SWF loadout restrictions

This is "tournament-level treatment" in the sense that we are limiting the top performance ceiling for survivors that can exist in public matchmaking just the same. And precisely because most groups are not tournament-level teams actually stacking 4 DH, DS, BT, Deli, Prove, BNPs is why it won't hurt most groups much.

New players are the least affected by this because they do not even know what the strongest and best perks are, let alone go for coordinated or stacked loadouts across the board. They'll just play with whatever they have. And players at this level actually even just intuitively know to benefit from SWF/voice comms much more than they know about perk power levels and whatnot. I for one really don't expect it will change much about the SWF survival rates at that level.

Personally I really don't feel like this would be "punishing" people. For one thing, they still outright benefit from teaming up in SWFs, so it's still a net-positive to do so, both in terms of overall performance potential and in terms of just having fun with friends. For another, I know I'm not talking for everyone, but I personally would not at all mind having to adjust my builds in SWF scenarios. In fact, I would rather enjoy having to come up with unique builds and coordinate with my fellow players, deciding who gets to use what. Seems interesting and fun to me.

Now you're repeating yourself and just repeating "bad". Why are you so upset over me suggesting SWF nerfs?

I actually think most people would get used to this rather quickly, but fair enough, BHVR might also think this would be worse for business, if merely on the basis of being a "nerf" when solo buffs and compensatory killer buffs would be "buffs".

Big disagree. Finding 16 more-than-good-enough perks to use in a coordinated manner in 4-SWF is super easy.

This part I don't get at all. What massive changes, and why would you have to do this for solo queue and killers too, exactly?

Like I said, one major reason why I prefer my suggestion to BHVR's approach of buffing solo and compensatorily buffing killers, is precisely that the latter is much more time and effort-intensive, and is sure to take years given past development cycles.

All 4 survivors do not need to run BT, and indeed the game is not balanced around that being the case as otherwise matches would almost never be balanced because the incidence of 4 BTs in a match is likely less than 10% of all matches.

And in 4-SWFs (where people could actually only use 1 BT, rather than the 2-3 that can still exist in trio/duo scenarios, due to the other players completing those lobbies) it is even less necessary for multiple people to have BT, because they can just say "Yo, BT guy, do your thing!". Obviously it's not always that easy, but the point here is precisely that we are trying to nerf SWF, to make things harder there.

The appeal of playing with friends is still entirely maintained. I really don't agree with this idea that you would be "punished" for playing SWF due to being limited in the perks you can then use. That's like saying you are "punished" for driving a new Mercedes because it does not have... a USB port to connect your phone to the radio with, which your VW Golf 2 somehow did (disclaimer: I have no clue about cars, probably all Mercedeses (Mercedesi?) these days do have the "perk" of being able to interface with your phone, and Golf 2s originally of course didn't... but I think the gist of the analogy is clear anyway).

I actually agree that the effectiveness of camping and tunnelling should be addressed, and indeed with base game changes rather than perks, but that is general balancing that I separate from the balance issue of the gap between SWF and solo, and if anything SWFs can of course deal with those things much, much better at base to begin with, and as such also are less dependent on perks to do so.

That said, reading stuff like "They can't attack SWFs on behalf of the killers, not while refusing to attack face camping and tunneling. They need to atleast pretend to be impartial to sides." here has me shook. I see tiring amounts of very killer-biased takes and stances here, regularly to silly extents even, of saying stuff along the lines of "killer mains exist in abject despair and hopelessness and evil SWFs literally ruin their lives", and then when I create an in my opinion fairly reasonable thread outlining that I want to nerf survivors' top performance ceiling, I get this. The hell?

Obviously half-joking, maybe your complaint is valid and this would be overdoing it without also shipping certain killer nerfs. Apart from Nurse/Blight/some add-ons I really don't think so, but again, I do agree that camping/tunnelling/slugging deserve rebalancing (albeit not as straight nerfs, but compensated for with buffs to other aspects of killer gameplay).

I avoided your guys' discussion so far, but let me butt in here I guess, if only to try and steer it more closely back to the topic of the original suggestion.

