Kill Rate is not Win Rate
The devs' current targeted kill rate is 60%. HOWEVER, this does not automatically mean killers have a 60% win rate!
Imagine a killer plays 10 games. A 60% kill rate means 24 survivors die, and 16 escape. A win for the killer is a 3k or 4k.
Here's one set of games: 4k, 4k, 2k, 2k, 2k, 2k, 2k, 2k, 2k, 2k
The killer has a 60% kill rate, but only a 20% win rate (with an 80% draw rate).
Here's another set of games: 3k, 3k, 3k, 3k, 3k, 3k, 3k, 3k, 0k, 0k
The killer has a 60% kill rate, with an 80% win rate (and a 20% loss rate).
My point here is not to argue the appropriateness of a 60% kill rate or if this is a good balancing decision. It is merely to point out that a 60% kill rate can mean wildly different win rates in different conditions.
Kill rate is not win rate, please stop conflating them, thank you.
Comments
You're compressing stats.
If a survivor escapes one match, but then gets killed the next three matches, their MMR goes down.
Does that mean they have only lost?
Fun fact: My example is exactly how the base MMR rating works for killers (as there are other factors like the duration of the match and the other side MMR that influence the amount of MMR you gain or lose, as stated in the wiki).
So I'm throwing them all into one game, because that is exactly how a match in DbD works for the killer in MMR terms and why is a 1v4 for him. And this has been confirmed by both dataminers and/or cheat developers (which, funnily enough, has access to the MMR rating of everybody when BHVR won't show it to us themselves):
So, again, have you won? Have you gained 10 and lost 30, or have you lost 10 because you lost the match?
Im not finding any of those numbers you posted on that page. I don't really want to go into numbers I don't know but, if a 0k is-20 and 1k is -10. Then it doesn't matter if I lost Mmr as it's just like I said above. By killing that one survivor I lost less mmr. I'm assuming a 0k is the starting point since survivors all start alive. So by killing one, I've gained 10 MMR. Doesn't mean I won't lose MMR overall, as that's basically the fee to enter the challenge.
The page does literally say that they are like mini trials though. But if we go by this:
"Killers gain points towards their MMR for killing Survivors in ranked Trials and lose points if they manage to escape:
Killing 0 or 1 Survivor(s) is considered a loss towards MMR.
Killing 2 Survivors is considered a draw.
Killing 3 or 4 Survivors is considered a win towards MMR."
Then I would call it at face value. That a 0-1k is considered a loss to MMR, etc...
I could be overlooking it but I don't see any where that says this is a win or loss condition of the game though. Just a loss of MMR. A hidden number that has other factors that also decide how it is calculated.
I promise I do understand what you are trying to say. And to be very honest ive been typing this so long I've forgotten what I'm even replying about lol. I don't understand though, why people want to calculate one side individually and the other as a single team or entity. It basically throws out draws on one side which either inflates their win or loss number. It also throws out balancing as a team if we want to consider things individually
And what is a "loss of MMR" according to you? Because for almost any other single ranked game in existence, a loss in rating is produced by a lost match, and a gain by a win. And I have literally shown you how the MMR win condition works for the killer and how you only win if you do more than a 3K. With a 1K you lose less MMR, but you have still lost.
Because it is a totally asymmetrical game, which needs totally asymmetrical win conditions. And it is not the people, it's the devs of the game. That's why for the killer is a 1v4, but for each of the survivors it is a 1v1 against the killer.
Also, you have the numbers in one of the latest videos from Choy, which I'm not going to post as the last time was removed for some reason.
If the only thing that matters is whether you win or lose against a -team-, why is there a distinction between 0K and 1K in MMR?
I simply call it a loss of MMR. In most of the other games there are clear modes for ranked and unranked play. In those I would say yes MMR is pretty accurate on whether it was a win or loss. In this game though, it is a mix of casual and competitive players. MMR can't calculate that I was trying my best but my teammate did 3 tome challenges and stood in a corner. The game also doesn't punish players for throwing matches. It couldn't anyway without separating it.
