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Trickle Down Balance Philosophy
Hey folks! Today I'm gonna be making a short post for discussion on top level play, DbDs skillcap, and the balancing ideas from this.
Top level play currently favors survivors, while low and mid favors killers. This can be fixed using trickle down balance, balancing around top players.
If say for example NOED or DS is balanced at top level play, it WILL be fair and balanced at other ranks. This applies to individual killer powers as well, such as spirit.
Dbd doesn't have a particularly high skill cieling/cap. Infact, it's pretty low compared to a lot of competitive games but it isn't non-existing. I genuinely believe it IS high enough to encourage the devs to please balance around the best players, not the middle.
When you balance around the middle, lower players are alienated and the top level players abuse it to all hell. (BT, Spirit)
What do you guys think, no feelings involved, about devs fully realizing the much suggested idea of top level balance?
Comments
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This makes sense, but the devs don't care.
They believe they know best and will continue to ignore feedback in regards to where the focus of balance should be.
It's a shame that they deliberately make the game increasingly frustrating to play for both sides.
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That's just flawed logic. Noed is pretty damn balanced at high level play because any form of coordination or just basic understanding of the game can remove it entirely, but it's horrible for lower rank players who can't rely on their teammates to do one totem apiece.
A killer that requires expert plays and specific perks to evade at high ranks, but can be beaten, can completely steamroll in the midranks because not everyone runs Iron Will or knows how to perfectly dodge grass while leaving confusing scratch marks.
Dota for instance is a game where they balance almost exclusively based on the pro players, and it's pretty evident that you end up with "pubstompers," heroes which excel in both pickrate and winrate in public games, and yet they continue to be buffed because they aren't as reliable against expert players.
DBD is not an esport, it's competitive but not in the sense of an actual "competitive game" to be ground for ever higher world ranking and such. It's far more casual than that and should be balanced as such.
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It would definetely help the game.
IMHO survivors have too much power if they use it correctly and killer's stuff is tier worse then that but that's talking about highest level of play.
I don't like the idea of nerfing stuff like they have been doing for a while and instead I'd love them to take a starcraft 1 balance strategy. Each side has some ridiculously broken stuff but it balances out because every race has some of that cake.
In dbd I'd love for them to take the most unbalanced maps off the map pool and fix them before they come back and then start to buff perks and tone down existing ones. DS would be fine if it only prevented camping but survivors do all kinds of risky shits with it to abuse it.
Ormund, the game, all of the maps with long loops needs changes and for gods sake don't give them to the same guy that made them to balance it as he clearly has NO CLUE WHATSOVER about how the balanced map should look like. Multiple connected loop tiles and long loops will be abused to hell and beyond by good survivors and frankly ignored by everyone that isn't that good. That is strenght of the experienced player which devs don't do anything about which increases differences between the ranks.
If only that would be taken care of devs wouldn't need to specifically choose between one and the other.
Final conclusion would be to balance for the highest level of play but after the field is levelled by terrible map design. If that ever happens game would be in much better state regardless of new perks and balance changes.
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I agree with you and you use good logic here. The devs prolly don't care about this, as "2 Kills and 2 Escapes" is there balance, which they are at mostly. Just too bad that 2 kills depips you at high ranks and Survivors have a ton of power at those ranks.
Overall good idea, but it will get ignored.
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You make a simple mistake here - balancing around high level play means that you're operating under the assumption that people will strive to play better. Dead by Daylight occupies a twilight niche in-between competitive and party game such that it is hard to balance around either without losing population and thus $$$.
Balancing around the higher levels of play is a bad idea, because it would mean nerfing survivors as a whole (by assuming they're playing in a coordinated, play to win mindset) since they're quite strong then buffing/nerfing killers in comparison to that. This will kill the game because A. if more people want to win competitively, they'll want it to be in their own hands and not in a teammates, so they'll queue killer = huge queue times and B. Solo survivors (a lot of the community) not wanting to play in a game that's balanced around SWF. If solo survivor is buffed to be equal to SWF, most killers would quit by the time the devs buff killers to par, because they honestly work quite slowly and don't address the legitimate concerns of balance in the game - thus, if solo survivor was buffed to be on par to SWF, the amount of killer players at such a level would dwindle to the point of killing the game before they got the balance right.
Balancing the game around a party-game level is also a bad idea because we have a ranking system. Rank means nothing right now and will likely continue to mean nothing because the Killer rank system is flat out contradicts playing efficiently and the survivor rank system is Freelo which means being r1 survivor is a joke.
Not to mention this whining of "survivors have been nerfed from the beginning" which is a load of bull. I want to put a stake into the heart of this "survivors always nerfed" argument because a ton of the nerfs that they have had are clearly needed. The game used to have double-window or pallet tiles with guaranteed fast-vaults, and killers vaulted at a greatly decreased speed. Just look at the game years before and you'll see how absolutely awful it was to play killer vs survivors who knew how to loop. The survivor "nerfs" have been warranted as the average survivor realizes how much of a killers' time they can waste of they play semi-consciously.
The worst part is, based on these forums, a lot of people play this game as a party game with made-up rules like "let someone live for free"...etc. With a vocal part of the community playing this as some weird RP chatroom with no chat, or some strange party game, it'll never be balanced competitively at the expense of them. People are just plain bad.
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trickle down balance works about as well as trickle down economics
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Agree the devs should take a look to other compatative games such as overwatch etc, they can handle those things good and can change their meta ladders really well. Dbd is still a "new" game because the most of the devs are new to this game because the company AND the game is still growing ALOT.
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The problem is it doesn't look like it's growing but rather staying in the same spot of repeating old mistakes and bandaiding them over and over again.
