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Survivor is no longer fun
This isn't a topic about balance. I'm not interested in which side you think is stronger, or what needs a nerf. The topic at hand is fun, enjoyment: jouissance.
Survivor is no longer a fun role.
Strictly speaking about how the role "feels", there is no joy in playing survivor anymore.
Being slugged on the ground for 4 minutes is not fun.
Watching a killer proxy camp you, only to immediately chase you and tunnel you out is not fun.
What was fun about this game was the reward of learning loops, pallets, timings. If you played enough, you were rewarded with learning how to get better. If you spent time researching how to play the different tiles, it then became a game of chess between you and the killer: who could better mind game a loop, who could better read the other player.
This is no longer the case, as most tiles have been turned into unsafe loops, where your best play is to force a 50/50.
Most killers are no longer even interested in looping, and understandably so. Why chase a survivor in a strong tile when you can tunnel their teammate out? Lower risk, higher reward.
I know this has been talked about ad nauseam on the forums, but the finisher Mori has really incentivized another really unfun aspect: you already lost the game, as it's just you and someone else, but now you're forced to crawl around on the floor so that the killer can watch their Mori.
Again, I'm not interested in the strength of any of the things I've mentioned — I don't care. I care about having fun, enjoying the game I've paid money for and spent a lot of time investing into. There has to be a way that BHVR can make the game more enjoyable for both sides, and that's what I'm interested in.
Edit: I'm going to compile the grievances that people post in this thread here, so that the feedback can be passed efficiently to designers of the game.
Compilation of Grievances found in this thread:
Survivors
- Being slugged feels uninteractive and boring (This includes waiting for the killer to find other survivor for finisher Mori, but also things like 4k slugging)
- Gen / healing / totem time feels like a slog and also boring
- Map Design
- Unsafe pallets discourage looping or more in-depth strategic play
- Massive dead zones
Killers
- Gens are being done too quickly
- Hooks do not have enough incentive when compared to slugging
Comments
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For me, the push to make everything take longer has led to survivor feeling worse. The pacing of the game is in a really bad spot right now. Your first gen is often going to be 90 seconds+Pain Res, minimum. And every killer has stacked slowdown, so you're looking at 110 second gens all trial, realistically. That's an absolute slog on top of all the other sit-and-watch-a-bar-fill actions like healing or totems. There's too much slowdown in the game currently.
It's too viable to grind the pacing to a halt and win via attrition. The vast majority of killers I face don't play for chases. They find the 1 or 2 weak links and focus on them. It's not that winning with chases isn't viable, it's that the game never forces killers to get good enough to do it. You can win other ways all while ignoring every good survivor in a lobby until the game is effectively over, which brings me to my 3rd point…
The role of survivor does not reward competency or skill. Even if you're a good survivor, your odds of escaping are completely determined by A: the teammates you were randomly matched with, and B: the killer's willingness to engage with you. Having a good first chase of the game? Congrats, the killer is going to walk away and ignore you for the rest of the match. Also, your teammates don't understand pallets, so you're getting 4k'd. SBMM btw.
31 -
Killers aren't having the best time either
10 -
Well you're winning the majority of your matches so stop complaining.
28 -
Everything you say is true but be prepared to be drowned out by masses of killer mains who like having the game rigged in their favor and will stop at nothing to make it even more so. (This was meant as a response to thrkeybs as well.)
Post edited by doobiedo on22 -
Solo survivor is not fun, and it hasn't been for a long time. Devs don't care, obviously most their revenue comes from swf and killer mains.
19 -
most of the "killer mains" you are referring to were in favor of improving matchmaking system to prevent such things from happening. Rest of community just said no because they want instant queues rather than accurate ones
11 -
To be honest when I was survivor main I found loops and sitting on gens boring. Circling around the killer shack with ease just didn't feel rewarding to me. I do find fun it going into survivor match with the mindset of "I probably won't survive but let's see what BP and goals I can get done, maybe get a few gens done and help others escape." My advice is approach survivor mode from a different angle, especially in soloq because you can bet other people in solo are doing adepts and totem challenges and other things. I find fun in that anyway
2 -
I walk into a restaurant that I know the steak will come totally butchered and not at all how it was advertised.
