Another day, another set of games with top tier survivors
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2PzvdWGuMg
When are people going to realize that we desperately need to do something about the kinds of things survivors can do and how difficult it is to even get a single hook against good survivors?
Comments
These are literally the best Survivors in the entire world.
Comparing them to anyone else is actual lunacy.
You will not find anyone even CLOSE to their level in public games.
... bro uses the top 0.0001% as baseline. pog. When's the last time Eternal even lost a set?
But seriously, do you really think there are more than a handful of other players among the entire playerbase who can even compete with Eternal?
Although, as others mentioned, very few people are capable of playing nearly to this level, it still shows survivors have a lot more going for them than they should tbh. If you take similar skill level on both sides even at lower levels you'll get similar results (although much more messy lol)
Yeah, this thread is pretty misleading. Most Killer players will never even play against a professional team. Let alone one of, if not the strongest team in the world.
You guys aren't even trying with the trolling anymore.
They dropped some sets in this series. Some incredible games here. In response to OP, it's about matchmaking. If you put the best comp team in the world in the game, you need one of the best comp killers in the world to go against them. Not a "master Huntress" or whatever.
Match them against the top killer in the world, and the match will likely go similar. Even in the video, they specifically went out of their way to find other top tier players.
Let me ask you a question here, and it is a simple 1 or 2 word answer.
Do you think this game should be balance around average skilled players, or top tier players?
Pretty sure they compete in tournaments where Killers DO win.
Show me a tournament that:
I couldn't find the original stream, but here is @zarr's analysis of the unrestricted tournament.
I'll take a look at that when i get some time, but already reading it i see:
One counter-argument against previous tournament stats is that there are various loadout restrictions in place for both roles.
But, i'm willing to watch and listen to the argument where its stated they generally are using the same things you see in regular matches. Do you have videos of the matches somewhere?
I think actually seeing the matches would help me get a better grasp of it. Additionally its mentioned that basically most matches were nurse spirit and blight. So that brings into point my main thing is that those are really the only viable killers. I'm assuming this was before the spirit nerfs as well, so i'd imagine if such a tournament were run today you wouldn't see her nearly as much as the other 2.
THIS tournament was unrestricted. Previous one's were restricted and people made the argument that they didn't count as the restrictions made it too different from pubs.
I don't have any videos, maybe someone else does?
Also, those Killers might be the only viable one's against literal competitive teams, sure. Not every Killer should be so oppressive as to be able to 12-hook the world's best players. Besides, that has no bearing on the overall viability of Killers. I'd expect to see Wesker, Pinhead and maybe Artist hanging in there today. I do think Spirit would still be there, MDR is still around after all.
Also, this is pre-DS and DH nerf.
These are some of the best survivors in the world, who incidentally knew what killer they were going up against beforehand. Against 2 mechanically weak killers.That's not a good thing to base game balance on.
99.99% of the player base does not and cannot play like this.
So i'll present to you the same question that i asked earlier that has yet to be answered by anyone so far.
Simple.
Do you think the game should be balanced around average skill players, or top tier high skill players?
Balanced AROUND or balanced FOR?
Should be balanced around average skill players.
Because Im sure you and I are average skill players, which you and I should have more benefits from.
Balance can only happen when matchmaking matches based on mmr instead of backfilling players in queue.
However this isn’t possible because this would lead to 10-20 min queues for certain groups of players.
Balancing around the average player is fine and all but if this results in imbalance for more experienced/veteran players, some will definitely stop playing or reduce play times.
When that happens, guess which pool of players matchmaking would have to draw from to fill up lobbies for more experienced/veteran players? The average player would probably be outclassed regardless of being on Survivor or Killer leading to the more vocal ones demanding for more nerfs to the other side.
I see both statements as mostly the same. Let's imagine 2 scenarios.
1) Something is super OP when playing in low MMR, but really weak when playing in high MMR. If you balance around high level players, you should buff this thing. If you balance around low level players, you should nerf this thing
2) The opposite, something is really weak in low MMR games, but really OP in high MMR games. If you balance around low level players, you should buff this thing, if you balance around high level players, you should nerf this thing.
