Breaking down the facts: Killers are massively overpowered and the grim numbers aren't even telling
'll just drop the science right away so you get the idea. Killer is obviously overpowered. Overall, survivors only survive 40-43 percent, and killers kill 57-60 percent. Of course this is bad game balance that should be fixed, but the problem is much, much worse than the stats show. Let me explain...
The devs have admitted on numerous occasions that the DC matches are excluded from the kill-rate statistics. This is actually very misleading advertising strategy which artificially inflates survival rates heavily.
Survivors DC on a frequent basis, so this will have a huge impact on survival rates. But why do they DC? Survivors primarily DC because they will most likely lose the match, because the killer is winning, because killer is so overpowered. Most players, including survivors, will finish a match if there is a good chance of winning. This is just human nature.
This is also the same reason most survivors will suicide on hook - they do so when the probability of winning is slim. So most suicides on hook would be legitimate losses for the survivor team regardless, and do not actually inflate kill rate statistics. The amount of suicide-on-hook matches that would end in survivor's favor is very, very small. Since losing 1 survivor creates a snowball effect, most of the matches where that 1 survivor has slim chance of escaping, are also matches where the entire team would have a bad outcome, and the killer would "win" with a 3-4k.
Only a tiny minority of survivor DC's and suicide-on-hooks happen when the survivor/survivors actually has/have a good chance of winning the match. Why? Because most players want to finish games they believe they can win and won't DC or suicide-on-hook.
So what this means is that the game devs are leaving out a massive number of legitimate survivor losses from the statistics, which is actually inflating survival rates dramatically and deflating kill rates immensely. This means kill rates are actually much higher than the public stats above indicate. Of course the devs don't want you to figure this out, because it would spark outrage and protests from the survivor main player base. Of course, I see right through their ploy.
Public stats have kill rates at about 60 against solo Q. But if we adjust for the excluded DC's it is almost certainly closer to a 70-80 percent kill rate. This means killers are massively overpowered. It is already common knowledge at this point that DBD is killer-sided, but it is important to realize that it is far more killer-sided than the devs and killer mains have the courage to admit.
Why won't they admit it? Well, killer mains want to win, so they very naturally welcome balance changes in their favor. They also want to feel good about winning, so they will post hoc rationalize that their win is not because killer role is OP, but because they are just so good at DBD and the survivor mains are just so bad. This is called motivated reasoning, which prevents most killer mains from objectively assessing the actual fairness of the gameplay since it favors their preferred role. This is of course not their fault, it is just human nature.
But the far more interesting question is, why are the game developers hiding the real survival rates, that are far lower than the 40-43 percent above, and closer to a measly 20-30 percent? The answer is very simple: money. Dead by Daylight is first and foremost a business, and the developers have already shown they are willing to implement a pay-to-win model by locking so many essential meta perks behind a pay wall. Of course, for good PR they will give you the opportunity to grind your way to these perks just so they can technically claim it isn't pay-to-win, but they know damn well the average player doesn't have time for this. So the incentive to simply pay up for the competitive advantage in a game with skill-based matchmaking is enormous. You see, it is all part of their carefully crafted marketing scheme orchestrated by top executives.
Now, the game being so heavily killer-sided makes perfect sense. It is the killer mains that make the devs the most money. Why? Because killer DLC is far more appealing and interesting than survivor DLC. If you buy survivor DLC, all you get is a boring cosmetic change and unlock a few unique perks that you either don't care for or can grind for if a perk is really good. But if you buy killer DLC, you get this overpowered bad-ass new monster with unique abilities that make the actual gameplay itself fresh and interesting again, while allowing you to win more without needing much skill at all. This is basically a pay-to-win model, with some very shady and dishonest advertising PR to pretend that it is not.
So how do we fix this problem? Unfortunately it cannot be fixed. As a business, the devs primary motivation will always be money. They have to make a living after all, so they can eat at fancy restaurants, go on fancy vacations, and get intoxicated at fun parties while poor survivors are suffering miserably in solo Q. The killers' primary motivation will always be winning and so the devs will always give killer mains a ridiculously unfair advantage to keep them fat and satisfied and buying more DLC for more easy wins. It's a vicious cycle that goes on endlessly until the game itself is dead. I'd love to end this on a positive note but this is a horror game after all. So this story does not have a happy ending, well, not unless you're a killer main or a DBD dev of course.
