Why do killers think this game is survivior sided?

The thing is, at least from my experience, these days surviving isn't hard because a killer is good, but because the killer is using the cheapest, most boring play styles.

Before taking a break, because I was no longer having fun and people should do that when such a thing happened (something the players of this game seem to not understand, but that's off topic) my friends and I were getting slugged. Immediately. Multiple games in a row.

And then left to bleed out.

No hooking. No chasing. No gens. Just left there for multiple minutes. And after reaching out to other friends to ask around, this seems to be the newest trend in killers.

And when stuff like this happens so often it seems to be a known trend and Behavior does diddly all and then salty killers have the gall to call the game survivor sided, it's...laughable. Add to the fact we now have statistics saying otherwise, and...yeah.

No.

You (killer players) always talk about hypotheticals where the best players face off against each other to claim the game is survivor sided, while the reality is that for the overwhelming majority of players, including high-mmr players, killers win most of their games.

This is true is low to high mmr, and solo to swf survivor teams.

Even there, the escape rate doesn't reach 50%, so it's not even killer-sided, statistically.

EDIT: Meant to say it's not survivor-sided.

The crazy thing is that the below-50% escape rate for high-MMR full-SWF survivors excludes matches with disconnects and includes hatch escapes, so the number that would be more closely resembling the played reality is even lower. What additionally has to be considered is that for these stats, they look at the survivor players' MMR value, which means there are tons of matches in there where these high-MMR full-SWF survivors met non-high-MMR killers, because we all know the matchmaking isn't all that strict at all. And despite all of that, they still didn't get 2 out on average.

For the larger topic, well, it's an eternal "conflict" that will never be put to rest, it's the lifeblood of the forums and of the game in some respects. And these discussions are always tinged with a lot of anecdotes, emotions, personal opinions and experiences. With a lot of people I assume even unloading their frustrations from a match they had literally just gotten out of, their entire view blinded by that one experience and their emotions in that moment.

Most of the casual opinions that the game is totally survivor-sided are based on (or rather: uninformedly parroted from) a distant past when survivors legitimately had comically broken nonsense. Now mind you, killers also had hilariously broken stuff back then, but survivors had more, many of the killers we have now didn't exist and maps are a shadow of what they used to be for survivors. Thing is, even apart from the fact that all of that has changed drastically throughout the years of course, even back then competent killer players won more than they didn't, good killer players still basically always winning. For which there are various reasons. To begin with, the fact that survivors don't always use the strongest stuff, and in fact, it basically never happens that you actually get a group stacked with the strongest stuff times 4. When have you last seen even just 4 Syringes/Styptics or 4 BNPs in a match? And that's just add-ons, that everybody knows are the most impactful choices among them, and they don't even cost a perk slot. And yet you almost never see it. Killers using the strongest stuff in every slot however is much more common, because it is only 1 player having to make that decision. Next thing is that survivors are almost never full SWFs, let alone on voice comms. And believe it or not, the game is notably killer-favoured if the survivors have no communication and coordination, don't even know each other's builds and play patterns and such. And another major reason is the matchmaking that fails to give good players adequate opposition, let alone 4 adequate survivors. A good killer player will maybe face 1 adequate group of survivors every hundred matches? If that. Facing a really good 4-SWF on comms trying hard to win stacking the strongest stuff is a one-in-a-million occurrence.

The mythical "balance" of the game whatever it may be does not matter if you can win 99-100% of the matches that the game actually gives you, and it has been proven time and time again that you factually can (as killer anyway, or in a 4-player SWF on voice comms), with countless winstreaks of hundreds (and thousands) of matches in a row on just about any killer.

But yes, even the supposed base balance is a world removed from what people casually or ignorantly or deliberately falsely make it out to be. Killers win more in tournaments too, so the assumption that killers don't stand a chance if everybody is highly skilled and experienced is provably wrong, always has been. Of course tournaments employ perk and item/add-on restrictions, but they go for both roles and they also don't change the base game, so at most arguments would shift to say the game is loadout-sided, that it is only ever (potentially) survivor-sided if every survivor is using the strongest stuff in every slot. But not even that seems to hold true, given that in tournaments where everything was allowed, killers still outperformed survivors. Of course, there are different killers and some are clearly more lethal than others so balancing between those killers seems called-for, and there are things to be said about whether the game couldn't be balanced better for the idea of getting more hook stages rather than relying on camping and tunnelling to succeed. But all of that stops being relevant in public matches anyway, where we can see even perkless winstreaks on even the weakest of killers, even winstreaks where the players will actively refrain from camping and tunnelling.