Obviously there are some nuances there. I think generally we can all agree that you should at the very least try to do a bit of both. In the first scenario, there may be things you can do that make it better in high level play, while weakening it in low level play. For example, you could buff that thing, but maybe make it harder to use effectively.
But for this i'm talking about in the broad sense. If you can't balance that way, and you had to make a choice, which choice do you make for each scenario?
Basically, if you HAVE to make a change to improve gameplay for high level players, but doing so will make the game worse for average players, do you still do it. What about vice versa? Making the gameplay experience better for average players, but it would make it worse for high level players. Do you do it?
You can imagine that in those scenarios all the players are equal MMr
Alright then, so we balance around and for average skill players. Based on that, we need to take a look at the statistics for the AVERAGE player base and see which killers need buffs and nerfs based on that. And if you believe this statement that we should balance around and for the average skill players, that means, that based on the latest statistics we have for kill rates, we need to:
The following killers are slightly overtuned and need to be nerfed:
The following killers are REALLY underpowered and need MASSIVE buffs:
The following killers are slightly underpowered and need some slight buffs:
And the rest are probably fine within a +/- 2% kill rate.
So, what major buffs do you think we need to do to pump up the numbers of nurse and blight so they have a higher kill rate. And what changes do you think should be made to Sadako to bring her more in line with some of the more balanced killers like spirit?
All joking aside, by now you are probably realizing my point right?
They are not quite the same.
Balancing around the top % of players is a top-down balance philosophy. The only thing that matters is the top % of players; games like OW do this. They make changes based off of their competitive E-Sports league.
Balancing for the top % of players is making sure that nothing is egregiously OP in the hands of those players, while still balancing around the average player. Obvious outliers (like old DH or old DS) that massively affect those games should be pruned, of course, but for the most part, you are balancing around the casual player.
Cenobite - His Possessed Chains should do more and his Box should do less.
Sadako - The Condemned playstyle needs to go, in return, lower the TP cooldown to TV's from 100 seconds to 60.
Wesker - Infection should be paused post-unhook until a Survivor does a Conspicuous Action.
Freddy - Honestly, he needs another rework, we all know that.
Nurse - She needs to be less punishing to pick up and learn.
Trickster - Make him playable on Console. Let him hold Main Event.
Hillbilly - Rework his collision. Give him his old add-ons, minus insta-saw.
Demogorgon - Ideally, let me rework him. If not, increase Shred's Range and increase his Portal Travel Speed.
Doctor - Reduce Shock Detonation slightly.
Trapper - Make Traps spawn with X meters of the center of the map. No more Traps in Narnia.
Blight - Make him slightly easier to pick up and play. Reduce his cooldown from timing out during a Slam?
Twins - Make Charlotte able to recall Victor after 20 seconds.
Deathslinger - Reduce his TR back to it's old value.
Huntress - Reduce Lullaby to 40 meters.
Average.
Games are for people to enjoy. And you want to make sure the maximum number of players enjoy them.
If DBD had a big, thriving esports community worth hundreds of thousands of dollars then perhaps it'd be more of an issue.
But it doesn't, sure there are tournaments but they impose their own restrictions on the games to provide balance. Asymmetric multiplayer games are an absolute nightmare to balance and in all honesty you're never going to make it completely even. Such a tiny pool of games, featuring the absolute best players on the game such as in this video is not an accurate objective look at the game's balance as a whole.
At the end of the day dbd is at heart a casual game, something for horror fans, people who enjoy something a bit different. Sure some people who play the game take it extremely seriously, but they are a minority, one that could not financially support the game on their own. Rebalancing the game specifically to accommodate the absolute best players in the world it is surv? Not a good idea imo. It could drive away the majority of the player base.
