Plummeting player count

The game is actually relatively balanced when it's SWF versus killer. The game cannot be balanced around solo queue.

60% kill rate does not mean a 60% win rate. Others have explained it better, but don't get too caught up on that number. Most of the time, even losing games, a killer can secure 1 kill and 3 kills on a winning game.

See above. You're hyperfocusing on one number that doesn't mean quite what you think it does.

Didn't you say in another thread that you actually want BHVR to be survivor favored?

And yet outside of 2v8, my killer queues are nearly instant and most of the time have a 25%-50% bonus. Clearly there is no shortage of survivors.

Define 'win' as it pertains to killer. Show your work.

(Yes, I'm making a point here. BHVR have never defined what a 'win' constitutes for a killer player).

Also - this game has 3 'sides'.

Think of it like this. You can have solo versus killer, SWF versus killer or a mix of solo and SWF versus killer. Game is fairly balanced as SWF versus killer. You cannot buff solo willy nilly without completely breaking said balance.

BHVR have been adding in a ton of things to help solos, and I can't really think of much more they can do short of preventing suicides. Even showing equipped perks in lobby could go sideways with increased lobby dodges (which borks matchmaking).

I used to play daily. One of my favorite games. However, i like to master underdogs, so I mained ghostie. P100. I also am not out to make anyone's experience miserable, so if I'm playing and notice the survivors getting stomped, I back off and let them catch up. If I end up getting a lot of hooks at once, I'll hold off and let people get unhooked and reset. I also almost always give last hatch.

However, I have not played in over a month, now. Why? Every patch, they keep kicking the weaker m1 killers in the gut making them weaker and weaker all in the name of global killer nerfs and survivors buffs because 1 or 2 killers are problematic. Playing "nice guy" killer and getting more and more difficult to play. Now we have shoulder the burden which can all but guarantee that m1 killers won't be able to get any eliminations before the endgame if you're in that higher mmr bracket. M1 killers cant compete in the endgame with 4 survivors up unless using the cheap perk NOED.

Nurse and blight are such a problem, and instead of addressing them, they just mass nerf all killers or mass buff survivors to "fix it", but all it does is make underperforming killers perform even worse to the point where it's just complete frustration to play them. What is the effect of this design philosophy? Friendly/fair killers stop playing the game or swap over to being sweaty, or killers just stop playing the underperforming killers and we end up having almost every match always nurse/blight/wesker.

DBD is falling apart because the devs are heavily encouraging fair play killers to quit the game or otherwise play sweaty. That means all we have left are sweaty killers, excessive sluggers, and so on along with a small variety of killers to actually face.

In the end, playing a fair killer just isnt an option anymore unless you want to deal with 4 man teabags st the exit gate every match.

Here's an example of how I typically play.

Chess merchant made me quit playing survivor for about a month. The first incarnation of Bone Chill (snowmen that were a third health state for survivors and also bugged out a lot of killer powers) had me taking a similar break from killer.

My hot take for the longest time is pretty simple, and pretty beautiful, as it would only hamper the most organised and well oiled SWF, while hardly impacting fun-SWFs and absolutely not affecting soloQ. Perk up and listen to me wonder cure for the game:

• let every survivor see the other survivors load-outs in the lobby
• don't allow for duplicates within a SWF

Thats it. With this simple change everyone could guesstimate what the others are up to and maybe adjust accordingly or at least take a mental note, that that player has that certain perk equipped. And the most well organised SWFs could not abuse stuff like 4DH, 4 UB or even 4 Head On in liu with a Dead Dog map offering, while in the same vain only minimally impact the gameplay of run of the mill SWFs who only want to play with their friends. In my regular SWF we sometimes have some overlap, but most of the time we all do our own things, and if we knew beforehand, it would be easy to rectify. And soloQ players could always bring whatever they fancy.

Wait.

Hang on a damn second there.

Where did I say 'the kill rate isn't real?'

Double inverted commas mean that's a direct quote. So again - where?

Statistics are accurate but also give an inaccurate view of the whole picture here. Which is why I posted that often misattributed Disraeli quote.

I mean what I said. The stats are what they are, but the stats can be deceptive in isolation.

I'm not sure if you didn't really read what I said or simply misunderstood

Also - the term 'win rate' is meaningless for killer. Because BHVR has never specified what the killer win state is.

That has nothing to do with what I said. I only mentioned SWFs as a variable that contributes to the average, so I don't see what that has to do with my comment.

well… yes?

My entire point was that the stats do not force outcomes like people always like to argue, they are a data point that has a very large deviation in either direction and not "I will lose 60%/win 40% of my games" guaranteed.

I get that (including the edit) and I don't disagree with it. My comments were addressing a post that was trying to frame the 60/40 statistic as immutable. Basically correcting that each individual player will not uniformly fall into line with this statistic. There will be survivors who win more than 40% of the time, just like there will be ones that survive less than the average.