First, with regards to the player activity stats, you are both kinda right. XStormyXDayzX is right that on average, the game has been growing over the years, including the past year. There are surges and dips in activity throughout years, and many of them are entirely to be expected as pointed out, as they coincide with holidays, content releases, and such. But the growth when you look at year-round averages is there, and with DbD now being on pretty much any platform you can game on as well as multiple PC clients (and soon perhaps even Linux), and with there being crossplay across all of them apart from mobile, it would be silly to talk about the game being in any danger of losing too much player activity.

On the other hand, player retention is important of course, and as you point out, DbD does not retain enough players to make up for players that play less or not at all anymore, otherwise we wouldn't see averages settle as much lower as the peaks. That said, the player retention rate might very well not be at all concerning for BHVR. Not only did we have some of the biggest surges in player activity yet last year from which a more steep downtrend is to be expected, but we've also had Covid affecting things throughout the last two years in unusual ways. Maybe BHVR is more concerned about the continued if slight decline in average player numbers (on Steam) throughout the last 4 months, and maybe particularly so because not even their Christmas event and log-in rewards brought numbers out of the reds, and the existence of Propnight and VHS is probably not entirely "unconcerning" for them either...

But ultimately, I don't think player activity is really an argument here either way. It would be speculation entirely on our end whether player retention is an issue affecting one role more than the other, and if anything, if BHVR is not doing big things that would boost killer player retention, we kind of have to assume that killer player retention is not actually a big problem or at all a problem, because BHVR does have the data to draw conclusions regarding these things, and indeed a big interest in solving such problems if they do exist and do threaten the game's popularity and longevity, because they of course care about those things (which is: profit) more than about... "killers" or "survivors".

I also have never bought into anecdotal arguments regarding queue times. This is something that has always changed between ranks (now ratings), regions, times of day and night, events, rifts, and so on. My personal experience is that survivor queues are in fact not very long, and indeed faster than my killer queues at certain times, such as in the early mornings to late noon. And having played this game for years, my experience with per-role queue times has been such pretty consistently: earlier in the day, survivor queues are faster; during much of the day, queue times are comparable on both sides; later in the day, killer queues are faster. That as a general experience. I also think queue times are a self-regulating issue to a certain extent, because there are actually a lot of players (me included) that will switch roles based on queue times, thereby obviously helping stabilize that issue around more reasonable averages. And anyway, whenever I have asked people for evidence of their claims that survivor queue times are actually so super long and killer queue times so super short, they haven't taken me up on that. And when I provide evidence from multiple streamers showing their survivor queue times averaging around 1min and regularly even being shorter than their killer queue times overall, that apparently doesn't matter. I think queue time arguments are indeed more often based in bias than fact. And this is again something BHVR can easily see and in all likeliness do very much look at, and so when people are sounding alarms about long queue times that BHVR can see is just not the case, that is not helping whatever case the people making those claims are concerned with, I'm sure.

So, let's ignore player acitvity and queue times and whether those would indicate anything that is relevant for my suggestion.

I have to say you seem too intelligent to be as unsensible as some of your statements regarding this game are. "Survivor by Daylight", "killer mains [...] are nothing more than punching bags" - I mean, come on dude. I appreciate the fact that you are the first and only person here posting so far that doesn't fundamentally dislike my suggestion and rejects it, but I will tell you that my suggestion is not based on the idea that survivors are super OP and the game hell for killers. In public matchmaking, I actually believe the game is favourable for killers, and even the average escape rates of 4-player SWFs even at higher MMR brackets are likely not very problematic either. That said, the performance potential of SWFs, the ceiling, is absolutely problematic, and while it is far from the average SWF experience, it is absolutely an experience that does happen, and it is a ridiculously imbalanced experience in the public matchmaking environment. That is the conviction my suggestion is based on. There are also killer performance ceilings I would like to see adjusted (mostly Nurse/Blight/certain add-ons, but also the effectiveness of certain strategies), but I do think SWF is a significantly bigger balancing problem that has more of a negative effect on the game, and as such I consider SWF adjustments to be more important and urgent, especially now with MMR in place where killer players at the top-end will be matched against SWFs with a notably increased frequency as compared to the rank-based MM past.