I've always found these forums extremely elitist. Which is to be expected, forums will be mostly dedicated players. But a lot of people on here forget, survs have a rough time at low and mid mmr. And tbh as killer I have a pretty easy time of things, even against very experienced survivor teams. I'd probably get thrashed by the survs in this video but hey, they are the pinnacle of skill in this game. The kicker is I've only been playing since august last year racked up maybe 25 days playtime, recently some of the survivor teams I've dunked on have had players with 300 DAYs solid play time. Surv requires a extreme amount of technical skill and game knowledge to play well. And even with all that they still barely broke even against deathslinger of all killers, a killer that's been notoriously nerfed and is D tier if I remember correctly? And that was when all restrictions were removed interestingly.
And, much as I love this game, I don't play it as much anymore, because my regular swf mates eventually lost patience with it because they are fed up with dying all the time as survivors. I have tried to get new people into the game and they have either refused to try the game at all because the learning curve is reputedly brutal, or tried it and given up after 48 hours playtime because they died 20 games in a row. That is not a trend that should be encouraged. What the Devs should focus on is making the game more accessible for new players. Improve the tutorials to let newer players know things like how to loop, ones that explain each killer power, killer instinct etc.
Around the top ~30% of players and for the top 5% of players. The top 1% and better can go play scrims with their own rules and balancing - their presence in pubs is neglible due to a) there aren't that many to begin with b) matches are over pretty fast. At least that's my experience with running into KL's Wesker.
Dan has ping, he doesn't count #copium.At the extreme top end of the skill spectrum, especially when looking at tourneys and dbd League's average chase times and what not, it very much depends on the specific constellation (which killer with which build goes against which survivor builds on which map). There are matches where the expected result is getting 4-6 hookstages - and there are killers that are pretty much expected to get 10+ stages.
So, if anything, all the opening post could make as an argument is that on the extreme top end of the survivor skill spectrum Huntress and Slinger need tools available to them to be able to compete with that fraction of the survivor playerbase --- without those tools having a significant impact on the rest of the playerbase. (spoiler: this is impossible.) The solution devs have come up with was to adjust matchmaking and lower the cap; while you will lose against a team like that you will not run into the top 1% all the time even if you are among the top 1% simply because matchmaking doesn't care if you're top 1% or top 15% (iirc bhvr said sth about ~15% of players being past the mmr cap).
Not to mention that comp teams (including eternal themselves!) are also some of the top comp killers too
@Reinami @Pulsar @devs I'm just wondering aloud here - it seems there is a lot of general discussion around balancing v Top/Higher MMR and Lower MMR. Some have mentioned that going like for like will make queues unbearable. For someone like me who is definitely a lower MMR and won’t understand the nuances fully around the issues at the very highest echelons my statement my seem naive and I trust you both with your rationale to pass judgement on this idea:
How about having a fourth tier for all perks - ones that for both killer or survivor may seem broken at lower levels but more justified at higher.
This tier will remain greyed out and inaccessible for anyone EXCEPT those who are at a certain level and even then, ONLY get activated when they face opponents at a similar level.
Similarly, when they face opponents at a significant unbalanced level lower than them, it may even grey out the Tier 3 so they can only play at Tier 2 of certain perks
Not sure if I’m articulating it well and I can imagine it is heavily dependent on the perks in questions and killers in question but as a general starting idea - I’d be keen for your thoughts.
Ready to be shot down and morid for making a ridiculous idea but forgive me I’m not advocating for this idea just throwing it out for discussion and analysis by more experienced and intelligent members like you both and others on the forum.
So Suupaalf etc can be cited when arguing for nerfing nurse but those guys arent an argument for tweaking survivors?
Double standard or am i just being a killermain? Lol.
Well i seem to face these best in the world survivors every 2-3 games.
10-7 = 3
6-3 = 3
10 and 6 can beat 7 and 3 equally hard. The tournament survivors are the 10, but Im not sure if your survivors are the same.
Yeah, but this kind of person exist!
You are mandatory to nerf survivor around these four person, it's logic, you silly Pulsar!
I think that's probably untrue.
Well, Supaalf ran around stomping public games for over 500 games. This video shows people playing in a competitive setting with the best of the best.
That said, people also said that survivor should be nerfed based on Hens' comp team going for some streak. Which, mind you, didn't last even half the games Alf won, and yet it had team Eternal members in it.
