http://dbd.game/killswitch
SWF needs changes
I know this will be a very controversial topic, and many will probably disagree, but I think SWF definitely needs to be looked at. It makes the killer experience completely different, and gives survivors more perks than they should have. Being in a SWF automatically gives you perks like kindred and bond which are both quite powerful. Although I know many people enjoy playing with others, I think SWF should be completely removed from the game, or survivors that are in a SWF should play with big handicaps to counter all the free perks that they get. These handicaps would be harsher for each survivor the more there are in the SWF. Again I know that a lot of people play with their friends but SWF is something that completely changes the course of the match for killer, and drastically lowers the chances of success for the killer, so I think the same should be for the survivors in the SWF to even out the playing field. Some handicaps survivors could start with could be slower gen repairs, faster bloodlust gain for the killer when getting chased, less perk slots and faster hook progression. Overwatch for example used to have a system where each team in competitive would have the same composition (eg if one team has a party of 3 and 3 solos, so would the other team) to give both sides an even chance. Since this isn’t possible in DBD as it’s a 1v4 I think some handicaps to survivor would be more than fair
Comments
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SWF wont be removed or addressed. its a part of the game whether we like it or not.
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Why would it not be addressed? We’ve been getting so many balance changes lately to both survivors and killers, but the most unbalanced thing in the game has not been addressed. I don’t see why that should stay that way. As a killer, playing against 4 solo survivors is completely different than playing against a 4man swf
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I agree that SWF needs to be handicapped, but it's never going to happen. The devs don't even acknowledge the SWF advantage and refuse to share any stats of kill rates vs. 3 or 4 man SWF. If you suggest handicapping SWF, the three basic responses you will get are:
"The tough teams are so rare it doesn't even matter!" (lie). EDIT: added bonus is god Nurses are equally rare but she needs to be nerfed into unplayable status though because it's different somehow
"You can't punish people for playing with their friends!" (you can certainly punish the player that wanted to have fun playing Ghostface or Pallet Freddy though. Trying to make the game more fair for all parties isn't punishment)
"SWF doesn't give any advantages! Killers only lose to them because they're bad! Solo queue can be just as good!" (lie)
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Please use paragraphs when you write.
Also changes for SWF is being worked on, Peanits says so right here.
Im personally just gonna kick back and wait for this one.
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A simple gen speed debuff would do. That's all it takes. SWF is stronger because it's more efficient, so curtail the efficiency to make it a little bit more in line with solo, and there's your solution. "Punished for playing with friends!" If your primary goal truly is to have fun with friends, this need not concern you. Why should killers get destroyed, after playing as well as they're allowed to, vs SWF who play to win, just because you want to play with your friends?
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Solo can be just as good as SWF... when the matchmaking works. It doesn't mean that SWF doesn't have a distinct advantage over killers though.
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There's been a lot of talk over the years over the death of DBD. Hasn't happened yet. However...
If you remove people's ability to play with their friends, you will kill the game.
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They did use a paragraph. Sometimes it's just short enough to where splitting it into 2-3 paragraphs would be redundant.
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That doesn't say anything like that at all. I think that's mentioning the buff solo queue with more information changes and then killers will wait a at least a year for a miniscule buff while they constantly get dumpstered by every lobby being more efficient
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The Devs did share swf killrates once, I think in 2019, so there are kinda old.
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They've said many times over they years they aren't looking to punish anyone for playing how they wish (aside from cheating & TOS like things). And that this isn't a comp game needing debuffs and limitations and other weird tourney rules in place.
Heck yeah I feel it when I go against a coordinated three- or four-man SWF, and know I'll get one to three hooks and maybe a kill. But in my experience those games are rare for me, and I blame matchmaking for getting those as I'm an okish surv but a terrible killer.
I believe I get those groups because they've been dodged several times and the matchmaking widens the search out, so we are making things actively worse with all the lobby shopping. But point is it goes back to the matchmaking, not SWF existing. And the uncomfortable fact is the best killers should go against the best survs, and most of them are in a SWF.
Last time they put out such stats (mid 2019 I believe) about half of all survs were in at least a two-man SWF, and that was by far the most common grouping with three- and four-mans far less seen. Since that time with solo queue being just delightful I have to believe the number of duos must have increased a lot. So you're talking about removing the largest portion of the surv playerbase. As others have said, that move will indeed kill this game.