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"If say for example NOED or DS is balanced at top level play, it WILL be fair and balanced at other ranks."
I don't follow the line of logic here. Why is this a given?
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Trickle down balance sort of requires a more widespread competitive culture in the given game, which DBD lacks.
It's also a game with a lot of things to keep in mind while balancing. Like the whole 1v1 / 1v4 aspect, leaning "too far" in either direction can be a bad thing. Original Legion was balanced from a data-driven 1v4 standpoint because Legion wasn't always that good at killing all the survivors while playing the moonwalking/franks mixtape singleplayer game, but basically took the entire 1v1 aspect of the game and threw it in the trash. A lot of perks and items are balanced from a 1v1 viewpoint but get more powerful in a very non-linear way when stacked by several survivors.
To even attempt to go for a hardcore trickle down balancing approach the devs would basically have to declare a "correct way to play the game" and balance around that. Balance around SWF or SWF-tier information and communication and players that play solo or don't want to communicate with others get left behind, balance around solo and you run into the impossibility of actually doing anything about SWF advantages. DBD is a game people play in all sorts of ways. Solo and SWF, aggressive and "immersed", altruistic and egoistic, defensive killer play or constantly getting into new chases, and all the different playstyles different killers specialize in. And while someone's playstyle might attract criticism from those that enjoy a different one, they're all valid and not "incorrect" ways to play the game.
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you know.... you right.
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Balancing for the top? You're clearly baiting the scottjundians.
lol i always love that party game argumentation. Ever played mario kart or party with friends? Heh, "noncompetetive" my ass.
And there isnt any nonpubstomper in dbd. The potatoes get mashed regardless if its a nurse or trapper. Theyre just that inexperienced or stupid.
A game shouldnt be balanced for people who have no idea what theyre doing.
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Totally agree. The fact that you can have a bunch of different builds and playstyles that are all at least somewhat viable is one of my favourite things about DBD, and I would hate it if they threw all that out the window in favour of perfect balance.
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That's my question too.
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No doubt it has it's drawbacks but I believe it's better than balancing for the middle of your games elo. Look at games like Overwatch where they do just that. Like OP said, people ABUSE the living hell out of everything and anything in that game that is broken if you are good enough to use it. This just leads to matches in higher elo consisting of only certain heros because they might suck for middle players but they have something that a good player can absolutely abuse without worrying about devs removing it.
In a game like DbD we need to balance around the top players because if we don't then we just prepetuate the killer bullying system we have now. Who PLAYS KILLER TO BE BULLIED BY SURVIVORS? Why is that even an option in the game lmao
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Generally speaking, all games that are "competitive" in any way balance from the top, and then the rest of the potatoes it doesn't have much of an impact on either way.
Since DBD has one mode and it's called "ranked" you can say that it applies to this game.
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This is an issue with the community, not the game. We NEED to either
A. Balance around top level play.
B. New mode, unranked.
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Ok, so what you're saying is that Nurse should be nerfed further, since god Nurse players still do well on her and we're only balancing around them? Oh she's not fun or strong enough then? Git gud?
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The problem with trickle down balance is that 1) things don't scale how you think, and 2) DBD has a lot of variables in the equation.
Like just having the basement spawn in a certain spot, or getting a good totem location can change the outcome of the game. It's hard to account for that at ALL levels.
Stuff doesn't scale linearly. NOED, for example, is very strong for low-mid tier play but a bad perk for high tier play. The reason being high tier survivors know where to look for all the totems, and they know how to loop which makes NOED less effective when it triggers. Baby survivors panic and die because they just don't know how to handle it.
It's not a smooth transition either. NOED goes from overpowered to almost worthless in a very tiny period along the survivor skill curve. Like it's literally almost like a step on the curve, where the bottom step is OP and the top step is not a good perk.
DBD is too different from other games to apply these sorts of balancing philosophies. Just the asymmetrical nature alone makes that hard, when you throw in RNG and the wide variety of builds it becomes it's own beast.
I also think there is a limit to the trickle down balance. Overwatch is a good example of how this type of philosophy can actually hurt the game. Sure it's balanced well for high level play, but it kinda sucks for everyone else. While you want to eliminate the overpowered/broken stuff at the highest level, I honestly feel like that's ALL you should do. Once you start to balance the game around these players you lose the core audience.
A better idea would be a "two steps back" philosophy where you aim to balance around the good players (not the best) and then just fix the outlying issues for the top players where there are problems. I feel this would do a better job of handling the core audience, because the BEST players in the world DO NOT make good game designers. They can identify flaws in the core design, but you shouldn't be listening to them because they want a very particular version of the game that doesn't jive the the general player base.
Case and point, Gears 5. The devs brought in pro players to give design notes on the game. What ended up happening is they basically ruined the core experience. Sure it might work great for them, but a lot of veteran players didn't like the changes, even the subtle ones (including myself). It's just kind of a mess of a game. They HAD a great design framework from Gears UE. It was balanced for high level play, but still a great experience for the core audience. They could have made very minor changes to the design of the Lancer to make it a bit more user friendly (ie. it's a very strong weapon but only if you know what you are doing with it), and added new features to expand that design. Instead they basically scrapped EVERYTHING including all the design work from Gears 4 and just went in a totally different direction with trickle down balance that made the game feel like total #########. Like I was pretty happy with Gears 4 competitive tuning. If they just boosted Lancer and Gnasher a bit it would have been fine. The pros can still play a highly competitive game, and the normies get their game too. Gears 5 was made by competitive players for competitive players and everyone else had to eat a big fat ######### sandwich. It's bad design at the end of the day.
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