The server hands me a plate full of beets. There's no steak.
Do I continue going to that restaurant?
Do I force myself to keep ordering, hoping one day to get the steak?
Do I start changing my own expectations of what steak is, and tell myself that "tonight, I'm going to order steak but I'm actually going to hope I get the beets."
Listen, I appreciate you trying to make the best of a lack of steak — really, I'm not being ironic.
But I fear we've lost the plot. The game's core is about hunting and being hunted. I want to enjoy the core gameplay that was advertised. Making the best out of beets is honorable, but… give me the damn steak I ordered.
24 -
100% — and this is where I think the discussion usually takes a turn into killer versus survivor gameplay, but I want to zoom out and think a bit more imaginatively:
What if BHVR made the game more fun for both sides? What if there were design implementations where both sides get rewarded?
After all, this is a fantasy game, and literally anything is possible.
2 -
Increasing generator times to 90 seconds was one of the biggest mistakes they ever made. Holy guacamole the objectives in this game feel SO sluggish as survivor. If you're not being chased then the gameplay literally boils down to holding M1 for ~100 seconds x 5. It's absolutely mind numbing.
13 -
Exactly. The issue has always been map balance, but they slapped more charges on the gens instead. You spend so much of the game on survivor sitting and watching a bar fill. It's so boring that a lot of survivors won't do it, which means you have to be hyper efficient at watching bars fill to even have a chance. It punished survivors who already focused on objectives by making the most boring part of the game take even longer.
And funnily enough, they re-balanced Coldwind as if the gens were 80 seconds. Now you have 90 second gens with an L/T wall, a hill, and a stink pallet to work with.
20 -
Meanwhile your attitude on killer is: Must kill them all at any cost. Laser-focused on the objective while essentially not caring at all about the people you just suggested this to.
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my fun factor in playing survivor is tied to improving my chase and macro gameplay, meaning i won't really care about what gameplay style killer uses until it's bleeding out just in an attempt to be a jerk
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Everybody is going to have a different opinion on what the kill rates should be, so it's pointless to try to convince people one way or the other. The fact of the matter is that when kill rates were lower, killer numbers were way down as evidenced by the extremely long survivor queue times that we had. BHVR have decided that the sweet spot for balancing the number of killer players vs. survivor players in queues is a ~60% kill rate. If you don't like it, then I don't know what else to tell you other than 1) play a different game; 2) play in a SWF team where you get an unfair advantage from comms and your escape rate will increase; or 3) play a customer match against bot killers if you want to escape more frequently.
Unlike many who are complaining about the survivor experience, I actually play killer a good % of the time so I know what happens to the killer experience when the survivor side gets overly buffed. You get exactly what has actually happened at certain points in the game's history when nobody wanted to play killer. Survivor-only players often forget that there is a human being on the other side of the screen who also wants to have an enjoyable experience on a level playing field.
I know that survivor, especially solo queue, can be a miserable experience but it's not because killers are OP. It's because matchmaking is non-existent and unless you're playing in a full 4-man SWF, you're getting matched with other people on a completely random basis with no regard whatsoever for skill level. I have well over 2,000 hours in the game and literally every day I play, I will get thrown into lobbies with brand new players and it's not because of a lobby backfill. This is the real issue that needs to be dealt with, not survivor vs. killer balance. My solo queue matches with teammates who know what they are doing are usually pretty competitive and enjoyable.
3 -
One thing i would like to add to edgarpoop's true words.
Being the weak link is not always tied to the looping skills of a player. Some maps have simply gigantic dead zones after the two filler pallets are gone with two or more generators in it. When you got hooked inside these zone and you or your teammates don't have special perks for that situation you get tunneled out or you are just trading hooks with your teammates until all are on deadhook.
So i blame unbalanced maps a lot for survivor frustration.
22 -
Nope. Stop.
You're not actually reading this thread, and you're morphing the thread into a "survivors vs. killer" strength argument.
That's not what this is about — Yes, the two are related: your enjoyment in the game is tied to the strength of your opponent. But the purpose of this thread is to step back from that specific POV, and to think about how the game could be more enjoyable for both sides.
