PLEASEEE BHVR BUFF SOLO QUEUE

Idk about their stats. They said low mmr chases are average 1 min while high mmr is 70 seconds.

HOW?

I don't think it has that much to do with fun; nowadays there is just a bloodpoint incentive for the lesser-played role, which smoothes things out a lot, and Crossplay provides more matches for those in regions that don't have as many players. The long survivor queue times before were typically during the evenings when friends had time to meet up and play together. At other times killer queue times were usually longer.

I don't think queue times would noticeably change if survivor was buffed a bit, especially if the buffs are more geared at solo queue as this post is requesting.

I was going to jump in to back you up on the standard deviation discussion, but being that seems to be over I'll look at your suggestions.

I should say, I like soloq. I think I preferred the game before the HUD update even, I like the idea of not knowing what the other survivors are doing. However, I understand that isn't feasible with the need to balance between soloq and SWF.

• More buff icons. Perks like Solidarity and Deliverance should show icons on the HUD so you know at a glance they're in play.

A gazillion times yes on this. This is one of those changes that really frustrates me because it doesn't seem to have any drawbacks (beyond balance) and could be implemented immediately. If the survivor has the ability to get off the hook (Deliverance, Wicked, AFC triggered), show their aura in a different color.

• Allow survivors to see their teammates' perks in the lobby and on the pause screen.

BHVR's response to this is it might lead to more lobby dodging and toxicity. I'm not sure, I'd definitely at least like to test this to see if it does. But they could also just penalize lobby dodging.

• More emotes beyond beckon and point to allow for more precise communication.

Yeah, I'd like signals like 'I'll heal you first', 'do this gen', 'killer nearby'.

• Base kit Kindred.

I think this one goes too far. I'd add the ability for the survivor on the hook to give emotes that are more clear about whether the killer is nearby or not, instead of trying to guess what the survivor means by hand flailing.

Appreciate the comment! Some good expansions in there. How would you feel about base kit Kindred, but without the killer aura read portion? That was really my intention, as you can easily lose the game by having two, or zero, survivors go for the save.

An alternative to base kit Kindred might be to also add your most recent emote to the HUD. That, combined with adding new emotes, would let solo queue survivors better handle tasks that requires coordination.

You need not win less overall, though. My point is basically this:

Let's say half of DBD matches are with 4 randoms with a kill rate of 60% and the other half of DBD matches are with SWFs and have a kill rate of 50%. The overall kill rate is of course 55%.

Let's say you buff solo queue so thoroughly that now all matches have a 50% kill rate, as solos and SWFs are just as strong, and then the devs buff killer / nerf survivor overall such that the overall kill rate once again settles to 55%.

This is a good thing, as now the quality of opponents you're facing is much more consistent. No longer will killers feel like "I'm facing a SWF so I'm at a disadvantage" or "I'm facing solo queue so it's an easy win". They would feel like they're facing teams of roughly their skill most of the time, which is exactly what you want. Of course, in practice SWF is not as big of an advantage as people make it out to be, so buffs to solo queue wouldn't change the killer experience nearly as much as in this example.

Still, there's a lot of attention on the experience of killers. What about the experience of survivors? If anything it stands to reason that the survivor experience should be more of a focus given that there are 4x as many players, and while the solo queue experience has improved relative to SWF over time with the new HUD changes, basekit BT, etc., it has long been a tough experience.

At the end of the day the game will be at its healthiest when both sides feel like they're not losing all the time. Nowadays, I only get that feeling while playing survivor killer, and the numbers bear that out. So, again, there's plenty of kill rate overhead that buffing solo queue should not be a concern.

Base Kit Kindred, no killer aura read: Like a lot a of ideas, I feel like it would need to be tested to be more certain, but here's my thoughts on how I think it would go:

Balance: It would be a huge gain to low and mid MMR, still somewhat helpful to soloq high MMR, and basically irrelevant to high MMR SWFs. So if you're only concern is balance, it seems like an obvious step.

—A interesting point on this, the people who should be pushing the most for base kit kindred are high MMR killer mains, because it would lower the overall kill rate in the lower MMR brackets, justifying more across the board killer buffs.

Theming: I have no idea how the overall community feels about this, but I suspect BHVR has data on it. If the game had always been this way, I doubt people would have a hard time imagining it otherwise. Right now, it would be pretty disconcerting to me to just have so much of the map where I know exactly where the other survivors are. I suspect I'd adjust overtime, but I think BHVR worries this would harm the theme too much.

Emotes: If both emotes and base kit kindred were on the table, I'd start with emotes and see how that worked out. If it didn't really fix things, then we revisit basekit kindred.

SWF teams only win about 3% more than solo players, and even at high MMR where we’re talking the top 5% of players- they only win 8% more than solo. Even the best players still escape less than half the time. Personally, I believe the killer should remain the power role in the game, but there are ways to maintain decent kill rates while making the survivor role feel less helpless. Not that I think balance should be considered "punishing" anyone, as we should all want the game to be balanced/fair for all players.

