http://dbd.game/killswitch
Survivors needs to coordinate less every new big patch and this is not good.
Hi! Hope everyone is doing fine.
I know this is a hot take but i want to give my two cents about the current state of the game and how its being balanced - specially considering the 9.2.0 PTB.
Although i'm not contrary on most of the changes the game have been giving for survivors recently - antifacecamp feature, removal of hook grabs, basekit endurance after unhooking - looks like BHVR been more and more changing the game so that survivor needs to be less better at cooperating with each other. Let me explain.
When i've started playing - around Sept 2020 - you needed to be very smart about unhooking. If you unhooked in the killer's face, the killer could just down the unhooked and put him/her back on the hook; if you had Borrowed time you could try more aggressive plays, but you had to take care if you were playing against Freddy, Wraith or Ghostface (since BT only worked under Terror Radius). So, unhooking need to be done smartly, otherwise you could just throw the match.
With the basekit BT change, survivors started just unhooking whenever they can, being the killer near or not (specially in SoloQ). Unhooking still needs to be done smartly - since you can kill your teammates depending on how you do it - but, because of the basekit BT, many don't mind too much how to do it.
Before the antifacecamp feature, if a killer were camping, you would need at least two survivors to do a rescue from the hook, otherwise you could get grabbed and end the match right there. So, the smart move was just to look around before unhooking, see if the killer is camping or if someone is coming to the rescue, to try the double save.
With the advent of the antifacecamp feature, killers now will mostly proxy camp - because if they facecamp the survivor will jump from the hook - which requires less coordination to counter, since, now that we don't have hook grabs, you can just run to the hook and do a trade - in the worst scenario.
Most of these changes come to address aspects of the game that require skill and coordination to counter. I'm not defending hook grabs or face camp, but i feel that knowing what your teammates are doing and when is the right moment to act is getting less meaningful every patch.
If the current version of the 9.2.0 goes live, the game will reward even more sloppy and rushed gameplay, since you can save your teammate with no care and the killer can't go after him/her or the killer loses the match. You see how the changes are going? The best knowledge the survivor must have - the macro play knowledge - is becoming obsolete every patch, as the game starts doing this for you.
Save in the killer face? No problem, the unhooked get endurance and can get into a loop. Saved your teammate without any care on how he will get out of the situation? No problem, he cannot be killed or the tide of the match will change drastically.
My point is: the game are giving less and less incentive for survivors to get better at the 1v4 aspect of the game, which is core to this game design. People are learning less and less on how to play optimally with teammates because they can rely on mechanics that fill the skill gap for them.
I wish BHVR focused more on giving SoloQ ways to coordinate than just adding mechanics that do that for survivors. I'm not against anti-face camp or basekit BT but i do think the game keeps getting balanced in a way that the essential aspect of coordination to win against the killers is being forgotten more and more, as if by design the game wasn't focused on a 1v4 experience but on a 1v1 experience.
Comments
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The game is designed around and balanced around the fact that survivors cannot communicate with each other.
So I don't think it's fair to criticize survivors for losing when they cannot read minds.
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Then they need to nerf survive with friends.
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It's a "cake and eat it" situation.
You can't have a spooky game of hide and go seek that's also a comp game of tag any more than you can have a game with fractured teamwork where you're all meant to be a solid unit. There are many ways to bridge that gap. Better matchmaking is a major one. Adding comms to the game is another that would have a big impact. But if those are off the table, you do have to ease up on Survivor or else that solo vs SWF gap only grows larger, despite the kill rates.
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Playing in a party doesn't make you magically better at the game. They're not all on comms either.
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Likewise, I've performed far better with strangers I've had synergy with over my friends. Then again, my friends and I fart around and sabotage each other at times too. 😵
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Its not reading minds, its just basic game sense. Because if you know the best strategy in that situation, most of the times the best players will play around that.
It like "choosing" who will go for a unhook in SoloQ: its a common knowledge that the person with less hooks and working in the gen with the smaller amount of progress - or closer to the hook - should go to the save. If you are on death hook you should avoid being chase by the killer at all costs, so going for a save in that situation will have destroy the match for your teammates.
Coordination doesn't require comms, but get easier with more information available.