The current levers of balance that BHVR has used are limited to survivor & killer strength, yes. Incremental changes to perks, items, add-ons, etc. that change the way the game is balanced towards one side or the other.
But those aren't the only buttons they can push — the game can be radically changed in a way that both sides actually enjoy the game more, regardless of being in SWF or solo queue. And it's also not our job to tell BHVR how to do this, we can simply provide feedback that that's what we want, and let them do the professional work of adjusting their game.
15 -
Thats just how games are now adays
People will optimize the fun out of the game just so they can secure wins or complete them faster
Its not just a killer or survivor problem or even a dbd problem its an industry wide problem
Now in terms of dbd, Optimizing loops, optimizing check spots, abusing linked tiles, powerful items, powerful addons, powerful perks, stronger vs weaker killers, map offerings with catered builds and killers, the weaker something you use is the stronger you have to play to make up for it if you still want to win, it just happens to be that the best strategies are usually boring to the people who spent all that time to learn because its usually all dependent on the weakest link on the team not the strongest and unless you have a team of 4 of yourself killers of the same skill level as the strongest player in the lobby will almost always have a buffet starting from the bottom of a lobby.
Frankly some killers on the tier list just can't keep up under conventual "fun" strategy not every killer wants to lose so they could say they had a fun chase especially when they know if that chase ends at the exit gate its going to come with a heaping helping of tbags for their fun. Most dbd players don't appreciate if you go out of your way to do that stuff so there's almost no point in doing so unless you do it for yourself, and even then its only so fun to lose on purpose.
And as survivor yes pretty much unless the killer does one of the "forbidden sins" its usually easy matches against all but the highest tier killers or extremely stacked slowdown even in solo queue where you have teammates who are allergic to generators sometimes killer time efficiency is just rough.
Its not really about the strength of things anymore its about the mentality of the players, how they treat each other and "reward" each other for trying to be fun or skilled 90% of the time.
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It's been like this for years and it won't get better. Survivors are fodder in public games.
12 -
this is something that had bothered me for a while too. Killer games range from “this was the easiest match ever” to “I want to quit this game” with some in between.
When you go against a few people who started and get 3-4k each game instead of getting people who are around your skill level you get the ttv’s who use “making the killer quit with my insane blinding build” or the swf’s who don’t know the meaning of having fun.
I want to have fun as killer, and by that I mean having the game be hard yet fair enough where I can recognize my mistakes and improve. I want the same feeling as a Souls game where I can look back and say “oh, I should’ve moonwalked to hide my stain.” Or “if I used flight of the damned then I would’ve gotten a down.”
This should be the case for both sides, where you can learn from your mistakes and get better because of them. When your getting people too strong or to weak, people who use tactics where you can’t improve (slugging, blinding parties etc.) you can’t improve your play style so you have fun.
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Wow you started what seemed like an interesting thread but then totally lost the plot. The problem in the game on a fundamental.level is that killer players demand and unbalanced playing field and to win the majority of the time or they won't play at all. Many people always say it in threads like these "when kill levels were more fair killers stopped playing." I will always turn every argument about this game into an "us vs. them" that I can because that is the fundamental problem, that one particular side demands an unbalanced game. Saying "no, you're us vs. theming" again is just gaslighting.
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If you believe that a 60% kill rate is the game being "rigged" in favor of killer players, then it's clear that you're never going to be happy with this game. What is an acceptable and fun escape rate for you? 50%? More than that? Should survivors escape a majority of the time? What do you think killer players are going to do when the game becomes much more difficult for them? Oh yeah, probably the same thing they've always done in the past when escape rates were higher, which was stop playing the killer role and survivor queue times were ridiculously long. There is a custom game mode with bot killers if you want consistently EZ wins.
3 -
Okay got it. So 60-40 win rate is fair but 50-50 is unfair. Interesting. Why dont we try 55-45 and see how that goes. Oh only 10% advantage isn't enough? It has to be 20%? Interesting. Imagine any other game.where one side gets to.just demand to have the upper hand mechanically and then paint the other side that actually wants a more fair game as whiners and complainers.
