The new patch notes, some interesting but mostly for new players atm

Yeah I’ve said for a long time the best way to balance solos against swfs is to buff the solo players a bit to even the playing field. I’m guessing the icons they’re talking about will show a gen, a totem, a locker, a medical symbol or someone running, something like that. It could be pretty useful information since you can tell at a glance if someone else is possibly going for a rescue or if all the other survivors are actively woking on gens or being chased and you might need to do be the rescuer.

As far as fostering the toxicity of our city (of our city) I think players who are rude to their teammates after dying will be rude regardless of the existence of the icons. Being a sore loser has nothing to do with the HUD and a jerk will rationalize lashing out however they like. I don’t think adding this in will exacerbate poor behaviour any more than not having the feature currently mitigates it.

The only group the devs care about are brand new players because the games business strategy is a revolving door style where people are sucked in, milked, and then spat out. Player retention isn't the games goal and doesn't seem to have been in years. Virtually every major change they make comes with a diary stating it's largely meant to help new players. We basically have SBMM just so brand new 2 hour players can feel good about them selves when they win. Then they stay, buy stuff, and either succumb to sunk cost fallacy or leave sometime after that once they leave the "fun zone" the devs designed and get into the real game, but once you already have their money, who cares if they leave?

Also no clue how you can say knowing what your team does won't change anything. My entire build as survivor is based on auras for this exact reason, because when I know what my team is doing, I can play a ton more effectively. Pretty much every talked about change in the diary is going to be harmful to killers but I am sure part 2 will have something lol. Maybe another nerf disguised as a buff, like back with the TOTH change.

Mikaela’s balance pass is about due, I have a feeling we’ll be seeing Circle of Healing or Boons in general mentioned in Part 2.

I disagree, I’m a killer main and I’ve said for a long time that the best way to even the playing field between solo and swf opponents is to give the solo players info similar to what swfs get naturally on comms. From my perspective it can help make matches less swingy between when I face solo survivors and swfs which I’m all for. 🙂 Worst case the change increases survivor escape rates a bit too much and then all they have to do is slightly increase the time it takes to repair generators to compensate.

Buffing survivors to godhood? Dude, it's a QoL change to ensure SoloQ survivors aren't at quite as big of a disadvantage, there's no reason to assume this will result in longer queue times. Relax. This is a good change that has been a long time coming, and they're not even committing to actually doing it without more deliberation.

Miserable games are a problem. One side having them isn't more or less important than the other, in either direction.

The difference between the build you laid out there and this change is that those perks show you where those things are happening. An icon just shows you if someone's on a generator, if someone's in a chase, if they're healing, on a totem, etc. It doesn't show you where those things are, and that is a huge difference.

This is a great suggestion for a change specifically because perks like Kindred, Bond, Empathy, and all the other aura-reading perks will still have their niche and will still be far more useful, because knowing what someone is doing is only a fraction as important as knowing where they're doing it.

Objecting this hard to such a milquetoast and obvious change kinda implies to me that you're going to object to any change to help out the gap between SoloQ and SWF, and at that point, why even bother commenting? Do you have a better suggestion in mind to fix that problem?

yeah it just seems like they want encourage smurfing by deranking MMR. The other part i got from it was that they want improved solo to swf level but not really. apparently this will somehow improve killer....

Ah, there's your issue, then. You're assuming that game balancing works that you look at "what side" needs "buffs or nerfs", instead of looking at where the problems in general lay and what the solutions would be. There are problems on the survivor side too, and there's nothing wrong with fixing those if doing so is quick and simple- and while these proposed changes are by no means a full fix, they are quick and simple, so implementing them is just fine.

There is absolutely no reason they can't make changes that will benefit both sides at the same time- and if they don't, that's worthy of criticism! But leaning hard into criticising an attempted fix for a problem that very much does exist, just because you can't look beyond the "us vs them" side-based view of balance, is a very silly thing to do.

And again, this isn't a massive buff. Survivors already have access to much stronger versions of this effect, either from perks or from being on comms with friends. This will only benefit people who don't play on comms, and the gap between SWF and SoloQ does need to be shortened before any meaningful balance can be made. This is laid out in the dev update that sparked this conversation, even.

At least its something.. it was about time to post some QoL changes. Only skins and new chapter updates get boring without caring about the core gameplay problems. And dbd has a lot of those..