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The planned skull merchant nerfs prove that kill rates include survivors giving up.
I have been long saying that the published kill rates that BHVR gives out include matches where survivors give up and kill themselves on hook. Leading to what i suspect are massively inflated kill rates. I have long thought that the "true" kill rate is significantly lower than reported because of the rampant giving up. It has gotten worse over time due to there being no more downranking and thus penalty for giving up. You simply give up, if you get a killer you don't like, and you quickly move on to the next one.
Enter the skull merchant. One of the most hated killers in the game. When i play skull merchant, out of 10 or so games, easily survivors will just immediately give up in over half of them. I'd say around 7 or so games out of 10, as soon as they see skull merchant, they just stand still, or run to a hook and start pointing.
Now lets look at the lastest published kill rates from BHVR.
They go on to show this as well:
- Executioner: 60%
- Hag: 60%
- Artist: 60%
- Xenomorph: 59%
- Blight: 59%
- Wraith: 59%
- Nemesis: 59%
- Legion: 58%
- Good Guy: 58%
- Twins: 58%
- Oni: 58%
- Cannibal: 58%
- Clown: 58%
- Deathslinger: 57%
- Trapper: 57%
- Trickster: 57%
- Demogorgon: 57%
- Singularity: 56%
- Huntress: 56%
- Ghost Face: 56%
- Nurse: 55%
- Hillbilly: 54%
- Doctor: 51%
- Overall Average: 58.50%
Now, there is only one of 2 completely mutually exclusive conclusions you can make of this.
- Skull merchant is the most overpowered killer that has every existed in the history of DBD, even more than 5 blink (yes 5 blink for the newer players) nurse. And current version nurse is one of the worst killers in the game.
- The stats included survivors giving up on hook
Giving that these nerfs to skull merchant are so massive, it is clear that they are basing these nerfs on the kill rates. If they balance kill rates around 60%, and see that skull merchant is at 70%, she is WAY higher in kill rate than she should be. Hell a 70% kill rate, basically means she kills nearly 3 survivors every game, that is effectively a 100% win rate as skull mechant.
Thus, the conclusion here is, published kill rates are including matches where survivors give up and kill themselves on hook, therefore kill rates that are published are MASSIVELY inflated. Especially for the "unfun" killers. That would then stand to reason, that kill rates are probably truly much much lower than reported, and i suspect would indicate a different trend that what players think in terms of the balance of the game.
Comments
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Sweats in Sadako main
Jokes aside, it's a worrying trend. If enough people realize that throwing on hook means an eventual nerf, they'll do it, even if it's a small part of the community.
Heck, I've had people do the exact thing people do against SM (pointing at hooks, giving up, throwing on first hook) when playing as Hag, who I barely play.9 -
We always knew it includes survivors offing themselves on hook. It's matches with at least one DC that are not.
21 -
in general hag has been a hated killer since her inception so that doesn’t really surprise me
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if that’s the case then when is nurse getting on the chopping block? cant come any sooner
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Has she? Maybe it's because I joined when Sadako released, but I see hag as… Kind of existing? Especially after the removal of lightburning her traps to just wiping them.
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yeah she’s always been one of those killers that’s powerful and rare and awful to play but also awful to play against it’s like artist
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they already do. Just give up, throw yourself on a hook and go next and BVHR will eventually change said killer.
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Have you considered that the game overall is balanced in such a way that dredge, Myers, and pig are over performing the stated goal of 60%?
That maybe, just maybe, the game is an unfun slog for a lot of players and over tuning the entire game is causing these problems?
I highly doubt that people are, en masse, giving up to skew numbers. What you're seeing is that the game is over in the first couple minutes for the first survivor hooked, and the only real reaction to the current game state is to admit their game is over and go next.
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I know from my experience on both sides that people give up for all sorts of reasons before the killer has had chance to do anything to be the reason they do.
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Oh yeah it's no secret that players giving up do inflate kill rates. I've seen streams where 1/2 games a survivor gives up first hook despite having a good first chase.
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I mean, she kinda has been for the past 7 years. It's just that her power is game breaking by nature.
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If people are giving up against something en masse it means it's unfun to play against to a large majority of people and it should be changed
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If dredge is overperforming then why did they buff him recently? This was before his buffs.
And are you honestly going to tell me. REALLY THINK ABOUT IT, do you truly believe that dredge, MYERS and PIG, are better killers than nurse?
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Changed =/= nerfed.
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We don't have full context of how this got here, nor do we really care, but we do wanna point out something with:
REALLY THINK ABOUT IT, do you truly believe that dredge, MYERS and PIG, are better killers than nurse?
The average player probably does do better as Meyers, pig, or dredge than Nurse. The casual player will therefore get more kills with those right? Just asking for clarity.
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The proposed changes don't seem to be aimed at making her less annoying to play against. They just seem like they're designed to make her weaker. Which was never really the problem. It's the tedious zone control that puts people off. That's still there.
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Better is relative. Those killers are more accessible to the average killer main than Nurse. She’s quite strong but does require a fair amount of skill to operate. Pig, Myers (two m1 killers), and to a lesser extent Druanee (Dredge, an anti-loop killer) do not.