14 -
I'm not saying what is fair or not fair. That's an incredibly subjective judgment and everyone has a different opinion or definition of what is "fair". The devs' definition of "fair" for this game is a 60% kill rate, for what it's worth. That's what they are aiming for with the game balance. Sorry you don't like it.
I'm telling you what happens when the average kill rate goes lower than what it's currently at (to be more "fair" in your view). The game becomes more difficult and unfun for killer players, especially against SWF teams which at higher skill levels already have a 50% or better escape rate, so killer players either switch to survivor role or they don't play at all. This isn't just my opinion - it has happened several times in the game's history.
3 -
Then find a better solution then making it unfair for the side that complains less. The only reason survivor players don't quit as much as killer players did in the past is because of the ability to go next. Maybe instead of falling back on a mechanic they pretend to not want survivors to use they can try buffing solo que to be closer to the level of swf with all basekit info perks or something. Anything is better than what they are doing now.
10 -
Ye lol a lot of killers are like me, I know, I been survivor main and still play survivor time to time. Hence why I play survivor in the way I do. I make my own fun, I don't rely on killers to play the way I want them to because I know that won't happen. They play their way I play my way, all have fun. I find going into survivor mode with the same head as I do killer mode is very stressful and not fun at all. So I change my mindset to make it fun.
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The devs do not call a 60-40 split fair. They’ve said it’s killer sided and that is intended.
15 -
I agree completely, friend.
6 -
This is very true. The tile distribution itself often creates massive dead zones. Reworked Haddonfield is a glaring example. Every corner of the map is a coffin corner.
14 -
The more we discuss this the more this feels like, at least to me, the biggest source of "unfun" in the game.
Since maps were redesigned, there's less emphasis on a survivor being able to outsmart a killer, or a killer being able to outsmart a killer, and it feels like you're just chum for shark bait. In fact, it feels like there's a straight line between map design and the other problems causing unfun things in the game for both sides:
Maps and tiles are redesigned to discourage looping
→ Survivors have few playable tiles & resources
→ Survivors only resource is then to focus on gens
→ Killers feel like Survivors are gen rushing
→ Killers avoid hooks to save time
→ Killers slug and tunnel more to become more efficient
= Everyone has less fun10 -
So how would this mindset help when you're being wiggled off/carried around just before you bleed out?
2 -
Maps are one contributor for sure, but almost all of the changes in the past couple years boil down to:
Survivors only resource is then to focus on gens
Maps made smaller, pallets weakened, tile spawn logic nerfed, more dead zones, perk nerfs, oppressive killer metas... The only real answer is putting more pressure to just do gens (i.e. "gen rush").
Any time survivors voluntarily choose to do something else, it gets complained about and nerfed or removed, leaving gens as the only viable gameplay.
Whenever an oppressive killer meta emerges (gen kick, 3 gen, camping, tunneling, excessive slugging, giga thrill) there's no comeback mechanic for survivors, so the only answer is to rush gens or basically instantly lose the game in some cases. People spent most of a year where if you didn't break the 3 gen immediately you just lost in a slow, agonizing, PvE game.
And if none of these factors are currently in play, then the go-to complaint reverts to "gens are too fast, nerf something". Which only ends up putting even more pressure on survivors to rush gens as the only possible gameplay.
11 -
High ping killers getting rewarded with bs hits is also a major fun killer.
10 -
Kill rate and win rate are not the same. A 60% kill rate is not a 60% win rate.
5 -
I think I remember seeing an analysis of how this often plays out. Iirc, it's like 50% wins, 20% ties, and 30% losses. That's only 30% losses.
Obviously this is going to depend on the distribution of those 60% killed survivors in individual games, so for specific killers that distribution of wins/ties/losses can vary. Not saying it's good or bad, but that's what I remember.
4 -
Posted without quote for post below this one. Couldn't add quote for some reason, so deleted :)
0 -
It's great when your feet are on the ground across a dropped pallet, sometimes with a stunned killer, and then afterwards you take a hit ;)
9 -
You can have a 60% kill rate with a 20% win rate. You can have a 60% kill rate with an 80% win rate. They are two different numbers and people should stop using them interchangeably. It’s disingenuous and muddies the conversation.