The problem with the MMR is the lack of separate modes or clear win condition. It's just a matchmaking thing to keep games more fair... That person doing the tome challenge may have felt they won because they finished their challenges. Also consider players who don't even know about the MMR. They are basing their wins, most likely, off the emblems and end game tally screens. Which is also fair, I do this a lot too because I find it more fun.
To the last point, it is just as much on the devs. By not defining clear win conditions and by lumping everything into one. Peanits also once stated that they tend not to balance around winrates because everyone has their own definition of what a win is.
Edit: Disregard that last part of you want. I think we both know it's on the devs we just both see it dicferently
Also, something about the stats that have always bothered me is that when they did the "all MMR vs high MMR", they did not specify what percentage of players were. In League of Legends for example, you can see the win rate of each character by their rank, be it either Bronze, Silver, Platinum, Master, Challenger... BHVR never tiered the kill rates on that. So we don't actually know how the best 10% or the best 1% killers perform.
Now, the only thing that may make that difficult for BHVR is that each killer has a different MMR, so it is possible that weaker killers like Myers and Trickster don't even have stats in the really high MMR tier because they simply don't reach that point.
I see what you are saying, but it's a flawed concept. Let's say the killer only ever kills a single person. That's hundreds of thousands of matches where the killer gets a single kill. That's a 100% win rate while survivors only have a ~40% win rate. Time to nerf killers! Right? Obviously not. You're have to take matches as a whole and realize that 3k+ is a killer win, not simply getting a kill.
If the only thing that matters is whether you win or lose against a -team-, why do you need to hook survivors 3 times to kill them? Why do you have to do 5 gens if only escaping counts? Why? Why does this have anything to do with what is being talked about? Why do you think you had made a real counterpoint to anything said? Why?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbArDY2iWSwIt just seems a little arbitrary to me.Of course its arbitrary. That's kind of the point.
Everything in a game is an arbitrary creation of its maker, points, goals, etc. Usually that creator also sets a win condition. BHVR has not, they've instead given a variety of goals for players to accomplish and allowed each player to put their own valuation on their own goals.
The fact that this discussion happens, and keeps happening on different forums, kind of proves the point. In most games the discussion would be silly. The team that won got more kills, held the point, pushed the payload, etc.
Now if you went into any of those games and had a discussion on 'what is considered a good performance', things would get a lot more subjective. BHVR has taken the win condition and mixed it in with the good performance discussion.
If you escape, you reached your goal, you get the positive message, you get more points, things like Adept challenges use that as their goal so it counts for that, the MMR system designed to track wins and losses counts it as a win, and generally speaking you successfully leveraged or avoided every system and mechanic in the game that is designed to aid or hamper your ability to reach that goal.The problem with this metric is you also gets 'positive messages' for lots of other things, such as rescues. The one thing that only tracks escapes/kills is completely hidden from the player (which I think is very relevant if we're going to creator intent).
You're riskinglosing,because you might get sacrificed too. If you just want to secure your own win for whatever reason, itwouldbe a bad play to go back and save that other survivor… but a lot of players find it more fun to risk that win to gain a better score or meet a more satisfying condition thanjustseeing the victory screen.You're risking getting sacrificed, which is clearly bad, but whether escaping or not on its own would be a win is up to the player.
And if many players are playing for a 'more satisfying condition', that makes it a part of winning. Take say a control point game, if a winning team on the verge of victory abandoned the point to get more kills we would think of it is as gloating, showing off, etc. In the vast majority of the cases it carries little risk and is seen as BM that is only done in rare circumstance where one sides dominates the other.
In DbD survivors going back for that last rescue is an expected part of the game (though not required, because, again, arbitrary by design).
Things do get a bit messier with killer- survivors have a hard binary, win or lose, escape or die, but killers do have some grey area. Logically it's obvious that the killer's win condition isrelatedto killing, for the same reasons that apply to survivors, but exactly how many kills you need in order to win is murkier and not something the game has as much feedback for. The general community consensus there is one I agree with, but thereismore need for a community consensus there compared to survivors.So I think this is the reverse. The killer condition is pretty clear, we're only discussing the degree they need to perform it. Whether survivors should view the fate of the other survivors as part of their evaluation of the match is entirely left up to the player.
