zarr

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Username: zarr
Joined: May 25, 2018
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Last Active: February 13, 2026

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@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2704201#Comment_2704201
But you have to distinguish if people are getting kills with Wraith or just getting kills with any Killer.
Because you're trying to use global killrates; bad matchmaking/team balance; and the performance of good players all at once. But each of these suggest something completely different! Global killrates obviously don't mean anything otherwise everyone needs nerfs except Nurse who suddenly needs buffs, and Pig's running out of things to nerf for the most hilariously obvious exception. The whole "this character does fine against random solo teams and then potatoes when it's a good SWF" is the recurring problem with SWF balance and how you can't have a balance where most of your players have lost the instant the match starts because of its initial conditions. And good killers getting kills with Wraith doesn't prove anything unless you can isolate how Wraith's power is contributing to that; because of the combination of the matchmaking being iffy and bad communication, you're not necessarily proving anything except "good perks and a skillgap mean you can win with M1's only".

And that's why one should use many different things in combination to draw these conclusions, and clearly BHVR has a mountain of more things to draw conclusions from than any of us. Maybe most killers do not need nerfs because now in MMR they actually average 50-60% kills rather than 60-70% like they did in the past of rank-based MM, and that might very well be the average target BHVR shoots for. Maybe Nurse does not need buffs because BHVR also knows that her skill floor is likely mostly responsible for her lower average rates, something they have other means to confirm too, such as looking at the kill rates in higher MMR brackets as well as games where highly-rated players actually meet her. But likewise, maybe most killers do not necessarily need buffs either, because they do already perform well enough in the game mode that actually matters. BHVR can look at stats accounting for skill brackets, ratings, loadouts, maps, rate deviations, etc., whenever they please. We unfortunately do not have those insights.
Either way, it doesn't matter what is causing people to be able to consistently win as Wraith in pubs, for live balance it only matters that they are able to. Sure differences in skill, experience, loadouts and so on could allow for that, but if it consistently does allow for it (which it does, I can fetch kill rates from various streamers), then the game is balanced in the actual reality of public play that 99% of players are playing. If even a killer without an ability altogether could win more often than not in the hands of a good player, it would only even more go to show that public matchmaking is favourably balanced for killers.
I am for SWF nerfs, that is a significant balance issue in my opinion as well. But SWFs that really leverage that imbalance are rare; 4-SWFs only make for around 5% of the player pools as far as we know, and while 3-SWFs can already be similarly problematic, they only amount to around 10%. Not to mention how few of these SWFs then actually are good players, use good loadouts, voice comms, and all that jazz. So it's not like it's the most pressing issue either, by much of any stretch.
@StarLost said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2704201#Comment_2704201
Most players in this game are new. This is very clearly demonstrated when you look at kill rates of the highest caliber killers in the game.
Yes, new players stomp with Wraith. This is what was causing the problems. His basic kit is very easy to understand.
Find me a single top-tier killer player who agrees 'Wraith is fine right now' in the current meta and I'll be happy to concede your point. Both Otz and Tofu have talked about this, and both agree that he was heavily overnerfed.
Not to be mean, but if you are playing against a lot of Wraiths, chances are that your own MMR is lowish (there's nothing wrong with this at all, but it would explain the success you're having). At my intermediate MMR (guessing) as survivor, I barely see them and those I do see get clobbered. Watching high level players stream, you almost never see him and when you do, he gets smashed - with the exception of one insanely good Wraith on a very favorable map that I saw a few days ago, or Otz running him with the best possible perks and addons.
Wraith can succeed. So can Pig, Cenobite, Clown, Trapper, Hillbilly, Ghostface and Legion. The nature of this game is that it tends to snowball one way or the other. This doesn't mean that these killers are fine and don't need attention.
That must been changed. I remember trying Wraith a few times after his nerf (when CoH was just added) and he definitely was completely unable to snuff boons unless he was decloaked. I can probably scare up an old Otz video where this was talked about if you really want.
Do you happen to have some videos of your matches on hand? Very curious here, because your experience sounds vastly different to my own, both in terms of me playing the game and me watching others playing the game.
If most players are new, balancing for those that aren't would also be worse. Again, it doesn't really matter what exactly the causes are for pubs to see an as killer-favouring state of balance as they are, with regards to the playing experience of the majority of players playing this game and how nerfs/buffs would affect it ("live balance"), it only matters that is in such a state where this killer on average kills two or more survivors more often than not and where good players win more often that not. Maybe if they were to make MMR more strict these players would stop being able to perform as well as they do now with a killer like Wraith, but that's not currently the case - and even if it were, there could still be the argument that one should balance with more regard to the majority of players that are not playing at that level.
I don't necessarily need players themselves to agree with Wraith being fine right now, only their stats. If they perform well with Wraith in pubs, then them complaining about his state of balance is frankly pretty entitled. A "they apparently want to win 99% of the time rather than the 90% they do now" kind of thing. I would have other players in mind than those two, but I can look at their Wraith stats too, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them win most of their games, on the contrary.
I don't play against Wraiths a lot, I just enjoy playing against Wraith a lot whenever I do. My suspicion is that my MMR is maxed out on both sides, I see tournament players and veteran streamers in my games regularly. Wraith is indeed not all that common a pick there from my experience as well, and again, I would agree with buffs for Wraith from a high MMR perspective (as well as a bunch of other killers), but my argument is about overall balance that BHVR weighs more heavily, and understandably so. But either way, again, when they do play Wraith good players even at high MMR still tend to win. I myself do (and can post a lot of screenshots showcasing as much, even if I know it isn't necessarily worth much), but the streamers I watch do as well. I will fetch Wraith kill rate stats from some streamers the next time I can be bothered to skip through VoDs.
If it was the case that Wraith wasn't able to snuff Boons while cloaked it's good that he can now, I've done it often enough (it was also a relief to realize he can rekindle totems while cloaked).
I don't record my gameplay, I would only be able to provide screenshots, I have tons of those. But like I said, I will go fetch Wraith kill rates from streamers with links to the streams.
in Is wraith bad again? Comment by zarr December 19, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2704158#Comment_2704158
That is an excessively long wall of text to, basically, say "BHVR is right and the forums/reddit/streamers are wrong". Come on, brevity has its merits; you don't need 1,000 words to say that you think he's fine against randoms. 🤣
But... other people don't think it's fine to have a Killer whose only strength is the ability to stomp noobs by sneaking up on them. Someone who's a pure M1 killer against good players and will have a winrate based on the player's skill at looping as an M1 killer outside of low ranks isn't someone that actually has anything going for them.
If you balance so that anything easy to use has its powers adjusted so that it can't outmatch similarly experienced survivors, you're going to wind up with a lot of characters that are basically just M1 once you hit that skill ceiling. Yeah, people will get wins, but those same people could probably get wins with literally anything with the same base movement speed in the same game.

But that's the thing, Wraith doesn't only stomp noobs, unless most players in this game are noobs (in which case the point would stand that he does not need to be buffed anyway, not least because it would mean even noobs stomp with Wraith). Global average rates show he kills more often than not, good killer players win with Wraith consistently, BHVR, based on a variety of stats, an overview of the game and other things that none of us have access to, said he was a wee bit overpowered. I think you will have to start entertaining the idea that public matchmaking is actually a favourably balanced place, for Wraith and most of any killer even in the hands of an average player.
Precisely because of the fact that those people (good players) can win consistently in this game with Wraith is why he isn't "bad" and doesn't necessarily need buffs. Doesn't mean buffing him would necessarily be terrible for the game, but likewise nerfing him didn't make the game terrible playing as Wraith either. Again, what reality are we balancing for? One where good players should have 99% winrates rather than 80-90%? Where even average players should get closer to 3 kills on average rather than 2 with a killer like Wraith? Because those are realities of pubs.
@StarLost said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/300766/is-wraith-bad-again
Yes.
He was perfect pre-nerf. The only reason he got nerfed is that he can be difficult for new players to deal with. Even at an intermediate MMR, he was mid 'B' tier at best, and that was with great addons.
CoH completely negates him - a particulary funny Otz video of a really good Wraith getting absolutely clouted basically by this perk alone made me pretty sad for the bing-bong boy.
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2703779#Comment_2703779
The nerf to his lunge doesn't look like much on paper, but in reality (factoring in acceleration and time) it's now basically useless in chase.
It still had the same problem as Pig's ambush, as savvy survivors will either just leave the loop or vault.
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2704158#Comment_2704158
Eh.
He's got the same problem as Cenobite has. He completely stomps all over new players. Against moderately decent solos or an SWF, he struggles.
CoH is another big problem - Wraith's whole thing is that he's good at getting the first hit and keeping multiple people injured, and using this sort of attrition style to gradually escalate pressure until he starts getting hooks. CoH negates this completely, and his pressure evaporates. And the fact that you have to manually destealth to snuff boons is just...why?
About the only way to play him now is a gimmicky DH+Undying+NOED+NWO style, or to play a better killer. If you want to be sneaky, Myers or even Ghostface is infinitely better.

Not that I disagree with the assessment that he struggles against good opponents, I've pointed out as much myself, but my point is that he is evidently good enough to be able to compete relatively comfortably against the vast majority of opponents players get in this game even now with MMR in place, otherwise it would not be possible for his average kill rates to be as high as they are. And even players that have to be assumed to be high MMR due to winning consistently, are winning consistently with him.
I don't think Wraith is all that problematically "overpowered", from my perspective of someone that likes playing as and against Wraith a lot and plays at high MMR I could definitely agree with some buffs for him. But I also don't think he's problematically "underpowered" - I still win much more often than I lose with him, I wouldn't want them to buff Wraith so much that I can even possibly beat the 1 crazy group out of 100 matches that I currently can't, if it comes at the cost of the 99+ other groups being notably easier to beat. Not saying reverting the speed boost nerf would do that, as I said I personally would want for them to revert that change, but that's also from a high MMR perspective, there's much more players in other MMR brackets and they might actually suffer from that a "wee bit" too much. I at least don't believe that BHVR based that change on nothing, again I think it's more likely their decision was much more well-informed than the opinions of many of the players discussing it, with regards to the "live balance" of this game that affects many more players.
You don't actually have to uncloak to snuff Boons, that just a by the way. I do agree that Wraith is one of the killers Circle hurts particularly much, and I hope they will nerf it at least insofar that it does not grant the 100% healing speed boost on any healing action other than its own (so it would allow survivors to heal themselves in 16 seconds within its range and that's it). Beyond that maybe they could put a cooldown on Boon perks, i. e. make it so that you can't bless a totem for 30-60 seconds after your Boon has been snuffed. Or that each survivor can only bless each totem once, so if it gets snuffed they have to find another one. ...But then again, COH is the only actually problematic one in my opinion, people barely even use the others from all I can tell, because they are just not good enough to compete for slots most of the time.

in Is wraith bad again? Comment by zarr December 19, 2021
It depends on what you mean by "bad". Having a difficult time winning if you go against 4 good and coordinated players communicating and using the best stuff? Yeah, his ceiling is pretty limited in those instances, you will mostly be fighting for a 2k at best. Having a difficult time in your average pub match? In that environment Wraith is far from bad and in fact one of the killers with the best "ease of use" to "chances of success" ratios.
I 2/3/4k with Wraith consistently in pubs, using a variety of builds and playstyles. If you are an at least competent player you will do well more often than not in pubs, with much of any killer, and with Wraith if anything more comfortably so than with various others.
While I personally dislike the speed boost nerf he received and would wish that it was reverted (it is a fairly significant nerf, both in terms of actual strength and more importantly for me in terms of the fun factor of playing Wraith), I think people are a little naive when they completely disregard the idea that there's actual reasoning behind BHVR's balance adjustments, to put it mildly.
Of course, from a perspective of the idea of facing 4 good survivors on voice comms using the best stuff they possibly can and on some of the most survivor-favouring maps, even the best, most experienced and reasonable players would agree that Wraith was indeed not even "a wee bit overpowered". However, the reality of this game is not facing such survivor groups, to much of any extent. Even now with MMR in place good killer players still win the vast majority of their matches relatively comfortably and decisively with much of any killer. And they do so because the reality of this game is that most players are mediocre at best, good players are relatively rare, and good players teaming up in SWF, using voice comms and the best loadouts is even rarer. If this game is to be balanced in its actual reality of the actual matches that actual players are actually playing, it has to be balanced with the wild disparities of skill and experience and the wild disconcertedness of loadouts, strats, tactics, decisions, playstyles, motivations, and so on in mind that is public matchmaking. That is the so-called "live balance". And rather than the few hundreds of people talking in online outlets about their personal experiences with and anecdotes of the game, I think one should have more confidence in BHVR to have a more accurate grasp of the state of balance in that reality - a reality of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of players every month, logging millions of hours of gameplay, a reality in which the entire playing experience of even the longest-standing players with years of playtime amounting to thousands of hours is matched in mere minutes. And if BHVR nerfs Wraith because he is a "wee bit overpowered" in that reality, I actually am compelled to believe that they are basing this on more accurate and factual assessments than any forum users. And with Wraith I can totally see why that could be the case, since his kit is so easy to make good use of that even average players likely do very consistently, while on the other hand also being a kit average players have a harder time playing against than various other killer kits (they don't know where he is, then he is suddenly there and they do not react fast or well).
There's a reason why Freddy has had such high average public kill rates and why Nurse doesn't. The "ease of use" to "chances of success" ratio of a killer ability is one of the most important factors in the live balance environment of public matchmaking where the majority of players are at best averagely skilled and experienced. Sure we can say BHVR should balance for high level play, but high level play is exceedingly rare even now with MMR in place, otherwise good killers would not still be 4king all day. There is simply no reality of this game in which it would be reasonable to balance for the highest level. That only happens in tournaments, and tournaments are inherently balanced by their format and ruleset. In public matchmaking, even at high MMR, the balance is already such that good players win much, much more often than they lose even with a killer like Wraith, and where even average players still kill more survivors with him than survivors escape against him. Balancing for the tiny fraction of games where there's actually a high level survivor side would screw with the 99% of other matches in undesirable, imbalanced ways that are to the detriment of countless players' playing experiences. That doesn't mean all balance changes will completely disrupt things of course, and I do think BHVR is much too slow and conservative with changes (a bunch of killers should totally long have been buffed and SWF long have been nerfed, a variety of maps long adjusted), but I also recognize that BHVR with an overwhelming likeliness is much more reasonable in their balancing decisions for the actual reality of this game as the vast majority experiences it than most of the opinions that can be read here and elsewhere.
Besides, if you do want to be able to compete even against the one-in-a-thousand occurrence of getting an actual high-level survivor group, there are still killers you can practice and play that allow you to do so - and they are super fun to play, if anything much more so than Wraith because their abilities have a much higher skill ceiling and reward you much more for practicing and improving.
Note: I do think lightburn for Wraith is a mechanic that has long outstayed its welcome. Or at least, if they want to maintain that mechanic because it makes flashlights and firecrackers a little more relevant, implement it for every killer and buff those that suffer the most accordingly. Wraith in his current form definitely does not deserve to have such a punishing drawback. If I dislike anything about playing Wraith it's seeing flashlights in my lobbies. There's not even add-ons against lightburn anymore. Sure there is some counterplay, but if I vault a window or break a pallet while cloaked, a survivor can reliably lightburn me, and out in the open without Swift Hunt I can't even uncloak against a flashlight if the survivor knows what to do.

in Is wraith bad again? Comment by zarr December 19, 2021
Is there actual evidence that blinds are not already handled on the server?
Just because there are instances in which you get blinded despite looking away in time doesn't mean it's the survivor's perspective that counts - if your latency is higher than that of the survivor it's still possible that the server saw the successful blind before you looked away.
I have a low latency (20-40ms) and I can't remember a single time in which I got blinded well after having looked away.
If you want to test this, you need a survivor using means to induce a high latency into their connection and blinding the killer, with the killer looking away within the last milliseconds of the blinding window (the exact timing depends on both players' latencies - if the survivor has 300ms and the killer 50ms, the killer should look away within the last 250ms before the blind goes through on their end).
If you can consistently demonstrate that high-ping survivors get successful blinds despite the killer looking away in time on their own screen, then we have something to suggest blinds are actually survivor client-sided. I have not seen anything that suggests this, personally.

in When are killers getting flashlight validation? Comment by zarr December 19, 2021
@Bardon said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2701678#Comment_2701678
Except they're not rare in the slightest.

Which ones are you frequently experiencing?

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 18, 2021
@ColonGlock said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2702951#Comment_2702951
I play a lot of clown and rarely use antidote except when I mistakenly press the switch bottle toggle haha. I do very well with him but I have been playing him since release. I will take your advice and try antidote out more. Speeding around does sound appealing. I just have to figure out the bottle placement so I do not lose momentum.

Here's some example games from a very experienced and good Korean player that uses the Garish Box combo and enjoys his yellows (looks like twitch timestamps do not work when embedding videos, so here's raw links):
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1235887510?t=2h21m12s
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1202214744?t=6h13m51s
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1207024451?t=5h43m6s
Nothing too crazy in these games, I've seen him have more impressive ones, but it still shows well how to work with Antidotes and the value of the add-ons, lots of easy hits once you know where and when to place the yellows.
@Akumakaji said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2702951#Comment_2702951
This guy clowns around, and this is the highest of praise in this regard.
Top advise and I hope that this inspires a few more aspiring Clown enthusiasts to learn the deeper secrets of his kit and see how awesome and fun he can be.
Though truth be told, nothing beats his sound design.

I'll raise my Antidote Bottle to that.

in Clown add on guide Comment by zarr December 18, 2021
Garish Make-Up Kit is a pretty incredible add-on, combine it with Cigar Box and it's absolutely on par with the Ether + Bleach combo. I find people still way underestimate how good the Antidote is, the speed boost makes hits possible on many tiles that simply aren't without it, and it particularly helps on pallet play once the pallet is dropped, something Clown in the past struggled with.
The advantage the Antidote has over the Tonic is that the survivor cannot really play around it since you do not have to try and get the survivor to run into it, you just have to place it such that it is opportune for yourself. Another advantage is that the invigorated effect on yourself regularly lasts longer than the intoxicated effect on the survivor - intoxication only lingers for 2 seconds, invigoration for 5. This often more than makes up for the slightly lower catch-up speed boost that invigoration grants as compared to intoxication. And not only that, but while intoxicated survivors have a fairly easy time judging where they can make it at their reduced movement speed, it is much harder for them to judge when your increased movement speed allows you to catch up. Hell, sometimes they don't even know that you're zooming. And the lack of experience many survivors still have going up against Antidote enjoyers also benefits you, especially once increased invigoration duration add-ons come into play.
Of course, the ultimate Clown combines purple and yellow for maximum effect, but if you are one of the people still skeptical about the value of yellow and find it more comfortable mostly sticking to purple, try sticking mostly to yellow for a few rounds instead, I bet you'll be surprised.

in Clown add on guide Comment by zarr December 18, 2021
I think if that was going to be a thing it would have already been. And between the tentacle, sound effects and animations none of which fit Mr. X, it's highly unlikely they'd go for that, or that Capcom would want them to. I'd find it weird as well. Would probably still purchase it though.
But if we are dreaming anyway, might as well go for a Mr. X paragraph. Zombies are there too of course, albeit maybe with new models, and his ability could be something relatively simple like if you get close enough to a survivor you can grab them and throw them against stuff, taking a health state, so they'll have notably less distance than they'd have from a regular hit. And hell, maybe instead of breaking pallets he would pick them up and throw them, likewise taking a health state if he manages to hit a survivor with one.
I do find it weird that there hasn't been more RE stuff. The chapter quickly became one of if not the best-selling DLC for the game, not bringing more cosmetics, legendaries for different tyrants and survivors or even additional DLCs feels like one of those "they hate money" things. Maybe Capcom was less willing to have too many of the options end up in the game than one might imagine though.

in Would Mr X work as a Legendary skin for Nemesis? Comment by zarr December 18, 2021
Definitely, Pain Resonance is a proper meta perk. Pentimento is also really good. Neither is necessarily something to be seen in top-level tournament matches where guaranteed delay is the go-to (Corrupt, Deadlock, No Way Out), but for everything else they are great additions to the game that are both viable and mix up the gameplay a fair bit.
I would want to see changes for Grim Embrace, namely to either make the time it blocks gens for depend on the amount of generators left in the trial (so 30 seconds up to 70 seconds), or to block gens for 10 seconds on the first fresh hook, 20 on the second, 30 on the third and finally 40 on the fourth. Grim Embrace is a perk that disincentivizes tunnelling and camping to an extent and as such I think it should be much more impactful so as to encourage players to use it and go out of their way to not tunnel and camp from the get-go. These changes would achieve that.
In general I think it would be cool to see a wide variety of game delay perks be buffed to compete for slots in popular loadouts. It's not the most ambitious meta change, and there are a variety of base game changes I'd likewise like or even prefer to see, but it's something, and it's actually pretty fun and refreshing to experiment and play with and against different game delay builds, even if they all have that same goal of delaying the game.
Blood Warden - Make it so any hooking after the last gen is finished will activate the perk, with its timer starting once a gate is then actually opened (or alternatively, a base game change: make gate opening progress reset over time such that survivors are regularly forced to open gates earlier as opposed to being able to 99% them). Also, any consecutive hook should prolong the timer somewhat.
Dead Man's Switch - Remove the Obsession condition. If that's too much, make it a Scourge Hook perk, or make it so it only procs when hooking a non-Obsession survivor.
Eruption - Remove the cooldown. Increase immediate regression to 10% or continual regression to 0.5 charges per second. I think the default regression rate should be bumped up to .5c/s globally, but I doubt that will happen, so put it on perks instead.
Huntress Lullaby - On top of the existing effect, make it so good skill checks apply a regression to the interaction of 1-5% depending on the amount of tokens on it. Or perhaps a reverse relationship would actually be more interesting, where the perk starts out at 5% regression on good skill checks at 1 token and goes down to 1% at 5.
Jolt - Tie its effect range to terror radius. Remove the cooldown. Remove basic attack condition. Increase immediate regression to 10% or continual regression to .5c/s.
Oppression - Remove the cooldown. Increase continual regression to .5c/s.
Overcharge - Additionally, make it so kicked gens regress at .5c/s.
Remember Me - Remove the basic attack condition. Remove the Obsession exemption from the effect. Increase the time per token to 10 seconds. Cap the maximum at 6 tokens. Make the actual time added to gates depend on the amount of survivors left in the trial - 4 = full possible 60 seconds, 3 = at most 30 seconds, 2 = at most 15 seconds, 1 = 0 seconds.
Gift Of Pain - Apply the action speed penalty until the survivor is healed, rather than once they are healed. Increase the penalty to 20%.
Thanatophobia - Include dead survivors. Make it also apply to healing speeds again.
Thrilling Tremors - Remove the cooldown. Make it block any gens with progress on them instead.
Just some ideas that would already really shake up the meta and create a wider variety of viable delay builds with different synergies and playstyles.

in Do you think the new perks for Killer has changed the meta slightly? Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2701753#Comment_2701753
Who said anything about proper transitions? Just randomly going from one frame to a different animation is still something.
Yeah, serverside hit detection is another idea. Really depends how much the servers currently need to deal with level geometry etc, I suppose.

