Why should every killer have counterplay?
This the main reason that the majority of killers can't do anything against 4 SWF. The survivor simply can take away the killers power, this design failure is very apparent with Sadako, her teleport can be turned off by survivors, her curse stacks can be reduced, she has lullaby to warn survivors, she has to demanifest which takes long time before attack. In short Sadako can be reduced to nothing.
Another good example is One or Demo which often called the most balanced killer by survivor mains, actually almost no one plays them. Oni has no power at the start and before can get power he has to hit a survivor which can take very long time at high level play, but even then he takes eternity collecting things on map before gets powerup. Demo portals can be sealed, his stealth is pathetic announcing every moments of his with loud sound, actually anything he does is so loud, its made so that survivors knows his position all the time, his anti loop is pathetic.
Or take the poor slinger, never had any map pressure, now survivors demanded to made him even more useless, no stealth, counterable gun.
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Every killer should have counterplay because this is a video game and video games should be fun, fair, and balanced.
Everything survivors have and/or can do should also have counterplay, because this is a video game and video games should be fun, fair, and balanced.
X being too strong means X should be nerfed, not Y brought up to X's level. Y can still be buffed, just not to the extent of X.
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Uh...
Honestly, this summarizes exactly what I wanted to say.
Things without counterplay are unfun. A CoH on top of Eyrie's or IWOM's main structure, or the RPD library are unfun - because the intended counterplay doesn't work. Thus CoH needs a nerf. Post-buff Boil Over could make survivors completely unhookable, and the only counterplay was hard slugging and camping. Unfun - thus nerfed.
Sadako needs a significant buff, but she still needs to have counterplay.
Demo is a well designed and balanced killer, rarity aside (and that rarity is mostly due to unavailability not power - Hags and Twins are vanishingly rare, but far from weak).
Oni isn't rare and is actually one of the stronger killers in the game. He's just very difficult to play well.
Slinger is far from weak, he's just clunky. He needs his old TR back, for starters.
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I mean having no counterplay doesn't necessarily make a killer good. Just look at clown. You can't loop him and he can catch up rather quickly if you hold W. Is he a top tier killer?
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Killers need survivors doing mistakes. The less mistakes they make, the harder it gets for the killer. (welcome to high MMR, it su**s)
But still, every killer has counterplay, some are just harder to counter (like nurse or old spirit).
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Don't you see the problem?
Killer only reacting to survivor gameplay if a team plays well most killer can't do anything. So killer rely on other player input, survivors controlling the games.
But pre nerf slinger is unfair in your eyes because survivor couldn't counterplay, if killer won't make mistakes he should win.
But nope that's unfair, but survivors dictating everything fair.
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If we go down the route that things don't need counterplay then it should reasonably apply to both sides. Which means along with reverting various killer nerfs we should also revert DS, object, COH, MoM, and leave dead hard as is.
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What do you think should be done for killers to be able to have more changes against 4 men SWF then? Because if something is done about that, solo survivor becomes even worse than it already is.
This is why I think solo survivor needs to be compensated to a point it is close to SWF level, so then killers can be buffed and balanced accordingly.
I agree that Demo is really loud, but I don't think Demo's anti loop it's pathetic.
As for Deathslinger, I think he had the same unfortunate ending that Hillbilly had. Only a single thing needed to be changed (in Deathslinger's case, I think the only thing he needed changed was a sound cue when he points his harpoon, same thing huntress has when she lifts up her hatchets), but BHVR decided to look too much into it and change things that no one had an issue with.
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Survivors always dictacted the game. Just MMR opens more and more eyes.
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- As other games do, assign SWFs a temporary inflated MMR based on the number of people in the group. 2man SWF = 1.1x MMR. 4man SWF = 1.6x MMR. Something like that, to offset the power that communication provides.
- Indicate SWFs in the lobby, but give the other side a pretty hefty BP bonus (say...+25% for every survivor in a SWF).
- Buff solos communication wise and buff killers accordingly (it looks like BHVR are going this route).
Demo's anti-loop isn't great. Shred is mostly used to zone survivors (it's ridiculously easy to juke) or as a gap closer outside of loops. What makes him decent is shred+mobility, and his honestly pretty sexy addons.
Agreed on Slinger. He got the Freddy treatment in that a few small changes would have sufficed, but they instead hit him everywhere he was fun.
