http://dbd.game/killswitch
Genuine SWF balancing idea/suggestion
I really hope this gets a developer response. I've had a serious idea to combat the swf balancing issue. The recent patch was to make the game less survivor sided. As a survivor main, I like the new added challenge. I recently dabbled as killer again and swf matches are still Infuriating and very unbalanced. I have figured out a build to combat toxic swfs but that isn't the suggestion I have.
Here is my suggestion:
Party Penalty
For each extra person in a party, there will be a small penalty to add balance to the game. This penalty only affects party members and doesn't affect any solo survivors.
2 party members -10% generator and healing speed
3 party members. -25% generator and healing speed
4 party members -50% generator and healing speed
This would slightly slow down and balance swfs as they are the thing that is making the game unbalanced. They're the thing that needs some form of nerf. And although perks can be used to combat this nerf, it will push them away from using meta builds if they want more action speed back. Hopefully this idea gets you all thinking about your own ways of combating overpowered swfs. Just an idea.
Comments
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Being punished for playing with friends
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It's not a punishment for playing with friends. I play with friends but I wouldn't mind a slight nerf like that. Shouldn't be much of a problem if you're efficient enough. All it would be is a barely noticeable nerf to slow down progression. It's not like it's taking blood points off of you or something.
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First of all, punishing people who like to play with friends is dumb.
Second, what would you do when a Solo plays with a 3 man SWF? The Solo is equally punished, because they are playing wiht 3 people who have a huge penalty on Repair Speed.
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There need to be "limits" for what you get in a SWF group to balance out voice coms.
The easiest way to balance SWF would be to change it so that you cannot repeat : characters/items/perks. That one small change would bring a lot of balance to the game.
Show all the perks before readying up in a SWF. Make non-repeated perks appear blue (like the vigil buff) and repeated perks red (such as monstrous shrine debuff icon).
Now you have limits and can see what perks your friends are using without asking. This also prevents any type of "bully squads".
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Punishing people for playing with friends is not the same as limiting the power increase you get with SWF. Look at comp teams and how they relay information constantly. Look at good teams and they relay slightly less information. Look at casuals and they still relay a lot of information. At the casual level SWF still gets you about +4 perks worth of information. That's akin to cheat.
A more complicated way to balance SWF is to give any solo survivor +4 information perks that activate when they are playing solo queue AND get into a SWF game. Perks that could be chosen include : rookie spirit, bond, kindred, empathy, but NOT perks like dead hard - which is an "action" perk.
Do the same for killer. Give the killer +4 perk slots chosen before the game starts that activate only in case of SWF (that do not need to be limited to information). Now all the solo players (killer and survivor) get buffs to counteract the advantage you get while playing in a SWF.
Again you will probably say this is a "punishment". It's not - it's balancing solo queue players to the level of SWF teams.
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I don't know about slowing down gen speeds further than what they already are, but definitely not a bad idea. Not a great idea either. But the first time I've seen something along the lines of balancing based on party members. And no it's not punishment for playing with friends. In fact, survivors are supposed to be punished. The Entity is all about punishing the survivors, especially those who work together. It's called turning up the difficulty level when players are playing together. The Entity demands sacrifice and I'm sure the devs will deliver something to us eventually. They started with the latest patch buffing killers overall. But I still like the idea of the devs giving solo q survivors more info with HUD indicators. And SWFs are basically more balanced now with killers. A little off here and there but manageable.
But like I said, not a bad idea, not a great idea. Something new and refreshing and ignore the haters. They just want games handed to them because they are playing with friends.
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"I still like the idea of the devs giving solo q survivors more info with HUD indicators. And SWFs are basically more balanced now with killers"
The last patch nerfed killers against SWF and buffed them against solo queue. Why? Instant regression was massively better vs SWF teams because you could take 20 seconds off a generator multiple times instantly. Or if you had Pain Res you could take away 40% of a gen's progress instantly.
Kick perks like Overcharge/CoB are only effective when at least one player is dead and one player is on a hook. Otherwise there is just no pressure on the survivor as they can go back to a kicked generator.