Fair enough, but then this point is of course not a critique of my suggestion or its validity, but you are expanding its rationale over more of the game. And I can agree that it could be good. Maybe introduce a sort of point system for loadouts, we've seen suggestions like that in the past and I'm not fundamentally opposed. I would certainly agree with buffs for perks. While there are totally more than 16 that are more than good enough to make for a very well-equipped 4-SWF team, I do obviously agree that too too many perks (on both sides) are just not nearly good enough in the total pool of perks. That's a big gripe of mine with the game too, in fact.

This is also fair. In tournaments, some key perks are indeed sometimes allowed 2 times, most of all of course BT. If the availability of multiple copies of certain survivor perks turns out to be too integral to the game's balancing even in 4-player SWF scenarios, then that should be something to further tweak the system according to.

That said, for one thing I actually am not convinced there are any perks 4-player SWFs require multiple copies of to be able to compete against most killers, let alone in the public matchmaking environment, and for another I would prefer if perks that are identified to actually be that integral to the game's balancing would instead be reworked into base game mechanics. And that is especially the case regarding the balancing around camping and tunnelling, which I do also think warrants being addressed.

Like so:

Something perhaps useful to know: To jump your cursor out of the quoted section, use the arrow down key on your keyboard, or press the enter key twice.

Yeah, sorry, your original post was rather dismissive, but you have since clarified or expanded on some of the points. I was just typing my response to Synzicle before addressing yours, and was then too lazy to go back and change the tone of that statement. 😅

I do think this loadout restriction system being applied to survivor groups at large and being balanced against adjustments to camping and tunnelling could turn out rather well. But that is obviously a much more complicated undertaking, for one thing making the loadout restriction system work for random lobbies that only have a minute to adjust perks, and for another of course dealing with the entire microcosm of the gameplay element that is camping. Not impossible, and with regards to the latter definitely something I want to see in the future regardless, but it's less readily-workable than the SWF loadout restrictions I suggest, which I do think would do a lot of good for the game and do it fast.

Here's a few more arguments I randomly attach to this post (they are tangentially related to points we discussed earlier, but they are not strictly directed at you):

I think buffing solos with SWF balance in mind power-creeps the game in a way that if anything leaves new players behind even more. New players often won't be able to make good use of the information the game gives them, hell, in many cases they will if anything be overwhelmed by the information while they are trying to still maneuveur the very basic principles and mechanics of the game. I know that's been the case for me whenever I entered a Tom Clancy game (just that it turned out like 90% of the information it gave me was inconsequential to my succeeding, lol). And so we create a situation in which newer players in the best case are not benefitting from this info all that much, while in the worst case even being negatively affected by it, and we then also buff a lot of killers to "compensate" so they will face even tougher opposition.

I think in general (so also with regards to all skill and experience levels) it is more reasonable to acknowledge that SWF's ceiling is too high and to balance SWF with the rest of the game in mind, rather than try to balance the rest of the game with that unreasonably high SWF ceiling as a standard in mind. That would lead to a power creep that is problematic well beyond the "new player" brackets. I mean, are we really looking to buff all killers to be as strong as Nurse and Blight, who can compete with that absolute top ceiling?

Tournaments show that quite a lot of the killer lineup can actually compete even against highly-skilled and coordinated 4-player SWF teams in an environment where those teams have loadout restrictions in place. Average kills fall slightly above 2, wins for either side are completely commonplace. So we already have evidence that these simple SWF nerfs would get us to a much more reasonable state of balance for a lot of the game, without having to buff a dozen killers in elaborate ways that would have to be both notable yet still sensible when accounting for solo environments too. It's just a much easier, faster and already proven way to get closer to our goal of closing the gap and making the game more balanced as well as easier to balance from there on out.

And I mean, BHVR has been talking about wanting to bridge the solo/SWF gap for more than two years now, and little to nothing of note has happened with regards to that in that time. And then there's killers like Legion that for years have been more than deserving of buffs even regardless of SWF/solo concerns and are left in a rather sad state for seemingly little reason. Why do we believe that BHVR will suddenly start shipping multiple notable solo buffs that actually improve that experience tangibly and consistently, and also then ship multiple such buffs for a whole range of killers too? They are still nerfing add-ons of mid-tier killers in an update that is yet to hit live, in what year would we ever expect such a wild reality of a tangibly more competitive solo experience and a more powerful killer lineup across the board? To that I say: "Just nerf SWF already, lmao."

