zarr
zarr
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Awful through-and-through.
Will paraphrase what I said in my - now of course deleted - PTB feedback:
Weaving Spiders is shockingly bad, and that's saying something because BHVR releasing bad perks is completely par-for-the-course. What contributes to how perplexing this is is the fact that they decided to create a new perk type for this. Now mind you, with Boons having long become irrelevant (and Illumination sure as hell not changing anything about that) and "Teamwork" perks never even having had a chance to be anything but trash pile fodder, it isn't like we should have come to expect good perks to establish a new perk type. But this is worse than bad, it's bewildering. This is genuinely the worst perk design BHVR has ever come up and out with. The entire concept of "Invocations" is flawed, and the specifics of this one are more than that.
Starting with the concept, there are multiple significant issues. You have to sit in basement twiddling thumbs to activate this perk. A common complaint about DbD's gameplay loop already is that doing gens for 90 seconds at a time can be boring, but the act of repairing gens at least has various gameplay elements that make it a little more engaging (finding gens, hitting great skill checks, keeping an eye on your surroundings, planning and positioning for escape routes, deciding which gens to do when, perks that interact with gens, ...). Sitting in basement staring at the floor however? For 2 minutes?! What were they thinking?
The perk can only be used once and deactivates for every survivor for the remainder of the trial if even just one person uses it. That is horrible for solo survivors, where it can mean up to 3 wasted perk slots. The effects do not even stack, all having the perk does is give you a 50% increased invoking time if you join the survivor in basement (as opposed to joining them without having the perk yourself), which is far from worth it even if its effect in and of itself would be. If you get interrupted for any reason (not only by the killer, but things such as needing to help your team, too, of course), the Invocation resets, meaning any time spent was for naught. And then there is the risk associated with being in basement. Getting found and downed in or around there can literally be game-deciding.
Another conceptual issue is that with the time spent in basement and the associated risks, as well as the idea of even more drawbacks incurred by survivors on top of that, the reward for using the perk has to be massive if it wants to be even just approachingly adequate. And on the killer side you will often only notice the massive impact of such an effect, you won't notice or think about them having just sat in basement doing nothing for minutes. It's a gameplay experience nightmare from the killer perspective too because any effect that would be worth that absurd investment would feel absurd to be on the receiving end of as well.
On the actual effects side, things aren't looking better. Two minutes of doing nothing is a massive amount of time, let alone spending it in basement. Consider that even looting a chest for 10 seconds is something players usually don't do and feel is a waste of time that can have tangible negative effects on their matches. That you also become Broken for the remainder of the trial after completing the Invocation is ridiculous, it's a massive iability for yourself and your team. And good luck even getting out and away from basement if the killer had even just been anywhere in its general vicinity when they noticed a survivor randomly becoming Broken. And all of this for a reduction of 10 charges on all gens. That's 70 seconds less of potential repair time, for 120 seconds spent in the most dangerous place to be caught out in instead of simply having spent it on gens. And it isn't even really 70 seconds, but effectively 50, given that only 5 gens have to be repaired. And that is of course only if no gens had been repaired prior to the perk's activation (or repaired beyond 80 charges), otherwise it will be even less.
The perk's abysmally bad. Even No Mither has more going for it than this. An actual killer perk. If I as killer could equip a perk that makes it so at least 1 survivor in my trials is Broken and has to spend 2 minutes sitting in basement uninterrupted and give up a mere 10 gen charges for that, I would take it every time. You would have to be crazy not to.
If I were to try and attempt to salvage anything from this trainwreck of a design, I think they should reduce the activation time to 1 minute, and make it so you only become Broken the next time you are injured (or immediately if you are already injured), but still for the remainder of the trial from there on out. It also shouldn't lose progress if interrupted. Other survivors can only enter into the Invocation if they have the perk equipped. The time to activate remains the same, but the effects stack (so 10 additional charges shaved off of gens for each additional survivor participating). But those survivors too will become Broken the next time they're injured.
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@Aven_Fallen said:
IMO it is worse than Self Care.
I think both are bad, but Strength in Shadows is worse, simply because you cannot use it everywhere like Self Care. It might be faster, but depending on the Travel Time, it might end up slower. Plus, it is just more risky.
Absolutely.
For the pure time-to-heal aspect, it has to be kept in mind that you not only have the travel time to basement, but also back from basement to wherever it is you actually need to be. A simple example being that you're close to a gen, have to leave it to heal in basement, and then run back to that gen. With Self-Care you could have just stayed at the gen to heal. Strength In Shadows allows you to heal in ~23 seconds, Self-Care in ~46. That means in any case where traversing to and from basement took at least 11.5s respectively, SC is better even when purely looking at time. Sure sometimes you are already around basement or have reasons to be there (someone being hooked in there, a gen being there), but that is far from reliable, and if you choose to only heal at times where you have reason to be around basement to begin with, you are obviously forgoing the benefits of being able to heal at any time. This is also ignoring that traversing the map injured is risky, and you regularly may well have to do so carefully to try and avoid the killer, which takes additional time.
Then there is the fact that positional play is crucial, being able to be at the right place at the right time can make or break rounds. SC affords its user the ability to heal wherever and whenever they need it or deem it beneficial. How important this is is obvious when you just think of the fact that it may simply not be possible to traverse the map and heal in basement and get back to where you need to be because the place you need to be is a hook between you and the basement that the killer is guarding and you can obviously only attempt to contest if you are healthy. Or a hook in basement itself. Or if the chase is around basement. Or if basement is on the other side of the map and the hook timer simply doesn't allow for you to make it there and back.
And finally there are the associated, significant risks of being around and let alone in basement while injured. Where SC allows you to heal anywhere, meaning you can regularly pick completely safe spots that are either so far out of the way or simply right at safe windows and pallets such that the killer cannot easily or at all get the jump on you even if they have Nurse's Calling or the like, SIS puts you in the most vulnerable place to be caught out in, where you going down can literally be game-deciding.
I have to agree that SIS is strictly and significantly worse than SC, and SC already is not the greatest of perks. Mind you, I for one don't subscribe to this silly idea that SC is a "killer perk", it is only 14 seconds longer than the 16 * 2 seconds an altruistic heal would take, which can often be worth it given the fact that you can heal anywhere and at any time and without having to have a teammate that also has to spend time going with you and back again. But I don't think SC is regularly worth the perk slot over other perks, not least when considering the possibility of bringing a med-kit and the existence of Mangled. I think it is a completely sensible choice in the hands of a good and smart player that knows when and where it is beneficial to heal and how to leverage health states, especially if they pair it with Botany or Desperate Measures or even Hyperfocus, but I also don't think it is among the best of choices. So SIS being worse means it's basically a gimmicky "fun" perk serious players will never use, or only if they are feeling frisky.
They could legitimately make this 100% healing speed and have it reveal the killer's aura to its user for as long as they're in basement and it still wouldn't be a prevalently used perk. Far from still, most likely.
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Deathslinger. Dodging shots is just so satisfying, and his shots are very precise so it's something that rewards skill on both sides. And the Slinger player can get really creative with the type of shots they can make work, which demands constant awareness, and makes for cool plays that honestly feel comparably as good to get caught out by as they do to play around. Enjoy it a ton, even more so than Huntress.
Twins. The macrogame focus makes for a nice change in gameflow/approach, with short, fairly fun bouts of trying to somehow do something against Victor. Of course, only really enjoyable with at least 2 other players that know what they are doing and/or are on voice comms.
Doctor. Encourages chases because he can fairly reliably find people, and his chaseplay is uniquely fun.
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@Archol123 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3669546#Comment_3669546
As for the part of it being easier to succeed on killer than on survivor, I would not necessarily agree... Because there is a big difference between comp players and average players. And killer and survivor gameplay are also not really comparable, because you are playing with completely different mechanics and tasks in mind... If you have a group of 4 friends on discord your chances to succeed are probably higher than the average killer ones if you are somewhat decent at the game... If you play solo only sure I guess... But as killer you can still lose fairly easily against 4 people that know what they are doing despite not being on comes... I would not generalize stuff like that, as it is way too blurry and not precise.
For the basic game premise of playing alone, yeah, I think it would be ludicrous not to acknowledge that succeeding on killer is infinitely more consistently possible than on survivor. A good killer player basically always wins. A good survivor player in solo queue will regularly die/have 2+ survivors die. Obviously this is because solo queue means you will have mismatched survivor groups, but that just adds to the fact that the matchmaking affects the survivor gameplay so disproportionally much. Including because the detriments of having even just one survivor player be worse than the killer player will regularly outweigh the benefits of having a survivor player be better than the killer player. The liability a weak link can be is so much greater for a survivor group than the ability of a good survivor to "carry", since the killer can exploit a weak link, while being able to more or less ignore a good player.
Whether a decent killer player will more often succeed than a decent 4-player SWF (with and without voice comms) might not be quite as obvious, but then again, I think since meeting good killer players is vastly more common than meeting survivors groups consisting of 4 good players (basically only happens in 4-player SWFs with any regularity, which are rare), my money is still firmly on the killer outperforming. I mean, we know from statistics that the public matchmaking environment has killers performing better on average than survivors, even when exclusively looking at "high MMR" 4-player SWFs.
Again though, I don't think solo queue should be an environment that yields a balanced outcome, it just inherently favours the killer and that's not a bad thing from a gameplay experience perspective either. But the matchmaking could still improve a ton without changing this too drastically. I think the game is still killer-leaning for a lot of the cast even if all 5 players on the server are roughly equally skilled, experienced and "sweaty", as long as the survivors have no coordination or communication (meaning they are not a premade group). And of course, the matchmaking will never be that good anyway.
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He's more than strong enough to win most of any of the matches matchmaking will provide one with. There's some Trickster mains I know that basically always win. Check out ayano_hm or wacek134 on twitch. He is downright oppressive in his camping capabilities, denying unhooks or at least melting through both the unhooker's and unhookee's health states. The frequent availability of Main Event has also made him much more lethal than he used to be.
I think he just does not feel very rewarding or satisfying to play, since you can spam your ability hits don't mean much. Why play Trickster when you can play Huntress?
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@Archol123 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3669392#Comment_3669392
As I said before, there are far more comp killers just playing killer than full on 4 men comp teams... The odds of meating a comp killer are just higher, therefore the streak ends with a higher probability. However the condition of such a streak ending is the same, if they encounter a comp player or a 4 men comp team, they will have a really rough time.
KNightlight on his 500 + Nurse streak has often said that if a comp team snipes him his streak would just end.
But this precisely goes to show that succeeding as killer in this game is much more possible than doing so as survivor. Since encountering good opponents is infinitely more common on survivor than on killer, as it basically takes encountering a good 4-player SWF on comms, which is vanishingly rare as compared to just a good killer player playing killer.
My general opinion on these streaks as always is that they most of all show how abysmal the matchmaking is. Even when ignoring top 0.X% tournament players and Nurse/Blight/Spirit all of which are extreme outliers, there's tons of players that go on streaks or have ridiculous winrates on killer. Any even just decent, above-average killer player rarely loses, as evidenced on streams. The MMR "soft" cap as well as the lax matchmaker simply do not yield competitive matches with any consistency, even though there absolutely are players out there that could make some of these people have reasonable winrates. Another major reason is that the game format inherently favours the one over the four in terms of the impact their decisions, skills and "sweatiness" will have on the matches, as any one survivor player can in theory only determine "25%" of their side's performance level. And survivors are by the nature of them being 4 different players much more disconcerted than the killer player, all the more so of course if they are randoms that don't know each other, have no coordination and communication. And even one weak link in terms of skill/loadout/trying to win can spell disaster. This makes the public matchmaking environment extra killer-favoured as its randomness benefits them not only in terms of matchmaking but gameplay as well.
Matchmaking improvements are the first thing I would advocate for, creating more nuanced high MMR brackets and a more strict matchmaking algorithm at least at those upper brackets. An alternative if BHVR is scared that this leads to too much competitiveness could be creating a casual and competitive queue, with differing rulesets that promote casual and competitive play respectively. And then some solo queue improvements could still be in order, albeit without going overboard with it since I'm of the opinion that solo queue should be that uphill battle and retain its unique difficulty, including that to do with some of the randomness it yields in terms of not knowing what other players are using, doing, planning, and so on. It just makes it a different gamemode that is much closer to the "horror"-type gameplay experience, thrown into unknown and uncertain circumstances and having to make do with that, with very rudimentary means of acquiring information and coordination, that chaos and disconcertedness being more tangible. SWF should have loadout restrictions and Nurse/Blight/Spirit/tunnelling should be rebalanced (camping has more or less been "solved" by the removal of hook grabs (although showing all survivors the self-unhook bar of a hooked survivor would still be great), tunnelling however is a major issue still because of how much it exacerbates the "weak link" issue).
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It's hilarious that there's actually people arguing in favour of this "mechanic". Bias knows no bounds.
- This is completely random. It is not a game mechanic that can or should be balanced around. It's crazy to argue this. Imagine someone arguing the game is balanced for instances where M1 attacks randomly get auto-aimed (or "aim-dressed", excuse me) into textures when they clearly should have hit the survivor, and let alone that we would need a global increase in vault speeds or some such to compensate if BHVR finally managed to eradicate these instances.
- People arguing that the survivor can react to the sound in time and decide not to let go have never played survivor. As someone with a sub-200ms reaction time, trust me, these cannot be avoided with any reliability by anyone. And that is of course beside the point that sometimes you are forced to let go regardless. And that even if you could reliably react if you have crazy reaction times, a game should not be designed to randomly screw over 99.9% of players that don't have those reaction times. Or those that have input/output latencies (e. g. most of all non-PC players) that make it physically impossible to have those reaction times.
- A 10% regression, 3-second progress freeze, as well as telling the killer where a survivor is, which gen they had been working on, and that they are leaving it is massive. That can and has countless time made or majorly contributed to the difference between win or loss.
- A perfect solution for this issue that mindbogglingly enough is still in the game all these years later has also long been implemented: the code for it exists in the form of Overcharge, where the skill check will simply play out even if you let go of the gen. Mind you, hitting a surprise skill check while you are also moving or let alone trying to dodge a killer or whatnot is much more difficult than just hitting a normal skill check, so this would still be a mechanic that benefits killers. There would in fact be no real reason not to simply cancel these skill checks. Skill checks are easy to hit, no sane survivor would let go of a gen to avoid having to complete skill checks, as that would make the gen take significantly longer to complete, as well as of course forgo any potential extra progression from great skill checks. But that is not even being argued as a solution, the "skill check plays out" thing is fine.
It is possible that BHVR had made the conscious decision to leave this in the game in the past, for reasons to do with wanting some degree of randomness and "chaos" represented as "horror" factors in their game, that randomly getting screwed over can be part of the thrill, as I had also suggested in this post: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3613964#Comment_3613964. But that doesn't mean they couldn't reconsider on this, now that the game has more and more been embraced as a competitive rather than thematic experience, by players and developers alike.
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Middle section of the map should more reliably have at least 1 pallet. Remove an unsafe corn filler for that.
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I like the map, an actual cornfield with combine harvesters towering over it which grant an overview. Only thing I don't like (apart from harvesters not offering much play potential for survivors) are LT-walls spawning in isolation. At the very least have some of the weak corn fillers spawn in adjacence to them. Map could be a tad smaller.
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Chapel is pretty balanced, the only two things I'd note is that the circus portion can spawn some nasty 3-gen setups, and the main nasty window setups. I think removing one possible window spawn in main and replacing it with a possible pallet spawn would be beneficial. Maybe a pallet spawn in the center of main, would make it a place where some more actual gameplay happens. You could also pull one of the circus gens to spawn downstairs in main, as long as it doesn't then create a new 3-gen along with the upstairs main gen.
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Reduce the safety of main, increase the safety of the area separating main from the surrounding tiles. Adding more of the semi-safe filler pallets and even edge map window walls along that band around main would do a lot to make it less of a place that survivors have to go to, while also not being a place that is as beneficial to go to as it is currently. I think making the 3 pallets and 2 windows in main tangibly less safe and adding 5 semi-safe filler pallets and "edge map" window tiles around main instead would be a good compromise.
