(LONG POST) As a killer main, I agree with survivors mains on the current state of the game.

Lmao, that deerstalker + knock out Wraith is a king. These niche builds make the game fun for me, as killer or survivor. I would rather go against that instead of the boring gen regression meta.

Yeah, the only real way to have fun as survivor anymore is be in a swf.

it really no nice way to say it... 1v4 solo q is a garbage experience on average when i play. It just a lack of communication in a meta that revolve around heavy tactics. This is my goat game but it pretty much only due to the killer experience. Out of about 2500 hours of playtime at least 900 is on survivor. The 2v8 was the most fun survivor been in years for me. 2v8 show that dev can massively reduce all the tactics survivors hate and make the game about chase. They see the state of solo q as fine because it reaching the 60% killrate but is it actually fun anymore?

To Summarize

solo q matches are rarely about actual chases and more about dealing with tactics.

And what about state of the game: it's in the best state ever balance wise.
If I would count only soloq games, where I got teammates near my level (I'm not god player, but at least I understand what I'm playing), my escape rate would be above 70% or maybe even 80%. Should we overbuff survivors again just to make another Sable player, who didn't learn the game for 1k hours at all and obviously won't get better at it even after 5k hours, escape more often? Of course not. Skill finally matter on survivors and I'm glad to see game in this state.
Survivors who didn't learn the game suffer together with killers who play against really good survivors. To make average matches fun and balanced for both sides, as it is now.

I agree overall. What do you mean with „But I feel that their current direction is off.“?

"sweat spot"? that's just my chair after i stand up from a gaming session 😆

The response I got from them all tells me everything about the complete lack of logic and strategy most survivors bring to the game. 

Absolutely, there is no any logic or strategy in most survivors head. But they strongly believe they should win at least half of their game. Literally my last matches:
1. Claud with 2K hours. Start of the match, we hear Billy chainsaw. Me: go into safe structure and don't shifting. If he has Lethal, i'm in the safe space and can start chase safely. If he has no, I won't give him early info and quick first chase with my scratch marks. Claud: run out in open space, shifting across half of the map, run into his chainsaw and instantly DC. Is that killer's fault that you don't understand basics of the game in 2k hours, lol?
2. Match against Twins. I gave them amazing chases, killer got 2 hooks when last gen poped. NOED kicks in, basement hook in Ormond main, totem spawned on balcony (10 meters away from basement?). Kate decided to cleanse it and just eat insta down right on it. She had clear vision of basement, heard killer's terror radius, had ultra safe pallet right next to her, but nah, who cares. My efforts alone was enough to win this game, but Kate decided literally gift free 2k to killer. Pretty sure her next move was going here and cry about killrate.
3. Unknown match, going pretty close, we 3 survivors left with 2 hot gens left. I give to killer solid ~2m chase, was enough to make all gens done. They did one and after this Nea came to me to give me back (WHO ASKED YOU???) and was downed in 10 second and me after. So we were laying on the ground and last survivor best decision was… instantly start running and give info to killer, when we barely start recovering.

And this happens almost every game, everyone can make a mistake and this fine, but those are not mistakes, it's straight up missing of gameplay understanding. Half of survivors with my amount of hours barely understand how to loop, Windows+Lithe is only thing they know, after this they are done. And I'm not even talking about how many survivors just give up without any reason, at start of the match, at mid-game, at the end, even when all goes pretty good.

Your stats show my main problem with solo queue perfectly. Balance wise, aside from some QoL changes, it’s fine for the most part but most games just aren’t fun.

Give some base kit form of anti-tunnel, deal with slugging for the 4K, and please do something to stop everyone giving up over nothing.

Hmmm the people who see their skin the entire match, or the people whose opponents see the skin, garsh that's surprising! /s

As far as tunnels, I think this is based on intent. If the Bubba is autopiloting towards the closest Survivor, that's fine, but when he purposely slugs the person bodyblocking to get the tunnel on the other person, that is what people mean by 'sweaty'.

For 'playing fair', the game is designed around a 60% kill rate, so the game is Killer sided definitionally. Same with the perks, the Survivor perks are designed to have 1/4th the impact of Killer perks. I mean are you going to seriously make the argument that 16 No Mithers would be more powerful than 4 random Killer perks, simply because they have 4x the perks? There has to be a calculation involved in perk strength, and you just ignored that.

At least you did learn your lesson and uninstall. I'm foolish enough to still play this game on occasion with friends, and am often miserable as a result.