Ah, tomato tomahto. Yes, I meant it in that sense although I probably could have said 'it's quite easy for the killer to regularly secure 1 kill'.

I think a lot of people have started to wake up to the fact that if you stop enjoying something you should take a break. I just came back from almost a 3-month break. There are a lot of things, though:

-Breaks

-Slugging

-“Recycled” Killers(I genuinely enjoy Houndmaster though, I think she’s got a cool different power)

-Game not being playtested(the bugs are insane)

-Toxic player base 😭

It's kind of a boring Winter event tbh. I can understand why a bit bigger of a decline is more likely.

Why did you compare Peak for June 2024 to a specific moment in December 2024? Peak for November was almost 70k people, the decline is nowhere near as steep as you make it out to be. And if You compare to 2023, the game is actually perfectly stable, with an average of 31k vs 32k (last 30 days).

I told you what could be done but apparently you ignored it unless its in a different post that I didnt see. Make all info perks like kindred, bond and even Woo basekit. Those perks are not going to help players on comms much anyway. Also get rid of perks that are stricly solo que stompers like third seal. Add some sort of conversation system (not voice chat because that causes other problems). Essentially buff solo que massively until they are as close as possible to making the comms advantage of swfs irrelevant. Then if that makes overall kill rates go down too much then buff killer to compensate.

As for your arguments about how "killer doesnt actually win more" im not even going respond beyond this sentence becauae that view is either clueless or disingenuous.

We're not trying to balance the game for the top .0001% that literally wins a tournament, we're trying to balance it for the player base overall ( or at least we should be.)

Yeah see - it's that 'oh well' that stops this sort of discussion from being germane. Because it demonstrates that you don't really care.

'Just buff killers' doesn't work. We've done this dance before. It's not that simple.

I'm all for helping solos. But it cannot be done in a way that breaks the killer versus SWF balance. Survivors have a choice whether or not to group up. Killers do not have a choice whether or not to face SWFs.

I play almost exclusively solo queue as survivor (i don't have any friends who play dbd, so not much choice). While i mostly play killer, I don't really have issues in solo queue. What's the general issue? I feel it's the lack of communication with the other players, but generally, I feel that as long as you can hold your own and work to help the team, it isn't much of an issue. I go take protection hits, unhook, and so on. Heck, if I have a hook state to spare and someone is on death hook being chased, I'll go down intentionally just to get the death hook survivor time to get to safety. Sometimes I feel it's more like solo queue survivors just expect to go at it alone without interacting with the other survivors then everything falls apart because you essentially have two survivor teams working against each other.

That would be fine, and worth a suggestion. Good luck I guess.

As to the rest of it - yup. This is what I'm talking about. You're inferring a negative intent about half the playerbase because…uh…you don't like them I guess? Most 'killer mains' want a balanced game. Easy games get really boring really fast.

At the highest levels of play DbD is fairly balanced. The kill rate stats are misleading because it's easy to secure one kill and DbD is snowbally, plus there are a crapzillion AFKing or suiciding survivors.

If you want to see just how hard it can be for killers against good groups, go watch Hardcore Survivor or some recent tournaments.

Are there things that could be done to help solos? Sure.

Know what the biggest is? Stopping hook suicides. I promise you, do that and you'll see kill rates decline. And before you start up again, I can be the nicest, most chill and sportsmanlike killer you can imagine and I still see a hook suicide in at least a third of my games, which is an auto loss for the survivors. The problem isn't (name a thing), the problem is that people have a penalty free way of bailing on games when they might lose, or just because they might not personally escape.

I have people suiciding on first hook, at 3 gens, against Demo.

Demo.

This isn't a 'killer OP' thing, this is a design flaw.

Go watch some Otz streams and see how many survivors suicide in games that aren't just winnable, they were ahead.

Killers typically have a win rate that's higher than survivors. Survivors have win rates on average below 40%. However, typical killers tend to get win/draw/loss distributions that land around 50/20/30. But that can vary per killer, per player, and per MMR/skill level.

But the game is intentionally designed in a way so that killers are winning somewhat more often than they're losing on average.

I feel It really comes down to the quality of the survivors in question.

Like these here are all solo queue situations for me

And getting a 4 man out with a face camping nurse

https://www.reddit.com/r/deadbydaylight/s/iiPateoWPS

You may say something along the lines that, "well, the survivors i get teamed up with in solo queue doesn't work like a team like that." but once again, that's comes down to the quality of the survivors. You cant balance around people's willingness or lack of willingness to work together. While comms for everyone would be helpful, sure, if you have survivors playing to help each other like they should be, you're fine in in solo queue. The problem is less solo queue and more players deciding to actively not work together. That's hard to fix.

matchmaking improvements would be the best buff to solo queue.

other than the anti-camp bar and nerfing some killer perks that only exist to crush solo players (knock out), survivors have enough basekit info available.