Asymmetrical games are hard to balance; you have a smaller, power role that has to feel meaningfully powerful, and the larger, weaker role that can't feel too helpless.

Also it's just a numbers game; every DBD match for instance is 5 people and 4 of them are the survivor players, so you're getting 4x the amount of feedback on the latter.

But the problem is also one of balance -- every survivor is generic in that their entire unique mechanical expression is their 4 perks they pick, out of a pool now of now just north of 250, so while there's a wide level of expression we can assume a baseline.

Likewise killers have 200 perks or so but also a unique powerset, movement speed, terror radius, etc. and the gap between the lowest tier killers and highest ones is massive.

So now we're getting changes that are designed to massively help survivors, essentially big second chances on every one of their failure states, which is kind of built on an implicit bias assumption that everyone only plays the best killers.

Because sure, the ability to just self-recover from the dying state if left alone makes sense for, say, Nurse or Blight, who can traverse the entire map in a matter of second.

But like, Mr. Bottom Tier himself, Trapper? The loss of the ability to be able to leave someone downed for pressure is now a massive loss.

Or the fact that the other major half of the update is the "anti-tunnel" update; tunneling being the term for just picking a survivor and trying to kill them off as fast as possible because the killer's objectives are to kill someone and also the math of the game begins to tilt to the killer's favor when the game becomes a 3v1.

And for lower-tier killers being able to pressure the survivors until the weak link shows themselves and punish them was the entire strategy to make the match doable.

I'm talking in circles here, but it's just amazing that a game can insist updates should be one-side-fits all for both sides, when one of the roles is essentially a different game depending on your choice of character.

Also to incentivize behavior on one side but just punish it on the other is a wild design choice.

Survivors who get tunneled get all kinds of benefits, survivors who get camped while hooked get all kinds of benefits, survivors who have been downed but not hooked are given all kinds of benefits.

Every failure state now has a massive list of upsides to it to mitigate how bad it feels for survivor, to the point it feels like they're now being encouraged to play hyper aggressively and recklessly.

Meanwhile killer gets... a list of minor, temporary rewards if they are intentionally spreading out who they target across the group and doing so successfully rather than targeting weaker players like logic would dictate.

And huge, crippling punishments if they don't. If you tunnel someone out of the game you lose the ability to interact with generators.

Which is what the survivors use to win and also is parts of several killers powersets and I'd guess like at least 40 of the 200ish killer perk powers you can get, including some of their best ones.

Like what the hell is Sadako suppposed to do? Her entire powerset is built around pressuring the group into making little mistakes, getting a temporary status effect called Condemned that she can make permanent by hooking them, and then when they max out on Condemned she can skip the middleman and just kill them.

Sadako's new gameplan is now deciding between playing like her powers suggest she should and eating survivors getting buffs to their ability to repair generators and eventually not being able to touch those gens herself, or playing frankly completely incompetently with her powers because the developers have decided picking on the kids bad at tag is a no-no.

Sadako's not even the only one; a lot of the lower to middle tier killers rely on making someone make a mistake, or emphasizing an aspect of the game as a skill check, and punishing the survivors for it. Sadako is the worst example but this is gonna be an issue for Pig, Legion, Ghostface, Trapper, Skull Merchant, Oni... a lot of the simpler killers.

Meanwhile the higher tiers don't care. Kaneki tunnels someone out? Who cares if the survivors gen rush when you can effectively fly across the map to hit them with zero counterplay?