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I think what would benefit this map the most is adding breakable walls in main building. One in the middle portion that would allow the killer to cut through that middle and not have to just chase around it (also allowing them to find the entrance more easily), and another on the outside wall close to the window, making that window less safe. There could even be a third breakable wall, next to the upstairs window, leading into the middle portion. The killer could use that to jump onto the staircase and cut off a survivor abusing that window.
Apart from making the pier variations be a little more close in safety levels, another thing both swamp maps could benefit from is having edge map fillers spawn a little more reliably. It already doesn't have any Z-walls or the like, and its edge maps are a pretty large section of the map that survivors will also regularly find themselves at because totems and even gens can spawn there.
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I for one enjoy the swamp maps. I think they are balanced overall, posing some problems to both sides. Although one thing that really irks me is that the pier RNG sways the "sidedness" of the maps a little too much. Make the strong pier spawn a little weaker, and the weak spawn a little stronger. Just for reference: There are 3 possible pier spawns, the strongest being the one that features a "jungle gym" at the head of it (pallet and two windows), the weakest the one that features a glorified LT-wall at its head, and the most balanced one resembling a 4-lane. To nerf the "jungle gym" pier, remove one of its two windows, making it a pain passage way instead. To buff the "LT" pier, add a pallet between the two windows.
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Cowshed is still a little too survivor-favoured. I think what most of all causes this are the safety levels of its filler tiles. Basically all of them are very safe. Decrease the safety levels of these (particularly the haybale "i-fillers") by simply shortening them a bit and things should be alright. Maybe replace one possible LT-wall spawn with combine harvester, the map otherwise has no elevation points. Elevation helps killers overview the map (and see through the corn) and provides survivors with opportunities to use Balanced Landing. Render survivors able to jump onto the haybales on the offshoot side from the ramp again, otherwise harvester just doesn't allow survivors to do much of anything that could outplay a killer.
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After the recent-ish Coldwinds nerfs, many of them really can be rather barren, with a reduced amount of pallets overall and with the incredibly unsafe new corn filler pallets taking away good pallet spawns. Thompson House is the most problematic of them, for a few reasons:
The main building doesn't have anything survivors can actually play. Its downstairs window is a guaranteed hit at latest once the breakable wall is broken, and the upstairs windows often also are a guaranteed hit. Survivors can use main to abuse distance and to try and lose the killer, but that's about it. The hook featured upstairs in main is a huge design flaw. Not only can killers defend this hook way too easily, but they can even outright physically deny the possibility of unhooking altogether, by bodyblocking the staircase.
The bottom side of the map is almost only corn. With a bit of luck you get a decent setup of a haybale filler and jungle gym leading to shack, but not only can this also only be a mere LT wall without the filler spawning, but the other bottom corner is literally just corn and one of those new Coldwind fillers. If cowtree spawns things are a little more playable, but even that is merely one tile in isolation, at latest once its pallet inevitably gets used you still only find death down here. And of course, if the combine harvester spawns instead of cowtree you are just stranded. Especially since the harvester has been nerfed so many times that it now provides no real outplay potential for survivors.
My suggestions would be to move the main building to one corner of the upper side, making it less possible for survivors to abuse distance from one corner to the other around the main or to find safety on each side of it, but making its windows a little more safe as a trade-off (an interesting way to do this for the drop-down window could be to add a small projecting roof that survivors vault onto from it, such that they are not immediately forced to drop down upon vaulting; this would create more of a game between the survivor and killer, with the latter trying to bait the former into jumping down). You can also have one pallet spawn in main, perhaps an unsafe pallet upstairs. Move the hook from upstairs main downstairs, maybe to the porch. With the new space created by this move of the main building, you can then have fixed spawns for both combine harvester and cowtree, with the harvester spawning in the middle of the corn and cowtree spawning all the way in the lower left corner. This makes it so cowtree cannot reliably be chained to other tiles, but serves as a safety pocket. Increase the safety of the corn fillers a bit. As the upper sides won't be separated by main anymore, you would have to remove at least 1 possible maze and 1 filler tile spawn so as to make sure there won't be too dense a tile setup in that upper corner. Combine harvester at the very least should be changed to enable survivors to jump onto the offshoot-side haybale from the ramp again.
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I'll keep my feedback on these maps brief because I fear just like the PTB feedback, all of it will eventually be deleted anyway.
Sanctum too decidedly favours killers. Its layout of separating the map in two halves consistently creates gen clusters on each half that make it easy for a killer to protect them. This is exacerbated by the fact that the main building provides an elevation point from which the killer has an easy time overlooking their gens. It also serves as a chokepoint for the killer to control the map from, being able to see survivors trying to cross to the other side. This makes it easy to intercept and deny unhook attempts.
On top of this, the main building does not offer much in the way of outplay potential for survivors. Its pallets and windows are all essentially free hits for a killer that has a modicum of patience. The same is true for the map in general, with lots of areas featuring at most 1 playable tile, which often also tends to be an unsafe filler pallet.
My suggestions would be: Either add trees along the sides of the main building the canopies of which obscur survivor movements from above, or add a tunnel leading through the main building. You can also have gens spawn on the sides of the main building, dissolving the hard clusters. You should also consider removing at least one of the gaps in the railings on the main building, such that there aren't always opportunities for the killer to drop down and catch out survivors, be it as they traverse the map or after they have vaulted one of the main windows. For the map at large, increase the safety of the rock filler pallets, but also make it a bit more likely for these fillers to spawn instead of maze tiles. If unsafe fillers spawn, it should be on the edges of the map, where just like the unsafe window tiles ("Z-walls") they give survivors at least something to play with. Replace the maze tile spawn next to shack with a filler tile. Shack should never really have a maze tile spawn directly adjacent to it, even an LT wall is problematic if it chains into shack window.
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This is what people talk about when they say players in this game can be profoundly blinded by bias, making sweeping, ignorant claims that lack a reasonable perspective.
"Survivors OP" is about the broadest, most ignorant statement one could make if their actual point is that "some structures that can spawn can be problematic". It shifts the entire narrative from "address certain procedural RNG on certain areas on certain maps" to "nerf survivors". It also ignores the fact that other structures and areas exist where survivors are essentially guaranteed to take hits and downs, that matches don't take place on one area of a map, and that the killer can strategically choose not to contest certain areas at certain times or against certain players.
Of course, your point wasn't even that some structures can be problematic, you go ahead and say "any good survivor can render this entire half of the map impossible for me to ever down them". How people can say stuff like this and not realize how unreasonable their thinking is beats me. It's downright delusional. First of all, this is one corner of the map, survivors regularly cannot make it there (let alone with enough distance not to have to use its pallets immediately) even if they're already on the same half of the map. All the less so if the killer is one of the many different ones with a chase ability. Secondly, the idea that any good survivor would be impossible to ever down is ridiculous even when they do play this structure with enough distance to abuse it. It simply is not true, a good killer player even when using a pure M1 killer without any ability or perks whatsoever would be able to down a good survivor on this without spending minutes upon minutes doing so, let alone an eternity. And finally, we are talking about Sanctum Of Wrath here, the most killer-sided outdoor map in the game. It's small and yet still littered with deadzones, often making it mindlessly easy to zone survivors into certain death, it has few pallets most of which are also unsafe or essentially guaranteed hits, it's laid out such that there's two halves that can spawn ridiculous gen clusters, separated by a main building that doesn't give survivors much of anything to play with but gives the killer an easy chokepoint and elevation to control the map, hooks and gen clusters from. But you don't mind any of that, I'm sure.
Also, most killers have abilities that help them deal with setups like this, some so much so that this poses no real problem whatsoever. Yes it is a strong setup, I agree that it is in fact unreasonably strong and making sure no gym tile ever spawns adjacent to shack is something I would sign off on. That said, for one thing you should be using Bamboozle on M1 killers to begin with. It's not great that some perks are necessary to an extent or another as bandaids for gaps in base game design, but that is simply the reality of the game (for both roles, at that). Mind you, a good player can still succeed in the majority of their matches on an M1 killer without Bamboozle, but in the rare cases where they do meet good survivor players, their lack of Bamboozle will hurt them a lot. Just like survivors would be well-advised to always bring Decisive Strike and/or Off The Record, because while if they're good players they totally can succeed in many of their matches without these perks (if they play with other good players anyway), in the matches where they do meet a good killer player their lack of anti-tunnel will hurt them a lot. And for another thing, it makes sense that maps have some areas that are more safe and others that are less so. That doesn't mean every map has to follow this concept, but I don't think it would be good map design philosophy to make it so any area of any map is roughly equally safe/unsafe. That would result in very samey, repetitive gameplay experiences. It would also do away with the strategical elements of when to contest which areas of the maps or when to try and lead chases to them, where to do gens or where to protect them. Either way, if they make some areas less safe, they have to also adjust the safety levels of other areas on the respective map.
The next thing to consider here is that you won more than decisively. As one of if not the weakest killer in the game. How often do you meet these mythical "good survivors" that make entire halves of the map impossible for you to down them on? How do you find it in you to complain about how OP survivors are when you can completely demolish a survivor group despite them having a setup that in your mind makes any good survivor invincible? Surely if any good survivor is impossible to down, even mediocre survivors should still be able to leverage such a setup at least to an extent where they don't get hopelessly destroyed at 4 gens? By Bamboozle-less Legion, no less. And if you say that these were particularly bad survivors, how often do you get them? Are you low MMR and get them frequently, or are you high MMR but still get them, because evidently even in "high MMR" getting pretty bad opponents is still pretty common an occurrence. Do you genuinely lose most of your matches, or what is it that makes you so adamant to lament the state of balance in this game? If you have a winrate anywhere above 60% you are already doing better than even pro players often are in many other competitive multiplayer games. Is winning the majority of your matches still not enough for you? Or is it that you actually think the matches which you do lose were simply impossible for anyone to ever win, that you are already at the uppermost barrier of what is possible in terms of being good and smart at this game, and so there is no room for you to ever improve, and the matches you lose are therefore evidence that the game is by design impossible to win? Surely you must think something along those lines, because otherwise you would at least get a hint of the idea that you can acknowledge that your opponents might have simply played better than you, and that a better player would have done better in your stead, that you should look to improve your own gameplay before you think about complaining to the devs and trying to get them to change the game. What do you think when confronted with evidence that good killer players win hundreds and thousands of matches in a row, and even when they are not trying to do winstreaks basically never lose? Do you think you are just as good as them and just get better opponents than them? Do you not realize that you could improve your gameplay and do better in this game as killer than most players do in most competitive games?
I just don't get it. Is it the asymmetrical format of this game that makes it so awfully common that players instead of acknowledging skill and skill differences jump to game design and blaming the game for everything? That they can't conceive of the idea of getting better at the game and think the game instead has to be changed to accomodate them? This is such an anti-gaming mentality and yet it's something I so commonly see in this game. The thing that is above all appealing and intriguing to me about games is the process of improving, practicing the game, thinking about it, talking about it, trying out and experimenting with things, seeing effects of that improvement in the game, challenging oneself, welcoming challenges, taking losses for the opportunities to learn and improve that they are. Acknowleding and appreciating good plays and good players. Or maybe it is because people struggle to think of DbD - a multiplayer PVP game where players strictly play to achieve diametrically-opposed objectives against their opponents, players literally being taken out of the match if they fail to - as a competitive game, and therefore don't think along these lines of "skill" and "practicing" and "improving" and so on?
That doesn't mean there aren't balance issues left in the game remedying which wouldn't be beneficial. And yes, some of them certainly affect (certain) killers more so than survivors. But with the matchmaking as it is, DbD is if anything uniquely positioned as a competitive multiplayer game that allows players to win the vast majority of the matches by outskilling their opponents. If they actually improve their skills, of course. And this is all the more true on the killer side, because on the survivor side it would require 4 skilled players coming together, which basically only ever happens in 4-player SWFs. If people that are actually competitively-minded and care about wins and losses and balance and how good they are and whatnot should be complaining about something in this game, it is the matchmaking that doesn't yield competitive matches with any consistency. Complaining about game balance when in 90+% of matches a good player can win even perkless on the weakest killer (or good players perkless as a 4-player SWF) is just so odd to me.
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3665402#Comment_3665402
To tackle those points in order:
1: But which is it? It can't be that they're only getting scanned when they leave the gen and that it happens quickly and reliably. If she's pushing people away from three generators, those scans will build quite slowly because they aren't even guaranteed to happen every time they're pushed away, let alone factoring in that she's pushing people away from multiple generators at once. If she's only focusing the one generator, sure, those scans build quicker, but she's also not defending her 3-gen if she's doing that. She has to choose, does she push to build stacks or does she patrol the 3-gen.
This is also where I'll note that disabling the drones matters here, because if you force her to come back and replace it, she's doing that INSTEAD OF getting scans on you as you leave. Don't do it every time you approach, obviously, but it does matter and does make a difference.
2: Approaching cautiously in this context just means stopping once for a brief second if the beam happens to cross over you, though. Even adding up, that's very little extra downtime compared to just running back to the gen normally. The power isn't an AOE anymore, it isn't just a big circle affecting you no matter what.
3: In a drawn out game versus a killer whose power doesn't need to build up, the effect is even more potent. There's no lull, the power is just already affecting you. That is an argument for why Merchant is weaker at this compared to other killers defending 3-gens; we aren't looking at her doing it vs her not doing it, we're looking at her doing it vs other killers doing it.
4: The point is that she only gets a worse Clown slow if she's built up to that point, and building up to that point takes time if we assume the survivors aren't just recklessly getting themselves scanned out of chase. She might be more threatening in a 3-gen scenario than Clown once she's built up to that point... but she has to build up to that point, where other killers don't, and she's still weaker than those other killers at doing it once she does.
5: If I voided every game where people gave up, I'd have way too small of a sample size to mean anything, that's more what I meant. You can't do experiments like this with Skull Merchant because all the data is irreversibly tainted. People giving up on top of all the massive misconceptions about her power on top of people randomly getting themselves scanned for no reason out of chase... it's just a mess, you can't glean anything from it.
6: It would be extremely damning, because it's only happening due to baseless outrage. Still, if they can manage to fix her without fundamentally altering her from the ground up - and "fix" in this context means appeasing those who have it out for her, so I doubt that's possible - I wouldn't be too annoyed. I would, however, be annoyed if her entire concept gets scrapped because people can't step back and realise it's not as big of a deal as they think it is.
I do like her. I've already lost parts of her that I liked, and that's fine, I'll accept losing those things to make her healthier for the game. Thing is, that's done. She is healthier, she only has minor problems... and she's still on her way to getting another round of big changes, over killers that actually deserve it, because of complete nonsense. I have every right to be annoyed at that - though it is just a game, it's only a minor annoyance - and I do think it's relatively important for the state of discourse that someone try and make sure this is remembered the way it actually happened. Can you imagine how obnoxious people will be if this gets remembered as "Skull Merchant was so badly designed they had to rework her four times before they gave up and scrapped her"?
1: Apart from scans not literally only happening when people are being pushed away from gens (there are hooks to contest, chases to hold, and so on, too), this is something I suppose you'd just have to see in action. There are numerous instances where survivors accumulate multiple lock-on stacks in a matter of seconds, such as when Merchant pushes them off, pretends to leave, but comes right back. And sure it also depends on just how favourable her gen setup is, and to an extent on how much survivors mess up, but nobody plays perfectly, especially in drawn-out, repetitive, tiring matches where they have to also constantly be on the look-out for a potentially Undetectable killer.
Hacking drones comes at the risk of being interrupted while doing so, and often the time you invest to hack one (and let alone multiple) isn't worth it when compared to the time it takes her to reset them while she is patrolling anyway. Upon which they will be in stealth mode, at that.
2: Approaching cautiously with regards to the possiblity of Merchant still being around means not going all the way up to the gen as fast as you can because that could result in you then being hit, or worse (scanned and downed). Again, something to see and experience in action. You usually have to stand still/crouch multiple times traversing a singular drone zone, and there's usually multiple drones to worry about, even with potentially overlapping zones. Even if it only takes 3 seconds more than running up to the gen would, that's 30 seconds over 10 patrols on any gen, which is already as much as Deadlock does on 1 gen, and it only does so 4 times a match.