Well, you need time to do transitions anyway, not least due to having to wait a roundtrip time for the server message that tells you your hit got overruled to begin with. That can't happen in a single frame even if we ignore processing times, again, the same issues exists for grab validation where the latency-induced delay before your client even realizes the grab did not work can already lead to the survivor getting outside of basic attack range.
Server-sided hit detection is everything I want, because it would be infinitely more fair than the current client-sided hit detection, and it would also be able to solve some of the janky interactions more harmoniously. But yeah, maybe BHVR is not comfortable putting that additional load onto their servers, fearing it will hamper performance and necessitate having to pay more for servers.

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2701730#Comment_2701730
I have no idea where you got the idea that I don't understand how latency works. I haven't questioned that at all, only possible solutions.
Yes, something needs to be compromised. Or collision detection needs to be reworked--i.e. the client should perhaps calculate what will happen if the survivor's hitbox is removed, which then preserves the interactions that otherwise need to happen or not happen without having to do a power-specific fix for every interaction in the game. Would it inevitably mean weird rollbacks of animations and swapping to other animations? Probably, but that is the compromise for having latency winning out and everything operating correctly: animation jank because the client isn't waiting.

I think for most of the special attacks we are talking about in this game, the speeds and therefore timings of these interactions would actually be prohibitive to the idea of being able to work with rollbacks and animation transitions. It would simply take too long to yield accurate results. It would be similar to validated grabs being turned into basic attacks - not seldomly the latency on that grab is big enough that the survivor is out of reach for the basic attack once it does happen (I think grab validation should simply take a health state off the survivor automatically, but current grab validation is a "temporary solution" according to BHVR, so maybe that's why they aren't touching it, ha).
Maybe for lunges it could still work kinda acceptably, but eh. Then they should rather do math in the background having the server make the most educated guess on whether the attack would have continued to still hit the survivor after the DH dash played out, and deliver the result of that to the players afterwards. Would still lead to jank where a survivor would randomly fall down after having seemingly avoided a hit, but it wouldn't be on the same level of jank as trying to go through wildly different animations within fractions of seconds.
And that is of course what they should do with the entire hit system to begin with: move it to the server. I suspect one reason why they aren't keen on doing so is that it would naturally cost more server resources to do all the complicated hit calculations that currently the killer's PC is doing.

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2701678#Comment_2701678
Dropkicking Victor is probably the most derp one that's allowed to stand, but they're all kind of ridiculous.

To be fair, if you successfully dodge a Victor pounce with Dead Hard, Victor is supposed to go into cooldown and you can then kick him, the only difference between a pounce that a survivor successfully dodges on the killer's screen and one that the server retroactively tells the killer the survivor successfully dodged is that Victor will overshoot its target in the former case, which can make it a bit more difficult for the survivor to run up to Victor in time to kick him.
But this cannot be solved without compromises, or at all. I'm not sure you got my point that a negated attack that in a latency-free environment might have continued to still register on a survivor after their Dead Hard dash played out cannot be made to work in that same way in an environment where latency does exist. If a successful hit of such an attack on the killer's screen would count no matter what, it would eat DH every time like it did in the past. And if these hits are subject to validation, they cannot continue after they have registered on the killer's screen - in order for that to happen the killer client would then have to undo the hit animations and velocity/position changes and go back into the middle of the attack animation, and then continue it for as long as it would have originally, all the while having to also account for how long the DH invincibility window still lasts so as to not get another successful hit a millisecond later that it would again have to roll back and start animations over. That's just not feasible, even at low latencies cancelling hit animations and velocity/position changes and going back into hit animations would be ridiculous, and more than that, it would cost so much time it would screw with the accuracy of the interactions it is seeking to "solve" to begin with.
A better solution would be to simply remove the invincibility from Dead Hard and replace it with Endurance, so that the hit still does happen on the survivor's screen too. While that would make it impossible to DH through bear traps and to negate Vile Purge or swarms of crows and other non-damaging special attacks, this would of course be a buff for the perk in other respects, so it might have to go along with other nerfs. I think a rework of the Endurance status effect would be good anyway. Namely, either take away the hit sprint from the survivor on an Endurance hit, or make the killer's hit cooldown only be a missed hit cooldown (1.5s) rather than a successful hit cooldown (3s). Or alternatively, reduce both the hit sprint and hit cooldown on Endurance hits somewhat (default hit sprint lasts for 2 seconds, make Endurance hit sprint only last for 1 second, and Endurance hit cooldown only for 2 seconds).

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2701661#Comment_2701661
I'm not sure if it's really correcting the speed boost part--I assume the speed boost is handled on the Survivor side (you're injured by some hit = speed trigger), especially with Overcome. Overriding which cooldown it should be appears to be the limit of the feedback it gets.
The problem is that, apart from the raw hits and this one cooldown (assuming that isn't also triggered by the Survivor changing to injured, in which case the server still hasn't interfered), yeah--everything else is just left as-is. I'm not surprised some perks/powers continue on perfectly normally since the validation is such a narrow case.

Well, ultimately it doesn't matter whether it's a killer or a survivor client-sided logic that governs the speed boosts and cooldowns and makes it so they don't happen on validated hits, the only important thing is that they don't. I do think the hit cooldown is handled on the killer client and the speed boost on the survivor client, the clip posted earlier in this thread shows Nemesis starting to go into successful hit cooldown because they have a very high latency, and then the overwriting message from the server arrives and turns it into a missed hit cooldown. But yeah, as that goes to show, even at ridiculously high latencies (red lag icon = at least 300ms) the successful hit cooldown only plays for a negligible duration.
Some other interactions are more problematic, such as for instance Nemesis' tentacle not breaking a pallet in its hitzone upon getting a hit rejected on a survivor, but like I said, these are fairly rare and fairly tame in terms of the impact they will usually have even then. Plus some of these interactions can even benefit killers, like a survivor magically losing their item to Franklin's. They should still be sorted out though of course.

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2701633#Comment_2701633
I think the overriding problem is that the client retains no memory of what it was doing, and the server doesn't seem to correct the client beyond confirming it was a hit/not a hit, and thus: we get all the feedback of a hit including the Killer coming to a dead stop, powers being used, pallets not being broken etc. (the Killer's actions and movement are allowed to stand) but not the hit (i.e. working out who pressed first).
Or, it's not being stateful enough; all it's doing is reporting hit/not hit and positional/anim info. This is not good if you're having all the conditions worked through clientside.

The server does actually correct the killer client according to the validated reality of the hit not having happened: killers go into missed hit cooldown rather than successful hit cooldown, and the survivor does not get a speed boost.
But you're not wrong, there are things this logic does not correct for, such as the possibility of an attack registering on pallets rather than the survivor, or funnily enough apparently even things like Oni still getting power progress or Franklin's Demise still robbing the survivor of their item. I haven't tested around with this much, but there's definitely some wacky interactions. These are very rare to happen in actual gameplay and only seldomly have much of an impact on the matches if they do, but I do think BHVR should sort these things out, not least because they would obviously have to be sorted out when moving the hit system at large to the server authority too.
But yeah, again, they cannot really solve the false feedback on overruled hits and DH sometimes eating attacks that might have otherwise still connected on the survivor after the dash, not without creating other issues. Maybe for one PTB they could disable client prediction of hit feedback so that players can see what it feels like to have latency-delayed feedback on that, and my bet is that nobody will consider it a worthwhile trade-off for getting rid of false feedback. I really think the easiest and most sensible solution is to play a sound/visual effect alongside the overruled hit.

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
I hope people will at some point understand this very obvious issue of networked multiplayer games: Every single player sees a slightly different game reality because network latency exists. The information every player has on the state of the game world is delayed because it takes that information some time to get to every player via internet connections. And since it takes different amounts of time for different players, the events on different players' screens can disagree with one another. This is an issue inherent to online networks, and it physically cannot be solved because even at actual light speed information still simply takes time to travel between different locations in space. So unless we are dreaming of networks employing quantum entanglement or spacetime curvature where information exchange might actually be instantaneous in both directions, we will simply have to accept this unfortunate reality and how it affects online multiplayer games.
There are three "perspectives" on game events: those of the respective player clients and that of the server. The events on the clients will be the most affected by latency since information needs to travel from one client to the server and then from the server to the other client. Example: Player A has a latency of 50ms to the server, Player B one of 80ms - in this case, the information either player has on the other player is 130ms delayed.
Of course, the question becomes, if two players' screens disagree on what happened in the game, how do we decide what actually happens? Do you think it is fair if we take the events on the screen of one player and disregard all other screens? That's what DbD has always done and still does in most situations now: whether a hit happens or not only depends on whether it did on the killer's screen, even if on the survivor's screen that hit is completely impossible. That means any latency in any player's connection including the killer's will benefit the killer on hits, because the higher the total latency, the further in the past the survivor model will be on their screen. Using our example values from above, the survivor position will be 130ms further in the past on the killer's screen than it is on the survivor's screen.
The server perspective on the game events is the most real-time accurate, since on it player information will only be delayed by the latency a respective player has to the server, rather than the latency of both players combined. Using our example from above again, the server will see player information at a delay of merely 50ms and 80ms respectively, rather than the 130ms total. It is not only the most accurate but also the most fair perspective on the game events, since players with a higher latency will be at a disadvantage rather than benefitting from their latency. And not only will it therefore not put any player at a disadvantage just because their opponent has a high latency, but the disadvantage the player with the higher latency has is also much smaller than the disadvantage in a system based on client perspective: in our example, Player B with 80ms obviously has the higher latency to the server, however they will only be at a disadvantage of 30ms because their opponent has a latency of 50ms to the server, so Player B's information is only delayed by 30ms relative to that of their opponent. We go from a disadvantage of 130ms to one of 30s, a four-fold improvement. And rather than latency always being to the disadvantage of the survivor player, now it will be to the disadvantage of the player with the higher latency of the two, survivor or killer.
To illustrate this a little more clearly:

Again using our latency examples from above, let's look at a gamestate from a survivor perspective and how it compares to the killer and server perspectives.
In this example, the survivor's real-time position on their own screen is 2.5 meters away from the killer. That is obviously 0.5m more than the killer's ~2m lunge range (6.9m/s * 0.3s), and therfore means the killer at this point in time is not able to reach the survivor and land a hit (which is especially true once we consider that the survivor can make another ~0.33m distance in those 0.3s, but we'll ignore that for simplicity's sake).
Now we look at what the killer player sees at this point in time. Since it takes their own position 80ms to reach the server, and from the server another 50ms to reach the survivor's client, it is clear that their real-time position at this time will be 130ms further forward than it appears on the survivor's screen. Since killers move at 4.6m/s by default, this means their position on their own screen is 0m + 4.6 * 0.13 = 0.598m. The survivor's position on the killer's screen will be delayed by those same 130ms since it obviously also takes the survivor's real-time position first 50ms to travel to the server and then 80ms from there to the killer. Since survivors move at 4m/s by default, the survivor position on the killer's screen will appear to be 2.5 - 4 * 0.13 = 1.98m. 2.598m (killer position + lunge range) is 0.618m more distance than needed to reach the survivor at 1.98m - the killer easily lands a hit on the survivor here, even if we account for the additional distance the survivor makes during the lunge.
So our clients disagree on whether a hit should happen or not. What does the server see?
The killer's real-time position on their own screen is 0.598m. Since they have a latency of 80ms to the server, they will be 4.6 * 0.08 further in the past, putting them at 0.23m. The survivor's real-time position of 2.5m will be delayed by their 50ms latency (4 * 0.05), putting them at 2.3m. At 2.23m with the lunge, the killer just barely does not reach the survivor here.
So we have a case where on the survivor's screen a hit is absolutely impossible, on the killer's it's comfortably possible, and on the server's end it's a near miss. Yet in DbD, this will be a hit every time.
We can express the unfairness of this numerically for the example too: Since the killer perspective decides, they have a 130ms total latency advantage putting them further away on the survivor's screen and the survivor closer on their screen - that translates to 0.59m + 0.52 = 1.1m advantage for the killer even though we are at relatively low latencies, and even though the survivor has a lower latency. If the server perspective were to decide, the survivor's position would only be 0.2m further in the past and the killer's position 0.36m, meaning the advantage would shrink to 0.16m, ~86% smaller of an unfair impact that latency will have. Of course, in this case the survivor would have that slight advantage, due to having the lower latency, but if we were to reverse the latencies for the players, the killer would have that slight advantage, which in this case would mean the hit still happens.
This means that when shifting from the killer client-dictated hit registration to a server-dictated one, we make latency as fair of an issue as it can be for all players and we reduce the impact latency has on game events altogether at the same time. Additionaly, once the server is the authority on hit reg, networking techniques can be employed by the server to further reduce the impact latency has on the game, such as lag compensation, a technique where the server will calculatively roll back the game state according to player latencies and check whether a game event was valid or not at that time.
And yet, despite the game favouring killers completely unfairly one-sidedly on hits with regards to latency, and despite this being something that benefits 1 player over 4 others as well as something that can actively be exploited via the use of VPNs and laghacks and the like, and despite the server being the objectively most fair perspective on the game, and with only 2 interactions (stuns and Dead Hard) having been moved to the server authority, people complain that letting the server decide on things is unfair...
If you want to see unfair, I invite you to imagine a reality in which DbD did the opposite of what it has always done and still does now, and looked at the survivor's perspective in order to decide whether a hit happens or not. Now if you as a killer have a high ping and/or the survivor you play against does, you could never swing at them from actual lunge distance, you would always have to account for latency and make sure you are much closer to them before you can secure a hit, and often hits would simply be impossible to get despite seeming perfectly possible on your end. Just like survivors in the actual reality of DbD have to account for their own and the killer's latency (which they can't even see) and still get screwed over by impossible hits reguarly. And it would arguably still be much more fair to look at the survivors' perspectives on things, because they are 4 players that otherwise suffer, as opposed to the 1 that is the killer player.
So I'm sorry, I can't find it anything but absurd to see killer-sided complaints about hit reg in this game. To be frank, you have no clue how "privileged" killers are in this game in terms of hit reg. It's a ridiculous aspect of this game and it negatively impacts the playing experience of countless survivor players in countless matches every day, and has ever since the game's launch. If both players are at around <50ms, things are mostly fine, but once either or let alone both players get above that, things start to favour killers on hit reg more and more noticably, and it gets completely ridiculous beyond 100ms. Hit registration should be moved to the server entirely, every single acclaimed multiplayer game from renown studios uses the server as an authority on important game events, even for games that are much faster and more precise than DbD, because it is objectively the fairest and most secure way to do it. And that's despite many of those multiplayer games not even being asymmetrical, meaning that in those games a client-sided system would not even be as unfair as it is in DbD, because all players in them both benefit and suffer from it, whereas in DbD only one side benefits while the other suffers.
Now to speak more specifically to the limited server-sided validation that thankfully at least exists now in DbD:
While it is possible for Dead Hard to "eat" special attacks that in a latency-free environment might have continued to still hit the survivor after the dash, every single one of these instances prior to DH validation simply ended in the survivor on the floor despite having actuated DH on their end. Prior to DH validation, any latency favoured the killer and DH would get eaten every time if the killer hit the survivor on their own screen; now latency favours the player with the lower latency on DH. It's objectively much more fair.
And any instance in which you in the past before the implementation of DH validation hit a survivor after their dash is unchanged, because validation only comes into play if you actually hit the survivor prior to the dash on your screen. Any timing in which you in the past would have hit a survivor after the dash is still the exact same, validation does not change anything about it.
Getting false feedback on validated hits cannot be solved without delaying the feedback on every hit. Your client detects the hit and gives you feedback (blood, scream) instantly, it however takes some time for the server to tell your client that the hit was not valid in the case of an overruled hit. The only "solution" for false hits would be to make the client wait for the server confirmation that a hit was valid, on every single hit, and this delay would feel awful even at low latencies and get worse with higher latencies.
What they however could and should do is play a sound and/or visual notification whenever a hit is overruled by the server, to avoid confusion.
Special attacks getting eaten comes down to very specific timings, and it is not something that can really be solved, it is a compromise of making DH's invincibility mechanic work in a reality where latency exists. Just like survivors can still die despite already being "invincible" on their screen, due to latency. But they could implement killer-specific remedies for some of these instances, such as having the client check whether there wasn't a pallet that would have been destroyed instead if the hit had not happened on the survivor. I think this is possible because it appears that there already is something in place allowing overruled hits to register on another survivor behind the Dead Hard-ing survivor.
Now whether Dead Hard in general is not an overpowered perk that should be adjusted is another question. I would agree that it is too strong and deserves nerfs. But the server authority on whether a hit is valid or not is infinitely more fair and something that should be implemented for the entire game and should have already been with the launch of dedicated servers years ago.

in Finally got a reply to my Dead Hard validation ticket - Official response added on P2 Comment by zarr December 17, 2021
One reason why Nemesis stands out is that he's already a game character, and more than that, a playable game character in REsistance. So he not only falls short of his original representation, but also of an actual multiplayer game implementation that already gave players more of a feeling of being Nemesis, with more powerful and impressive abilities that mirror those he had as a foe in the original much more closely.
Personally I think most of the licensed killers are actually reasonably well-represented in DbD in both personality and gameplay (only Freddy isn't really), and while they could all certainly be improved still, Nemesis also feels like more of a letdown because his persona is not captured nearly as well. In the source material he's a crazy power package that jumps, runs and roars around, breaks through walls and ceilings, throws around chunks of buildings and uses rocket launchers and flame throwers, yet in DbD all he does is whip people. He's not nearly as menacing, he doesn't pose a unique threat nor feels like a destructive force.
Obviously there's a more limited range of things they could reasonably do in DbD, but there's definitely still stuff they could have done to represent him better and make him more crazy and fun, both in terms of abilities and VFX/SFX. A secondary tentacle ability that has more range and allows him to grab survivors and hurl them around to get them away from windows/pallets, much more tangible power-ups from the mutation levels, such as sprints or general movement speed increases, a roar that temporarily stuns survivors, maybe the ability to turn zombies into something more dangerous like in RE. More of an effect of the contamination status on survivors. Of course his kit shouldn't become too complicated or loaded, but just 2-3 things would have already gone a long way, and I suspect one of the reasons why they weren't more ambitious with his kit is as lame as wanting him to be as simple to play as and against as possible for all the new players the chapter would bring with it. And it doesn't help that pretty much all of his add-ons are lackluster as hell either.
And then also more impressive visual changes to the model with the mutation levels, like his outfit coming apart and body partially mutating. A higher POV for the killer player to translate the increased height he has over any other killer. More of him screaming and those screams also being audible around the entire map. Demo and Oni have a much more impressive presence than Nemesis because of those map-wide screams.
He isn't a bad character/gameplay design, and he doesn't feel like a completely different character from his original self either, but he's just strikingly more lame and tame and brought nothing unique and uniquely compelling/engaging/threatening to the game, not even unique mechanics that make for truly unique gameplay interactions. The zombies are the unique thing that came with him, but they are the opposite of compelling, engaging or threatening, and they obviously don't affect Nemesis as a playable character much at all either.
I still enjoy playing Nemesis, he's not weak, he's comfortable to play and requires rather little thought, which is nice sometimes, but also not really what you'd expect from such an "ambitious" crossover.