The realization everyone should be glad to come away with if they look at the environment that actually matters for most of everyone (public matchmaking) is that high winrates and winstreaks prove that it is skill-sided, and as such, you can succeed (and even dominate) in the vast majority of your matches if you practice, improve and get good enough. Now, I suspect this precisely is a realization many are in denial of, because it means if they are struggling they would have to face the fact that they simply aren't good enough, that another player in their place would have done better, that it wasn't the game that made them lose, that they would have to put in more time, effort, work, thought. But for everyone that actually plays competitive multiplayer games to practice and improve their skills and for the competition, to put in that time, effort, work, thought, this realization should if anything be exhilarating, as few other multiplayer PVP games allow you to win as consistently and decisively as DbD does purely by leveraging one's skills. And this is all the more so true on the killer side, where your skill constitutes 100% of your side's skill and you aren't at the mercy of the matchmaking system, which more often than not throws together blatantly mismatched players. The skill-sidedness of DbD in its main mode (public matchmaking) favours killers, which is obvious both from global stats as well as from the way larger number of killer winstreaks, that have also achieved way higher records.

In fact, if I have a problem with the game in terms of its competitive viability, its "balance design" so to say, it's if anything that it's too easy to win as killer and in a full SWF team. I believe balance-wise the primary and major and for now really the only thing anybody that is even halfway decent at the game and not looking to constantly win more or less effortlessly (i. e. looking for an actual engaging and challenging multiplayer gaming experience) should be complaining about and annoyed by is the poor state of the matchmaking system, that allows one to win 80+% of the time handedly once above a certain skill/experience threshold, rarely getting a real challenge or competition, much of the time beating up on clearly subpar players. A higher MMR cap (or even its removal) and a more strict matchmaking algorithm are the first things people should be advocating for. If in that new environment actual balance grievances then arise, those can then be talked about. But until then, people bickering about the game's supposed balance when you have players out there winning 1000-2000 matches in a row is pretty asinine and futile and ridiculous. Even many of the players that constantly complain about how survivor-sided the game supposedly is win their killer matches most of the time, seemingly not wanting a challenge or engaging competitive gaming experience and to improve and grow as a player, but wanting to just win the remaining 5-10% of matches that they are currently not winning too.

This multiplayer stomp as Killer is so accurate. Back before engagement based matchmaking styled MMR was frequently used by every game, you could play social slayer on Halo and stomp newbies. Most the times you would only do that if you were playing with weaker friends though. Now, since the game is leveraged for Killer to have a greater win chance, if you sweat and your opponents sweat, they needed to pre-sweat more than you, in order to have a chance of winning, to bypass the default 60-40 killrate odds stacked against them.

That's probably why so many main-brained Killer players complain so much about SWF, it is the only people who have a 'fair' chance against them with 48% escape rates. It is almost a coinflip where the side with more skill exclusively prevails. They queued up for their free win, they didn't want to have to actually try to earn their win.

The rest of this post perfectly describes nearly every facet, but I just wanted to add on to the old vs new multiplayer differences on top of that.

Exactly, the randomness or "chaos" favours the killer in the matchmaked asymmetrical format in multiple ways, from the loadout stage, to their skill and sweat levels, the amount of impact their decisions have on a match, how well their gameplan translates into the match, and more, simply because the survivors are 4 random players without any coordination or cohesion, whereas the 1 player is obviously as cohesive a "unit" as it gets. I expanded on that concept in various posts, some of which in this thread: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/405382/new-stats-feb-15th-2024. Specifically:

Skill and sweat is much more impactful on the killer side. This is simply because on the survivor side you have 4 players, which have varying levels of skill and of trying to win, with weak links of subpar players that can doom an entire match even if the other 3 players are better than the killer player, and with people not playing in earnest (i. e. not trying to win, but to do funny or stupid things, or tome challenges, or at least not trying hard to win, or just playing for hatch). On the killer side, there is 1 player, their skill level therefore obviously determines 100% of their skill-based performance potential, their degree of "trying to win" 100% of how sweaty their side will be. Any survivor on the other hand can only determine 25% of their side's skill and sweat levels. There is the disparity in strategical game approach as well - again, with 4 players things can be very disconcerted and downright chaotic, whereas on the killer side, even if their approach to the game may not necessarily be good, at least their approach is as concerted as can be, the decisions they make translate into the game as well as the gameplay design allows for them to. The asymmetric nature of this game favours the killer player's skill, tryhardiness and decision-making to have a more notable impact on the outcome of matches. And this of course starts before the match has even begun, at the loadout screen (it is infinitely more common to have a killer that has the best thing equipped in every slot than an entire group of survivors doing the same, again simply because they are 4 players - when have you last seen even just 4 BNPs in a match?)

And:

Absolutely, and this is implicitly included in what I meant with the greater degree of disconcertedness among survivor groups as compared to the killer, for the simple and obvious reason that there will be much more randomness in the loadouts, mentalities, intentions, decisions, skills and so on of a random group of 4 players than in the 1 player. As long as the killer player doesn't have 4 personalities or is in 4 different minds about what and how to play, they will on average be about 4 times as concerted as the survivors, ha.