To be totally transparent, Hens' team did have restrictions while Alf had no such thing. Maybe they could do as much as Alf without restrictions. But ultimately, both are bad examples.
This is why ranks were better imo. If you wanted harder games against better players/teams, you could aim for the red/purple ranks. If you didn't play a lot or wanted mixed games, you could aim for rank 10-12. Instead, now you get sweat squads every other week if you did well the previous week. Takes a week of being stomped to find better matches again 😅
I disagree, rank matching was the definition of mixed bag. If ranks were reset further than just 1 color grade (at the tippy top of that color grade, mind you), then maybe, but that ignores the fact you can just breeze your way to rank 1 on both sides in like, a week or two, if you play enough. I'd argue sbmm is a bit more consistent at giving me better teams.
If you read my post above, let me know what your changes will be to nerf sadako and bring her more in line with balanced killers like spirit, and which ways you are going to buff the nurse who is by far the worst killer in the game, and blight as well who is pretty far down there with trapper.
You may think i am joking, but if you truly believe we should balance around average players, the data shows this very thing. So if you believe this, then stick to it.
Points for at least sticking to your convictions that we should balance around average players at least. Most people try to weasel their way out of the argument somehow when i point out that nurse is by far the worst killer in the game when you look at average players and she needs massive buffs, and that sadako needs nerfs given that it is pretty "known" that nurse is actually the best killer in the game, and sadako is super bottom tier outside of the 1 playstyle.
I will say i disagree that we should balance FOR average players. Any competitive game with an longevity never balances for the average players, they balance for TOP tier players, while keeping in mind that low tier players exist. One of my favorite examples is this video, i put the timestamp at the part that i think is most relevant here, but the whole video is worth a watch.
Now the general question though is, why would you balance for top tier players? Because they are the ones who are going to exploit something to its fullest. Look at games like League of Legends for example. If a top tier player exploits some champion to their fullest and is able to just dominate every game with them, low tier players will see that and emulate them. Yeah, they might not be as mechanically good at it as they are. But generally, they are still going to be giving themselves a massive advantage playing some broken thing when playing with their peers. Additionally, it gives you something to strive for and makes mastery of the game worth it.
Why sink thousands of hours into the game, if at the highest level the game's balance is a complete joke? There isn't any point in dedicating time to it. Sure maybe you get people to come in, play for 30 or 40 hours and then leave, but you want to encourage that longevity. The people who stick around stream the game, and bring in new players, they make content for it, and they keep the game alive. They tell their friends about it, and play games with them, bringing in new players, and new revenue, and the cycle continues. But if the game isn't worth sticking around for, people won't do that, and you'll always be cycling in players who play for <100 hours, and then cycle out. Eventually you, run out of players, and your game will die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1p42KtZOCw&t=203sYou definitely aren’t facing Team Eternal or any top tier survivors often. You’re just not as good a killer as you think. And you’re certainly not good enough to face them.
You don't have to be the "best in the world" to be doing this kind of stuff though. Nothing they did in the video was particularly special. Its simply, just doing gens and being efficient with time. There wasn't any super crazy play, or dodge that suddenly made everyone go "OOOOOOH MAN!!! THAT WAS CRAZY" or anything like that. And if you disagree, timestamp me a video in comp play where a top tier survivor team did some crazy thing that your typical player wouldn't be able to also do.
You also aren’t facing Team Eternal or survivors of that echelon. Lol.
Funnily enough, I was also involved in TF2 way back when.
Here's the issue. DBD isn't TF2.
If you balance the game around competitive play, the game WILL die. The kill rates show that the average Survivor isn't very good. If you buff Killers to be able to deal with comp SWF's, every single one of those players will quit since their matches will be completely hopeless.
You can balance for the top %. You can take their opinions and struggles into account, for sure. You can't make the game about them though. That's a quick way to make sure there isn't a game anymore.
See, and this is where you misunderstand the whole point.
Why can't we do both? Why can't we make the game more fair at the high level for killers, while making it better for survivors at the low level? You already admit to yourself that "kill rates show the average survivor isn't very good" i see their gameplay as being just as important as the top level players. So why can't we fix both?
