"The Average Survivor is Bad"
My time on this forum has shown me one thing clearly, some of you need a math lesson.
These are normal distributions. When you graph the frequency of many attributes across a population they create distributions like these, particularly in the natural world. Many human characteristics, like height, reaction time, the number times in a day you use the bathroom, you get a graph like this. Rarely perfectly, but close enough that they are a useful tool. In a normal distribution the peak in the middle of the graph is simultaneously the mean (average), median (middle number), and mode (most common number).
Now, what does this have to do with DbD. Well we could create a metric called "Survivor Skill in DbD" and make that our X-Axis, the further right we go the better those survivors are at DbD and then make player count the Y-Axis. When you make the statement that the average survivor is bad you are arguing one of two things.
The first possibility is that the graph created by doing that would not follow a normal distribution. You are claiming that said graph would perhaps look something like this. (I am not sorry for my bad paint skills and I am not fixing it)
Now, given that skill in DbD is made up of human characteristics, like reaction time, spatial awareness, the ability and willingness to cram a ton of worthless information about killer powers, maps, addons, and perks into your head, and the mechanical ability to execute on that information, you would need an incredibly compelling argument for this non-normal distribution to be true. I have never seen such an argument and while DbD has unique characteristics it is not nearly unique enough to warrant such belief without an extensive study of the games playerbase.
So that leaves us with the other possibility. Survivor player skill in DbD follows a normal distribution and so does killer player skill, but your statement can still be true. It just requires you to place the survivor skill required to be decent at survivor, effectively the survivor skill floor, above the average point. Since survivor skill is measured directly against killer skill we would necessarily have to place the killer skill floor below the average point on their distribution.
The end result, by stating that "the average survivor is bad" you are arguing that it is more difficult to do well on survivor than it is to do well on killer, thus you are arguing that survivor is the harder role and killer is the easier role.
Comments
I have one.
And that's that the game is incredibly hostile to survivor players, driving most of them away. This means the only ones left to keep playing survivor are
A) New players who are fresh to the game and haven't been beaten down yet.
B) Die-hard try-hards that are determined to chisel out a win no matter the odds.
Thus you get a chunk of players on the lower end and a chunk of players on the higher end, but way fewer in the middle, as that's where the game is brutally unfair to the player and they're also experienced enough to see the pattern and decide to quit.
That's my theory.
Statically game would be heavily unbalanced if you as killer can't reach point where you no longer win. Average killer has about 300-400 winstreaks, meaning in the end they reached point where they lost a game and lost their streaks.
This is certainly a possibility and definitely the best one I have heard. However, I think there are also counter-arguments against it.
Human perseverance being normally distributed. We are not the only game hostile to newcomers and mid-skill players, though we certainly are on the upper end of that distribution. In this game those mid level players can swap over to killer for the majority of their play while still potentially existing amongst the playerbase and playing survivor occasionally. A player can be a die-hard while sucking or be a noob but weirdly good at the game.
All of this and the general hostility could just leave us with an incredibly wide and shallow distribution, something like this.
I really doubt that something as far removed from the natural world as a video game being played in a virtual world would follow normal distribution curves. There are a lot of crazy factors in play in DbD that are hard to quantify, especially on a single curve. If you had some real data graphed, then maybe it'd be worth entertaining such a hypothesis.
Nothing is consistent about DbD or its player base.
I think player churn accounts for the poor performance of DbD's player base. It's not like everyone who buys DbD follows a predictable skill curve. How many players actually get to >1k hours and actually get decent at the game before burning out?
I disagree with this conclusion. I don't see how saying the average survivor is bad means survivor is more difficult than killer.
The average survivor AND the average killer is bad.
It is easier to handicap yourself as survivor. Queue up for a match as a SoloQ with a non-meta build and yes, it is harder to be successful than if you play killer.
Are you a robot? Cause if you are a robot you have to tell me, its the law or something.
The game is virtual but you (unless you are a robot) are a piece of meat piloting that virtual survivor or killer using your thinking meat and your bony finger meats. That leads us straight back to the natural world and normal distributions whether you want to think about your meat suit or not.
