Why do killers think this game is survivior sided?

Like you said, No Mither/Invocation Lobby Dodging if you tell people too early. That's why I understand the loading screen at the earliest is probably the best place. The pause menu in-game should have their perks next to their offerings.

Yeah, needing all 4 Survivors to be as sweaty as the Killer means the Killer is always going to come out on top in normal cases. Since 4-SWF is only ~5% of matches, that makes the chances all the lower.

I'm not fully sold on stricter matchmaking. I think maybe looser matchmaking is better. During the climb of MMR, seen in the 'all MMR' stats, everything larger plays out as we'd hope. I think this is because we get more 1-sided stomps, so Survivor is actually getting more chances to win. When it is stricter, everyone is sweating for just one more kill/escape. The only 'evidence' I have for my opinion here is old Emblem based matchmaking. I personally preferred that, and it also encouraged everyone to 'play the game' in every facet. It was much more loose, because sometimes Iri matchmaking was against Purples (we'll just assume a free win), sometimes Iri was against fellow Iri's, but they were goofing off, and sometimes Iri was against fellow Iri's calling clocks.

I disagree on the directional balance shift for SWF/soloq, but agree on adjusting Killers on the extremes. I wouldn't go as far as to add voice comms in-game, but I do think info should be freely shared and Blindness buffed to cover up the Survivor HUD as well as auras (other than Health states and Hook states always being visible). I hate the Chaos, because it almost always means something bad. For Killer balance, I think we currently have S→D tier, and basically the top 5 are S and the bottom 5 are D. I would love to see no S or D tier, having the range be from A to C instead (if we use current power levels). Just occasionally buff the bottom 5 a tier or two, and nerf the top 5 a tier or two. This may just be me, but Horror can never exist with multiplayer. Even playing RE:Revelations 2 in co-op, all illusions of fear are shattered when you have a buddy by your side, or an opponent calling you slurs lol.

I know this might be utterly crazy, but that dead Survivor bug that caused multiple gens to pop might not be bad to basekit in some fashion. I would say if the Survivor died at 6 hooks or fewer, then their death causes gens to count as an extra one. I normally play to 2-hook everyone before killing them, so even if at least 1 rat hides, the death hook for the other 3 are at hook 7. This would naturally punish tunneling early, and if someone is tunneled late, it was largely because they ratted earlier in the match.

I do agree with the invulnerability alternative post-hook, as long as there is no collision off-hook (to prevent intentionally bodyblocking, either Killer to basement, or Survivor to protect fellow Survs).

I partially agree, but remember, it wasn't specifically tied to Survivor death, but the Survivor leaving the lobby entirely (so you couldn't spectate). IMO if it was implemented in some way, it should be tied to death, not lobby existence. New players who get tunneled leave, since they have 0 reason to stick around. They also often falsely think the Killer is just a cheater since their perks are hidden. If they don't reveal the perks on death, then they should encourage sticking around so that Survivors don't mistake this unexplained mechanic of only revealing perks once the match is 100% over.

I disagree

Yeah, that's why I often try to make the distinction between the basic idea of a 4-SWF, and a clock-SWF. Heck, a clock-duo is going to make you lose more often as Killer than the average 4-SWF.

I definitely think they should look into hooks instead of just kills for MMR and balancing, i think it would be much more healthy for the game.
Also instead of just escape it should take into account what a survivor does during the match similar to the old emblem system, that way someone who runs the killer all game would rank up while someone who hid all game doing nothing wouldn’t even though they escaped.
I think it’s why we have this mess in solo queue where really bad survivors have ranked up while some people feel they are stuck in an MMR hell they can’t climb out of because it’s so reliant on your teammates performance. I think we would see a massive improvement in match quality.

I understand most matches ended up being 'free', and it was just who got that roll of the dice. However, I see this as a feature, not a flaw. Back then, you would know the next match very well might just be your 'free win', so you could afford to run the goofy builds and still win while having fun. It made the game less sweaty, and more enjoyable, at least for what I want out of the game.

That's also why 'carrying as a duo' felt possible, you got the 'free win' that roll of the dice. Killer is different, since they are already designed to win 50%-100% (multiplicatively) more often than Survivor. I wasn't a fan of the ultra sweat-fest matches, so I didn't always play immediately after resets. The people who did, were still afforded that opportunity, as well as customs as always.