3: With regards to comparing her to other killers the point was that her power needing to gradually build up doesn't matter much as her power will inevitably build, and then is much more threatening than most around a 3-gen. Her ability also stalls the game to begin with, particularly around a 3-gen, much more so than most other killers. The other point was just another angle to highlight the fact that Merchant inherently benefits from/gravitates toward this sort of gameplay.
4: Apart from the fact that her Hindered isn't strictly worse than Clown's (it can last longer and she doesn't need to throw a bottle to effect it, and besides, Clown's slow is very potent, hers being weaker than it isn't too decisive of an argument), I just will not agree that her power is not as potent around a 3-gen as Clown or Myers or whoever. Undetectable is already huge, as is having people injured, the tracking, the mending, the slowdown, the speed. Imagine Plague with the wallhack add-on and frequently being Undetectable and you get more of an idea of how problematic it can be, and that's without a whole bunch of other stuff Merchant has going for her here.
5: I'm afraid the "massive misconceptions about her power" and people "randomly getting themselves scanned" are part of the killer's strength in a real-life setting. A kit not being easy to understand for the average player or difficult to play around for one reason or another, good or bad, have to be factored in when designing a game that includes the average player experience. But that's beside the actual point which is that you can absolutely still have matches in which people actually try and get a sense for the ratio between how easy it is to 3-gen as her and how strong it is, for which I just cannot tell you anything but that your sensibilities right now seem far off from reality to me. Or again, get friends or people from the official Discord server or whatever to play against you. Preferably including matches without voice comms, which aren't all too common in pubs.
I've been trying to find some of the (few) tournament games I've seen of her where her 3-genning was problematic even against highly coordinated teams of survivors. I guess I will try to get back to you with that or other videos that showcase how potent this strategy is on her.
6: A damning reflection upon the community I would understand as something that reflects on the general state of it, particularly insofar it relates to future game development. I don't see that that's given here because this isn't a general phenomenon, it is very specific to this one design, largely unprecedented and hasn't happened since either. Obviously we have differences in opinion on whether this response of the community is at all warranted, calling it baseless outrage to me is as absurd as the community's sentiments seem to be to you, but regardless, while I do feel for you if you genuinely mourn the loss of original (and current) Merchant, the game at large is not losing so much (not least because she has a very low pickrate to begin with and many of her matches aren't actual matches), nor can it be expected to lose other things in this sort of fashion in the future. It can also be noted that Merchant will soon have been in the game for a year, with some 7 months before she got her extensive rework and 5 months and counting in her current state since. Months of gameplay in which some Merchant mains I'm sure have racked up hundreds if not thousands of hours of game time is more than players regularly get out of other games altogether. Not too damning a prospect.
I do appreciate your general... "plight", let's say, that you look to uphold a narrative of a certain reasonableness against the admittedly often rather overstated complaints regarding this killer, or a certain dismissiveness or casualness with which people can dunk on her entire design. I will even admit that I personally could do better in terms of being more willing to look to any positives she has, and not to assume as badly of Merchant players as I do either, thinking they mostly just enjoy how easy it is for them to kill people as her. That said, I do genuinely like this game and many or most killers in it (with few if notable exceptions), and I genuinely just do not like Merchant much. I honestly don't even know why I engage in lengthy discussions on her, much less because I know these won't sway the devs any which way even if they were to follow them.
I tire of talking about her, but just to lead this somewhere potentially more fruitful: What do you think of the proposals made in this thread: https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/405988/skull-merchant-improvement-proposals?
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3665327#Comment_3665327
The only thing you listed that the drones actually do just as soon as the button is pressed is stealth. The other things only happen as people get scanned, and some of them only once they've been scanned over three times.
Leading on from that point, I really don't know how you can say avoiding beams as you approach gens wastes a lot of time. What time does it even waste? Maybe like a second if you have to stop and let the beam cross over you? After that, you're at the gen and you can just keep repairing with zero risk until she comes to harass you off.
My stance comes from two factors. One, her power has to build up before it does anything more than a slight Haste boost and some Undetectable, where other killers can immediately threaten you straight away. Two, when she does build up, what she gets is a worse Clown bottle on an injured survivor. If she's not committing to that down, at which point she's breaking away from her 3-gen, she's not getting all that much. All she has going for her before she builds up scans is some Undetectable, and while that's okay in some 3-gen scenarios, it's not outpacing the fact that she can't keep defending those gens and therefore the progress keeps ticking up-- and it's definitely not better than what other killers can provide.
As for playing her and finding out, what would that prove? Whenever I try and play Skull Merchant at all, people give up and go next quite frequently. Obviously I'll have an easier time doing anything when I'm in a 3v1 early. Also, I don't like 3-genning? It's boring.
To the point about her inevitably getting changed in your other response there: Yeah, that's going to happen. We just need to acknowledge why, and it's not because of anything to do with her actual power. It's because people are still refusing to engage with the killer in good faith and are just immediately giving up. People were spoiled by the fact that they had a reason to give up before, and its led them to believe that they're justified in giving up against a killer that they just don't like whenever they face her now, after her problems were fixed.
Her inevitable fourth rework is going to be a damning reflection on the state of the community, not the killer itself. I know I won't be able to prevent people from feeling validated instead of shamed whenever that fourth rework happens, but still, I'm going to keep acknowledging it.
The only thing you listed that the drones actually do just as soon as the button is pressed is stealth. The other things only happen as people get scanned, and some of them only once they've been scanned over three times.
I think you are calling back to an earlier point about her getting all these effects "just for pressing M2". Obviously that's a bit of a hyperbole (although it is pretty much the extent of her gameplay on the killer player side of things), but that's not what we're talking about here. Again, in a 3-gen scenario survivors will inevitably get scanned as they scramble from Merchant approaching their gen. This happens incessantly, 3 scans build quickly and reliably, and it isn't only 1 drone they have to worry about either.
Leading on from that point, I really don't know how you can say avoiding beams as you approach gens wastes a lot of time. What time does it even waste? Maybe like a second if you have to stop and let the beam cross over you? After that, you're at the gen and you can just keep repairing with zero risk until she comes to harass you off.
You have to cautiously approach as Merchant can still be around. You have to worry about multiple drones and beams. And yes, as being chased away from gens and having to go back is something that happens numerous times, the seconds spent not being able to run when approaching gens will add up significantly. Stealth mode drones can be even more time-consuming to approach, and harder to avoid the beams of.
One, her power has to build up before it does anything more than a slight Haste boost and some Undetectable, where other killers can immediately threaten you straight away.
That's not a concern in and of itself, defending a gen cluster yields drawn-out games, her gradually building a power (that then very much is threatening) if anything is an argument as to why it's such a good strat on her as opposed to not doing it. Undetectable is also threatening from the get-go, it leads to survivors being caught out around her gens, realizing too late she is approaching.
Two, when she does build up, what she gets is a worse Clown bottle on an injured survivor. If she's not committing to that down, at which point she's breaking away from her 3-gen, she's not getting all that much. All she has going for her before she builds up scans is some Undetectable, and while that's okay in some 3-gen scenarios, it's not outpacing the fact that she can't keep defending those gens and therefore the progress keeps ticking up-- and it's definitely not better than what other killers can provide.
Survivors will constantly be injured, regularly suffer from Deep Wound, Broken, Hindered, while she has Haste, Undetectable and can track their positions. This is much scarier than a Clown around a 3-gen, who has to get M1s to injure people, from which they can also heal much more quickly and reliably, who doesn't innately have any capacity to get the jump on people, find reset locations. These things allow her to reliably get hits in ways Clown never would, precisely making it so that she can often "break away" from her 3-gen because the time investment is so little to get a down on a survivor that got caught by surprise, is injured, hindered. Not seldomly not even having to break away but getting downs within her setup.
As for playing her and finding out, what would that prove? Whenever I try and play Skull Merchant at all, people give up and go next quite frequently. Obviously I'll have an easier time doing anything when I'm in a 3v1 early. Also, I don't like 3-genning? It's boring.
I wager it would prove to you that 3-genning on Merchant is a very potent and very easy strategy to employ. Cruise control 4ks whenever I or the people I know and watch tried it. Tangibly more so than on many or most other killers. You'd obviously ignore any match in which people give up prematurely or the like. You could also get some friends to play against your 3-gen Merchant and 3-gen Myers or Clown in custom matches.
I don't like being told "maybe play against Merchant and perhaps you would understand her better" (which you didn't do), not least because I have played my share as and against her and usually only go next once it becomes clear that other people don't want to play or that she just wants to hold a 3-gen. But if you really don't think 3-genning is a particular problem with her despite it being one of the foremost complaints about her, I think you'd do well to find out for yourself by actually seeing and experiencing it in play.
Her inevitable fourth rework is going to be a damning reflection on the state of the community, not the killer itself. I know I won't be able to prevent people from feeling validated instead of shamed whenever that fourth rework happens, but still, I'm going to keep acknowledging it.
I'm not sure it is damning or all that grim an outlook even if it were the case that there is nothing rational justifying people's feelings against this character (anymore). She absolutely is an exceptional outlier in this game's 8-years-spanning history, not even original Legion came close to garnering this type of response (Legion by the way being a story that goes to show collective perception on killers can change with reworks), so I wouldn't worry about this type of reaction being something common that will affect the game's development in years to come. Sure, it's unlucky for the people that do enjoy Merchant in her current state (although again, those players still stand to benefit from her being changed such that there aren't as many people disconnecting and suiciding against her), but it's only a game and only one of dozens of characters in it, I'm sure not even the staunchest of defenders are too married to the idea of what Merchant is right now to consider it a great tragedy should that change (fingers crossed).
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@jesterkind said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3665240#Comment_3665240
The problem with what you're describing is that any killer with a halfway threatening power can do this, and most of them can do it better than Skull Merchant.
3-genning does, to a degree, still exist and is still powerful as a tactic if your goal is to actually close out the match. Any killer whose power actually threatens survivors more directly than a drone maybe scanning them once as they leave the gen (and only doing anything once three scans are hit) will be able to leverage that tight space to gain pressure. Skull Merchant is no longer a noteworthy figure in this regard.
There is, genuinely, no reason to highlight her anymore. If anything, doing this with her is weaker than doing it with, say, Blight, or even a more direct-threat power like infinite tier 3 Myers.
(Also, you DO get a post-hit speed boost when you're claw trapped, she doesn't deny that hit-sprint)
I disagree that Merchant is not notable in that regard. How you can think that when drones can injure people for her, force them to mend, render them unable to heal, slow them down, speed her up, give her stealth and tracking, is beyond me. As you patrol gens, survivors will be forced off them over and over again, regularly unable to avoid beams, they will quickly build up scans and inevitably become clawtrapped. If they avoid drones on their approach to gens, they are spending a lot of time doing so. If they hack them, you recall and reset them. Contesting hooks within the droned gen cluster makes avoiding them extra difficult. She will also regularly be Undetectable and get the jump on survivors on her 3-gen. Add-ons additionally play into things, such as the ones affecting skill checks. I legitimately don't understand your stance that her ability is not noteworthily suited to 3-genning, or noteworthy in its potency for that strat. Another notable problem again being the "ease of use" of it on this killer.
I invite you as I did in that post to just put it to the test. Play a couple of 3-gen Merchant matches and then try it with infinite Myers or whatever. See who you have an easier time demolishing most opponents with just strolling around your gens.
What I'd also consider is that people simply 3-gen on Merchant more frequently than on other killers, and be that because of her past, reputation or because it simply makes sense to set up drones in an area surrounding gens. And so even if she wouldn't be particularly, disproportionately problematic in terms of her 3-gen prowess, it could still be a problem that she disproportionately promotes this gameplay. I think when looking into her stats, the incidence of matches that are won at 1 gen left would be comparably as (if not more) notable than that of hook suicides and disconnects.
@ReverseVelocity said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3665240#Comment_3665240
I don't think you really get how Skull Merchant works. Claiming she gets literally all of those status effects "just from pressing m2" is disingenuous. She actually has to have good Drone placement, zoning and m1 skills to capitalize off of these effects. They're not active all the time.
Also, again, you get the hit speed boost when injured from a Claw Trap. If you actually stuck around to play a game or two instead of just instantly giving up just because it's Skull Merchant, then you'd figure that out.
Her 3 genning is far less effective now. With the nerfs to her area control and changes to regression mechanics as a whole, there's only so much she can do. A hard 3 genning killer will exhaust all of their kicks and then lose.
It seems like you hate literally everything about her, not just gameplay wise. I don't think there's anything they could do to make you enjoy the Skull Merchant at all.
I don't think you need "good drone placement" or zone people in order to accumulate scans on them. You set up a drone on any tile in chase or around a 3-gen patrol and that's it. Unless you majorly mess up the placement I don't see that there is too much to think about. M1 skills are naturally still beneficial, but they are not as needed as they are on killers that don't get all of these effects, downing most survivors is fairly trivial once Deep Wound, Undetectable, Haste and Hindered are in play.
I must have been thinking about being fully scanned once already injured, in which case I'm pretty sure you don't get a hit sprint. In the matches that I do stick around and play against Merchant I tend to make her M1 me if I'm healthy and at risk of getting scanned for the third time, for obvious reasons, so I suppose I just haven't had too many healthy-to-locked-on instances to remember that there is a hit sprint.
I don't hate everything about her, I did say I don't think she is irredeemable, that would be silly, she's just a bundle of design choices that could be reconsidered on, mechanics that could be altered. I have made various suggestions in the past regarding things that could make her more engaging to face.
What staunch defenders of this killer character will have to acknowledge is that much as you may think or feel she is completely fine and any hate unwarranted, the fact that there is hate is a problem from a game dev perspective regardless. A 70% killrate (excluding matches with disconnects, at that) as well as a fairly resounding dislike of this piece of gameplay design among the playerbase to an extent where people will often "go next" simply are an issue if the devs care about creating gameplay experiences people enjoy. I'm not sure whether you enjoy people killing themselves or disconnecting in your Merchant matches, but on the wager that you don't, you would also want them to do something that changes things. Forum posts will not change people's minds on this, not least because the vast majority of people never read these posts or even visit these forums - not wanting to play against Merchant is their natural reaction and inclination based upon their playing experiences. So even if you genuinely believe there is nothing wrong with her design and swathes of people are holding the opinions, feelings and reactions they do regarding her irrationally, that still doesn't mean some redesigning isn't reasonable.
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Good on you if you actually refrain from 3-genning (which, frankly, I doubt you do, sorry, I haven't seen a Merchant player that doesn't 3-gen), but pretending 3-genning is not her most potent strategy anymore or let alone "physically impossible" is nothing but Merchant player propaganda. Sure she doesn't excel at holding matches hostage for an hour anymore, but instead now she just actually kills people around her 3-gen with ease. You still get 24 regression events across those 3 gens, which is more than enough to close out the vast majority of matches, and that's ignoring that you can capitalize on and benefit from protecting a gen cluster entirely without regression too. It's also ignoring things like Ruin, Dead Man's Switch + Ultimate Weapon, Grim Embrace, Overcharge, all of which can incur regression and stalling much beyond the already more than sufficient limit. And the idea that "drones don't do anything to survivors sitting on gens so they can't be used to 3-gen anymore" is nonsense. Survivors need to move to get to and away from gens.
Merchant simply is much too easy to play when compared to the difficulty of playing against her (both in chase and in contesting her 3-gen), and she gets a boatload of strong effects for next to no investment. Injuring without hit sprint, Deep Wound, Broken, Hindered, Haste, Undetectable, tracking. All for pressing M2. Add-ons exacerbating things. Drones can be recalled and reset at will, including hacked drones. Any group that isn't coordinated (i. e. full SWF) will lose against a 3-genning Merchant most of every time, even if the Merchant player is generally much worse at the game than them. And I don't understand why there is this mystery and discussion about this. Just do it, the "play" button is right there. Use some mix of Surge, Eruption, Weasel, Overcharge, NTH, STBFL, Sloppy, pick 3 reasonably close-together gens and keep droning and patrolling them. See how often you don't effortlessly win doing so, getting free downs left and right.