in Double standards for Nemesis's accuracy Comment by zarr December 16, 2021
Will definitely echo the people that said survivor aura perks are underrated. Not only can even the most coordinated players and those with the most game sense and awareness still benefit greatly from them, but indeed the top meta has been set by SWFs and yet people adopt it into solo games where they could regularly benefit much more from utility perks. Bond, Kindred, Windows Of Opportunity, Aftercare, Detective's Hunch - all great perks. I think WOO has seen a drastic increase in usage with its recent QoL buff though, so that's good. Honorable mentions for Object Of Obsession, which may be a shadow of its former self but can still provide a lot of useful information, and Any Means Necessary, which is still mostly a meme perk but now at least pretty reliably informs its user of where chases are taking place and pallets are being used up. Spine Chill can be mentioned along this same vein, but I wouldn't say it's underrated anymore.
Vigil, Hope, Fixated, Alert, Lucky Break, Botany Knowledge, Desperate Measures, Quick & Quiet, Dance With Me, Renewal - there are various underrated perks that can work to great effect with certain builds and playstyles, but if I had to go with one that stands out, I would say Self-Care. In the Western meta this perk is notoriously ill-reputed, yet in the Asian meta it has always been and continues to be a core staple. I won't open this can of worms here again, especially now that Circle Of Healing exists (which you however don't even have to use yourself to benefit from, so this is only half an argument), but it has always been true that SC in the hands of a good player is a good perk and this as well is particularly true for solo queue.
For killer there's a variety of pretty underrated perks as well, such as the aforementioned Third Seal, Thrill Of The Hunt, Agitation, Oppression, Fearmonger, but also Enduring, Whispers, Butcher, Knock Out, Surveillance. With newer perks like Pentimento and Pursuer it's harder to say if they are really underrated, they don't see that much use but a fair few people are aware that they're good. Anyway, the stand-out underrated killer perk in my opinion is Play With Your Food. It's actually pretty broken on certain killers, and it gets increasingly more worthwhile the better your opponents are at the game, since it will be much easier to catch them than it would otherwise be. Particularly Plague and Myers can make good use of the perk, but also Clown (particularly with Pinky Finger), Wraith and Pinhead. Twins and Deathslinger as well as Leatherface used to benefit from it as well, but they (un)fortunately don't anymore.

in Underrated perks. Comment by zarr December 14, 2021
Pentimento is pretty great, but yeah, it requires specific builds to really shine and so Pain Resonance has turned out to be the more viable pick of the chapter.
When it does shine it really is ridiculously good though. Alongside Ruin, Undying and Thrill you will often get into a situation where you have cleansed totems to rekindle earlier on in rounds (they want to get rid of Ruin as soon as possible, they don't want to bless for 48 (or more) seconds), and so not seldomly you will have Pentimento and Ruin up simultaneously, even with 4-5 gens left to go, which is pretty oppressive. I have been using this on hit-and-run Wraith with "Blind Warrior" - White (which is the Mangled add-on) a fair bit and to lots of success, and the cool thing about it is that you tangibly benefit from two tokens here as well, as Pentimento combines with Mangled to make heals 44% slower (so 57 seconds for a Self-Care heal and 28.5s for other heals). But obviously this perk combo is particularly potent on all killers that can apply lots of pressure to begin with, especially Nurse and Blight.
Another particularly nasty build is Plague with Plaything, Pentimento, Thanatophobia and Black Incense. Plague already benefits from Plaything more than most killers since survivors will be injured and noisy and therefore even more threatened by the Oblivious status effect, put Black Incense on top of that and they frequently become free downs. And then Thanatophobia (which is obviously a great fit on Plague) combines with Pentimento to decrease repair speeds by up to 44%, meaning a gen will take a whooping 143 seconds to complete. And as a little bonus, Thanat also decreases cleansing speeds. Of course, this build will usually take a little longer to get going as you need to get people infected and hook them to get your Plaything Hexes up and for them to get cleansed in order to then rekindle them, but once it does get going it reliably grinds rounds to a halt. The last perk slot can be occupied by stuff like Corrupt or Ruin to help with the aspect of getting going too.
One downside Pentimento has is that survivors will usually naturally know where the rekindled Hexes are located at. While I've found that I can still often keep rekindled Hexes up for a long time for various reasons (such as survivors losing track of where they cleansed totems or not having the time or opportunity to get back to them) and while there are also ways to play around this downside (such as by tunnelling the survivor that knows where the totem is or actively defending the totem), some killers can protect the rekindled Hexes particularly well and are therefore also interesting: with Trapper you can trap the totem after rekindling it, which at worst gives you a notification if someone is trying to cleanse it; with Demogorgon and Lifeguard Whistle you get that same notification, and you can then of course even traverse directly to your totem; Hag can also trap the rekindled Hex, and this is especially useful in 3-gen scenarios; as Twins you can leave either of the two at the Hex to protect it; Doctor and Artist can snipe people off of the totem from afar.

in Is Hex: Pentimento even worth using? Comment by zarr December 14, 2021
Possible to activate up to two times, but disabled in the endgame, that's a trade-off I could agree with.

in Make Decisive Strike usable for both hooks. Punish tunnellers more. Thoughts? Comment by zarr December 14, 2021
@aknitus said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2685953#Comment_2685953
Yes, I understand that but I dont face this issue in other games where I may have 60-80 ms ping. Like what is the difference between 60 ms and 100 ms (max). Not much that it can make me lose?
Regarding lag, I dont experience much or any major packet losses.
So I think the vault latency dsync (if I may call it so) is a burning issue, which needs to be fixed. How? Idk, other multiplayer games dont have these issues, so yes they can act as reference for BHVR to fix this.

A fast window vault takes 700 milliseconds and covers about a distance of 2 meters, and a killer moves at 6.9 meters per second during a lunge, so a 100ms delay puts you ~0.3m further back, and the killer ~0.7m closer to you, which is already 1m difference in this interaction. And if we then consider that the total delay is not only your latency to the server, but also the latency of the killer to the server on top of that, it's obvious why even 80-100ms on either side can combine to create pretty bogus hits. Especially for special attacks and projectiles that move even faster than a lunge.
It's not really a desync "issue" in the sense of a bug, it's completely expected behaviour given the fact that hit calculations are done on the killer client only, and the killer client of course does calculations based on the player positions it has at any given time. Since the killer position on their own client is obviously updated realtime, they will be closer to you than it appears on your screen where their position is subject to network latency which puts their model further into the past. Likewise, your model position on your screen will be updated realtime, whereas on the killer's end your model position is subject to network latency and therefore further in the past, thus closer to them than it appears on your screen.
The more latency there is between a survivor and the server and the killer and the server, the more the three will disagree on how much distance there is between the player models, with the survivor appearing closer to the killer on the killer's screen the more latency there is, and the killer appearing further away from the survivor on the survivor's screen. The server is the most neutral perspective on the distances, since the player positions on it will only be delayed by their respective player's latency, rather than that of both players combined. Since however only the killer client decides whether a hit happens, their perspective alone counts, and that means any latency in any of the connections benefits the killer on hits. For stuns and Dead Hard there now exists server-sided validation, meaning the server perspective will be used as an authority to judge whether a hit was fair. For everything else though, the killer is still the sole authority.
Hit validation for stuns and DH only works because the server doesn't actually have to do any hit calculations to determine whether it was a fair hit, it can simply look at whether the stun or Dead Hard arrived earlier than the hit, since then the hit should be impossible. For hits in general on the other hand, they cannot "fix" this without doing actual hit calculations on the servers, which I suspect they refrain from doing mostly because it would cost server resources and therefore perhaps more money. But it's also possible that they simply think people have accepted the reality of the game in which latency favours killers and don't want to risk upsetting people by changing this, even if it is of course objectively more fair (and healthy) to take the server perspective on things. I mean, you can see a lot of rather passionate complaining about overruled hits with stun and DH validation already, lots of people don't understand it and genuinely think it is unfair even though it is shifting things from being completely unfairly one-sided to neutral. So yeah, moving hit authority to the server entirely would probably cause uproars.
What you personally can do is try to improve your latency. Use a wired connection, make sure no other programs (or people) are straining your connection while playing, optimize your netsettings (realtime priority for your device in the router, low-latency DNS servers), use software like ExitLag to optimize the routing path to the server.
The least BHVR could do is show the killer's ping to survivors in the lobby, or at the very least show the killer's ping in the match details screen once in a trial like they already do for all survivor pings. Then survivors could at least dodge or adapt a little better to laggy killers.

in Issues - Any Escalation Matrix in BHVR? Comment by zarr December 14, 2021
Vaults are not as simple to validate for as stuns and Dead Hard. Stun events and DH invincibility simply make a successful hit impossible within their respective timing windows, which means that validation can be as simple as rejecting any hit event arriving on the server within these timing windows after a stun event/DH actuation has been registered by server. This is fair since the player with the lower latency to the server will be favoured on a first-come-first-serve basis, and it doesn't require much of any complicated logic run by the server to determine whether a hit was valid or not.
Vaults on the other hand do of course not make successful hits impossible - you can be hit in the run-up phase locking into the vault, during the vault animation itself, and it is even possible to be hit through windows after the vault, up to a certain distance. This means that the validation logic cannot simply be to reject any hit arriving after a survivor's vault event is registered by the server. You would have to have actual hit calculations done on the server that take the player positions and speeds into account and check whether at gamestate X a hit would be possible given the attack range (basic and special attacks, both of which can have varying ranges). This would require the server to do a lot more complicated work, and I suspect the reason why we do not have validation for anything but stuns and DH is that BHVR does not want to do hit reg calculations on the servers because it would increase the load on them and perhaps deteriorate performance, and so they would potentially have to pay for more or better servers.
It could be possible to implement a dirty version of event-specific validation for vaults, namely that you use the maximum time it takes for a survivor to get from the vault actuation into a range within which they physically cannot any longer be hit, and implement a validation rule that any hit will be rejected that arrives on the server after this vault actuation + Xms time needed to get outside of hit range has passed. But again, this would be dirty - it would only work for hits that register after vaults, the server would have to check whether the killer is actually on the opposite side of the vault from the survivor at the time of the hit, exceptions would have to be made for projectile attacks as well as any other special attacks that can reach through windows and over pallets (e. g. Victor pounce, Nemesis tentacle), and it also has to be kept in mind that survivors don't automatically keep running after a vault (at some vault locations it's even physically impossible to run straight away from the window), and so basing the validation on the mere assumption that the survivor kept running instantly after the vault is not perfect. Since it is impossible to be hit over pallets once you are a certain distance into the vault this method would be less dirty for pallet vault hit validation though.

in Is there any ETA on the window/pallet vault change? Comment by zarr December 13, 2021
@Carth said:
"
This is not about competing period, it's about competing against the highest level of opponents with the highest level of stacked loadouts. Please don't take or make this out to mean in your pub matches you can't compete with any of the other killers - in average pub matches even the weakest killers can compete, and even dominate if piloted by players of this caliber.
Survivors also only have very limited options if they want to compete at this level. In fact, survivors are much more limited once we take into consideration that they need to be 4 players that practice together frequently as a team and coordinate their builds and plays. That's a much more difficult premise to fulfil than the killer equivalent of simply picking the best stuff.
This tournament only shows what the top-end balance of everyone using the best stuff is like, it does not show whether everything else would be "garbage" in this environment. Maybe kill rates would not go through the roof if survivors started using flashlights or saboboxes instead of BNPs and med-kits; maybe kill rates would not plummet if people started using Huntress, Twins, Oni, Pyramid, etc. - in other tournaments other killers are able to compete perfectly well, with some of the strongest add-ons that are banned in those tournaments it would not be impossible to see them still be able to compete in this tournament as well, and of course, even if they wouldn't average 2 or more kills, there's still a lot of room between "able to compete" and "garbage", especially if we include hook stages. I wouldn't say Oni's and Pinhead's 6 stages here were garbage, for instance; 12 stages are obviously the maximum achievable, so 6 stages would be the equivalent of a 2k if we were to look at balance from that perspective. Not saying 1k 6 stages is necessarily actually a balanced result, but really not garbage either.
"
@zarr Why is this argument made(re point 1) that the survivors are brand new players and the killer they vs is a pro? I agree with your point but this argument that one side is brand new and the other side pro can be argued without proving a point either way(de-pip squad vs pub killers).
I would also argue that tournament results do not dictate an ideal state of the game or where we want to go balance wise. Sure the games followed the 2E2K path that the devs desire but watching some gameplay I saw tons of proxy camping + tunneling going on. Yeah the end result maybe was 8 hook states but most players(survivors in particular) scream bloody murder if killers play in this style. So should we only look at post game stats in a vacuum and make the claim that the game is balanced because there were 2 escapes/2 kills and 8 hook states? Even if the killer camped/tunneled and just traded to get most of those states? I'm not trying to take one side or the other here but point out that just analyzing the result independent of the path taken to get that result can give misleading results or support results that most of the players do not like. I do not like using 'hook states' as 1 hook + camping can equal 3 hook states. We should not be disingenuous and call out the delta between a 'hook' and a 'hook state'. Re point 2 and 3 I agree.
Also thank you for the in depth write up and responses, it's been nice to read the responses and see peoples feedback based on your data.
And thank you for reading and engaging with my lengthy replies and the thread in general. Fair warning: another novel incoming, totally understandable if you won't feel like reading it all of course.
It's not even about pros vs. newbies, average pub lobbies are a wild mix of players, many of them ranging from bad to mediocre even if they have hundreds and thousands of hours in the game. Sure there are better players and SWFs too, but even then, the majority of pub games are full of skill and experience disparities, people playing far from efficiently, gimmicky loadouts, disconcerted decisions and plays and tons of downright mistakes, and even stark differences in how much people care about winning and/or play to win to begin with. And this chaos more often than not benefits the killer player because their skills, experience, decisions and plays will have a greater impact on how rounds develop the greater the degree of messiness in them.
I think this is a good way to highlight why a chaotic environment favours killers strictly: There is nothing a killer can do at any point that will immediately result in a match being lost and over. Even the biggest of mistakes or even literally being AFK won't result in all gens popping instantly and every survivor instantly escaping, there will always be more to play for. Survivors on the other hand can in theory at any point end up in a scenario that is a foregone conclusion, such as ending up being slugged around a hook within a short period. Of course, this is not the norm and as such this fact does not mean the game favours killers per se, but the more "messy" the survivor side (bad players and plays, bad builds, bad attitudes, etc.), the likelier and more common it is that it can happen, and things like NOED turning 0 into 4 kills go to show that even in endgame scenarios where survivors should be even more secure it can and does happen. Just go to the extreme of this and it will be pretty clear: If a survivor disconnects early on in a round, most of anyone understands that the round is pretty much over and the killer will win 9.99 times out of 10 if they aren't completely outmatched. Now apply this strikingly obvious logic to the idea that survivors can (and not seldomly do) behave in ways that are akin to them being disconnected from the round - playing so bad they get taken out of a round very early, killing themselves on hook, not progressing objectives with any dilligence or at all, making various mistakes, even ones that cost other survivors' lives, hell, intentionally sabotaging rounds. If even just one survivor is a weak link like that or let alone refusing to play or play in earnest, the round can quickly turn into a non-round just like a round in which a survivor disconnected early on, and often it just takes the killer abusing this weak link in order for it to happen.
Of course, even having blatant weak links like that or bad attitude players is not the absolute norm in pubs, and less so still now that MMR is in place, but these are also just the most extreme examples that highlight how rounds can quickly fall apart due to them particularly if the killer abuses them - there are way more subtle and less extreme things that can and do happen all the time even if the survivors are competent that while not having the ability to outright end games, still shift them in the killer's favour due to still increasing the impact the killer's decisions and plays will have on the round. And as the sole player constituting their side's performance and making their side's decisions on loadout, strategy, tactics, plays, etc., the killer of course by definition has a completely concerted approach to the game. That approach is not necessarily a good one, but either way, as opposed to survivors it is still completely concerted and not "messy" since one person will be making all the decisions and plays based on their observations and conclusions, their strategies, knowledge and experience, executed as well as their skills allow for. And so yeah, the messier the survivor side, the higher their degree of disconcertedness, and the heavier the impact the killer's concerted effort in terms of all of those things can and will more often than not have.
For random survivors "teaming" up in pub games, the stars kind of have to align in order to present a competitive side for even just an equally experienced and skilled killer opponent. If anything, personally I am surprised that escape rates even are between 40-50% in pubs overall given how much the asymmetric format favours the one player in that chaotic environment. Funnily enough, I think the fact that escape rates are that "high" goes to show that the base game in many constellations (various killers and maps, some perks) is favouring survivors. Of course, at the same time the conclusion then is that the base game has to favour survivors in order for a "live balance" to be even approachingly achievable, if a ~50% escape rate is the goal. Either way, I think the aspect of "skill" (and experience) is most of all the one making the difference, i. e. the fact that the killer player's skill has much more impact potential on a given round than any singular survivor player's skill, that this impact potential increases even more the "messier" the round is, and that the skill disparities that are the norm in pub matches are therefore much more to the detriment of the survivor side.
Sorry for the lengthy and perhaps unnecessarily lengthy explanations for my point. But yeah, the point boils down to my view that skill and experience are the strongest factors and predictors for outcomes of pub matches, and that this is even more true on the killer side, and as such that players are even more rewarded for their skills and experience on the killer side.
And there are many degrees to which this is true. One doesn't have to be a pro killer in order to perform well in pubs, and one doesn't need opponents to be new at the game to do so either. This will be a bit of an oversimplificaion, but it's probably mostly accurate: In pubs, average killer players will average 50% kill rates, competent players 60%, good players 70%, and really good players 80% and more. 50% is in line with the global average, 60% with the top end of the global average, 70% is around the kill rates most veteran killer streamers have, and 80+% are what the best players that try hard to win consistently have (also evidenced by streams, although most of these players are not "streamers", many of them at most stream on an on-and-off basis). For survivor players, their level of skill and experience of course also affects their survival rates, but I guarantee that it does not scale nearly as significantly as it does for killer players. In solo queue, even the best survivors do not have 80+% survival rates. Beyond that, a really good player using the best killer with the best loadout will 4k much more consistently and decisively than even an SWF composed of 4 really good players with the best loadouts using voice communcations will 4-escape. Sure, these tournament teams playing like that in pubs will still win the vast majority of their matches pretty comfortably, but they will not only more regularly have at least 1 person die than the killer will have 1 person escape, but over a large enough sample they will also have notably more matches in which they draw or even lose than the killer. There are Nurse 4k streaks of 300-500 rounds in a row; 4-escape streaks of even just 100 rounds in a row are and always have been unimaginable, and I can't even see survivor "win" streaks (4 or 3 escapes) of 300+ rounds ever happening. Partly because killers can secure at least 1 kill fairly reliably, and partly because meeting strong killer players using the strongest killers and loadouts is much more common an occurrence than meeting strong 4-player SWFs using the strongest loadouts (because the killer is only 1 person having to make this decision, for a survivor side 4 strong players have to come together to do so).
This is how I explain why pubs are statistically killer-sided despite the game in many ways not being killer-sided, and if anything I for one am surprised that pubs are not even more killer-sided than they are. And this is also why I want to encourage people particularly with regards to playing killer to believe that if they spend time learning more about and improving at the game, getting more experience, knowledge and skill, they can actually become able to perform perfectly well in this game. More than that, it is possible to perform more well in this game than in many other competitively more viable games - even the best players in games such as Starcraft don't post win rates of 80+% at the highest MMR; looking at the top 10 players in the highest rank in the Asian (most competitive) region for Starcraft II, their win rates average out to 68%, and these are the top of the top, many of them are tournament players, and they are much better at SC than people that can have 80+% killer win rates in DbD are at DbD.
It's not likely you are still reading this, but to still address the thing about camping and tunnelling: Like I've said before, I do actually think the game would be better if it was changed such that camping, tunnelling and slugging are less effective killing strategies and the game concentrates more on alternating chases and hooks. But for one thing I would not want for them to be removed from the game completely (they have a valid place in the game for various reasons and are even desirable in some ways), and for another we cannot look at balance in any other way than without ignoring the "path" to get there, because as long as these paths exist, players can and will abuse them. Like I've mentioned before, however noble the idea to balance for a reality in which killers even at this level could feasibly win by hooking every survivor 3 times, if we do so without changing the actual reality of the game in which it is possible to camp, tunnel and slug, players that camp, tunnel and slug would win even more reliably and decisively than they already do. And mind you, these strategies even work at the highest level against the most coordinated teams - in pub matches they regularly demolish most survivor groups, and often it is laughably easy to win abusing them not least because survivors in them are not in a tournament mentality but simply feel bad for letting people die on hook or want to save their friends, or are frustrated getting tunnelled and camped and throw their lives away. For anyone that doesn't usually camp or tunnel, I encourage you to try it out - your primary goal should be to get the first survivor out of the round as soon as possible. I think you will find the difficulty and entire dynamic of your matches will change significantly, and if nothing else this might lead to a change in your perspective on the game's "balance". And so yeah, we cannot ignore or let alone balance the game without the realities of camping, tunnelling and slugging in mind, no matter how unfun they may be, and precisely because they can be unfun.
To note: That doesn't mean camping, tunnelling and slugging are necessary to perform well in pubs, I and many other players do perfectly well all the time without "abusing" those strategies, but they are definitely the most effective strategies if you're trying to kill as many survivors as possible as consistently as possible, and they can even carry players to punch well above their weight against more skilled and experienced opponents, if even sometimes just because many players in pubs won't play optimally against them even if they know how and are able to. I have been getting tons of perkless Legion 4ks in Central EU high MMR by tunnelling and camping hard, something I usually don't do anymore because I feel fairly bad about it and don't even have enough fun doing so to justify it, I have more fun going for as many fair and proper chases as possible, but with the weakest killer in the game and no perks it can actually be a pretty fun challenge to try and win by any means necessary, and it goes to show that the game in its current state (of balance and matchmaking) is still decidedly in favour of killers in pubs if you are at least competent and have no qualms abusing those strats.
in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 12, 2021
@MMR said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2691100#Comment_2691100
Here we are not discussing how interesting the game is, but rather which side has the advantage when both the killer and survivor sides are trying to "win".
A hook counter of 12 is a complete victory for the killer side, and a hook counter of 0 is a complete victory for the survivor side. So, from the point of view of victory, it is desirable that the average hook counter is 6 or 7. Of course, just repeating camp might get the hook counter to 6, and that might not make for an interesting game, but that's another discussion.
There are two types of DbD players: those who seek to win and those who seek to have fun. Normally, there would be a division between casual and ranked matches, and these would be separated from each other, but DbD doesn't have such a system, so they exist in the same place at the same time. This is the biggest problem when it comes to game balance in this game.
Many of the maps and killers are very well done if you take balance out of the equation. (R.P.D. is the best map for me because I like Resident Evil. I think the balance is terrible...)
Winning is not always the same as having fun.

