Solo survivor is getting more and more hopeless
2.3K hours, over 2K as solo-survivor and sadly I can no longer say I see any semblance of light at the end of this tunnel.
Look, I understand SWF is an issue, and I am not going to tip-toe around it. Significant changes were needed, and had been needed for a while with regards to it. However, there is also the other side of the coin: solo survivors, who have put in thousands of hours into the game, and whose gameplay is likely way closer to the original idea behind DBD, than anything any SWF team does today.
Anytime developers make a change to a perk abused by SWF, they use a broadsword, and the result is always the same: killers, no longer having to account for a previous disadvantage against SWF, now take every chance to get their fill.
Was Decisive Strike an Issue? Of course, but for solo-survivors that perk was hardly ever part of the top 4. After all, one first had to get unhooked for it to activate, Solo-survivor's gameplay does not operate the same way as SWF, any time we go into a match , we have no idea if we are going to get rescued on our 1st, or 2nd hook, yet we still have to work on the objective like usual because that is the only thing that matters in terms of gameplay.
For some of us Mori change was not as significant as it likely was for SWF teams; we still often die on 1st hooks for no discernable reason. Kindred has been a part of my build for the last 1.5k hours, and I still often don't get rescued in spite of killer's aura being nowhere near the hook and thus the rescue being more or less safe. Hence, why I also bring Spine Chill, which does 2 things: a) let's me know if the killer is actually approaching my generator or I can keep working on it, which is the obvious one, and b) the few extra seconds of warning it affords might allow me to avoid/deceive the killer for a few additional seconds, which very often happens to be the difference between getting rescued at the 1st or the 2nd hook stage.
After all my played hours, I can call a match inside of 60seconds with uncanny accuracy. Both killers and expreienced survivors know that the first 60 seconds are the most important regarding the ultimate outcome. Now imagine having the bad luck of spawning the closest to the killer and being the first one chased....
At red ranks, and especially playing solo with at least half of our perks skewed towards preemptive information, chases tend to last only as long as "they absolutely need to". What do I mean by that?
Anytime we push a chase past a critical point, the result is far worse; the killer - having little to no idea if survivors have been working on generators during the chase, will often simply assume they have been. If the chase lasts longer than 20 seconds, the notion of multiple generators about to pop will be on every killer's mind. At that point, taking one survivor out as quickly as possible will be the only viable strategy and I can't blame them for it. After all, they used to also have to account for DS and the additional time penalty it would cause. Now, imagine getting hooked and then Kindred letting you know that nothing has been getting done, 4 or maybe even 5 gens remain, and 1,2 or maybe even all 3 other survivors inside of the match are already in hatch mode.
What are we suppose to do? go straight to dying on 1st hook or worse disconnect ?
Look, long story short all I am trying to say is that everytime SWF are meant to get a nerf of some sort, we get punished through killers no longer having to take that previous disadvantage into account, who in the end are simply getting a buff from our solo-survivor perspective.
We have gotten accustomed to every poorly designed thing in the game: exposed-status-causing ultra rares like pinky finger, iri heads that are even worse, moris (when they were effective), camping, tunneling, insidious bubba, and a hundred other things. Yet honestly - since major ruin rework - we have not gotten any type of consideration (not to mention buff) in terms of solo-survivor gameplay. Please understand that designing/equipping perks that do nothing but help teammates is hardly beneficial to solo-survivors, yet can be exploited by SWF. In fact, it often causes killer-mains to vent their frustration both inside of DBD through their gameplay, and on this forum.
All the possible changes in the next update seem outright scary to me: Open-Handed and Borrowed Time changes are terrible for solo-survivors. Lucky Break may have potential with Iron Will but it requires 2 perk spots. I don't think Small Game change was something that required developers' attention but thats just me. On the other hand, Demogorgon getting nothing but buffs and Freddy's one addon turning into Stridor inside of dream world.
Comments
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Just wait for the influx of new RE SQ players :D
On a side note, the change for OoO made it less obnoxious in SWF but slightly better in SQ since most killers make use of BBQ.
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As certain, unfortunately common SWF squads beat the mercy out of killers, it's the solo's that they end up hurting the most.
Not that they care. Some people really like to blur the line between having fun with friends and having a massive power trip.
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For the past 2 years I've been writing on DBD forums about solo being a horrible experience, but almost nothing has changed since then. Devs added some perks that are supposed to help solo survivors. But you don't fix solo gameplay with perks, perks are designed for fun, not to fix game design problems and we can't equip 20 perks. It doesn't seem that DEVs really care about solo. It's no fun when 80% of all your games end in 3k-4k, so I stopped playing DBD.
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