Also, even regardless of her strength, she simply isn't engaging or interactive to play against. And not only because of her propensity to patrol 3 generators, but because the level of interaction with her power is literally "stand still". And in chase you can't really do much of anything about it, you can try to avoid the odd beam but you will sooner rather than later inevitably get clawtrapped, losing a health state and thereby half the chase, without a hit sprint, then also having to deal with Hindered, Haste and Undetectable. It's not like her chase strength is S-tier in and of itself, but it's easily the strongest when compared to how mindless it is for the killer player. All you have to do is press M2, you will injure the survivor, hinder them, become faster, and lose your terorr radius and red stain with which survivors could read your movements. You just press M2 at every loop the survivor may make it to and hold W and most chases will be over under a minute just doing that, little to no mindgaming or thinking necessary, let alone anything mechanically demanding.
I also dislike her visual and audio design, from her model to her animations, her terror radius, chase music and voice. That is subjective to certain extents of course, but it is something rather common among people I know, talk to and watch.
Just a bad design that regularly makes for gameplay that is tiresome and boring at best, or frustrating and obnoxious at worst. Doesn't help that there seems to be a not miniscule amount of players playing her that know perfectly well that people don't like facing her and enjoy precisely that, being happy to BM, keeping people in the match when they clearly want to get out, refusing to kill them, slugging them for minutes, then picking them up before they bleed out, refusing to kill the players left over when others have killed themselves or disconnected. Those kinds of things are much more common with Merchants in my experience.
She isn't this irredeemable evil that some may make her out to be, but she just isn't a good design, with an ability that innately lends itself to area control, is incredibly easy to use while being difficult to play against, and doesn't promote any really exciting or engaging interaction.
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Personally I've never even been too big Adren. It only procs once a match, and only of course when (if) the last gen pops. I'm of the mind that having perks that help you get to the endgame are much more important than perks that help you once in it, especially since the endgame is regularly tilted in the survivors' favour to begin with (if more than two survivors remain, anyway - and if they do not, Adren also won't often do too much). Adren can also be lackluster if you're already healthy and/or not in chase, or downright detrimental as it robs you of your Exhaustion perk.
Don't get me wrong, Adren is a super strong perk that can come in very clutch, and it shines once you have a group that can coordinate its usage and timing. But I'm not convinced it is the "S+"-tier perk many make it out to be, for that its impact is just not nearly consistent enough, even if it can at times be game-changing.
BHVR definitely has a mountain of perks (on both sides) they should be buffing before they consider nerfing some of the few really good ones there are. And Adren specifically is not all that problematic, it if anything has the healthy effect of encouraging late and endgame heroics where otherwise players and groups would regularly just let the person on hook die or whatever and play for gates instead. It also makes for exciting and fun gameplay whenever it does come in clutch, both in solo environments and in cases where a group coordinates to make rescues or other aggressive plays with it.
If they are adamant that it needs some touching, the only thing I would really do to it is make it so that it causes Exhaustion for the entire endgame. Although I assume the thing BHVR may deem problematic about the perk and are looking to change is (the complaint) that it encourages survivors to opt to stay injured while pressuring gens, banking on Adren to heal them. I don't think that is really a problem, survivors choosing to stay injured and even forgoing bringing means of healing in favour of this "strat" comes with significant risks and imparts onto the killer snowball potential throughout the game for the idea of averting risks and snowballs in the endgame. NOED and Terminus are also impactful endgame perks that counter Adren to an extent or another that make it even more detrimental for survivors to have stayed injured throughout the match hoping for payoff in the end.
Either way, whatever happens to Adren, I don't think any of the perks you've mentioned need adjustments. NOED provides endgame power to a set of killers that often direly need it (for M1 killers, getting a hit on a healthy survivor can mean them making it to a gate even from halfway across the map). The threat and danger of NOED if anything make the game more exciting. Although I do think removing the Haste effect on it would be sensible, and it wouldn't even purely be a nerf: survivors would not be able to tell anymore whether the killer has NOED by making note of their movement speed. Penti is great how it is. Terminus and Friends 'Til The End if anything could do with buffs.
The only perk here that should be getting nerfed is Ultimate Weapon, and it has long been slated for nerfs by BHVR. It's hilariously obvious that it is the Made For This equivalent, designed with its pointed overpoweredness in mind. It appeared on the roadmap set for nerfs shortly after its release, but conveniently with a 6-or-so-months grace period. How much more blatant could they make it, acknowledging that it is a problematic perk with its inclusion on the roadmap but pushing any actual changes to it back months in advance? Which is particularly notable when considering that they have in recent years transitioned to a pattern of touching things released in chapters in the bigger updates directly following said chapters. They knew it was a problematically powerful perk (and then some) before they had even released it.
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@SimpingforThePig said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3663847#Comment_3663847
No. Let me rephrase the question: Pain Res regresses the most progressed gen, but what happens if the most progressed gen is currently blocked by Deadlock? Will it search for the second most progressed gen and regress it?
Yes, it will apply to the second-most progressed gen in that case. If there is no progress on any other gen (or if all other gens with progress are also blocked), Pain Res will simply not activate, and you keep your token.
How blocked gens interact with regression events has gone through various changes indeed, some intentional others not. Don't count on it not randomly changing again at some point.
For some time prior to this change, Repressed Alliance was actually a slept-on counter to Pain Res, where you would block the gen with the most progress and it would "eat" Pain Res, consuming the token but no regression actually happening.
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@xltechno said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3662660#Comment_3662660
It depends on the time of day I play. And while it's true that there are matches where there is a skill disparity that almost never ends, there are also many matches where the opposite is true. As both a killer and a survivor, I have experienced many matches where the killer had no chance. This is not a skill issue, but a theoretical value.
Players with many years of experience, both survivors and killers, say this in unison. "Why did the Survivors want to lose to the M1 Killer in this match? It's because the Killers made almost no mistakes and the Survivors made a lot of mistakes."
I totally agree that MMR is the worst thing ever. But this is the responsibility of the developer.
Eh, that might be your region, but good players here basically never have matches where they stand no chance, M1 killer or not. I have legitimately never seen the good players I watch lose a killer pub match in which they were actually trying to win. They can and do have winstreaks of hundreds of matches even on "M1" killers (whatever M1 killer means). The very experiment I referenced shows people winning 90+% of their matches (note: the ones they didn't win they didn't necessarily lose, either) with the most M1est of M1 killers (that is, literally refusing to use an ability), while also refraining from camping and tunnelling.
I also don't subscribe to the idea that an M1 killer can only win if the survivors make a lot of mistakes and they none. Which is an ungraspably vague concept anyway, the decision trees for both sides are so vast and a thousand things may or may not constitute a "mistake", there would likely always be a better choice to be made.
Doesn't mean I think Legion is perfectly competitive against an equally high-skilled 4-player SWF with voice comms, 4 BNPs and whathaveyou, but not only does that simply not happen, but it can still be possible to tunnel out one and in the endgame camp another survivor. I also think the balance changes drastically if they don't have comms, to the point where even the comparably weaker killers stand a perfectly good shot to get at least 6 stages/2 kills, which much as it may not feel good is literally a balanced outcome. With the comparably stronger killers likely on average outperforming survivors notably in that setting. Tunnelling and camping are nigh-mandatory in a setting where the survivors are comparably as skilled, experienced and trying as hard as the killer, and that's something that could warrant rebalancing, although I for one think tunnelling and camping are integral part of the game that should never be sought to be removed entirely. Just nerfed a bit, with compensatory buffs for killers in other respects.
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@xltechno said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3662409#Comment_3662409
I've seen the video, and even from the clippings of the short story, it's clear that there is a skill disparity as survivors who are hit run in the wrong direction to avoid being chased, or are caught in the killer's simple feints. I'm not interested in a story that assumes MMR is not working. If this happens all the time, the problem is not with tactics or game balance, but with MMR.
The problem definitely sits majorly with the matchmaking. That simply is the reality of the game, though, and has been for years and years. If you are a good killer player, you can handedly win the vast majority of the matches the game gives you, regularly even without camping and tunnelling.
Some rebalancing is still in order, but a better (stricter) matchmaking is much more important.
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If you are good enough at killer, you can even go out of your way to play nice and still win most of your matches. I refrain from camping and tunnelling most of the time, not seldomly even going out of my way not to despite knowing it would be "optimal" in the moment, and I rarely have trouble in my matches. The MMR cap and lax matchmaker simply mean that once you pass a certain skill/experience/knowledge threshold, many or most of your matches will be relatively easy (as killer or in 4-SWF with 3 other such players).
Proof that it is possible has more than once been provided by good players going on 90+% winstreaks without camping, tunnelling or slugging, and even without using a killer ability altogether (https://twitter.com/HensDBD/status/1688640900677652480). And of course, you don't have to "win" (kill 3 or 4 survivors) 90+% of the time to play this game, you can still have a fun, engaging and worthwhile time getting stages and 1-2 kills in some of your matches.
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@supersonic853 said:
Im honestly surprised 120 fps isn't available on ps5 and series x. Its available on a bunch of other games and the console can support it.
:^/
@PreorderBonus said:
I'm not sure how ViewDistance affects the game now, but I remember that around 4-5 years ago the value would range from 0 to 100 meters. If you set your ViewDistance to 20, once you were in-game, it would only render 20 meters in a circle around you, and the rest would be a complete void, EXCEPT for important items such as gens, totems, traps, survivors and killers. So many people used to cheat like that back then lmao.
Oh wow, I didn't know that.
I think it just doesn't do anything anymore. I took comparison screenshots and I can't really see a difference.
@JPLongstreet said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3658993#Comment_3658993
The consoles are strong enough for those framerates sure, but it's the dang coding of this game they cannot deal with well.
BHVR wanted to rewrite DbD's basecode (or at least important elements thereof) from Unreal's own Blueprint "language" (basically building blocks for amateur devs or prototyping) into C++, which is much more computationally efficient. Whether that's ever happened I'm not too sure about.
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@glitchboi said:
DirectX 12 is an absolute blessing and should be immediately popped into the launch options if your GPU supports it. Probably the setting I recommend the most.
It's a shame that BHVR patched out the ability (whether intentionally or not) to upscale your resolution in the settings.ini file, FSR is a nice alternative to that but native upscaling still looked a lot better. It costed a ton of performance, but it looked damn incredible.
Not only did they (most likely unintentionally indeed) patch out the possibility of upscaling from the display resolution by going above 100% screen resolution scale, but they also patched out that of going below the 65% the in-game menu slider limits the scaling at.
I find their FSR implementation questionable. FSR is also a resolution scaling technique, the only difference being that it's supposedly doing the scaling more quickly and with less loss of quality. But they aren't even giving us rudimentary options on how "strong" we want the FSR to be, i. e. how low the render resolution it upscales from should be. Given that the image barely changes, I suspect it's rendering the game at almost the same resolution it is being displayed at, so the performance difference will be minimal to none.
@JPLongstreet said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3658736#Comment_3658736
TV's brightness has been at max for gaming since I first started playing DBD back in 2019. Still can't see squat on some of the upstairs rooms on Haddonfield. 😂
I think many of our PC cousins overestimate the set-up some of us consolers are running. The old TV seen from across the room on a couch using that TV's speakers is a real thing!
You're not the first one I've seen be very skeptical about their explanations of the bottlenecking issues. All I know is my Xbox1x had an awful time digesting their code, and my Series X has been getting more and more serious acid reflux as time passes. Just imagine what our precious Switch cousins deal with!
Hey, if it's old enough a TV to be a tube one, you are actually getting minimal latency on the display end at least. 😉
@not_Queef said:
Post-processing set to 0 is a must. The godawful bloom effect makes my eyes bleed, especially on bright maps like Eyrie.
To be honest, the game looks better to me with everything on 0. The low quality just fits DbD's cartoonish aesthetic more, ha. The only reason I have shadows on 4 is that it's objectively a disadvantage not to, since it allows you to see shadows you otherwise not always would.
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@JPLongstreet said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3658709#Comment_3658709
The devs said a couple of years back that changing the graphics settings would not improve game performance on any of the consoles (I think we're locked at "Good").
This they said is due to the resource bottlenecking problem with the games coding that prevents them from getting their game to run even at a stable 60fps on any of the older consoles, despite them being strong enough to do so. Our PC cousins see a little of this when they notice DBD is an unusually voracious eater of resources, far more than similarly-sized games that are far more demanding graphically etc.
As far as what I can do with my TV, every time I mess around with the contrast everything looks like nuclear winter! 🤣
I remember them saying that the CPU is bottlenecking performance on consoles so much that graphics settings wouldn't make a difference, and their game code is definitely not well-optimized, but I honestly don't buy it. And even if it is true that the GPUs in consoles are not ever hitting 90+% load with the default graphics settings, the performance improvements I have seen with graphics quality set to Low on systems with good GPUs suggest the CPU also benefits from it, which would make sense because not all of these graphical enhancements are necessarily done exclusively on the GPU, and some are at least impacting the CPU at the pre-rendering stage. It also bears mentioning that apart from the raw framerate, there's framerate stability, and low graphics settings can improve things in that regard as well, having a more consistent framerate, less stuttering. And then there's also the fact that the game is brighter and less visually noisy on low quality.
TVs tend to have weird settings, and they are notorious for adding lots of latency and ghosting and whatnot, with their myriad of post-processing techniques. You can play on a gaming monitor instead, which will have lower latencies, higher refresh rates and more sensible settings. But yeah, for the time being, you can at least increase your brightness.
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@OrangeBear said:
Fullscreen over windowed fullscreen makes the performance worse for me for some reason.
I know you've solved the problem by now, but just to note: Windowed fullscreen renders the game at whatever resolution your monitor is set to (usually its native resolution), and the only way to change this is with the resolution slider, somewhat misleadingly called "screen resolution" in the settings. What a setting below 100% does is render the game at a lower resolution (a percentage of your display resolution) and then scale it back up to your display resolution. I think it should always be set to 100%, if you are struggling with performance you should rather decrease your display resolution. In windowed fullscreen this means having to reduce your monitor's resolution, while in true fullscreen this is obviously being done automatically when you select a lower resolution in the settings.
@JPLongstreet said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/406291/various-little-performance-tweaks
As a consoler all of this sounds like a different language. Any of it apply to my Xbox and old ass TV? 🤔
Unfortunately none of this really applies to you. BHVR for some reason doesn't even give console players the in-game option to reduce the graphics quality or resolution scaling, even though they would improve performance tremendously. What I would definitely do if I were to play on console is enable FSR at 100% sharpness, as this can help with the performance a bit and the sharpness makes things slightly more crisp, emulating to an extent what people do with NVIDIA or ReShade filters on PC. You can also turn up the brightness and contrast on your TV to make things more discernible in the game. But I think that's about all you can do. Cleaning and upgrading your console is the only real thing that can otherwise help, I suppose.
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Video game bandwidth usage is usually in the low kbps range, the data throughput is minimal and increasing your bandwidth won't change much of anything. Your ping improving in other games can have various reasons, and while different internet service providers or services can improve things, often the bottleneck is simply the physical internet infrastructure (at one's home and in one's country) and the physical distance to the game servers.
Here's a tip for something that actually helps a lot of people that live far away from the game servers: Use ExitLag (or NoPing), it's a service that improves your routing, sending your game data through optimized or prioritized streams.
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Goes without saying that BHVR doesn't take sides for the roles in the game, the side they take is that of the game overall succeeding so they profit. Although that of course doesn't mean they always make sensible or good decisions.
While survivor gameplay has been fairly stale with few exciting things being released in terms of new toys to play with (with rare but notable exceptions, to be fair) and more perk and item nerfs than buffs, the basic survivor experience has gotten drastically better in the recent few years, which was likely a response to the years of killer improvements that came before them. It took them much longer than it should have, but with the introduction of basekit unhook Endurance, the anti-facecamp and anti-3-gen mechanics as well as the removal of hook grabs, they have addressed some of the most egregious issues survivors have had to deal with. The HUD info has also been a tangible if slight improvement. Hit validation on pallet stuns and Dead Hard is at least something, even if the hit reg system is still essentially entirely killer-sided. The implementation of disconnect penalties and bots to replace disconnected survivors have also had positive effects on the survivor experience, even if disconnects still aren't all too rare and bots far from well-coded.