I can also understand the desire for an ultra-sweat environment, the problem is that this game ain't it. When they had the intense limitations, Dowsey had 2hr+ queues as Twins. The game was literally unplayable, because the playerbase isn't large enough. It's the big fish little pond issue. That's why I always encourage people who actually want to sweat to take it to DOTA, or SC, or CS, or customs on a Discord channel purpose built to sweat.

The largest problem with balancing for SWF, is you can't just punish people for playing with their friends. They will just hard quit the game, to find a place where they aren't punished for playing together. Heck, most SWFs aren't even sweating. Nearly no one is actually calling clocks, but that is the image in main-brain Killer players when they hear the term 'SWF'. Most of my SWF (half of which quit the game since it got so bad,) brings meme perks like Invocation of Spiders or trolls us with No Mither. So any nerf to SWF is flawed in its conception, without a counter-balance of a single bad perk negating everyone elses limitations.

I agree in a sense that soloq is an entirely different experience, one where horror and suspense lies around every corner, but the problem is that the horror comes mostly from your soloq teammates. "How are they going to throw this match" is the looming dread each time you hit the play button, not anything from the Killer. Heck, the most suspense you get from the Killer is "are they going to bleed us out or not". Every one of these is such a horrible experience, that it should never have had the potential to be real in the first place. Soloq is only a place to do tomes and dailies, fun is illegal there, because if you try, one of the other players WILL ruin your day. The only question is who. (It's Feng/Sable/Mikaela 90% of the time for Survivor, Blight/Plague/SM 90% of the time for Killer IME.)

However, I see this as a feature, not a flaw. Back then, you would know the next match very well might just be your 'free win', so you could afford to run the goofy builds and still win while having fun. It made the game less sweaty, and more enjoyable, at least for what I want out of the game.

That's fair, and a matter of preference of course. I just think the game has more and more embraced its competitiveness, and the matchmaking system should follow suit. Which it did, until it again didn't. I personally also prefer things to be competitive, to have more of an actual challenge more often, hard-fought matches. But I'm mostly concerned with the ridiculous extremes of players being able to have winstreaks in the hundreds and thousands, and generally winning 90+% of their matches decisively. That just shouldn't be a thing.

When they had the intense limitations, Dowsey had 2hr+ queues as Twins.

Dowsey's hours-long queue was a special case however, for multiple reasons. For one thing, it was a test run of their MMR system, so who knows what was really going on under the hood that may have caused the queue to be that long. My suspicion is that it was simply strict to the point of only ever giving someone a group if they had an exact MMR match, just for BHVR to see what really accurately matched trials based on the rating looked like in practice. But more importantly, they had had the rating system active in the background for weeks or months prior to actually running this test where the matchmaking was then based on those ratings. So in those weeks and months, Dowsey's rating increased into the absurd in the background because he won hundreds of matches. Had the matchmaking already been based on those ratings however, he would likely never have gotten to that point in the first place.

It's the big fish little pond issue.

There likely indeed aren't nearly enough high-level players (and even less so high-level SWFs) out there to give these winstreakers a challenge every match, but there is an entire world of improvement possible still between the current reality wherein people can win hundreds and even thousands of matches in a row without it even getting all that close even just once, and at least spending a few minutes trying to give these players an actual challenge every then and again. Like I mentioned, at the beginning when the MMR cap was higher, the matchmaker more strict and less people populated that capped bracket, meeting high-level players was actually a fairly common occurrence, with queue times being 2-4 minutes at the higher average. There was also an active EU crossplay off scene for a while, where a lot of highly skilled and experienced players gathered, and you had instant queues and competitive matches. The players are out there, they are just almost never meeting each other in the cesspool created by the MMR cap. And the players at the extreme end that have 90+% winrates and long winstreaks having to deal with, say, 10-minute long queues is nothing I think is too unreasonable. Plus, again, with a more strict system in place fewer and fewer players would even be able to get to that point in the first place.

I wasn't a fan of the ultra sweat-fest matches, so I didn't always play immediately after resets.

Generally under this system the game would only get sweatier and sweatier for a player if they actually manage to sweat themselves into these more and more exclusive high MMR brackets. If someone does not like that kind of sweaty gameplay, they can simply refrain from playing in those ways and they won't be able to end up having the ridiculous winrates/streaks required to get there. My concern most of all is with high-level players that currently almost or actually never lose. Adjusting the MMR for that realm specifically would affect almost no one, relatively speaking. But yes, there's also a lot of not-so-high-level players that are still winning some 70-80+% of their matches, particularly as killer, and I guarantee there's actually more than enough players out there capable of competing with them to make that a more reasonable 50-60%. Without prohibitively long queue times whatsoever, at that. And it wouldn't have to be tough matches every time either, since the matchmaker would still expand the MMR range it searches within after some time, and there'd definitely still be times where it can't find 5 players within the same, more strict bracket.