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hehe good luck, if you forgot, this is bhvr the dev team, about 2 or 3 years ago a bug came in before the new year where the killers no longer had terror radios (game breaking bug) and bhvr was on vacation and over 1 month it was finally fixed xD
example a good dev team from a other game, they care about theys community when dbd came out, they would have immediately put something in for the solo q and done that in a few months, but don't announce it at bhvr years later maybe bring it out and at the end of the day it doesn't even work properly (the is my experience i made dbd in 4 years)
but hay I don't want to take your ilustration of a good dev team from you, gl ^^
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This dev team is actually a really good one compared to other games. Although sometimes they may be a bit slow the vast majority of the time they do listen to the community’s feedback (fingers crossed they do something about this too). They are quite a small company and dbd is pretty much their only game so you can’t expect from them what you would expect from a company like Activision or valve, but I still think they are a very good and active team regardless
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simply let the killer know if its a 3 or 4 man in the lobby
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It won’t be addressed because plenty of killers are still playing the game despite the massive advantage that SWF on comms have. As long as there are enough people willing to player killer, why would BHVR risk losing a lot of players by nerfing SWF?
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What they inted to do is bring Solos closer to the level of SWF and then balance it from that point onwards... Giving a disadvantage to people who play with friends would kill the game rather fast, why would you even want that, most games are more fun when played with friends why do you want to rob them of fun just because they play with friends?
I think they once talked about the amount of people in SWF and 2 and 3 men were a far larger amount than 4 man swfs so I think people overestimate how many SWF they get... I agree that a SWF consisting of 4 players using coms has an advantage over those exact same players without using coms, but when they get solo closer to swf they actually have a somewhat consistant base from which onwards they can balance the game, with players having roughly the same information that's something they can work with... And I'm honestly looking forward to that independantly of both changes...
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You can't really do anything to swf without essentially killing the game. It's unfortunate but that's the reality of the situation.
The best solution is to buff solo to an acceptable point then buff all killers to be good.
Also everyone talk about how unfair it is for killers to go against swf but it's also a bit unfair for killers to go against 4 solos who have no clue what anyone else is doing and in order to have that info they are required to bring perks which killer also complain about having to do.
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Ok so we're not allowed to have fun with friends... Fun world we all should be alone without friends i get it... Killer is dead soloQ is broken you get teammates with 20 hours or gods... Its unreliable as hell unless you play with friends
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I would love to hear how making gens take 10 seconds longer or not allowing you to stack Dead Hard on everyone or not being able to have 4 green medkits or something if you're playing in a SWF mean you can't have fun with your friends lol. It's only fun if you get to easy 4 out every game with your busted setups and Eyrie of Crows offerings?
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Did you even read Peanits post? He's talking about buffs to Soloq. That has literally nothing to do with SWF 🙄
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You are getting a disadvantage for playing with friends, you are punished for that... That in itself makes it less fun...
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change is change.
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But which excuse should Killers bring then if they lose a game?
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According to the devs, there is little to no difference in survival rate between SWFs and solos, for the majority of players. Basically, unless you're top mmr, SWFs are not escaping significantly more than solo players.
So SWF is definitely not that urgent. I do hope they won't forget that regular players play in SWF too, without being gods at the game. If there's only 2% escape difference between Solo and casual SWF in mid mmr, then I don't expect the devs to apply the same handicaps to all SWFs equally.
I think they should balance the game by giving some info to solos and then buffing killers if necessary, not by nerfing SWF.
In theory, if SWF really was boosting, matchmaking would take care of it seamlessly by putting them in front of better killers. So in my eyes, the problem lies more with matchmaking than anything else.
That is, before anyone decides to hound me about how stats don't mean anything or how SWFs kick their asses, only my opinion. =)
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Being wrong is being wrong.
Changes to Soloq is not the same as changes to SWF as you claimed in your post.
Accept you were wrong and move on.
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If you're just playing with friends for fun, why do you care if a change makes groups less powerful?
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Couple things here. I don't believe the devs for one second about survival rates between SWF and solo. They haven't released exact stats in 4 years, they won't show killers who was in a SWF after the game, and they're overall just extremely hush hush about the giant advantages SWF enjoys over solo.
Second of all, SWFs don't exclusively get matched against better killer players. If queues are too long, basically any killer gets shoved into lobbies against SWF even if they aren't near their MMR level. Also, killers probably play against SWF more often than solo queue because of the MMR system IMO. It's easier for killers to reach the "high MMR softcap" because it's easier to get kills than it is to escape in solo. Solos don't push high MMR because they have to rely on their teammates too. Killers that reach the high MMR softcap are probably exclusively fighting SWF
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Because sitting on gens for even longer is like the least fun thing about the entire game? And every time when you encounter a killer that plays in an unfun way you will be thinking it would be easier if you did not have the disadvantage of playing in a swf... And that's something that should never happen...