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I think it would be more reasonable to close the gap between killers as much as possible, give soloq some buffs like the proposed action icons and then buff general killer gameplay accordingly instead of trying to buff single killers that are mostly suffering for being m1 killers.
killers without any counterplay are just boring from a gamedesign pov and are bad for overall balance.
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It does seem a little absurd that a good Survivor can "counterplay" a Killer into being utterly and completely ineffectual.
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I suspect one of the things they were testing in those MMR trials the last couple of weeks is regarding 1) above where they were tweaking how the system handles MMR for swfs and also handles choosing a killer when survivors are a mix of lower and higher rated players. That’s why one of the days, for instance, everybody was seeing matches with all the survivors being relatively really high MMR, they probably were doing a test that time where swfs were rated as the rating of their weakest member (so three 2000 rated players with one 1000 rated player becomes a 1000 rated group). And another other day it was the opposite with much lower rated players,
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Because this is a game???
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That's an issue with lack of counterplay, not too much of it. Specifically certain perks (DH best example) and bad map design turn very good survivors into largely invincible ones, and those are the things that should be looked at over making killers equally unhealthy to match.
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True points about Sadako but the few I've encountered have actually been pretty decent.
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That was Day 2 and Day 3 for me, which were mostly really good, close games. I hope that's where we end up.
The final two days were complete chaos.
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That wouldnt work.
If a 3men SWF gets inflated MMR, what do you do about the 4th survivor which is solo? They also get inflated MMR and go against a better killer because they were unlucky to get paired with a 3men SWF?
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Yeah, the only really bizarre day for me during the test was I think Day 3 I had a match against four Iri 1 survivors. That’s really unusual, normally at least one of the players isn’t Iri 1. It might have been a squad but even then I can’t remember going against an all Iri 1 swf.
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In principle I agree... but how do you balance a 1v4? If every survivor is able to counter-play each killer, then it means the killers have to spend a disproportionate amount of time chasing each survivor (who each have their own 4 perks at their disposal, to the killer's 4 in total) which puts them at a disadvantage already.
The killer needs an edge in the 1v1 to be able to win chases quickly to make up for the survivor's numbers and ability to spread themselves out and work on multiple objectives simultaneously.
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Yeah, you lost me when you called Demogorgon's Shred "pathetic". If you're going to talk about something, atleast know what you're talking about
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yeah, I love Demo and Nemesis specifically because of the usefulness in a loop involving pallets.
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Yes. But their MMR will be taken into account too, meaning that the killer will be a lower MMR than if it had been a 4man. Essentially, including the inflation, the average MMR of the survivors should be approximately equal to the average MMR of the killer, to ensure that the killer has an approximately 50% chance of killing each survivor.
Honestly, by the end of the month nearly all the survivors and killers I face are somewhere in Iri. All Iri shows is that you've played the game a fair amount that month.
If you're running into Iri 1's the first week of the month...that's probably a dangerous group.
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Right, Iri in the first few days is more correlated with being good than being Iri 30 days into the period.
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So you want it to be easy mode is what you’re saying?
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Because that's... good game design
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X being too strong means X should be nerfed, not Y brought up to X's level. Y can still be buffed, just not to the extent of X.
I agree completely. Though it baffles me that people think solo survivor should be on par with SWF's strength. Just wrong. Solo could use a buff because randoms are terrible but it should not be brought up to swf lvl. Solo needs to go up and swf needs to be brought down.
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I disagree. Counterplay is good. But hard counters are bad design. The counter should be player skill. This is why Nurse and Blight are the two best-designed killers by a massive margin. The only way to beat them is to out mindgame them with player skill. They can counter both hold W and looping, but the survivor can also evade them by being better at mindgaming.
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Play a single player game with cheat codes if you don't want counterplay. Multiplayer games are not for you.
Not that I think this is a serious topic.
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I agree completely. Though it baffles me that people think solo survivor should be on par with SWF's strength.
There is a reason for this; there's absolutely zero meaningful way to nerf SWF while leaving solo untouched, because people that want to play with each other will play cross-off solo and dodge until they find each other, avoiding the penalty. It happened before, admittedly with a much smaller community, but that's why it's cross-off only. Sometimes there is no meaningful way to nerf X that would at all work, so Y and Z must be brought up to X's standard and everything else rebalanced according to this new standard. Other times, with say, Dead Hard or COH, you can nerf X and leave Y and Z untouched or give them small buffs, instead of bringing Y and Z to the standard of DH and COH.