Anyone could fall anywhere on the skill curve, regardless of playtime. Every other game has some level of player churn as well yet the skill of their players also fall onto normal distributions. The argument that DbD players have never played another online pvp game is proven more and more true every day.
Since survivors face killers you necessarily must compare the two and in order for the average player of one side to be bad the average player of the other side must, again necessarily, be good. Believe it or not, I actually agree with the statement that the average survivor is bad but its because I think my conclusion is true, it is harder to do well on survivor than it is to do well on killer. This is backed up by BHVR's desired (and met based on the stats they share with us) kill rates and escape rates.
You are my new favorite forum member. Thank you.
(Jk, I love this #########)
(JK, I do love the outside, here is a Semipalmated Sandpiper (pretty sure) I saw on a recentish trip)
We're going to get a lot of 'my time on the forum type' conclusion posts over the next month, aren't we? I'm already thinking about my own.
Anyway, yes, agree with this, a few things to add.
1: Let's say you're a developer who, for whatever reason, wants one side to achieve their objective 60% of the time and the other 40% of the time. A pretty easy way to achieve that is just make the 60% side more straightforward ('easier'). You put more skill expression burden on the 40% side, and the 60% side learns and responds from that.
2: DbD is a very 'stompy' game. This is true I think regardless of the MMR level. If the survivors are better than the killer, than to the killer they seem unbeatable, but if they are worse they are so easy they seem awful at the game.
3: All of the stomps have thrown off what actual 'even' would be like. The classic is the 'the game is survivor sided, look, they almost won this game'.
Completely agree, particularly number 2. This is a game of distance but the most important distance isn't measured in meters, its measured in the millimeters directly around the pallet or window currently being looped, those tiny increments of skill have a significant impact on the match as a whole.
You're way overthinking it. The average survivor is bad because 1. Constant rotation of new players coming into the game and 2. The vast majority of players only interact with the game casually, most don't care to know hard numbers behind things or the weird ways killer powers or survivor perks interact with things. They wanna screw around with their friends for a little while and then log off.
I doubt survivor skill level would be a bell curve I would imagine it looks a lot more like an inverted yield curve where most survivors don't know that much or don't care to and then as it curves downward you have the very low number of experienced and competitive survivors that know all the numbers behind killer cool downs and obtuse mechanics like knowing to crouch Billy's chainsaw to make their hitbox smaller.
Yeah. I can totally agree with the statement, that survivor is the harder role to master in modern dbd.
You have a constantly growing roster of killers that have unique forms of counterplay, a hellhole of default megs plagueing you in soloq and generally way less opportunity to outplay newer killers like Jason or Judgement.
Survivor is hard. But if you master it, survivor can be very rewarding.
Killer is the easier role by far, especially if you focus on A tier killers and above.
We are not the only online pvp game with a constant rotation of players (many of whom return not just new). The vast majority of ALL online pvp games consist of casual players who don't care about hard numbers and are just there to screw around and log off. Go look at the rank distributions in these games and you will see the same thing over and over again, an imperfect normal distribution that extends to the right (with astronomically small numbers of players at that top end). There is no reason those games would have that and DbD wouldn't. Someone could learn to crouch Billy's chainsaw on the first day they play. Being a casual player doesn't automatically make you bad, you might only play every so often but even doing that you could be weirdly good at it.
Besides, if survivors have an inverted yield curve and killers are normally distributed you are still arguing that survivor is harder to play and learn. An inverted yield curve would suggest that survivor has a near insurmountable learning curve, otherwise you wouldn't end up with the vast majority of your players at the lowest possible skill level. If you are instead arguing that both sides have an inverted yield curve you need to stop solely lambasting survivors for being bad and start actually caring about the killers skill and saying the same about them.
Except DBD isn't really like any other PvP game. Most people even if they don't know the math behind things can understand the point gun at the other team and shoot concept of most other PvP games. DBD is a bit more obtuse since looping is never explained to you even in the tutorial and only very recently did we get an in game resource for learning killer powers. Like nobody is learning to duck a chainsaw their first day unless told by a friend because that isn't intuitive.
