Statistics on Gameplay Balance

Sounds more like a personal matter to me or perhaps you need to change character as well. Not to mention it sounds like you were playing solo and not SWF which more times than not makes a huge difference. Change your playing method and your perks and if need be character. Hell even stake out the killer at the start of the match rather than going straight into a gen.

The problem with statistics like this - and equally marth's "depip squad", and the like - is that you are not getting data actually useful to "measure" gameplay balance; this data is only (somewhat) useful to indicatively say a few things about rank balance. Which, most people know that getting to rank 1 on either side is just a matter of time, not of proficiency, and that thus the skill disparity at any rank is "imbalanced".

Similar to marth's squad, there are killer players in any region that get 3 to 4 kills 80+% of the time, at rank 1. Some of them streamers that you can follow and watch 3-4k at rank 1 consistently, hours on end, making survivors look hopeless. How? Because they are some of the better players at the game, with thousands of hours of experience, knowledge and skill, and they regularly go up against players that don't even match theirs when combined.

In order to actually be able to derive from data meaningful things as far as gameplay balance is concerned, you need to have a competitive premise that is met: all 5 players on the server need to have a comparable amount of experience, knowledge and skill; all 5 players on the server need to be aware of what it is you are determining balance by, and try their best to fulfil their side of that equation (which in DbD terms to most people means number of escapes, where the game is considered balanced when two survivors escape and two other survivors do not). I'll ignore other formal and technical competitive premise stuff like latency, framerate, and such.

My guess is, if you do run tests in meeting that competitive premise, the statistics will show the game to be noticably survivor-sided, still, because generators are just getting done too fast, but it will be decidedly less skewed than marth's statistics, for instance. It will also be in dependence on killers, maps, perks and items and add-ons as well as offerings used, of course, but the fact of the core gameplay balance is that gametime as determined by generators is just too limited for killers to consistently get 2+ kills, if the survivors diligently do generators.

The fact of the game reality however is that the majority of players is not that good, on both sides. A lot of survivors do not repair generators diligently, or efficiently at all, hardly last half a minute in chases, make bad decisions in save scenarios. A lot of killers do not utilize tunnelling, slugging and camping properly or at all, do not chase efficiently or otherwise manage time well. There are of course degrees to which players are better at some of these things than other players, but the ranking system just pits them all together. So, as a group of four good survivors you will do well against average rank 1 killers, just like as a good killer you will do well against average rank 1 survivors. To put that into perspective: If even just 1 survivor is noteworthily more or less experienced, knowledgeable or skilled than the killer, the competitive premise is all but out of the window and the game result is not a meaningful measure of core game balance.

Since DbD is not an esport with a distinguished pool of professional players, and since the ranking system pits all kinds of players with wildly varying levels of game experience, knowledge and skill against each other (as well as wildly varying levels of even building and playing to "win" (which is, survive vs. kill)), it's really hard to say what the game should actually be balanced for. The game at its core is certainly survivor-sided, but with the landscape of actual, average gameplay, adjusting the game too strongly with that in mind could very possibly make the actual, average escape rates end up being lower than what is considered balanced. As BHVR's presented stats have shown, the average escape rate is already slightly under two across all ranks, and all killers - to be fair, this is months ago and disconnects factor into this unfairly, but it is still indicative of the fact that in actual, average, day-to-day gameplay, the game is not as severely survivor-sided as people make it out to be, at all. Hell, the statistics they've released have in the past regularly shown that not even 20% of rank 1 survivors even use perks such as Sprint Burst and Decisive Strike - the by far most impactful survivor perks in the game (Sprint Burst certainly was, before the Exhaustion change).

So, yeah, balance is a fickle thing to come by in a game like this, but it is hard to determine what to even balance for, when the competitive premise of the core game is hardly ever met, in actual gameplay.

My opinion, for whatever it's worth, is that the game should be balanced around rank 1 escape rates, excluding games with disconnects, aiming of course for an average of 2, and keeping in mind that some killers are much deadlier than others (and potentially, hopefully buffing those weaker killers...). The vast majority of the playerbase is not rank 1, but they are also vastly less affected by any balance-relevant changes. The regularly-playing rank 1 minority develops a metagame around the actual, average balance, and are the ones that benefit and suffer from anything that affects core balance at least more-so than players at any other rank.

Double-post due to permission stuff.

Triple-post due to permission stuff...