Why Do People Say There's No Clear Win Condition In DBD?

Well I've talked about this with you in another thread, but I'll try to lay it out in more detail.

1: The fact that people disagree about it kind of proves the point. Even if I say I have a win condition, and someone else has a different one, that shows there isn't a clear win condition.

I played a lot more of Deathgarden before I got into DbD, and the lack of clarity was even more confusing there. How many scavengers (survivors) needed to be killed for a killer win? Did it matter if they just hid until the timer ran out?

Basically if the win condition is super clear to you, and the win condition is super clear to someone else, but the two of you have different win conditions, well than the game doesn't have a win condition.

2: DbD is unique in degree of victory. Most types games you either win or lose (second place is just the first loser for example). Winning by a lot might make a statement, and is sometimes used as a tie breaker, but the win is the absolute most important thing.

The only thing I know of that I can compare DbD to is a board game called Diplomacy. In the standard version there are 7 players who are eliminated over the course of the game and the ultimate goal is to be the last player. However, most games don't actually result in a single remaining player, it usually results in a stalemate, a common one being where one player gets strong, but two players ally to match him in strength and the game cannot progress (quite literally the game deadlocks). In that case all three remaining players 'win', but they don't win as if one player had won the game entirely.

So in this game the conditions are clear - don't get eliminated, and eliminate everyone else. But what about all of the middle case scenarios that can arise? If you play over many games how do evaluate your performance? And how much risk/value do you put on trying to achieve a last player standing goal at the risk of being eliminated?

3: MMR confuses the issue more on the killer side. The killer has five possible outcomes (0k, 1k, 2k, 3k, 3k+hatch, 4k). 4k, 1k, 1k and 3k, 3k, 0k have the same overall MMR result even if a player might feel very differently about those mixes of games. The community definition would be a win and 2 losses vs 2 wins and a loss, but the MMR cares that the one win was a large win and the losses were small losses.

Win a lot and win a little are more statistically significant than the difference is in other games.

4: Win condition, singular, is different than win conditions, plural. We're back to degrees here. If there is more than one thing I consider a win condition, and I accomplish some, but not all of them, then we have an unclear thing.

5: On survivor side the way people play the game can not be boiled down to a single win condition. Survivors, who have a guaranteed escape will risk it to go back for a hook, but they also won't blindly run into a suicidal situation.

If the win condition was escape, nothing else, then the other survivor is pointless. If the win condition was total escapes at all costs, then survivors should try to rescue no matter the almost certain death (as happens in comp sometimes).

What we have though is not a win condition, but different things of value, your own escape and the escape of other survivors. Different players value them in different ways. This is a departure from most games, where players differ on strategy (how do I accomplish X objective), but here players differ on strategy and goal (how do I accomplish my objectives, and how much value do I attach to X and Y).

When I first started playing the game, I thought the Killer lost if one of the survivors escaped from the trial. The entire purpose of the killer role is to prevent survivors from powering the exit gates and leaving. Back then, one survivor escaping meant that all survivors won, as it was a team effort to get that one body out of the trial.

Then I discovered Twitch.TV and downloaded my new opinion from the Internet. :)

That's a good question. I think I see DBD more as an experience in a way somewhat similar to survival mode RPGs. In games where the entire goal is survival, I see the outcomes more like the outcome of a dangerous situation in life: I wouldn't say I won in a terrifying life or death situation; I'd say I lived.

And as killer, I don't have equivalent life experience since I'm not a murderer, but I see killer matches the same way: I don't feel like I'm winning or losing; I'm sacrificing or not sacrificing. So as killer, I just feel like I'm doing a job. I can do it well, but I usually don't think I win or lose at my job. And honestly, from my perspective, my most important job as killer is to give the survivors a good match. If they escape and feel like they didn't have to work for it, I think I didn't do my job.

As a result, I don't see most of the game in terms of winning or losing. That's why sometimes on these forums, I'll put 'win' and 'loss' in quotes :)

I think the clear win condition for Survivor is to power all the Generators/Exit Gate and escape. The clear win condition for Killer is to stop that from happening at all costs. Do new players know these things?.. Probably not.. BHVR needs better tutorials to show newer players how to go about those things. "When" is it a good time to hide/unhook/do Gens/Heal. "Why" should I do a Gen/Heal? "Which" Gens are more beneficial to do at the moment? Those kinda things.

