Why I believe Pipping Shouldn't be Considered a "Win"

its a pretty stupid thing to debate about why would I care if someone says I lost but I feel like i won because of my own standard. Like everyone says theirs no "defined" win condition its not as simple as sacrificing or escaping because you can still depip if you only focus exclusively on that. I agree with the "its a win if I had fun" because with all the toxic dingbats trying to ruin games for people its a treat to have a game thats a good cat & mouse game and a few ggs at the end.

@NuclearBurrito

na I just like grinds. thou this games grind isn’t so bad. If they gave people the items and perks removed the grind I’d probably stop playing.

Doesn't answer the question. Someone playing their first game can't have BBQ nor any BP offerings without paying real money.

If right now you went and bought a new account and played a game with the wincon you just gave me then you would lose no matter what.

You should care because the idea of a wincon is more important than you are giving it credit.

In any PvP game a wincon is required in order for the players to have a thing to compete in.

A wincon is also the basis for both strategy and balance and without a wincon both of those are both meaningless and impossible.

Since Balance is inherently tied to the wincon that means you need to design everything with that wincon in mind. If you change the wincon without changing the mechanics then you will end up with vestigial mechanics that just get in the way of the experience.

So you should care and I do care because those wincons influence both how players act and how the devs make changes on a fundamental level.

@NuclearBurrito

not really saying what one should be as much as just saying how I see it. there’s time for rank after all perks are unlocked on all killers / survivors

Anything claiming to be a wincon thus must be able to fulfill those 3 functions.

If it can't then it isn't accurate to say it's a wincon.

If we want to go that route then I'd say a better example (not that yours is a bad example) is that it's possible for all 5 players in a game to double pip.

That means there is a strategy which if everyone uses it will have a 100% winrate and is also completely cooperative, thus using the pips as a wincon breaks the game once optimized.

I feel the same when I go into a game with a spookin' time mentality. For me the game has it's set rules but I feel this game has a set of subjective win/lose conditions. Depends on the person. From what I've read a lot of people really seem torn on what qualifies as a win or loss. Maybe with this new lore coming up they can make something more concrete?

Either way I think the "Entity displeased/pleased is as accurate as I need it to be as a killer. As a survivor, from a lore perspective, I feel I'll always lose regardless. In a way as killer too. It's never ending, live or die, you come back for a new game every single time. So I might as well make the most every game!

Though.. I definitely feel the killer gets the better end of the stick lore wise. Gets to keep going 'till the end of days!

"winning in an asymmetrical game involves a multitude of conditions beyond any one player's control, thus serving to create game which are impossible to achive a simple arbitrary win condition. Let's making it based off of scoring, so that the win condition is slightly more maliable to the circumstances of a game's twists and turns"

"nah pipping isn't winning only a perfect win for either side allows them to win git gud scrub"

..to be fair, the pip system is still pretty piss poor in a lot of situations at gauging a player's individual contribution. its possible for all 5 players to depip in the same game.

This is supposed to be a PvP game. So I can absolutely use the properties of a PvP game in order to make claims about this game in particular.

Wincons are required for PvP as an inherent property of what PvP is. Not having a wincon makes something not PvP even if it otherwise would be, and having a wincon can make an otherwise PvE game become PvP even with identical mechanics.

Mario maker is a good example of that in action.

I didn't say the presence of a wincon always makes something PvP, just that specific wincons do and that the absence of a wincon makes something not PvP, even if it otherwise would be.

I brought up mario maker because it has a cooperative and competitive multiplayer mode which differ only in wincon outside of a few specific minor details.

As for Sea of Thieves that game is not a PvP game. It's an open world sandbox like minecraft is. And like in minecraft you can stab someone and take their things, but doing so is something you do for purely optional and internal reasons. The game didn't tell you to fight, you haven't won anything beyond accomplishing some literal set of outcomes, and the game doesn't need to design assuming that 2 players will fight, just under the assumption that they CAN fight if they happen to chose to.

In most (but not all) cases this applies to MMO's as a whole, and the most common case where it doesn't is self contained duels which DO have a wincon (Kill them first).