Accurate. In terms of competitive viability of a game, we have to look at objective win and loss criteria, we cannot consider subjective elements of how fun the gameplay is in that context. And I mean, many of the people competing in these tournaments actually find it very fun to play like this, that's the main reason why they do compete.
And while I actually do think the game could be improved in terms of "fun" and "health" by changing it such that getting as many hooks as possible is encouraged and feasible and camping and slugging not as effective as they are now, I am also convinced that camping and slugging and other such strategies that aim to win by doing other things than merely chasing and hooking constantly also give the game a lot, even in terms of the fun factor. The fact that camping and slugging can end games in a very short period adds a danger quality to the game that can make things much more exciting for both sides, and every trial is much more unique due to not following a set pattern of chases and hookings but being able to spiral in and out of control within seconds, a few decisions and plays snowballing into immense pressure or losses of pressure. Hell, even 3-gen games where it can take ages for progress to be made and it becomes a war of attrition with nobody wanting to make the first over-commitment can be interesting and fun. So yeah, while I do think chase-heavy matches with many hooks happening are the most fun and healthiest gameplay DbD can yield, the existence of the many other strategies and ways for matches to unfold are still very important, for its fun and health included. Likely very important for its popularity too.
There's definitely some adjustments I would still want to see happen, with regards to camping especially, and I would not even be opposed to separating "casual" from "competitive" play with different queues, but yeah, none of that is really relevant for the premise of balance here.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 11, 2021
@Pulsar said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2690575#Comment_2690575
I do not believe using hook states is a good measurement. For example, if a Leatherface attempted to play the game normally, but only got 4 hooks by the time 4 gens were done and he downs someone else and facecamps them, that's 7 hook states. I'd also like to know how many of those hook states occurred after the gens were done. I know a lot of Killers are good at forcing trades, especially if the area's are far from the gates.
Also, I'd like to see the hook/kill distribution on the maps. I only find one of those maps to be "Killer-sided" and I see 1 being neutral and the others being somewhat "Survivor-favored." My point with bringing up maps is that the tournament was limiting Survivors best offerings, but not the Killer. You mention the strength of mori's and how they allow Killer's to ignore DS and possible rescue attempts on the final hook. However, if Survivors were allowed to bring their best offering, Killers would either have to run a Sacrificial Ward or deal with Cowshed, which I doubt many would choose willingly. Ergo, the power of mori's would be nonexistent.
I am not a competitive player, but these are things from my perspective that either do not make sense or that I take issue with.

Your points regarding hook states don't really change anything about the fact that they're the objectively better measure. Bubba was not being played here so that's a pretty irrelevant argument in this context, but even if we do entertain it, it's a rather specific example because Bubba can defend hooks like practically no second killer - and even then, the fact that he can do that is entirely balance-relevant and an obvious strength of this killer; if he gets a guaranteed +2 stages simply by standing in front of a fresh hook, why should we take that to somehow unfairly be skewing hook stages, rather than affecting them in a completely balance-relevant way. Again, camping is precisely one major reason why hook stages tell a better story of the real balance, as they account for this and many other scenarios where survivors go through multiple stages on hooks. Why would we look to actual hooking events to gauge balance with if the game reality is not actually balanced for that? If we were to try to balance the game for the ability of winning by hooking every survivor 3 times without accounting for the reality that camping and slugging can lead to survivors dying after only being hooked once, we would likely end up with a scenario where Bubba could facecamp every single hook and consistently 4k doing so. The fact that he cannot do that currently (not at this level anyway) goes to show that the game is balanced with camping in mind, and hook stages are a great measure for the balance of that reality.
Likewise, stages being racked up in the endgame also doesn't affect things in any way that is somehow not balance-relevant. Mind you, in tournament play it is actually very rare for survivors to try and rescue a teammate in the endgame, in the vast majority of cases they will just leave. But even if that weren't the case, survivors contesting hooks in the endgame are still playing to try and survive with more players alive, so if they end up giving up more stages for that it's not like they gave them up for no reason.
While your point regarding map offering restrictions still being a restriction is valid, it is again not only a restriction for survivors. Killers can bring map offerings for killer-sided maps too, and they have the same chances of ending up on that map. Of course, survivors could be burning map offerings for 4 different maps each of which they consider favourable for them, thus skewing the odds 4 to 1 against the killer, but not only are they also forgoing other offerings for it, but it has to be kept in mind that "map" offerings are really realm offerings, which for various realms means they don't actually guarantee ending up on a specific map. There is no Cowshed offering for instance, maybe they would end up on Rotten Fields. And yeah, a Sacrificial Ward being played would make it a crapshoot entirely.
I really don't think people are making a strong point by attacking this tournament's map pool. Rancid Abattoir is a super strong map for survivors, Gas Heaven is in line with the state of balance of a wide variety of maps. Sure Cowshed is ridiculous, but we could also go to Resting Place, Shelter Woods or Coal Tower, which are more favourable for killers than any of the maps in this pool. Besides, Nurse, Blight and Spirit really don't care so much about the maps they're on - obviously there are exceptions, but I wouldn't expect very different results for these killers on most maps.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 11, 2021
While I do agree that the snowmen benefit survivors too much if they "abuse" them against some killers (particularly Twins), there are killers that can actually benefit from them. Huntress being one of them. If instead of M1-ing the snowmen with the survivor inside she would have M2'd them, the survivor would have made almost no distance, as can be seen with the last snowman where she did use a hatchet. A survivor jumping into a snowman is basically a guaranteed hit in that case. I think Slinger, Artist, Clown, Pinhead, Pyramid Head, Nemesis, Trickster, Doc and Leatherface can also more or less guarantee hits from snowmen with their abilities.
On top of that, the idea of having fun with it because it's an event also stems from the fact that survivors do too. Survivors get into snowmen and creep around the map doing silly stuff not progressing the game frequently. And survivors of course want to get hit while inside a snowman in order to get rewards, and they regularly will try to achieve that by creeping around in them seeking out the killer, again wasting tons of time. And killers can even refuse to hit them to bank on them staying in the snowmen wasting more time. Of course, just because it is a minority of survivors that will only use snowmen if they can get an actual advantage from them and only use them to do so doesn't mean that's not a problem. I suggest that a survivor that got hit while inside a snowman should not be able to get into a snowman for the rest of the round, not least because they'd be taking away snowmen from other survivors who might still need them.

in How is this fair for Killers? Look at this BS! Comment by zarr December 11, 2021
@Dino7281 said:
CoH is not that good for tournaments, because those games are just done faster and you can bring 4x medkit each game, that's just not possible for normal games.
That's why CoH is so good for normal games, you give your all teammates free infinite medkits. Also CoH is not any issue for those killers, they just commit anyway to most of their chases, lower tier killers just can't do that.
and I don't think 2,16 is killer sided. Thing is, that results are not really between 0 and 4. Even when they got stomped, they were able to secure at least 1 kill except one game, so it's actually between 1-4, so avarage should be around 2,5 with that logic.
Hook stages mean nothing, if it was from first hook, it still counts as 3 hook stages.
I don't really wanna nerf survivors overall, except spawns those are broken and CoH. That's it for survivors in terms of nerfs, then just tons of buffs to weak perks.
I don't think top killers (S-A) need changes, I would just buff lower tier killers so they have some chance too.
You can't really use only top 3 killers and say it's balanced game, you it's kinda balanced for few killers, but I wanna see those results for Legion, Clown, Ghostface etc.

Circle is not quite free infinite med-kits (fairly far from in fact, there's a reason med-kits are a much more popular pick here), but it is indeed an amazingly powerful perk and this tournament's meta doesn't negate that. I do still think a nerf is in order, primarily that Circle should not affect the action speed of any healing action other than its own, meaning of course that healing other survivors and healing with a med-kit would not get the 100% boost, which in my opinion is the actual ridiculously overtuned thing about Circle. Maybe those other healing actions could still get a boost somewhere between 30-50% though.
The argument that due to looking at results mostly ranging from 1-4 kills we should not consider 2 kills a draw is flawed. That the nature of the game favours killers to still kill 1 survivor even in bad losses is not something that can reasonably be used to then shift the point of balance to even further favour killers - that's actually the opposite of the conclusion that would have to be drawn from this from a balance perspective: to instate balance with regards to this, a 1-3 kill range would have to be sought for, changing the game such that survivors also stand a much greater chance to still have 1 escape in bad losses, likely of course achieved through changes of the hatch and gate mechanics in 1V1 scenarios that tilt those scenarios much more in the survivor's favour.
Hook stages mean quite a lot. You might want the game to be balanced around actual hooking events, such that a killer can win by getting 12 hooks rather than 12 hook stages, and that might be a noble and desirable wish for the game (I'd mostly agree), but the reality of the game of course is not balanced around that. Camping and slugging exist, and they allow for killers to win decisively without hooking everyone 3 times. The existence of these things is completely balance-relevant unless you want to balance for wishful fantasies, and hook stages tell us pretty clear things about the state of real balance that includes these strategies.
Survivor spawns are definitely something that could be looked at. Spawning all survivors together every time could be an easy and healthy change for the game. As I've mentioned, Circle could do with a nerf. Then there are a variety of map adjustments I'd like to see, as well as restricting the ability of SWF groups to stack perks and items/add-ons. On the flipside, there's various killer add-ons I'd tone down, and some adjustments of maps that can be pretty oppressive for survivors (such as Azarov's Resting Place, to which I'd add an alternate route between the map halves, or Sanctum of Wrath, where I'd like to see a tunnel through the shrine). Beyond that, I would actually want to experiment with nerfs for camping, tunnelling and slugging, compensated for by buffs to other aspects of killer play, such as chase strength, map and gen control, snowball potential... Albeit only to a certain extent, since I think camping, tunnelling and slugging do have a valid and even important place in the game. And yeah, a bunch of killers and a whole bunch of perks on both sides could very much do with buffs. Some survivor items too for that matter, especially once SWFs would be restricted in their use of them.
As for your last argument, that's been addressed multiple times now. For one thing, the blanket satement of "game balanced" cannot and is not being made, however keep in mind that "game not balanced" does not equal "game X or Y-sided" - there are way too many variables and RNG aspects and skill/experience/loadout disparities at play in the game's actual mode that players are actually playing (public matchmaking), and even disparities in levels of "sweat", i. e. how hard players are even trying to win... and then 4-player SWF teams that practice together and use voice communications that are inherent to the balance of these tournaments are awfully rare. The competitive balance premise is almost never met in pubs, and this skews "balance" in both directions (and in fact, as global stats go to show, overall more often does so in favour of killers). And for another thing, you cannot compare a killer side choosing Legion, Clown etc. to a survivor side choosing the best of the best stuff, that would not be meeting a competitively balanced premise either. In tournaments with restrictions for both sides, many of the other killers do actually perform perfectly reasonably well. At the very top end with everything allowed there may be argued to be a lack of diversity, but it's not a lack of balance - and while I would like to have around 2-3 more S-tier killers, I mean, I would also like for flashlights to be viable at the top end, or saboboxes, or any of the many other things that are currently not equally as viable at that level. So yeah, both sides suffer from the lack of diversity in top-end viability as well.
@SadLegion said:
Nurse Blight Nurse Nurse Blight Nurse Blight Blight Nurse
2 useable out of 26 killers is an indicator of a very well balanced game. I sure as hell want to stick playing only 2 killers in the game to be on equal footing with survivors running 4 meta perks(which is really common in pubs, as well as bringing medkits with Styptics)

A correction: To be on equal footing with 4 survivors equally as skilled and experienced as you, teaming up together in SWF, practicing together regularly to have refined strats and cohesive tactics, using voice communcations and doing so in efficient, trained ways, coordinating their builds to all use only the very best perks and items/add-ons. If you show me you meeting this in pubs even just once, I'll give you the new DLC for Christmas.
@Leatherface1990 said:
Tell me more about CUSTOM matchmaking. LOL

Exactly right!
We should rather talk about the game reality that 99% of players are actually experiencing in 99% of matches, and the game reality that people on forums such as these actually refer to when they discuss balance, the reality namely of public matches... and that reality is seeing global kill rates of above-50% with just about every killer on every map and seeing good players win 80+% of their killer matches with much of every killer (as evidenced by countless streamers). That doesn't mean there aren't balance issues in the game remedying which would help improve the gameplay experience in pubs as well, but it does mean that most of the concerns about balance (and specifically a supposed survivor-sidedness of the game) are much less pressing in that environment than it is being made out to.
@MMR said:
I'm Japanese, and this is a very interesting discussion, the likes of which you don't see on Japanese forums!
I would also like to know the result if we use the same rules but exclude Nurse, Bright and Spirit. The only thing I can tell about the killer side from these results is that "if you master Nurse or Blight, you can 4k against any survivor".(A lot of people have mentioned killers other than Nurse, Bright and Spirit, but that's probably not the purpose here: they may be able to do 4k or only 0k.)
I was surprised to see the combination of No way out and None escapes death used in a top level match. It's a unique build of the nurse, who doesn't gather the generators in one place and hunt down the survivor while calculating the situation of the board, but just attacks and breaks it down at once.
Nurse, Blight, and Spirit are tactically "offensive" killers, not "defensive" killers. What are the tactics of defensive killers like Hag and Cannibal? "Dead lock" will be used to force the camp as it has to be 1k by the middle of the game. "Corrupt Intervention" will also be used to prevent the game from being settled in the first a hundred seconds. Will they use "Starstruck" or "Bamboozle" to supplement your offensive capabilities, or "Pop Goes the Weasel" or "Eruption" to further strengthen your defensive capabilities? We'd love to see the next tournament held with something other than the Top 3 killers.

Always cool to see engagement of players from the Asian region with the "Western" playerbase and discussions. I'm fairly familiar with the Asian playerbase actually, since I watch a lot of Korean as well as some Japanese and Chinese streamers, including tournament play (primarily DFC of course). I find the Asian meta pretty fascinating, and it is unfortunate that the latencies more or less prohibit the participation of players from all regions in the same tournaments. I would love to see KDBD and some of the top Japanese teams compete against the top Russian/European/North-American teams.
And I completely agree, it would be great to see various other killer characters compete in this environment. I do suspect a fair few of them would be hard-pressed to average more than 1.5 kills, but I also suspect a fair few others would be surprisingly successful still. And yes, the meta for some of those other killers would likely be very different, which would make it all the more interesting to see. Maybe Wispy will hold a similar tournament again, or perhaps other people will be inspired by this to try more adventurous formats for their tournaments themselves. There are actually a lot of tournaments being held for this game, and in many of them people are forced to play other killers, it's just that the majority of them have a restricted format of course. Either way, if you are interested I could share info about those other tournaments as well.
No Way Out's rise to popularity (and even ubiquity) in tournament play was a bit surprising to me at first too, but it has been a popular pick in tournament circles for quite some time now and it isn't surprising anymore. In general a shift in the top-level meta can be observed to guaranteed game delay perks, most of all of course Corrupt Intervention and Deadlock. And like them, No Way Out is not only guaranteed delay that creates more possibilities for killers, but it is passive delay that the killers can therefore make use of in any way they like (such as using it to camp and secure a hook stage or kill as you point out). No Way Out can often secure an entire additional kill just on its own, and that's obviously a massive impact. Rancor is actually not seldomly banned in tournaments due to having a similar effect.
@Tsulan said:
In conclusion. 3 out of 26 killers are viable to compete against high skill survivors. With a slightly survivor sided outcome.

Against high skill survivor teams using 1-3 different items out of a total of 28, and voice comms, yeah. With a slightly killer-sided outcome in terms of average kills, and a significantly killer-sided outcome in terms of average stages.
@Pulsar said:
I have two questions.
One, how do you account for Survivors not being able to choose their own maps? I'm fairly confident these results would change if the Survivors could send themselves to Badham or RPD. If we are meant to be comparing the best of the best with the best possible set-ups, why not allow Survivors access to their strongest offerings? Does that not unfairly skew the results?
Secondly, were you counting hook states using the "hook wheel" on the left-side of the Killer's screen?

This tournament does not account for being able to choose maps. Of course, therefore it also does not account for the killer being able to do so, or being able to deny any map choice with the Sacrifical Ward. As I've stated though, the maps play did take place on are completely in line with the state of balance of a large quantity of maps in the global pool, and while I do think there are more survivor-favouring maps in that pool than killer-favouring ones, there still are some of the latter too.
But yes, to reiterate, I think a bunch of maps need adjustments and are not fit for top-level competition. I don't think every map should be perfectly "balanced", even if that were possible, I think maps having a certain "flavour" of balance is preferable, and certainly I don't think map balance is a huge concern in pubs where stats show that even the most survivor-sided maps average below 50% escape rates, but I do obviously agree that some maps are in a completely unreasonable state, such as Cowshed and Haddonfield. I don't actually think Badham and RPD specifically are terribly imbalanced - that doesn't mean I think they're super good maps, just saying I'd be cautious to assume they would favour survivors significantly in an environment such as this. They might, but I would be less surprised if they didn't than with some of the other maps.
I did count hook stages using the hook wheel, as I've pointed out I did not count individual hooks. Doing so would be an interesting additional stat, but hook stages is objectively the more balance-relevant stat because as much as we may wish for them not to be, camping and slugging are integral elements of this game and therefore obviously its balancing.
@ScottJund said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2689268#Comment_2689268
...with 4 BNPs, 4 DS, 4 UB, 4 DH. The last tournament by DBDLeague also had similar results except there were no Spirits or Blights and Nurse was used a single time. Here is the data https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1X3rdzkKtTY-CPw9OjieWdTWrHCIFkSYhMdiKTZOyTlM/edit?usp=sharing

Thumbs up. I can provide stats for at least 10 other restricted tournaments in which various killers were played and in which kills averaged out to slightly above 2 as well, with outright wins entirely commonplace. And I would argue restricted tournaments are actually much closer to the public matchmaking experience than this tournament in terms of the loadouts you will see most of the time.
By the way: Cool to see that you covered this tournament and some of my evaluations of it in a video. Your conclusions seem mostly correct and reasonable, as I dare say is usually the case. I would have liked for you to perhaps highlight more that seeing survivor sides like these is vanishingly rare in pubs to the point of basically never encountering it (when have you last seen even just 4 BNPs in one of your matches, how often did that happen in your last 1000 matches? Certainly not often for me), but you did make the more essential point that pub matches are almost never actually meeting a "balance premise" like these tournaments do, and as such can obviously be notably imbalanced even in cases where all 5 players in them are roughly equally skilled and experienced (which itself is already very rare of course).
I think the proper conclusion from the fact that matches are often imbalanced in terms of the stuff people bring in is not that skill and experience often don't matter like people usually argue, on the contrary it's that they matter even more, because in order to overcome those imbalances consistently, you need to be even better at the game. Players are rewarded a lot for their skills and experience in this game particularly because they are tools with which to overcome base game imbalances, and if anything this is even more true on the killer side where one's skills and experience constitute 100% of the impact one's performance can have on a match, as opposed to the survivor side where any singular player's impact potential is obviously limited. A player's skill and experience are also the only consistent elements in the otherwise wildly fluctuating balance-relevant circumstances of matches with their many variables, which further adds to the importance they carry. Skilled and experienced players such as yourself will find this easy to agree with given that even now with MMR in place, good players still win most of their killer matches even with some of the weakest killers and on some of the most imbalanced maps.
That doesn't mean those imbalances are fine, but it does encourage a change in mentality wherein people stop looking to the devs so much for help with improving their experience of the game, and instead look to themselves, and the realization that practicing and thinking more about the game in order to become a better player can make for a tremendous improvement of one's experience with the game. Things are not nearly as hopeless as not few people seemingly believe, and if there's a change in mentality I want to effect with threads and posts like this, it's most of all that one. Some of those people for one reason or another choose or want to believe that the game is hopelessly imbalanced as you point out in your video as well, but I think there are also a lot of people that more or less blindly believe that the odds are stacked against them impossibly much, partially because that's a lot of what they read online, and as a result they never really even conceive of the possibility of becoming better and beating the odds.
@OldHunterLight said:
This is too long for me to read but I will sum it up, if everyone is using busted combinations the game is balanced, if one side isn't then it is unbalanced.