The problem is DBD still just throws everyone in expecting them to know what to do, because if they like the game enough, they'll just look it up themselves. I've always hated that developer mentality.. The "we want it to be crazy and you never know what's going to happen" answer is another way of saying we don't want to put any more effort into it than we absolutely have to.. :/

Cause there is no clear win condition. Proove your point.

Its an elimination game on the survivor side, while having multiple "degrees" of winning and losing on the killer side. Survivors can have their win con be determined by how many survivors escape regardless of themselves, just themselves, just their SWF, hatches do/don't count, etc. On killer side if you go off of MMR strictly, then anything less than a 4k is at least partially a loss since each survivor that escapes won in the individual matchup. Pips and SBMM's implementation do not directly correlate, so even that becomes nebulous as well (dying while pipping, getting a 4k while not pipping, etc.) People can make up their own down to even just completing a tome or daily challenge, if thats all they set out to do and they accomplished their goal.

It doesn't translate to many other games because most games are very clear, like your overwatch example. Many games are explicitly clear whether you win or lose, and both teams have symmetry for a zero sum game: All wins are balanced by losses to create a perfect whole regarding outcomes. If DBD had something where survivors won universally based on how many escape (group based outcome result) then it would be a start toward a more structured win condition definition. Same with if Pips/Emblems were removed, degrees of winning for killer were removed (which many people do in their personal wincon definitions, ala the win/draw/lose based on kill totals) potential draw variables removed or reworked (like hatch,) and shared agency in outcome were introduced those would be steps toward making it more solid. Elimination games are hard to define in this manner, as are asyms, so a game that has both while half dipping into two systems that don't directly correlate is basically asking for confusion among the userbase.

Kinda, yeah. The biggest point of confusion comes from the game having three different systems that work at least partially different all giving conflicting feedback: Pips, Survival/entity approval, and MMR (which has pretty much none, aside from assumptions based on the previous info paired with fringe cases like hatch or DCs.) You can have all 3 line up, but when they don't the unifying concept of a singular win definition becomes split.

Its not something you have to think about with most game design, since the outcomes are usually much more both binary and mutually exclusive like you surmised.

Payload is a good thing to use as a comparison, though I've never played Overwatch I'll go off payload modes I've played in other games.

Payload, especially with ranked, gives each side a turn to push. The win condition is not to push the payload to the end, that's the objective, the win condition is to do so better than the other team does. That win condition cannot be applied to DbD because its asymmetrical, both sides aren't doing the same objectives, there's not as clear of a line where one side outperforms the other.

Which is a huge difference between 'winning' and 'having objectives'.

Additionally, its how the game is laid out. Imagine if a game had payload, but when entering the player choose to play attacker or defender and each side had unique characters. Further, let's say pushing the payload to the end was a relatively rare feat, and that the game creators assigned varying MMR totals based on how many checkpoints where past. At that point players would begin to ask 'how far do I have to push the payload for it to be considered a win'.

To comment on the idea of multiple people having differing ideas, how would you control for some people just flat out being wrong?

Community, creators, singular goal.

1: Community - if like 95% of the people were playing the game toward a certain goal, and the other 5% where doing something different, easy to say they are outside the norm. But when they split into a variety of groups and desires, you don't have a win condition.

2: Creators - If they literally say 'this is a win, this is not a win' sure helps, but BHVR has explicitly avoided doing that.

3: Singular goal - If the game has a goal that only one side can achieve. Comp has this, win objectives are clear, which team outperforms the other along stated metrics. Payload - who pushed the payload farther or faster. Team Deathmatch - who killed more of the other team.

The generic DBD goal is Survivors have to escape while the Killer has to sacrifice them. This is how the game is generally advertised.

Going any deeper then that and it becomes debatable on so many factors that it becomes very opinionated. The most generic one many people use is,

0-1k a loss
2k a tie
3-4k a win

This is based on killer sacrifices and team escape. Individual win conditions can be a huge variety of things from bloodpoints, challenge completion, hooks, fun, etc. Comp also has it's own rules.

There is no real in-game win condition. Just a generic goal to work toward.

If the entity tells me it doesn't "hunger" on my screen than I feel like I did well. Its a win for me haha.

However, I have matches where the survivors all escape, but I had everyone on death hook. I dont beat myself up over that either.

Send 3 survivors to the entity. Its a win. I do think the entity wants all 4 though.

Take this with a grain of salt because im killer biased.