I also want to note that most good SWFs don't really need perks to succeed in the public matchmaking environment, let alone multiple copies of the strongest perks. In fact, I think it is much more reasonable to assume that way more survivors are propped up by SWF loadout coordination to succeed against better killers, than good survivors are helped by it to compete against equal killers. Good SWFs would still comfortably do well, lesser SWFs would stop being favoured as much by the mere stackedness of their loadouts. And since most SWFs fall more on the "lesser" side of this, the killer experience would stand to benefit a lot. And I also don't think "lesser" SWFs would start losing to equal and worse killers a lot more due to this change either. They would have a harder time naturally, it would do a whole lot to bring more balance into those scenarios, but nerfing SWF is of course precisely the point.

Now that's a more reasonable take.

Online outlets for this game and multiplayer games in general can and do tend to bring out some of the more narrow-minded views of players, as well as heated arguments in the context of which even more ridiculous stuff is regularly being said. But I also always keep in mind that, for one thing, a lot of people are most likely actually using these things as outlets, to vent their frustrations with the game, often even in the actual heat of the moment after having just come out of a match, and for another, they often most likely don't even really mean the things they say as literally as they frame them. In a non-text-based discussion, they would probably be more reasonable, concede more, contest less, be less disagreeable.

And oftentimes players don't even really know what they want. The players that say things along the lines of wanting their opponent to be a "punching bag" would quickly grow bored if they actually didn't face opposition they can feel good about having performed well against due to it having been a challenge, killer or survivor. I've seen a lot of complaints where I'm reasonably sure the person in question would likely not even be playing the game anymore if the things they are complaining about didn't exist.

So yeah, my advice is to take such stuff less seriously, because even for themselves it is often not as serious as it may sound, whether they realize or not. I for one try not to engage with stuff like that much, not least because one can be reasonably confident that it won't have much of any sway on the devs' decisions anyway.

Unique abilities or perks for survivors could indeed be cool, and there have been various suggestions for stuff like that from what I've seen through the years, but it doesn't seem to be something BHVR is looking to do. One understandable reason is that it would likely lead to a meta of using certain characters and team compositions. One of the cooler suggestions I've seen and that I doubt would really tank player character diversity (if anything it would positively affect it) is that survivors get special benefits on their respective teachable perks that other survivors using those perks do not. The same would work just as well on the killer side, of course. I'm all for perk buffs, so many of the perks in the game are blatantly subpar and barely see use, and this teachable-specific way to buff a ton of perks could be an interesting approach to do that, since it strengthens the "personality" of different survivors and killers alike, creates soft gameplay "roles" for different survivor characters, and encourages more diversity in the selected characters. And it does so without even affecting global balance all that drastically, since those perk buffs being tied to specific characters of course means there can only be a limited amount of those buffs having an effect in any given match.

Either way, yeah, stuff of that nature is not really something I can see happening, as opposed to this comparably simple SWF adjustment.

This is well and true, but with regards to this SWF restriction specifically, it also shouldn't really matter. Precisely because many SWFs aren't using or looking to use the most stacked and coordinated loadouts it's not a very painful restriction for them. And precisely because they don't take the game so seriously they will if anything even come to enjoy this restriction, because it encourages them to experiment with builds more and think more about individual perk and item choices, and do so specifically in the context of playing with friends, where people will develop "trademark" perks and items that the group has decided they get to use most of the time, and stuff like that. Will be sort of a SWF bonding experience making their loadouts work and deciding who gets to use what, ha.

I think for "casual" SWF this should if anything make things more fun both for themselves and their opponents, and it won't really feel like a "punishment".

Besides, there's totally enough of a pool of viable perks (and items/add-ons) to choose from to still be able to have solid builds even if they have to be distinct.