For example, lets look at some stuff
What are some of the things low skill survivors do that high level players don't do:
What are some things we can do to make these things better while balancing high level play?
These are just some simple ideas, but the general point remains the same. Why can't we do both?
I don't believe it is possible to balance around both the average player and the high-level player.
You have to commit to one or the other. Using an example you mentioned, Nurse. Kill Rates would have us believe that Nurse needs extensive buffs in order to compete with the rest of the Killers. Tournaments have taught us that she needs nerfs in order to be brought in line with the rest of the cast.
We cannot both buff Nurse's power and nerf her power at the same time. We have to commit, one way or the other. BHVR chose to prioritize the high-level play on that one.
Yes you can, the main problem is she is hard to play, they could make her easier to play mechanically while reducing the effectiveness of her power.
I know that you're trying to tell that "winrates do not tell the truth" but the stats are actually surprisingly accurate when you factor in pickrate. Imo it's your way to interpret stats that is very misleading.
Nurse winrate is 52%, ie. still above 50%. That's not "MASSIVELY UNDERPOWERED" at all, you realize she still wins more than she loses right.
If you look at pickrates you'll actually realize Nurse has among the best pickrates in the game ( 5.4% pickrate vs 3.4% for the average killer) and especially the highest pickrate at high MMR (6.1%). Note: Wesker does not count at the timing of these stats coincides with the RE chapter release.
You should always look at pickrate when looking at winrates. It is very naive to look at winrates alone, especially in a game where half the killers cost money.
Do you notice how:
Usually you should look at pickrates and winrates combined. Nurse has 2 to 3 times higher pickrate than Freddy, Sadako, Cenobite, so comparing Nurse vs. Sadako on a 10% winrate difference is completely irrelevant. If 1/10th of Nurse players happen to be new with her - which makes sense since she's one of the default killers available completely for free - then that alone would likely explain the winrate difference.
The stats don't show that Nurse is underpowered at all. She has among the best pickrates in the game consistently, especially at high MMR (most picked killer with higher than average winrate). This seems to indicate that Nurse is strong at high MMR and weak at average MMR, which confirms common knowledge.
Demo has one of the worst winrates despite being a licensed killer, with 2x lower pickrate than most other licensed killers. Considering he's not available anymore, the low pickrate is expected, but it also means that only veteran players play him and so we would expect a very high winrate, yet, he has only 56%. So he might be the actual weakest killer in the game. (Twins and Trickster are candidates too, maybe also Billy and Trapper.)
If it wasn't particularly special, the global kill rate at the top 5% MMR wouldn't be ~60% for all killers. You having unrealistic expectations of what top level survivor play looks like doesn't make it any less impressive. You seem to have an expectation of pub juker 9000 plays, but players typically don't try it because it doesn't work against a comp level killer and you'll throw a game doing it. And you don't seem to appreciate the macro aspect of it. There would be a whole lot more parity at the competitive level if it was easy. But it's the same 4 or 5 teams at the top consistently. So it's either easy but nobody cares to win money, or it's tougher than you're giving it credit for.
Instead of addressing my actual point, you're diverting the conversation. A tongue in cheek exaggeration doesn't prove your point.
We weren't talking about individual killer balance, which killers were strong or weak or anything. You were complaining that survivors are too powerful, and your evidence is a tiny sample of the very very very top end of the game. And that is a flawed sample. And tbh your evidence showed that a d tier killer, skillfully played could compete with absolute best survivors.
"When are people going to realize that we desperately need to do something about the kinds of things survivors can do and how difficult it is to even get a single hook against good survivors?"
^^ this directly implies that the survivor role needs to be weaker. I'm saying that is absolutely not the case. You balance for an even game around the top 1% then you shaft the bottom 99%. Because this is not, by it's very definition, an even game. I'd like to see you respond to that point without hyperbole pls.
This argument seems even more silly because tournaments can balance themselves. Why change game balance at a fundamental level when you can simply impose rules? No duplicate perks, no add ons etc to create an even match. No need to mess up the low-mid mmr games.