As i've said above, coordination doesn't require comms. If perk like Bond, Better Together and specially Kindred were basekit and any other changes that give info on what your teammates are doing SoloQ would be so much better since you would play properly on the information you have. Also, 4 solid SoloQ players are good enough to go against most of the killers in the game. Survivors should have better matchmaking and more info instead of these changes. But lets see how things will play out.
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Lack of coordination is the primary problem for survivors. There's no VC (and I don't want there to be) so it's hard to know what your teammates are doing except with certain perks and HUD notifications. Survivors are much weaker than killers. They're each a quarter of a whole (which is why early tunneling is such a problem.) In soloq—which I'd assume is the majority of matches--a team with one or two weak links is doomed, even against terrible killers. It's logical for the devs to keep factoring these issues in and make changes accordingly.
I would love to see some changes to survivor that encourage genuine teamwork. Big incentives to do shared tasks or to get people off hook and out the door in endgame instead of letting them die, since it currently has zero negative effect on the ones who leave. As it is, gen speeds reduce with mutliple people on them. Seems to me it should be the opposite. It's currently more efficient to spread out, which isn't very team-orientated. There could even be tasks that require two or more survivors to work at in order to complete them.
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You're joking, right?
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Hay you put a lot of effort into this thread and it's a good read and collage of all the nerfs that killers have received through out the years. But I sure some one could easily create a similar one for survivors using everything taken away from them from 99% hooks to instant flashlights to MFT haste. The list is endless no doubt from both sides as things are "balanced"
But Behavior has always had a vision of this game being a fun casual type of game. I feel the word "party" demeans it a little but the fact no competitive mode was added after all this time speaks volumes.. with that being said a game where a participant is killed super early in is not something they ever liked about the game. And trust me it's really ######### when your playing with your friend in a duo and your tunneled off in the weaker player so it made sense that it would be me but I've waited a collective of HOURS in spectator mode… some times he just "dies" so we can move on but that makes it even worse for the other two players.
The attempted solution of course correcting killers to not tunneled is huge in my opinion it allows me to play a few game with my friend that actually will be meaningful if they need to keep buffing killers to balance this so be it. IDC if they get 15% haste for 2 minutes each first hook they get. But we will have to wait and see .
Ps. My escape rate is 32
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Please do elaborate on your argument.
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They are correct.
Which is more frightening to you and why?
A group of 4 Solo Survivors who are individually excellent but they have no communication.
Or
A 4-man SWF with comms, but four average-slightly below average players.
as an aside, good to see you back
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4 man swf with comms.
Comms are the single most powerful ability in the game. By itself, it makes every other information perk redundant and obsolete. As long as one survivor has eyes on the killer/totem/whatever, that means that they all have that knowledge. Without comms, a survivor might know that a gen somewhere on the map is mostly done. With comms, they'll know exactly which gen it is and if the killer is still nearby. Survivors with comms don't need to run any information perks, and can instead load up on gen progression, healing, or second chance perks. Survivors with comms can also coordinate on hook saves, slugs, heals, resets, etc. They are more efficient on gens because nobody ever has to waste any time. They all know what each other are doing and can coordinate to always make the optimal play.
Comms hard counter many killer playstyles. The reason I never run anything with Blindness, Undetectable or Oblivious is because these status effects are completely pointless if the survivors have comms. Stealth Killers essentially have no power against survivors with comms. If one survivor finds your totem, they now all know where it is and someone else can easily cleanse it while you are chasing the first survivor. They can also split up to find high value totems. Four survivors splitting up to find a Devour totem is a lot more effective than four individual survivors each individually searching.
I don't play weak killers anymore. I'm confident enough in my Spirit phases that I can win individual 1v1 chases, even against good survivors. Winning the 1v4 against a team that has information on everything and everyone in the match that can easily coordinate on gens/resets/etc while also getting extra perk slots due to not needing any info? That's a lot tougher.
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That's so interesting. I might come back and revisit this later, but I've got to sleep so I'll say this.
I would rather play against players with comms than 4 good players.
the true strength of SWF, to me I suppose, has always been pre-selection of teammates. I can guarantee that I won't get a new player or a bad player as a teammate, and that is FAR more valuable than comms.
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But you didn't say 4 man swf with bad players. You said 4 man swf with average players. Average players and good players can both do gens at the same speed. Swfs can do gens faster than those with no comms.
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this is true, I did say that. Still, the gulf between average and good is immense. Average players are massivel inefficient, even with comms. Good players arent perfect, but they know how to rotate for the save and read the UI lol.