Worth noting that unhook Endurance has not entirely remedied the issues with tunnelling and that more rebalancing in that regard could well be in order (and at least a Decisive Strike buff is apparently coming), that the anti-facecamp mechanic really has mostly only rid us of literal facecamping and hasn't changed too much about the balance surrounding camping in general (but the removal of hook grabs absolutely has - apart from a few specific killers, I think camping is actually in a decently balanced spot now, even if some more improvements particulalry for solo queue should probably still be made (such as showing the self-unhook meter to all survivors)), and that the anti-3-gen mechanic doesn't solve all of the pertinent issues with 3-genning having really had become a severe grievance with the release of certain killers, perks and maps. Still, things are in a much better spot now for survivors too, there are much fewer grievous gameplay frustrations to deal with.
That said, there are definitely various perplexing decisions that I would not blame people to construe as a sort of malice. Flashlight nerfs out of nowhere, nerfing COH and MFT into obscurity (the only two metagame-changing survivor perks released in years and years), most survivor perk releases being painfully lackluster, years of not addressing Blight's blatantly busted add-ons only to then still not really doing a great job of it when they finally did get around to touching them, Skull Merchant's entire existence lol, the fact that we still can't see the killer's ping, not addressing problematic add-ons such as Pinky Finger and Iridescent Head (both of which even stand to be collaterally buffed next patch), or Mother-Daughter Ring and Dried Cherry Blossom, giving Nurse a lunge range add-on, nerfing DS to begin with, the way they had overbuffed Eruption and recently Billy (although they did address Billy's major issue very quickly, which was the ridiculously short cooldown), ...
There are still quite a few things that could be improved (same for killers of course), but things aren't that rough out there for survivors either. I think one of the first things they should tackle is the matchmaking. I believe MMR can do more for the game than it is currently. But if they really can't find a functioning compromise between queue times and match quality or decide on the level of "competitiveness" they want in an average match of DbD, maybe at least trying out the concept of a casual and competitive queue could be something, with the comp queue having strict and visible MMR, loadout restrictions for SWFs, leaderboards, no map offerings (maybe even a pick-and-ban mechanic for the map), and the casual queue having no or lesser disconnect penalties, lax matchmaking either entirely random or loosely based on emblems or bloodpoints or ranks or whatever, maybe even a killswitch on the top 10 statistically most used perks on the respective sides. Alternatively, we can at least hope that future Game Modifiers will be more fun and exciting and yield more pointedly casual experiences for those fed up with how increasingly competitively-minded the main game has become.
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@D0NN1ED4RK0 said:
vigil to 40% is gonna be my favorite thing
I long to see Vigil + Sprint Burst be a more commonly used combo again.
@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3657028#Comment_3657028
your pwyf is something I agree with and deeply understand. The blastmine+wiretap would be really good. wiretap wall-hack would be usable perk. I could accurately predict impact most of the perk if i spend a lot of time analysis them. Unfortunately i do not see much reason to do so given that no changes will occur.
I had to chuckle at your last sentence, but it's a somewhat sad, jaded chuckle, because of course you are right. I have made posts like this one as far back as 2017. Of course BHVR has buffed perks here and there and released a few really good ones, but not only have only very few of them actually risen in the ranks enough to be metagame-changing (most not being A or even B tier even after their "buffs"), and not only have they also nerfed just as many if not even more perks out of the meta, but it's also still just a fraction of perks they have ever looked at, with 70-80% of all perks in the game still being objectively subpar, swathes of which likely seeing usage rates below 1%.
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@Devil_hit11 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3656452#Comment_3656452
what is wrong with 32 second of self-care? it already has 14 second bless time to set it up.
I like his blast mine idea. that is so cute. the gen begins regressing so killer cannot kick it. I think streetwise is very dangerous perk to buff to 50% because of existence of toolboxes.
that version PWYF might be worse current version. I currently the perk is somewhat underrated for killer because it allows killer to create a weak-link in the team.
I find that idea cute too, and it's so obvious, isn't it? A mine explosion should cause a gen to regress, and it would make the perk much more tactically valuable, posing a counter to perks like Weasel and Nowhere To Hide, lifting it up from its current status as a sort-of meme. And the gen starting to regress would also balance it out enough, since that is obviously not something survivors want.
For PWYF I actually think the perk in its current form is not only underrated, but a pretty broken design. No perk should ever make someone 15% faster, at that point the concept of "chase" stops existing. I'm not saying it is regularly viable from an overarching "match economics" perspective to spend the time required to get the tokens (although on some killers it definitely can be, such as Plague or Wraith, and in 3-genning scenarios you can often get stacks inadvertently without needing to really invest time), but the effect in and of itself is just a design flaw. And this is particularly true in the case of Tombstone Myers. "My" version of PWYF on the other hand makes it so people will get stacks constantly, but the stacks won't have ridiculous effects. I think it would be a really rather reliably good perk in this form, but it goes without saying that I can't quite gauge how some of these perks would behave in actual matches, one would have to see them in action and fine-tune numbers. Also worth mentioning that a lot of these perks I came up with on-the-spot, really only few of these ideas are stuff I'm really all too invested in or thought too much about, which if anything only supports the point that it would be trivial for BHVR to ship tons of simple buffs and make many perks much more valuable parts of the game that don't see usage rates below 1%. Doesn't take a genius, ha.
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@MechWarrior3 said:
I pretty much agreed with all of this for the most part except for circle of healing. We really don’t need that again. I still get tons of a value out of it.
Spies would be to strong if it was mapwide but a range increase could be nice.
Overall good post, appreciate the effort you put into it.
Cheers for going through them.
Obviously some of these suggestions will be controversial, and while I did actually try to make sure to think about synergies and builds that may arise from these changes, there are bound to be oversights or things I haven't thought through too much. I made this thread mostly on the basis that I want to demonstrate how easy it would be for BHVR to buff most subpar perks at least to a "seriously useful" level, without even having to change too much at all or code too many entirely new interactions. Why they have never done this beats me. I mean, I can come up with a few speculations, but still, players can only use 4 perks, there are more than 4 S-tier perks in the game, so given that players can already run a build consisting entirely of S-tier perks, the existence of more such perks should not be all too upsetting to the balance of the game. And of course, only few of the changes proposed here would actually lift a perk into S-tier strength.
For Circle specifically, I really do think it enabling survivors to heal themselves at 50% the regular healing speed would be perfectly fine. That is still twice as long as an altruistic heal, it requires someone spending time finding a totem and setting up the Boon, it requires people to spend time traversing the map to get there, they can also only heal there which is significant in multiple respects (Self-Care and Med-Kits are/were so good because they allow you to heal at any place and any point, and positional play is crucial in so many scenarios, plus it also allows the killer to know where survivors might be when they are resetting), the killer can snuff the Boon, Mangled still makes it a 40-second heal, and if multiple people bring Circle it can be a bit of a wasted perk slot. In general Boons are just pretty dead in the water, and part of the reason for that is that Circle (which definitely was too strong in the its original iteration) was the only one really worth investing the perk slot and blessing time for, any other Boon only ever being brought alongside it in a sense of "if I'm gonna be blessing anyway, might as well bring this too". To lift Boons back into viability without having to buff all of them a lot (the other Boon effects really don't lend themselves as well to buffs as Circle, they could quickly become busted), a viable Circle is integral I think. I would also argue that survivors spending time looking for totems, blessing them, traversing the map to the Boon area and healing is something that would benefit the gameplay flow from a killer perspective too, making people sit on gens less, especially while injured. Games would likely get less snowbally, but they would also get more drawn-out. I suspect it would actually balance itself out. To also note: This and the 100% altruistic healing speed buff is the only effect Circle would have, it wouldn't reveal auras anymore.
Map-wide Spies is also a spicy one, I admit. Although I'm not too sure it would be too strong. It is still only rudimentary info on "someone is on that rough part of the map right now", and it is also pretty inconsistent and map-dependent. Survivors also have counterplay and counterperks. I think Ultimate Weapon right now is stronger than Spies would be then, frankly. But again, debatable.
@sizzlingmario4 said:
The Agitation change is a nerf because it removes the synergy with Starstruck.
Diversion with 3 tokens sounds funny, I'm all for it.
Well, but it could gain synergy with Awakened Awareness, catching survivors you have wallhacks on off-guard with a low terror radius. Hell, one could even argue that it improves the Starstruck synergy in a sense, because when the survivor then gets Exposed it might be too late for them to run or hide from you. Imagine a build of Agi, Starstruck, Awareness and Monitor - you sneak up to a survivor, they become Exposed at the last moment and you down them, lol.
Thanks for reading and the feedback.
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@crogers271 said:
@zarr your post is probably too long and too late to make much of an impact, but I read it and thought you were spot on pretty much everything.
A few comments:
Consider on top of this that matches with disconnects (which typically happen when survivors get demolished, or regularly mean that they will get demolished thereafter) are excluded entirelyYeah, I wonder why this doesn't get pointed out more. Survivors sometimes DC just because they don't like the killer, but lots of times its because they got downed early. Which means if they actually played it out, it likely would have resulted in a 3 or 4k, and removing those games delates the kill rate.
not only would you need to have such a top tournament team with top loadouts, but they would also have to meet a top tournament killer with a top loadout. I would not be surprised if this has not happened even just once in the history of this game.That's an interesting hypothetical. I agree that it would be vanishingly rare, but interesting to think if ever. I'll say given the propensity of people playing for streaks its probably happened where you have killers and SWFs trying win streaks running into each other, but that's really the only circumstance I can think of to get the sweatiest level of each style of play randomly matched up.
Stream sniping trying to break streaks would be the only other possibility of such a matchup, but that isn't really getting randomly matched.
killer is easier at the beginning because survivors have to proactively lead the most mechanically skill-based aspect of the game, namely chases; then survivor is easier at intermediate levels of experience because killers have to battle against mounting gen pressure; and at the advanced and expert levels killer and survivor can be said to be about equally difficult, much in dependence on killer, map and loadouts at playOne thing I'd like to add to this good point: killer and survivor are improving different skill sets. Survivors are improving reflex/response time. When looping around pallet/rock the success is going to depend basically on the survivor response time. The killer can throw mind games in, but the key is how fast the survivor can respond to them to determine whether a hook occurs. The killer, especially outside the throwers, don't have a mechanical skill, success comes down to things like game sense. Is it worth it to keep chasing around that rock, or is there some other issue that is more pressing?
It's one of the reason I think there is such a community disconnect on which role is harder/more stressful.
Skill and sweat is much more impactful on the killer side. This is simply because on the survivor side you have 4 players, which have varying levels of skill and of trying to win, with weak links of subpar players that can doom an entire match even if the other 3 players are better than the killer player, and with people not playing in earnest (i. e. not trying to win, but to do funny or stupid things, or tome challenges, or at least not trying hard to win, or just playing for hatch).One other thing I'd add, soloq also just suffers from the randomness. With camping many killers would say 'just bring reassurance'. Okay, who? If we all bring it that's a huge waste. Likewise players have different skill sets. I'm not a great looper, but I'll go crack a 3 gen from the start and bring healing skills to help the loopers. If I get paired up with other survivors with the same skill set and no one can take the killer on chase, we're in trouble. I imagine it is the same on the other side if everyone comes in geared just for chase mode.
They don't even have to have it affect 99% of the playerbase, just make the matchmaker much more strict at the highest MMR levels.I suspect the reason they don't do this: the viability and growth of the game has a lot to do with streamers. Many streamers, especially the most popular ones, are high MMR. If they had to wait the extra time stricter match making would take, it would either harm the viewership and/or move them on to other games. From a game growth standpoint I just don't think we'll stricter matchmaking around the top level.
Cheers, appreciate you spending the time going through and responding to some of the points.
Survivors sometimes DC just because they don't like the killer, but lots of times its because they got downed early. Which means if they actually played it out, it likely would have resulted in a 3 or 4k, and removing those games delates the kill rate.
Absolutely, tons of disconnects happen on early downs, as well as when a player gets downed on death hook (particularly if they got tunnelled), or when the match is basically over and people are slugged and whatnot. It's obvious I think that overall the majority of disconnects will happen in matches where players are frustrated with losing. Filtering these out deflates the effective killrate significantly (it supposedly was around 5% in the - albeit more distant, pre-disconnect-penalty - past).
But it can be argued that even filtering out all those instances where players disconnect without the game having been lost or as good as lost, simply because they don't like the killer or get frustrated with trivial things or whatever, does the survivor experience a bit of a disservice, because there are still survivors left in that match having to fend for themselves. Just because the reason for the disconnect is not based on game balance doesn't mean the survivor players in those matches have a better time, there is still a factual negative impact on the playing experience. And again this naturally doesn't mean one should want them to balance the game such that survivors still meet the target when including all of these matches with disconnects, but it at least shouldn't be ignored entirely, either.
I agree that it would be vanishingly rare, but interesting to think if ever.
It is interesting to think about, although I suppose my measure for "highest levels of play" is a bit far-removed from what the average poster on this forum may think. I think of survivor groups that are actual top 10 tournament teams facing off against killers from those same teams. I struggle to think of a singular instance of this having happened, and I really would not be surprised if it actually hasn't. Again, those teams playing pubs together at all (and let alone with voice comms, stacked builds and trying hard to win) is already vanishingly rare, and them then meeting a top 10 tournament killer doing the same makes it an astronomically low likeliness.
Of course, that was just an argument to highlight how absurd the idea of "balancing for the highest levels of play" is for the public matchmaking environment, and yes, it is a bit of a hyperbolic premise, there are good players out there playing in 4-player SWFs, but the actual point obviously is that for one thing, people often make the mistake of thinking balancing the game for the highest level should render them able to compete with such a strong team even though they in all likeliness are nowhere near close to that level, and for another, even just decent killer players that are nowhere near the highest level of skill can and do win the vast majority of their matches with the state of balance and matchmaking as it is, so the idea that we need massive killer buffs because the game is oh-so survivor-sided at the top level (which it also isn't actually) just flies in the face of the reality of what actually happens in people's matches. I've found that much of the time, the people that incessantly complain about balance and make things out to be bleak for killers are pretty mediocre players that however already win most of their matches, but apparently feel awful about not winning one every then and again, and think them losing clearly must mean the game isn't balanced and there was nothing they could have done differently or better. I wonder how they would feel in a game that has actual competitive matchmaking, where players that are worlds better than them are not getting winrates close to the ones they do in DbD.
Anyway, while I do think the game isn't all too well-balanced for the idea of 4 highly-skilled players coordinating and communicating and do want SWF loadout restrictions for that reason (as well as a few other good reasons), it for one thing also is not nearly as imbalanced as people often take it to be (again, some of the killers ridiculously enough can actually compete with and even outperform the best survivor teams on the strongest builds, and with loadout restrictions most killers are competitively viable, with some of them actually needing nerfs to be balanced at that level), and for another the basic balance premise is not the idea of a good 4-SWF on voice comms, and it shouldn't be because they in all likeliness make up 0.X% of the public playerbase, if that (whereas good players playing strong killers is obviously vastly more common).
It's one of the reason I think there is such a community disconnect on which role is harder/more stressful.
I think I agree with your basic point here, which is that killer and survivor require different skill sets to succeed, and the skills generally more pronounced on the killer side (at least in the average public match) can be said to be of the more cerebral kind, whereas those on the survivor side of the more mechanical. And yes, many people I suspect will find thinking about and analyzing games and making smart strategical decisions especially when under pressure more difficult or stressful than making mechanically good plays, and having quick reaction times and good split-second decisions.
Although I do want to point out that the macrogame aspect (the "cerebral" stuff) is actually much more important on the survivor side at a high level than even I had suspected it would be. For a fairly long time I had simply intuitively thought the survivor players that are the best at leading chases will also be the best in the 4v1 setting. But that I have had ample opportunity in recent years to find out is far from true. There is a tournament team called Torment, consisting of some of the hands-down best 1v1 players there are, and while they are a good 4v1 team, they are not performing nearly as well as one may assume they would, losing to teams the players of which they would absolutely demolish in a 1v1 competition. The same can be said for a team called Aeternum. There are also players like Knightlight, Zaka and Dan, some of the most prominent players in the tournament community, "comp royalty" so to say, undoubtedly some of the best players in the game, and none of them are 1v1 gods, they don't even all too regularly play 1v1s. Don't get me wrong, they are still incredibly good in 1v1, but that is not what they are best at. These just as examples that go to show that at the higher levels of play, the notable survivor skill set increasingly gets to be about tactical decision-making, strategy, teamplay, macrogameplay, too.