Comments
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I love us vs them posts. It amuses me. Keep it going!
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Do you really think it's possible to deny at this point? Case in point: Lich. This new killer is sitting at a 70% kill rate, and even if you support the 60% kill rate target you must agree that 70% is MASSIVELY unbalanced. Yet the devs do nothing.
In other live pvp games if something is so unbalanced it gets hotfixed within a week, sometimes even 24 hours. It's not normal for something to stay overpowered for years like Skull Merchant for example to the point it ruins the game for one side. Anyone who cares about balance should realize the devs have give up on it, because the goal now is to sell overpowered killers in the shop. This game can not be taken seriously as a competitive game anymore. I believe this business model will eventually end up being what kills the game, because survivors are 80% of the playerbase.
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Those who can't stay in a match doesn't deserves to be represented in statistics, the game might as well not exist
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How often do you see killers rage quit? The discrepancy between both sides says a lot, unless you're one of the killer mains who think killers win most games because they're more skilled than survivors on average and not because the game is massively unbalanced.
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1. This game isn't competitive.
2. The stats are too early to determine Vecna's power.
3. Vecna did get some nerfs.
4. Skull Merchant isn't who she was before the reworks she's now a chase orientated killer. People are still in this weird mindset from the past, just like the people who hate Germans because of WWII or the Dutch VoC enslaved black people. They are not the same anymore, they have changed.
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Do you really think it's possible to deny at this point? Case in point: Lich. This new killer is sitting at a 70% kill rate, and even if you support the 60% kill rate target you must agree that 70% is MASSIVELY unbalanced. Yet the devs do nothing.
He's still near 70%? I was told that the nerfs he got would bomb him down to F-tier!
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This is the exact kind of post hoc reasoning from killer mains I was talking about in my post. If you completely ignore stats by rationalizing them to support your view then all that's left is forming an opinion based on feelings.
If the devs wanted a balanced game they would aim for a 50% kill rate, not 60%.
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I have a simple question for you. Do you think survivors would enjoy the game more with the current 60% kill rate target or a 50% kill rate? (the enjoyment of 80% of the playerbase)
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If the devs wanted a balanced game they would aim for a 50% kill rate, not 60%.
Well, we had kill rates like this and it showed on queue times.... So clearly not best approach.
Fact is lack of killers is more noticable than lack of survivors, or at least way faster.
Killers should definitely be a power role, so equal kill rate doesn't really make sense for this game.
If you would aim for average 50% then most killers are going to be terrible to play.
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I feel like that's not really true.
It's still an average game. We should have stats with and without DC's.
I don't like how the OP said it, but I've long felt that we should be able to see the stats with DC's included. Just saying, "those matches don't count" is silly because they still count for MMR, BP and they happen and affect those players within them.
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I'm not a killer main. Thanks for assuming as much as you did in your original post.
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When you say terrible to play all I can assume is that you're saying killers don't want an equal challenge and want to win with ease.
On the queue time topic, you are talking about BEFORE the BP role bonus was introduced right? Because after 6.1 killer queue times went up to 10 minutes but the BP bonus already solved that problem, so it's no issue.
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Except you're playing an asymmetrical game, which by nature and design is not supposed to be 50% equally balanced as the killer is meant to be the power role.
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When you say terrible to play all I can assume is that you're saying killers don't want an equal challenge and want to win with ease.
When you say kill rate should be 50% all I can assume is that you're saying survivors don't want any challenge and want to win with ease.
you are talking about BEFORE the BP role bonus was introduced right? Because after 6.1 killer queue times went up to 10 minutes but the BP bonus already solved that problem, so it's no issue.
Yes, basically time before healing nerfs. Average kill rate was something like 53% if I remember correctly and survivor queues time were between 5-10 minutes. I refused to play waiting simulator.