While I think that they could simply make these things more strict for the top MMR brackets and that it as a result wouldn't affect most players all that much (not even most streamers, who would presumably fall more so within the "3-5%" brackets than the "1-0.1%" ones), and that it could simply happen on a basis of at least looking for a few minutes before widening the MMR to match players among (e. g. 1 minute in the 5% bracket, and then an additional minute from there for every bracket above that, meaning that even if you reach the 1% bracket the game would at most look for 5 minutes for other 1% bracket players to pair you up with before widening the search), maybe an alternative really would be to have separate casual and competitive queues. BHVR has already talked about the possibility of having modifiers active year-round, so the idea of a separate casual mode queue with much more casual matchmaking (and perhaps even some gameplay adjustments to "casualify" the experience) isn't too far out there anymore.

Or again, they could at least implement special rules for the really egregiously extreme cases, of people that win 90+% of the time or have long streaks, making sure that if someone breaches certain thresholds the matchmaking will give them a special pool treatment. Won your last 10 matches in a row? You will now be matched with other players that also did, only returning to the normal queue pool if no match can be established after 1 minute. Won 20? 2 minutes in the special pool. And so on. (One reason why I suspect BHVR is not too keen on having strict high MMR brackets is that there's tons of cheaters in this game and this would lead to players in those brackets encountering them frequently, so part of the reason for the huge """high MMR""" pool created by the low cap is not unlikely to be that they want to obscure and mask the amount of cheating going on.)

So any nerf to SWF is flawed in its conception

My preferred SWF nerf would be to restrict their loadouts such that any perks/item/add-on/offering can only be present at most once between the members of a party. I don't actually think this would chase off many SWF players, and could if anything even be a welcome change of pace, having to decide who gets to use which perks, adopting "signature" perks within their respective groups, assuming "roles" of sorts for the team. And it would significantly increase the design space for perks (and items/add-ons/offerings), that then wouldn't have to be designed anymore with the concern in mind that multiple survivors can be abusing them in coordinated manners, therefore also allowing for individual perks(/items/add-ons/offerings) to be stronger, which benefits solo groups disproportionally since they as opposed to SWFs can still end up using multiple copies of those. I went into various considerations regarding this topic in another thread if you'd be interested (https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/304057/swf-loadout-restrictions). Of course, the idea here is to bring the SWF performance potential down alongside that of some of the strongest killers.

I agree in a sense that soloq is an entirely different experience, one where horror and suspense lies around every corner, but the problem is that the horror comes mostly from your soloq teammates.

The uncertainty, the things that are unknown, unpredictable, having to figure stuff out on your own and to try and play along and around random strangers - all of these aspects are "horror", "survival"-type gameplay elements already, it's not only about the suspense or scariness created through that, it's just the quality of gameplay this more so leads to. I obviously share your pain with regards to solo queue being messy and rough mostly due to awful teammates, although a stricter matchmaking that tries to pair players of more similar performance levels should also help with that, more so in my opinion than giving these bad players more and more info would. But I can definitely empathize with the desire to simply buff solo survivors, and I guess that is more realistic since BHVR has at least said they want to (not a whole lot happening in that regard however).

The game has more and more embraced its' competitiveness - Yeah this is the same issue I had with Smash Bros. The game isn't suited for it (such competitive gameplay), yet people created their own walled garden. Then the garden overgrew its containment zone, and poisoned the surroundings as a result. I find it more and more difficult to enjoy Smash/DBD matches, because there is too much sweat permeating out from every corner.

Dowsey's MMR only skyrocketed because MMR was accumulating without MMR being used - I mean we still have the same conceptual issue now. People can still get that ultra high MMR, and they would have to wait hours for an actual accurate MMR match.

Less likely to have win extremes with stricter matches - Maybe if the game was actually based on 50/50 kill/winrates. The problem is the game is designed around 60/40. You can never really properly maintain 60/40 and 'fair' matches, because the system is designed to be unfair from the onset.

