A Circle Shaped Hole with a Sqauare Peg - DBD design
What do you need to do as a killer to win?
If you were to ask a new player that, they would say hook people. If you were to ask red rank killers, they would say create Pressure. What is Pressure? We will get to that in a second.
What do you need to do as a survivor to win?
Do gens. That's it. As long as gens are getting done, the survivors will win. And that is where Pressure comes in.
Pressure is anything that forces survivors off gens. A hooked teammate, a totem, and even healing, all count as some form of pressure. So what is the problem?
The problem is the relationship between killers and survivors. Put simply, survivors hold almost all control over pressure, not the killer. They don't need to save their teammate quickly. They don't need to heal. They don't need to do totems. They can just do gens. To make matters worse, some of the best survivor perks can straight up negate pressure. Oh, my teammate is slugged? Are you sure about that?
This causes a very binary system for the matches. Either the survivors are doing gens, or they are all busy. If even one survivor is doing gens, you will lose as a killer. This also makes playing survivor terrible as well, as a good survivor will only tend to lose because their other teammates decided to not gens.
Speaking of map pressure, End Game Collapse is useless as survivors can just 99 the gates. This makes end game perks such as blood warden useless. 99'ing the gates is also another example of survivors being able to control pressure, rather than the killer. And no, opening the gate yourself does not count.
So how do you solve this problem?
You have to, in my opinion, do three things.
First, buff killer's base kit. More speed, Always instadowns? Nope, not needed. All you need to do is give killers better mobility options and better stealth than survivors. They don't need to move faster, they just need to able to come from unexpected angles. One of the biggest reasons why pressure is so under the control of the survivors is that it is way to easy to know which way a killer coming from. If hear a heartbeat but you are on the second floor of a building, you can just keep doing what you are doing until the killer walks up the stairs. But what if the killer could climb up behind you? Suddenly you have to stop doing the gen there because you don't want get caught by the killer entering from the window. Adding on to this, grabs need to be more easy for a killer to do. if you get right next to someone working on a gen and they are still working on it, you should be rewarded with a free hook.
Second, buff survivors escape options, but nerf their ability to affect pressure. I don't play that much survivor, but off the top my head maybe they could make the breakable walls actually, you know, do something interesting. For gens, I think that maybe having the gens go through stages with you need to find parts between each stage could be an interesting idea.
Finally, don't make the survivors and killers enemies. Let me explain. Right now, if you are hooked, lugged or even just dead, you just have to sit there doing nothing. Meanwhile, for the killer, there is nothing worse that having a fun chase before realizing that you have to leave if you don't want gen to pop. In both cases, the other side ruins the other sides fun. I think that the solution is to give both sides slightly different and not directly in contrast goals. Instead of trying to kill all four survivors, it should trying to get the most hope and despair out of them for the entity. Instead of trying to just escape, the survivors are tasked with trying to get certain items and find out more about the entity in order to find a way to escape the trails.
That being said, that is just my own opinion and I am open to more ideas, but I do believe that something is needed to be done.
Because right now, the killers and survivors are like a square peg in a circle shaped hole. One side is always going clash with other, and in the end neither the circle shaped hole and square peg get what they want.
Comments
-Fixed an issue that made the hole a triangle.