I believe killers should maintain the power role, but adjustments to how kills are achieved could make the high kill rate feel less frustrating for survivors. While everyone has personal opinions on fairness, most agree that certain tactics like tunneling, slugging, and proxy camping- can feel miserable and even helpless to face, especially when they’re used by specific killers. These strategies often lead to quick, unchallenged kills, and while there are perks survivors can bring to counter them, killers have access to these tactics baseline. (which I feel is quite slanted especially when you consider most of these counters are on paid characters)

BHVR has taken steps to discourage some of these playstyles, but they remain common because they’re still the most efficient ways to win. It’s not just on players choosing these tactics, but on the devs for allowing them to be so effective. If these strategies were made less rewarding, so they were no longer the optimal way to win, I think survivors would be more accepting of higher kill rates.

This is just my personal opinion, but from what I’ve observed in forums and player spaces, the frustration seems to come more from dying to these particular tactics than from dying in general. These strategies make it much harder for survivors and much easier for killers, which creates an imbalance. While this could mean a nerf for some killers who rely on these tactics, I’d gladly trade buffing all killers or killer perks across the board (aside from Nurse, maybe?) in exchange for healthier gameplay overall.

Unfortunately any data on killrates are GOING to be off due to the massive amount of survivors killing themselves on hook super early on. There's no way for the devs to sort those games out like they do for games that had a DC, and it's the main reason why I avoid soloQ survivor. I had a game the other night where the first survivor downed by a Wraith killed themselves. In a 3v1, we managed to get 4 gens done with the last gen at about 75%. A game that COULD'VE been a 4 man escape turned into a 1 man escape due to hatch.

Yes I don't "need" it and I run builds without it too, however it helps to narrow the gap between swf and solo que. Also why is it just accepted that killers get to see aura' s of all generators but the idea of windows being basekit is beyond the pale. As they nerf maps more and more I will just insist to the same degree that windows should be basekit so players can actually see the few windows.and pallets that are even left on the maps. I am even more conviced i am right about this as they nerf distortion and keep giving killers more and more wallhacks. If they are going to try and make it so killers know all the time where ths survivors are then the survivors should be entitled to know if a pallet has been dropped already. Its not such a big deal. Do you seriously think if they did make it basekit kill rate would go massively down or something?

Why do we use win:loss for survivor but win:draw:loss for killers?

A 50% winrate for killers means a 50% loss rate for them.

A draw only happens when neither involved team reaches their goal. DBD is not "have more kills than escapes, thus a 2/2is a draw", because survivors arent scored as team (you still lose when 3 others escape).

DBD is killer wins on 3+ kills and each escaped survivor wins....

A 50% winrate for killers means a 50% loss rate for them.

If you want to define it that way, that's fine. But's that's not how the person I was replying to was defining it. If kill rate and win rate are the same thing, then a 50% kill rate would be an inherently balanced game.

A draw only happens when neither involved team reaches their goal.

If you want to view a draw as impossible, again that's fine, but you need to also discard the terms 'win' and 'lose' as the end result of the match, because there is no singular opponent to win or lose the match against, you either went 4-0, 3-1, 2-2, 1-3, or 0-4 (excluding hatch). If you don't want to adjust your definitions that are based on symmetrical games to asymmetrical games you need to be consistent.

In my opinion, this seems overly pedantic. If a sports team played four games, won 2, and lost 2, how would we refer to them? They aren't winning, they aren't losing, we'd call them even or 500. I think if someone said 'so far the season has been a draw' that would make sense to pretty much everyone even though not a single game has been a draw.

It’s because I don’t see the game as a competitive faceoff between the two sides. I see it as a “climb the mountain” kind of game for Survivors. How high can they get before making too many mistakes, can they work together?

I'm absolutely okay with this. As I mentioned, I don't really have a problem with the kill rate. Theming or a belief that survivors voiding the trial occur more frequently than the killer equivalent are absolutely valid reasons to believe in a higher kill rate.

It's just not a mathematical necessity for balance purposes for many reasons.

People have been constantly asserting this, but hook suicides seem to be a drop in the bucket. @I_CAME posted the following in another thread:

…the devs literally said in the recent stream that Skull Merchants kill rate is still 68% when they throw out games where someone gives up on the first hook. I think the number they gave was 2.5% of games against skull merchant have someone dropping on the hook.

If the impact is this small against Skull Merchant, you can be confident that pretty much every killer is not going to have their kill rates skewed much by hook suicides. And there are factors in the other direction as well that aren't being considered. DCs probably happen more often in matches that survivors are going to lose badly, for example, so removing them from the stats effectively lowers the kill rate compared to a world where everyone tries the whole match. Killers also sometimes just want to farm or turn friendly during the match for various reasons (e.g. survivors were cute, one survivor sandbags another).

So, while imperfect, I think the stats we've been given are close enough to their "everyone is trying all the time" equivalents to draw some conclusions about game balance from.

How would the devs be able to tell what games included survivors refusing to play? Do you really think hook suicides only occurred in like 2% of games against SM? I guess I'm getting ALL of them when I try solo Qing, because it typically occurs at least afew times a night no matter who the killer is.