Restrict SWF loadouts - This is poison to non-competitive gameplay. Now just because I played in a 3-SWF, I can't use both SB and Deliv at the same time, but if I played with only 1 friend I could? "Sorry Billy, you suck at the game, I'm just gunna play with Julie so I can still have fun with my perks." The strength of SWF is already counterbalanced by natural skill differentials in friend groups. Sweat squads, or people calling out clocks, are the ones who pre-select their 'friends' based on skill level, rather than enjoyment to be around. Plus if someone brings Invo Spiders or No Mither, it would have to delete all perk restrictions for everyone else. Then you can't change perks mid-lobby, because Jim unequipped No Mither, unequipping everyone's perks. It is only a good system if you have a separate 'ranked' gamemode (as opposed to the current forced ranked we all can't avoid), where everyone is knowing what they sign up for. As for now though, that is best kept in customs.

Soloq - My main complaint here was that there is 'fun' horror, and 'unfun' horror. Current soloq is 'unfun', because it is a roll of the dice of which way your game will be screwed over. Imagine playing Elden Ring, and randomly when you enter each new zone, a button is disabled. That's current soloq. Can't use your Flask this map, better die and go next. Can't use basic attacks, and the weapons I have aren't good with Heavy attacks, better go next. Soloq is 'forcing' people to go next, because the dice rolls are too heavily stacked against enjoyment. If that same Elden Ring instead had a random enemy that wasn't normally in that area, it would be a novel challenge, but still possible to win. We need soloq to be more like that, than the random button disables it currently feels like.

SWF advantage - Yes like I said buried in my reply above, SWF's advantage does exist. The issue is that it is most often counterbalanced by skill levels between friends being varied. It doesn't matter they could call it out, if the weakest person lasts half as long in chase as the strongest person. As for matchmaking, this game has been so bugged I don't even know which system they currently use. At one point, it used lobby-leader MMR, so you could have a newbie queue as the leader to get free wins. At one point, they used the highest MMR in the squad, which leads to easy stomps for Killer. Average MMR is the best solution, because it is the most fair for all involved.

Are you saying Invocation of Spiders isn't intended, and thus reportable! I would love that. Sadly that isn't reality. All perks are 'intended' no matter how much of a grief it is for them to be brought. Also this was a counterpoint to the idea of the advantages of SWF, since if they were truly so powerful simply by being in the same Discord lobby, then surely 1 perk wouldn't prevent us from winning. You post did nothing to disprove that notion. If anything, you are admitting that you expect everyone to only sweat.

Agreed, there is no main stuff here, Survivor currently just isn't fun. I currently am comparing negative extremes to determine my fun for both sides. As Killer, I win, so I have no issues. As Survivor I lose, so the game has to be fun in the moment, not in the result. When I get bledout or a teammate gets bledout for the 4K in ~1/4 of my matches, I'm not having fun. When Killer perks/add-ons aren't revealed when I die early in soloq, forcing me to be held hostage if I want to find out what they are, I'm not having fun. When someone teabags at the exit gate, I can force them out, or get a cheesy kill. My main issues with Killer, are 'skill dif git gud', I can learn, and improve, and make up for my mistakes. My main issues with Survivor, are 'my team is always 1 throw from a loss', which doesn't feel good. No matter what I do right, I can't make a better decision, and my loss is artificially forced. I don't mind when I lose because I made a judgement call to risk the heal under hook, because I thought the Killer was going to stop the final gen from popping, causing me to be facecamped in endgame, as I took the risk and lost. The problem is most losses are 'Feng randomly decided to open a chest without chest perks, fail a skillcheck on a gen, then hide in the corner', or 'Mikaela decided not to take the safe unhook, forced a trade, then took a hit without trading, forcing the person into 2nd stage anyways', or 'Sable was in the lobby and you didn't lobby dodge against your better judgement'.

I find it more and more difficult to enjoy Smash/DBD matches, because there is too much sweat permeating out from every corner.

I for one enjoy that, the competition and competitiveness is what I play PVP games for, but I get you, if only to an extent. Again though, a properly functioning MMR system should mean you can escape the sweaty high MMR brackets simply by not regularly playing in sweaty ways and being fine with not winning so often. It doesn't force people to play hard to win, and if anything makes it less likely to face people that do if you don't.

Dowsey's MMR only skyrocketed because MMR was accumulating without MMR being used - I mean we still have the same conceptual issue now. People can still get that ultra high MMR, and they would have to wait hours for an actual accurate MMR match.

