http://dbd.game/killswitch
What is a bully squad
I see killers complain about how “bully squads always abuse this” and survivors saying “killers will always call a decent team a bully squad” and it’s just annoying st this point.
Personally I have a criteria for a squad to be a bully squad.
1: using meta or broken perks
The team has to be using the best perks available at the time. Most likely gen rush and chase perks but sometimes a different perk peaks through.
2: at least 1 flashlight
1 is the minimum but most will have 2-3 or use flashbang to hide their plan. Using these to blind and force a drop. If they all have a mix of these then they become a flashy squad.
3: have the dedicated chaser (optional)
While most have the entire team chase there will always be that one survivor who keeps trying to get a chase. T-bagging and following you is normal and they will always run at you.
4: they sweat
The survivors are playing like they are winning money. Pulling all the comp moves or just gen rushing and rushing to shack or another strong loop once they see you.
5: this all must be done maliciously
calling everyone who has this style of play a bully squad is an easy way to make a us vs them debate. To be a bully squad they must try and do this all with the purpose of winning at any cost, or at your expense. Being blinded once or having one player be good at chase doesn’t mean they are a bully squad.
if I missed something you think makes a squad a bully squad or you think I was wrong about something please tell me. I’m open to changing my mind on this stuff.
Comments
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To me a bully squad isn't just a team running full meta and trying their hardest to win, that's just a sweaty SWF. I think a bully squad doesn't care that much about winning and is intentionally trying to make the game as miserable and annoying as possible for the killer. Coordinated builds to run the killer into multiple head on stuns, power struggle/background player uncounterable pallet saves, double locker flashbangs or abusing audio occlusion on bangs with indoor map offerings. Sabo squads sending you to Eyrie etc
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IMO the term "Bully Squad" has no meaning anymore. Point 1 to 4 of your list are not bullying or anything similar. It is either winning the game (using good Perks, sweating, dedicated chaser) or just having fun at the game (using flashlights). If all 5 points are fulfilled, you can call it a Bully Squad, but this is only due to Point 5.
And IMO the term is not really justified anymore. Most people who talk about Bully Squads dont encounter a Bully Squad, but they lost a game and therefore the others bullied them. I have read people say that Flashlight Saves or Pallet Saves are bullying, or "Genrushing" or just being good in a chase.
For me, a Bully Squad is a bunch of players who dont play to win or to maximize points, but only play to make the other side miserable as possible. Those people still exist and they are on both sides, but they are rare. I just think that using the term "Bully Squad" has become old for at least 5 years now. Back in the day, in old old DBD, Bully Squads were more common since they were able to toy with the Killer while still winning the game. This is just not possible anymore and even if some people might want to engage with the Killer as much as possible, they cannot really do that if they want to win. And most people want to win and not just tease the Killer a bit and then lose.
So yeah, doing it in a malicious way and only playing to ruin the fun of others - those are players who bully. But anything else… Nah.
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A team that wants to have fun instead of holding m1 for minutes
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Probably just focusing on blinding, BMing, stunning, or making saves against the killer more than doing anything else. That does not mean that they don't do gens. They do this specifically because the gens are so easy and quick to complete, and they have the time and ability to "spice things up" aka engage in group bullying. Some argue, "They're just trying to make the killer mad so he makes a mistake." Really? Even after the match is complete when they're still talking trash, they're still mindgaming the killer?
If the survivors really just wanted to win, they'd do the gens quick and leave, because it really is that simple for them at a certain point. I don't think anybody is calling decent teams bully squads. But the level of frustration you face is about the same, because the experience is the same: you can't do anything. Whatever play you make, the survivors will capitalize and be that much closer to winning. It never feels like you're not losing, until the very end when you actually aren't. 1 bad chase is unrecoverable even by doing lots of good chases. The flip side of that means survivors screwing up chases over and over can be rectified by 1 decent chase, and suddenly they're winning again.
Killers perhaps overestimate how common bully squads are because they feel isolated against that threat. I almost never see toxic survivors getting reprimanded by their teammates. I'll do it. I'll say, "You didn't have to be toxic." and they'll come back with, "Ehuhhehh! My game, my way of playing! Don't tell me wat to do!" with like 1 functioning brain cell, which they use to be toxic on the 1 game they're good at. I'd push back against toxic killers too, but they're rare for me, have messages blocked, or I decide, "You know what? Not worth my breath. Let him have. Allow him his blissful ignorance until he faces a team strong enough to just crush him." If only there were a way to put all the toxic survivors and toxic killers in their own queue.
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Reminds me when I asked people to define what gen rushing is. And the answer was very much, "It is what I say it is." Meaning everyone has a different definition of what constitutes as a Bully Squad, as Gen Rush, as BM, as Toxic etc. Each thing can be broken down piece by piece, but not very many people in the community want to do that. (It does drive me crazy because in order for a word to have a definition it needs to fit a certain criteria with a widely agreed upon meaning.) So all that to say, there really isn't such thing. The only term majoirty agree on is Tunneling, but everything else is very much personal opinion. Because as it stands you can currently call it X and I can call it Y and we're both as wrong as we are right, just like everyone else.
"When everyone's super - no one will be."
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This is one of those terms that literally nobody agrees on in the community. Other common phrases that people still bicker about the definition of is tunneling, slugging, camping, sweaty, genrushing, BMing and many more I am not remembering off the top of my head.
