Is the game Survivor or Killer sided
Assuming equally competent players - which side has an advantage (assuming any/all perks are available)
I have been told it is survivor sided, killer sided, etc so many many many many many many many many many……. many times by different people.
Personally I do tend to believe it is survivor sided (as every 1 second of killer time is 4 secs of survivor time +numerous 2nd chance perks) but I am wanting to hear what yall would say, and suggestions to "fix" any balance issues.
Comments
This question will heavily depend on who you ask..
It's a difficult question to answer because there are far too many variables.
We can imagine two hypothetical games, in neither of which are any perks or other loadout options restricted. In game one, the four survivors are a SWF coordinating strong meta perks for robust chases, decent gen speeds, fast heals, the like, but the killer's playing Wraith with a fairly gimmicky off-meta build + plays the game fairly.
In this game, the killer's not throwing, they're playing a perfectly serviceable killer with perfectly okay perk choices, but what the survivors brought means that match is gonna tilt towards them.
In game two, the survivors are solos, a pair of duos, or just a casual four-man, all of whom are bringing perfectly decent off-meta perks and an array of middling items, but the killer is a Nurse with slowdown + aura who tunnels aggressively off their first hook.
This is the reverse. The survivors here aren't throwing either, what they're doing is perfectly down the middle and viable, but what the killer brought just outclasses them.
This isn't even getting to maps; it could be that both sides decided to bring their A game or both decided to bring generally decent stuff, but in match one the survivors get Garden of Joy and in match two the killer gets Midwich, meaning those matches slant one way or another anyway.
The argument could be made that the game is killer sided because coordinating three other human beings for highly specific builds is less accessible than picking a strong killer and targeting someone as soon as they're unhooked, and I sort of agree, but at the same time killer choice is a huge variable- some people just aren't going to be picking Nurse or Blight, and many try to play the game without crutching on a huge balance problem like tunnelling. The game isn't as clearly killer sided for them and I do think that matters for a conversation like this.
Zooming out and assuming a matched set of players, as in, they're all bringing the same intensity and nobody's leaning on any balance issues… I'd say the game's actually pretty fairly balanced. At the same time, though, how likely is a match like that to happen?
Ultimately where I land is that the game isn't killer sided or survivor sided because the balance problems are too specific.
Unfortunately you’re probably going to get a lot of opinions from people who only play one side, and those are obviously going to claim that the side they don’t play is stronger. It’s really hard to take these opinions seriously.
It really depends a lot on the skill level of the players in a given match, but in general I would say the game is killer sided at lower skills levels and shifts to survivor sided at higher skills levels, especially when it’s a SWF that can coordinate on comms which basically gives the team a ton of info perks for free. Some people will claim that the game is killer sided even at high levels and point to long wins streaks as proof. The problem with that rationale is only a handful of killer players in the world are capable of doing that. A good SWF may lose to that top killer player, but they will win a majority of their games against other high MMR killer players.
It's definitely dependant on what skill level the players are, what killer is in play and what map it is.
There is so many variables it can be very hard to give a solid answer.
Overall tho things are relatively well balanced for either or side when you don't consider the extreme examples (High skill teams and High skill killers) etc.
I think its a bell curve. At low MMR/skill levels, killers generally win. As survivors get more competent, the game errs on their side, but at the top of the top (talking 5000+ hr players) I think games generally favor killer, but only marginally, and only if the killer is tunneling, slugging, etc. If the killer is ever trying to play fair and spread hooks, it swings back into survivor sided hard.
This is why tunneling is so common and such a solid strategy. IMO, Bhvr spends far too much time trying to dissuade tunneling and not enough time trying to encourage spreading hooks. The reward for spreading hooks needs to outweigh the benefit of tunneling, but survivors aren't ready for that conversation.
If you consider all the factors, like swf, maps, perks, etc etc, then you'll be forever going back and forth on killer or survivor. I'm a simple creature though, and overall I win more on killer and lose more on survivor. And official stats seem to indicate that's pretty consistent across the playerbase. So for that reason I say the game is killer sided.
It'd be nice if one day we get a barebones mode, where there's no perks or items or add-ons. Just make it as basekit as possible. I do anticipate killer would overall come out on top in such a mode (stronger killers would compensate for weaker), but I'd love to see.
Overall I'd say it's killer. I've known regular players with 80-90% KRs. They essentially win every match. I've never met anyone on survivor with comparable numbers, like a 70% overall ER. Even if you maintain the basic goal numbers of 60/40 that means you tie or win most of your killer matches snd lose most of your survivor matches.
