weeks, and while I haven't been keeping track of them to give you 100% reliable numbers, it was clear most my escapes came from pity hatches, friendly killers and AFK, and by a lot.
This is also backed up with how it feels when I play killer. I've been playing more killer than survivor since 6.1.0 and my kill rate is roughly 85~ish%, mostly because I don't really do pity hatches most of the time. This has been fairly consistent, and it's one of the reasons I get annoyed every time the forums talk about balance.
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Furthermore I suspect that killers having an advantage by design encourages killers to do the aforementioned things (afk/memeing/pity escapes). This skews the true kill rate by downplaying it, which results in further imbalance as BHVR tries to maintain the 60% kill rate. What I'm trying to say is that I believe if killers felt the same kind of pressure that survivors do to succeed with the same rate of failure which would result from a 50/50 balance, killers would on average would feel more motivated to try as hard as possible to win rather than allow survivors to escape, compared to when it's 60/40.
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This is so true. Survivors are much more likely to DC in a game where they aren't winning, so throwing out the DC games can bring kill rates down.
And this is especially true, now that we have survivor bots, because if a survivor wants to ragequit, they'll either DC or purposely get hooked and will let go on hook.... and letting go on hook doesn't replace the survivor with a bot.
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Post your numbers if you're so confident that your sample size is significant enough
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If you are seeing this message, and you haven't read the comment I'm replying to, do everyone a favor and give it a read.
@mizark3 expertly articulated what OP wanted to convey while offering valuable insights into the conversation.
I've nothing more to add to the conversation at this time--please please read mizark's remarks before offering your own opinion.
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Once again all of this is your experience and doesn't represent everyone else experience. For example I keep track of stats as killer as well since the game doesn't do it for me and I enjoy looking at my own stats. I can tell you right now my games are not as easy as you says yours are. On any given night I avg around 2 kills a night and I'm playing to win in every match. I don't usually show mercy or pity to anyone I come across. I treat everyone the same. Now once in a while I get a super easy match where I get a 4k easily but it's definitely not every single match like you are implying. On the flip side I have had nights where I don't even get a kill at all.
As you see I say our experiences are quite different. Now let's say they decided to use my data to balance the game. Then that would most likely lead to killer buffs and survivor nerfs across the board, making matches for you even easier and unfun for you. Then let's say they do the same but with your data. That would lead to them buffing survivors and nerfing killers across the board leading to me having even harder matches to the point I'm not having fun.
This is why matchmaking is so important. We really not talking about balance here, we talking about match quality. A good matchmaking system is supposed to match you with equal skill players so matches are challenging but so challenging that it feels impossible to win. I always thought DBD matchmaking needs more work because there are times where I get survivors who are way out of my skill level and completely crush me as killer than at the same time I get matches where the opposite happens where I get survivors who act like newbies and I completely crush them. The matchmaking in this game is all over the place and rarely does it accurately pair you up with someone who is at a similar skill level.
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It also doesn't take into account all the games that could've been a win but weren't because someone gave up or because someone/the team didn't care about winning and just wanted to mess around or bully the killer.
I disagree with this. When I'm a survivor most of the games that have someone DC are still very winnable. Same when I'm killer, I could still easily lose but then someone DCs and then the games just over.
Yes there's a few where someone DCs on death hook after being tunnelled, but there's also people throwing simply because they were found in the first 5 seconds or because they got hit through a pallet. Survivors DC less so because they aren't winning, and more so because they aren't having fun.
Same with giving up on hook. Most games are still winnable in my experience before they give up.
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I think they're aware this only happens because people suicide on hook against her.
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I am not refering to your entire post (though you are making quite some good points there) as I need to go to bed. Just one quick food for thought morsel of my mind:
"The targeted 60/40 feels much different for the 3 Survivors with a DC, as they can't just toss their experience to the wind, unless there is a system implemented to allow for unpunished DCs in matches where a DC already happened. In other words, data collection should as closely match player experience as possible. (So either count DCs, or let us quit after someone else does please.)"
This would also imply that the 60% kill rate that gives killers a bit more success doesn't count this very loopsided games with one survivor DCing at the first opportunity as a win. Considering that this game still raises the killers MMR, how many toxic-death-squads will be send against the general killer population, to even out the whole affair so that the killrate eventually comes to a "true" 60/40 split?
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It still shows an issue though. If her kill rate without hook suicides was average, then this would imply that the rate of hook suicides against her is disproportianally higher than on other killers. And while many hook suicides may come from people being dicks, this still means that players hate to play against her. More than against any other killer.
Skull Merchant did not receive the changes she needed to make players hate her any less. There are so many things in her design that were completely wasted and could easily be focussed on for a proper rework. But it hasn't happened yet. Her power is still area denial, which is always hated. In Skull Merchant's case it's even worse though because people have gotten used to resenting her anyway.
This is not something that can be resolved by some small tweaks alone. She needs heavy changes in every aspect until she becomes a new killer altogether. Even a name change would probably be necessary just so her name is not associated with unhealthy design anymore. That does not mean that they have to delete her and start over but it does mean, that they have to sort through this mess and go in a different direction.
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