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So if doing gens is boring and unfun and being in chases is really fun, how is the killer playing in an unfun way if they keep you in chase the entire time??
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But not even every SWF consists of really good players, some are just mediocre or even bad and want to have fun with people... I played rather consistantly with two groups of like 20 guys in total and out of those 20 16 were complete trash... No idea how to loop just hiding sometimes even missing skillchecks, I liked those guys but winning games was a struggle me and one of the other guys that somewhat knew what they were doing had to always try to get the killer to chase us because our mates would not last 20 seconds in chase... That was really rough... It is just not true that every SWF is really good at the game... You will find many solo players that are far better than a SWF... Also a SWF does not necessarily have a higher mmr...
The softcap is so low that they do not exclusively face SWF... According to some dataminers the softcap is 1600 and really really good players with coms reach about 2200-2400 I think it was... You also need to think of the fact that with long queues you can be matched with lower mmr players as well and not only higher... Since there are far more mediocre or low mmr players than high mmr players above the soft cap you will more likely play against those, because there are just more of them...
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I didn't say that beein kept in chase was the unfun thing... But when you have a facecamping bubba but are playing in SWF and therefore your gen time is even longer than that really sucks... Or when you have a killer that hard tunnels and you cannot really do something about it the same thing...
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Whether or not you believe the devs stats is your prerogative.
Survivors get put against all kinds of killers as well thanks to matchmaking. I remember quite a few 5k hours killers going against me when I had no more than 100h on the game as a whole. (Granted, most of them had very good manners, as I am generally lucky with this kind of things)
So killers don't exclusively get matched against god SWFs. I do believe that highest mmr killers might see more SWFs than anything else, at least 2-man and 3-man, but I don't think it's such a common phenomenon. When you listen to everyone on the forums, pretty much all killer players that don't goof around only ever face SWFs and subtle cheaters. At some point I think there might be an exaggeration, or an unwillingness to believe a good lobby might have been at least partly solos.
I do think they should show in postgame who queued together. Maybe that way people would stop badmouthing both Solo ("poor unfortunate souls who can't expect to reach high mmr") and SWF ("meanies that are so handheld that they can 4E with no skill") as much.
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("meanies that are so handheld that they can 4E with no skill")
I mean this is definitely true if it's a lobby of competent players tryharding and they aren't playing a god Nurse or Blight
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Or Spirit, Plague, Artist, Wesker, Pyramid Head or Twins... Even in comp those killers are viable so they are probably also viable in normal matchmaking against high skilled players.
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No they aren't. Comp doesn't allow you to stack perks or items. A lobby of competent players all running green medkits, BNPs/toolboxes, insta heals with multi dead hards, a CoH, a deliverance that's played perfectly, etc. and it's gg ez
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"Competent players", but "no skill" ? Hm. My point exactly...
Anyway. Gotta go get some sleep ! I'd say I'll see you in the fog, but I'm excessively bad at surviving and probably the goofiest killer around, so our chances of meeting are quite low =)
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Being on comms, knowing to hard split gens, bringing very strong perks/items, knowing you can hold w and predrop takes very little mechanical skill and practically guarantees a victory on 95% of maps and you can also just bring an offering to take yourself to Garden of Joy, Borgo, Eyrie etc
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I was not wrong.
Changes are coming, get over it.
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I've still been waiting years for somebody to explain the first quote with clear logic and I'm a Survivor main... I definitely don't agree with the OP to have ridiculously overtuned debuffs for simply being a SWF or having BHVR straight up remove it from the game but it does needs changes. For as long as its existed its been the most privileged role in the game and people need to stop being delusional and pretending it doesn't break immersion/balance in a lot of scenarios. The foundation of the game's design and mechanics aren't consistent with SWF gameplay because it wasn't a launch feature. This has never been addressed, just mitigated through the years
Over time they've done a decent job at applying band-aids in the form of perks, but you can't hide the wounds forever and that goes for both sides too. On this particular wound though, I'm really tired of the lame excuses for SWF when the same people making them go so hard to advocate for every other perk/character/mechanic to be balanced for everybody. Some people just wanna have their cake and eat it too
For example, Nurse shouldn't exist as she is according to them because "she breaks the game by default by ignoring game mechanics" yet SWF somehow doesn't do that providing 4 players access to multiple perks for free by default and ignoring game mechanics that were designed without Discord or party chat in mind..