I don't take real issue with this statement, but you do make a mistake various people here already have: these stats show what they do, they don't show what they don't. Just because everybody was using the strongest stuff here and the results were fairly balanced, doesn't mean that every other scenario has to have unbalanced results. It could be true, but it isn't automatically true.
And we know from many other tournaments that the game trends toward similarly balanced results without using the strongest stuff too.
@Tsulan said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2689369#Comment_2689369
GF outperforming Nurse. I see a nerf incoming.

There is an actual point to be made in this regard though: Obviously GF performed well here because it was on an indoor map; some maps benefit some killers particularly, so much so that even some of the weakest killers like GF can perform exceptionally well on them even at a very high level. Not everything that skews balance does so in a linear fashion that would always benefit the strongest side or character the most. With regards to indoor maps specifically, there's a reason why they are the statistically most killer-sided maps in public matchmaking. Even RPD is a map that I would say while it does have potential to be notably survivor-sided if the survivors actually know the map very well individually and play to its strengths in a coordinated manner collectively, it is notably killer-sided if the survivors don't know the map very well and are not coordinated (read: most survivors you will actually face in pubs). So that quality of maps changing their "sidedness" between coordinated SWF and non-coordinated SWF/non-SWF is also noteworthy.
@Carth said:
The argument that as long as killer players have at least one option that can compete is terrible. While it may be true it is terrible to say 'yeah 90% of x is garbage, but at least 1 x can do well therefore all x's are fine as it as on you to select the 10% of good x's. Otherwise you can't complain, x is fine.".
1. This is not about competing period, it's about competing against the highest level of opponents with the highest level of stacked loadouts. Please don't take or make this out to mean in your pub matches you can't compete with any of the other killers - in average pub matches even the weakest killers can compete, and even dominate if piloted by players of this caliber.
2. Survivors also only have very limited options if they want to compete at this level. In fact, survivors are much more limited once we take into consideration that they need to be 4 players that practice together frequently as a team and coordinate their builds and plays. That's a much more difficult premise to fulfil than the killer equivalent of simply picking the best stuff.
3. This tournament only shows what the top-end balance of everyone using the best stuff is like, it does not show whether everything else would be "garbage" in this environment. Maybe kill rates would not go through the roof if survivors started using flashlights or saboboxes instead of BNPs and med-kits; maybe kill rates would not plummet if people started using Huntress, Twins, Oni, Pyramid, etc. - in other tournaments other killers are able to compete perfectly well, with some of the strongest add-ons that are banned in those tournaments it would not be impossible to see them still be able to compete in this tournament as well, and of course, even if they wouldn't average 2 or more kills, there's still a lot of room between "able to compete" and "garbage", especially if we include hook stages. I wouldn't say Oni's and Pinhead's 6 stages here were garbage, for instance; 12 stages are obviously the maximum achievable, so 6 stages would be the equivalent of a 2k if we were to look at balance from that perspective. Not saying 1k 6 stages is necessarily actually a balanced result, but really not garbage either.
To reiterate: I for one don't use these stats (or the ones from the 20+ other tournaments I've looked at in the past) to say that things are simply fine, as if the game would be in a perfect spot and there's no need to complain. Things are certainly vastly more fine than people here and elsewhere not seldomly make them out to be ("killer impossible, can't get a single kill if survivors have more than a single brain cell", and more such ridiculous nonsense), but they are not simply fine either. There's a very blatant disparity in the strength of different killers, and I do think all the weaker ones should be buffed to be at least A tier with add-ons, and that more S tier contenders would be good for the game. There's some blatantly imbalanced maps that should have long been adjusted. 3/4-player SWF with voice comms and stacking the best perks and items is problematic. But yeah, the ceiling for survivors is not nearly as astronomical as some people believe, and this realization should be something positive: if it's possible for killer players to become good enough to compete even with the best survivor players using the most ridiculous ######### that you will basically never see in your pub matches, then surely it is possible for you to become good enough to do well in those pub matches more often than not. It should be a realization that breaks with the timidity of killer players that don't believe in their chances and stirs ambitions to become better and overcome imbalances, perceived or real.
in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 10, 2021
DH and stun validation just check whether a survivor's DH actuation or stun event arrived on the server prior to a killer's hit within a certain timeframe in which they'd make a hit impossible. It's probably not even a retroactive "check" but just as simple as the server rejecting any hit on a player arriving within Xms after receiving a DH/stun event from that player. The fact that event-specific validation can work with this simple logic also helps explain why they've not actually implemented general hit validation - general validation would actually require the server to do more complicated calculations based on player speeds and positions, and that's probably more of a load overhead than BHVR is willing to put on their servers (it might degrade server performance unless they pay for more/better servers).
Anyway, while the simple "first come first serve" logic of event-specific hit validation does mean that the player with a faster connection to the server is obviously favoured in these interactions, it doesn't mean the one with the faster connection will always "win". If the survivor actuates DH at t0ms and has a latency of 50ms to the server, and the killer hits them at t30ms with a latency of 30ms, the DH actuation will still arrive 10ms earlier than the hit event. Likewise, if a hit happens on the killer's end at t0ms and takes 50ms to travel to the server, a survivor's t30ms DH actuation that takes 30ms to make it to the server won't save them.
It is not only latency that matters, but obviously also still timing. A full lunge lasts 300 milliseconds, so at full range even a player with an average reaction time of 200ms still has a window of 100ms within which to actuate DH, and so if they don't have a 100+ms slower connection to the server than you, chances are they will dodge that lunge. The closer the scenarios the more timings and latencies start to matter of course.
But to answer the question directly: Yes, it is still possible to end up on the ground despite having actuated DH in time, due to having a higher latency to the server than the killer. I'm pretty sure the Exhaustion status is handled by the server now though, meaning you won't get exhausted on the ground in these instances anymore, just like a survivor's health state on the HUD seems to be handled by the server, meaning even if you get a hit that is then overruled as killer the survivor will never enter the dying state on the icon. Maybe if a player has a ridiculously high latency it's different and they can still get exhausted, but from all I've seen in these instances the DH prompt disappears and the perk goes dark, indicating it has been activated, but the player still dies.

Here's an example. This player usually has a ping of around 100-120ms, and as you can see, the DH prompt disappears, the perk icon goes dark, the model even initiates the DH animation and the killer is seen swinging at the old model position, but the hit still goes through a moment later.

in Is it still possible to get exhausted on ground with DH? Comment by zarr December 9, 2021
The skill ceiling in this game is much higher than the majority of players have any clue about. There are so many so fundamental mistakes even some of the most experienced players still make constantly, and many advanced things even they don't know about or almost never actively or effectively make use of. This goes for both roles. The average player is frankly pretty awful. I know a ton about the game, have a ton of experience and practice in it playing since 2017 and consider myself to be a fairly highly skilled player, of DbD and other games, something my successes also support... and yet I still know people that are better at the game than me. Even knowing what the optimal plays are in theory is a world away from actually consistently and continually identifying them in the moment, making the right split-second decisions based on that, and then having the mechanical prowess to reliably execute them as well as to react to of course constantly and rapidly changing scenarios. And again, most people already fail at the hurdle of even knowing what the optimal plays are in theory, are wholly oblivious to much of it and barely think critically about the game in a way of analyzing gameplay after the fact. So yeah, the game has much more potential for players to be skilled than it is regularly being made out to, survivor and killer. And one just has to look at the disparities there are between players to appreciate that fact: For a lot of players, killer is seemingly impossibly difficult at "high MMR", yet for others it is kind of a joke; in 1V1 competitions the vast majority of players average chase times that are not even half of those the top 1% in them do, and the players usually participating in these competitions are mostly already the 1% of the playerbase, making the top the 0.1%; in tournaments where the top 0.1% compete, there are a handful of teams that for years have been significantly disproportionally successful, beating out other teams on both the killer and survivor sides consistently, and that despite their competition also being highly skilled and experienced "0.1%" players.
...Anyway, here is a liberating realization for you and other people with similar concerns: Players have been complaining about just about everything in this game since day 1, and they of course continue to. And yet BHVR still released Boons, buffed 3-blink Nurse, nerfed Slinger, etc., just recently. All the ridiculously unreasonable complaining about the game being literally unplayable and hell on earth as killer? Rest assured that it doesn't actually impact the devs' decisions. This can be for the better and in other cases of course also for the worse, but either way, next time you see someone argue some really rather stupid points, you can relax and know that you don't have to argue with them, they won't actually affect the game. This of course goes for ridiculous survivor-biased complaints as well.
BHVR does sometimes come out with questionable or downright bad decisions, and some of the stuff they don't do is also questionable or bad, but overall the development of the game has really been rather reasonable, they don't just see posts like "this game is completely flawed they hate players and they have to change everything" and actually take it seriously. The game is good and has only grown and is attracting more players than ever, and the state of balance has improved tremendously over the years. Just play the game and engage in online conversations and discussions about it only insofar you enjoy them or feel points are being made that could actually improve the game, you don't have to engage with the moaning and whining.
I mean that as a serious piece of advice for some peace of mind. They haven't made gens take 3 minutes each to complete or reduced the amount of pallets per map to 5 in all the years where there was all the complaining about how impossible the game is that suggested something along those lines would be needed to make it fair, so yeah, they won't start doing that now either.

in Since when did the whole forums start saying survivor "takes no skill"? Comment by zarr December 7, 2021
The reality of public matchmaking already is that a highly skilled killer player will win consistently. Prior to MMR, highly skilled killer players boasted win streaks of hundreds of matches in a row, and even now with MMR in place good killer players still win some 80+% of their matches.
In fact, skills are much more rewarded on the killer side because in order for a survivor side to be "skilled", four skilled players have to come together. A highly skilled survivor player in solo queue won't have 3/4-escape matches with nearly the same consistency that a highly skilled killer player will have 3/4-kill matches. In reality, the solo survivor's 3/4-escape matches will be a tiny fraction of the killer's 3/4-kill matches. To have decisive wins like that as a skilled survivor with any consistency comparable to that of a skilled killer, you need at least 2 other skilled survivors to queue with.
I don't think it should be possible to have ridiculous win streaks like killer players used to be able to have, but good players winning more often than not is okay, it doesn't actually have to be a perfect 50/50 split. MMR has improved things in that regard, ridiculous streaks do seem impossible now, and while the better and best killer players are still only seldomly really challenged, the incidence of challenging matches is probably around 1 in 10 now, rather than 1 in 100, a tenfold increase as compared to the free-for-all chaos that was rank-based matchmaking. (Likewise of course, MMR has made things much tougher for 4-SWF teams that used to be able to achieve similarly as ridiculous streaks, now they will much more frequently encounter strong killer players using strong loadouts and strategies.)
MMR was a step in the right direction, from here I would want for the system to be made more strict (much harsher rating decreases for losing) such that the MMR brackets are more strictly separated, and for the matchmaker to perhaps be a little more strict as well, at least when looking for pairings for highly rated players, even if that results in somewhat increased queue times at high MMR. I would rather have queue times take a few minutes longer at high MMR than for players on either side to get shafted by ridiculously lopsided matchups as frequently as they still do now where BHVR seems to have relaxed the rating and/or matchmaking logic so much that the size and frequency of skill and experience disparities are on the rise again.
And hell, perhaps they could introduce a "casual queue" alongside the "competitive" one after all, although I'm not entirely sure how that would be set up such that players don't simply go there still using the strongest stuff and playing their hardest, just because they want easier wins. Maybe disable DC penalties in that queue such that "sweaty" matches can just be skipped if players don't feel like it. That way players that often play in such ways in the casual queue will have non-games too frequently for them to continue to do so.

in Should a high skill killer win consistently? Comment by zarr December 6, 2021
Mostly hoping for changes that make Legion more threatening in chases. There could be ambitious reworks such as things to do with actually being able to tag in and out different Legion members and for them to have different skill sets, but we know not to hope for anything too ambitious.
The most crucial changes for me are reducing Frenzy fatigue back to 3 seconds, and increasing Frenzy movement speed again, or at the very least again providing add-ons that increase Frenzy movement speed. Once a survivor is injured, Feral Frenzy stops being of much of any use in a chase, and being a barebone chaser is Legion's biggest weak point. These changes would alleviate that issue.
At 4 seconds, Frenzy fatigue as it is allows survivors to make a distance of 7.7‬m on Legion in that time, a distance it takes 12.8s to catch up over, meaning a survivor can cover a ground of roughly 50m - a range within which they will almost always find a window or pallet. Lunge range takes roughly 2m off, decreasing catch-up time by 3.45s and ground covered by around 13m, but it's still just too much for it to regularly be at all worthwhile trying to use Frenzy to catch up to a survivor - while you are stuck in fatigue they often make a similar amount of distance on you again that you tried to use Frenzy to bridge to begin with. Taking a second spent in fatigue away reduces that distance to 5.8m, 9.6s to catch up, 38m covered. If we take off the chunk made up for by lunge range from this, we arrive at around 24m a survivor can cover, which is already a much less safe range. At 2 seconds (achieved by stacking the fatigue-reducing add-ons), this comes out to around 12m ground covered if accounting for lunge range.
With a 3-second fatigue time, using Frenzy to catch up to survivors in chases can actually often be effective, and at 2 seconds it becomes a threatening chase tool.
An increased Frenzy movement speed on the other hand obviously allows you to catch up to survivors faster, and even more crucially, it allows you to overtake them in order to try and block them off of windows, pallets and pathways. (Although in order for this to be really effective, collision in fatigue needs to also be looked at - it should be maintained as usual, which it doesn't seem to be currently.)
I think a 5.3m/s base movement speed with one add-on for +0.2m/s and another for +0.1m/s would be a good spot.
Beyond that, there's a bunch of add-ons that barely have an impact on the game.
Frank's Mix Tape and Stab Wound Study are remnants from Legion's dark times of being able to down survivors with Frenzy stabs, and while there's a few gimmicky ways to try and still use them in that way, there's just no reason for that sort of gameplay to exist. Those two add-ons should be reworked to create some interesting and stronger new effects. For example, how about Frank's Mix Tape being an add-on that rewards Legion for chaining Frenzy stabs, such as by increasing their regular movement speed by +0.1m/s for every survivor you stabbed during a Frenzy, an effect that would last from the time Frenzy ends until the power bar is fully recharged again. Not only would this improve Legion's chase strength, but it would even give them a reason to Frenzy-stab survivors that are already injured (as well as already in Deep Wound, for that matter, as that would obviously reset the power bar completely, granting a full 20 seconds of increased movement speed). Or how about Stab Wounds Study making it so that the Deep Wound timer still counts down while running, albeit at a reduced rate, and the mending speed is increased significantly and pauses during the mending action - this would create a wholly new chase dynamic wherein a survivor plays to find little time windows within which to mend, trying to remove the Deep Wound state mid-chase, with the killer of course trying to deny this.
Iridescent Button is a good add-on, but Fuming Mix Tape is lackluster. Even Wraith's "All-Seeing" - Spirit feels a little lazy and underwhelming for an Ultra Rare, but that one is at least active indefinitely and therefore pretty valuable - Fuming Mix Tape on the other hand is only active temporarily, and you regularly have to waste Frenzy to get value from it. I would change it in this way: When you stab a survivor in Feral Frenzy, the progress of generators is shown by their aura; after that, if you damage a generator in that same Feral Frenzy, the generator regresses at a rate of twice the base rate (so at 0.5 charges a second). If you stab 2 survivor before damaging a generator in Frenzy, it regresses at three times the base rate (0.75c/s), and if you stab 3, it regresses at 1c/s. If you stab 4 survivors in one Feral Frenzy, the next generator you damage within that same Feral Frenzy immediately loses all progress. It's cool that Legion can do stuff like pick up survivors and damage generators in Frenzy, but most people don't even know about it and even those that do barely ever use it. This add-on would actively encourage using that mechanic.
The Legion and Defaced Smiley Pin add-ons are kinda illogical: since Legion can injure survivors with ease, healing up against them is often a waste of time. These add-ons make it less appealing or impossible for survivors to heal up, yet the Legion player actually benefits from survivors spending time healing up and therefore would want for them to do so, while survivor players are regularly looking to simply stay injured against Legion to begin with. In my opinion, these add-ons should be changed to instead encourage survivors to want to heal up, by afflicting them with drawbacks in the injured state. Drawbacks could be things like Blindness until healed, Obliviousness until healed, Hindered until healed.
The add-ons that increase the Killer Instinct detection radius are meh at best. It is already impossible to catch survivors at the edge of the default range in Frenzy if they run away from you, these add-ons all the more send you on a wild goose chase. Sure they may be used for map knowledge, but eh, for that the range is too small again. These should simply be replaced with add-ons that increase the movement speed in Frenzy, not least because an increased movement speed actually allows you to chase after far-away survivors.

in What are you people hoping for from the upcoming ghostface and Legion changes Comment by zarr December 6, 2021
Dead Man's Switch's effect is a fun gimmick that's not even all that bad, but yeah, as you rightly point it is basically made useless by its Obsession condition.
There are some killers that can in theory make good use of the perk. Take Freddy with Class Photo, who can potentially get multiple if not all survivors off their gens immediately after activating DMS, getting immense value out of it. Artist can also force multiple survivors off gens with crows at any distance. Doctor can be mentioned due to his static blast which at latest with range-increasing add-ons and perks could be used to trigger DMS on multiple gens as well. Killers with good map mobility (Blight, Billy, Nurse; Spirit, Legion, Wraith and Victor to a lesser extent) can try and run around the map triggering DMS on multiple gens manually forcing survivors off them.
But since the perk only activates if you hook the Obsession, it will at most activate three times per trial, and regularly it might not even do that since you won't always be hooking the Obsession three times. Sure there are perks that can cause other survivors to become the Obsession, but the ones on the survivor side are obviously not something we can take into account, and the two that exist on the killer side are terrible. Well, Nemesis isn't entirely terrible, but that's only strictly in combination with Play With Your Food. But not only would that already be three perks needed one of which does not do much of anything for you itself, but even then it's just too gimmicky, since you not only have to get Nemesis to activate, but then you also have to obviously try and get survivors off gens - survivors at that which at latest after the first DMS activation have ways to play around your attempts to force them off.
So, the Obsession condition should be removed. What would a good alternative be? I think the perk could even exist without a condition whatsoever: every time you hook a survivor, it activates. I would like to see how that version of the perk would affect games, I can see that it would be balanced since you still have to force survivors off gens to get value, and they can also try and stick to gens as much as possible to play around the perk (e. g. if you are Class Photo Freddy, they can simply commit to the gens despite not knowing which gen you are teleporting to - you can obviously only actually teleport to 1 gen, and if the survivor on that gen is healthy they are at least only giving up a health state for it). Furthermore, DMS has notable anti-synergistic relationships with some of the strongest other game delay perks, such as Weasel and Ruin, since you obviously cannot kick blocked gens and they also do not passively regress while blocked. However, if it should turn out that the perk is too oppressive in that form, they could make it so that it only activates if you hook a non-Obsession survivor, or reduce its timer to 30 seconds I guess.
I also like the suggestion by anarchy753 to make it a Scourge Hook perk, and I do agree with them that in that case the perk should probably only trigger once any survivor does let go off a gen, then blocking said gen for 30 seconds. Since scourged hooks are limited, it might already be balanced in that form. However, there could still be further means of balancing it, such as by making it so the perk is only active for 45-60 seconds after the hooking event, so only if survivors let go off gens within that timespan their gens would then become blocked for 30 seconds.

in What would be your preferred way of buffing Dead Man's Switch? Comment by zarr December 5, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
I don't think hook grabs are the reason for facecamping. See Bubba. Or just anyone who's worked out if you hit a healthy survivor before they get in for the save you have time to down them before the unhook completes.

