Visit the Kill Switch Master List for more information on these and other current known issues: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/kb/articles/299-kill-switch-master-list
We encourage you to be as honest as possible in letting us know how you feel about the game. The information and answers provided are anonymous, not shared with any third-party, and will not be used for purposes other than survey analysis.
Access the survey HERE!
Balance around high ranks and force low rank survivors to get good.
With the amount of safe pallets and windows on most maps, I think it's pretty obvious that this game is balanced around lower ranks. If I had to put a number on it, I'd say it's balanced around rank 10 (late season). What separates low rank survivors from high rank survivors is that low rank survivors do not conserve pallets. For instance, low rank survivors will often times throw down a pallet right after being hit. At high ranks, the survivors will save the pallet and simply take the free sprint burst and run to another loop. Low rank survivors will also throw down pallets for the sake of stunning the killer, even though they could have looped it. In order to account for the fact that low rank survivors don't conserve pallets, the devs have added more safe pallets than there should be, when you factor in windows as well.
The problem is, this completely breaks red ranks for most killers not named Nurse, Spirit, and maybe Billy. I get that most survivors are green and yellow ranks and it makes financial sense to balance around them, but from an ethical point of view, I think it's bad to coddle lower skilled players for the sake of profits. At the end of the day, Behaviour Interactive is a business and the goal of a business is to make money. What BHVR is doing is not illegal, but I think it's unethical.
Comments
-
"Alienate the player base so bad killers can 4K regardless of survivor skill".
ok buddy.
17 -
I would rather prefer that they added further objectives for survivors in ranks below 10 assuming balance is around rank 10 :)
2 -
We need separate game modes. Unranked, Ranked & Hardcore.
Then the devs can balance around red ranks, instead of rank 20.
11 -
What if they did this and a lot of survivors just quit?
0 -
Alot already are quitting
9 -
The majority of the player-base is low ranks, if you center it around the higher ranks you'll basically single out the majority over the minority.
Its a messed up evil, but a necessary one. When it comes to the majority not being as skilled as the red ranks they have to do this. They're fixing this stuff though, so things are more fair for high rank play, and still thinks about the majority.
7 -
They can't do it in a one for all scenario as it is now as the majority wouldn't do well enough and the grind would be even bigger due to lack of bloodpoints.
The only feasible way it to seperate the ranks more and make it so each bracket is balanced for what it is.
Make it harder to derank from a bracket and also give decent rewards for ranking up so it's actually worthwhile.
0 -
Add Unranked because the majority of peeps are not high rank for some reason :/
0 -
You can never have a balanced rank system as long as SWF is allowed to exist, unless voice chat is added to the game so that advantage is removed
7 -
Lower ranks see a lot of tunnelling and camping from killers so they might need those safe pallets more then then the higher ranks not needing them. Nothing is more likely to drive away players then being camped out of the game after really long match making times and not a whole lot of game time. Also how do you balance around people who purposely de-rank to bully new people.
0 -
Honestly they should just listen to feedback instead of making rushed decisions
0 -
This is not an eSports game,
This is not an eSports game.
I repeat, this is not an eSports game.
6 -
Losing because the game is tilted against you is not fun.
6 -
The devs announced during the year 3 devstream that theyre gonna rework the maps to reduce the amount of "safe" pallets and instead, bolster the amount of mind gameable pallets. I forsee this greatly improving gameplay for all killers who dont simply see pallets as an obstacle to immediately break, but rather use these unsafe areas to score hits on BEFORE breaking the pallets. Thats the difference between good and bad killers. Good killers can accuratly assess a situation to determine if they can score a hit from it, while bad killers feel like they have to break every pallet on the map. Im seein this working VERY well for Clown.
3 -
I know it's not. You know what else is not fun? Any aspect of this game at a high level.
Honestly, think about how the optimal playstyle for survivors is right now. Spreading out, not interacting with the killer, holding M1 and leaving.
Until that changes, there's no point trying to balance at the highest level. Changes like map reworks are obviously well granted and necessary, obviously, but those are already happening. Thing is, the "highest level" of this game is probably 0.5% of people playing optimally. Even good players don't like playing optimally as survivor because it sucks d.
