Is the game supposed to be fun when you're the killer ?

Adtaleur

I'm really enjoying both roles in the game and I consider myself as an average player (surely not amongst the bests and not noob anymore : 1k hours). My goal when I start the game is to sit down and have a good time.

The last 2 months, I constantly face 1 or 2 red ranks as a rank 10-11 killer...

No need to wait until the game ends to see the ranks, when you play, you immediately feel the potential of survivors.

Experience learnt me to leave the strongest survivors in the early game. But even then, they know how to be efficient on gens, and I get my first hook when they already finished 2,5 gens (halve their objectives while I'm only at 1/12).

I set importance to improve my gameplay. But the fun factor is even more important to me. And I'm missing this the past weeks...

The same goes when I'm a survivor. When you face a killer with a much lower level as you, there is no fun. You don't feel the threat and the pressure. Although that's why we play this game, right ?

I mean matchmaking was never great and is certainly a complex issue to fix. But I feel the trend is worsening highly.

I am wondering if this feeling was also shared by others down here. Are there any concrete info from BHVR that they are adressing this issue ?

I mean...if people don't play killer, Ithey won't buy any new DLC...

i can't imagine they are letting this issue standing still for so long...

Or maybe I see things wrong and you're just supposed to have fun when you play survivors ?

swager21

try playing other killers, use fun pallet builds like enduring and spirit fury. try fun addons like jumpscare myers.

ColonelManny

@dezzmont said:

Killer is in a bad spot where regardless of its mechanical tuning, it has pretty much everything that can be stacked against it in the fun department lined up against it.

Your the defensive player. This means you can't proactively progress an objective with non-interaction, which is important and healthy for an offense-defense game. However, it also means you have ABSOLUTELY NO DOWNTIME which is NOT normal: Usually the 'defensive' team in games are in games with at least short term player elimination or waves or something so that you can take a god damn breath and chill out, refocus, re-evaluate, stretch your hand, take a drink, alt tab to check a message, whatever. Your never forced to be active for more than a few minutes outside of really explosive events, like say a final push.

This is, obviously, not at all ideal. But it gets worse. You also have very little margin of error on time. You are amazingly heavily punished for misplays on killer in DBD because if you say... "overcommit" to a chase and win it in 40 seconds (Which is AMAZINGLY FAST, and literally impossible unless the survivor makes a mistake because you get more than 40 seconds in a chase just by holding W and running in a straight line) you get 1 out of the 12 hookstates you need to win... while survivors complete arouuuund a gen and a half out of the 5 they need. So DBD's design is in a bit of a pickle: The killer *literally does not have enough time to defend gens.* They just don't. It isn't POSSIBLE if the survivors don't want it to be, outside of killers that can bypass chases like Nurse, the raw mathematics of the speedboost upon being hit and how long it takes to do a gen just... don't allow it?

So despite survivors crying endlessly about 'the killer isn't letting me play the game when they camp/slug/mori/exist' in reality survivors can just... deny the killer the ability to play DBD by sticking to gens and refusing to interact in chases via looping until they run all the way across the map with a speedboost. Most survivors don't like to do this as plan A, but if they think you have any chance of winning they absolutely will.

This is a core flaw of the interaction between survivors, killers, and chase time: Killers are fundementally not rewarded enough for winning chases and any time anything comes along that creates strong rewards for even temporarily removing survivors from play it gets nerfed (Undying, for example, created a strong reward for reducing the number of survivors on gens for even a bit and is gone now. It was too good, but ultimately... killers kinda need 'too good' stall tools right now). The solution isn't longer gens (That won't help unless gen times get actively stupid). Something else needs to happen that makes it so the killer isn't just screwed for daring to take an entire minute to win a chase without already having the entire survivor team injured, off gens, and one slugged.

Ultimately I think DBD should try to pivot off absolute balance and into actual playability issues. Killer's issue isn't that its too weak (The best killers will win basically any game if they make no mistakes on the top tier killers), its the fact that killer has this 'no downtime, also ######### you if you make a single mistake and don't play maximally sweaty.' Killer players would probably be more happy if killer's upper end power went down yet killer like... god less hectic and bullshit? Ultimately its way more a problem of 'Killer doesn't really feel good even when you end a chase quickly' than 'killer isn't strong enough.' More power isn't going to fix the problem that playing very well as a killer Does. Not. Feel. Good.

They really need to consider just adding one more generator for the survivors. If they have no plans to do anything yet, why not test out something like this in the PTB and see people's reactions and see if the killer problem is sort of solved.

Dr_Loomis

Killer games are more intense than survivor games, and this is thanks in part to the eye-ball rolling behaviour of many players.

Killer games can be particularly annoying when attempting certain rift pass challenges and/or killer adepts.

I doubt this will ever change.

dezzmont

@ColonelManny said:

https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/1998017#Comment_1998017

They really need to consider just adding one more generator for the survivors. If they have no plans to do anything yet, why not test out something like this in the PTB and see people's reactions and see if the killer problem is sort of solved.

Because the devs only do experiments and quick tweaks for survivor buffs. NEVER for survivor nerfs.

This isn't even like a salt thing. The way they communicate towards survivors vs killers makes it really clear that while they want a game that is mechanically balanced (because if killers didn't have any potential the game would collapse like it did during the killer strike) they care way more about the feelings and concerns of one side over the other.

The bloodlust test and the mori surprise change come to mind, but this is a thing they have a looooong history of and it was a huge reason why there was a killer strike back in 2017. Killers aren't imagining things when they notice they are not being treated fairly, though they often over-generalize or catastrophize outcomes. But either way DBD has... an actively super toxic design cycle where they hype minor killer changes to make killers think the game will become more fun before heaping surprise nerfs on them over a long period of time as a sort of bait and switch.

It is such a thing its talked about outside the DBD community. I have written papers about how DBD exploits anchoring effects to basically monetize cyberbullying in a fun, new, and different way than season passes and exclusive Fortnite skins. Its... not great.

And its complicated because if DBD DOES do hotfixes to critical issues or experiments they get slapped for it, because the survivor playerbase, by my rough napkin math, outnumbers killers some odd 30:1, and have actively learned they can bully the devs via stuff like review bombs. So the devs are currently in a hostage situation with their own playerbase.