Adrenaline, Balanced Landing, Circle Of Healing, Borrowed Time, Dead Hard, Decisive Strike, Deliverance, Iron Will, Kindred, Lithe, Lucky Break, Prove Thyself, Resilience, Spine Chill, Sprint Burst, Unbreakable - that's a 16-perk lineup of some of the most popular and best perks, so we aren't even forced to break into "tech" perk territory to equip a team with this restriction in place. We just won't be able to stack 4 of the absolute best things.

Thanks for reading it all!

1. As in earlier arguments, while I do concede that there's merit to this and that adjustment to the restrictions could be made specifically with camping and tunnelling in mind (so pertaining BT and DS, basically), we also have to remember that we are talking about a 4-player SWF team playing in pubs here. They will still be in a super good spot even with just 1 copy of each of those perks, not least because they can also make better use of perks like Deliverance, Kinship, Renewal to deal with camping and tunelling, on top of course again of their coordinated ways of dealing with them better, by sticking to gens if someone is being camped, or attacking the hook together, bodyblocking for a teammate that is being tunneled, and so on. They will of course have to be more cautious, it will be more difficult, but I don't think the balance in public matchmaking is really such that 4-player SWFs would suffer without multiple BT and DS.
2. As outlined in my reply to KateMain86, SWFs will still be able to put really potent loadouts on the board. So the more "casual" SWFs not only won't be hurt much by this because they aren't usually stacking the strongest stuff times four anyway, but also because they will still have solid builds, in many cases likely not even all that different from the builds they used to have. But for the also existent SWFs that do stack DS, DH, IW, UB, BNP, and all that good stuff, things will change, and many of these SWFs are also not expert-level players but "boosted" by these loadouts to differing degrees, winning against killer players they perhaps shouldn't be, or at least doing so much more comfortably than they should be.
3. Exceptions to the restrictions are possible, though as I've also pointed out earlier, if it should actually turn out that even full SWF teams still need multiple copies of certain perks in order to be able to compete against camping/tunnelling, there should be base game changes regarding these things instead (which there should be anyway, in my opinion). For everything else, I would still insist on the hard limit of 1 per player, because it would encourage more perk diversity, and come without the baggage of having to decide for every single perk whether it warrants being restricted. You are of course right that there are perks that aren't problematic even when present 4 times in a match, but I also don't feel like it's a problem that SWFs won't be able to use them 4 times.

For 1., and 2., these restrictions shouldn't really hurt much. People playing in SWF have various advantages, even without voice comms, and taking away the ability to stack the best stuff or coordinate some broken combinations on top of that is only sensible, even for SWFs that are not looking to arm themselves to the teeth (who of course will be less affected to begin with by restrictions to the ability to do so).

Your argument would have to be that it's actually fine to have a group with 4 DH, DS, BT, UB, BNP and whatnot. I think that's an imbalanced set of loadouts regardless, and SWFs are the only groups that can actually consistently put together loadouts like that.

For 3., I don't think I agree. I think there are much fewer killers that currently can compete with the SWF performance ceiling than killers that cannot. So if we close the solo/SWF gap by nerfing the SWF ceiling, we only have to adjust those few killers to account for this. If we close it by bringing solo closer to the SWF ceiling on the other hand, we of course have to adjust those many killers that currently cannot compete with that ceiling.

I agree that not being able to coordinate fun builds as liberally anymore as one can currently is a downside (though I also don't think it hurts "a LOT"), but it's a small price to pay for getting rid of the ability of groups to abuse completely busted loadouts and combinations. It is particularly small a price because groups can still coordinate various fun builds with this restriction in place. Which builds that rely on perk stacking even are there that are actually purely for fun and pose no risk of getting abused? I would not even classify 4 Head On as purely for fun, since it's not fun for killers to keep getting stunned. Of course some things come to mind, such as stacking Slippery Meat and Up The Ante, but it's a compromise I for one would be more than willing to make, not least because it is very rare for people to actually run stuff like that, from my experience through the years; even most casual SWFs usually run useful perks and play normally. So I don't really see it hurting a lot of players either.

Besides, as I've mentioned, these restrictions would open up design space for the devs to make individual perks more impactful in their own right, further decreasing the necessity of being able to coordinate to get use out of certain perks.