As I said, this would solve the issue of facecamping for most killers, indeed with exceptions (Bubba, (perma) Tier 3 or 99% Tier 2 Myers, Iridescent Head Huntress and Pinky Finger Clown, Oni in Fury). But that's a minority.
Without STBFL you regularly cannot down a survivor before the unhook goes through if you hit them around the hook, not if they don't mess up royally.

in I Know my posts are all very killer-sided changes so i wanted to post a survivor-sided change. Comment by zarr December 5, 2021
I think there's an easy way to "solve" facecamping for most killers: remove hook grabs. It's a BS mechanic that is the primary reason why facecamps are still a thing, leads to awkward, silly dancing around the hook with survivors scared to commit to the unhook and the killer not wanting to hit them, and it is not only subject to latency and therefore random luck that can screw over either side, but it's also been bugged forever, in that a third survivor cannot unhook the hooked survivor for as long as the grab animation lasts, because the hooked survivor stupidly enough is locked into it as well.
Of course, this would be a killer nerf, since now a healthy survivor can force a hook trade in many situations against many killers, and there should be compensation for it. For a general thing, I think SWFs should not be able to stack perks (or items/add-ons), and this is tangentially related because against the better and more coordinated teams, you would at most see 1 BT and 1 DS anymore, so their hook rushes would still come at a significant risk for them. For a more specific thing, I think BT and DS should be disabled once the EGC has begun. In the endgame the killer regularly has no choice but to hardcamp a hook if they don't want to let that survivor get out for free, and this is especially true because any unhook could mean BT and DS coming into play. Without BT and DS available in the endgame, killers are if anything more free to roam around because unhooks don't mean guaranteed escapes to nearly the same extent. Not only that, but I would even go farther and make it so that exit gate progress regresses at half a charge a second, meaning that if you want to leave gates 99'd in order to delay the EGC, you have to keep standing there buffering the progress, or risk it resetting to 0 over the next 40 seconds. This would of course force survivors to actually open the gates much more frequently, giving killers a slight edge (and disabling BT/DS). In turn, I would make it so DS can activate up two twice per match, however only being active for half the duration (30 seconds) and also only stunning for half the duration (2.5 seconds) the second time around.

in I Know my posts are all very killer-sided changes so i wanted to post a survivor-sided change. Comment by zarr December 5, 2021
@ThatOneDemoPlayer said:
This is very cool and informative, but it doesn't fix the problem of there only being 3 Killers max that can deal with Survivors at high level

Statements like this are misleading because most people will read "high level" and think it refers to their average pub match whenever they think the survivors are not all that bad in it. To be clear: the level we are talking about here is something 99% of players never have and never will face in public matchmaking. Tournament teams with years of competitive practice, team cohesion, coordination of builds, strats and tactics, game knowledge, individually some of the most skilled and experienced players in the game playing and practicing as a collective, trying their absolute hardest, playing for money, with disciplined, efficient callouts. These teams almost never play pubs as 4-SWF, and in the vanshingly rare cases where they do they almost always mess around.
Dowsey, Otz and TrU3Ta1ent are veterans of the game that have been playing for years and thousands of hours and they win most of their killer matches and have for years as well. They all faced a tournament team (Oracle) for fun at some point, in custom matches. Each of them professed that this level is something they basically never play against and never have played against. That just as an example that goes to show how much beyond the pub experience comp DbD is. In all likeliness, you won't encounter it even just once in years of gameplay.
That killer players can compete with these teams on the most stacked loadouts is crazy, and that they use the strongest killer characters to do so takes nothing away from it. After all, we could reverse this frankly dismissive argument and say, survivors have to team up in 4-SWFs, use voice communications, use 16 of the strongest perks, 4 of the strongest items with 8 of the strongest add-ons, just to stand a chance against these killers at a high level, and then they still are not even surviving half the time!
In reality, 99% of public matchmaking matches are nowhere near "high level" when by high level we are talking about tournament matches like this. If you think these players (or any competent and above player) need to play Nurse, Spirit or Blight to perform well in "high MMR", I'm sorry, you are wrong. While it is completely possible for these players to only play those three in pubs and get win streaks of hundreds of matches in a row, they win decisively and comfortably in pubs with much of any killer they play. Pubs are a literal joke among comp players.
To note: I would want for more killers to join these three in the toppest of top tiers, but it is not necessary for "balance", let alone that every killer should be at that tier like people apparently think.
@Barbarossa2020 said:
So basically 20% of the killer roster on 20% of the maps have a chance at not gaining or losing pips.
Great.

Another tired, dismissive non-argument. If we look at the very specific loadouts used on the survivor side here that allowed for them to compete, we can just as well say "only 20% of the survivor roster have a chance to escape, and they are still less likely to escape than the killers are to kill". Players only use the best things at the highest level on both sides. That's a basic balance premise.
If your argument is about diversity, well, then likewise it should be equally bad to you that survivors can only use a handful of perks, items and add-ons if they want to have a chance to compete at this level. Oh, and of course they need to be teams of 4 players practicing, coordinating and communicating together.
Besides, these stats only prove that these killers are able to compete at the highest level, not that all other killers are absolutely unable to. People simply did not play other killers here, so we have no stats to go on, it would be baseless conjecture. (Well, 3 times it did happen, one of which the killer still won.)
Unfortunately they did not play on every single map in the game for us to make factual balance statements regarding them, but the maps they did play on are comparable in balance to much more than 20% of maps overall.
Not sure how pips factor into any of this, I hope you don't actually think this level of play has any significance in public matches, these survivor teams would win (or pip in, if you prefer) the vast majority of their pub matches without perks and items; these killer players would win the vast majority of their pub matches with Legion. Skill and experience are a much more significant factor and predictor for outcomes of public matches than the state of base game balance at the highest level or the characters, items, etc. used at that level - skilled players have no issue frequently winning (and pipping) with 100% of the killer roster in pubs.
@JeanCharpentier said:
I see extremely long posts just to try to justify what is impossible to justify lol...
The game is totally unbalanced, period.
Stats have been made with trials on the most balanced maps + Nurse/Spirit/Blight, the three best killers. And still, the average kill is 2.
Spirit almost never get more than 1K.
Nurse struggled to get 2K.
Blight performed pretty well with almost constant 4k.
But what would have been the average kill with other killers ? It would have been <1k, it is pretty obvious.
The game is unbalanced and if you don't play Nurse/Spirit or Blight, you will loose every trials at high MMR.
And some interpretation are flawed here, especially when talking about the results obtained with Oni/Huntress/Pinhead... saying the game is really balanced there. First, there are only 3 trials...the population is too low to set conclusions.
However, if we admit that Spirit is not S tier anymore, let's take the results of all trials with Oni, Pinhead, Spirit and Huntress : average kills = 1,7; deviation is 1.16. It means that the result is pretty much stable with less than 2 kills most of the time.
So once again, imagine the results we would get with the Wraith, Trapper, Clown etc...
I don't think you should be throwing around accusations of "flawed interpretation" when you are saying things like "game is totally unbalanced, period" and "It would have been <1k, it is pretty obvious" and "if you don't play Nurse/Spirit or Blight, you will lose every trial at high MMR" based on nothing whatsoever but you thinking those things are true.
Do we have stats on how all the other killers perform in this setting? No. Your opinion that it's obvious all of them would average below 1k is speculation. And I mean, we did in fact have 3 other killers in this tourney, and they averaged 1.6 kills and 7 stages. I do agree that 3 matches is too small a sample size to draw any valuable conclusions from (and I did not do so, I actually even argued to exclude those matches altogether, you must be referring to someone else here), but certainly, 0 matches for all the other killers is even harder to draw conclusions from, yet for you this is obvious.
And hyperbolic statements like claiming one will lose every trial at high MMR playing any killer but one of those three are just hard to describe as anything but delusional, and make it difficult for me to even want to engage in discussion with you, sorry.
I don't know why you keep bringing up deviation as if it would be an argument somehow favouring survivors. Deviation extends into both directions, meaning the results deviate both in and against the favour of either side. High deviation from a balanced average doesn't mean a game is unbalanced in either direction, it just means the average balance is achieved in a way of victories for either side being overwhelming and ties being relatively rare, which one might argue is not a good way for a game to be balanced, but it's still balanced (on average). Either way, while I agree that a low deviation is preferable, the deviation we have here is not even all that high - having a deviation of close to 1 kill is actually fairly good, because it means both sides can beat the 2k average and win, but not usually by an overwhelming amount. And again, that this is true is obvious by looking at the individual results, where we have a 40 - 20 - 40 split in percentage of wins for one side, draws, and wins for the other side. A perfect split would obviously be 33 - 33 - 33, which we are not far away from. In fact, if you look at the standard deviation of data sets consisting of numbers 0-4 that do fall into an even 33 - 33 - 33 split, it is around 1.4 - higher than the deviation we have here. And the deviation we have is not only lower, but lower in a way of favouring killers, since in DbD we are looking at results ranging from 1-4 most of the time, as 0ks are much more uncommon than 4ks. That killers are much more likely to still at least kill one survivor if they lose than survivors are to have at least still 1 escape if they lose obviously is an aspect of this game that favours killers.
@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2676355#Comment_2676355
"Anyway, the most stacked survivor loadouts are absolutely ridiculous and not something that should be in the game, vanishingly rare as it is to be seen in pubs."
I agree. The main issue is that if you weaken BNP parts, stacked toolbox and med-kits which are last really impactful items for survivor, why would a survivor spend BP if all their items are not very good? Keys are not longer instant escape buttons, flashlights are easily countered by looking away at walls and maps primary only use for totem hunting which killers have given up on using totems because their totems are weak because the totem defense perk(Undying) is too weak and their totems have no game lifespan(easy to disable from sound cue)+ map knowledge.
In regards to killers, add-on often work in pairs, though I'd say that add-on often need to be individual good effect to be used in first place. I was not saying that these killer add-on need to be worse. I was just stating that these are the best add-on for said killer.
Oni is overrated killer, He is not viable at highest level of play. I have nothing more to say about him.

I agree with the issue you point out with weakening these survivor items/add-ons, in fact I think if only 1-2 of them are in play they actually are just strong enough in their current form to be impactful enough to be worthwhile, especially if we consider them being used by a group of randoms. That's why rather than change them, I want to restrict SWF groups' ability to use them. Not only do random groups almost never bring 3-4 of the most busted items/add-ons (even 2 is fairly rare), but even in the rare case where they do I don't actually think it's all too problematic - we know that the best killer players can even compete against the best most coordinated teams on voice comms using the most busted stuff, so certainly it is possible to compete against randoms without coordination or communcation using these things. I think SWFs should only be able to use 1 instance of any item/add-on (and perk) between them.
I guess I get what you're saying with regards to the killer add-ons. I think you're probably right, in as much as, if only 1 add-on were to be allowed, people might very well prefer Crow on Blight over 33 or Ring, or recharge on Nurse over range, even though the respectively latter add-ons are the problematic ones. They (33, Ring, range, etc.) only get to be really problematic in combinations, while the add-ons they are combined with (Crow, recharge) might be better on their own but not necessarily problematic even in combination with other stuff.
As an Oni main of sorts, those words hurt. Well, not really, I know perfectly well that needing to get an early M1 as a killer without any ability sort of categorically excludes Oni from highest-level viability, in concept. However, not only is the reality of even the highest level of play in this game (and any game) still prone to mistakes and random events (and DbD if anything more so than various other competitive games) that allow for Onis to still perform well even in tournaments, but there also exist perks like PWYF and Spirit Fury that can more or less reliably work around that downside. But yeah, if Oni deserves a buff, it's making it so passive charge of the Fury meter does not stop at 99% but allows for the power to become available. And it should also be faster - they could make it so passive charge rate is in relation to amount of blood orbs on the map, with 0 orbs being 100% passive charge rate and 100 orbs (which is the limit) being 0%.
@Veinslay said:
How about a tournament with a rotation of Coldwind, Badham I - V, Haddonfield, Ormond, Mother's Dwelling, the new one, The Game, Grim Pantry, Father Campbell's Chapel, Disturbed Ward, Groaning Storehouse, etc etc

Campbell's and Storehouse are not seldomly used in tournaments. Results are usually pretty even, Campbell's is perfectly alright for killers, Storehouse is big and has a main building that always spawns its fairly busted windows, but on the flipside it tends to spawn good gen cluster setups the area around which can often quickly be turned into deadzones. They used Rancid Abattoir in this tournament, which is a strong Coldwind map for survivors. Thompson House is often used in tournaments.
Either way, if your point is that there are maps in this game that are not balanced at the highest level and should be further adjusted, you are right. I also do think that there are more survivor than killer-favouring maps in the game, and have pointed out as much in the OP, but there's still a whole bunch of reasonably well-balanced maps, with a few favouring killers.
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2676744#Comment_2676744
No, it doesn't. You have one unofficial tournament, with a small sample size in terms of games, which excludes nearly 90% of the roster. It's a bad balance argument on those grounds alone because we don't have the missing Killers to draw conclusions from because nobody actually tried them outside of, like, three games.
With regards to "no game has every viable option in tier S": the problem is that said games are pitting two options from multiple tiers against each other. But survivors are essentially always a top tier pick in this sort of analogy; the only hope for a non-top tier Killer is that the Survivors play badly and go for suboptimal loadouts, even if the Killer is specced correctly.
If one side is always an S Tier pick, the other side needs to be all S Tier. You do not have a functional balance if you tell people "90% of your choices always have the option of putting you in an unwinnable game regardless of your performance :)"

While I won't go and argue this one tournament proves without the shadow of any doubt that the game is balanced at the top end, it's infinitely better an argument than most of what you can read on here proclaiming the opposite. People say the game is hopelessly survivor-sided, unwinnable as killer, you can't get any kills, it's tremendously difficult to play killer, and more such asinine stuff, and they base it on exactly nothing of substance. Official stats showcasing 60+% kill rates for years, including recent MMR stats? Obviously don't mean anything whatsoever. Streamers combining for years worth of video evidence showcasing that good players win most of the time as killer, and do so pretty decisively at that? Of course those are literal beyond-human gods and they are also all low MMR and their opponents are paid actors. Tournaments almost always averaging out to slightly above 2 kills, with 3/4ks being common occurrences, even when everything is allowed? Just read this thread, you'll find your share of "arguments" as to why this too shows nothing meaningful whatsoever.
If I'm trying to convince anyone that the game is not hellishly skewed against killers, it's because I prefer that people would see that it is possible to become good enough to perform well as killer, even at heights they will likely never play at, and as a result, for them to be more positive about the game and their experience of it, to more embrace the idea of practicing and improving, thinking about the game and their gameplay, rather than succumbing to the idea that they never stand a chance anyway. I find precisely the notion of improving and being rewarded for it is what makes competitive games worthwhile, it's weird to see so many people seemingly just give up on themselves and the idea that they can become a better player that doesn't struggle and lose all the time.
Bwsted's reply already addressed your concern regarding the S tier stuff, and I also explained it in other parts of this post. Do you think survivor sides would stand a chance against these killers without the specific powerful perks, items and add-ons they used here, or without voice comms and practicing together? I mean, we can see that even with all that stuff they already average below 2 escapes, so I would wager they would not be able to compete. Are they thus not also forced to pick very specific and limited options in order to stand a chance at competing?
And in tournaments where survivors are not allowed the best most stacked loadouts, these killers in fact do average even higher kill rates, with the best players consistently getting 3/4ks with them - and that despite killers too having pretty severe add-on restrictions in those tournaments.
@RainehDaze said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2676800#Comment_2676800
Survivors are an S-Tier pick the same way an S-Tier Killer is an S-Tier pick. Of course, it's dependent on the player and the perks and the addons. But there's only one tier of Survivor because they're all visually identical. Same way a Survivor could have a less optimal loadout or be a worse player or be playing in a suboptimal environment, a Killer can have a worse loadout and be worse. The only difference is the teamwork, which yeah, that's unique to the side that is actually a team.
You literally can't make a bad survivor choice if you're being matched against opponents of equal skill and perk selection, because there is no choice (hoping people don't spot you aside). There is such a thing as a bad killer choice. 90% of killer choices, in fact, once the idea of game balance is actually relevant.
Or: picking an s-tier choice against an f-tier choice doesn't guarantee victory in isolation, but once you have equal skill it probably does.
And it's a bad place for game balance when one side is always the s-tier choice and the person not picking an s-tier choice has to hope they screw up from the very, very beginning.

This is a pretty disingenuous argument. Survivors have different items they can only at most choose one of, which is akin to different abilities on the killer side. S-tier pick means only the best of what you can bring. So already we have survivors only being an S-tier pick if they each bring S-tier items. You also need to have the best perks equipped on everyone. Not on the same page about that with 3 other players? Not S-tier. Survivors can have teamwork or not, and they are only an S-tier pick if they do. No 4-SWF? Not an S-tier pick. No practice together? Let alone no voice comms, including a callout system? Not an S-tier pick. These are all criteria tournament teams have to fulfil in order to present the best survivor side possible and be able to compete with S-tier killer sides in them.
It's actually more the opposite, like Bwsted has already pointed out: For a survivor side to represent an S-tier pick, a ton of criteria have to be met and four people have to come together to meet them, each and as a collective. That is vanishingly rare in public matchmaking. Want to present an S-tier killer pick? Any one person can do so at any time whenever they feel like it - just select an S-tier killer in the game menu and equip the best perks, add-ons and offerings and there you are. This happens in public matchmaking all the time.
And yeah, another crucial thing is that you say "once the idea of game balance is actually relevant", which in public matchmaking it all too often isn't because of skill and experience disparities, survivors not being SWF, people not using the best stuff, etc. I mean, I'm sure it's annoying that I'm repeating myself saying this, but good players win more often than not even with Legion in pubs, and that's the farthest thing from an S-tier killer pick. I'm 30 - 4 in perkless Legion 4ks (meaning I 4k'd 30 times and did not 4k 4 times, but I didn't 0k once) just in recent days.
@clowninabout said:
I'm only going to add that this tournament put a scoring emphasis on hooks and not kills, which is not the emphasis in pub matches. I don't think a single player would class 8 hooks yet no kills a good result for a killer.

This is not the argument you think it is. If killers in these tournaments are encouraged to go for hook stages rather than merely kills, it is only even more telling that they are still performing well in terms of kills too.
Besides, while the scoring system does encourage killers to go for hook stages, that doesn't mean they don't still concentrate on kills too - after all, if you can kill one survivor before the endgame, your chances of killing all survivors increase significantly, thus likewise your chances of maxing out stages do. This is also why tunnelling and camping even early in the game are still completely common strategies here.
Oh, and personally, I actually think 8 stages can be a great result against a worthy opponent, even if it ends in 0 kills.
in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 4, 2021
@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2676228#Comment_2676228
"which I did not think prior to the tournament, but I still hold that the latter is also overtuned. I don't think Blighted Crow is overtuned, but I do think Blighted Crow + Blighted Rat is."
I do not agree with this statement. If add-on was indeed so valuable and overtuned, than blight would be using Alchemist ring+C33. It is very obvious from pick rates that Blighted crow is indeed blight's most powerful add-on. I am not surprised as this is quite common for solo-queue. All good blights use Blighted crow.
In regards to nurse, Nurse's most popular add-on is Fragile wheeze. Nurses biggest weakness is holding W and cooldown on blink makes this more effective as she moves slower than survivors. Once again 100% of nurses used Fragile wheeze, again I am not surprised as every Nursed that I've ever played against in solo-queue uses this add-on. I think your overrating range add-ons.
Range and triple blink are ok secondary add-ons for gap-closing distances, otherwise as seen by one of nurses used double recovery(Dark cincture).
"they would likely average somewhere around 1.5 kills, with 4-6 stages"
I think you overestimate many of the weaker killers. I will concede with Myers, Tombstone piece is very powerful add-on. Straight moris are very powerful. See one player that was brave enough to play Oni. He got 1 kill. Most of other killers are likely to get 1 kill as well mostly from EGC facecamping and survivors being over altruistic. Otherwise 0 is most likely possible if the killer is bad at defending hooks. All other killers would suffer same fate as Oni. Just an expected result.
Poor Oni, his one good add-on topknot to give him anti-loop erased into oblivion. I wish he was a bit more competitive with less trash balancing :(

Hmm, at that point the discussion would shift from what are the most overtuned add-ons, to what are the most overtuned add-on combinations. I don't actually think Blighted Crow is the problematic part of the mix in any of those combinations; Rush speed is great, but if it were the case that speed is the problem we would probably see stacked speed add-ons more commonly here. I simply think that base Rush speed is too slow for comp DbD for anyone to go without at least one speed add-on. I think Blight with Crow and nothing else is fine, problematic combinations like Crow + 33, Ring or Rat would stop being problematic if 33 and Ring were adjusted (and Crow were to not stack with Rat). On the other hand I don't think 33 and Ring in their current form would be much less problematic in combination with a lowered speed boost on Crow. But perhaps adjusting Crow from +6 to +4 and Rat from +4 to +2 is sensible either way.
Likewise for Nurse, I think the recharge add-on only exacerbates the true issue that is range. In most other tournaments range is banned and people use double recharge and it's mostly fine. Well, of course, Nurse is not simply "fine", in most other tournaments she actually averages closer to 3k, with the best Nurse players consistently getting 3/4ks, so recharge add-ons could also need adjustments. But I think range is the blatantly overtuned one.
Oni was honestly a poor pick given that the map for the round was Abattoir. You don't wanna be having to get an early M1 on a coldwind map, and corn also doesn't help with getting lots of Fury downs. But 1k 6 stages is not nearly as awful as one would expect, given this and the level of play/loadouts. We could also go into talking about the actual game, and I think it'd be obvious that the Oni player was not as on top of things as the survivor players in that match, I remember a fair few questionable plays or downright mistakes. Double duration add-ons was also kind of not the play, I think you need at least one speed add-on (or Top Knot, which is still good IMO), or an add-on to increase the frequency of orb drops so as to get your first Fury as soon as possible. Either way, I'm not sure that I overestimate some of those killers. Corrupt, Deadlock, No Way Out give even the middle of the pack killers enough opportunities to secure stages and kills, add some of the strong add-ons into the mix and games should be able to end in 2 kills with non-negligible frequency even in this heavy format, with more kills not being impossible (but less than 2 kills most likely indeed more frequent than more than 2 kills).
Anyway, the most stacked survivor loadouts are absolutely ridiculous and not something that should be in the game, vanishingly rare as it is to be seen in pubs. I'm for perk and item/add-on limitations for SWF groups, not least because the many other tournaments I've watched and taken stats on go to show that there's actually a neat variety of viable killers once the surv teams can only use 1 copy of most things between them.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 4, 2021
@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675592#Comment_2675592
I knew it that compound 33+blighted crow is best add-on combination for blight. I use it this as well.
in your post, you said alchemist ring is overtuned than you show a chart where 1 person out of 9 games uses alchemist ring. Blighted crow is 9 out 9 add-on.
Its not surprising that brand new part is most used add-on. Stypic needles aren't that strong, their main use is for egc where you can save against instant down killers by popping it before hook save with BT. They can extend looping in some cases and give killer bad early game. Sometimes they provide more value than BNP,
When your using 4 toolbox with BNP, Healing isn't too important because most of the games are so fast that you are unlikely to heal, so you do not need COH. COH is old self-care. Long match = good. short match=bad.
Saying killer is balanced when only 3 killers are being played with ebony mori, best perks, best add-ons is a bit misleading. Try playing killers like ghostface, legion, wraith, demo, pig with like no anti-loop than look at results. even if killer tried to play camping killers like trickster, clown with pinky, myers, billy, hag and so on, they'd probably struggle to secure 2 kills on average. just my 2 cents on it.