As for giving solo que players more information - this is a mistake. You are supposed to pay with perk slots to be able to see auras and have extra information. Now then if you are advocating for the killer to have 6 slots base kit and survivors to always have hud information as to what people are doing? Sure thing.
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Bringing Comp-Teams in it is already nonsense.
No SWF-Team will communicate like Comp-Teams. Really, nonse of them. And second, the strength of SWF is not communication, the strength is that you filter out the bad players.
Most of the time Killer players dont lose because of SWF, they lose because they are just not good enough. The same players who beat you in a 4 man SWF will also beat you when all of them are Solo in the same match.
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You can't punish people for playing with friends. Giving SWF a debuff is doing exactly that. Limiting what perks they can bring is doing exactly that. This isn't the first time I've seen these kinds of suggestions and the solutions are and always will be to buff solo queue and reduce map sizes.
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If you read it properly, I state that solo q survivors do not get the negative effects from the swfs. And this wouldn't be punishing people with friends at all. If you had a problem with it, run perks that will combat the penalty like prove thy self 🤦🏻♂️
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Swfs are the only thing throwing off the balance of this game. Do you have a helpful suggestion to balance this or just complain about "punishments"?
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If you read it properly, I wrote that the Solo would be stuck with 3 Survivors who repair slower. They will also be affected, even if they dont have the penalty themselves.
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Not if they are doing a gen themselves. They'd only feel the effects if there was 3 people on a gen but even then with a penalty, 3 people on a gen would speed things up and you wouldn't feel the changes. So it makes your point, pointless
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It is not pointless. But you dont seem to understand it. Of course the Solo repairs Gens at a normal Speed. But should they do all the Gens?
For the rest of the Gens, they take far longer. So the overall time needed to complete all Gens would increase - for the Solo Survivor as well (unless, as said, they do all Gens themselves).
But in the end, your idea is bad, many people already had it and the Devs will never implement it.
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That's terrible. Just look at it from a casual, even a high mmr casual. It won't solve anything, but hurt people.
Going the way of giving solo more hud features is better than debugging survivors for playing with friends
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Other games utilized something similar to this idea, however there is a small issue with this. Randoms.
I don't think if two friends are playing together they should be penalized, thus dragging the two randoms down with them.
If it's 4 man swf then yes I think they should have a slight penalty to compensate, but it gets to finicky if you're trying apply penalties to 2/4 or 3/4 of the survivors.
Another issueI have with this idea though is that I don't think slowdown is right way. Realistically it just makes the game longer and makes survivors spend more time on gens.
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Swfs are not throwing off the balance of the game. Killers are quick to complain about the bully squads but don't notice the swfs that aren't bully squads. You pay more attention to the games you lost against a bully squad than the games you won against a casual swf who're just playing for fun.
The only difference between a swf and solo queue is information. Anything else is a player's individual skill. Communication doesn't magically make a noob play like Oracle.
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I never play killer. Probably one match every 6 months as killer. My suggestion is purely from a survivor main point of view so you're just completely wrong. Don't jump to the conclusion that I'm a killer player just because of my suggestion 🤦🏻♂️
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Swf is very obviously the most unbalanced and infuriating thing in the game. Yet you can't have a discussion ever about it because all the "punished for playing with friends" people start with their nonsensical banter. It's a game and swf is a huge balance issue when it's a 4 man on comms. Creates bullying and lopsided gameplay in favor of the survivors but we can't talk about it ever.
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In your original post, you said that you recently dabbled as killer again and that swf matches are still infuriating and very unbalanced. That's from killer perspective, which contradicts you saying that your suggestion is purely from a survivor main point of view.
If it was from a survivor perspective, there is no way you would suggest it in the first place since you'd be matching with a duo + 1 solo or a trio. If you play killer once every 6 months, how are you so certain it isn't a skill issue?
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"Swfs are not throwing off the balance of the game"
"The only difference between a swf and solo queue is information."
I guarantee you if I take 3 of my friends and play against you in a private match we will win more games on average with voice coms. You can say : the generator at killer shack is 50% completed. And if you rotate off a gen with 10% or less progress then you saved a ton of time. This tranlates to efficiency.