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Solo survivor should be buffed to level of SWF (in terms of access to info), and killer should be rebalanced around every player always being a “SWF” information level-wise.
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I'm not sure many people think solo should or even could ever be buffed to MATCH swf's strength, but there's plenty of room for buffs so the two are more comparable.
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Because this is not a single player game where you can pick your auto win condition by selecting character and difficulty setting.
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its very important that every Killer has counterplay, otherwise they would be unbeatable. This is why Nurse is problematic, because she is just a powerhouse in everything.
the question we should ask is:
why should every Killer have counterplay in chase? There is nothing wrong with a Killer being an absolute powerhouse in one aspect of the game, if they therefore are weak in the other. Old Deathslinger is a perfect example of how to do this right: while the counterplay to him in chases was very limited, he had plenty of counterplay outside of them. Amazing 1v1 capabilities, but as soon as people grouped up on him he struggled a lot.
And i dont think there is anything even just remotely wrong with that formula - in fact we see it applied on a Killer like Legion too, just that the roles are reversed with them being extremely good at punishing Survivors grouping up, but struggeling heavily in the 1v1 aspect of the game (and the upcomming buffs just further expand on this). So why is it okay to have a Killer great at 1v4ing people but horrid at 1v1ing them, but its not okay to have a Killer great at 1v1ing people but horrid at 1v4ing them?
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That’s a weird way to spell “Spirit”
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Spirit has a significantly bigger power downtime and her anti loop is comparatively weaker to both. Not that she’s bad, she’s still easily #3. But why Nurse and Blight are better design. They can continuously play more so, if that makes sense.
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It means Spirit is more punished for a bad read and survivors are more rewarded for a good play. Nurse and Blight’s cooldowns are laughable how little they are.
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Every killer should have counterplay because the game should be fair and balanced for both sides. we dont need broken powers with no counterplay just because the maps are poorly design , maps tiles needs major changes imo
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Nurse and Blight cooldowns are where they should be and other killers are far too behind. Even 6-10s is sizable especially in the hands of better players. Other killers have 15-30+ for mistakes or losing a trade, which is absolutely absurd. Every single second is worth 4x that much to the survivors. 10 seconds is 40 net seconds.
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Having counterplay is good, having hard counters that deny a whole Power is not good
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I'd say the problem with every Killer having counterplay is how like half of them have their counterplay reduce them to "you effectively don't have a power for X time".
With the problem in another direction being "your power can inexplicably benefit the Survivors more than yourself" (Spirit's audio compared to Survivors' audio for instance)
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Your time as a Killer is not always 4x more worth, it depends on how many Survivors are doing gens, so it's usually around 2-3x more important
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Killers should be unhealthy to match. It is a 4 on 1. It is not supposed to be fair.
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By this argument survivor perks should 100% have no counter and we should return uncounterable stuff oh wait you wouldn't like that
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Counterplay is just another word for player agency/choice
When you're facing a certain killer, it shouldn't feel like no matter what you do in a chase it doesn't matter. When people say some killers had "No counterplay" they usually refer to killers who put you in completely lose/lose scenarios, such as the various animation lock punishing killers who basically are guaranteed a hit on survivors who are in animation locks aka windows and pallets
The natural counterplay that appeared when facing these killers became what everyone now calls "Predrop + Holding W" - wasting as much of the killer's time as possible while creating as much distance as possible.
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Killer's that lack counter play need to be weak in order to justify their oppressive power. Take the Artist, her power does not allow for counterplay and can shut down any loop with ease. In order to justify this power however she lacks the map pressure needed to slow down generators. Thus she is a killer that killer mains don't like due to her being objectively weak, and survivors don't like due to her not allowing for them to have any input in chases. . Ideally you want a killer that has extremely high potential, but is offset by the survivors ability to counter them. Blight, Hillbily, Huntress, Nurse ect. These killers are all fairly strong, far stronger then killers like Artist who lack counterplay, however survivors feel like that have more control over how a match goes and therefore has fun as well.
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