January 2023 Developer Update for Midchapter 6.5.0
Comments
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loving the HUD changes, a very healthy change for the game
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Don't know if I agree. Efficiency is the essence of "sweat" in this game, due to how the lopsided dynamic works. The more efficient either side is, the less the other side has a chance, the less fun people have. I get the idea of buffing solos up to swf level and then balancing around that, the issue is that type of lopsided jenga balance doesn't work, especially when its not treated with even parity. An absurd number of problems in this game stem from half assed attempts at fixing previous problems, and it just keeps cascading because the devs refuse to address issues that affect both sides in an even manner.
Introducing things like the HUD update will still leave plenty of survivors pissed at how horrible and inefficient their teammates are, which will lead to a whole different form of efficiency focus/frustration with inefficiency/etc. Meanwhile it'll have a disproportionate effect on any killers who use oblivious/stealth making them even weaker regardless. By the time "the feedback is collected," If there's a new complaint du jour that'll outprioritize the affected killers, and it'll get pushed aside for whatever new thing gets the ol torches and pitchforks out of storage. They really need to stop with the lopsided adjustments when a lot of the core issues are deep enough to affect both sides evenly.
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Please keep the old wiggle as an option. I really despise the skill check wiggle :'(
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Maintaining some sort of 'efficiency deficit' through the inadequacy between SWF and solo isn't tenable. This just makes it so killers have good games against solos, and bad games against SWF, and we're supposed to treat that as 'balanced on average'. That's not sustainable for solo survivors. 0Ks against SWF and 4Ks against solo's might be a 2K average, but it's not balanced.
It doesn't matter what other balance considerations are necessary, there are many and there always will be. Closing the gap between solo and SWF will ALWAYS be a good thing. Do this before all else, or all else is pointless.
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Yes, I get it. Sometimes survivors don't do the stuff you want them to. I've read a hundred permutations of the same story. It's the same stuff every online game falls prey to. It's also just confirmation bias. You remember the times your teammates are not useful and you gloss over the times that they are very useful in your memory. There's a story there that you want to tell yourself because you want to commiserate with others about how useless solo is. It's just how our brains work.
You don't have to be the one closest to the hook. All you have to do is see that a survivor stops repairing a gen and is not in chase. They are very likely going for the save. Then if they get in chase then you know you have to go for the save. The distance to the hook is mostly irrelevant. The save has to be done. It's the same decision making that you would make with kindred except you don't need it anymore.
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If I had to choose between old wiggle and adjusted wiggle, I want old wiggle. Current wiggle gives me 1s bonus making it worth trying to hit greats. But this adjusted thing makes great skillchecks pointless.
Apart of this one and a few other less relevant things, the update seems very good. Great job devs 🙂 Sure I would love some more changes (like eruption nerf, shut down loop on knight nerf, fixing both midwitch and garden at the same time, camp&tunnel fix ...) But overall good job.
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I also think you're underestimating how much time is typically spent not doing objectives. Most of the time, there will be no action icon displayed at all. You simply cannot know if that person is making their way to a hook, or a downed survivor, or hiding from the killer, or looking for a totem, or crouching in a corner, or sneaking into the basement. You cannot make any concrete judgements about what another player is doing at any given time. Even with a Gen icon is up, you don't know what Gen, when a totem icon is up, which totem and is it a cleanse or a blessing? Chest icon, well you know the survivor is wasting time.
The only really useful addition is the chase identification, which we already had on 1/4 survivors, and is typically apparent the moment a survivor gets injured anyway.
Not to mention, all of this information is entirely superfluous, if you run Kindred, which most solo survivors already do, and will still do, because Kindred is still more precise than this, and gives you information on the killer.