People will boast that every Nurse in the world should be harshly punished with the nerf-bat because the top percentile players reached a level that's stressful for them to go against, but SWF at the top percentile stacking full meta playing comp-style against M1s is fine and Killers should cope because most SWFs are casuals while the top percentile SWFs are rare (They're really not once you're above the soft-cap. Its very common to run into high prestige teams with stacked items or very obviously playing with comms. You don't need to be Oracle to have 'SWF' moments either, it happens on a daily basis)... I should cope with my stressful SWF matches (even when you win it can feel deflating to go through) because its part of the game and we should consider other's fun, but its not fair that a good Nurse can have fun at your expense once per 30 matches you play.... If you change Nurse (most likely coming in the future) and micromanage every little perk because of her then you have to start doing the same for SWF. They bottleneck balance too
Balancing SWF without removing it is a difficult task for sure, but its hardly 'punishing people for playing with their friends'. The main people who use that line are the ones that use 'playing with my friends' as a disguise for 'I like to stack the deck with randoms I met through Looking For Group or my list of Survivor contacts and I don't want any aspect of my advantages altered'. If playing with friends is the sole concern they have in regards to SWF then they should be fine considering they're not being restricted from doing that, they'd just be brought back a little bit closer to Earth. Its not a conspiracy either, most of the people who want SWF to be addressed SWF themselves or have SWFd in the past. Its obviously a lot of fun and it should be in the game, it just shouldn't be left the way it currently is. Its literally the easiest role in the game to play between SoloQ and Killer
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They are both overpowered but the frequency is the difference. Sweaty killers bringing the most OP **** imaginable is far more common than a SWF where all four players are insanely good. I'm about done with people pretending like comp SWFs are running around all over the place. Especially now with how low the soft caps are. There's no way anyone is getting constantly matched with these teams. If this game had an extremely strict MMR system then maybe people would have a valid point when complaining about SWFs. The amount of four stacks is very low according to behavior's own data. The number of people playing in a 4 man SWF is only around 4% based on the most recent data. The amount of that 4% who are ridiculously good is even lower. I run into killers running the most busted builds imaginable in every other game I play as survivor. It's far more common than the dreaded SEAL Team Six SWF where everyone plays perfectly.
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The eternal struggle.
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I remember killers said "Solo's dont need info, good Solo do fine"
Also killers "Swfs are efficient because of info"
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And those teams would be dodged into oblivion and never ever ever evaaaaa get a match.
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Or she can write however she wants, and you can read it or just skip it and move along…
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i think SWF is completely fine the only possible way to have fun and a decent game as survivor, solo qs doing nothing, all death and uncordination and not caring to do anything either. been a month since last solo q game and im not missing one single bit of it.
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The real solution to this problem is to buff solo Q to have communication roughly on-par with a SWF, and then buff killer accordingly so that they can handle SWF (which would in a way be every match).
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Agree with you 100% but nothing will ever be done about. Playing against a swfs is easily the most frustrating unfun part of the game. I'd rather be hard tunneled 10 survivor matches in a row then face 1 gen rushing perk stacked swf.
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It is not being in SWF that makes survivors strong; it is the fact that said SWF is composed of experienced survivors.
Have 4 people play, in vocal, on accounts with all the items, all the accessories, all the offerings and all the perks ... if those 4 people are newbies who have only 10 hours of play on DbD ... they will get destroyed by a Piggy.
To say that "SWF = unstoppable team" is wrong.
I know quite a few people I play SWF with, and yet some of them may have hundreds and hundreds of hours on the game (if not at least a thousand), they will still sacrifice the shack palette first, still don't know the concept of 3-gens, and don't communicate important aspects of the game during the game, when it's not just bringing the killer back to the people who make the generators. As for the chase, it doesn't even last 10s.
So yes, they are SWFs. But it doesn't mean anything. What matters is the composition of the SWF.
If you run into 4 people, 3 of whom are beginners, you can have the 4th one down. The same goes for 2/2.
The fact of communicating does bring an advantage, but if it is exploited by players who are not good in DbD, the result will be inefficient.
And if not, concerning the fact of having a team which would not take duplicate perks, one could imagine a system which, when it detects that the team of 4 is composed of all different perks, rewards each member by doubling, for example, the BP obtained? 🤗
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Not necessarily true. I have have a few YouTuber that played DBD for fun, usually in custom matches (with the killer in discord), that didn't have a clue of the game.
That was 4-5 years ago. Then they played public games as a team and still didn't have much of a clue but still they managed to win games simply because of constant call outs.
From their usual gameplay and more importantly their understanding of the game according to the BS they were talking about mechanics, like killer powers, they completely interpreted wrong, they shouldve never won against any killer in pub games.
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Someone's in denial 😂 sorry your ego can't take it.
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