This game needs to be able to call itself competitive BEFORE balancing at the highest level.
2 -
It's easier to change the optimal playstyle if the game is balanced beforehand, since you'll have a better understanding of how your changes can impact the game.
0 -
I can kinda agree on that, it's more of a question of semantics. Because I'm not sure you can call changing the way the game is played merely "balance". It's more of a "game philosophy" thing.
For all the hallmark eSports games that are fun, engaging and interactive at the highest level and have healthy metas overall (MOBAs, fighting games, you name it) it's very reasonable to balance mostly around the highest level and expect the players to improve.
I'm not sure DBD gets in that group of games without serious changes though. No one wants to get good if the way the game is played at the highest level isn't fun.
3 -
The entire game concept at the moment is schizophrenic.
If this game should be a fun, interactive horror game it needs some changes in the gameplay and would lean into "Last Year"
If it wants to be a competitive horror game, with competitive gameplay at it's core it needs to be balanced at the top with separate queues for SWFs and casual play. If they don't want to support 3 gamemodes and throw it all into one pot, we need to balance the game around SWFs/voice.
But right now we have small cashcow ready to be slaughtered.
4 -
I'm not calling it that. However, if you manage to properly balance a game (on purpose, not by random chance), that shows you understand how it works. The act of balancing provides information that can then be used to change the meta.
PS: I think the existence of metas is bad for a game because metas are boring in and of themselves, so we'll have to agree to disagree on the "healthy metas" bit.
2 -
But competitive games will always develop metas. As long as good players are playing the game, they will emerge.
I'm not a big fan either, especially when they're too restrictive or last for too long, but if we want a competitive game, metas are just a part of the package.
0 -
You do realise that this game doesn't have 500k people playing at any given time to support 3 game modes?
3 -
Metas are part of any multiplayer game, competitive or not, which is why I usually avoid them like the plague.
Also, just because you design a game to not be competitive doesn't mean it won't be. If you want a multiplayer game where balance issues won't make people quit, then it needs to be co-op only. If it's PvP, it needs to be balanced to be fun, period.
1 -
Adding voice chat won't do anything but up the toxicity, randoms simply don't coordinate as well as swf can or synergise perks not to mention it hurts those without a mic or simply bought the game who don't want that option and the majority are solo with no chat afterall.
Can you honestly ever see the devs removing SWF from the normal play mode? They have never talked about it it is always buffing solo to try and close the gap.
At this stage it may as well be conceded that the game will never be balanced as some would like it.
Post edited by twistedmonkey on0 -
Bad idea. VERY bad idea.
Who do you think pays for BHVR to have lights on in their office ?
The NO-LIFE and NO-JOB hardcore player who sits inside his/her room all day with 5000 hours of playtime and no income to spend in the shop.
or
The casual gamer with a job and disposable income that plays a few hours a week if any and purchases some cool skins.
2 -
You guys do need to realize that balancing for top ranks doesn't mean ignoring the other ranks.
There are ways to make sure that a given change will effect some ranks more than others. And no I don't mean by changing the game rules depending on your rank.
Basically there is just one assumption you need to make:
High level players will do what is optimal while low level players will do what is easy.
So if you can identify what is optimal and what is easy, and then balance both of them up against each other (optimal survivor play is balanced against optimal killer play and easy survivor play is balanced against easy killer play) then you have a game that is balanced for the high level but remains fun at the low ranks.
For example, if a Killer buff makes the game too hard for low ranks, then that means we need more mechanically difficult interactions or more punishment on failing existing interactions.
The Legion change is a good example. Specifically the stun he gets when missing an attack, an Optimal Killer will never be stunned by that, however a new Killer will often misjudge distances and miss. Thus this change will mostly only effect low to mid ranks (yes console is an exception but still)
Another approach is to buff low skill actions but keep them worse than what the optimal outcome is. Such as making good skill checks give a 1% progression bonus or reducing the failed skillcheck penalty.
