60/40 kill rate to escape rate doesn't make it "killer sided" 60/40 balances the game around a 50% win rate due to how the math for it works.

I mean its just math. Basically, the game is not actually designed around a 1v4, in terms of MMR anyway, its actually 4 1v1s. And the devs are balancing the game around killers winning 50% of their matches.

So, if we write a simple python script to simulate game results assuming a 60% kill rate with say, 1,000,000 games? We end up with something like this: https://gist.github.com/Reinami/abbc3f0ad878bbfd0acf4b4ea9f44501

Basically, we are simulating 1 million matches, and rolling the dice for each survivor saying they have a 40% chance of escaping, and a 60% chance of being killed in this script. And doing that 1 million times and printing out the results.

This is what our result will be roughly (obviously slightly different each time but over a million matches its pretty much the same every time):

Killer wins: 474744 [0.474744%]

Survivor wins: 178979 [0.178979%]

Draws: 346277 [0.346277%]

Total Kills: 2400181

Total Escapes: 1599819

Total Possible Kills: 4000000

Kill Rate: 0.60004525

So basically, with a 60% kill rate, the killer wins about 47% of the time, survivors as a team win about 18% of the time, and about 35% of the time its a draw.

This initially seems unfair to survivors, but that's again, because you are looking at it from the point of view of a 1v4, when again, for mmr purposes, its actually 4 1v1s. So when you look at a draw, its a "draw" for the team, but the reality is, 2 survivors won, and 2 survivors lost. When you look at it from that perspective, the results show in total_escapes as being a 40% "win rate" for survivors (our 60% kill rate). But, the killer "wins" 47% of the total games.

It is a bit confusing, but basically, a 60% kill rate, means that the killer wins 47% of the time.

Now if you take the same script, and punch in a 50% kill rate, these are the results you get:

Killer wins: 312844 [0.312844%]

Survivor wins: 312156 [0.312156%]

Draws: 375000 [0.375%]

Total Kills: 2000955

Total Escapes: 1999045

Total Possible Kills: 4000000

Kill Rate: 0.50023875

As expected you get a roughly 1/3 split between killer win, survivor win, and draw. But you can see that the killer only wins 31% of the time. But, because a draw is still 2 survivors "winning" and 2 survivors "losing" there are significantly more games where a survivor "wins".

Now, keep in mind that this is looking at a simple roll of the dice. I think we can all agree that, statistically speaking, every kill a killer gets, the probability that they get ANOTHER kill increases. For example, if the killer gets a single kill, then it is more likely they will get a second, and if they get a second, its more likely they get a 3rd. What this means is that in reality, what you see is probably lots of matches where 3-4 survivors escape, and lots of matches where 3-4 survivors are killed, and less matches where 2 survivors escape. That isn't really possible to factor in without knowing the data BHVR has, but its likely enough of a factor that it changes the results here a bit as well.

Id also imagine SWF factors into this a bit as well, but again, without data directly from BHVR its hard to tell.

Then of course there is the hatch, which also comes into play here where a survivor escapes even though they still lost.

When you factor these in, it makes sense that you'd want to balance for a 60% kill rate, rather than a 50% kill rate, as the likely leads to matches being more even.

EDIT:

If you actually add a simulation of a 50/50 hatch, and then if the killer closes a 50/50 of which gate they get out of, this actually lowers the kill rate by about 2.5% without changing the wins/losses either.

There's a lot of incorrect math that kind of goes along with this.

The current issue seems to be presuming that the 40% survival rate means each survivor having an equal chance in each match. I think this was the first thread that really went on that.

Other variations are things like believing the game results occur in a bell curve or that all game results are equally distributed.

The problem with the math assumptions is that they don't reflect reality. We would need more data to know for sure, but last time I did a dive on the Nightlight stats a 60% kill rate led to a win rate between 52% and 55%, but its really dependent on killer.

You can criticize BHVR. You can call the game killer sided. I do pretty frequently. Keep it polite and constructive.

Go home OP, you’re drunk

super helpful - thanks!