In the first two years of dbd, killers only considered 4k a win ( like you said, only a 4k gets rewarded and lesser results got mocked by the game: "prtty killer" etc).

Then survivors started a constant stream of downplaying killer desire for 4k and conditioned/gaslit killers into considering a 3k a win too, even if the game doesnt reward it. (Similiarily in current time, survivors keep telling killers 2k arent a loss.)

Now as for topic tax:

3-4k are wins for killer, other results are losses. 4k still more desireable due to actual rewards.

Survivors is easy: escape = win, death= loss

Survivor team rating doesnt exist, so there arent ties or draws. A 2e/2k isnt a tie, but 2 players winning and 3 losing. Theres no survivor team to tie with the killer.

Mostly we feel its a personal choice and maybe to keep moral up somewhat. Some like us can get a 4k as killer but if its not amusing/exciting…we dont feel we won or at best its a pyrrhic victory. Others only get happy at the 4k and anything less is unacceptable. The devs have mmr rise at 3-4ks for killer yet we still get a happy entity at 8 hooks 0k so what does that entail? Theres room for interpretation and people take it.

As survivor its more simple, if you ignore oddballs like us who are happy to die a hero and consider it a win if successful, but moral will drop fast as you can easily and repeatedly "lose" due to many factors out of your control. Potato teammates, tunneled to death, farmed to death, complete counter to your build, running the killer forever while the team doesnt work, etc.

You either have fun or you lose. Dbd has too much RNG elements to ever be taken too seriously.

I came into dbd in 2021 expecting to lose 95% of my games so I've always tied my win conditions to my personal growth. But for arguments sake, I've always considered a single survivor escaping as a "win" on the survivor side. Sure, when I play killer i too consider that a "win" but these are 2 different sides so I don't feel it's too odd to have different standards. I'm not ashamed of calling myself the champ by dying and getting one solo random out

because the only thing that "defines" a win condition is the mmr system.

but the game doesn't tell you how to win. it just tells you what you are there to do: survivors repair gens, open exit gates and escape and killer interrupts survivors, downs them and kills them.

i can get that, in the enclosed scenario of a trial, 4 survivors escaping is a win for the survivor TEAM and killing all 4 survivors is a win for the killer because they are the opposite ends of what the outcome of a trial can be. i might accept those as a definitive win condition, even if nothing proves it. but, everything in between is hard to classify because mmr says that a survivor escaping alone is a win for the survivor, and killer should at least get 3 kills to "win", even if there is nothing other than mmr to indicate it.

but is it really a win for a survivor to just open the exit gates and leave without staying behind to help, turning what could have easily been a 4-man escape into a 1-man escape and 3 deaths? is it a loss for the killer to get just 1 kill but the 3 others survivors escaped on death hook, injured and almost didn't make it to the exit gate at the end? there's nothing at the end that tells you that you "won" or that you acquired a "victory" other than a phrase that reiterates your fate in the game (you escaped/got killed/got sacrificed or you fed the entity well/the entity hungers…).

people take this game too seriously, especially killer players. altruism is normal between survivors because a lot of people play with their friends and want to escape together for fun so it's not sweaty to stay behind when they can already escape to try to help a friend that's in trouble. they don't do it to get a "win" against the killer, they do it so their friend doesn't feel bad for getting killed (getting killed too many times in a row really mines up one's morale you know). on the other hand, killers do slug the second to last survivor for no other reason than catching the last one and mori one of them in the end, which is sweaty af. the hatch mechanic is there for a reason, just let it go and let the last survivor have a chance at their escape, you already "won" anyway according to mmr…

because unless you are really really bad at the game, you will most certainly kill at least one person each match by playing fair. and getting bm'd is not an outcome, you just have to try to ignore it. also, even bm is worse for survivors because killers bm usually comes after the killer already has a way to end the match, but they decide not to and let you bleed on the ground while humping you, wasting everyone's time. survivor bm is like "i click click my flashlight and/or teabag from afar trying to get your attention or annoy you after throwing a pallet". even if they just stay on a door on egc, egc is shorter than a bleedout timer, and you can always go there and make them leave, getting some extra points in the process if they let you hit them. i'm not saying it's ok, i'm just saying that it's not as harsh as what a killer can do in a bm situation. and if you don't want to be told anything on end game chat, just click next.

