Killers please stop complaining about SWF

That's the funny thing, most people assume it's swf because they got stomped.

I've had many people accuse me of communicating things, when I did not. I simply played the game the same freaking way I do with my friends.

I wouldn't call it unethical, but quite literally by definition it is cheating. Cheating is defined as an unfair advantage, look it up. Whether the devs allow it or not is irrelevant to its definition.

You're right the devs should do something about it, but blaming a loss on SWF is completely reasonable when that could have been very much the reason why as they are indeed "cheating". They could have simply played bad yes, but to say they shouldn't call out an imbalance in the game as to having a huge effect on its outcome is unreasonable. Yes even just friends messing around is a huge advantage.

In the end the blame should be at bhvr for not balancing the game around it and not at the players though.

I just want more bloodpoints for facing swf groups. Bhvr won't ever change them so give me mah extra bloodpoints.

And then people wonder why killer mains hate survivors. Face camp them with Leatherface next time.

Killer mains don't understand for some reason if they remove/debuff SWF the game will die.

Maybe they don't have friends or something because they play only killer.

This game is alive because SWF.

Right! You remove SWF and no one would play the game anymore.

And here I am just wanting an option to turn off SWF matches.

It’s infuriating to spend the entire match doing gens and healing the strays that run over to me (while on a gen) teabagging until I stop what I am doing to heal them just so that they can run back over to taunt the killer.

When the fun of taunting the killer and getting hit wears off, the killer then gets ran to me. I get downed and hooked no matter how long I run the killer and left to die on the hook while the SWF wants to teabag at the gate. While not having done a single full gen.

It’s not just killers that hate most SWF, it’s the solo’s that are tired of it too

Just let the killer know how many people are together in the lobby

Those are terrible reasons.

1) Voice chat would be optional and a ping system would be implemented for people who don’t want to use it. Easy solution.

2) Discord is not a part of DBD. Built in comms are required to be able to rebalance the game around them, which is a vital step to fix the colossal balance issues that would otherwise never go away.

Relying on third party services like discord simply leaves the game fundamentally broken as the devs can only balance around solo queue, meaning killers have to be weak, making them terrible vs people who do choose to use comms.

So the devs’ rationale for not having comms amounts to a misunderstanding of how their game works on a fundamental level, and catering to an extreme minority of players at the expense of not only everyone else, but the balance of the game as a whole.

Not surprising to hear at all.

2) isn't correct. The devs themselves use third party comms when they play, so they also presumably use them for internal testing. And they can relatively safely assume that the great majority of swfs use their own comms, so any game data involving swfs also use comms. Therefore leaving comms out of DbD as a built in feature has no impact on how easy or hard it is to balance the game.

As far as 1) goes... 🤷‍♂️ I'm just passing on what I remember them saying in dev chat about it.

When they last put out stats (like over two years ago) they stated about half of all survs were in at least a two-man SWF. No doubt that number has increased with just how lovely it is in solo queue these days.

Also keep in mind the vast majority of the DBD playerbase is on one of the various consoles, where the role killer is played much less so there's an abundance of survs, plus party chat is built in and very simple to use.

SWF are here to stay, in the same queue as solos, and comms are here to stay too, as there's not much the devs can do at all to disrupt it either.

We need to work within those realities and frame our suggestions with them in mind, just as we need to keep the entire playerbase in mind too.

Then don't complain if killers continue to complain about SWF

I didn't say you're incorrect that SWF is a balance issue, I said you're incorrect that the devs not having voice chat built into the game is affecting their ability to gather data on it.

Also you're incorrectly assuming the devs are "balancing around solo". That's not the case, they're balancing based on how they internally play the game and the actual game data, both of which include many, many games that are on comms. The devs themselves regularly play on comms in fact, so why would you think that's not a factor when they're balancing things they're working on?

The issue with swfs isn't that the devs don't use comms (they do) and it's not that they don't have comms built into the game (because their test data already has lots and lots of games that have swfs on comms). It's that the fundamental advantages that comms give versus people that don't play on comms is difficult to actually work around unless they maybe had from the beginning gone into development with the eye toward having persistent buffs for solo players the people in swfs don't get to level the playing field. Without that many things they add to the game will have slightly disparate impacts on both solo and swf players that might be intractable - buff something that's weak for solo players and it becomes too strong for swfs, and vice versa if you nerf things that are too strong for swfs but not for solos.

So yes, they should address solo versus swf balance disparity, but adding comms to the game as a built in feature does absolutely nothing toward that end.

The issue is your missing the main point of all the complaints. It's not playing with your friends it's not wanting to punish anyone like that. It's the fact that SWFs use Discord to have constant surveillance on the Killer at all times and can plan accordingly.

Killers want something done about that and not SWFs in general.

Not only that but say if the killer is running thana, i’d fall asleep.

Again, you're assuming that the devs are "balancing around solo queue", but that's not correct. Literally half of all games include a 2-, 3- or 4- person swf, they're not ignoring half the game data when they balance the game.

Also building voice chat into the game does nothing to balance people on comms versus people not on comms because it's not going to force people to play on comms who don't want to. At most it could get a higher percentage using them, but there would still be a large segment who don't simply because they don't like playing with comms. (The same exact thing happens in other multiplayer games that have built in comms, there's a large number of solo players who just don't bother turning them on in the first place, it's not DbD specific.)

Now as far as "weak killers being nerfed because they're too strong against bad players", that is a tangential issue. It's nothing really to do with the devs ignoring comms or comms not being in the game, it's that they're allegedly making balance decisions based on whatever the average data for all matches versus data on specifically matches which consist only of high rated players. That has as much to do with certain killers having steeper learning curves than others or having a weakness against survivors who are efficient on gens or who just have higher level of awareness (solo ones or otherwise). High skill players on the forums complain most about these types of imbalances because they encounter them personally and tend to be more active on the forums, but the average DbD player doesn't come to the forums in the first place and may or may not encounter the same issues.

So no, the devs aren't "missing data on comms", they have plenty of it. Half the game data includes players who were on comms and they're well aware of that. And so it's not a lack of data or awareness that is causing the imbalances you're complaining about, it's about what the devs overall goals are and which target audience they're balancing the game for. They want a game where the median results are some survivors live and some die, and they are looking at overall results across all matches, both with and without swf, for those numbers. But that direction is in contrast to a vocal minority of the overall game population which consists of long time high skill players who are active on forums and who say they have made corresponding decisions which negatively impacted that top tier of play, the argument being that if they balanced solely based on high level matches then it would trickle down and also improve the experience in the average players' matches. Without going too much down that rabbit hole, though, the fact remains it's a tangential question to what we've been talking about, namely the suggestion that the game have built in voice chat, and the answer to that suggestion is it wouldn't impact their game balance decisions like you're claiming.