And outside of tournament? Yh some highish-mid mmr killers will be unlucky enough to get matched with these guys and get rofl stomped by them. But not often enough to affect them unduly. Anyone who is getting consistently and repeatedly smashed as killer is in the wrong mmr bracket and has probably been using lazy tactics to 4k numerous mid teams and solo q lobbies. Suddenly they are seeing sweaty survs well above their skill level? They either get better or drop mmr. And tbh they've been sweating 4ks by any means necessary? No reason why they shouldn't play survs with the same attitude.
Meanwhile getting repeatedly smashed as survivor seems to be acceptable in your eyes.
The devs are balancing for a 60% kill rate. So thats your baseline. I dunno why it is, but that's what they chose. And pick rates doesn't show what you think it does. Just because something is picked more doesn't mean its going to immediately change the stats.
Kek, we literally had a thread about people like you last week involving this video. This community is so predictable.
So repeatedly getting smashed as killer because you went against a high mmr 4 stack is completely acceptable? If you think that is the case, then you truly are biased and beyond hope. At that point, why not just make the killer an NPC and make everyone happy?
But better still, you are assuming i think survivors need to be weaker in a way that hurts low level players. Watch the clip in this video here talking about the "Base Jumper" item in TF2. I timestamped the clip, it goes for about a minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1p42KtZOCw&t=203sThis right here is exactly what i am talking about. Now think about how you can get some crazy setups in this game, or certain main buildings that are just nuts in the hands of good survivors. You can have crazy windows spawn into pallet gyms, into shack, into unmindgameable god pallet setups. And with just 1 or 2 pallets these top tier survivors can waste so much of a killer's time. So why not nerf these things?
These low mmr survivors aren't using these things like this to begin with. If you nerf these crazy setups, you aren't going to be hurting these low mmr survivors, because they don't even know how to effectively use these setups anyway, and they just drop the pallet immediately and run off and probably get hit anyway then go self care in a corner for 60 seconds.
On the flip side, everyone seems to admit that low mmr survivor play is miserable. So, nerf these godly setups, and add more pallets to the map. You'll "Nerf" survivors at high mmr by nerfing their ability to waste a killers time to the point where you literally don't even bother chasing them if they go into certain parts of a map (looking at you fun bus, or asylum main building) because if you even take a single chase there against a good survivor, you are completely throwing the game away because they can easily run you for 5 gens. But, in turn, you'll also make the game better for the low mmr survivors. Killers in low MMR aren't doing crazy mindgames at every single pallet, nor have the skills necessary to exploit the weaknesses of these weaker tiles on these lower skilled players.
If we are going to say that "its ok because these players play in tournaments and not in regular queue" that is entirely untrue. You can often see hens and his team/friends play in pub games in order to create content and videos and stream. If you want to make that argument, then those player should not be allowed to play in pub queues at all.
And the worst part about it is, nobody has been able to show me a video of these types of things being relegated to ONLY THE BEST SURVIVORS IN THE WORLD. Nothing they do in these videos or tournaments is anything that special outside of heavy communication and organization. There isn't any crazy mechanical skill they are doing that couldn't easily be learned by most players after playing for 50 hours.
So you aren't going to make any kind of constructive comment? Just spew some "kek" which kinda shows the type of person you are. Maybe stick to "That site" where those kind of terms come from.
"And the worst part about it is, nobody has been able to show me a video of these types of things being relegated to ONLY THE BEST SURVIVORS IN THE WORLD. Nothing they do in these videos or tournaments is anything that special outside of heavy communication and organization. There isn't any crazy mechanical skill they are doing that couldn't easily be learned by most players after playing for 50 hours."
You've essentially just said that Team Eternal has no skill and anyone could do what they do.
Yeah, I think every reasonable person can agree that you've managed to find the worst takes. I don't think a single person has even remotely agreed with you. Maybe, instead of continuing to double-down, you should think about WHY several people (some of which, iirc, have comp experience) have vehemently disagreed with you.