SWF does not offer gen speed bonuses. I suppose I should've said no perks either, but gen perks arent really meta.
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Swf doesn't offer gen speed bonuses. They do offer knowledge on which gens to work. If my teammate gets chased off of a gen that's 90% done, I can leave my 10% gen and go finish his while the killer is chasing him. Can't do that without comms.
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This is blow out of proportions. Your assumptions require not a 4 man with comms team but a highly cracked team equivalent to a SWAT team... You need like full understanding of the maps layout, have a full time scout that is following the killer. And a bunch of other stuff. Also how does comms ruin stealth killers anymore then any other team?
Here is what my opinion comms give survivors.
They can communicate that you are camping them wether slugged or on hook.
They coordinate hook safes to reduce no one going for the save or everyone.
You can call out to a injured survivor who escaped chase and heal them. (Failed escape would just get healed by unhooker)
The rest of your stuff is wild. Calling out a hex Totem location not in a really well landmarked location would be a nightmare to explain... Probably resulting in more time wasted then actually gained.
As for the rest of your claims the UI HuD gives almost all of that. You can see a gen close to completion you should have a general idea by end of game where the last few gens are.. and at 5-3 gens this seems less useful. Blindness oblivious and undectable.. are still all strong you can make an argument about blindness but oblivious and undetectable absolutely still have value... Your argument assumes that survivors have x-ray vision of the map and can give real time coordinates to each other at all times. Your absolutely just going to show up with u detectable and get them jump of them still especially on indoor maps.
Now I think it's important to mention swf escape rates are not even magnitudes higher then solo que. It's a few % and like 8-9% at the highest MMR last time I checked.
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Lol. Are you seriously using the argument, "Not all survivors use the comms that well!"
Yeah, well not all Nurses are that good at blinking. Guess we need to give her a bunch of buffs then, right?
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so much for teamwork. Everyone is becoming a one man army .
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You're assuming that team collaboration is a given. As someone who played survivor for years, it is not. You can try and force team cooperation, like the devs did with healing changes a couple of years ago (making it more efficient to heal each other than to heal yourself), but the recent healing buffs show that clearly didnt work the way they planned. There are plenty of lone wolf players and there always will be. The devs cant tell survivors they need to rely on their team mates when they cant guarantee that.
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I mean if we want to bring comp teams into the conversation.. survivors have like a max 219? That is the literal seal team 6 situation taking 4 highly coordinated people to get 219. Mean while one dude on blight knocks out a 1900+. Your arguments hinge on the best of the best but using that metric means killers are highly over preforming.
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Lol. You do realize he's a fog whisperer, right? Have you noticed that you never see a fog whisperer playing against comp players? Otz and Tru3 play at roughly the same time on the same servers, yet Tru3 is consistently against comp survivors, and Otz is against potatoes that run into walls.
Just a funny little thing I noticed.
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To be entirely fair, I doubt the amount of losses would bring it down to that 219 number. And the amount of effort to create and implement a queue "filter" (I don't even know what to call it) seems highly unlikely that it would even be a thing.
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I thought it was proven that Fog Whisperers were given preferential queues? That they were given shorter queue times and more favorable mmr.
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Otz and Tru3 play at roughly the same time on the same serversKnightlight's team hit Otz about two months ago (going off Youtube postings), they hit Tru3 about four months ago that I can see.
Is there any evidence or we just going on feeling for the conspiracy theory?
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They're in diff regions though.
Tru3 plays in London servers at peak UK times and Otz probably plays in Frankfurt servers.
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Sure you can, the HUD shows you what percentage the gen was.
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But it doesn't show you WHERE it was. You need something like Bond for that.
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or good game sense.
Good players generally know where the smart gens to work on are. Edge gens first middle last ect ect
It'd take longer, but they could absolutely still find it. Probably within the chase too, considering its likely to last longer.
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Which would take longer, and leave the killer more time to make a play. Ergo… gens would take longer
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Not necessarily.
If you use your SWF comms to say, "hey work on gen in shack" people will know where that is.
People will not know which cornfield gen your talking about on Rotten Fields, for example. God forbid you go to Lerys.
Ergo, in the worst case scenario there could be time saved, but in all likelihood, it will average out to be about the same.
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It's the first I've heard of it, but it could be possible. I just see the scope being larger than it seems and I don't see BHVR doing that very successfully.
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