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I guess the developers give Skull Merchant a hard nerf not because she has a high killrate but because players don't like to face her and either give up or dc against her. They already confirmed that they want to give her a third rework in the near future but I guess until this they want to make her rather weak so less players will play her which means less players will face her and give up→ necessary evil, I guess.
However, I am not happy about these changes. The only reason why survivors give up against her is because she is Skull Merchant. They don't try to play, they just give up for no reason. If players would actual play against her, she would have a rather low killrate because she is not that strong.
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But a "NERF" implies she is too strong, if she was "annoying" that would imply needing to rework something, not just nerf her outright into uselessness.
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So we make balance decisions based on what the "average" player experiences?
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I feel like it doesn't matter how much you change the Kill rates or not, or nerf a Killer or not - if people do not enjoy playing against that Killer? They can and will still give up on hook or DC. Like, even if all the Killers had a 40% or lower kill rate, people would still give up just because they hate [insert Killer here].
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Like I said, I guess the developers nerf her because this is an easy and quick fix to make her less annyoing until her rework goes live. She is not too strong, her high killrate results due to all the gives up against her (like you already said in your startpost) because survivors hate Skull Merchant because she is Skull Merchant. That's it. There are other options to make her less annyoing but these would include bigger changes which means more work. This is just my guess, I could be wrong.
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Since it's in quotes, how are we defining "average" here?
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However it is you define you, but when i hear "Average" i assume a bell curve:
So if this graph is skill level, with the far left being the worst players, and the far right being the best players and the height of the graph being the amount of players. Then, balancing around the "average" would assume that you take that point in the middle and that is what you balance for.
If you feel it should be defined differently though that is fine with me, just tell me your definition of it and we can go with that.
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This is quite a leap without any insight into the data or "give up" rates for each killer. It's also, as usual on these forums, trying to look for qualitative things in a quantitative data point (kill rate). Even if we assume the kill rates include players giving up, we have no data to adjust them off of. We can't just say "massively". That's "high MMR" all over again. How often to players give up against Skull Merchant across all MMR ranges across all regions? What is her kill rate in trials with no unhook attempts? Nobody knows except the devs with access to the database.
Post edited by edgarpoop on5 -
That doesn't need to be proven, it's a known fact.
The only ignored matches are the ones with disconnections.
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We were talking about the survivors who aren't new but aren't SWAT experts, so the graph will do nicely. Still using the graph we would say a tad less than the middle parts (30 going left and right equalling 60) would be ideal. Some simple things for any skill level to enjoy while having things that those of higher skill enjoy.
Now we would put Nurses skill floor somewhere near the upper end, not the top end but up there. How many people in that "average" skill group would try nurse thinking "strongest killer", fail, and stop? How many would keep going, failing a ton before reaching that skill floor to become somewhat effective? Compared to the other 3 who's floors are much lower than Nurse, people can pick up and play and have a decent shot at murdering the survivors. It seems more likely that these 3 would be getting more kills than Nurse since there would be more of them that could.
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So if you think balancing around the average level player is ideal then do you think that nurse is "fine"? Does she need a nerf?
What about BHVR? Why did they nerf blight and remove hug tech? Surely average level blights didn't know what hug tech was, let alone actually using it properly in a match.
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We 3 think nurse is fine as is yes (shocking we know).
Do you expect us to know what BHVR thinks? We still have the impression they have a spinning dart board with ideas taped and have a game of it as to what happens. We agree most wouldn't be able to use it to the extremes that people we're whinning, but thats the thing, people kept whining about Blight (technically we also read somewhere that it wasn't a intended thing by the devs. That might have factored into hug tech specifically). What should be balanced and how is different for everyone (look no further than our opinion of nurse) and numbers occasionally outweighs…sensible? [Not sure of the right word here].
While we're genuinely curious as to where this is going, it doesn't answer the question of: "If more people can play these 3 killers better, doesn't that make them overall better than the 1 who has less people that can play them well?" Seems more of asking our opinions on balance.
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It includes people giving up, but excludes any games with a DC (despite there being a bot thrown in). So probably evens out.
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Jokes aside, it's a worrying trend. If enough people realize that throwing on hook means an eventual nerf, they'll do it, even if it's a small part of the community.You don't really have another choice as a video game developer. If your customers just outright refuse to engage with content you have to listen to that.
It would have to be a significant part of the community to actually yield this though and given the size of DbD's community not realistic to fake.
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Not when the end result is kneecapping something so hard it goes into a messy state like this. There's a fine line between fixing something the community hates and ruining it further for everyone involved.
They were better off not touching her until their planned rework.0 -
So I've thought about how often people just give up and die on first hook, generally speaking, and giving up has zero penalty, where as disconnecting gives you a temp ban that gets exponentially worse. Now have you thought about when you dc your team gets a bot that replaces you, but when you give you your team gets nothing, so BHVR went thru all of this trouble creating bots but it doesn't even matter bc people just give up for no penalty and your team is screwed. There is zero reason to not give up and go next if you aren't having fun, I mean what is the purpose of dbd anymore, your rank is hidden, your prestige is hidden, everyone hides their names, and I understand that you lose mmr for every loss but what does it matter if i dont even know what my mmr is. I play killer someone gives up, i play surv and i get humped. I would like to ask a serious question, why doesn't bhvr make a ranked game mode, is there something stopping them? Until then what is the purpose of dbd?
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