I don't get why you would have to change anything about combinations like Ruin/Undying/Tinkerer/Pop. How does this relate to fun builds? And if it's that you think 4-player SWF teams would not be able to compete against builds like that with these restrictions in place, I simply have to disagree.

I rather deal in realities of the game. People in reality as good as never coordinate anything in pre-game lobbies. People practically never even tell others simple stuff like "I have DS", which would be easy and crucial loadout information to share... but suddenly they will coordinate entire harmonious perk setups, and do so in a mere minute?

In reality, only SWF groups actually coordinate builds, and in the 0.X% of lobbies where solo groups actually attempt to coordinate builds, they not only will not be able to do so very effectively because of the time limit even if every single survivor just so happens to be on board with changing their build, but they also will still not be able to use those builds in coordinated fashion like SWFs can even if they would succeed in making the builds happen. This is a non-issue.

Sorry, this doesn't really make sense. Even apart from it being common sense that SWFs have various huge advantages over solos, we have hard data on SWFs in fact being more successful in the game, that's the very reason the devs specifically are addressing the problem of the solo/SWF gap to begin with.

I don't disagree that SWFs can be overly altruistic, but not only do I think that solos are usually comparably as altruistically minded, and not only can SWFs be altruistic in coordinated manners and as such regularly succeed in their altruism as opposed to solos who regularly fall apart due to it, but one shouldn't really balance the game just on the expectation that people will be somehow inclined to play in unoptimal ways rather than abuse the advantages SWF provides as much as possible. That doesn't mean SWF has to be balanced for the idea that every single group will do so, but we are not bringing the ceiling that much down here either.

While this is a more or less fair point in and of itself, I don't quite think it's as easy as you make it out to be to find things that actually only benefit the killers that aren't already more than strong enough. Not least because there are also pretty considerable differences in strength between those non-S-tier killers still, so even if you were to find general killer buffs that don't affect the top-end killers and put some of the other killers into a good spot, they could at the same time be too little or too much on yet other killers.

I will say that the sentiment behind the Fire Up idea as a general buff is good. Weaker killers are generally those that have to kick pallets and vault windows, so buffing those things would be a fairly sensible route. Then again, not only would a killer like Blight still tangibly benefit from this as well, so it's not entirely "clean" either, but this also limits design space for future killers, since they will then always have to be created with these base buffs in mind, another problem that doesn't exist if we just nerf the SWF ceiling and its killer equivalents.

It's not treating every SWF as an elite group because the restrictions still allow for teams to use really good builds. The 1-copy perk/item/add-on limit does not actually decrease the ceiling of SWF so much that non-elite groups would suffer much. Do you think those teams need 4 copies of the strongest perks and items to succeed? I don't, and I actually think many of them never even do use such builds. As I've pointed out earlier, a 16-perk setup could consist almost entirely of proper meta perks (Adrenaline, Balanced Landing, Circle Of Healing, Borrowed Time, Dead Hard, Decisive Strike, Deliverance, Iron Will, Kindred, Lithe, Lucky Break, Prove Thyself, Resilience, Spine Chill, Sprint Burst, Unbreakable), and then you can still add on top of that a toolbox with a BNP, a med-kit with a Styptic, a different med-kit with a Syringe, a key with Blood Amber or a Rainbow Map. The restrictions will bring down the top of stacking the absolutely strongest things, but it won't mean that SWFs are forced to bring weak builds, whatsoever.

I think SWF teams can still have a ton of fun and a lot of different fun builds without being able to stack perks. And for the much more common case that SWF teams actually use normal builds, it will of course actually lead to much more variety.

But it's fair enough that you prefer the direction the devs are trying to take of buffing solos and killers. There are arguments for and against both directions, but personally more than anything else my conviction is based on the fact that the devs have already been talking about wanting to pursue their direction for more than two years now, and practically nothing has happened in that regard. Moreover, their direction would require significant changes to the game, for survivors at large and a lot of different killers. Given BHVR's pace, I just can't see that this would be feasible. It would likely take years, years during which the game is still of course constantly getting new additions of more killers, perks and who-knows-what changes to complicate the process. Nerfing SWF on the other hand, with loadout restrictions like these, is something they could implement within 1 patch cycle of one and a half months.