The Decline of Survivor Game Quality Over Years

TheSubstitute
TheSubstitute Member Posts: 2,493
edited September 1 in General Discussions

Here are the links to the data for those that just want to see the data and watch some mediocre Survivor play over the last couple years. DbD Survivor Game Data is from the current games. DbD Stats is from games that were about two years ago I think. The descriptions of all games show which video to look at if you want to see the video.

(2095) Casey Ingram - YouTube

For those of you that have the patience to read my very long post here goes.

I started an experiment because I feel that there has been a substantial decline in the quality of survivor games over the last few years and the amount of tunneling and camping has gone up substantially. Fortunately, a couple of years ago when somebody said nobody was enjoying solo survivor and I said I can’t speak for anyone else but I do the forum poster accused of me lying and being a killer main (when I’ve played Killer/Survivor 60/40 roughly for years). As such, I recorded 74 games from close to two years ago and I have a basis to make this comparison.

So what I did was recorded 100 games over the last three months so I could compare and see what the changes are. I didn’t record games during 2v8 as that was too popular and would have thrown off my basis of comparison nor did I start until after the anniversary event this year. Also if there were bugs noted such as being unable to unhook or I had to leave suddenly I did not include the session. The Excel sheets showing the stats and links to the YouTube hosting my videos are in these series of posts.

First before I start I want to clarify some definitions. Also please keep in mind that I understand that my experience is my experience and other people may have different experiences. I have an understanding of statistics and sampling so I’m not going to claim anything truly foolish like a poll out by a content creator directly applies to all regions and all MMRs in a game as large as DbD. I can only speak to my experiences.

Tunneling: This is defined as attempting to remove one survivor from the game over all others first. If survivors were swarming a Killer and someone just happened to be the first one out, or if a Killer just found a particular survivor first, that’s not tunneling. If a Killer tried to remove one survivor first but the survivors countered that’s still attempting to tunnel. The Killer just failed to do it successfully. People will also try to tunnel but just realize they’re up against a strong looper and switch to take a different person out first. That’s still tunneling. The easiest way in my opinion to judge is do they return to the hook and do they target the unhooked or the unhooker. I didn’t include it if a Survivor was specifically targeted in the endgame though.

Dbd Survivor Session 1 (youtube.com)

Auspiciously or not auspiciously depending on your point of view my first game when I started was against a tunneling Clown so you can see an example of what I consider tunneling in Survivor Session One in the first game.

Camping: This is defined as staying around the hook and the returning to the hook to hit either the unhooked person (also tunneling) or the unhooker (not tunneling). If the camping was after all gens were done I did not include it.

Slugging for the 4K: This was defined as trying to slug all survivors left to either complete the 4K to minimize Hatch chances or slugging at the very beginning to just knock all survivors on the ground to either bleed them out or hook them all at the same time to minimize any chances of Hatch.

As a sidenote if you do watch my videos please note I’m not a content creator so don’t expect editing or commentary. Two of my videos have managed to reach the dizzying heights of low double digit views (but less than 20 for each) so don’t expect too much. I’m also average as a survivor. I’m not claiming anything else but as that would put me in mid MMR my experiences are more likely to be similar to the majority of the player base as opposed to a comp survivor that would be in top MMR.

For the current sessions all the videos showing this are title Survivor Session (Number) and there were 20 sessions to get 100 games.

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Comments

  • Alphamax
    Alphamax Unconfirmed, Member Posts: 7
    1. Bad idea. Cages removes critical gameplay features.
    2. Another bad idea. Survivors shouldn't be awarded for bad plays.
    3. You don't stop making bad ideas do you? Killers that tunnel shouldn't be rewarded by increasing their MMR. You only incentivize killers to do more tunneling.
    4. Untrue and yet another bad idea. Camping and tunneling existed before emblems were changed and it was worse than ever before. Nobody cares enough about emblems killers will keep doing it again.

    There is no changing to it. You have to understand that it's the game's own flaw. There is nothing you can do about it.

  • TheSubstitute
    TheSubstitute Member Posts: 2,493

    The only bad idea would be leaving in a feature that allows for such a disproportionate and undeserved advantage.

  • Alphamax
    Alphamax Unconfirmed, Member Posts: 7

    Then you should play another game. I don't know what else to tell you.

  • NarkoTri1er
    NarkoTri1er Member Posts: 541

    dude, once again, give players an actual incentive not to camp and tunnel instead of making another punishing system to catter to people that refuse to play against those strategies. Further punishing strategies that don't work on skilled players will have completely counterproductive effect and will make bad players be even worse because they will rely on BHVR punishing their opponents more.

  • Alphamax
    Alphamax Unconfirmed, Member Posts: 7

    Good. It's a design flaw. It can't be changed. They would have to make a new game. What don't you understand, mate? You could give everyone bells and whistles, give godmode after unhook for 99 minutes until the survivor repairs a generator, remove hooks so we play 2v8 in 1v4 but survivors can only do generators and no sabotaging hooks, flashlight save, etc. (Super boring btw)

  • NarkoTri1er
    NarkoTri1er Member Posts: 541

    hmmm

    It's not apples and oranges though. There are people who like easy wins and can't envision the whole but instead favour one side in a show of tribalism. That's why it's apples to apples.

    so, killers that actually adapted to average survivors, found what their weaknesses are and actually found a meta strategy to play against them in order to boost their killrates are the ones that want easy wins, but suddenly…survivors that refuse to learn how to learn basic counterplay to tunneling, last 20s in an M1 chase even though chase aspect favors survivor side a lot are the victims?

    You know that, if average killer noticed that average survivor knew how to counter tunneling, tunneling usage rate would drop by a huge percentage due to killers realizing how situational it is?

