Why are nerfs seemingly quick to be dished out, but buffs take ages when it comes to killers?
Honestly, it seems that as soon as Nurse's 'small tweaks' were posted a few months back, a sudden influx of 'nerf Spirit' threads popped up. One month after Nurse's nerfs went into effect, Spirit was hit. Agree or disagree with them, that's pretty quick. Why can't we expect the same when it comes to buffing 'underperforming' killers the community has been asking for, for years? Trapper, Wraith, Clown, Leatherface, etc? To the same degree, why not spend a chapter focusing on balancing maps?
Comments
Because only killers want a killer buff, while survivors want a killer nerf. Long story short: survivors>killers
BHVR is too scared to buff something cause when they do, its too OP or they are scared of making a viable killer
But too lazy when it comes to nerf and end up band aiding everything thinking its okay.
I think they are scared of backlash and constant whinning, it's why alot of the killers are pretty underwhelming imo.
Buffs are harder to do, because you need to take care that a Killer will not end up too strong. Nerfs are easier, both Nurse and Spirit will still be good Killers. To be honest, Spirit-Nerfs cam also pretty fast, would not have expected that (and to be honest, I would not do Nerfs or Buffs to any Killer, when the PTB is full of people testing the new Killer).
Furthermore, if you buff a really weak Killer and he is still garbage, this simply looks bad. Just imagine new Freddy would be as weak as old Freddy. People would laugh about BHVR.
" To the same degree, why not spend a chapter focusing on balancing maps?"
Because it is easier to push out new content and nerf certain Perks than to look for the actual problems....
TBF Spirit had been complained about for longer than 1 month, this wasn't a spontaneous complaint that got traction overnight.
BHVR has mentioned many times that whilst they take complaints into consideration, they don't make changes on the basis of those complaints. It they did, Killers would instantly die for Camping/Tunnelling/Close Patrolling/Mori-ing/etc.
I agree on the spiri nerfs. I definitly disagrrr on the nurse nerfs. After so much time i really thought BHVR would do the right thing, nope, they nerfed her basekit for some reason.
because this is a game made for survivors to have fun.
It's easier to nerf something than buff something, it's that simple. If something gets too nerfed sure it's unfun and weak, but it doesn't break the game in the way that something overpowered does.
Sadly I think this is the correct answer. With the introduction of cosmetics and the other monetization, it simply makes much more financial sense for BHVR to ensure the survivor side is happy with the game rather than the killer side. Because in every match there are five customers, and only one of them is the killer.
This is why we see sweeping nerfs to killers much more rapidly in comparison to seeing buffs. That and the upper management at BHVR seems content with making money off the game but not improving the team working on it. IIRC someone posted here or on Reddit that DbD is a top 30 game on Steam. I'd imagine it's popular on consoles too, and there's a mobile version. It has to rake in a lot of money. Yet the team working on it is still so incredibly slow, the amount of time it takes to get stuff done is just baffling. Even Turtle Rock was way faster when Evolve was alive and kicking.
Because if something is too weak players still have a ton of options, you have 71 perks for survivor and 17 killers and 63 perks for killers to chose, IE: imagine 1 survivor perk sucks a lot, like No One Left Behind, it just makes people avoid that perk, there is still a lot of disparity in builds and a lot of choices it leaves you with 70 options, same with killers and their perks.
On the other hand, imagine you make something super super strong, like old Mettle of Man (or even stronger), everyone picks it, it leaves you with 1 option (either you use it or you gimp yourself by refusing to use something way better than other choices), disparity suffers greatly from everyone picking the same perks and same killer over and over, it makes the game dull very fast.
Disparity suffers most from superstrong stuff than weak stuff, another example is fighting games where in a roster of 30 everyone picks the same 4 top tier characters and executes the same cookiecutter combos it gets very boring very fast.
Cause underperforming isnt as nearly as the same issue as overperforming.
Cause Killers are not statistically under performing.
Yes stats are not everything.
But why should they buff killers when it seems like they are already too good in general?
Im talking from a dev perspective here.
Its an asymmetric game, it is hard to balance, small nerfs can work as bandaid fixes while the devs work on reworking killers