The fact that macrogame aspects are so important for survivors in high-level competition is part of the reason why I think that the game is actually killer-sided (or killer-leaning, if you will) in the basic balance premise where the four survivors do not have means of coordination and communication beyond the ones the game itself provides them with. Take 4 top tournament survivors (preferably not from the same team) and pit them against a top tournament killer, without giving them the ability to discuss their loadouts and without any means of communicating outside of the game, and I am reasonably sure that the killer will win most of the time (depending on the map and killer character, of course).
One other thing I'd add, soloq also just suffers from the randomness.
Absolutely, and this is implicitly included in what I meant with the greater degree of disconcertedness among survivor groups as compared to the killer, for the simple and obvious reason that there will be much more randomness in the loadouts, mentalities, intentions, decisions, skills and so on of a random group of 4 players than in the 1 player. As long as the killer player doesn't have 4 personalities or is in 4 different minds about what and how to play, they will on average be about 4 times as concerted as the survivors, ha.
This sounds obvious at best and silly at worst, but to highlight in simple terms what this means using something you also brought up in the example of loadouts: just think of the fact that the killer's loadout consisting of the killer character, 4 perks, 2 add-ons, and an offering is the equivalent to the survivor group's loadout of 16 perks, 4 items, 8 add-ons and 4 offerings. How often will the killer player have a (more or less) perfectly concerted, synergistic loadout, where the character, perks, add-ons and offerings each and all make sense together, are well-rounded and can even serve very precise strategic intentions (e. g. Mirror Myers with a Lery's offering), and how often will the same be the case for the survivors' loadout? For killers, most matches. For survivors, outside of 4-player SWFs, basically never. As you said, some perks can be overrepresented, others underrepresented or not represented at all, all of which detrimentally so, there can be multiple conflicting offerings, and in any case, it will essentially never happen that all perks, items, add-ons and offerings will be perfectly synergistic and fine-tuned, let alone serving a preconceived strategy. In my SWFs we will sometimes use 4 luck offerings alongside 4 Up The Antes and 4 Slippery Meats. This allows us to unhook ourselves on the first hook every time. It's an incredibly strong loadout. How often do we think random groups have used this build in the history of this game, among billions of solo queue matches? 0 times, in all likeliness. Even having something like 4 BNPs in a solo group is vanishingly rare, and that despite the fact that everybody knows how good BNPs are, and they cost nothing to bring and are merely an add-on for an item. It's easy to understand from this that killer loadouts will most of the time be enormously more optimized than survivor loadouts, and from there the jump to understanding in what other ways killers benefit from their concerted approach, efforts and decisions as compared to the more disconcerted survivor groups is easier.
Many streamers, especially the most popular ones, are high MMR.
While I agree that streamers are likely a pretty major part of their concern, I will say that many of the popular content creators we know would not be at the highest MMR anymore if the matchmaking were to actually be strict. Content creators can generally be said to be among the "1%" of players, but without a "soft" cap that matches the 5% among one another willy-nilly and with a more strict matchmaking algorithm, the 1% would fall behind the 0.9-0.1%, there would be more nuanced high MMR brackets forming that are much beyond the level someone like Otz for instance plays at. He's good, but he's no Zaka, not least because he doesn't regularly actually use the strongest stuff and strategies. I obviously have no idea what queue times would actually be like under such a system, and frankly I have no real clue how the matchmaking algorithm functions and what other variables BHVR has to keep in mind that I am not aware of, but in my mind if they were to simply remove the soft cap on MMR and have the matchmaking look for precise MMR matches for, say, 1 minute before expanding the range, that would already change things a lot, and without creating prohibitively long queue times. Especially if we also consider that they could make the algorithm stricter the higher the MMR is, such as spending more time before expanding the range, or expanding the range less per unit of time. This to me would mean the more extreme wait times of an average of 5+ minutes would be experienced mostly only at the very top of MMR, and even that I'm not so sure about because when the players that currently almost or actually always win meet other such players, they would obviously not win quite as much anymore and not end up in some astronomical bracket where too few players dwell. That said, I of course also don't know how many players this "0.9-0.1%" would actually capture, how many cracked players like that that regularly play pubs are out there. Maybe there really are too few to match them among each other consistently without queue times growing prohibitively long.
What I do know however is that things absolutely could be much better than they are in this regard, because they already had been - there've been times when they tinkered with the MMR specifics and more competitive matches happened much more consistently, without notably long queue times whatsoever (although notably longer than the couple of seconds to at most a minute it usually takes right now). There were times when I faced known tournament players pretty much every session. And things could be even more strict than they had been then, given that even at high MMR queue times had been 1-3 minutes at most. Alas, they do seem to prioritize <1-minute queue times over match quality, and Knightlight still gets Totem-Meg in his 500th loadout-less Nurse 4k streak match. Maybe the "solution" really is to have a casual and competitive queue, where the casual queue has completely random matchmaking and the competitive one employs strict MMR. Whether we will ever see such a thing I highly doubt myself. The most I can hope for is that BHVR at least changes their stance on the current matchmaking paradigm to degrees. They have before.
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That is true. Survivors haven't gotten new items (in a sense the equivalent to killer abilities) in 7 years. In that time, existing items have also only been nerfed, all med-kits now being virtually identical, unique flashlight interactions having been removed for no reason when flashlights are the only really fun and interactive items to begin with. There are still various add-ons that don't do much of anything, or are downright detrimental to use. The perk landscape is desolate. Look at the top 10 most used survivor perks: every single one is 7 or 8 years old, the most recent one being Windows, which is 6 years old. Most perks BHVR releases (and "buffs") are painfully subpar, the majority not even being B tier (and why would anyone regularly use any perks but A/S-tier ones?). The last bonafide metagame-changing survivor perk release was Made For This, and it has since obviously been gutted. I will say that Cage was a breath of fresh air, with Plot Twist and Dramaturgy being fun and at least good enough to seriously use, and Background Player (after its buff) as well as Hyperfocus (with Stake Out) are actually borderline top-tier perks, but that's just not nearly enough. That they've recently introduced a new Boon perk after more than a year and made it the worst of its kind by far when Boon perks had already died with the gutting of the only one that wasn't "meh" to begin with speaks volumes. And in a licensed survivor-only DLC, at that. BHVR simply refuses to not put out survivor perks 90+% of which will have usage rates below 1%. The fact that the survivor perks set to come with the next chapter are hilariously bad even by BHVR's standards is, well, it's not funny.
Playing killer, we get wholly new killers every chapter, not few of which have such rewarding skillsets that you can put hundreds and thousands of hours into them. Among the top 10 most used killer perks, there are various released in the past few years, and with things like Ultimate Weapon, Grim Embrace, Dead Man Switch, Pain Resonance, Eruption, Deadlock, Pentimento, the killer perk meta has received gamechanger perk releases and buffs every other update. Don't get me wrong, too many killer perk releases and adjustment are still painfully lackluster as well, but there is just tangibly more notable stuff being put out, and this on top of the already more varied killer perk landscape that comes with the fact that different killers benefit from different perks. Killer designs could also be more compelling and engaging, but they've brought some legitimately good ones that introduced unique and fun gameplay with rewarding learning curves and lots of room to grow as a player anew.
There is so much more BHVR could be doing, and I don't know whether they don't because they are scared to mess with the formula that has been working for them, or if they are simply too lazy to bother upsetting the balance they've created and having to deal with what that entails. But in a better world for DbD they would be substantially buffing and nerfing a whole bunch of perks at least once a year, to really switch up the meta and keep things fresh. Or buff perks en masse to lift most of them at least to B or A tier. And that's the least they could do, you know, making the things they release actually worth regularly using. If they were actually ambitious there could be all kinds and manner of things, new items, mechanics, map interactions, game modes, and so on. Alas, instead they don't even dare do anything actually exciting and game-changing for events, not only rehashing their snowmen every time but also making them less and less gameplay-relevant.
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I agree to an extent, playing for a gen cluster is still very potent. Now, the regression limit wasn't meant to make 3-genning unemployable, it was more specifically aimed at preventing a killer from being able to indefinitely stall the game - playing around a gen cluster in and of itself should still be a viable strategy as well as something the killer can capitalize upon should the survivors 3-gen themselves. But it arguably is too potent still on some specific killers, and the buffed 5% instant regression on kicks as well as the requirement of needing to put in 5% of repairs before the regression stops are de-facto buffs to 3-genning.
Most importantly, the regression limit does next to nothing to alleviate issues where generators simply spawn too close to each other for survivors to be able to contest them. In these instances, killers can feasibly stall the game for an hour even without kicking gens at all, just by walking from one to the next. The regression limit is not a band-aid for this, BHVR still has to do something about spawns like this:
Then there are killers like Skull Merchant, Singularity, Knight, Doctor, Hag and Trapper that excel at 3-genning and could do with adjustments to account for that. Singularity even in tournaments after the implementation of the regression limit has had various instances of winning against top teams by playing around a 3-gen setup, with players like Wispy and Knightlight essentially never not at least "4k1"ing (killing everyone at 1 gen left, because they can't get one of the remaining gens done).
Apart from remedying ridiculous cluster spawns and adjusting some of the most egregious killers in terms of defending gen clusters, I think it could be beneficial to change the regression limit system such that it only starts applying once the last 3 gens are left, but then having a much lower limit.
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The mental olympics of pretending stats don't mean anything have begun again.
The game is (and has most of always been) statistically killer-sided in its main gamemode. That is simply a fact, that is what these stats mean. Even an average player is expected to kill more survivors than escape against them over the course of their matches, even at "high MMR", and regardless of the killer character they choose to play. Even regardless of the map the match is being played on, at least according to past stats (the least deadly killer on the least deadly map still boasting a killrate above 50%). If you're better than average, you are likely killing the majority of survivors you get. And if you're good, you're likely barely ever having anyone escape. This is also a demonstrable fact as winrates of 90+% and winstreaks (at times of hundreds and thousands of matches) are completely commonplace among good killer players, evidenced by streams and videos.
The fact that even high MMR 4-player SWFs (which constitute a fraction of a fraction of the playerbase, and the strongest configuration survivors can present) on average aren't getting 2 survivors out of the gates is staggering. Consider on top of this that matches with disconnects (which typically happen when survivors get demolished, or regularly mean that they will get demolished thereafter) are excluded entirely, deflating the killrate, and that hatch escapes (which typically happen when survivors got demolished) are included, inflating the survival rate. And yet still, even high MMR SWF groups consisting of 4 players are not averaging 2 escapes. That suggests a grim reality for the average survivor experience.
To address a few things that can regularly be seen in response to stats:
Nurse not having the highest killrate across all MMR ranges does not mean the stats are nonsense. It is nonsense to expect that. Why would we expect the average player to play killers to their full potential? It is obvious to understand that the most deadly killers on a global average will precisely be those that do not have to be played at a high level to be strong. The ratio of the ease of playing a killer as compared to their lethality (particularly in the sense of the difficulty of playing against them) is the majorly determining factor for average killrates. It makes perfect sense that killers like Merchant and Plague are high up in the stats because their abilities are very easy to use and very problematic for survivors. Nurse particularly is the only killer in the game that can never fall back on normal chase mechanics, it could not be more self-evident why she tends to have some of the lowest average killrates. There's just countless new, average and intermediate players not doing well with her because she requires a wholly unique skillset. What has to additionally be considered is that console stats are of course included here, and Nurse is among various killers that are significantly limited by the input potential controllers provide. Even just looking at PC-only stats would in all likeliness already bump her rates up quite a bit even on a global average scale. And last time we got stats on killers in high MMR, Nurse obviously was among the top 4 most deadly killers. The further up in MMR you look, the more the killrates would line up with common sense on who the strongest killers are. There are Nurse and Blight 4k streaks spanning thousands of matches, those players will have the highest MMR, meaning Nurse and Blight at that point would show up as the top 2 killers with 99.X% killrates.
"A 60% killrate isn't a 60% winrate" is not the argument some may think it is. The higher the killrate, the higher the winrate, that follows imperatively. What also follows logically is that the higher the killrate, the lower the survival rate - and the lower in turn the winrate for survivors. So if you want to make an argument about the winrate, you have to keep in mind that the 60% killrate means killers also have a higher winrate than survivors. So it's ultimately a moot point. Just because the killer winrate may not be above 50% (we do not know this, and there is no way to infer this from the stats without seeing actual kill distributions) does not mean they are underperforming, because the survivor winrate certainly would also not be above 50% (again because the killrate statistically dictates that the killer winrate is higher than the survivor winrate). It would just mean draws are fairly common, with killer wins being more common than survivor wins.
The people that argue "well, a 60% killrate is what BHVR aims for so things are in a pretty good spot" I can appreciate for at least not letting their bias run wild and claim the stats to be meaningless, instead saying the game is supposed to be killer-sided on average so it being so is not an issue. But for one thing you have to actually embrace what that means and in the future try and refrain from assuming the position that the game is survivor-sided and BHVR caters to survivors, since it is factually killer-sided (in its main game mode, meaning public matchmaking) and BHVR intentionally caters to killers on live balance. And for another, you will surely understand that "BHVR aims for it" is not a be-all-end-all argument. There can be arguments that their target is misguided. Personally I think 60% average killrates would be a fine target if disconnects were to be included and hatch escapes excluded. These things significantly affect the survivor playing experience in any match in which they happen, so to design the game in a way where stats completely ignore these realities to me renders the game too one-sided. Think of all the matches in which survivors get demolished with multiple gens left standing and the last survivor happens to get the hatch - all of those have a 25% survival rate, meaning even matches which survivors lose horribly can still contribute significantly to their overall survival rate. And one more reason to exclude these escapes is the fact that the killer can go out of their way to make hatch escapes nearly impossible, if they simply so desire. Many players don't, but since they can refrain from killing one of the two last remaining survivors virtually indefinitely and circumvent the hatch mechanic fairly reliably, the hatch balance-wise should not inform decisions being made to benefit killers based on their killrate that is deflated by the hatch. To note: I won't argue they should aim for a perfect 60% killrate with disconnects included and hatch escapes excluded (if anything they should improve the 2v1 game scenario that is often a stalemate tilted in the killer's favour, such as by enabling the survivors to kill themselves in the dying state), but at the very least they should look at those stats too and make sure the deviation from the 60% ideal is not more than 2-3%. Hell, maybe count hatch escapes as half an escape. If the killrate without disconnects and with hatch escapes then turns out to coalesce around 50-55% for most killers, so be it. I also think 4-player SWFs should have a 50% average survival rate, although disconnects can be excluded and hatch escapes included in this instance (because full premade groups are only screwing over each other by disconnecting rather than strangers, and because full premade groups can actually coordinate hatch escapes fairly reliably). The game at its core is balanced for the idea of 4 random survivors that have no means of coordinating their builds, plays and strategies, nor to have external communications. If the balance target for that is a 60% killrate, that is fine. But once you have full premade groups of survivors, the game changes completely, and to try and maintain a 60% killrate in that environment would lead the base game balance far astray.
