SWF shouldnt and never should be nerfed
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Maybe do what some tournaments do in limiting multiples of items and the same perks. I would also add a way to track individual survivors so when swfs get cute and run the same survivor with the exact same outfit.
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50% of the player plays solo less than 10% of the playerbase plays 4 man and most of that teams are potatos, that argument to defend nurse sucks
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swf needs to be nerfed they are playing with all aura perks for free or al least killers need to know when they are going to play againts a swf
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Swfs are impossible to nerf anyway, because the most powerful thing about them is their comms.
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Here's what happens when you tell the killer they're playing against a swf: Lobby dodge.
Tournaments have different rules because there's prize money on the line and the rules apply to both survivors and killers. If you wanted to place restrictions on survivors, it'd only be fair for restrictions to be applied to killer as well.
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If it's hard to get killers to play against SWFs, doesn't that indicate a problem, though?
SWF doesn't need to be 'nerfed', so much as solo queue needs help (in a way that won't buff SWFs - very difficult).
However, there are a few things that probably should be done to help make SWFs a bit less obnoxious.
- If a survivor changes items or perks after the killer hits 'ready', the countdown is paused and the killer is unreadied. There's nothing quite like seeing a sudden switch to 4x flashlights without there being any way for me to switch to a counter.
- People playing in a group gain a small, proportional inflation to their MMRs, depending on the size of the group. Say...1.1x for 2 people, 1.2x for 3 people and 1.4x for a full squad. This allows the communication advantage to be offset by a slightly stronger opponent, and also frees up killers at the original MMR point for solos.
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It indicates that there's a grey area in that regard. Do killers not want to play against swfs because they're unbalanced, because solos are easier to play against, or because of the bully squad boogyman?
I agree that solos need help, and giving them the same level of information a swf has would significantly reduce the gap between solo and swf. Swf doesn't benefit from information they already have via comms.
Both of your suggestions sound fair. I can't really gauge MMR since I'm not sure if it even works in Australia.
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You’re using the same argument to defend swf.
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I think that having a fair match in which every player has the same opportunities would be more helpful. When swf groups have three people, it is usually the fourth survivors, the one who is alone usually dies first. It is unfair that your chances are reduced due to that. Then, it is also unfair from the killer's point of view, as they have perks that complement each other. Truth is that SWF is op as hell, it has always been, and playing against a group of survivors with a ridiculous advantage like that when your performance against them affects your rank and MMR is simply unfair. Some have suggested that swf should be removed, but I think that is not the way. A competitive match with everyone playing on their own would be fairer, no survivors especifically assigned to have long chases with the killer while the other three repair compulsively. Then, a casual match which could be played with your friends to simply have fun with them, and in which no one's performance affects the ranks and MMR would still keep the option to play with your friends and do anything you want without the ones that are alone worrying about their performance being conditioned.
I mean, it's no wonder that SWF had at least a little part to play in the fact that kill rates were lower than expected and the huge meta nerf was done.
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To answer your question, I already lobby dodge as a killer when I get into a lobby with already four people that somehow makes me think they're a a team.
Because, despite what other people say making up data with no actual proof, I would say the swf bully squad are way above the 25% of swfs. I would dare say 1 out of 3 matches I play with the same killer is one of those, which is absurdly irritating -same as when I face an extremist tunneler as a survivor.
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SWF should be nerfed, but only in ways that explicitly single out their potential, not their general performance. Most SWFs are not sweatsquads, and shouldn't be punished as if they were. They do, however, have access to a lot of information that they should not have via comms, which allows them to get levels of synergy and coordination that should not be possible in the game's base design (and especially its balance.) Honestly I think effect stacking should have a negative penalty (when specifically between people in an swf,) and coop action speed penalties should be a bit higher. Basically a bunch of minor changes that hurt peak efficiency and coordinated rushing, but not QoL or overall action speeds. Also map offerings shouldn't work if the person is in an SWF, refund em if that sounds mean but its rare for an swf map offering to not lead to a toxic game for one side or the other.
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It's not a punishment to balance and account for all the things swf on comms can ignore/negate.