It should also be noted that there's two different kinds of "bully squad", there's the type that maliciously tries to make your match as miserable as possible by holding you in that match for as long as possible, something that harkens back to the days of content creators like Ochido popularizing exploits to ruin the game for others. That to me is a bully squad. A group of people set out to well…bully you. They want to hold you hostage and prevent you from playing the game, all the while BMing and generally being obnoxious. Thankfully this isn't really common anymore as BHVR has patched out a fair amount of stuff that is easily abusable for survivors. There's still some examples such as people forcing specific kinds of grabs at lockers to get easy flashlight saves, but generally those are few and far between and also have a fair amount of counterplay if you're smart and quick on your feet.
Now another type of term (and one I don't see thrown around often anymore but used to be much more common) is a "Death Squad". This is a team that is STACKED and has every advantage in their favor. But they're INCREADIBLY rare. While I did get two yesterday, those were the first two I had seen in literal years. For reference one was a full comp team just tearing apart pubs and the other was a 4 man that involved
- Two syringes
- One styptic
- A BNP
- A commodious with maxed charges.
3 of them had Unbreakable/DS, ye olde small pp build. Combined with Up The Ante and Slippery Meat, along with 3 luck offerings and an Eyrie offering.
As it is safe to assume, that match was over in under 5 minutes and I lost pretty heavily. Most people saying they encounter "Bully Squads" I assure you are not dealing with matches like that often.
TLDR, It's a term that has virtually no meaning because it's used incorrectly to compensate a bad player or as a catch all term for a slightly sweaty SWF.1 -
The only thing most people on these forums agree on…
Is that problematic killer behavior, like camping, slugging, and tunneling, is incredibly easy for any killer to do, in any game, with any perks, and any addons… and that the requirements for problematic killer behavior is so very very low, that people can constantly see problematic killer behavior in just about every game they play.
…Meanwhile, problematic survivor behavior, like gen rushing and bully squads, requires an incredible amount of specific requirements, and most games can't ever meet the requirements for problematic survivor behavior. This means that survivors can pretty much do anything they want, even if they know it's super unfun for the killer, because it's not considered problematic. Survivors can literally spend an entire game making fun of a killer, and being disrespectful to them, because they don't meet the super high requirements of "bully squads", so it's considered acceptable behavior.
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If you have to ask then you never faced one.
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A Bully Squad is a little odd, because you don't actually see them that often. For the most part it's a term that people, typically killer-bias players have coined on matches that were difficult. An example I would have is where I got my butt handed to me as Vecna on a map the survivors sent me to. Was it kind of sweaty? yeah, but nothing near bullying. They wanted to win, so they brought what made sense to them (map offerings, items, perks, etc.)
Your final point of being malicious is really what "makes" a bully squad. As a bully squad isn't inclined to win, the true goal is to mentally degrade the player being targeted (survivor or killer) to the point where even if they do win, they don't feel good about it.
A common example would be using bugs to hold the game hostage while taunting it, or performing activities in bad faith like spamming the unhook animation on someone to prolong their death and hold them on the hook for an extended period of time, using perks to reveal your teammates and expose them to the killer (it happens more than you think in solo queue). Or intentionally sending yourself to problematic map bugs to gain an upper hand like "fat shaming" spots where the killer can't move through but the survivor can.
Again, this doesn't happen all that often, it's once every so many months that you might experience this. Where the stars align and a bug goes unnoticed and not kill switched.
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Much like tunneling this term lost most of its meaning years ago.
Also I do not think this conversation can possibly be helpful.
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I see bully squads as only those groups who try to make it impossible for the killer to play the game in a normal way by constantly blinding, stunning, or doing other saves or sabos. They try to make it impossible to hook, and generally should be bringing WGLF, an expo or two, and perks to make it hard for the killer to hook or keep them down. Head-On and Flashbang are common since they make it possible to repeatedly annoy the killer. Usually an oak offering and a one for a strong map are there too.
Teams that are efficient are just efficient. They make me learn to play better :)
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I agree with the assessment that bully squads are mostly teams whose main goal is to annoy the killer. I get them occasionally, and as you said, I don't even remember the last time a team doing that finished all the gens against me. Their goal is to annoy the killer though, and the sad thing is that usually I get to the post-game chat and there's just an eerie silence.
Most of my games end in ggs, wp, etc. from my side and the other. But these teams swarm around the killer, making pickups much too risky and forcing a slugfest until the killer is able to force some of them away or slug them all. In my experience, nobody is happy at the end of these matches; the survivors usually get 4ked, and I'll usually be annoyed that I had to spend time playing that kind of match. I'd much rather do chases, get people on hooks, or get shown how to play the game better :)
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If you can't deal with a group of survivors that interact with you constantly you aren't as good as you think.
"Bully Squads" are a trial of fire for the killer: They will either have the easiest match of their lives or the hardest, success rate completely depends on the killer.
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I'd argue that the Death Squads are more common in this day and age.
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average killer player will consider everything they lose against a "bully squad", but the true definition of bully squad is just a:
squad that puts their victory priority aside and focuses more on trying to tilt the killer as much as possible so that they either force the killer to DC or simply make them look as miserable as possible.
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Going to agree with some others that a bully squad is one that isn't interested in doing the gens, they just want to harass the killer.
A squad that dedicates time to slowing down the killers objective so they can accomplish their own is a strategy. It may, or may not, be a balance issue, but that's a different thing.
It's like killers that slug. Slugging and rushing to stop a gen from being finished, perfectly acceptable. Slugging for the 4k, annoying, but BHVR leaves it in the game. Slugging and letting the survivors just bleed out for 4 minutes, bullying and toxic.
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I have two criteria for describing a team as a bully squad:
- Must be at least 3 players coordinating
- They prioritize frustrating/harassing/clowning on the killer over completing objectives
That's it. Sweaty, coordinated teams that BM aren't necessarily a bully squad if they prioritize the objectives.
Bully squads don't care about winning, they just want to feel powerful and get the killer tilted.
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