I know I've had a lot of matches where I feel satisfied with just one kill even though it's pretty obviously a loss, because it was a hard fought match with plenty of close plays and interaction. I lost, by most reasonable interpretations of the game's structures and feedback, but I don'tmindthat I lost. That doesn't mean the game's win condition is unclearbecauseI was satisfied, though.That's just a totally different thing and it applies not just to this game, but all games. I've lost plenty of video games, sports, etc. where my team lost while I was happy with my individual performance, and times were my team won and I was disappointed with my performance. But never once did I have any reason to question whether the result was a win or a loss.
Sorry about the delay in reply.
And if you played the game a 100 times, 400 minigames, and ended up plus $600, did you win or lose? It doesn't matter what the induvial result of each set of four mini-games was, what matters is the amount of money you are holding at the end.
Which is how MMR works. It doesn't matter how you break up the minigames or what the result of each set of four was. In the long run, the only thing that matter is the total result. The killer played against 400 survivors and killed 240 of them, how exactly it broke down is irrelevant to the system.
Now you as a player might care more about the results of those individual sets of four than you do the overall whole. Which is fine, but MMR doesn't, so trying to use it to justify a win rate discussion doesn't make sense. As others have said, if you're going off MMR, win rate = kill rate (actually, win rate > kill rate assuming at least some hatch escapes).
Are you just trolling now?
You came in here, referring to the MMR system as to what is defined as a win.
And I point out to you, that in the stuff that you yourself linked, it says that players get MMR for a KILL, not for 'beating a team'. This is why you lose less MMR for a 0K than you do for a 1K: Because you gained MMR once to offset the fact that you lose MMR three times. It's also why you gain less MMR for a 3K than you do for a 4K: Because you lost MMR once to offset the fact that you won MMR three times.
I don't know how much more clear I can make this for you, buddy.
Your MMR loss depends on factors like average opponent MMR, length of the match and other similar factors. You will lose most MMR on 0k, but portion of the loss will be mitigated if your opponents have a higher average MMR than your MMR value.
Core factor for MMR outcome is number of kills. Additional factors that serve as multipliers are match length, average opponent MMR and the gap in MMR between you and your opponents
Why do you only gain MMR after you have killed the majority of the team? Why? Why in the European football / soccer leagues you gain 1 point for a draw when what is important is to beat the other team? Why? Why in the ELO system used in chess they do a mathematics equation to determine the new ranking of a player if what counts is if someone won, lost, or tied with his opponent? WHY!?
Because that's how that ranking system works. Period. That's it. Doesn't change the fact that for you to gain or lose ranking, you have to beat or lose against the rival, independent of how the ranking system works or the final amount of ranking granted. That's why your "why" question was completely irrelevant.
But hey, you want to say that a killer in DbD has 5 possible outcomes instead of 3? Fine! A killer can "lose more", lose, draw, win or "win more". Doesn't change the fact that less than 1K is a loss, 2K is a draw, and more than that is a win. So no, the kill rate is not equal to the win rate no matter how many fallacies or mental gymnastics you people want to do.
There, crystal clear. Whoever doesn't understand by now is because he doesn't want to.
Well True but the metric for whether its a win or loss for killer isn't the same as a win or loss for a survivor, I can get hatch and consider it a win for myself while 3 teammates who died consider it a loss. The metric for what is a win / loss is very self determined since of course the devs don't want to set one.
not sure exactly what everyone else is talking about here, but these are the stats according to Nightlight:
56.9% kill rate, 51.8% rate of killers getting a 3-4k.
If the survivors are playing as a team, survivors have a 36.6% winrate (0-1k). If their results are considered individually, they have a 43.1% win and draw rate (escapes counts both gates, which are wins, and hatches, which are draws for the survivor.)
although kill rate is not win rate, by looking at stats, basically any reasonable metric we can choose still indicates a game that favors killer. definitely good to not lie to ourselves and claim the killer has a 60% win rate, but also good to not lie to ourselves and pretend that killer winning 50% of the games means that survivors win 50% of the time as well
it would be cool to get more in-depth stats from official sources that have the same format as the Nightlight data (as the nightlight data is skewed towards showing a disproportionate number of 4 outs) but for now this is what we have
It does let us know about the player base a bit.