It also shouldn't matter if not all of them are great players. With any game the devs need to create a fair exchange at the top, this way shortcomings are not due to balance issues but the personal responsibility of the player.
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If you think the game should be balanced around the 95% of players, then great, you don't need to nerf nurse. Because she is always the lowest kill rate killer when looking across all skill levels.
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The fact that swf has such an overwhelming advantage over soloQ is the core issue IMHO. However, "punishing" people for choosing to play with their friends is ridiculous. Instead of that, they need something to bring SoloQ up, and a killer buff.
Personally, i play 95% of my survivor games soloQ, and that's largely through choice. Theres plenty of posts for swfs, but i find DBD to me more immersive and yes, more fun, as soloQ. To me, its practically the only way to play this "horror" game. Communication between survivors should not be possible, and the game is vastly better without it. However, since there are so many ways to voice chat outside the game, this sadly isn't feasible. So the matter is how to bring soloQ up to be closer to swf. And how to improve killers in the process.
Simple in-game voice chat would help in this regard massively. That is the single greatest advantage a swf has. Icons / in game chat options aren't even gonna come close to making an iota of difference, especially since the main time people talk in swf other than at start is mid-chase.
I've always said that survivors who wanna communicate should have to equip an item to allow them to do so. And the communication should be broadcast in game, so killer can hear too.
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"as confirmed by MandyTalk in a previous thread. The game was always intended to have swf, and it is intended for them to be communicating. The feature simply wasn't ready at launch."
This statement is fundamentally false as we learned from M. Cote years ago that the game was originally designed as a 2 person game : 1 person chases and 1 person was chased.
"Making swf play by a ruleset that only applies to swf is punishing them for playing with their friends."
Playing in a SWF gives you huge advantages. You can call out totem locations, perks or addons the killer is using and can tell each other which gen has the most progress. For 5 years the devs said : playing in a SWF gives no advantage. Then on year 6 they made the statement : playing in a SWF group gives you a 15% escape advantage on average.
Do you remember when Freddy got nerfed? It was because he had a 4% higher kill rate.
"Out of all swfs, bully squads represent less than 1% and are few and far between."
This is made up data you do not have access to. It is your opinion that you present as fact with no evidence. The fact that SWF increases your escape chances by 15% suggests that bully squads are far more likely to happen in a SWF than in solo queue.
Actually this is wrong too. There is one killer better than every other so whenever a map is designed you have to consider how the best killer would play on that map and how the worst killer would play on that map. The same goes for perk balancing. Pop for example might have been nerfed because it made Nure too efficient when she has very short chases in average at high MMR.
If we disabled Nurse and Blight for a period of 30-90 days for evaluation testing we would find that the escape rates in DBD would be : far too high again.
"But gutting her like so many whining children want, without reducing map sizes and obscene strong loops and tiles, and making things fair for all killers to compete with the power of SWF, shouldn’t happen."
There are two killers capable of handling every map size in the game and those killers are Nurse/Blight. Everyone is clearly aware those two killers are far too good compared to every other killer in the game. Their base kit is too strong and they have problematic addons that are far too strong. These two killers either need to get a lot worse or all the other killers need to get a lot better. Either choice is "fine" but that does not adress the problem of map size.
Imagine if we had some maps that were 15000m² where only nurse and Blight could play. That would generally speaking be grossly unfair to those killers in the same way that playing on 11,000m² maps is unfair to almost all the other killers. All the maps in this game need to go down to 9000m² or smaller.
"They like how the game has crap rng."
Yea this sucks but is true. In general they designed NOED to be the "equalizer" so that when the game is basically over the killer has parity. Unfortunately they nerfed the perk so you don't get 9% move speed anymore and it is now a hex totem that shows its aura instead of lasting forever and being able to be removed.
At this point NOED should cease to exist. I used it exactly once since the change to finish a challenge from an Old Tome that I had overlooked. And since NOED would no longer exist we can start making balanced tiles that are spread out. Imagine how much more interesting DBD would be if the game tiles could not be clustered up - as per Scott Jund's "dream patch notes" video.