Regardless though, predefined or otherwise all competitions have a win condition as an inherent property of the wincon. It doesn't have to be just 1, but while there doesn't have to be a winner there will be a loser. If a set of people conclude that everyone can win and work to make that happen what you are left with isn't a competition. But ultimately the thing that makes something a competition is that 2 or more parties are working of achieving mutually exclusive goals. Thus without mutually exclusive goals it's not a competition.

So just make it where it says "Killer/Survivors win(s)"?

I think if you spend time trying to convince others why they really haven't won, despite them considering it a win, then you're doing nothing more than wasting your own time.

It's next to meaningless whether or not you win in a video game. If the devs really cared about defining winning and losing, they would have done so by now.

One of the reasons why it is so difficult to declare what is winning and what is losing in Dead By Daylight is based on its inherent non-competitive design, and I hope we can all agree on this - DBD is a casual game, which can be played with optimisation in mind, you can be competitive, but still that's not enough.

You win or lose a competition, but what if this competition is not fair by design?

Well, now you need to establish something else as a goal to tell yourself "I won" - that is in fact "I achieved my goal".

Subjectively, everything can be a goal: do the daily rituals, escape, never get hooked, or even... have fun - whatever it means.

This is totally fine for casual players, but as I said there are competitive players, even if the game is not. And that's where convention is needed. A tournament could have its rules (I remember a TydeTime tournament where the sum of the bloodpoints of the two teams was the win/loss condition), but since we are playing public games there are basically two conditions to meet, considering that survivors work as a team, while the killer is a slave of the entity.

Survivors - help the team survive as much as possible

Killer - please the entity as much as possible

For a survivor that wants to "simply escape", maybe by hiding, not doing generators / being chased / save fellow survivors, it's obvious this goal is not met at all, and that's why objectively to survive is not by itself enough to win.

A killer that camps hooks and even manages to 4k, but without chasing (...instilling fear in survivors) or multiple hooks, is a bad employee for the Entity. It wants more, it's a sadistic being, and that's why to simply kill survivors is not enough to win.

The pip system tries to solve the dilemma: even if your team gets annihilated, if you as a survivor did your best to help it out, you'll still gain good emblems, and pip. You did your job.

Similarly a killer that is able to hook everyone multiple times, chase them a lot and delay gen progression, will receive a pip as a gift from the magnanimous Entity, even without 3-4k.

But here's the thing, is this objectively winning?

No.

The reason being: if every survivor do well, and the killer does well too, every player in the match will pip. In other words: every player in the match should win, and this is impossible by definition - a win implies there's a loss somewhere.

Moral of the story - objectively you can't really win or lose, but you can help your teammates or make the game difficult for survivors, which are the fundamental goals of the game.

To me, the game tells me i won or lost when it tells me i won or lost, a.k.a. the message that appears after the match does the fade-out, but before the scoreboard appears.

I mean, I go by "3-4k is a Killer win, 0-1k is a Survivors win, 2k is a draw." Seems about as straightforward as you can get.

Yes.

I mean, why not? It's like saying it's not really a win if all you did was spam Hadoukens.

And if you genrush and all make the escape, you demolished the Leatherface (by that system), no?

Devs are allowed to be wrong. ;)

Lol sounds like you had a game with a braindead killer saying they won just because of their points/pips or something (which I find annoying). I'd say I agree with you. Some games I feel very proud as far as doing diverse tasks or just helping my team in something they need done quickly, then the endgame screen tells me I didn't do well with my pips. To me, if I saved someone at the end of the game and died or helped the team escape, then I feel like that's a win.

The current ranking system tries to control playstyles too much.

The most important category for ranking up should be escapes and sacrifices. You can’t play stealthy generator mechanic anymore as survivor, you wont pip.

Killers with instadowns have a much harder time ranking up as well, you have situations where you 4K with five gens left but don’t pip. What the [BAD WORD]?

One by camping? Perhaps. Two by camping after the gens are probably done? Different story unless Survivors are bad. There is a reason Leatherface is considered a bad Killer.

Besides, worst-case scenario, we can legitimately target camping in ways beyond "Camping? Harumph! We're gonna punish you in the worst way possible: TAKING AWAY POINTS. OOOOooooOoOooOoooOOoOooOo"