also, you mostly suffer as killer against coordinated swf that try to make your life impossible (i've also lived it on the rare occasions i decide to play killer, but i don't like it because what stresses me is missing plays that i feel would have worked against me if i was playing survivor more than the bm). with survivor you can suffer from the killer AND your own team unless you are part of a coordinted swf. so yeah… i can get why some killer players with thin skin can get stressed by survivor player's actions, but i genuinely believe that survivor players have it worse.

so the last survivor doesn't surrender the moment 3 people are dead. also, a last survivor that gets a hatch escape may maintain their morale to keep playing while not demoralizing the killer who already won. so yeah, i think it is positive that a survivor escapes via hatch even if it doesn't affect mmr.

in matches where the killers steamrolls the survivors kills 3 before 2 gens are done, this doesn't look like the survivors belong in that MMR bracket. They might benefit from taking the loss, lowering the MMR and going against easier killers. Maintaining the current MMR via hatch against skilled killers won't do them any favours. Maybe this is why so many survivors are struggling, been maintaining MMR via hatch instead of accepting the match as a loss which results in people hiding most of the match not doing gens and basically waiting it out for the hatch because it's easier than doing the objective (gens)

To add to my post.

MMR is just a means to grant a fair match. To increase or lower your MMR is just to adjust matchmaking so matches are not lopsided. Raising your MMR is not a win. At some point your opponents will not yield positive MMR score even if you kill all 4 or escape. When your MMR gets too high it becomes increasingly harder to gain. Does that mean you are doom to lose?

Kill and escape are ways to conclude the match. They are the only legit way in doing so. The game loop end once all survivors are dead or escape. Thus bringing an end to the match. How you performed during that match is what matters. You can kill all 4 in seconds but that is not valid from the game's persective. At least not today. You can hide all game and jump in the hatch but that too doesn't make you the victor.

I believe what brings confusion for most is that the "win" condition has changed a few times in dbd's lifecycle. Remember, a pip determines the condition. But what is a pip? At first, it was bloodpoints. Not kills nor escapes, simply how much bp did you earn that match. It's been awhile but I believe anything under 7k was a depip and above 10k was a pip. (Don't hold me to that.)

Then for killers the Victory Cube changed the condition for pips to (basically) hooks states. You must get 9 hooks states to pip. You can see why killers got in the mindset for kills equals wins.

Now with the Emblem system the win condition is based on how well you played your roll. In the lower ranks/grades it is possible to pip without escaping or killing any survivors. It is only when you move up in rank/grades do the condtions for winning (pip) become harder. By gold you cannot easily win (pip) without killing at least one survivor. For survivors, escaping cannot be the only goal and you must go for saves, get in chases, and interact more with other players. By the time you get to Iri you must perform exceptional to meet the winning condition (pip).

I feel if you let the herd of players playing the game make a decision like this, you'll get different answers on what a 'win' is.

BHVR needs to be better at these simple, very normal things about a pvp game. I mean we can't even agree on what a 'win' or 'loss' is. I enjoy your posts, Jester, but the fact this post needed to be made at all makes me just stare in BHVR's direction.

I had this debate the other day regarding defining a tie, and I struggled to find the correct words to articulate my point of view (I dont believe a 2man escape is a tie from the killer perspective, as you failed to hold the gate). Very eloquently put, and thank you for giving me the language I needed to express it 😁

But it's still weird, 'cause this system implies that both the killer and survivors can 'win', to a degree. How can a game with fundamentally opposed sides see both parties as a partial winner?

So the thread has gotten me thinking about this a bit.

Have you ever seen one person play multiple others in chess at the same time? Like one person playing 4 chess games simultaneously. A DbD trial is kind of like that, 4 individual games happening at once.

In the chess example, how does the person playing others rate their performance if they win 2 games and lose 2 games? And if you are on the other side, how do you rate your performance if you win your game, but the other 3 lose? You won, yes, but the person you were playing was severely handicapped.

Now, there are differences of course. DbD is actually designed for a 1v4, whereas the chess example above the 'one' is either considerably more skilled or just imposing a challenge on themselves. But that's how MMR works. The 'trial' isn't the game, there are four individual games, just as the chess example is 4 individual games happening at the same time and how you rate the overall performance is up to you.

Things would obviously be clearer if MMR was team based on the survivor side, but BHVR has designed the MMR to be like the chess example. But MMR is invisible, so whether we worry about it or not is totally up to the player.