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”you already lost the game, there’s only two of you left”
This attitude in an of itself is a massive issue and contributing factor as to why the game has gone down the pan. There are still half of the team in play. There should be no way shape or form this should be considered a lost game.3 -
Swf is no different from solo q too, swf scan have frustrating experiences just like solo q, people need to understand that solo q and swf is playing the same role and that is survivor. Survivor as we agree is just hell to play.
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I think that would lead to a scenario where most matches are ties (2k) in order to preserve the 60% kill ratio. That would translate into a nearly 0% loss rate.
I guess you could also have 20% of matches leading to 4k, very few 3ks, and then more ties and losses than wins. Does the math work on that (I don't feel like working it out at the moment)?
Anyway, I think you're right that it complicates the discussion. Still, I think the number of matches that end in a 'win', 'loss' for each side is typically relevant to these player experience conversations.
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I think that’s the rub. Where does a 2k land? Do we have a draw rate that needs to be in the conversation instead of just talking about win/loss rates? If a win is a 3/4k only, does a 2k therefore count as a loss?
Ultimately though, as far as these conversations tend to go, one simply cannot conflate “kill rate” and “win rate” as some folks have done in this thread. They are simply not the same thing.
5 -
Depends on the situation. If I'm the 3rd survivor being slugged to find the 4th for example then I would wiggle free and run to the other survivor so killer can wrap up if they keep me alive and I can try another match. If I'm left to bleed then I crawl to the survivor and wiggle by the locker they are hiding in (they usually hide in a locker somewhere).
1 -
when escape rates were higher […] survivor queue times were ridiculously long
Source? I don't know who invented that claim and why it remains so popular, but survivor queues were not particularly longer in 2021, and killrate was 50% back then.
This is something you can easily verify yourself, search for "2021 dbd VODs" on Youtube, then pick random ones. The vast majority of queues seem to take less than 15s, arguably faster than today.
7 -
As someone that has around 80% playtime on killer: playing killer is a LOT better than solo survivor.
18 -
I just think the game is suck a cluster ######### of perks and addons, it has created a whole bunch of really unpleasant metas and killers have a lot of means to turn matches into miserable events you endure rather then enjoy.
Honestly some days are not bad, today has been a good day in the fog for me, all the sadistic weirdos seem to come out on the same days with what seems to be a primary goal of creating the most miserable matches possible.
I do feel very nostalgic for pre-2020 DBD, where it was still broken in some ways (and very janky) but it was also quite simple and less sweaty unless you were red ranks.
4 -
Its hard to make the game fun most of the time for both sides in an A-symm. It's the very nature of A-symms to where either side trying to win is gonna be boring for the other at least in most cases.
Also is unsafe really that bad? Doesn't it imply you need to make more correct reads to be able to play the tile. Also before anyone says anything I am not including the death pallet that is the midwich hallway pallet. Basically every pallet can be played to some effectiveness when ran right.3 -
it has never been fun. Too easy and boring (tasks related), and usually faced against absokute tryhard sweatlords who make the gameplay miserable
1 -
I hate to be this guy, but it's not how little you lose that counts. It's the way in which you lose. You did just as fast chases, used just as much strategy, and made as few mistakes as when you won, but because the survivors were fast on gens, they just get 3 out by default. It's got nothing to do with skill.
4 -
Yeah, because we want to win against good survivors, not just rely on them playing bad. That shows the game isn't balanced. We'll take super tough killer matches, which is what a fixed MMR system would give us, in exchange for the data from those matches being used to balance properly. That's what the devs did at one time. But for some reason it's fashionable these days to hide MMR to confuse people and inflate egos, so that everyone thinks they're top level as they're complaining about Wraith and Chucky, and BBQ, being OP and stuff like that. You can't even begin to have discussions on the game with most of these people, just because of that level of orchestrated confusion and forced benefit of the doubt.
4 -
My experience 10/05/2021 time from 22-00 to 23-00.
Survived 4 minutes.
Killer 40 seconds survivors all ready waiting. I assume lobby trade from other killers
Before that we had 2020 where the killer lobby turned into this
2020
While the old ranked system worked fine in 2018-2019.
2