• Devs have an obsessive attention to killer gameplay for the last 2 years, they think that if a killer has fun, then the survivors will have a good game too. How many years has it been since a single new object has been introduced for survivors? How many years has it been since a new "mechanic" was introduced in survivor gameplay? (can we consider "chemical trap" a new mechanic?) even the 2Vs8 mode from the point of view of survivor gameplay was an absolute bore, eliminating practically everything and reducing survivors only to doing m1 to heal teammates or m1 to repair generators. how many years have they been asked to add simple "text lines" to help the Soloq. in the recent PTB there were hundreds of reports asking for a buff new survivors perk... they literally didn't touch anything. I'm starting to lose hope.

You are right! It would be foolish to simply say kill rate = winrate, lets do some math! Wait, I just did the math in another thread!

Hmm, we get 50% Killer, 22% Survivor, 28% Draw. Or if you want to take out Draws, ~69% Killer, ~31% Survivor. Heck, even if you want to be favorable and give the Draws out as 50-50 (14% each) for both sides, that still is 64% Killer vs 36% Survivor. So when you do the math, it actually is even MORE Killer sided.

As far as the inflated numbers concept, I agree. When DCs don't count towards the stats, and Survivor DCs are far more common, that would mean someone who had to actually play through a match with a teammate DC felt the loss, but their pain was discounted/ignored by the BHVR stats. In other words, DCs mean the killrate is even higher than stated/aimed.

That's why I think using a killrate = winrate is actually a generous metric when speaking against Killer specific complaints, because it is the most favorable to Killers. I would do the same when speaking against Survivor complaints, to give them the best odds when I oppose the specific complaint being voiced.

(Also as far as MMR specific things, it is based on the MMR of each person, and reduced per subsequent person. That means if you kill a babysurv first, you get the least MMR. Also if you kill a godsurv first, you could theoretically go positive if all the other Survs were also godsurvs [with your loss against a godsurv making you lose the least amount of MMR].)

Edit: Fixed some mistyped numbers

The worst aspect of playing Survivor to me is the horrible SoloQ teammates. And by horrible I don't mean being inexperienced or a lack of skill. I mean babyraging brats who ragequit as soon as the match starts, go afk, or sandbang and team up with the Killer. I can get bothered by Killers' playstyles but they are far less frequent and also less aggravating than dealing with toxic teammates. Yet it's impossible for me to find people to group up with to form a 4 man SWF every match, because as long as there's even one SoloQ teammate, they're going to ruin the game. It's actually insufferable.

I completely forgot about two things by the time I finished my post.

The first is that if we're talking about fun, which I think we should in this case, balance isn't the most important thing. I've seen it happen a few times, that a developer shows something about their game being mathematically balanced, and can't figure out why no one is playing it. Sometimes things can be fair and not fun.

It's a tougher question because obviously what's fun varies from person to person, but it doesn't mean it isn't something that the players feel and it can be aimed for.

The other thing is Hooks vs the Cage. 2v8 made me really appreciate the Cage. I've realized that one of the quickest ways to stall the progress of Survivors is to get them trapped in a "Rescue Leapfrog" cycle. I've seen so many teams get the first 4 Gens quick and easy, but the second one person gets hooked and the rescue goes bad, they get caught in a cycle of rescuing each other and never finish the final generator. The nature of the Hooks makes this very common, especially for teams that don't think about it or aren't coordinated for it.

Now, any permanent transition to a Cage system would have to rebalance a lot of things, because a lot of Perks and other elements of gameplay right now expect that the Killer will be temporarily busy while carrying someone to a Hook, but I think it might be worth the effort.

It's weird, I'm a Killer main who only started playing Survivor again thanks to 2v8 (including after 2v8) and I agree overall, but I do have some different experiences.

1. I run into DC'ing Survivors all the time when I play Killer, but not so much when I play Survivor. Usually the DC happens the first time I hook someone (they have no idea the nice match they just missed out on), but one time I had two people DC at the same time about 20 seconds into the match for no apparent reason.
2. My Solo Queue teammates don't seem to be that bad on average. Sure they don't often last too long in chases, and there's often inexplicable periods where no one seems to be doing anything, but they're generally careful, safely unhook, and the only people I ever see leave anyone for dead are when bots take someone over.

Before I go into my ideas for solutions, I want to cover a couple of common things I see people want the game to balance around, but why I believe you cannot balance around them.