The devs absolutely could balance this game and make the RNG far less bad. But as you sate - they clearly do not want to do that. The game is much worse off for it as a result.
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I wouldn't be surprised if a killer thought I was solo q with my goofballs of friends that just meme around all the time, lol
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I suspect that it's a 50%/10%/40% split. My own reasons for sometimes dodging an obvious SWF if I'm on a killer/build that I'm not especially comfortable on is definitely the third - numerous really, really bad experiences with SWF opponents (one of which resulted in me making my Steam profile private).
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"Here's what happens when you tell the killer they're playing against a swf: Lobby dodge."
Let's talk about this for a second. Why does a killer dodge a lobby? They see something in the looby that says I don't want to play against that. So what about a SWF makes a killer want to dodge a lobby? SWF gives an advantage and they would rather not play against that given the choice.
If as I have said in other places I get +4 perks of my choice for playing against SWF groups then I would ALWAYS want to play against SWF groups (the perks would be chosen ahead of time and only activate if the game inlcuded a SWF team. Any non SWF players would get +4 information perks).
One of the advantages you get in a SWF is that you don't need to spend perks to see auras. You never need to bring perks like Rookie Spirit because your team can tell you where the gens are. You never need to bring Kindred because your friend can tell you if you are being camped. Your friends can tell you when they throw shack pallet so you know not to go there. You can call out a location to meet friends to go to heal each other - making perks like bond/empathy completely unnecessary.
All the while you get the benefit of those perks without actually selecting those perks. You get the best of both worlds as you get information perks as a result of talking in your SWF and you can bring whatever action perk you want. This allowed for SWF groups to bring the "ultimate" build in previous patches : Unbreakable, DH, DS, BT.
Do you know what happened when people used that build in solo queue? They got destroyed compared to when they used it in a SWF. In short being in a SWF gives you extra perks.
If the solo players in the game with a SWF got extra perks to compensate it would make SWF far less valuable. Take a moment for example to imagine playing against nurse with 8 perks. What can you come up with?
How about : No way out, Remember Me, Overcharge, Call of Brine, Starstruck, Agitation, Floods of Rage, Lethal Pursuit.
That would be fun to play against - right?
If you think that would not fun to play against then how much fun is it to play against a SWF team that uses voice coms to gain an advantage?
How many perks worth of information you get out of a SWF varies as some groups are only one or two perks but when I play in a SWF it's closer to about 16 perks worth of information. Many years ago there was an exploit that allowed killers to use as many perks as they wanted. This was called cheating and was patched out of the game. Meanwhile being able to talk and bring 2-16 extra perks worth of information is just "standard" for SWF? Hello?
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what about swfs without comms, ik its not all swfs but most swfs i play i dont voice chat
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Honestly, if I knew that I was playing 4 soloQ players, I wouldn't play as sweaty and try-hard then as if I am suspecting that you are SWF. Of course, some SWF are just goofing around and having fun or mememing, but against the good ones, in order to stand a chance at all you gotta shift gears into overdrive right from the start.
Sometimes you can idendify the one player who isn't up to par, ie the soloQ player in the lot, but this still puts you in a bind: do you kill the soloQ player off, so that you have an easier time dealing with the SWF? Do you let them off the hook and hope that the SWFs are more into bullying, then doing objectives? Then you could off them one after another and gift the soloQ player the hatch. But honostly, this kind of outcomes are super rare, most of the time the soloQ player dies early and you might get one of the SWF team, while the other two escapa dancing.
I am all for giving soloQ players the action icons better yesterday then tomorrow, and you shouldn't punish the guys and gals who are just in for some casual fun either, but the high level SWFs groups ... oof, if you don't balance the killers power to what they can bring to the table, then its just aweful and akin of bringing the lambs to the slaughter.
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Solo q is bad because survs are bad, when the survs are good solo q is good, just use kindred. Swf is braindead and not intended, forever ever stupid and should receive a nerf, 2 people swf max at each lobby, atleast a bonus poont increase for killer because the y the killers will deal with the usual toxicity.
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Swfs have the equivalent of team-related information perks. It doesn't really matter where the killer is when you can deduce from the hud whether or not they're in chase, and from their terror radius if they're nearby. Most swfs play just as well without comms.