I am quite happy with current queue times on both sides. Don't really care about BP bonus, even when playing with 0% queue times never get really that high for me.
Because after 6.1 killer queue times went up to 10 minutes but the BP bonus already solved that problem, so it's no issue.
Huge aspect about decreasing queue times was definitely healing nerf patch. BP is nice but it's not going to make you play something you really don't want to do.
About current balance possible questions.
Should all killers get nerfed? Hell no
Should there be specific killer changes buff/nerfs? Yes
Should all survivors get buffed? No
Should gen time decrease for higher escape rate? Hell no
Should soloQ get QoL features mostly focused on information? Definitely
At least from my experience balance SWF vs killers is quite good now.
Even when I play soloQ, killer is not the issue, teammates are.
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"Asymetry" in DBD has always referred to the team count ratio of 1 killer to 4 survivors. It has never referred to the game balance in terms of kill-rate (i.e. 57-60% kill-rate overall). Asymetry simply means 1vs4. I repeat, "asymetrical" does NOT REFER TO THE KILL RATE.
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devs dont exclude all the games where survivors die on hook on purpose and even so most killers are within 50-60% killrate
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Tbf, I don't see it a lot - but there's a subset of situations where I pretty much always see it. That's usually when one surv manages to stay uninjured for the time it takes to repair a gen - if they so happened to be the first in chast that means three gens are completed and the surv still uninjured. Chases don't usually last that long, so on the whole it isn't that often. - But I'd say on 9/10 occasions it happens the killer DCs. - And you know what? I absolutely don't blame them. The ones who do stay usually just stop caring about gens and hooks and practise whatever M2 their killer can do / whatever tile there is they want to practise playing around.
Which I suppose further strengthens your point.
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Except it does, asymmetrical applies in literally all aspects of the game itself.
Both teams are meant to vary in strength because they differ in their role numbers, Survivors are meant to be less powerful than the killer because they outnumber the killer role by 4 and vice versa.
If you want a game where both sides are equally balanced, then what you're are looking for are symmetrical games.
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If People DC they can't complain. Period. The opinion of those kind of people don't interest me in the slightest because they are too much entitled for seeing the things by a neutral perspective...
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Kill rate is not win rate.
People need to stop making this mistake.
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Have you considered about the chance of killer players having a little more responsibility than most survivor players, I'm not saying this is a fact or anything, but I think trying to tie those things to the game balance seems like a worst kind of argument
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A 50% kill rate would mathematically mean the killer's power is equal to 4 survivors. A 60% kill rate means that 1 killer is mathematically 50% stronger than the combined power of 4 survivors, which is vastly imbalanced.
You can be in favor of a 60% kill rate, just don't try to pretend it's in any way shape or form balanced.
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There's a reason why every other pvp game aims for 50%, because it creates an equal challenge for BOTH SIDES. How on earth did you conclude that a 50% kill rate means the game would be too easy for survivors, when killers currently win with ease with the 60% kill rate target? Many experienced killers even have kill rates in the 70-80% range. One thing is for sure, if the game was balanced around a 50% kill rate then you wouldn't see these killer main streamers going on 1k win streaks. They would have to face the fact they aren't as skilled as they think they are in a balanced game.
Also bringing up queue times is a moot point since BP bonus was introduced. Your idea that that a 50% kr would mean long survivor queues is a moot point, because the past showed that the BP bonus solved the survivor shortage which happened after 6.1 was released.
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Except Survivor escape rate applies to all Survivors individually, meaning for Survivor escape rate to be 50% would mean each Survivor would be on equal level as the Killer like they were back in the day.
60% kill rate isn't balanced, because like i said, it's the entire point of an asymmetrical game. It's meant to be unbalanced and uneven.
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If they want killers to have a slight edge then they should aim for a 55% kill rate. 60% is just a number they pulled out of thin air without realizing the effect on the game. 60% is WILDLY imbalanced in a pvp game, like in other competitive games it would be considered game-breaking.