1. Solo Queue being balanced differently than Survive with Friends. The problem with this is that, while it's more likely that a friends group will be more coordinated than a solo group, it's not by any means guaranteed. It also doesn't anywhere near guarantee they'll be good. The friends I play with are less good on average than the people I Solo Queue with. I don't mind playing with them because they're my friends, but playing together doesn't magically make us good. On the other hand, there was a Lara Croft in a Solo match of mine the other day that was absolutely amazing. She knew exactly when to be where and saved me from every mistake I made (which was a lot, because I was doing an annoying old challenge that guaranteed the Killer would want me dead). I thanked her for bailing me out, but I really felt sorry for that Killer.
2. It's hard to punish quitters when you don't know why they quit. As someone who used to have incredibly unreliable internet, I've DC'd from games 100x more due to reasons beyond my control than because I "ragequit". Also, punishing someone when they already weren't having fun isn't going to make them put up with not having fun, it's just going to make them leave altogether. I also think this is moot nowadays since Bots fill in the gaps. Aside from being incredibly selfish and running out the exit the first chance they get, the Bots play like most players I play with, so I don't see the problem here. Really that's already the best of both worlds. Someone who isn't enjoying the game can stop playing the game, and the people who are still playing still have a full team.

I remember someone articulating it very well somewhere once that I unfortunately cannot remember, but as much as a high skill ceiling is something seen as a virtue in modern gaming, the bigger the gap between the low end players and the high end players, the more impossible a game is going to be to balance properly. The answer cannot be "get good" for a large variety of reasons, but the simplest being that there's always going to be someone new who hasn't even had the chance to get better yet.

1. The first step in balance is trying to close that gap. Considering how much I see Killers complain about Survivors with decked out Items, I think that's a good place to start. I almost never see Survivors bring items into a trial. It's not a very common newbie/casual thing, so this is probably more of a reason than anything else that games are so different between the low and high ends.
   
   I had an elaborate class/skill system suggestion elsewhere that served a similar purpose, but to summarize the intent: if Survivors are to have access to items, you need to make sure all Survivors have items so that you can balance around knowing for certain that they will. As long as some teams have no items, and some teams have fully kitted out items, you can't make sure that's fair.
   
2. The second gap I've noticed is one of information. By default, Killers can see the Auras of the Generators and the Exit Gates. This means that without any Perks, and without even using their Power, they have the basic information they need in order to win because the Survivors have to end up at these locations at some point. On the flip side, by default, Survivors start with absolutely no information at all. With no Perks, they have none of the information they need to win and can't even make informed strategies.
   
   For new players, this automatically means that Killers are more likely to look competent than new Survivors. I remember when I was new, I spent several matches crouching around, trying not to be seen, yet still getting caught before I found a single generator. One of the most jarring things going from 2v8 back to 1v4 is realizing how few generators there are in 1v4 and how there can be huge chunks of the map with none or a single one tucked in a corner out of view.
   
   I recently learned about what is apparently some sort of infamous Killer Perk that prevents Survivors from seeing certain Auras for either a long time or the rest of the match or something. That's absurd. You cannot make an informed play with no information.
   
   I don't know what would be best, but Survivors need some sort of information by default. Obviously some existing perks would have to be replaced or nerfed, but that's sort of the whole point. Shrink that gap so the game can be better balanced.
   
   I understand that it makes things scarier to play Survivor, but it's not the best design. It means that the gap between someone completely new and doesn't know any maps and even just a casual player who's seen the maps a few times and knows where generators generally are, is huge, let alone the gap between a new player and a pro expert. Balancing a game in that situation is virtually impossible.

The game is designed to have a 60% kill rate, yes. However the devs decided it would be best to nerf gen regression perks. As a killer you need to be able to juggle yet a lot of maps tend to be RNG for killers. If it's a map that goes against your power, then you're probably lucky to even get 1 kill. There are killers I love(d) to play as and they just seem too weak now. Survivors got a base borrowed time. And killers got a base….what? Survivors pretty much have 4 perks and a slightly less time of borrowed time. Kicking gens isn't really worth it since it's 4 seconds to remove 1 second of the progress. Most survivors are smart enough to just have one go touch it while you spend time chasing another person. Eventually the only logical option is to slug and tunnel. That's not exactly fun for either side that's meant to be a party style game.

I have around 300hs on it, and after two years without playing DBD, I tried again.

Result: game uninstalled again 🗑️

Unplayable as survivor unless you play in a premade of 4. Devs do not know the word "balance."

You simply cannot enjoy the game. Maybe some day…