Yeah, I knew Compound 33 was overtuned, survivors make almost no distance after pallet breaks with that add-on, it's pretty nuts. It does seem like it's even more problematic than Ring, which I did not think prior to the tournament, but I still hold that the latter is also overtuned. I don't think Blighted Crow is overtuned, but I do think Blighted Crow + Blighted Rat is.
I also agree that 4 Commodious + BNP and brute-forcing your way through the game, injured if needed, is probably more effective than going for healing-focused builds. That said, it's kind of a "glass cannon" approach that is more vulnerable to snowball/3-gen scenarios and can be notably harder to recover with, and if you look at the per-round distributions you can see that a fair few teams actually went with a mix of BNPs and med-kits. But those are just casual observations - while I think that 30 matches are a good-enough sample size for some balance evaluations given that most of these are players that have been playing in tournaments for years and are very seasoned, I don't think it's enough to draw all too definite conclusions on the meta of the format. If more tournaments like this were to happen, I would expect it to still evolve in some ways.
I'm not saying "killer is balanced" period, such a statement can never really be made in this game anyway because there are too many variables, in and around the game. But it does show that the best killer characters in the game piloted by some of the best killer players can compete against some of the best survivor players using the best loadouts.
That a few killers like Legion and Ghostface, Demo and Wraith would stand almost no chance to win in this format is true, they would likely average somewhere around 1.5 kills, with 4-6 stages, i. e. actually having to tunnel one and camp another survivor endgame to try and consistently get to a 2k result. Various other killers like Pinhead, Pyramid Head, Doc would probably peak at 2ks indeed, with 3/4ks not being strictly impossible but rare exceptions. They would likely average around 2 kills, but with most of the matches actually being 1 or 2ks. Then there are a bunch of killers that I do expect could still perform well (meaning 3/4ks are not as much of a rarity), mostly due to some of their strong add-ons, such as Plague (Seal), Hag (Shackles), Clown (Pinky), Myers (Tombstone Piece), Huntress (Iri Head). Killers like Oni and Twins are also always dangerous even at this level.
But yeah, again, I'm not saying the game is perfectly balanced. Just significantly more balanced than many people take or make it out to be, and this is at the highest of levels, the average group of survivors you get in your killer matches even at high MMR is a world away from this, for pub play you can throw most of this balance talk out of the window anyway. I consistently 4k as perkless Legion, all of the killer players I watch win 80-90% of their pub matches, are rarely even truly challenged.
@PleassBuiltInNoed said:
"If we were to suppose that the lack of skills and smarts on players playing survivor would tilt the global average rates to favour killers, the conclusion would have to be that it is more difficult to play survivor in skilled and smart ways,"
Wrong. The game favours killers at low level of play, because survivors don't have the necessary basic skills to survive, while killer does not need any skill at all to be able to fulfill his objective vs such players, you just swing your weapon and they die and they don't know what to do.

Well, stats of the past have shown that kill rates actually increased as ranks did every time, not the other way around, and while ranks didn't correlate very closely with skills and experience, they still correlated with those things somewhat, so at the very least we should have seen a slight decrease in kill rates, not a notable increase, if we are to assume survivors reach their skill ceiling earlier and are also favoured once a certain "skill threshold" is exceeded. We unfortunately don't have stats for different MMR brackets, but again, all the killers I watch are definitely high MMR, and they win much more often than not. I expect high MMR kill rates to be at least in the 60% realm that the global rates are too. Hope we will get more official stats on that at some point.
@JeanCharpentier said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675906#Comment_2675906
Kills' deviation is too big for the game to be balanced but still, even if we admit that the stat showed here are balanced, they are obtained with the 3 best killers...
Just imagine any other killer that are all way weaker than the Nurse...

I don't think it's damningly big even just for raw kills. 1.29 means the deviation is still much closer to +/-1 kill/escape than to 2. I think if deviation were greater than 1.5 it would be fairly damning, but even then I would still account for stages, which are again completely reasonably distributed.
@[Deleted User] said:
I do want to clarify a few things in regards to these stats and the level of play in general:
It's hard to draw general public match balance conclusions from competitive DbD play. Like OP said, there are usually balance restrictions in place.
Many of these teams rarely play public matches together, if at all. The "tournament" SWF people claim to run into is probably goofing off.
Keep in mind that these killer players "scrim" against these teams all the time in custom lobbies. They are used to this level of play. In a 3 hour scrim session, they are playing more games against this level of team than an average high MMR killer player is seeing in a 6 month span. It's not really reasonable to take their results and set that as an expectation for public matches.
I know from experience that many of the players from the high end teams put in 40+ hrs every week. They are literally playing DbD as a job against that level of competition.
The average player against a 4 man SWF with 4x BNPs is going to struggle regardless of what killer they're on. They don't have the reps against high level competition. It's something you might see once a week, not multiple times every day in team practice like these players do.

Absolutely. "Balance" in public matchmaking is pretty much pure chaos. And this goes for both sides. There are way too many variables and RNG aspects at play, starting of course even with the casino of matchmaking itself, i. e. who you get matched up with and against, which even with MMR is still a fair bit of a mess. When people say DbD is "not balanced", they are mostly right, only they are wrong in usually assuming it just means the game is "X or Y sided" and this would affect every single match in a deterministic manner. But the reality is that in public matchmaking matches (99% of matches people are actually having in this game), much of everything can happen at much of every point. "Not balanced" simply means that whenever you go into a pub match, as whatever role, you should not have any expectation as to how the game will or can go. Which can be frustrating, but we can also hold that due to this fact, the game actually rewards players for skills a lot, since they are a consistent aspect in otherwise fluctuating match circumstances. That this is true is easy to see when we look at the fact that good players win most of the time in pubs, and in fact even more so on the killer side (for survivors you obviously need 4 skilled players coming together to set the same premise).
The conclusion from tournaments like this for more casual and pub play is not that the next time you get blown out by an SWF with 4 BNP you should think "if I didn't suck and were playing Nurse I could have still won so this is okay", but indeed that in your 99 other matches in which you did not get a 4-SWF stacking BNPs but still didn't win every single time don't think "this game is completely imbalanced and nothing I could ever do could have helped me do even just a little bit better in this match".
@throwaway79465468797 said:
It should have gone without saying that tournaments are not a good indication of what is balanced in the game... from what I'm hearing, official tournaments have their own rule set and limitations their participants have to follow in order to make the game manageable at such a high level of play. This is just a random tournament with some shoddy data trying to force the opinion that if you play only 3 killers in the game then it is balanced. Not even close...

I mean, what made this tournament particularly noteworthy and led to me creating this wordy thread evaluating it (as opposed to creating threads for the 20+ other tournaments I've taken stats on) in the first place is that there were no rules and limitations.
@gentacle said:
Map pool was limited and every killer was nurse/blight/spirit. I think that's all that needs to be gleaned from this, sorry gamer.

Wrecker's Yard, Rancid Abattoir and Gas Heaven are completely in line with the balance levels of a ton of other maps in this game. Are there completely ridiculous maps like Cowshed and Haddonfield that long should have been addressed? Of course, that is obvious. We cannot account for every last thing, but learning that even at the highest of levels with the most stacked of loadouts, a selection of the killer characters are perfectly able to compete doesn't get any less valuable just because we tack on "on a wide variety of maps but not necessarily all maps".
@Impose said:
So who was actually IN this tournament? A random streamers tournament, while likely has people that want to play the game sure. But were these ACTUAL high caliber players?

For one thing, Agony, one of the top most successful teams in DbD's tournament scene with dozens of tournament titles under their belt. Various Russian teams including many comp veterans (Russia has the biggest and most historied comp scene). Demise, composed of some of the better NA comp players. It isn't the absolutely most stacked tournament in the game's history, but these are still all players with thousands upon thousands of hours of playtime and tons of experience practicing and competing in tournament-level DbD all the time. These are absolutely some of the best there are.
@Labrac said:
You have a lot of free time, don't you?

Guess I'll reply to this too. My post count is not even a third of yours. Feel free to say that most of your posts are low-effort spam like this though, that will help your case!
I will say that talking this much about DbD is not something I think is worth the time, but I do like talking about it if there's actual and reasonable conversation to be had and some things to be learned.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 4, 2021
@RainehDaze said:
As for the actual assessment, I'd say that's 11 wins for killers, 12 draws, and 13 wins for Survivors (I refute the notion that having extra hook states counts as a win unless you were using it like goal difference with tied points; you still didn't finish the person). Of those killer wins, half a dozen were Blight, 3 were Nurse, and 1 each of Huntress/Spirit.
This supports the thing people are actually complaining about: the game is horrifically survivor sided against the majority of the roster, and only a tiny number of killers can consistently pull off wins in these scenarios because of mobility or outright ranged pressure. But there's 26 killers in the game. And it's not balanced at the high end if you exclude 80% of the roster from being playable at all, because all the highly skilled and high-MMR players picking those are not having an even time.
I don't think we should draw the tautological reasoning from this of "the game is balanced because the things that aren't played at the top end aren't played at the top end". It'd be like having an RTS where entire factions aren't played competitively because they're not viable, but saying the game is balanced because the factions that are viable are still being played. You're just ignoring the things that aren't balanced at all once you do that.

For outright wins I didn't consider stages, as that's indeed another argument. I only argued the 3 games where non-S-tier killers were played could be ignored if we are looking at the actual top-end state of balance. But results were overall pretty even regardless.
I do agree that too much of the killer lineup is too weak and various of them deserving of buffs. I do not agree that only these three are able to compete at the highest level. In other tournaments a wide variety of other killers is played, and they average slightly above 2 kills as well, with 4ks being possible. In this tournament without any limitations, do I think most of those other killers would still be able to replicate those results? Well, in those other tournaments killers have limitations too, various of the killers actually have pretty busted add-ons with which I don't think it's imposslbe they could still perform here (see Huntress getting a 3k here, similar story could be the case for Clown with Pinky Finger, or Plague with Iridescent Seal, etc.). But I do think they are obviously not nearly as fit to compete as the big three, which stand a pretty good shot of 4king and that's indeed just not the case for most other killers, they would probably fall at an average 2 at best, with the "almost guaranteed 1ks" helping bump their stats to that.
I absolutely don't agree with the idea that most of the other killers are not "playable at all", let alone at high MMR. Again, in restricted tournaments around half of all killers perform well enough, in this tournament I would at least still expect a third of them to be able to average around 2 kills and/or 6-8 stages. And public matchmaking is a whole different story still. When these tournament players (or any really good killer players) play pub matches with even the weakest of killers, they still win much more often than not. Sorry, but that's just true.
I do not ignore the fact that the highest-end level is not balanced for ~80% of the killer lineup, but that's not a game balance argument. I do think having at least 5 S-tier killers would be nice, that would make for more variety. I also think all the other killers should be B tier at least, and A tier with add-ons, which again is not currently the case for around half of them. I doubt we'll see that happen, it's been years already and they are still cautious when adjusting killers like Legion and they nerfed Pinhead and Slinger recently, but I do hope it will happen. That said, I don't really think it's a huge issue. If you want to stand a chance against much of anyone you play Nurse, Blight or Spirit, but you can still play any other killer and do well in the majority of your pub matches if you play enough to get good enough. I've 4k'd around 30 matches with Legion over the last week, losing only 4 times.
@PleassBuiltInNoed said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675758#Comment_2675758
From what I can see, experienced survivors wait 10-20 minute queues, just to get matched with killer of the same skill level. Also majority of the survivors in the game are casuals who don't even know basic ways of looping killers in general or specific counters to specific killers. That is why killers dominate statistics, simply because majority sucks, and minitory waits hours to get match on their skill level.
Also 4k hours is loads of time, and for regular players who play 2-3 hours a day, it would take 4-6 years to reach such playtime. Also the game is constantly changing and so are the mechanics. This puts regular player into great disadvantage when learning game's mechanics.
One of the biggest issue is that killers gain MMR way too quickly. Some people are just naturally good at the game, so they get to high level very quickly, and then they simply suffer because of massive imbalance in the game for majority of the killers at that level and also lack of experience gained by playtime.

I don't see 10-20 minute queue times, and I watch and play with and against some of these tournament players.
If we were to suppose that the lack of skills and smarts on players playing survivor would tilt the global average rates to favour killers, the conclusion would have to be that it is more difficult to play survivor in skilled and smart ways, because everyone playing this game is just human, why would we expect humans playing survivor to consistently be less skilled and smart at the game than humans playing killer. I think the asymmetric format actually is mostly at fault for that imbalance in pub matches, where 4 survivor players each have to match the "skills and smarts" of only 1 killer player, and are much more likely to suffer from skill disparity for that reason, as well from disconcerted plays and decisions. But either way, I also don't think or see any evidence that the base game balance is nearly as far off as people make it out to be, all evidence points more to the opposite.
I think you got a point with your last statement. We actually know from dataminers that there are (or were) significantly more killers in the high MMR population than survivors. I think the MMR is not strict enough and allows many players to rise particularly on the killer side that are not actually experienced and skilled enough to be able to consistently compete with the best opponents within those respective MMR brackets. I think it should be harsher, such that people don't see such jumps in difficulty levels, and that they fall to more reasonable levels more quickly if they do.
@DeadByStreetlight said:
I would like to see a fun tournament which randomly gives any perk to the teams. And the challenge is to make the best with their perks.
That would be also nice as a game mode for the game? You can choose your killer and survivor but the perks are totally random. It's not for competitive ofc.

Could be cool! I would like to see a "solo queue" tournament, where the survivor players are one big pool that matches are randomly created from, and they have no voice comms or prior coordination of builds etc., with the killers likewise being a pool randomly "queued" into these matches, ultimately the survivor and killer players with the highest survival and kill rates winning after X rounds. Would be fun and interesting, both to watch and participate.
@JeanCharpentier said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/297338/statistical-evaluation-of-an-interesting-tournament
Nice stats, an average with deviation, omg... never released by the dev>
So what do we see ? Average kill is around 2 but deviation is 1.29. It means the game is totally unbalanced and that trials are never tight, it's most of the time a big loss or a big win for the killer.
Moreover, most of the trials are played with the 3 best killers...
It shows how broken the game is atm, and why SBMM is despised by the killer community...

While the deviation is fairly big, you can look at the actual results and see that it's around 40% wins for either side and 20% draws, which is not an awful split. But beyond that, that deviation is only for actual kills, if we look at hook stages (which I find are a better indication of "balance" with relation to the actual experience of the gameplay), the average and deviation fall around 6-10 stages, which is a totally reasonable state of balance in my mind.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@Iliketoplaykiller said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675713#Comment_2675713
I would say the evidence is the community discord for finding teams to play with. I’ve gone there and found teams in under 5 minutes I always already in discord and queueing with them. This game is unplayable solo q survivor and I personally wouldn’t play it without a team.

I think you have to concede that that's not very convincing evidence. Do you really think 4-SWFs make for more than 10% of the player pools? I just don't see it. (And I still want SWF nerfs.)
I don't think solo queue is "unplayable", my survival rate is above 50% in solo and I do have genuinely good gaming experiences in solo with an alright frequency, but I understand of course what you mean when you say that. It can be a frustrating experience that makes one question the worth of playing survivor solo ever at all, since many random survivors you'll be "teamed" up with seemingly refuse to play the game themselves.
@Bwsted said:
Tnx for posting this. I will share my thoughts probably on Monday, as I don't have much free time in the weekend.
Do you happen to know the scoring criteria? Those would impact the way the trials play out and how players approach them.
Also, is the killer know beforehand or there's a surprise factor?
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675686#Comment_2675686
4% is in a 4-man, not total swf.
Iirc, the last figure we received was that swfs are in 45% of matches, but only a minimal portion are full pre-mades.

Thanks for thanking me!
Yes, the scoring criteria are as follows:
```
Killer Scoring
2pts for first hook
2pts for second hook
1pt for Death hook
Total Possible Points = 20

Survivor Scoring
2pts Per Gen
3/2/1 pts per escaped(based on hook stages left for survivor. Ex. 0 hook escape = 3 points)
Total Possible Points = 22
```
This goes to show that the points are entirely based on kill and survival objectives, and not only that, killers get more points for fresh hooks and are therefore even less encouraged to simply play for kills (and yet still performed well in terms of kills).
The killer was not known beforehand, but of course players expected one of the big three every time.
@RainehDaze said:
Trying to use bold text inline to create a summary is terrible readability, FYI. Particularly with this forum's font and colours, it barely stands out at all.

Yeah, I originally didn't have the bold parts but then added them because I thought it would draw the eye to a more digestable "summary" way of reading it of sorts, and also to break up my long ass texts. But you're right, it's not very nice on the eyes, not on this forum anyway.
@OopsAllHexes said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675713#Comment_2675713
Wasn't there also a more recent version of this as well that showed it was around the same as two years ago? In the same year that the devs posted that statistic of the most popular killer and survivor perks, I think.

I don't remember another stat presentation of the player population, but there may have been statements in threads presenting/regarding stats from the devs, or maybe on some stream...
in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@PleassBuiltInNoed said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2675592#Comment_2675592
you are forgetting that those killers live their life by playing the game
it's much easier to learn how to play survivor as best as you can, compared to killer

Disregarding whether I feel like that is an accurate assessment, most of these players are at 4k+ hours, and most of them play both roles. The killers here do not have more hours than the survivors, many of them are one and the same players. Sure, maybe 4 1k hour survivors would perform better against a 4k hour killer than a 1k hour killer would against 4 4k hour survivors, but the "difficulty" of playing either role is not an actual balance argument because for balance arguments we assume everyone being equally skilled at the game. And to that end, it shows that players can become skilled enough at killer to compete with the most skilled survivors.
Besides, if we assume not only that the game is survivor-sided at base, but also that players playing survivor more quickly reach their ceiling than players playing killer, we would expect public matchmaking to only even more heavily favour survivors statistically. But it doesn't even favour them.
Not only that, but I would argue survivors stand to gain much, much more from the tournament environment than killers. Killer players are still the same singular player on their own just like they are in every single given pub match. Survivors on the other hand get to play in a team with which they can practice all the time, communicate, coordinate their loadouts and strategies, something only a vanishingly small minority of groups in pubs do (again, a fraction of the player population even is 4-SWF, of which even smaller fractions use voice comms, even smaller fractions coordinate their builds, make strategies, practice together frequently, etc.).

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@Iliketoplaykiller said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/297338/statistical-evaluation-of-an-interesting-tournament
I honestly stopped reading when I got to the only 4% of the players are SWF. From my experience that is a bs number and definitely varies on mmr.
Edit: you said 5%.

The last time we got official stats on player population, 4-player SWF constituted 5%. While that is admittedly 2 years ago, we have no reason to assume it has changed significantly, and that is the only objective evidence we have.

Of course, at high MMR 4-player SWFs could make for a larger chunk of the population, but I think it's highly unlikely to be more than 10% even there. I certainly don't see 4-SWFs all the time in my killer games.
As a by the way: The stats actually showed that the survival rate of 4-player SWFs was not notably higher than the global average survival rate. That doesn't mean SWF isn't a problem, I absolutely think it is and want there to be perk and item/add-on restrictions in place for SWF, but it does go to show that not every 4-SWF is a death sweat squad.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@FreshCoal said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/297338/statistical-evaluation-of-an-interesting-tournament
A killer getting 2 kills is not a win buddy...
I also had a great laugh when you said that killers were overpowered in public matchmaking.

2 kills is a tie, a balanced result. And the hook stages show that all of the 2k matches here were actually killer-leaning, with more than 6 stages happening in each of them.
I would go as far as to say that it's a healthy mentality to consider a 1k or 2k with more than 6 stages a killer victory, but I do not make that statement in my evaluation of victories based on kills, where I clearly state only 3k and 4k games are outright killer victories.
I also did not use the word "overpowered", but killers do factually perform better than a 2k average in public matchmaking (it is "killer-sided" statistically), with the kill rates increasing notably the better the killer player is (based on stats taken from various killer streamers).
I encourage you to read my post more carefully, because I think you will find I'm not so disagreeable to killer main sentiments. I do think a bunch of killers should be buffed, SWF needs nerfs, some maps are ridiculous, etc.