Take nurse for example.
On the lowest end of kill rates. Not once, not twice, but three times in a row.
Strongest killer in the game (not disputing) and yet low kill rate = majority of killer players have a ____ issue.
But that's also exactly how the game calculates Survivor wins, it doesn't care about the team escaping. It only cares if you do. If you don't, MMR goes down. It really is that binary.
Killer meanwhile is less binary, but that leads to extreme imbalance depending on the Killer and depending on the MMR, server, time of day, etc.
You don't.
That's what I've been telling you. That's what that line says. As soon as you get a kill, your MMR goes up. It just goes back down if you then lose the other survivors.
You asking 'why' is basically asking why your MMR goes down if you lose more than you win. You're just compressing the stats.
According to the MMR system, kill rate = win rate.
And you know what? This could actually be a way bigger issue than it seems at first glance.
Not that I necessarily agree with the person you're arguing with, but I feel like this is an argument that kinda misses something important.
If we're defining our win condition based solely on the MMR system (which I would argue is completely backwards, for the record), then we'd still be looking at MMR gain at the end of the match, because that's the point at which you'd logically suggest someone has won or lost. It wouldn't make any sense otherwise.
Ergo, based on the MMR system, the killer only "wins" if they get three kills, because otherwise their MMR overall goes down at the point those ups and downs are actually "locked in" by the match ending, so to speak. Batulasen is correct that you only gain MMR if you kill a majority of the team, they could've just been slightly more accurate by not saying "after" and instead saying "if".
(Kinda, there's more nuance than that, the MMR system only uses the win conditions and then modifies them to accommodate its actual purpose, but you get the point.)
Again, the MMR system doesn't actually dictate a win or loss, it reacts to a win or loss, but I did feel that was worth pointing out.
Ah, but this is where you make the mistake of assuming that the MMR system is, in any way, logical.
Lest we forget the 'If you ran the killer for five gens but then got caught and died in the end, was it really a good play?'-debacle.
I fully agree that it doesn't make practical sense, but that IS how the MMR system works. So when someone points to the MMR system to define a killer win, the MMR system considers every single kill a killer win, and every single escape a killer loss. The match outcome is simply a compression of those stats.
Ah, I see, it's that kinda statement, I misunderstood your objection.
Well, I'm not gonna rehash the reasons the MMR system works the way that it does since that's not really on topic, so I'll just let my statement stand and leave it at that.
Morever, it is theoretically possible to overall gain MMR from a match even without killing 3 or more survivors in that match, if the survivors in that match have a significantly higher rating than you. In that case you might gain a lot of MMR for killing the players rated more highly than you, and lose little for those that you don't kill, likewise because they are rated more highly than you.
In either case, yeah, the game does not have clearly or let alone strictly defined win conditions for either side, and if we wanted to invoke MMR algorithms for this (which are obscured from us, and from what limited we do know more things than simply "escape" or "kill" play into it, such as order of kills, duration of match, hatch escapes being excluded (but included in escape rates)), killrate would indeed equal winrate.
With regards to the actual topic… Well, it's a tired topic that really seems to serve no point but for people to want to argue that killers need more buffs even if they have 60% killrates. Mind you I don't agree with various of BHVR's balance decisions (or lack thereof), and these stats alone certainly shouldn't inform those decisions. But as an overall indicator they are telling a very clear story as to killers doing more than well enough across the board, including in the - oh-so-competitive - "high MMR" bracket, even against 4-player premades. Even while including hatch escapes and excluding matches with disconnects entirely. It is a significant, major indicator (among various others, such as streamers and tournaments) that DbD is infinitely less "survivor-sided" than some people like to make it out to be.