There is also QoL changes that make things easier to execute without changing the mechanical interactions themselves. For example the ghostface change that made detecting him easier to pull off. Or the indication addons for doctor and nurse. Plus a number of subtle UI things that make it easy to know what is doing what where otherwise only the high level players would have that information. These changes don't effect the balance of the game but still will improve the performance of low skill players.
However, none of these tricks will work for the higher ranks. The only thing that will make the high ranks balanced is just making a balanced game. That's why you need to balance around the high ranks, because low rank suffering can be fixed independently.
5 -
I mean.. based on the achievements on Steam: 3.8% of players get to rank 1 on survivor, 2.1% on killer. Only 9.4% of survivors get to rank 10, only 5.5% of killers too.
Dead by Daylight has had a 75,044 player peak. That means:
- 7054 Rank 10 or higher Survivors
- 4127 Rank 10 or higher Killers
And in those totals, only
- 2851 have ever reached Rank 1 as Survivor
- 1575 have ever reached Rank 1 as Killer
All this against, in that 75,044 total, 67990 people who have never reached rank 10 Survivor and 70917 who have never reached rank 10 Killer.
I'm comfortable saying we should rebalance around purple ranks, so people can push to be better, but expecting people to have to 'git guud' to the level of people in the top 1% of hours invested is a lil bit crazy.
2 -
You definitely have the right mentality.
My only problem is that optimal play for survivors at high ranks is boring af and I'd like that to change.
As long as it becomes less optimal to spread around, rush gens and ignore the killer, the game could be good when balanced at the highest level. Otherwise it becomes impossible to balance the bad killers to compete at high ranks without making them pubstompers. Map pressure creates too big of a gap between killers.
3 -
@ElusivePukka
Expecting people to "git gud" and balancing for red ranks are not the same thing.
This is a multiplayer game so as long as there are people at most ranks at any given moment we don't need to worry about that.
All we need to do is make sure that both sides have a roughly equal difficulty curve.
After all. If high rank survivors have a higher kill rate does that mean that high rank killers have a lower kill rate? Or in other words as you get better at killer your ability to complete your objective is going down?
If the game is balanced then the escape rate should be roughly the same at all ranks, because Survivors who are better at escaping will be facing Killers who are better at killing and vice versa.
If we succeed at doing that (or at least getting close enough) then why would that mean low rank survivors would have a problem? They are still escaping trials often since the Killers they are facing won't be using their tools as well as the high rank Killers.
Raising the skill cap for Killers or lowering the skill cap for Survivors doesn't break the game at low ranks.
Now of course there is a bunch of issues with the ranking and matchmaking systems themselves. But that's a separate (although related) issue.
0 -
Also peek player refers to active users and not total uses (otherwise that number would never go down)
Since red ranks players likely stick around longer than any other playerbase, that means that the 3.8% (which is out of the total player count) of players represent far greater than 3.8% of those 75,000 players.
0 -
I would like for the game to be balanced around high ranks, but I seriously doubt that will ever happen.
0 -
Balance needs to be around optimal play. Focusing on players still trying to overcome their mistakes only broadens a gap when they actually improve. Balance backwards from a perfect game and then your only imbalance is between the player's skill.
4 -
I was about to say something similar as only 26% of all DBD owners raised a character to lvl 25.
4 -
My only question to all those complaining about balancing is how long you guys been playing the game. Ive been playing since mike first came out. Before Franklin's. Before slow vault fast vault only. Before insta blind bulb. Before double pallets were removed. Before exhaustion was a thing. Before broken was a thing. Not just survivor. Machine gun build on Mike or phil. Go play about that time and I'll be here waiting for you to congratulate the devs on the balancing they've done. The recent patches to mettle of man shows they are working. And as stated before its not an esports game. Its one of the last couple CAAUAL games i truly enjoy playing. And i think its just fine lately with the variety of builds, characters, and experiences.
4 -
Not gonna happen when only 5% of all killers and 10% of all survivors have managed to get the rank 10 achievement. The developers are focusing in the area where the majority resides.
0 -
I would of expected that to be much higher on the survivor side and this is probably taking data from before updates to make ranking more difficult. I also expect a decent amount of those rank 1's play both killer and survivor.