Killers have no perks that are equivalent to that because their objective is the opposite. Thus giving them extra perks of their choosing to compensate would actually be busted beyond belief and allow for builds that completely prevent survivors from doing their objective.
The solution isn't to break the game by power-creeping killers and solos. The solution is to shrink maps, bridge the gap between solo and swf, nerf the survivor role as a whole, and buff killers where necessary.
Doing so will ensure killers can get downs at a consistent pace which is arguably better than just breaking the entire game because of the swf boogyeman.
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This game was created w/ solo in mind. SWF was added to the game because it was something the community (at the time) asked for quite a bit. No surprise the game is unbalanced as can be.
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That's wrong. MandyTalk already addressed the whole "Swf wasn't intended to be in the game" debate. The feature wasn't ready at launch which is why the game launched without it, but it was always intended to be part of the game. It is also intended and expected for those survivors to be on comms, while information perks are made with solos in mind.
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Gaining in-game benefits by using 3rd party software that other players do not benefit from and the other side has no counter against:
Bannable offense.
... unless it's voice chat on Discord. Then it's apparently fine.
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"The solution is to shrink maps, bridge the gap between solo and swf, nerf the survivor role as a whole, and buff killers where necessary."
Making all the maps smaller would help. But how are you going to bridge the gap between voice coms and none? Giving killer and solo survivors extra perks to make SWF weaker would do exactly that.
"Swfs have the equivalent of team-related information perks. It doesn't really matter where the killer is when you can deduce from the hud whether or not they're in chase"
That information isn't always readily available without voice coms or aura reading perks. But if you have voice coms you don't need a perk - one of your friends can tell everyone else where they are leading the killer. Without giving solo survivors free perks how do you intended to even out that advantage? You can't.
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I was here on release. There was no SWF. The devs even pushed back on initial requests for the ability to invite friends. It may be true the intended to eventually add it, but the game was balanced around solo play. That is a fact and one you can easily go back and see with early content creators.
You can go away with your accusations of lies and falsehoods. You need to take a chill pill and clear your head some.
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They won't get a nerf in any way, no point in discussing.
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A swf without comms is almost the same a 4 solos, but I'd also say solos are not weak. The only difference I see is the swf has the benefits of reliable teamwork and coordinating with perk loadouts. Survivors don't need to dictate everything to be efficient.
When it comes to balancing for swf, the strongest form should be the primary consideration since fair balance at the top means balance at every mmr level.
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I'm agree, buff the killers
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"It may be true the intended to eventually add it, but the game was balanced around solo play. That is a fact..."
This is one of the things that people who want SWF to be OP have no answer for. It is the truth that DBD is balanced for solo play. Giving the killer 4 perks against SWF teams would make things a lot less "OP" for SWF. That is exactly why they fight so hard against it.
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no, swf needs to be nerfed too
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Never thought of that, honestly. I personally played a SWF for the first time ever as a 4 man the other night and saw how powerful SWF can be first hand.
While I think your thought here is not a bad idea, because I understand the power a SWF holds, I think most SWF players would see a debuff as a punishment for playing with friends. And rightfully so.
I think at the end of the day, maps need updated to a decent size for both sides, tile spawns need to be more fair and consistent, a buff to solos close enough to SWF as possible (with the actions icons/quick chat) , and accurate matchmaking especially (thanks for the reminder @GoodBoyKaru). Simultaneously, buff killers around the above changes. Anything else would be up to player knowledge, like any other game. At least then we could blame crap players on true skill, rather than bad matchmaking giving us unexperienced players, which isn't fun for either side.
It would be a ton of work for Behavior, and dependent on the honest/unbiased opinions of the community. But I think that's attainable.
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Giving solos the same level of information swf gets bridges the gap. This means things like basekit kindred, and HUD Icons that tell you what each survivor is doing.
Swf gets no benefit from this because they already have this information. That addresses the Solo vs Swf imbalance. For killers, basekit regression buffs and smaller maps. That addresses the imbalance between killers and swfs in a way that's fair for everyone. Then the survivor role can be nerfed as a whole.