  • TheSubstitute
    TheSubstitute Member Posts: 2,493
    edited September 1

  • NarkoTri1er
    NarkoTri1er Member Posts: 541

    i am the one who said that MMR system needs a rework in order to make whole game more fair and to actually give people grasp of what balance is.

    Average player DOESN'T want MMR system to be reworked because they want insta queues, but then they proceed to complain how tunneling is OP.

    Even your statement is contradictory, first you are trying to present tunneling as a balance issue, but then you proceed to actually agree with me without realizing it by pointing out that MMR system is flawed.

  • Alphamax
    Alphamax Unconfirmed, Member Posts: 7
  • NarkoTri1er
    NarkoTri1er Member Posts: 541

    i don't tunnel, i don't camp, i don't use "crutches", yet i'm having quite a decent winrate thanks to MMR being terrible.

    You want easy wins, I get it. However, there's a difference between believing only your fun matters and believing that the fun of all players is important. That's why I said I can't help you. If you don't want to accept truths because your bias stops you from putting yourself in other people's shoes there's no point in having a conversation with you as there is a fundamental mismatch in our basic positions. Unless you believe that more than just your fun indicates game health there's no way to have a productive conversation so have a good night.

    ohh yeah, i definitely want easy wins, that must be the reason i'm advocating for severe MMR changes and even implementation of ranked gamemode even if it would mean that i'd have to wait 5mins in queue, what a great conclusion!

  • NarkoTri1er
    NarkoTri1er Member Posts: 541

    you are again trying to present player factor as game balance related factor lol. Fortnite really got it's grasp of dbd community

  • lifestylee
    lifestylee Member Posts: 262

    Getting super high mmr and playing vs sweatlords isnt being rewarded lmao, the killers are hard tunneling/camping every game cause they want to win really badly, if they are playing vs better survivors they wont win as much and it will be harder for them.

  • Halloulle
    Halloulle Member Posts: 1,333

    Some of the responses are wild and so besides the point.

    With how contentious the topic of tunneling/camping is, I actually find it really nice that there is a before-after comparison applying the same definition. "It's more now" and all that is just relative. - And while the definition might not be one everyone agrees to, it is consistent; so seeing that much of an increase is interesting.

    Speaking of interesting:
    "Could that be due to DCs and Survivors giving up? It turns out that out of 18 games where there DCs and survivors giving up while the game was still winnable 13 of them were done when there was no camping, no tunneling and no slugging for the 4Ks. In other words, it was more likely a Survivor gave up or DCed when the Killer was playing in an enjoyable fashion. That I didn’t expect either."

    There are a number of killers that change tac once a survivor DCs. Personally, I'm on the fence about this: sometimes I want a DC match to just end asap (cause really, having to watch a bot is… there are no words) other times turning the whole match into players just vibing and making the best of a situation does work and can actually be quite enjoyable and there's a silent agreement that everyone gets done what they want to get done in the match and then the killer gets to sacrifice the survs (except maybe if they have an escape challenge and can somehow communicate that). — Anyway: here it would be good to know at which point the DCs occur.

    I do agree: a particular playstyle by one side, leading to exceptionally good results for that side if used against a particular subset of players of the other side, is concerning. Especially if the 'solution' is "git gut" — cause that automatically boots you from that subset of players of the other side. Making MMR increase more if tunneling/camping is detected (lets ignore the technical challenge implementing this would pose for the sake of argument) is not the way though.

    This is for two reasons: one is that "challenging MMR" isn't actually something that makes the game experience good; most people enjoy a mix of difficult and easy matches and MMR should facilitate that (if I find it I edit it in/post it in a later reply - it's a statement of one of the guys who did a lot of MMR things and I found his argument very compelling). The other reason is: DBD's SBMM doesn't actually use "strict" MMR; the soft cap is at a point where anything beyond that soft cap is still an extremely mixed bag. People in "medium"-MMR would probably see less suffering - people who are past the soft cap would suffer all the more though. Especially those that are barely past the soft-cap would get the extremely short end of the stick; as they're not actually super good but they still get matched with those who are on a regular basis.

  • NarkoTri1er
    NarkoTri1er Member Posts: 541

    countless practice reps in terms of countering tunneling? This is completely incorrect and you are literally trying to turn countering tunneling into some thermonuclear physics class

  • RpTheHotrod
    RpTheHotrod Member Posts: 1,894
    edited September 1

    This really comes down to MMR and survivor experience. I almost exclusively solo queue and more often than not escape unless I'm going out of my way to be risky to do some late game saves (more fun). One of the most experienced survivors in the game did a video series of solo queue where a win = 3 survivor escapes. Throughout his series, it was a 60% win rate. If I recall correctly, he did an anti-tunnel build and would intentionally try to get aggro which freed up the other 3 survivors to blast through gens.

    That being said, tunneling is popular because at higher MMR, it's the only chance killers have to reliably try to get a win. Being "the nice guy" and hooking everyone once in a row just isn't feasible. I'd personally suggest that killers be given strong incentives to not tunnel as opposed to trying to nerf tunneling which will inevitably hurt all killers across the board (even the kinds that typically don't tunnel) because sometimes tunneling IS the only option the killer has considering how much power survivors have over killers.

  • I_Cant_Loop
    I_Cant_Loop Member Posts: 542

    If everyone else is having the same experience as you, then the overall kill rates will go down below the target 60% and devs will make appropriate adjustments. If the overall kill rates are still around 60%, then your below-average escape rate is a skill issue, matchmaking issue, or just a run of bad luck.

  • TheSubstitute
    TheSubstitute Member Posts: 2,493

    I did a comparison between other survivors escape rates and mine and explained in the posts above the flaws with your argument.