"Solo queue is fine and the gap to SWF has been bridged" is not quite accurate, in multiple respects. First things first, even a difference of 3% is quite significant when looking at sample sizes of millions upon millions of matches. Just think of the fact that 3% can literally be the difference between a killer being top 5 or top 20 in terms of killrate. And in the high MMR bracket, the difference between solo and 4-SWF is 9%. Secondly, like I noted in the previous point, disconnects and hatch escapes affect these rates, and they should be treated differently for solos and SWFs, widening the gap. Then the experience is also different: If in solo queue you die, you will not all too regularly care or even know whether your fellow survivors escaped; in SWF, people are more so actually playing for the team result. A 40% survival rate in solo feels much worse than one in SWF because in solo that means on average you die more than half the time and consider the match a loss, whereas in SWF even if you do die you can still be happy that 1-2 (1.6) of your friends made it out alive. And finally, the gameplay gap between SWF and solo cannot be bridged and it would therefore be asinine to try and bridge it statistically. The differing experiences and potentials simply yield a completely different game (which is a good thing, solo being much closer to the survival horror theme, SWF making it more of a competitive strategic multiplayer) - if a 40% survival rate is the target for solo, it should always be expected that 4-player SWFs will be notably above that, and that is fine. That said, I do want there to be loadout restrictions implemented for SWF, such that any offering, perk, item or add-on can only be present at most 1 time between the party members. At the very least for 4-player SWFs. I don't actually suspect this will decrease their survival rate all too significantly. But it would limit their ridiculous potential ceiling, and at the same time free up design space to make perks (and items/add-ons/offerings) more powerful since they then don't have to be designed with the possibility in mind of coordinated premades abusing multiple instances of them. And more powerful perks existing of course help solos, especially since they can still happen to have multiple instances of them.
"The game is survivor-sided at the highest levels of play so this doesn't matter" - Quite a few issues with statements of this sort. Above all, it's ludicrous to say millions of players' playing experience should not matter for the balance design. Even if the game were to be survivor-sided at a base balance level if you have the best players competing, BHVR designs the game for the live balance environment that actually matters when it comes to the actual playing experience actual players in your game are actually having, which is what these stats capture. It is absurd to even entertain this idea because the "highest levels of play" simply do not exist in this game's matchmaking. Actual top teams of survivors basically never play pubs, and in the exceedingly rare cases where they do, they basically never actually play like they would in a tournament (much the opposite). You can go for 8 years and 10000 hours of playing this game without ever encountering even just 1 top tournament team in your pub matches. Ask any player that has played since 2016 how often they have faced an actual top tournament team in pubs. It never happens. And even if it were to happen 1 time in 8 years or whatever, it still in all likeliness wouldn't be a match where they bring 4 BNPs, do gens and get out - it would more likely be a match where they bring 4 flashbangs and 4 Head Ons and all die after having fun in main for 15 minutes. Moreover, that is only half of the equation of course: for it to constitute an actual "highest levels of play" match where the balance for this would be relevant, not only would you need to have such a top tournament team with top loadouts, but they would also have to meet a top tournament killer with a top loadout. I would not be surprised if this has not happened even just once in the history of this game. The next issue is that not only does balancing for the highest level not matter even in tournaments (balance is established by the fact that both teams play both sides, plus tournaments can implement custom rulesets), but tournaments go to show that the game is not even all that survivor-sided at the highest levels. In tournaments and showmatches without loadout restrictions, Nurse, Blight and Spirit have outperformed survivors. And in tournaments with restrictions (applying to both survivors and killers), most killers perform perfectly well, with 3-4ks being commonplace, average killrates being above 50% and skill still making a huge difference in the results. These killer players can compete with top survivor teams that practice together all the time, have high levels of coordination and communication, and we want the entire game balanced around that when even just 4-player SWFs using voice comms are unlikely to constitute even 1% of the overall playerbase, let alone then also being highly skilled, coordinated and playing like they are in a tournament?
"Killers are better at the game than survivors so it's a skill issue not a balance issue" - First of all, nobody is a "killer" or "survivor". There are simply players and they may (and countless of them do) at any point choose to play either role. Furthermore, every player is simply human. There is no reason whatsoever to assume players playing killer are better at the game on average than players playing survivor. Statistically, both have to be assumed to be precisely that, average skilled. The only way skill could then relate to the rates would be that playing survivor is simply more difficult for humans than playing killer. Which I don't really think is true (killer is easier at the beginning because survivors have to proactively lead the most mechanically skill-based aspect of the game, namely chases; then survivor is easier at intermediate levels of experience because killers have to battle against mounting gen pressure; and at the advanced and expert levels killer and survivor can be said to be about equally difficult, much in dependence on killer, map and loadouts at play). But even if it were true that survivor is more difficult for humans to play and that's why the rates favour killers, and hell, even if it were true that for some reason players playing survivor on average are just worse at the game despite survivor not being more difficult to play, the reality would still be that with the current game balance state, the result favours killers to the detriment of the average survivor experience, so if the rates were to be deemed undesirable, the reasons wouldn't matter, they would still be looking to improve survival rates.
To touch on some of my opinions surrounding these stats:
The "high MMR" range is simply still much too broad a spectrum to actually show problems that experienced players are aware of. Even if it is only 5% of the playerbase, it has to be kept in mind that huge swathes of the playerbase are sub-100-hour newbies. Look at the 1% and 0.1% of playerbase and you will see that there are a lot of killers out there that are basically never losing or even having anyone escape, especially on characters such as Nurse and Blight, as well as a whole bunch of SWF survivors that are almost always escaping. The issue precisely is that "high MMR" is capped and matches the 0.1% among the 5%, meaning a Knightlight even 500 matches into his "no loadout Nurse 4k streak" can regularly face a Meg that thinks hunting for dull totems is a great idea to counter NOED (all the more so against Nurse, of course). There is a plethora of players in your game that can and do demolish 99-100% of the opponents they get, that is a huge problem. It has to do with the matchmaking (remove the "soft" cap, make the matchmaker less lenient), and with the overpoweredness of specific killers (nerf them - most of all Nurse, Blight and Spirit), specific strategies that still need rebalancing (mostly tunnelling and camping, 3-genning to a lesser extent), specific maps (a few being too killer-sided, a bunch too survivor-sided) and SWF (implement loadout restrictions for SWF, at the very least for 4-SWF).
On the flipside, there are also quite a few killers that will need to be buffed to be able to compete in such an environment where the matchmaking is less lenient and tunnelling/camping rebalanced. Same for solo survivors. Billy is a great example for a killer that was lifted to a state where he is now viable in a competitive matchup. The same thing would have to happen for about one third of the cast (for most other killers slight basekit adjustments and add-on changes would suffice). Solo survivors would already benefit a lot from tunnel/camp/3-gen rebalancing, and more HUD improvements (such as seeing each other's loadouts) can be a great help (the latter can even be part of the solution for the former).
The major reasons why killrates are and have most of always been as high as they are I think are the following: Skill and sweat is much more impactful on the killer side. This is simply because on the survivor side you have 4 players, which have varying levels of skill and of trying to win, with weak links of subpar players that can doom an entire match even if the other 3 players are better than the killer player, and with people not playing in earnest (i. e. not trying to win, but to do funny or stupid things, or tome challenges, or at least not trying hard to win, or just playing for hatch). On the killer side, there is 1 player, their skill level therefore obviously determines 100% of their skill-based performance potential, their degree of "trying to win" 100% of how sweaty their side will be. Any survivor on the other hand can only determine 25% of their side's skill and sweat levels. There is the disparity in strategical game approach as well - again, with 4 players things can be very disconcerted and downright chaotic, whereas on the killer side, even if their approach to the game may not necessarily be good, at least their approach is as concerted as can be, the decisions they make translate into the game as well as the gameplay design allows for them to. The asymmetric nature of this game favours the killer player's skill, tryhardiness and decision-making to have a more notable impact on the outcome of matches. And this of course starts before the match has even begun, at the loadout screen (it is infinitely more common to have a killer that has the best thing equipped in every slot than an entire group of survivors doing the same, again simply because they are 4 players - when have you last seen even just 4 BNPs in a match?). From this viewpoint a 60/40 ratio may also seem sensible, although it further supports the idea that remedying the tunnelling issue is paramount to alleviate the negative impact a weak link can have on the survivor side (and this wouldn't necessarily have to happen by nerfing tunnelling itself (although that seems like the preferable route), it could also be something like increasing generator repair speeds for the remaining survivors if someone dies). The next major reason for the high killrates I think is simply that the game is actually a bit killer-sided in its basic competitive premise, which is the idea that all 5 players are roughly equally skilled and experienced and trying to win, and that the 4 survivors are randoms that have no coordination or communication. Of course it depends on the killer, map and loadouts too, but as long as the killer is using good add-ons and a sensible build, I think about half the killer cast is actually favoured to kill more often than not in that base balance premise.
There is much more that could be said but I've clearly already said too much as is. I don't really care about balance bickering much anymore anyway, these days I mostly play 4-SWF with voice comms with other good players so I have no issues winning 80-90% of our matches, and on killer I haven't in years had issues winning to begin with. If this post has a purpose it's saying BHVR has to do something about the atrocious matchmaking that allows good players to basically never lose (as killer or in 4-SWFs). They don't even have to have it affect 99% of the playerbase, just make the matchmaker much more strict at the highest MMR levels. And bring down the performance potentials of some of the most egregious killers, maps and 4-SWF. I guarantee BHVR knows this perfectly well, they have the stats, they can see the kill and survival rates of the 0.1%, and the fact that they are almost never facing each other.
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So Adren Vial will: increase maximum Rush tokens by 2, increase Rush look angle by 20 degrees, and increase Rush speed by 5%, without any downside.
Not only does this make it a "jack of all trades" again, but how do you not understand that the strongest killer in the game does not need an add-on to make him 40% stronger (+2 rushes), without any downside? Let alone coming with additional upsides.
I'm glad Blight Tag is getting addressed, although I still can't quite fathom how "infinite rushes" was something you thought should be in the game. Blight Tag in its original state was a perfectly fine, well-designed add-on. In this form however, there will still be a lot of instances of "well, guess I'll die" because there is no way to avoid Blight with infinite rushes unless you have an actual god pallet, and those are few and far between.
Next, having two add-ons that reduce Billy's post-chainsaw cooldown even further on top of the base and Overdrive cooldown reductions will prove to be problematic. In Overdrive, his cooldown is already such that even if you do manage to dodge the chainsaw, you can still get chainsawed if there isn't a pallet or window basically right next to you, and if there is you will at least still get M1'd. You should tone down base cooldowns on missed chainsaws to compensate for these add-ons. Billy will be comparably as oppressive as he used to be in his heyday, and although I am excited for that and know that he is mechanically not easy to play and therefore won't be too much of an issue in many matches, it is especially the lack of punishment for not converting saws that can make him too much of a threat even in an average player's hands, especially so with the existence of Lopro now.
There's much more to say, about Sadako and perks being painfully underwhelming or at least not optimally designed (Grim Embrace) and so forth, but it won't make a difference anyway, so I will stick to just pointing out these two egregious issues I see because these two killers have been a long time coming to receive changes, and you might still be open to adjusting them.
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Cheating is far more prevalent than people assume. I run into cheating Spirits every so often. Epic Store, anonymous, Spirit, having even just one suspicious instance? Likely cheating.
Watch for them suddenly losing all sense once the match is in a winning spot. Such as searching for the last remaining player for ages. It's laughable how predictable cheaters are. Of course, even more laughable is how easy it is to cheat and get away with it in DbD.
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Whatever the entity may think of it, it is... curious, that the devs chose to have the survivors die when the matchtimer runs out. This I suspect is big part of the reason why trying to indefinitely hold generators even was as much of a thing. If they had simply closed the game server and told players as much, or dressed it up as "the entity lost interest" or whatever, with all players just transitioning straight to the tally screen, I guarantee at least not nearly as many instances of gen hostage situations would have occurred.
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This is partly my jadedness speaking, but I really don't think the snowmen and snowballs constitute an "event". Yeah sure, it can be fun the first two or three matches to mess around a bit, and here and there there might still be opportunities to have a little fun with that, but they really just do not provide actual fun and interactive gameplay. Snowballs don't do anything but very briefly obscure vision, which is useless, and the snowmen are glorified lockers.
If they actually want to meaningfully change the game experience and gameplay during the events, then actually introducing, you know, gameplay mechanics would be a start. It's only for a couple of weeks, why not live a little and mix and spice things up a bit? Snowmen have been nerfed multiple times to be in the sorry state they're in now. They used to tank hits if a survivor was inside of them, now they don't even tank hits anymore if you hide behind them. And sure it was BS on the killer side that they tanked hits (although there were killers that even benefitted from this, such as Bubba or Doctor), but not only could they just ship compensatory buffs for killers to do with the snowmen (e. g. if you jump out of a snowman within Xm of a survivor, they become Exposed for Xs), now that snowballs are here and allow us to destroy snowmen that really wouldn't be much of an issue anymore, and make both of these mechanics much more gameplay-relevant. Hell, they could even make it so that getting hit by a snowball incurs a brief Hindered effect on the respective player. Since killers and survivors can both use it, it would be fairly balanced, and fun. Killers would in fact stand to benefit from this, because not only is it easier to throw snowballs while looking ahead rather than looking behind like survivors have to, but if you decrease the speed of both the killer and survivor while maintaining the same speed differential, the killer always benefits as the survivor covers less of the map in the time needed to catch up, therefore not being able to reach structures they otherwise would have, or to chain them as well.
It's probably a mix of negative feedback from prior event mechanics and just the fact that they don't want to invest time and effort into events if they can help it. Not least because such gameplay mechanics can cause bugs or exploits that they potentially would have to address, which is difficult with the holiday break. It's lame especially given that they've said they want to be more ambitious with events and such. The Halloween event at least had that secondary realm thing going, which was neat enough an idea and an alright execution on it (the realm itself could have been a little more interesting, and overall the event was rather survivor-favouring again; maybe the realm should have been much darker but with outlines around player models, like Dredge's Nightfall).
But yeah, bottom line is that the event gives nobody a real reason to do anything but play normally, past a short grace period perhaps.
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The only somewhat reliable way to break Xeno out of crawler mode is to have two turrets set up such that it can't break one without the other one firing at it. And if it's using the add-on for flame resistance, not even two turrets will do the trick.
A competent Xeno will almost never allow themselves to be pulled out by one turret, no matter its placement. Which I think is an issue.
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@Archol123 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3614247#Comment_3614247
I don't agree with the assumption, I think basekit Blight is a pretty balanced killer, basically same for Nurse without addons. I don't think the baseline of players should be 4 Solos without coordination... Like sure not everyone is a 4 men, but you can still do pretty well if everyone is a good player.
Sure both teams play both sides, but a game becomes more interesting if the outcome is not guaranteed... And if I watch Freddy vs Team Elysium I might fall asleep faster than the survivors in this match... Jokes aside I think comp is interesting because games that are not guaranteed to end one way or the other, therefore such killers would greatfly benefit it.
Sure it does not necessarily matter for public matches, but a well designed killer is one that is strong across the board and offers enough to learn and master to make a difference between beginner, intermediate and comp players when using the power. And with the more basic killers we don't really have this distinction from a certain level onwards.
Even if you increase the queue times that way in the end you will still mostly put together fairly inexperienced players against those hundreds of wins-streak players... All you do is give them less matches in the time, because the amount of good players does not suddenly increase. And on the side note, I do think that certain players should get that many wins in a row, just because the opposing side is that much worse... Sure in a perfect world they would only match against other comp players and what not... But that is just not what is happening. And I simply don't believe that there are enough different groups of players that are as skilled as those 10 k hours players... I think there are really few players with that amount of hours and skill.
Basekit would be more arguable indeed. Blight without anything probably is A tier, the lack of speed particularly would be notable. Nurse without add-ons is still S tier though.
The baseline balance is 4 solos, of course still with the assumption that they are all equally as skilled, experienced and "sweaty" as the killer. That is just the base game design perspective for balance, I do think that build coordination and voice communication does break that balance for many killers. But in the actual game mode, solos make for around 50% of all players, 90+% of lobbies will be some mix of solos and duos, and that again of course does not mean there are voice communications in play either.
I agree on your point about Freddy vs. Elysium. While my prior point still stands that the difference between one Freddy getting 5 stages vs. the other one only getting 4 can still be what there is to play for and this still being engaging and dependent on skill, more powerful killers that actually can more reliably turn the tides of the entire match are more impressive and engaging to watch.
I think killers like Blight and Nurse are simply so egregiously powerful that they can be considered a game design flaw. In any other game, winstreaks of thousands of matches would be pretty scandalous. But I personally don't meet the best of players using these killers often either (although I have played against KL's Nurse multiple times, it's still just a handful in thousands of matches), I don't think more S tier killers like this would kill the game (for me or in general), particularly if they're difficult to master, like Blight. Even many of the good Blights I meet I can handle fairly well, as long as they are not using some of the oppressively broken add-ons (mostly Vial or C33), because there is still quite a big difference between a good Blight and the best Blights. But with a stricter matchmaking - which is desirable for many more reasons - of course I would be likely to meet them much more often.