It's a lie to say that voice coms do not aid in efficiency/coordination. If I have distortion I can tell my team if the killer has Lethal or BBQ. Killers are much easier to handle when you know what perks they are using. If you are very familiar with the killer you might be able to determine the addons.
Imagine if we went into every map in DBD and had the same 4 players race to find all five totems and complete 5 gens with the killer afk. If After rotating through all the maps 10 times we removed voice coms it would be the expectation that it would take longer to find the totems/complete the gens in the next 10 rotations. For both trials we would use no perks/items to help find totems.
"Communication doesn't magically make a noob play like Oracle."
And let's have a little tournament where Oracle isn't allowed to use voice coms but everyone else in the tournament gets voice coms. Know what the result would be? Oracle loses. Communication is a huge advantage when one team has it and another team does not.
You don't have to play like Oracle to get an advantage from voice coms. I played today with 1 veteran, 1 intermediate and 1 "noob". The noob told us which killer we were facing every round thanks to the loading prompt. Even that is an advantage because you know to hide vs certain killers. Every round we called out Lethal+BBQ because someone brought distortion. We regularly called out the killer's location and that too is a huge advantage.
From time to time I get streamer in my lobby. If they are live I love to listen in to their coms when they are playing 3-4 man SWF groups. It's hilarious when people say it's ok I have DS right before I pick them up. So I don't and instead slug them. People always call out to their group if they have unbreakable. So of course I stop a chase and return to immediately pick them up. By listening to the calls they make I know exactly how to counter everything they are doing. They tell me which generators to go kick. They tell me where they put their boons. I don't watch while I play - just listen. But the information they give me always throws the game to my favor.
If talking were not an advantage then I wouldn't listen to their stream as I played against them to try and counter that advantage.
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I don't have the patience to explain to you in detail why it boils down to a skill issue if you can't beat a swf. When solos have access to the same level of information swfs has, you'll understand that comms don't make up for a lack of skill.
You listening in on a streamer's comms doesn't mean they have an advantage, it means you have an advantage, because you know their next move before they make it. It's why stream sniping is frowned upon. That is an unfair advantage, and swfs with comms is intended.
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I get the feeling that many people get the issue wrong. The swf-solo gap has nothing to do dith skill.
"Survivor+comms > Survivor"
The swfs have an advantage by using a mechanic unavailavle to "solo".
Just because some people use an additional tool better than others doesnt mean that said tool isnt an improvement to not havi g that tool at all.
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"When solos have access to the same level of information swfs has"
This will never happen. Do you know why? Because it's one thing for a menu hud to say Jake is repairing a generator, Nea is being chased and dwight is running to a hook. But it another thing entirely to be able to say in voice chat : the killer has a lit totem behind the concrete pillar at the end of the street. Need another example? There are traps on the Killer Shack doors but not on the window. That level of information is borderline cheating.
"You listening in on a streamer's comms doesn't mean they have an advantage, it means you have an advantage, because you know their next move before they make it. It's why stream sniping is frowned upon. That is an unfair advantage, and swfs with comms is intended."
Given your previous statement this is illogical.
This statement admits:
1) I flip the advantage of voice coms by listening to streamers
2) This implies you are aware that voice coms give an advantage.
If players were in a SWF and did not talk then would they have an advantage over solo queue? Some games they would have better allies with random assortment.
You know how in star wars Anakin was supposed to bring Balance to the Force? The Jedi thought that meant one thing and it meant something completely different.
My example where I give solo players (survivor and killers) extra perks does exactly that. But that is appalling to people like you who want to keep SWF untouched because it gives you an advantage when you play in a SWF group.
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The simplest solution would be to split it out to a different queue that has different rules that is balanced around the 4 survivors. Perhaps the killer just moves faster. Or the recent buffs they did are a bit stronger. Or gens take a bit longer. Or there are extra gens added. Or some other objective. Basically balance the game differently in that queue so that it is still fair for both sides. Then they have the solo queue mode where they can balance that differently so that solo queue isn't so terrible for survivors. Similar to like CS:GO where there is a casual mode where you get more money and free armor each round, but ranked has different rules.
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