I said absolutely nothing about killer skill in my post so weird to try and make it about that but if I had to think about it I don't think they would go all on one curve because killers are all different and they would all have different curves. Like it's a lot easier to be good at Ghoul than it is to be good at Hag so they would have completely different curves.
Lastly I'd say I care about survivor skill more than killer skill because it effects me more. If a killer is bad I get an easier game and I'm kinda fine with that. If a survivor is bad that screws me because my chance to escape goes down so of course I'm gonna care about that way more.
DbD isn't different enough from other games in general for it to be treated so differently. If you have moved a character in third person view in another game you have moved a survivor. Obviously there are specific things to learn about the game but that applies to every other pvp game as well. Looping was learned intuitively when the game was first released, you will have new players that figure it out intuitively. Given the game is ten years old you shouldn't even assume someone new to playing it has never interacted with it in any way before and could know looping from those interactions. Or you play killer, get out of the truly baby leagues, and suddenly you face survivors doing that and then start doing it yourself on survivor.
We absolutely could split killer skill into separate distributions but the exact same could be said about survivor, as survivor your skill against each individual killer can be different and could be graphed separately. However, for both roles you could create an aggregation of those scores to create a more general skill level. Since the killer gets to pick who they play and survivors don't get to pick who they face I would agree that the individual is more important for killer and the general for survivor but this is just another point in favor of survivor being the harder role. Its not enough to be decent against a couple killers you need to be decent against everyone. There are things that apply against all killers but most have at least something additional with some practically creating a different game. Killers have things that apply across killers as well but you only need to know all the specifics of one to do well.
Your final point isn't a problem with survivor skill though, its a problem with matchmaking. Its no different than someone complaining about pallets because they play ghostface, a valid complaint for ghostface, without acknowledging that blight is in the game. These are not problems with survivor capability, they are problems with something else in the game that gets blamed on survivor.
For the record, I am not even trying to say that killer is easy, I consider both roles to be difficult. But on balance survivor is clearly the more difficult role and I am tired of the general refusal to acknowledge this fact and I am tired of arguments that blame "bad survivors" for things when there are other systems much more at fault.
True that DBD is unique when compared to today's most popular PvP games and that few skills are transferrable from other games, but I question the impact of such uniqueness on skill distribution.
For arguments sake, I thought League of Legends would be a great comparison.
There are many more moving parts and there is so much more information to memorize.
Fun story:
After roughly 20 years of gaming, I tried to get into LoL. I played very seriously for 2 weeks—watched YT tutorials, tips & tricks, multiple hours of gaming a day—and not a single game went by where I wasn't the weak link. I developed insomnia because the concepts were so foreign to me and I was trying so hard to improve. I would wake up every 15 minutes, having played multiple full games of LoL in my dreams, heart-racing, cold sweats, total disorientation…so I quit that game.
This is the rank distribution in League of Legends (NA Servers; Source: OP.GG):
The interesting thing about skill distribution is that skill is all relative.
If something is easy, more people will demonstrate proficiency—but that doesn't make them more skilled.
Inversely, if something is difficult, more people will demonstrate inadequacy—but that doesn't make them less skilled.
What makes distribution unique in DBD compared to a game like League of Legends is not how players are distributed, but how they are matched. Because opponents are not playing the same game, an even match-up might look like 1 Platinum Killer vs 4 Silver Survivors, or vice versa.
…though I imagine the MMR system increases and decreases ones rank at inequal rates, according to whatever the data tells BHVR is the easier role.
There is no way denying that having a good outcome is easier on killer than on survivor. Still most of ALL players are bad, and with the actual matchmaking esp. survivor players getting better at the game is a harder task.
I've felt this way for awhile. There's a pattern to it. I've made friends and watched them go from appreciating the game in a simple way, being goofy, and not caring about outcomes, to getting more intense and fustarted as the obvious trajectory of lost matches emerges and the opponents become more hostile. Many burned out and never came back. Others became killer mains. It usually seems to happen around 1k-3k hours. That's the hump period, where you either dig your heels in or leave.