Quick Fix: SWF Penalty

Aerys

To keep this short and awful, SWF, what is it? Where did it come from? How can we erase it from this Earth? Worry not, for it isn't the demon we all consider it to be, it's just friends being friends and wanting to play together. I for one am part of the group who consider it to be rather game breaking however as facing four randoms at rank 1 vs facing a 4-man SWF at rank 1 is extremely day and night in comparison and there's an extremely simple reason for this; communication. Simply put, if you can communicate via voice in DbD you're essentially using the most broken perk there could be. But friends are going to voice and that's not something you can change from happening nor should you. However, there does need to be something done that allows for this obvious advantage they have to be dealt with, and while segregating them off into their own SWF mode area would be real nice it isn't practical for queue time reasons.

So, that brings us to how one can go about it to ensure that you reduce the power of a SWF while not catching solo players up in the mix at the same time. For that I suggest a very simple solution and it has to do with what most SWF's excel in, Gen Rushing, for as legitimate a strategy it may be it certainly takes away from the game when you know with 100% certainty that the Killer is at a specific location at all times and that you can work around them with ease, popping Gens left and right while your teammates relay information you'd typically not have in the game. To this end, if a SWF is able to Gen Rush so efficiently it's silly, perhaps negating their ability to do so would be the most reasonable course of action, that is to say nerfing their repair speed while in a group by -15/-20/-25% for a duo/trio/4-man. People outside the SWF would experience no "penalty" and so this would only specifically target the SWF group, who I might remind you have essentially a super power and thus having a penalty simply evens it out.

While one might argue "But if they did that then people wouldn't want to play together with their friends!" I can assure you that friends will still play together regardless and that even the maximum of -25% repair speed for all 4 survivors would be minimal to the experience and that they'd still do just fine, it would simply give the Killer a chance to breathe. If anyone would like to expand on this concept feel free to do so, perhaps there's a more subtle and nuanced way to nerf them than this, or perhaps we should compensate them for their penalty via a bonus SWF BP gain, I'm uncertain simply because nerfing them is balancing the gameplay yet perhaps people won't understand how strong communication is as an outside the game perk.

Orion

I like this in principle, but in practice, gen rushing is not a SWF-only problem. Furthermore, the issue with SWF is not gen rushing, but rather the fact that they have knowledge of the map and events on a scale they shouldn't have. They know when one of them is being chased and where they are. They know where everyone is and what they're doing. They know where the Killer put down traps. They know where the Killer is at any given point, as long as one of them sees him.

Aerys

Indeed, as I said it's pretty much a super power for all of them to know those things at any given point, but this is the best I could come up with while not nerfing them into the ground or punishing solo players who happen to be also playing with them (albeit does slightly in a way). All I know is that getting a 4-man SWF with 4 toolboxes = gg lol

Tiersis

I think that as a killer, when you are in a chase with one SWF member, the auras of all other players in that group should be revealed. That seems fair.

CornChip

@Aerys I was thinking the same thing today.. A 5% penalty to gen repair speed to each player in a party stackable to 20%.

If there are two duos each duo pair have a 10% debuff

3 party is 15% for each player in the party and the 4th solo has no penalty.

I think your idea Aerys is great and would help close the gap without ruining the game for everyone. 

Obviously the numbers would have to be tested and adjusted accordingly by the devs. 

Good idea Aerys. Simple and plausible. 

milo77727

Tiersis said:

I think that as a killer, when you are in a chase with one SWF member, the auras of all other players in that group should be revealed. That seems fair.

That would promote tunneling injured or hiding survivors. Say you're injured and your friend runs the killer nearby. Killer can see your aura and ditch your friend to go after you because you're injured.

Also makes distractions for unhooking or cleansing completely useless. It basically gets rid of teamwork in general.

Aerys

@milo77727
Indeed, though I've posted in other threads out of order and already responded to this, revealing the Aura of other Survivors in the SWF just doesn't work for the multitude of reasons that it breaks the game to some degree (Perks based on revealing aura being garbage, multiple Survivor strategies being nullified, etc). At the end of the day there needs to be some sort of soft nerf, one that doesn't interfere with the gameplay all that much but allows the Killer a chance to compete.