A lot of killers strength comes down to the ability to flip the script, like to be losing and slug everyone for a sudden win, or to hard tunnel into a guaranteed victory. End game can quickly shift into killers' favor too. Survivors don't really have anything equivalent to this, where they're losing and just suddenly win.
Killer and it's not even close. Besides the devs literally saying they want the game to be rigged in favor of the killer we can look at things as simple as hit validation being based solely on the killers side giving them tons of free hits and kills.
The "game" is killer sided. Now, if you limit it to less than the game and just create a hypothetical scenario (usually four person SWF against a weaker killer), sure, you can make it sound survivor sided, especially if things like the different skill ceiling levels are not looked at. But the game as a whole is, by design, killer sided.
I mean, it comes down to the killer played and the map rng present in the end.
Nurse on a midwich with bad room rng? Yeah that's gonna be killer sided.
Ghostface on Borgo with good pallet rng? Yeah that's gonna be survivor sided.
Statistics tell you that it's killer sided overall.
if both sides were competent survivors hands down they win even harder as a swf there uis a eeason why dbd comp has to restrict perks/perk combos because survivors are that strong
At the highest level of play it is survivor sided, but that requires 4 players in a party communicating as well as being highly skilled with the best loadouts. This is very rare. In a regular match with the average survivor group the game isn't survivor or killer sided because killers don't really exist. Nurse and Skull Merchant are not playing the same game. Killers like Jason are allowed to power creep half the roster.
Killers win more often often because of the asymm nature of the game. Lets say a team has two excellent survivors, one good and one noob if the killer gets the noob out early then 3 v 1 is very hard for survivors to win. If it's four really good survivors, on comms all running meta I think it does become overwhelmingly survivor against most of the killers.
With no MMR and every survivor being solo - slightly killer sided.
With MMR and every survivor being solo - balanced.
Anything else, any form of swfs or whatever, heavily survivor sided.
My main issue is how maps and layouts affect killers. Imagine Nurse on Badham having equal chance to win as Skull Merchant.
Killer-sided. And honestly, in regular public games it can only become survivor-sided if the Killer lets this happen. This with their choice of playing Killer, someone who does not pick one of the strongest Killers will most likely not want to win that badly. Or how they play, if someone decides to play nice and not tunnel, the Survivors have a bigger chance.
But if Killers play to win and play strong Killers and tunnel and slug a lot, then it is clearly killer-sided. It can only really become survivor-sided if the Killer decides to not do that.
the recent unrestricted tournament event highlighted that killers, even with free choice of map selection piloted by top tier killer players can only barely hope to scrape a 50% kr against a swf pulling out all the stops to try and win
In comp it's survivor sided. In public play it depends on so much that it's hard to say and maps decide a lot.
I'll give two examples, get a ghost face on Midwich and they're threatening but get a ghost face on Blood Lodge and they're a joke. One map has many line of sight blockers and places to peak around and is quite small. The other has long sight lines and strong loops. Same killer but a radically different experience depending on the map.
Now let's take Trickster's Delusion a map that people have realized can spawn a brutal market 3 gen for survivors if they spawn in the shack, market and in front of the market near the nightclub or the park if you're lucky. If the killer is aware of this the survivors will have a bad time if they're not and the survivors are and break it early the map isn't so bad. But this says nothing of the killer or the perks the survivors brought. There's simply too many variables to say definitively which side the game favors.
Only reason game is survivor sided in comp is they try to take out as many variables as possible and when you do that communication is the strongest thing left.
Going by my own play sessions I would say it's Killer sided by a long way. If I play 5 Killer games, I know I'm in with a good shot of winning most of the time and at the very least, will win at least one of those games. I say this as a fairly chill "rule book" Killer that intentionally makes trials harder for myself. But if I play double the amount of Survivor games, there's a very good chance I won't escape in any of them (and even when I do escape, the Killer rarely walks away without at least one Kill).
I don't count SWF on comms as part of the discussion because (and this might earn me some down votes) I think it's basically cheating at the game. It's the biggest balance problem facing DBD that BHVR have so far completely refused to do anything about. Yes, a good SWF on comms is very rare to face, but their existence still throws the balance of the game entirely out of whack.
There are lots of other variables people have already mentioned, but one that nobody has yet is the platform you play on. I'd say if you play Killer on Switch, the game is more Survivor sided (especially so when cross play is enabled). The poor, inconsistent frame rates you get on Switch 1 will screw you over much more severely playing Killer than when playing as Survivor. Get used to whiffing and getting spun a lot. Switch Survivors at least have the choice of playing ultra stealthy and letting the team take the heat while they busy themselves on the gens. But Switch Killers have no such luxury.