There are interesting conversations to be had about the asymmetrical nature of DbD and how an MMR system could relate to that, although I've found that the conversations are usually not very interesting since there's often basic biases at play. For instance, when it comes to something like escape rate, people are quick to argue that "survivors only or mostly care about their own escape", hence it would be fine that as a group they may only very rarely succeed - and yet when it comes to things like the late and endgame design, suddenly the remaining 2 survivors should just immediately and automatically be killed or hatch certainly not exist because "the game is lost anyway", the idea of those remaining players still being actual people that may play for their own survival suddenly doesn't factor in anymore (nor the concept of, you know, having actual gameplay in a video game rather than making it about some arbitrary, empty concept of "winning" to the detriment of the former).
Either way, while OP is correct that killrate does not translate 1:1 into winrate (if by winning we mean killing 3 or 4 survivors in a match), I think there is no real or pressing problem with conflating the two because it's a meaningless distinction as far as we as a community are concerned: we don't know the actual winrates, we don't all agree on what "winning" even means, we don't have to care about global average winrates because in the end only our own experience really matters to us, and ultimately from a balancing purpose perspective it doesn't matter whether the devs aim for a higher winrate or killrate for killers than survivors, both accomplish the goal of leading to a killer-favoured balancing (that is to say, certainly even the staunchest of "killrate does not mean winrate" arguers will have to admit that while killer winrates may not be 60%, they will still be higher than survivor winrates due to the 60/40 killrate/escape rate split - which we can see evidence of on NightLight, where killers around the 60% killrate mark showcase a 50-55% vs. 30-35% killer vs. survivor winrate split).
Personally more than the global average balancing, I'm much more interested in or concerned with egregious outliers. I think the game is well-enough balanced for the average experience of players at most levels, leaning killer (a major reason for that being that most survivor groups consist of solos and duos and often pretty mismatchedly so, although there's more reasons too). But it leaning killer is a good thing. What I don't think is a good thing are extreme imbalance cases of a select few overpowered killers/add-ons, SWF loadouts, maps, and the fact that for (killer and SWF) players beyond a certain skill and experience threshold, most matches become laughably easy, winrates of 90+% being the norm and winstreaks of hundreds (or even thousands) of matches not uncommon. These outliers are much more pressing issues in my mind than the question whether the game is killer-leaning enough at 60% killrates on a global average.
Why in the European football / soccer leagues you gain 1 point for a draw when what is important is to beat the other team?and
But hey, you want to say that a killer in DbD has 5 possible outcomes instead of 3? Fine! A killer can "lose more", lose, draw, win or "win more".I feel like these are the right examples, but the totally wrong conclusion.
In European football if a team won 4 out of 10 games, how well are they doing? The answer is, you don't know until you know how many of the other 6 games were draws/losses. 4 wins and 6 losses the team is below the middle, 4 wins and 6 draws the team is probably 2 to 5 points behind first.
But DbD is even more complex than that. It would like like if in the above standings 'win more' granted 5 points and 'lose more' resulted in -2 points. Now to know how well the 4 and 10 team is doing, you need to not only know how many of the other 6 were draws, but how many of wins were 'win mores' and how many of the loses were 'lose more'.
The total amount of 'wins' and 'win mores' is irrelevant because you need to consider each of those 5 factors (actually six or more when you throw in hatch).
Which is exactly what MMR does which is why it is a horrible thing to base your argument off for win rates because with MMR kill rate = win rate (though again, actually slightly higher because of hatch).
@zarr You are the only one I have seen so far who has really hit the nail on the head here. The issue isn't MMR, kill or win rates, or whether or not the game is "too Killer sided" (it is slightly Killer sided and as you point out that's a good thing, even a necessary evil). The issue is that the outlier things are so strong, they create problems for the other 99% of everyone else who is in the bellcurve of average, to the point it makes the game feel bad for the losing side in these setups.
It simply should not be possible to winstreak in the hundreds or thousands just because you picked the right SWF setup or Killer, win 90% of rounds either side, run loadouts that make imbalances even more imbalanced as a SWF, force things to always be in your favor, and create such terrible MMR imbalances due to bad matchmaking that babies end up stomped on by a really amazingly good 6000+ hour Xenomorph.