Is there a correlation between balance and fun?
From what I have gathered from before many people find it was most fun they had in dbd was the past. Back the game was really unbalanced but I don't think many people cared as long as it was fun.(I could be wrong) but it seems like as Toxic game becomes more towards a balanced state for both sides (albeit its very slow and not at this moment) the game gets more and more unfun for people. So now I'm wondering is there a correlation between balance and fun? Does the more unbalanced the game is the more people have fun and vice versa? I'm I just crazy.
Comments
No one wants to go back to pallet vacuums and infinites besides survivor mains
Wasn't trying to make this into a killer vs survivor post I was just asking question
The only correlation is that its basically a tugowar match as not everything balanced is fun as well as the flipside otherwise you degrade the game as a whole.
sort of.
If a game is wildly and completely out of balance where one thing is just... broken beyond all reason and you have to use that thing or lose... then it probably won't be fun. Unless of course you happen to be one of the people who enjoys abusing the broken thing.
However, a game that is more balanced is not inherently more fun. It may even be less fun depending on how the balance was achieved. After all, the only way to have a 100% balanced game is to have something like Street Fighter 1... where it was a 1v1 with 2 characters that were merely pallet swaps of each other.
That's why Developers need to be very careful when they're balancing their game. Generally speaking better balance is a good thing but you DO NOT want to get there by lopping off the interesting bits of your game. If you do get there that way, you'll just kill your game.
Neither am I, I just don't see who could possibly like old DBD better besides Survivor only mains and maybe Nurse mains.
There is a correlation but a negative one
The more "Balanced" the game becomes the less "Fun" some players will have.
This game can never be truly balanced as both sides are inherently different and have different tools. There is supposed to be a power imbalance that should naturally lean more towards the killer role. Instead the game is in a place where killers and survivors are closer to being "Equal" in strength.
The closer the sides are in relative power the more difficult it is for killers to feel they are the power role. That translates into the game being less "Fun" as the game is becoming to evened out. There are some caveats though, survivors can't actually reach the same level of power of a killer in terms of singular effect on the game. As a group though, survivors can push the game at a pace faster than most killers can reliably work with.
So it would be better to say that the more "Balanced" the game becomes "The more stressful" the game becomes. There is a limit to the amount of stress an active can generate before its no longer fun to engage with. Asymmetrical games are made with the an inherent power imbalance, but that imbalance has shrunk as dominant strategies have emerged and the game has become hyper optimized at certain levels of play due to mechanical stagnation.
Fun is very subjective but balance is more like objective.While bullying the killer that we all know is unbalanced as hell can be funny for toxic players and not for the killer if the killer have a chance to get you feels more fun and rewarding and more balanced.
When the more skilled player wins - the game is more intense and more fun.
It's 1 v 4 and solo vs swf.
It will never be balanced, there are to many metrics.
If swfs were removed, there might be a chance.
Im calling b.s on that.
I've just done my red 1 grind, some games i would absolutely stomp survs and get no pip, due to not getting enough points to pip.
However on my last game before red 1 i versed some newbies, so i set out to maximise my points so i double hooked, purposefully let chases go on longer, let them get back up so i could keep kicking gens.
I could have ended it in 10 minutes. But i dragged it out just to get more points, which correlates to ranking.
The issue is how BHVR has been balancing the game. Instead of lettings killers have fun and strong powers with fair trade offs, they keep adding arbitrary restrictions and clunkiness to make playing as a killer less enjoyable. Then with the balance being towards making sure killers struggle to get 2 kills in a match if they try to play fair just causes many killers to play in a way survivors don't like in order to win.
Devs are just slowly extracting the fun aspects of the game out to make it more balance instead of trying to balance the fun aspects.
I mean when its close, not a 100000 hour gamer going against a guy who just installed.
In my opinion, toward the years DBD has lost a lot of its horror aspect and BHVR has pushed a very competitive scenario (even though she says otherwise). Survivor gameplay is basically the same (that's why it's still fun to play the survivor role). Killer role became a very complex one with too little rewarding (lacking fun).
As someone who is more dedicated to Old DBD than anyone else, I think this question is a bit difficult to answer.
First of all, we would have to point out exactly when did DBD reach its most fun state for the majority of the community. It is obviously somewhere in the past, but we can't just say "Old DBD" and go along with it in this specific scenario.
Dead by Daylight received many changes throughout the years which potentially made the game more fun or less fun, and many of those changes happened in the past.
If you asked that question to only me, I would tell you that Dead by Daylight's most fun state ever was around the Hallowed Blight Event, in October of 2018:
And the thing is, if you take this version of the game, it is actually pretty balanced. Just not the same type of balance that we have today.
The thing about this version is that, if one side has a strong advantage that they can use, so does the other. An Insta-Saw Hillbilly can be overpowered by himself, but throwing him against 4 Survivors running Old DS makes it technically balanced in that context.
So, in my personal opinion, there is a correlation between balance and fun, it just depends on the type of balance you are going for.
Obviously there are way more things that could be said here, but I tried to keep it on-topic.
I don't think there should be a correlation. Fun doesn't mean balance. Fun is subjective, balance is not. The DbD community (from what I've seen on the forums) keeps on thinking that fun=balanced and that unfun=unbalanced. This couldn't be further from the truth, let's look at some examples of something being unfun while being balanced:
Camping, tunneling and slugging. The ultimate trio. These 3 strategies are hated by almost everyone in the Survivor side of the community while the Killer players usually don't have a problem with it. Yes, these things aren't fun at all to be a victim of but they are counterable.
NOED. I don't need to explain why it's hated or the counterplay to it.
Hoarder Pinhead. The idea behind this build is to use Hoarder on Pinhead and to keep the Chain Hunt going for as long as possible, usually combined with Add-ons to make it even more difficult to do the box. It's not easy to play around it, but it's possible it just requires team work that sometimes doesn't work.
The Artist. The newest Killer added into the game and some people already want her nerfed. She isn't a Killer you want to take a 1v1 engagement with, so people are hating on her due to her different type of counterplay.
These are a few examples, there's probably more but I can't think about all of them.
Now let's look at the fun stuff that isn't balanced.
Boon: Circle Of Healing. There's no need to explain why it needs a nerf of some kind. It's a free Medkit for the whole team but only requires 1 Survivor to bring it into The Trial.
Dead Hard. It's recent buff made it so you can't get exhausted on the ground, great! You can't be outplayed by the opponent having bad ping but guess what, now you are immune to Killer Powers and are able to eat them up with no counterplay whatsoever. Even before its buff, it was pretty much impossible to counter it when used for distance, now it's even more so.
Prove Thyself. It's a beginner Perk, telling the Survivors what their objective is while helping them do it at a faster rate. This would've been fine if maps were more balanced, along with Items.
The game is fun when you win by your actual skills. As killer, downing survivors fast and getting pressure feels fun. As survivor, it feels fun to loop the killer and getting efficient saves.
On the other hand, having to tunnel and camp because survivors are too efficient and barely engage in chases feels incredibly unfun, or having to hold M1 on gens for 5 minutes because the killer wants to get rid of a single person asap.