The game isn't survivor sided or killer sided per say, it's SWF and S tier killer sided. When you have mostly solo or duo survivors in a lobby up against a killer who is solid but not overly oppressive (say Bubba for example), the game is pretty well balanced overall. But if the survivors are a four man squad with thousands of hours on the game, that tips the scales to the match being survivor sided. On the flip side, if that first group of mostly solos and duos go against a highly skilled Nurse, Blight or Kaneki, the match will be killer sided, where it would be more balanced (though extremely sweaty) if it's that four man squad against the S tier killer. And that doesn't even factor in stuff like how maps change how good a killer is (Bubba is awful on Trickster's Delusion, but Myers is super strong on it for example).
answering this is like robert peston trying to answer philomena cunk
It depends on the skill level.
In general you could say low skill its killer-sided, while its survivor-sided on the higher end.
Thats mostly bc of two reasons: An inexperienced killer doesnt need chase knowledge bc the survivor doesnt know how to loop. And being scared hurts the gen pressure.
One the higher end its becomes more survivor-sided bc most killer lack the chase to apply enough pressure. But its just most killer. There is no reason to not choose the strongest options. So in the end the high end is really balanced, there is just not much variety.
All said if you take the average of map balance. You can still have unwinnable matches on both sides bc of specific maps.
And also important: this discussion is not really relevant for public lobbies. The matchmaking is a mess. Quick tip: the non-event-que has always a higher chance for better player.
I was around when playing survivor was easy. Trust me, it's not like that more. Playing survivor is miserable unless you're in a swf. Even Otz is too much of a coward to play solo survivor.
Depends on bracket of MMR and application of skill, among other things. The game is largely killer sided at the mid to lower end. Played at peak performance, as in e-sports levels, the game is survivor sided and it's pretty obvious why: basic action economy. Four professionals versus one professional, they have four times the availability to thought, communicate, and action the board so to speak.
The problem here is that discussing these brackets also becomes an issue. What percent would you say are those comp players? What percent are standards? In comp the Killer picks the map, and gets their own perk bans to try to adjust for this egregious level of advantage survivors have. Discord alone gives a sweaty group such an astronomical advantage as to break the entire game.
Which brings me back to Jesterkind's reply. It's just too complicated to quantify. Which killer? Which perks? Which map? Are they full sweat SWF or casual Andy's? Cog also points out how the late game can swing in Killers favor pretty dramatically with a good play via slugging or tunneling. Does this opportunity exist for the given killer in the given scenario? Who makes the first mistake?
End of the day there's no solid answer because there can't be. At highest performance play, Survivors have overwhelmingly strong win odds. At lower ends of play the Killer has overwhelmingly strong win odds. Everything in between does not reflect that spectrum as you'd think it does - it's more of a wibbly wobbly, timey-wimey tangled up mess.
Am I the only one who doesn't see the issue with this? I believe the result was 48% escape rate vs 52% kill rate. Can you explain how this is horrifically unbalanced? This was with fast track too. Both sides brought the most broken setups possible and the result was… fairly even? How much do you think killers should win?
The game is balanced around the assumption youre playing with friends (hence the solo queue buffs to try to bring them up in line).
That being said,
Low mmr - killer sided
Mid mmr - generally balanced
High mmr - survivor sided
Exception: blight and nurse at experienced level is above everything else. However, that is before considering their recent nerfs - I am uncertain of their capabilities at high mmr post nerfs.
In addition to all of this, which is true, its worth pointing out a few other things:
1: If it was truly unrestricted the killer side would have played Nurse every match. In essence we had one side playing S Tier every match and the other side sometimes forced to A/B tier. It's not surprising that the side constantly running the absolute best possible did a little better than normal.
2: A few of these tournaments have been run, but in at least one of them I saw the survivors also knew the killer they were going to face. This is a pretty substantial advantage for the survivor that exists in lots of comp frameworks that gets overlooked.
3: They weren't playing for kills/escapes, but hooks. That has a lot of impacts on the games, but an obvious one is that in end game situations the killers will target a fresh hook instead of an elimination, lowering what the expected kill rate would be.
It's astonishing how people are downvoting you for having an even-handed opinion. Some people won't be happy unless we announce wholesale the game is X or Y. God forbid there be nuance.
It's not that deep
Play killer, then play survivor.
As weak killer you will always get at least (!!!) 2 kills. One during the game, and one in the endgame.
As survivor you might escape one time every 10 rounds if you don't hide and try to get all gens done.