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Killers win 55.4% of games and only lose 32.3% with the rest being draws so no it's still a fair point
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Except those other pvp games aren't asymmetrical and DBD isn't seen or balanced as a competitive game, because if it was, the devs would be balancing it for high level players, which they have admitted themselves that they do not because it's not what they're aiming for.
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But the far more interesting question is, why are the game developers hiding the real survival rates, that are far lower than the 40-43 percent above, and closer to a measly 20-30 percent? The answer is very simple:money.I wasn't expecting this to take a conspiracy turn.
A small percentage of the community ever actually bothers to look at the stats, most people just play the game. So intentionally releasing stats in a way that makes them the most appealing will only impact a small portion of the player base.
Additionally, if they were going to lie, why not just say 50/50 or like 48/52 and move on.
The devs want the game to be killer sided. They've said it numerous times. We can discuss whether that's the right decision or not of course, but doesn't help to make it about more than just a discussion on game theory.
But if we adjust for the excluded DC's it is almost certainly closer to a 70-80 percent kill rate.So we have a 60% kill rate in the status quo. What would happen if everyone played out every match to the best of their abilities.
This means: no one would ever DC, yes, this would increase the kill rate.
It also means: survivors would never suicide on hook (or otherwise give up). When this happens yes many times the game probably would have been a 4k anyway, but there are definitely scenarios when survivors suicide in situations where one or two could still escape.
It also means: killers would never go AFK because the chance of a win is impossible, meaning they could turn 4e into 3es potentially.
So we have two situations where the kill rate is being deflated because of people giving up, one situation where it is being increased. I think the kill rate would probably be higher if we had everyone playing to the best of their ability, but 70 to 80% is too much.
This is calledmotivated reasoning, which prevents most killer mains from objectively assessing the actual fairness of the gameplay since it favors their preferred role.I'll agree with this paragraph in general, but just because a person has bias to reach a certain conclusion does not mean their conclusion is inherently wrong.
The same logic can be applied to your argument that you are stressing all of the negatives of the survivor side because you have a motivation for that argument to be true.
Dead by Daylight is first and foremost a business, and the developers have already shown they are willing to implement a pay-to-win model by locking so many essential meta perks behind a pay wall.So I don't think DbD is a pay to win. It's a pay to have options, yes, but the starting characters, not to mention the ones that can be pretty quickly unlocked, give plenty of meta game winning possible builds. You don't need to come even close to unlocking all the characters to have a chance at the game.
It is the killer mains that make the devs the most money. Why? Because killer DLC is far more appealing and interesting than survivor DLC.I don't think this is true.
One, I don't think killer DLC inherently sells better, it kind of depends on what we are comparing. With how many Nick Cages I see, that seems to have done really well.
Second, there's just not enough money in the DLCs. The DnD expansion costs $7 on steam right now. The base game costs $20 (ignoring the fact that it is frequently on sale). Simply put, there is not enough money to sustain their operations off one time base game purchases and a DLC that only a portion of their player base buys every few months for under $10.
They need people to buy cosmetics. For that they need people to be playing the game, and the game inherently needs more survivors than killers. To go back to Nick Cage, people didn't buy him for his meta perks. They bought him because they wanted to play Nick Cage. That's a far bigger motivator for people, they buy characters or outfits because they want to have them.
They have to make a living after all, so they can eat at fancy restaurants, go on fancy vacations, and get intoxicated at fun parties while poor survivors are suffering miserably in solo Q.There is a much simpler explanation to this.
BHVR thinks more people enjoy the game when the survivor role is hard.
That's it. Yeah, money and making the best game possible is still the motivation, but the answer here is pretty simple: they think this is the best game design (at least at the moment, they also believe in a constantly evolving meta).
It's possible you don't enjoy that. I'm not the biggest fan of it either. Which is fine, but we don't need to jump through loops to try and explain why the game is the way it is.
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You got a source for that?
Also I'd like to know what math says for example: I always get a 2K, so I have a 50% kill rate, I draw all my games, yet I have a 50% win rate because kill rate is win rate.
Last I checked draw =/= win.
1K would be a 25% kill rate, so that would be a 25% win rate if you get a 1K every game. That doesn't seem right when a 1K is considered a loss.