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@throwaway79465468797 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/297338/statistical-evaluation-of-an-interesting-tournament
1 tournament that strictly used 3 killers does not make a good argument for balance...

A better argument anyway than anyone's ever brought forth when saying "the game is completely hopelessly survivor-sided at a high level and you can't get a single kill", as is common on the online outlets. It is indeed only one tournament where everything is allowed, but in countless other tournaments where both sides have restrictions the game also trended toward a balanced, slightly killer-leaning result.
Most of all I just found this tournament interesting and surprising, because I too expected the results to be while not "hopelessly survivor-sided", at least still survivor-leaning.
That only 3 killers were used is not relevant for balance arguments. You can use 1 killer 100% of the time, and in competitive settings players will always use the best characters/items/etc. a game has to offer. DbD is not unique in having a limited pool of S-tier characters. I do think there should at least be a couple more (Artist might be, although I don't quite think so, she lacks really strong add-ons), but that's not a problem of "balance", since again, you can just play those killers all the time. It's more a personal problem of lack of diversity in the playing experience, if you will, but a lot of players have no issue still having fun playing (as and against) Nurse and Blight after years and thousands of hours of already doing so, so not even that is a problem for everyone.
(Besides, it was not strictly 3 killers, 3 times other killers were used, with 1 3k 9 stage and 2 1k 6 stage games, which is not awful).

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@Exxodus21 said:
I'm gonna need to hire an intern to read and summarize this.

I already did provide a summary, if you simply read the things in bold.
TL;DR: a tournament in which every character, perk, item, add-on and offering was allowed; average kills settled slightly above 2; the game is actually reasonably well-balanced at the top end; In the tournament I'm talking about now, all restrictions were removed; 4 Styptics/Syringes, multiple Brand New Parts, 4 Dead Hards and Decisive Strikes; the killers were absolutely able to compete; average of 2.16 kills; outright victories are basically an exact split between both roles; 73% of matches were killer victories in terms of hook stages; etc.
To note: The conclusions I draw from it (and many other tournaments) are not that the game is in a perfect spot. Various killer characters are not viable enough at the highest level and do deserve buffs (in public matchmaking most killers are perfectly viable enough, we don't need all killers to be S tier, but I do think all killers should be at least B tier at base, and A tier with add-ons, which is currently not the case for a little under half of the killers), various maps are not fit for higher-level competition and should be further adjusted. Some killer and survivor add-ons are overtuned and should be toned down, or in the case of survivors, I think it would be more sensible to make it so SWF groups (i. e. where players can actually coordinate their builds) cannot use any add-on (or perk) more than once between them.
To tack something useful onto this post, here's the items, add-ons and offerings people used in this tourney:

What I find interesting is that Brand New Parts by far dominated the field. I would have expected for Styptics and Syringes to be at least equally as common picks, but it's not even close, with BNP having 71 instances, and Styptics/Syringes only 38.
Reminder: The finals for the tournament take place tomorrow or Sunday!

in Statistical evaluation of an interesting tournament Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@PixelBush said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2674260#Comment_2674260
Dowsey's winstreak, as impressive as it was, was done in an age of DBD far more favourable to Twins.
It was done with...
-Twins being able to ignore BT and DH
-OLD Ruin Undying
-None of the collision bugs that arrived post-Resident Evil
-No MMR, meaning going on streaks was much easier than now
-no Circle of Healing, DH validation or Exponential
-The old 3 second fatigue rather than 5 seconds
-they were really new so nobody knew how to play against them
Twins were top tier for a bit, but they've fallen from grace so spectacularly hard and only remain relevant against uncoordinated messes who don't know how to travel in pairs or teams who've been prohibited from bringing any of the super strong items or perks that stop them from doing their thing, specifically chosen on a map that favours them. For Twins to be able to "hang with the best" pretty much every meta tool the Survivors can bring have to be taken away from them. But we live in a world full of god kits, impossible maps and supercharged healing and recovery perks.
Compare them to an actual top tier like Blight and the differences are stark. Blight has several strong add-ons banned, several perks banned, is given a much less favourable map (Gas Heaven) and is given fewer Survivor perk and item restrictions and still does substantially better than them. Twins aren't nearly top tier. They're good, at least in a world without Circle and Exponential and stupid medkits, but they're still just a worse Oni at the end of the day.
For the game as we have it now, Twins are inexcusably badly equipped to deal with it. Something has to give.
Otz did 50 wins in a row with 3-perk old Trapper, does that make Trapper top tier?

While the points regarding Dowsey's streak are of course valid, we are talking about a 199 match streak here. Something like that is absolutely beyond insanity to even just think of in any even remotely competitively balanced game, the fact that it was possible doesn't suddenly go from "what the hell?!" to "oh, okay" just because of some perk changes.
The idea that Twins are only "relevant" anymore against uncoordinated messes or survivors without med-kits and Circle is hyterical. They are still 3-4king in tournaments against some of the best teams in the world, and sorry, but in the world where I live you can give most pub teams 10 med-kits and 10 Circles and they will still not be anywhere near as competitive as these tournament teams that are composed of some of the most individually skilled and experienced players that compete and practice in the most competitive settings in the game all the time and have for years, and do so in teams of players they've known and played with for years, having a degree of coordination and cooperation that pub teams can never hope to have. And they are not in fact deprived of "every meta tool", their builds are highly optimized, abuse perks like Deliverance and Kinship in ways randoms never could, they still get to bring 1-2 copies of the most potent perks in the game like DS, DH, BT, Unbreak, and beyond that they can coordinate in ways that easily make up for not being able to bring 4 of each of those. Such as sending your BT player for rescues.
Likewise, in the world I live, having random pub groups full of ungodly stacked loadouts is vanishingly rare an occurrence. I almost never see 4 med-kits, and let alone 4 Styptics/Syringes. I'm pretty sure not even half of my (high MMR) matches even have a map offering being burned, and that costs no perk/item/add-on slot and objectivey can skew the odds of the match significantly, yet more often than not all 4 survivors decide not to do so. And if they do it's not at all always even for a map that is actually super unfavourable for me. The average loadout pub groups have is really not all that ridiculous (but again, I do agree that it can be, and that loadout limitations for SWFs are in order for that reason).
As a related by the by, you might want to have a look at this post of mine where I evaluate a recent tournament in which everything was allowed, meaning you get to see not only teams stacked with god kits and 4 DS 4 DH and the like, but those teams are also some of the best and most competitively experienced in the game: https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/297338/statistical-evaluation-of-an-interesting-tournament - Of course, nobody played Twins here, so it's not directly related to our discussion, but it goes to show that the ceiling of survivors with all these things in play is not nearly as astronomical as people make it out to be. I would not be surprised if Twins could still be "relevant" even against this sort of competition, meaning that while I don't expect them to actually consistently have a chance of outright winning like Nurse, Spirit and Blight (particularly because Twins have no truly busted add-ons like those killers do), I could still see Twins deliver an average of around 2 kills and 6-8 stages, which is balanced.
Anyway, even at the oh-so-scary high MMR, the average pub lobby is not nearly as scary as you make it out to be. I guarantee that Dowsey and any other good player would still be able go on impressive streaks with Twins (and any killer for that matter), and I in fact know that most good killer players still win the vast majority of their matches with much of any killer. MMR has improved things, absolutely ridiculous streaks like that do seem impossible now, high MMR players see more challenging matches more frequently now... but it's still like 1 out of 10 matches, which is better than 1 out of 100 like it was in the past, but either way, good killer players still win pretty decisively 80+% of the time in pubs.
You are not facing tournament-level squads stacked out to the teeth every time, far from. You are actually more likely never facing actual tournament teams like that. You can absolutely do well with Twins most of the time if you are competent. As I've said, Circle is a problem, for Twins and in my opinion also beyond that, and there are nerfs for it or Boons in general that I would agree with, and I do think Twins deserve adjustments specific to this new Boon world. But I do not agree with this idea you seem to have that Twins are a thing of the past, forgotten, "irrelevant", poor, bullied by Boons, or whatnot. I find that sort of rhetoric silly at best, and more often overly dramatic and tiring. I can 4k with perkless Legion in EU Central high MMR, all the competent-and-above players I know and watch have no issues comfortably sweeping the floor with most pub survs. I really don't vibe with this idea that killers are "not viable", I more vibe with the idea that people should git gud.
That's not to say various of the killers don't deserve buffs, they do. Even Twins could do with some buffs, both specific to the new issues they are facing now and with regards to encouraging more fun playstyles. I however don't think their basic gameplay loop has to be buffed as you suggest, by decreasing Victor fatigue after pouncing, or decreasing Charlotte's wake up time without compensating for it by increasing the regrow time. Their base gameplay is in a good spot, they're a completely competitive killer many experienced players regard to be among the top 5.

in Exponential Proves the Devs Have Forgotten Twins Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@PixelBush said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2672707#Comment_2672707
One thing that's worth saying: Twins do well in tournament play because in Twins tourney matches, basically everything that heals you is banned. According to DBE rules, Circle, Self-Care, Exponential, Soul Guard and Botany are banned against everyone, but Twins also get more or less every other healing perk banned (WGLF, Desperate Measures, Inner Strength, Resurgence and ALL MEDKITS banned). Twins, for their part, have no perk bans beyond the general perks that are banned on every Killer, and can use any addon except Ultra Rares.
And perk stacking is also restricted, so you can't have more than 1, say, Unbreakable, Dead Hard or BT. That's not a restriction in pub games.
Twins do well because the stuff that massively counters them is kept out of their tournament matches. In pubs, you can go against 2-3 strong medkits with addons, 3 Circles, 2 WGLFs and an Exponential or two and that's just something you can run into on a regular basis.

While it's undoubtedly true that particularly the DBE ruleset benefits Twins, it's still a fact that they suffer tremendously from coordinated and strategic teamwork, and in tournaments the level of coordination and strategy is higher than you will ever see in pubs. Survivors can team up to counter Victor, in fact in tournaments you will regularly see them abuse lockers alongside bodyblocks to completely deny Victor downs. They can heal each other reliably, and there's even certain healing perks such as We'll Make It and Desperate Measures that are allowed.
Twins are not far behind the big three of Nurse, Spirit and Blight in terms of consistently having a chance to 4k teams in tournaments, in more than one tournament they even outperformed some of them statistically, and that does go to show that they're a top-tier killer. Again, more than any perk or item itself, coordination and practiced strategies hurt Twins, and the disparity of coordination and strategy between the vast majority of pub groups and tournament teams is immense. The fact that Twins players can still compete against that consistently makes it easier to understand how it is possible that someone could get 199 4ks in a row with them in pubs, killing 796 survivors without a single one escaping. Victor just has no meaningful counterplay much of the time, even tournament teams that coordinate to make it as hard as possible for Victor to snowball regularly get grinded down by them. In pubs Twins regularly just dominate.
As I've already agreed, Circle and Exponential are particularly problematic for Twins. I did suggest the Twins-specific buff of enabling Victor to snuff Boons. I've also suggested general Boon nerfs in the past, such as making it so that each player can only bless each totem once, meaning if it gets snuffed they'd have to find another totem to bless. I'm also for limiting the amount of perk and item stacking that can happen in SWF groups. I think Twins (and other killers) can compete perfectly well against random survivors with uncoordinated loadouts and plays, even if they each have some of the strongest loadouts (which is awfully rare). But SWF groups not only get the benefit of being able to communicate and coordinate their plays and strats, but also their loadouts, so they can reliably boast some of the most powerful survivor side loadouts. Personally I would like to see SWF groups only be able to equip any perk and item/add-on at most once between them, so they would all need to have distinct loadouts.
Why should the regrow time be longer when you lose huge amounts of distance every time you get kicked and can get kicked after every single attack (miss or hit)? Like I didn't know whenever Blight landed a rush or Huntress threw a hatchet, they teleported back 40m and were unable to use their power again for 15 seconds.
Again, we are talking about a top-tier killer here that has proven in pubs and tournament settings that they are able to hang with the best. Not just that, we are talking about buffs for this killer, prompted by the introduction of perks that survivors might very well not be using in any given game (and in the case of Exponential much more often than not will in fact not be using). I think a little caution is in order.
With a pretty much instant wake up after regaining control over Charlotte as I've suggested, you are not losing much distance at all. Victor is a unique ability in that he not only has little counterplay, but he obviously can pressure survivors on the map while Charlotte is still being a threat elsewhere. If you could control your hatchets mid-flight, stopping and starting and seeking targets, and also leave them around the map and switch to them at will, maybe then it would also make sense why there should be more of a penalty for missing with them, and why it should not be possible to spam them. If there is a sensible nerf for Twins to compensate for the buffs I lined out, I think it's an increase of that regrow time. And again, that's especially because the quasi-instant wake up time will make it much more attractive for Twins to chase survivors with both characters, and if a survivor manages to actually crush Victor in such a scenario it would be ridiculous if they both get no distance from Charlotte and Victor is back out a handful of seconds later too.
Morever, I think you will find that many players just do not enjoy facing Twins (or playing them, for that matter), because they naturally encourage some of the more oppressive and unpleasant playstyles, such as slugging and camping. If BHVR is neglecting Twins (at least in the sense of not buffing them), I think that would be the reason. I've suggested entire reworks for Twins in the past for that reason. I think the coolest thing about them are ambitious and tricky Victor pounces, as well as surprise pounces over obstacles - I would want to see a rework that actively encourages those things, because in their current form the optimal play is always to get Victor as close as possible and guarantee the hit, which is pretty boring. I would also want them to put more focus on Charlotte, currently she is kind of just the vehicle for Victor, the latter being who you want to be controlling as much as possible, Charlotte mostly just being there to take care of the chores.

in Exponential Proves the Devs Have Forgotten Twins Comment by zarr December 3, 2021
@xili84 said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2673689#Comment_2673689
Nice brag. If those are not doctored or lobby dodged in any way. You are truly the top 1%. Especially since you did all of them practically perkless and on Legion is highly sus. I doubt that so many people cannot loop an M1 killer :D But if they are legit... respect. But again I doubt it :p

If you are competent at the game, you can do well with much of any killer in public matchmaking. Not saying you will win every game or that there aren't problematic things left in the game, but good killer players win the majority of the time. I'm sitting at like 27 to 2 in perkless Legion 4ks just in the last couple of days. The game is just not nearly as skewed against the killer as people make it out to be.
Keep at it and practice and improve and you won't feel like it's such a nightmare playing killer anymore. There will still be things to complain about, but they'll be more reasonable.
@JPA said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2673689#Comment_2673689
Look at all those ash and bronze rank Survivors you absolutely dominated! Not a single team there is not rainbow ranks.
This doesn't prove much, I could go and drop my MMR and 4K against SoloQ/baby survivors all day.

Grades have nothing to do with the MMR value, I'm sure you know that. Rank reset was like two weeks ago, people don't play all the time. I am definitely high MMR, I have been playing killer for years and rarely get beaten hard, and I mean, just in this run I've been 4-killing some 20+ games in a row. Most of the people you see in those shots are 1000+ hour players. Tunnelling/camping/slugging are just very effective, combine that with solid chase game and you will perform well most of the time. Mind you, I usually refrain from abusing those strategies, but even then I still average between 2 and 3 kills comfortably. But sometimes it's fun challenging yourself and trying stuff like winning with the weakest killer in the game without perks.

in Killers Can Be Just As Powerful Comment by zarr December 2, 2021
Killer is impossibly difficult. You can only play one or two killers if you want to stand any chance of killing anyone at all, and even then you need 10 slowdown perks and sweat a liter just to maybe get 1 kill. It's hell.

in Killers Can Be Just As Powerful Comment by zarr December 2, 2021
@PleassBuiltInNoed said:
Even without the bug, 36 seconds is just too much time you have to spend by blessing a hex.

Again, that's not a bug - Thrill (at 5 tokens) is supposed to halve cleansing and blessing speeds, effectively doubling cleansing and blessing times.
The "bug" is that rather than 24 seconds as BHVR has stated, blessing a Hex apparently takes 28s, twice what cleansing it would. But yes, even if they were to make it actually take 24, 48 seconds to bless a Hex under the effect of Thrill is still regularly just too much, it will cost too much time or even lead to them getting interrupted doing so and having wasted all that time as a result. Survivors will often just need to cleanse Hexes with Thrill in play.
A detrimental "bug" with Thrill is that it does not count rekindled Hexes as tokens, despite those still being Hex totems. It not counting Boon is sensible, the perk outright says it only counts dulls and Hexes and Boons are "survivor" totems, it makes sense that it as a killer perk does not benefit from them. But yeah, rekindled Hexes should definitely count.

in Even with boons, pentimento has got some potential if you have strong totem build Comment by zarr December 2, 2021
@PixelBush said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2671829#Comment_2671829
You're right, but just because the perk is uncommon doesn't justify how much you can't play the game when you do see it.

@Chocolate_Cosmos said:
https://forum.deadbydaylight.com/en/discussion/comment/2671829#Comment_2671829
Yes but that still doesn't mean it can't happen. It's like old Object of Obsession perk. You didn't see it offten but when you do for someone like Trapper well it was gg. You was powerless trapper. If it was SWF group then you coudnt use your power because everyone or that Survivor would know where it is. By one perk. One person is enough to run it for the whole team to ruin your game. This is the same case.

While I do agree that Exponential (and Circle) is particularly problematic for Twins who obviously excel at building pressure and snowballing by injuring and slugging multiple survivors, my argument is that not only will it be awfully rare to see Exponential, but even when you do the game is not at all "unplayable".
The moment Twins released, experienced players already understood that the optimal strategy against them is to team up in duos, such that if a person gets downed by Victor, the other person can kick him and potentially even heal the slug back up in time. And yet despite that being an obvious and optimal strategy from the get-go, Twins still performed exceptionally well. Most survivors (even when grouped up in SWFs with voice comms) are just not that "clever" and coordinated and make suboptimal and downright bad decisions and plays all the time, and Twins thrive on chaos. Not only that, but healing a survivor up takes 16 seconds, and in those 16 seconds Charlotte can cover a distance of 73.6 meters, more than two terror radii worth. Accounting for the 3 seconds it takes to regain full control over Charlotte, it's still 60m. And even in cases where she is so far away that she can't get there in time, she will obviously still get much closer, and will have Victor available again, ready to create mayhem with Charlotte now around to capitalize on it. Even in tournaments Twins have performed surprisingly well despite the levels of coordination there obviously being much higher.
With Exponential it also takes 16 seconds for the survivor to recover, and if there's no other survivor around, Victor will still be positioned close to the slug and so you can just switch back to Victor should you not be able to get there in time. Plus that Boon obviously has to be set up first, and a survivor has to make it into its area before they go down (and for that they first have to even know that that Boon is Exponential). It's just not something that I can see will ruin her chances even in the rare matches where it does come up, not least because Twins' playstyle can be adjusted - even if it isn't optimal, one can adopt a playstyle of mostly using Victor as a short/medium range chase tool, where you will first initiate chase with Charlotte and only unleash Victor when you are close enough to capitalize. They can also be played with more of a focus on defending hooks rather than constantly injuring and slugging survivors, where you commit to chases even as Charlotte to secure hooks, and then leave either of the two at the hook while pressuring the map with the respective other twin. Similar to how Oni can also be played for short-burst Fury activations where rather than trying to cause as much damage as possible within any Fury, you try to get one down as soon as possible, and instantly pick and hook the survivor so as to conserve Fury for the next chase, also regularly being able to defend the hook with Fury at the ready.
That said, Twins do suffer disproportionally from Exponential and Circle, and the latter is obviously actually commonly used. And rare as it may be, against well-coordinated groups all members of which know how to play against Twins and play to abuse these Boons, Twins' game plan will actually be heavily disrupted by them. I do think Twins adjustments to the new Boon reality are in order - Boons are a new category of perks the value of which is strictly tied to an area on the map, and Twins are the only killers in the game that are limited in terms of what they can do in certain areas (wherever you are while controlling Victor, that is an area you cannot pick survivors up in, kick generators in, break pallets in, and so forth), and so I do find it perfectly reasonable to make concessions for Twins with regards to Boons.
I wouldn't be opposed to decreasing the "wake up" duration from 3 to .25 seconds when switching back to Charlotte, same as when switching from Charlotte to Victor. I don't see a balancing reason that would even necessitate this long period where you are unable to control Charlotte. It feels bad and if anything the "surprise attack" quality of catching survivors out that are being bold around a dormant Charlotte is something Twins should have. It would also improve the chase interaction where the killer player can switch back and forth between the two in order to catch a survivor out on tileplay, and this quality of "chasing one survivor with both twins" is pretty cool and something we barely see with the current 3-second wake up duration.
Furthermore, I think Victor should be able to snuff Boons (and rekindle Hexes, for Pentimento).
On the other hand, I think the time it takes until you are able to unleash Victor again after he regenerates should be increased. Crushing Victor should be more meaningful, especially considering that "being chased by both simultaneously" would be much more common with the fast switching between them. The "regrow" time is currently 6 seconds, I think it should be at least twice that. Add-ons that currently pertain the "wake up" duration can then be used to decrease the regrow time.

in Exponential Proves the Devs Have Forgotten Twins Comment by zarr December 2, 2021
Give it a week or two and you will almost never see Exponential in your games anymore. I barely see it as it is.

in Exponential Proves the Devs Have Forgotten Twins Comment by zarr December 2, 2021