There is no justifiable reason why killers should be OP by mere virtue of them being killers. This is not a simulator where you play against bots.
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i can't? i won't be so sure about it since they shown us during these years how much "truthful" they are... i'll give you a valid example: even with the "reduced grind" thing where they claimed that they have reduced the grind by 75%, then someone disprove them with actual numbers...
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If matchmaking ever works as intended they will be the same MMR range, not time invested necessarily, you can't guarantee that.
People come into this game with varying knowledge. I came into this game after watching Otz play and make videos because I followed his stuff before he changed to DBD. I already knew quite a lot coming into this game.
Also, you're acting as if the 'focus the weak link' strat is a unique concept to DBD. Less people being easier to manage is always a common sense concept even in symmetrical team games.
Actually this is something I've experienced in another game. I played DotA 2 for a long time. That game is so aged there are experienced players in every MMR bracket, meaning there is nowhere for new players to be matched exclusively with new players before they implemented a 'new player experience'. I'd probably argue DBD is old enough to be getting that way, that anyone getting into the game now, will unavoidably be matched with and against much more experienced players. Especially as DBD's player base is proabably much smaller than DotA.
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That would still buff most SWFs, because most SWFs aren’t 4 people, and that would give SWFs extra information about the survivors that are not in their SWF.
The end result is SWFs that aren’t 4 people would have their escape rate raised.
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No, it wouldn't. The HUD already tells you when someone is in chase. The next logical step is for it to simply tell you who's doing what, not where.
This doesn't lead to an increase in swf escape rates unless the killer plays poorly, in which case I'd say they earned the win. It makes no difference to a swf what the solos are doing because they can't communicate with the solos.
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I don't know, guys. I understand giving solo survivors extra information is the easiest way to narrow the gap in power between one solo surivor and swf teams, but doing that blatantly kills the purpose of the game on the survivor side, which iirc was to have four people trying to survive a killer with no possibility to be coordinated. I'd say it goes against the lore too. The most I would do is a sort of in-game proximity voice chat. We need to find a different solution for swfs, and I think it's not easy for the devs, so we should go easy on them.
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If all survivors are given extra information in the future, then the people in SWFs would be given extra information (that they currently do not have) about the survivors that aren't in their SWF.
And it would make a difference to a SWF, because they would get extra information on what people outside their SWF is doing. For example, the HUD currently only tells people when the obsession is in chase, but if survivor icons are added to the game, then the SWF members would know every time someone outside their SWF was in a chase.
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The hud tells you when any survivor is in chase. It's a bit more subtle when it isn't the obsession, but their portrait and name become a bit brighter when in chase and dim when not in chase.
You can also deduce that a solo is in chase by the change in their health state. If they suddenly go from healthy to injured, you know they're in chase. I fail to see how knowing that a solo is in chase magically increases a swf's chance of escaping.
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Proximity Chat presents several problems as it assumes everybody is speaking the same language. In America, the primary spoken language is English, but then you have Europe where there are many different languages all encompassed under the one region.
Then you have to take into account people who don't much fancy the idea of communicating with strangers. Then there's the children, because children play this game too. This is why giving solos access to the same level of information a swf has is the best way to bridge the gap.
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Survivor action icons would raise 2-SWF and 3-SWF closer to the level of 4-SWF. This would raise the escape rate of 2-SWF and 3-SWF.
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"Giving solos the same level of information swf gets bridges the gap. This means things like basekit kindred, and HUD Icons that tell you what each survivor is doing."
So you're basically implementing my idea but only for the solo survivors. You give the survivors more basekit perks but nothing for the killer..... right.
"This is not a simulator where you play against bots."
Do you know why they buffed killers with this last patch? I suspect it has something to do with the fact that most people who play this game do not play killer. There is a huge disparity in the number of people who want to play killer vs the number that want to play survivor. Before you say the ratio should be 1:4 you need to realize the numbers are way more skewed than that.
Earlier this year survivor queue times were closing in on 10 minutes. It was happening because there were in some cases 40 people playing killer while 4,000+ people were playing survivor in the same region.