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So Killers should give Survivors more handicaps or people should play Survivor less? I see your point but I don't see what your solution is OP
Tbh all these arguing about % kill rate and whether it's " fair or not" is moot since the devs already have their own vision of what is fair for their game and I highly doubt a few forum posts would dissuade them. They could say 90% KR is their goal for the game and no one can stop them save for their shareholders. That's the reality of the situation
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There's a reason why every other pvp game aims for 50%
Every other symmetrical pvp game...
How on earth did you conclude that a 50% kill rate means the game would be too easy for survivors,
Because I have played with 50% kill rates? Everything other than Blight, Spirit and Nurse was easy to win against for us.
If you have average 50% with how killers work, you are going to have majority under 50% and few noob stomping killers like Skully, Pinhead, Sadako, Freddy, Pig above it. Those are going to boost the average while other killers would be miserable to play.
Many experienced killers even have kill rates in the 70-80% range
Many experienced SWF groups have those escape rates. Your point? Both sides can achieve this.
Hens in soloQ somehow managed to get 60% escape rate, because he played perks to help his teammates and was able to carry the game with good chases.
If all players have equal skill then game is quite balanced. Issue is there is low chance in soloQ to get 4 decent players, there is going to be a weak link. It can happen tho...
If you would aim for 50%, then group of 4 decent survivors is simply going to have easy time. That's what happens when you balance around the bad players, which 50% escape rate definitely is.
50% kill rate then you wouldn't see these killer main streamers going on 1k win streaks
You would.
Btw during 50% escape rate we had SWF group to get on 500 win streak. How exactly is that better?
Basically when we have those type of players, even now you usually need a competitive killer/team to break it. On both sides.
They would have to face the fact they aren't as skilled as they think they are in a balanced game.
Or you are not as good as you think now... At no point game was more balanced than right now.
because the past showed that the BP bonus solved the survivor shortage which happened after 6.1 was released.
Except it improved way before that. So not really.
If you make one side miserable, players won't play it just for BP. Queue times are good for both sides now, why make it worse again?
My main difference is killer is way more stressful role to play. 50% kill rate means more games end in late game / escapes, which is simply going to make this even worse.
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There are 3 other survivors though. Just because one survivor DCs, doesn’t mean that game shouldn’t count for everyone left.
Plus, let’s not forget all the friendly killers that deflate kill rates by playing nice. There’s a lot of killers who play nice, instead of trying to win the easiest way possible, massively deflating kill rates.
And I know the common “but what about suicides” rebuttal. 1st suicides are pretty rare. 2nd a person committing suicide probably is doing it because they see the game is lost.
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This is pure conjecture without an ounce of proof provided.
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I can't really agree with this reasoning here.
The kill rate is largely independent from other factors that cause people to disconnect or give up, for example.
The devs could theoretically make the kill rate as high as they wanted as long as the core gameplay is fun overall.
But the fun is what we're losing now, or rather, we've been losing steadily for about two years now. Every patch is supposedly "bringing balance" to the game, but it's also driving the core gameplay to be more competitive. For survivors, a >50% kill rate means you're going to likely lose, but if the gameplay was actually fun, then even losing is a fun experience.
The game used to have that: even losing games could be fun.
Now, it's still the fact that you're going to lose sometimes, but the gameplay, the process of losing, is just one big competitive slog. Even some wins suck for that same reason.
And that's true regardless of if you play killer or survivor.
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The Devs have stated that they want a more 40~60% win rate for killers. They do balance/change the meta around it, but that's what they said at one point in time. As for the Lich, he is the same as Chucky and Xeno were, new killers with new abilities and it usually takes time for players to learn how to play against them/counter them. So they usually tend to wait before they make any major changes to a killer.
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Except that's not what happens. 50% kill rate does not mean all games end in a 2k. And even if every game ended as a 2k that would still be a 50% win rate because in sports statistics a draw counts as half a win.
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I wouldn't say "massively overpowered" but BHVR has definitely been balancing the game for the past 2 years or so as if most survivor players in public matches were comp team members.
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I think we have different definitions of the word “facts” too much to agree on anything.