0 -
"For instance, low rank survivors will often times throw down a pallet right after being hit. At high ranks, the survivors will save the pallet and simply take the free sprint burst and run to another loop. Low rank survivors will also throw down pallets for the sake of stunning the killer, even though they could have looped it."
I've seen good high rank survivors waste pallets too.
0 -
Remove Ruin as a perk and add it into the game until all totems are broken, or not. It could last until the gates are powered and still be balanced.
0 -
"it was worse before" doesn't mean anything in this discussion.
In fact, it only means that they CAN do better if they want to, so we should always suggest improvements and complain about what isn't right.
3 -
Thats a dumb ass comment you guys are all the same. Its pretty ######### funny you guys will never be pleased. 2 pallets per map.... Oh man d strike still needs improving lmao. They can do better. Fact of matter is if your a good survivor or killer you wouldnt be complaining. I never have when you complain about design more than bugs shows your #########. You CAN go play something else if you complain that much. Say Friday the 13th. 😆
1 -
Those saying the game shouldn't be balanced around high ranks is BS. You want the players base being bad while the good one smash them(so called deranking). High ranks is not fun for many reasons.
2 -
This just reeks of "git gud"
I admittedly don't play the game a lot with my higher rank friends because I know I'm not good at looping or 360ing or any if that, so I'm an easy kill and end up dying first unless the killer is tunneling my friend who IS good at looping for 5 minutes. As someone else said, low rank killers have a lot of people who tunnel and camp and it turns a lot of people away from the game. I have a few friends who I tried to get into the game on free weekends but they didnt like it because the game has a steep learning curve and getting camped doesnt make the game fun to play even with friends.
2 -
@gambit92
Couldn't I use that argument to counter ANY balance change request so long as the game has had at least 1 balance change?
How do you differentiate someone complaining about a problem and someone complaining due to lack of skill and someone who lacks skill complaining about a real problem anyways?
Since all 3 of those are possibilities at least in principle.
Simply claiming that the game has a problem doesn't make you bad at the game. And being bad at the game doesn't make what you say wrong, at best it's fallacy fallacy and at worst it's ad-hominum.
0 -
Just because I only kick you in the balls half as much as before doesn't mean your situation is good.
1 -
Why balance around high ranks when only 10% of players ever makes it past rank 10? Sorry to say it but no sane person would ruin the experience for 90% of the players just so the other 10% can have fun.
0 -
Balancing around high rank is pointless when rank has no meaning. The only thing this accomplishes is making the game less fun for new players which is a bad thing for the health of the game overall
2 -
Balance is not a zero sum game. You can balance for high ranks while making sure the game is balanced at all ranks. In fact, that's what normally happens when you balance games at high ranks. What you can't do is balance games at the most common rank and then expect it to be balanced anywhere else.
2 -
There’s a lot of mechanics that low ranks don’t use right anyways. They could start by balancing those.
3 -
They want too balance the game around a Quick Match based game, but they don't have a Quick Match Mode. If they had a Ranked and a Quick Match mode this would be solved. I agree that they should balance the game around high ranks, since ranking is the only thing that is in the game too play, but they won't since they want it too be easier for people too join, instead of easier for people too learn.
0 -
You're just wrong. Name one game that has a ranking system that doesn't balance towards the high ranks? LoL does it, Overwatch does it, Heroes does it, most people will balance towards it, as they should, and people should know that you have too learn too get better, not just whine and cry and get what they want because they don't know how too conserve pallets.
2 -
Even games that don't have a ranking system eventually have to balance for high level play. The difference being that those games can take much longer to do so without problems. The reason being that as the game ages the player base gets better and better.
Take the game throne of lies as an example. When the game first came out one of the teams was far stronger than the others, however their winrate didn't reflect this because mistakes meant more for that team. As the patches went on and on high skill high reward became nerfed as the playerbase was more able to fully utilize those mechanics for far too much power at far too much consistency, and thus many nerfs and buffs later you have a game that is relatively balanced for high ranks despite not having ranks at all.
Considering that this game DOES have ranks, there is no reason not to balance around those ranks.
0