We don't have that issue now because of the MMR cap, that pools together players that win all the time with anyone that has won barely above half of their matches, maybe not even that. We wouldn't have that issue with a stricter matchmaking either, because then someone on a winstreak would face other such players, and likely wouldn't be able to keep up their winstreak for as long because of it in the first place, thus also not ending up with some absurd MMR value. But even if some of the absolute top players still could get into the hundreds of matches won in a row, again, I would simply make it so that the system only looks for accurate MMR matches for X minutes (perhaps even cross-region, to a point) before letting them loose to a more general populace again. I want a stricter matchmaking, not one that is prohibitively strict, and there are easy levers for that.

Less likely to have win extremes with stricter matches - Maybe if the game was actually based on 50/50 kill/winrates. The problem is the game is designed around 60/40. You can never really properly maintain 60/40 and 'fair' matches, because the system is designed to be unfair from the onset.

I don't see how them aiming for a global live balance of around 60% killrates takes away from the fact that a stricter top-end matchmaking/special rules for extreme cases of winrates/streaks could help combat those extremes, and yield actually competitive and challenging matches again, for high-level players in pubs. These are very exclusive pools, they wouldn't affect the global results much. Besides, if anything these things would help get closer to that desired result, as many of the players currently having 70-100% winrates would not be able to keep up those rates under those conditions.

Restrict SWF loadouts - This is poison to non-competitive gameplay. Now just because I played in a 3-SWF, I can't use both SB and Deliv at the same time, but if I played with only 1 friend I could? "Sorry Billy, you suck at the game, I'm just gunna play with Julie so I can still have fun with my perks."

You could still use SB and Deli, only someone else in your SWF group could not also use those perks when you do. Issues with making sure everybody has their builds adjusted accordingly could be solved by showing survivors' each other's builds in the lobbies, highlighting duplicates. And if people load into a match with duplicates regardless, they are simply replaced with random alternatives until only one copy remains respectively.

There are more than enough good perks to have everyone on good distinct builds, and fun builds too. Plus again, in an environment where SWFs cannot any longer stack and synergize multiple instances of like perks (and items etc.) and coordinate their use in multiples, BHVR would have much more room to make them stronger in their own right, which benefits solos that still can end up using multiples of them but also makes unique builds in SWFs more attractive of course.

Precisely for groups that don't get together merely to increase their chances of winning but to have fun with friends these loadout restrictions shouldn't feel bad, because they aren't looking to stack perks and optimize loadouts to begin with. And SWFs generally benefit greatly from being able to stack, synergize and coordinate builds in ways solos can't, and can put together downright disgusting loadouts. Playing SWF even loadout-wise will still be a distinct advantage over not doing so, even when having to have unique builds, because synergizing loadouts and coordinating the use of them in the match makes them much more valuable.

The strength of SWF is already counterbalanced by natural skill differentials in friend groups.

In some groups, sure, but not generally, not least because the skill differentials in random groups can also be immense. Although again, I am mostly concerned with the high end of SWFs that actually leverage its strengths and can achieve performance potentials that are comparably as unreasonable as the killer equivalent, winning 90+% of the time or hundreds of matches in a row without often even being challenged. But I would also welcome if these restrictions only applied in the high MMR brackets, or indeed a separate, "competitive"/"ranked" queue.

But I have already shot my shot and made a thread for it where I discussed it in more detail, and of course nothing came of it, they likely never even saw it. So there's no real reason to discuss this possibility anyway. Plus I mean, even things BHVR outright say they want and plan to do (e. g. bridge the divide between SWF and solo by buffing solo, specifically by supplying them with more info) take them years to implement, and then they often don't do much either. The only thing we really got in the regard of solo info sharing are the activity icons, which are nice, but not nearly enough to bring it anywhere close to SWF of course. There are so many obvious ways in which they could be improved upon but they just haven't been, in the soon-to-be 2 years since their introduction. Let alone all of the other info that could be shared. So yeah, it's borderline impossible we will see something like SWF loadout restrictions, even though BHVR knows perfectly well they are a reasonable balancing measure (they used this exact format for their Community Cup tournaments, where every perk/item/add-on/offering could only be present at most once in teams).

If that same Elden Ring instead had a random enemy that wasn't normally in that area, it would be a novel challenge, but still possible to win. We need soloq to be more like that, than the random button disables it currently feels like.

Maybe for a large amount of the playerbase a more or less completely random matchmaking like that would actually be preferable for that reason. But it definitely would not be for good players that are actually looking for challenging and engaging gameplay, which is what I'm mostly concerned about. In a random matchmaking they would only be even more likely to handedly win most of the time and able to win hundreds and thousands of times in a row. So yeah, a casual and competitive queue separation could really be something.