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Agreed. Solo queue should be buffed instead, then game balanced around that.
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SWF without any kind of balance buffs for the killer was a huge mistake as DBD was a game built with indecision in mind. You are not supposed to know if you should keep working your generator, go for the save or hide. You always know which action to do when you are in a SWF.
Imagine playing games where no one is talking, the survivors are all talking, or the survivors are all talking but you can hear them talking. The scenario where the survivors are all talking is the scenario where they have the advantage. About 1/3 of the perks in this game become pointless if you can talk to each other.
"This is why giving solos access to the same level of information a swf has is the best way to bridge the gap."
Let's imagine we are in a SWF. The killer comes to chase me and my generator is at 75% progress. We only need one generator to escape. If I tell you my generator is at 75% and I run far away from that generator then we are guaranteed to escape if you come to repair my generator.
If the killer kicks my generator with overcharge before chasing me and nobody does anything about it then it resets to zero after a minute. How do you balance out voice coms? If we are in a SWF I can say go to the generator near the hill besides shack. If we are all solo then you will likely start a new generator and get nothing done before my chase ends.
Do you propose that there would be a map wide 75% flashing neon sign over the generator with the most progress? This is just one advantage you get by being in a SWF.
Do you propose that solo players would all know the killer has Bamboozle as soon as he uses it near a survivor? This is what happens in a SWF.
Do you propose that solo players see the aura of any active totem that another solo survivor has run past? SWF don't get to see the aura but they can relay the position of the totem to their team.
In short there is no way to 100% bridge the gap between solo players and SWF. But there is a really simple shortcut to make the game a lot less unfair to the killer and solo survivor when they play in a game with a SWF. Give solo surviovrs 4 information perks of their choice that active in case of SWF. Give the killer any 4 perks of their choice that activate later in case they play against SWF.
I think you will find that most killers would enjoy playing against SWF with 8 perks. Most SWF would absolutely hate it - because their advantage would dramatically decrease.
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Survivors already hate playing against four slowdown perks, what do you think is going to happen when you let them stack more? Survivors are going to DC en masse because literally nothing can be done. Killer perks and survivor perks are not equal in terms of strength.
You propose that solos get 4 extra information perks of their choice, while the killer gets any 4 extra perks of their choosing. This is in absolutely no way a fair trade, and survivors in general wouldn't enjoy playing against that.
I'm proposing that solos get the same level of information as a swf, not the exact same information. If solos can make informed decisions, they'll (hopefully) play better. If somebody's on hook and at least one person is thinking about going for the save but they're also thinking somebody else is on the way, they'll be able to glance at the hud and know that one person is in chase, and the other is on a gen.
Survivors can't have games without killers and killers can't have games without survivors. You can't punish people for playing with their friends and you can't just give the killer an absurd buff to compensate for the existence of swf.
Smaller maps means killers can get downs at a consistent pace, which also means that all that information sharing isn't going to make a difference.
Solos get buffed by giving them the same level of information a swf has. This means things like basekit kindred and action icons. They can never be made equivalent to a swf, but the gap can be bridged.
After this, the survivor role can then be nerfed as a whole while weaker killers can be given buffs where necessary. This allows for more killers to be viable, and for killers to get downs at a consistent pace without relying on stacking slowdowns.
As for the reason why killers were buffed this last patch, it has nothing to do with killer numbers and everything to do with kill rates. The devs were unhappy with the kill rates hence the killer buffs. I don't agree with their reasoning, but I do agree with the buffs.
I'm not against killers and solos getting buffs, but I am against ideas that only really benefit the killer. If you can't beat a swf, it's on you as a player. That same swf would've beat you even without comms. Comms, believe it or not, do not make or break a victory.
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You still haven't explained how this increases their escape rate. You can't coordinate with solos.
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SWFs can better coordinate what they should be doing, if they had more information about what the other survivors are doing. It’s the same concept of how solo q survivors want survivor action icons, even though these icons don’t involve direct communication with the other survivors.
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Unless someone is on hook and nobody's able to get them, they should be doing gens. Nobody really runs noed anymore so totems can mostly be ignored unless there's a hex in play.
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