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Asymmetrical means competitive play against a role that is different to the other.
No Asymmetrical game boasts what side wins and is more fun to play when they advertise to markets. They boast what each role can accomplish in their own respective form.
If they did that then everyone would play the power role and not the underdog. That's human nature.
BhVR deciding 60% killrate nearly what 4 years into their game is absurd. Choosing to make one side inherently stronger to chase a horror theme is shortsighted.
TLDR: Power Role is just a moniker/title. It's not an excuse to give bad players easy wins.
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60% kill rates never give bad players easy wins, you'll only win like 20% more times than game with 50% kill rates, which is barely noticeable to bad players because their absolute number of winning games are already abysmal as is
If they can win 10 games out of 100 games, now they can win 12 games out of 100 games, that's not a big difference
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Killers don't have an option to leave the game early without a DC penalty. Survivors do.
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It's not 60% tho. Many have come to the forums to complain about their 30% survival rate.
They gave killer base buffs that surivor can't just circumvent like killer can with tunneling or camping.
2 Stacks of stbfl baeskit? Surivor can't do anything.
Anti camp basekit? Killer just moves slightly out of the way.
Killer is way better to play then soloq rn. Is that healthy long term?
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An M1 killer having less cd after a hit is hardly the reason why people are seeing personal escape rates of 30%.
Also it's anti-facecamp system and if killers aren't facecamping then the system is doing the job it's intended to.
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I don't understand why BHVR have seemingly decided that nothing can be learned from trials that include a DC.
You'd think they would be more interested in finding out why such things happen with the regularity that they do and why such a large chunk of their player base is so unhappy.
I'd be willing to bet that after a string of poorly matched up trials, the chances of players DCing out of frustration increases dramatically (many seem to frame this as a "Survivor problem", but I've seen plenty of Killers do it too). How could BHVR ever discover if this is true or not if they discard every trial with a DC? It's as if they don't see frequent DCing as an accurate reflection of the experience of playing DBD (we all know it is).
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Its simply a killer sided ego game really. 60% feels terrible and we know it is much higher because your argument is correct in that survivors DC when they are losing, on the last hook, etc. it is speculated these are removed to hide the imbalance as much as possible. The killrate is probably close to 80% because this is what it feels like whenever you play or even watch. Actually, when you watch, killer mains win like 90% or more. There is no hiding at this point how terrible the balance is. The only hope is for the devs to actually be honest and try to make the game more fair.
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If BHVR used trials were people D/C'd as a metric for their balance changes, it would incentive the community to D/C to get things nerfed.
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I just want to mention that the devs intend the kill rates to be 57-60% because of the fact that it's a 1v4. DBD isn't like TCM where the teams are more balanced and to balance out completely unbalanced teams you need to tip the scales in favor of the smaller team. There's no other way to balance that aspect out realistically nor reasonably. As for the new killer, Vecna, having a higher kill rate it's because of the fact that they're a new and complicated killer who just came out meaning that everyone is still learning how to play against him and will be dying a lot learning how he works.
As for a part of your original post the real reason why a lot of survivors suicide on hook is because they don't want to stay in the game(for varying reasons) and they don't want the DC penalty since you can get stuck at a penalty of 1-2 hours after just a FEW match DCs. This problem is just a part of the controversial decision to keep the DC penalty which, ultimately, promotes hook suicides and doesn't allow the bots to help out.
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It's not solely. But with the other numerous buffs with tunneling and camping being still very strong against uncoordinated soloq...
Anti facecamp nerfed one killer and tbh should have been in the game long b4. Killers say it's a survivor buff and say then it's not supposed to do anything about camping.
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Fair point. There's a lot of stats BHVR don't share, so perhaps they do track DCs rates internally and it does to an extent inform their decision making more than they would ever publicly admit.
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I like the part where you said you'd "drop the science" and then provided no science and only conjecture.
Even the conjecture was wrong cuz I've had many games where someone suicided early and the game easily could have been a 3 or 4 man out of they actually played the game instead of throwing a fit that they only lasted 20 seconds on chase.
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