I do think there are enough players, particularly because it isn't just these 10k hour tournament killers that are winning most of their matches, it's most of any decently experienced and skilled killer. Even those that are really rather mediocrely skilled and lament how painfully overpowered survivors are win decidedly more often than not. I guarantee those people could get paired with players that actually make them average out to a 50-60% killrate, instead of the 80-90% they have now. At the very least, BHVR could try to make things more strict, see how it pans out. They have already made things a little more strict recently, which I for one appreciate. But anyway, it has long been clear that they make decisions based on whatever internal processes and opinions they have, based in turn on whatever indicators, motivations, intentions, convictions... Maybe they have simply come to the conclusion that people actually need to be able to win 90+% of their matches to keep playing past a thousand hours or two, and that the people losing out on the receiving end of this aren't actually quitting over it. Personally I just find it extremely boring that good killers (and good 4-SWFs) barely ever get challenged in pubs, can win hundreds of matches in a row. I had to stop watching most of any killer streamer that only plays pubs, it's just mindless.
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@Archol123 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3614152#Comment_3614152
Considering the perk item and addon restrictions on survivor side I would say killer gets less restricted in a tournament setting, if we don't count the addons that should not exist like c33 and alc ring.
The issue is not winstreaks, those players win the vast majority of their game regardless, as it is their job to play dbd and stream it they are very experienced... So all of those players would have way too long queue times to be still worth the wait for quite a lot of players.
I don't think Nurse or Blight are op, just some addons on Blight are busted... However I would say that there are just too few killers that enable the player to win in a comp setting... Because most of them are just not good or consistent enough, at the same time many killers also don't have the depth or skill ceiling to enable plays that can catch comp survivors off guard... I would want more killers that enable the player to win if he is good enough or lose if the other side is better... But as it one half of the killers is worthless against comp survivors a handful can win rather consistently and maybe like 4-5 are in that parameter of strength were it can go both ways... However the major issue will always be matchmaking... On an average level you can totally run a nurse long enough to get gens done, but you cannot do that against players much better than yourself.
It's debatable, the strongest killers (i. e. those that should be compared to the strongest loadouts survivors can bring) have a plethora of restrictions. And again, I hold that survivors actually gain a world more from the competitive setting, because the killer is just that same one player they are in any setting, whereas the survivors get to be a 4-player team that practices together constantly, has communication and coordination.
From the base balance perspective, Nurse and Blight are pretty abhorrently OP, which is the perspective of a group of survivors that don't know each other, and therefore have no coordination (of loadouts, strategies, tactics), nor communication. Again, this is the base assumption of the game, and it is infinitely more often the case in the game's actual game mode than the scenario of a seasoned 4-player SWF on comms. I think A tier killers are barely balanced under that base assumption, and a fair few B tier killers also get to be A tier with certain add-ons.
As for whether there should be more killers that can consistently win in a tournament environment against actual survivor teams... Well, while I do think a couple more S-tier killers would be neat to have for that environment, it has to be noted that first of all, killer vs. survivor balance does not really matter in competitive formats because both teams play both sides, there is an inherent competitive balance established in that format, a team can win even if their killer only gets 5 stages, simply because the other team's killer may have only gotten 4. Secondly, in these competitive environments, balance rules can make the lesser half of the killers more viable, with map picks, perk and item limitations. Thirdly, and it may surprise you, but most killers perform well in the comp setting. Sure, not many of them consistently 4k like Blight and Nurse can, but many of them are perfectly competitive, 3/4ks not being uncommon, averaging around 2.X, skill still making a huge difference in how well the respective killer players perform. And finally, this of course does not matter at all for the game mode that 99.9% of players are actually playing, which is just public matches, in which those consisting of highly skilled 4-player SWFs on comms facing off against highly skilled killers constitute 0.X% of all matches, if that.
I don't think the queue times would get very bad unless they go for extreme streaks like that. I mean, one simple change would be to just extend the period within which the matchmaker searches for an accurate MMR match by 1 minute for every, say, 300MMR beyond the soft cap. So say the soft cap is 2000, and at that cap the matchmaker will look for other players around the 2000 mark for 2 minutes before it widens the range. Now at 2300MMR it would take 3 minutes before it widens the range, 4 at 2600, and so on. At the upper end of MMR queue times would still just be around 5 minutes, and only of course if it doesn't actually find other players of that rating in that time. And again, these players not being matchmaked away after one minute with 500-hour Megs that happen to be at the soft cap also increases the possibility of even matching them with others at their MMR range that may be in queue wait time. It also has to be noted that with a stricter matchmaking, the MMR of these players would never even reach too ridiculous heights, they wouldn't be expected to have as high winrates anymore or let alone go on winstreaks of hundreds of matches. The reason Dowsey for instance had hours-long queues is simply that BHVR had had the MMR rating system active in the background for weeks or months prior to actually basing the matchmaking on it, meaning he racked up wins without actually facing higher-rated players that themselves are also winning. He would have simply lost his streak earlier and his MMR would not have been inflated astronomically. And also, the amount of players at these extreme upper MMR ranges also is and will be fairly low, so the increased queue times won't affect many players. And I really doubt most of the really popular streamers and content creators will be up there, they just don't play hard enough, and often also aren't as good as those tournament players.
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@Archol123 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3613897#Comment_3613897
I mean BHVR basically asked the community what would be an acceptable time to wait for a match and apparently they just went with the results, so we really cannot blame them much for, if that is what the community wanted.
Can you really call Nurse and Blight op if in a tournament setting where those guys play who mastered those killers they can get beaten?
I don't really think the streaks really change much... Whether people do a streak or not does not really change how they play, people that do streaks tend to try to win when they play, whether or not they are on a streak and do you seriously believe people would have a higher chance to win against knightlight or V1 if they played other stuff? Knightlight literally plays without perks or addons, he still wins 99% of his games on every other killer despite ridiculous meme builds being requested. It does not matter if he does a streak or not he willstill win most games with ease so the players at which cost it comes still suffer the same result streak or no streak.
You just overestimate how many people are playing this game with the amount of hours and experience those streamers have... There are just not that many players and people cannot be asked to wait for 30 min... The streamers are free advertisement for BHVR and if they could never find games that would be almost a death sentence for the game, because how many people sit around in a stream where nothing happens for half an hour?
I'm not sure asking the community what an acceptable wait time for a match is is the way to go, but regardless, the more extreme wait times expected under a stricter matchmaking would mostly only apply at the extreme ranges, and affect relatively few players as a result. And like I said, they could even stricten the matchmaking only at the upper brackets, with it getting more and more strict the higher the MMR is. Certainly people that have won hundreds of matches in a row are few and far between, and deserve to have a matchmaker that first searches for strict matches for 10 or so minutes before it decides to feed them their next victims that will end up just another number on their streak counter.
Nurse and Blight absolutely are OP, they win consistently even in the tournament setting where you have teams of survivors that practice together constantly, have call-out systems and coordinated strategies and so on. Survivors have restrictions, but as do killers, comparable in severity. Blight has a whole arsenal of busted add-ons that he doesn't have access to, and yet for good tournament Blights the expectation is still a 4k, the deciding factor of who wins usually being how many gens are left standing at that point. And the base balance that we measure these killers by (and that is also the infinitely more common scenario in the game's actual mode) is one where survivors don't even have communication, let alone being a coordinated team. It's actually insane that these killers can beat the best players unified within the best teams, with years of competitive experience and honed coordination and communication. No wonder they then go beat up hundreds and thousands of random groups in a row without it often even being a challenge.
It is true that they can go on long streaks or have ridiculously high winrates with just about any killer. And although I expect they would struggle to get 1600+ with any killer but Blight or 500+ perk/add-onless with any but Nurse - because these killers are still far and away above the rest, apart from maybe Spirit -, that is precisely why the other major issue is matchmaking. Any sufficiently competent killer player in this game (so not only some of the best that compete in tournaments like Knightlight or V1, but really any experienced killer player that is at least decently skilled) can get winrates that even some of the best players in a game like Starcraft can only dream of (on the game's own matchmaking), and those players are worlds better at SC than even the best DbD players are at DbD.
Like I said, the crossplay off scene when it was active had enough players for fast queues and matches filled with skill and experience. Maybe you overestimate how many players it takes at this level to match them among one another. And if they don't get matchmaked away to the next random 500-hour Meg in the first minute of their queue, they will also find each other more quickly. Plus, the streamers that actually go for ridiculous streaks like that aren't all too common, and they aren't all too popular or integral to the game's popularity either, at all. The game could absolutely survive (on twitch and otherwise) if someone that sets out to win hundreds of times in a row had to wait a relatively long time in matchmaking after a certain number of wins. And it's not like they couldn't alternate matchmaking specifics either, such as loosening things for players if they have had strict matches for the last 5 queues, or whatever. There's absolutely room and possibility to stricten matchmaking to a point where streaks like this aren't as feasible, without affecting things too much outside of the relatively small pools of high MMR players (talking about players well above the "soft" cap of course - that cap is precisely one of the major issues with the matchmaking).
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@Aven_Fallen said:
Getting a auto-failed Skill Check when getting up from a Gen is in the game for years. And the Devs refuse to fix it.
Which is funny, because when the Killer uses Overcharge, you get the chance to hit the Skill Check even when running away from the Gen. But if Overcharge is not involved, you just dont get the chance to hit it. And since the Devs dont want to fix it, we have to live with 10% progress lost randomly because you decide to stand up from a Gen.
10% progress lost, and letting the killer know where you are, where the gen you had been working on is, and that you are leaving it. This can be game-deciding and is a completely happenstance "mechanic" that has no real counterplay (you can wait until you get a skill check and leave the gen right after completing said check, because there appears to be something in place guaranteeing that you cannot get a skill check within a short period of a prior one ... but that is of course not always possible, not least because you never know when you will get a skill check next, or whether you will at all), and a completely obvious and easy solution that is already in the game (Overcharge), as you also point out. Baffling that they are not changing it, but also not so baffling, it's far from the first time simple and obvious solutions to real issues are not being implemented, and far from the only such issue left in the game, of course.
That said, if BHVR has actually ever thought about this, I can imagine that they may have come to the conclusion (presumably without much deliberation, however) that they actually want some of these RNG elements in the game that can randomly screw you over. This is the type of "horror" and "chaos" and "excitement" or "terror" or "tension" they may want to have in their game to some extent, the randomness may be intended to create a more visceral playing experience. And there are arguments for this, I could see such a point being made. Even if these random skill check failures can cause frustrations, frustration can get people emotionally invested, and not only that, the tension of "will I get a skill check if I let go now? what if I do?!" as well as the relief of "nice, I didn't get a skill check" can be conducive to emotional investment too, just as much as the "great, of course I got a skill check in just this moment!". Not to mention that this is also a source of amusement for many, joking about getting skill checks at just those times.
Doesn't mean I think it shouldn't be fixed, it's completely stupid to have in the game from a gameplay design perspective (and even from a game experience design perspective I'm sure there would be much better mechanics to promote this emotional investment), but I suppose it at least isn't impossible that this isn't one of those things the devs are simply too "lazy" or oblivious to look into.
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@Archol123 said:
https://forums.bhvr.com/dead-by-daylight/discussion/comment/3613402#Comment_3613402
I don't think the matchmaking is not strict enough, I think that there just are not enough players at that high level to find a game to put them all in...
While it is true that finding a group queueing that could compete with things such as Knightlight's Nurse and V1's Blight is nigh impossible as it takes actual tournament 4-SWF teams on voice comms trying their all to win to do so (and those teams still regularly lose in tournaments against this too), the matchmaking absolutely isn't strict enough. The type of opponents these players often get even hundreds of matches into their streaks is guaranteed to be far from the best players queueing at those times in those regions. Blight and Nurse are OP outliers, but to for instance get a 4k-at-3-gens-standing streak with Wraith, the matchmaking has to be lax. There used to be a crossplay off scene in central EU, where good players collectively decided to queue in the crossplay off pool, and it consistently led to much more competitive matches. These players are out there, they are just very rarely meeting each other in the cesspool that is general matchmaking.
We have seen what an actual strict MMR looks like when BHVR was first experimenting with it, and it took a streamer by the name of Dowsey hours to get into a lobby with his Twins, who he had been on a winstreak approaching 200 matches with. A tournament team decided to get together and queue to end his suffering, and they got him (and they ended his streak, bringing him to old Cowshed, using old instaheals and whatnot). Of course the matchmaking shouldn't be strict enough for it to take hours, but a few more minutes for people that are constantly winning is more than reasonable. Particularly for people that are on ridiculous streaks like this. If anything, 10-minute queues or whatever would discourage people from even doing these things, which are really not good for the game as they come at the cost of thousands of players being on the receiving end of something they would never be able to compete against. The "soft" cap of the matchmaking is too low, and the matchmaker prioritizes faster queues over more accurate matches. At least for the upper extremes of the MMR range, things could be made much more strict, because there you have players that are almost (or actually) never losing in the current system. These players could also preferentially be paired against SWFs.
As a more general point, it is far from only these players or winstreaks that go to show how lenient matchmaking is. Any even just competent killer wins most of their matches, go watch any sufficiently experienced killer streamer and they rarely lose. You don't have to literally win 100% of your matches for things to be one-sided, of course. A winstreak being broken is still a 99.X% winrate, and they could just go on winning for hundreds more matches afterwards. The game in its main game mode (public matches, matchmaking) is killer-sided. There are various reasons for this, although the major ones (apart from some killers being OP) is that the game actually fundamentally favours killers if the survivors are randoms that have no communication or coordination, and that the matchmaking leads to disparities in the levels of skill, experience and "tryhardiness" among the survivor groups, which is awfully detrimental to their chances of succeeding, whereas on the killer side there can be no such disparity of course. And you could take the best team in the world and replace 1 of their players with a random weak link and I guarantee a good killer would win most of every time against them, by capitalizing on that weak link.
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People discount these streaks as "not meaning anything, it's good players playing pubs lol" but in the next thread will talk about how impossibly hard killer is. I guess all of these people are playing customs against competitive teams, surely they can't be playing pubs because that would necessarily mean they are simply not good enough at the game. I mean, if good players can get 4k streaks of hundreds or even thousands of matches, even when using lower-tier killers, no perks, or at 3-4 gens left standing, and you struggle to win even just every then and again, you are having a massive skill issue. Although I suspect that while many of the people complaining about survivors being unbeatable truly just are bad, many others of them actually do already win 60 or even 70% or more of their matches, but think every single match they lose is proof that the game is skewed against them, because there was absolutely nothing they could have done differently or better.
Truth of the matter is that these streaks showcase how killer-sided the game is when you don't have full squads on voice communication and build coordination, as well as disparities in levels of skill, experience and trying to win. Sure the matchmaking is majorly at fault for these killers only vanishingly rarely being paired against SWFs of a similar level, but we are all playing on the same matchmaking - if you struggle to perform as killer in this environment and think that's because survivors are super OP, you are simply bad at the game. Acknowledging and accepting this is the first step to improving. Good killers won the vast majority of their matches even years, years back when the game actually objectively was survivor-sided. In the public match mode (i. e. the only mode everyone that talks about these kinds of things on these forums plays), the game is skill-sided first and foremost. And especially so on the killer side, because on the survivor side it obviously takes 4 skilled players coming together, which is exceedingly rare unless you have a 4-player SWF.
Ridiculous streaks like this are unthinkable in any even approachingly competitively viable game, and they should be a huge point of shame for the devs. Some of those killers are completely busted and have been for years, and the matchmaking is just not strict enough to ever give players like this an actual challenge. If you are afraid that a stricter matchmaking would make people leave, introduce a competitive and casual queue. If you are afraid that at a more strict top MMR bracket cheaters would be too frequently met, implement something that preferentially pairs people with many reports for cheating against other such players (something you already should be doing, the vast majority of submitted reports do nothing at all because an external ticket with video evidence is needed).