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You're right, which is why the efficiency potential of SWF should be brought down as well. The game was designed to purposely have survivors be inefficient and disorganized, and a lot has changed since then for both sides, yet there are a lot of holdouts specifically relying on that lack of information. Why can't killers get some basic information for parity? The argument that information like hook counters, plague sickness progress, RBT timers, etc would be abused doesn't hold weight if we're relying on just trying it and listening for feedback, and all of them account for forced inefficiency through having to mentally track additional information. I'm just never a fan of how selective a lot of this logic can be sometimes.
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I absolutely agree, killers should get hook counters and a better FoV, for starters. I've been asking for these for years.
Neither of which would significantly affect outcomes at the top either. Just like these HUD icons, those two change would predominantly effect; non-tunnelling killers, and lower-skilled killers who get juked by 360's and survivors hiding on their toes. They would be lifting lower killers up, rather than buffing killers as a whole, because the better killers don't need the higher FoV and the tunnelling killers don't need the hook counter.
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Its funny, usually Survivors who abandon their team and do nothing to get Hatch are not considered really good or helpful. But when it fits, they can become godlike players, just with a bit of information.
The Information will bridge the gap between SWF and Solo a bit. But Information was never the real strength of SWF.
You will not make bad Survivors good with just a few Icons.
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Most of the time the action icon won't be lit up. Are you serious? Do you literally think survivors just like.... Sit around not doing anything at all? Only the newest of the new players do that. This position is divorced from reality. People don't play games to sit in a corner AFK.
You can know what everyone else is doing through inference. You're 25% of your team. What are you doing? That influences what everyone else is doing. Surely you have eyes on at least one other member of your team. You're likely on a gen with them; prove thyself is a very popular perk. You don't need to know what gen they're on, only that the game is progressing. Totem icon? They're blessing. Nobody is breaking to totems unless it's for a challenge. Is someone down and the gen icon becomes empty? They're going to get them up. Common sense stuff. Come on.
Kindred only works when someone is on a hook. This gives that same information, all the time, in addition to when they are on hook. Without a perk slot. I'm unable to take you by the hand and explain to you how this is a gigantic buff for survivors. You're an intelligent person. I'm certain you'll realize information perks are entirely redundant after the patch.
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Ye, I wasn't trying to single you out or anything, I was just giving examples of how these things don't happen. Its why I always end up being called a killer main just for advocating for parity, one side always seems to get far more consideration than the other. Even within the Solo vs swf gap, why is the balance discussion never about the trapper/sadako/etc tier vs nurse? Surely a more balanced and normalized killer roster would be just as easy of a starting point to then bridge the gap between solo and swf, but killers perform better at lower level so their spread gets continuously de prioritized and chipped away at so slowly the gap never really closes faster than the game continues to evolve around it. Nerfing some peak synergies nurse gets with her power is a step toward closing that gap, but when was the last SWF-centric nerf? OoO's rework?
I just hate how often these types of changes lead to new problems before the "second phase" takes effect, like the damn key/mori fiasco.
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And what about the 30 seconds it takes to walk between the totem you blessed, and the locker you hide in, before you make your way to a gen? Most of that is travel time.
Yes survivors absolutely spend a ton of time doing nothing, even when they're playing well, and when they're not... I've had several survivors games just today with survivors acting as clueless as the examples I gave earlier. I watched them via spectator mode after they let me die on hook. This is not a niche thing, nor is it about lower MMR brackets, it's just solo queue in general. As Aven just said. You can't make bad survivors good with a few icons.
These icons are a fraction of the information that Kindred provides. A fraction. And most crucially, they give you no information as to what the killer is doing, except for the singular scenario of a survivor being in a chase farther than 32m away from you and they haven't yet been injured. They do not make up for Kindred whatsoever.
It is a buff for sure, it is not as significant as you are claiming it to be, it's a minor buff that doesn't come close to what basekit-Kindred could provide. The sky is not falling, it's just a spot of rain.
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Kindred users know how useless some teammates are. This will just make things more obvious and force a different playstyle for everyone. I´m looking forward how it turns out in the long run.
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Imagine Nurse with an overheat mechanic. What would they call it? Catching Breath?
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