This sounds obvious at best and silly at worst, but to highlight in simple terms what this means using something you also brought up in the example of loadouts: just think of the fact that the killer's loadout consisting of the killer character, 4 perks, 2 add-ons, and an offering is the equivalent to the survivor group's loadout of 16 perks, 4 items, 8 add-ons and 4 offerings. How often will the killer player have a (more or less) perfectly concerted, synergistic loadout, where the character, perks, add-ons and offerings each and all make sense together, are well-rounded and can even serve very precise strategic intentions (e. g. Mirror Myers with a Lery's offering), and how often will the same be the case for the survivors' loadout? For killers, most matches. For survivors, outside of 4-player SWFs, basically never. As you said, some perks can be overrepresented, others underrepresented or not represented at all, all of which detrimentally so, there can be multiple conflicting offerings, and in any case, it will essentially never happen that all perks, items, add-ons and offerings will be perfectly synergistic and fine-tuned, let alone serving a preconceived strategy. In my SWFs we will sometimes use 4 luck offerings alongside 4 Up The Antes and 4 Slippery Meats. This allows us to unhook ourselves on the first hook every time. It's an incredibly strong loadout. How often do we think random groups have used this build in the history of this game, among billions of solo queue matches? 0 times, in all likeliness. Even having something like 4 BNPs in a solo group is vanishingly rare, and that despite the fact that everybody knows how good BNPs are, and they cost nothing to bring and are merely an add-on for an item. It's easy to understand from this that killer loadouts will most of the time be enormously more optimized than survivor loadouts, and from there the jump to understanding in what other ways killers benefit from their concerted approach, efforts and decisions as compared to the more disconcerted survivor groups is easier.

The consistency with which killers can win in DbD is unheard of in any comparably popular multiplayer PVP game, and being able to win thousands of times in a row flies in the face of anything that is a remotely competitively balanced game. It's simply insane and would be scandalous in most other games. Apart from the lax matchmaking, one of the major reasons for this absolutely is the asymmetrical, 1v4 format itself: the only constant in all of those matches is the 1 killer player; as survivor, unless you are playing in the same 4-SWF every single time, you can never have that consistency, in fact you will be a universe away from that consistency, every single match is a crapshoot.

I do think that contrary to common belief, the game is actually sort of well-balanced for the 4-player SWF team format, certainly well-balanced enough for the expression of that idea in the matchmaking gameplay reality where these SWFs aren't tournament-level teams (as the stats obviously also support). Of course, killers, maps and loadouts at play will always affect things greatly and there certainly are still things to be balanced out in those regards, but generally, through the skill range spectrum, the game is much closer to being competitively viable for the idea of a premade survivor team on comms than people assume. And average killer players on average having 2 survivors escape in those matches seems completely reasonable, unless of course they don't actually want a competitively well-balanced experience where their opponents can outplay and outperform them and instead want to win most of the time no matter what. And I do think a lot of players do adopt this mentality when they play killer, that they think they should be able to win every single match, and the game reinforces that idea because you actually can win most killer matches even if you aren't an outstanding player. Which leads to them then taking any loss (and especially if it's a decisive loss) as an affront and are quick to invoke game design as the reason for their loss, and this obviously is more likely to happen against the rare full SWF teams.

What people rarely consider when they think about "solo queue" and how bad it is, is that it is killer-favoured at a basic level. It's not merely that solo queue has people trolling, throwing, giving up, being bad, stupid, or whatnot, that causes it to be so rough, it's also simply that the game appears to be killer-favoured if the 4 survivor players are strangers with no cohesion, coordination and communication, knowledge about each other's builds and playstyles, gameplans, and so on. That is to say, even if every single one of those 4 players is equally as skilled and experienced as the killer player and trying equally as hard to win, from loadout to gameplan and gameplay, I'm still convinced that the killer has the base advantage in that scenario generally (again, it does depend on the killer, maps and specific loadouts at play too, but generally I guarantee this holds true). With most (around 80-90%) survivors being a mix of solo and duo players, average-and-above killer players are simply used to winning and being at an advantage, they are conditioned to expect to do well, and so whenever they don't they quickly feel like something is wrong with the game, that their opponents beat them "unfairly", and so on. The asymmetrical format also seems to make it really difficult for people to accept that skill and effort just like in other PVP games play a huge part in the outcome of matches, to conceive of the idea that a better player would have performed better in their stead, that the opponent can play better and outperform them. And that despite being a good player, not winning all the time is actually normal in balanced games because you are supposed to be facing other good players on an even playing field. That I can see really rather mediocrely skilled streamers lament day in and out, year after year, the oh-so survivor-sided terrible state of balance in this game despite winning some 80+% of their killer matches when literal world champion deities in other, much more competitive games such as Starcraft are barely hitting 70%, I feel like DbD is some insular kindergarten community where people expect things to go their way by design, and don't want to challenge themselves and others and work for their successes. I've been in a few competitive gaming communities, but this phenomenon is unique to DbD.