Kindred (without killer aura) should be basekit for solo survivors

I don't think it's necessary. With the HUD icons you can see what everyone is doing and who is being chased.

With the anti-camping coming later, that could gain HUD indicator too, such as an icon to show a survivors sacrifice meter is slowed, indicating the killer is within 16m.

Any aura effect is pretty strong, better than most SWF comms can be. So basekit auras shouldn't be a thing imo, except for when the survivor is powerless like the current aura when dying/hooked.

I agree. The HUD changes helped in this regard, but I still think that basekit Kindred would be the final nudge solo needs to make saves functional.

Not even for really coordinating saves, just to ensure that someone only ever goes to second stage because of bad decisions, not because of lack of information.

I feel like a lot of people leave off the "if necessary" part of that sentiment, though.

Have killers needed sweeping basekit buffs as a direct result of the survivor HUD? Not really, killer's not exactly struggling in general and anywhere problems do arise it tends to have more to do with items and perks, or map design. The survivor HUD was just a good addition that didn't really end up making killers weaker.

Killer players only struggle against good survivors if you define "good survivors" as players who are capable of making the killer struggle.

If you define "good players" as those who have a general idea of what they're doing and how the game plays, no, killers of comparable skill don't struggle against them. Now, I'll grant that you aren't at all guaranteed to get players of comparable skill to yourself - I've had multiple seven-thousand-hour players in my games recently and I personally only have a fraction of that - but that's not a balance issue, it's a matchmaking issue.

As for your last paragraph there, it's not about winning. It is completely impossible to actually make solo and SWF equal, I agree with that, but solo also feels bad because of actual game design elements outside of your control but inside BHVR's control. They can't force your teammates to make good decisions, but they can address a lack of information that the game must necessarily balanced around you actually having. SWFs exist and can't be removed, so it must be assumed that a good chunk of the knowledge SWF pass to one another is known by all survivors otherwise balancing is impossible.

TL;DR winrate isn't everything and solo needs balance changes that aren't directly related to whether those players actually win their matches.

I've had a few matches like that myself, but since whether or not the player in question loses isn't relevant to my argument here, neither are those anecdotes.

There is no amount of good play that will overcome the fact that you just don't know certain critical things in the basekit currently. This was even more the case before the HUD update; there was no amount of good play that would make up for not actually having any way of knowing what your teammates are doing at base, and needing to run perks to remedy that is exactly why it felt bad, not a solution to it feeling bad.

Again, though- if the game is balanced around a good SWF, which seems to be your implication and is something I'd mostly agree with, solo players must necessarily be given some of the information the game is balanced around them knowing. Otherwise their chances of winning actually will go down.

Basekit Kindred and the ability to see your teammate's perks in the lobby + match details mid-game are the last things needed for that, imo.

Right, but whether or not people are trying to use the lack of information as an excuse for poor play is irrelevant. The lack of information still both feels bad for good players and is presenting a balance problem insofar as you can't balance around SWFs while they have basic information solo queue lacks.

(I'm not referring to really advanced callouts here, but just the ability to say what perks you have and who's going for a save, which my suggestions there would remedy. SWF are always going to be better than solo and that's fine, but there is a baseline solo needs to meet that it current doesn't.)

For your last point, if it is needed then BHVR certainly will. I think too many people just assume it obviously would be, when the information we're talking about here is useless in the hands of poor players and would only be nice to have for good players.

Take this thread's particular example- I can't conceive of a world where half a Kindred basekit is actually going to require killer buffs to compensate. It just isn't going to have that kind of impact, at worst it'll prevent the handful of matches you might have where someone goes to second stage or dies without a save because you got particularly disorganised solos. Those matches don't happen frequently and it's pretty obviously fine to lose them in exchange for the game's overall health improving.

What half a basekit Kindred would do is bring solo queue to a point where it's a better basis for overall balance, and it'd make solo queue feel a little less frustrating as players don't need to give up a perk slot to get super basic information. Those don't necessarily translate into killers directly getting weaker. A great parallel here would be the DC bots just added- those are undeniably a survivor buff, as players no longer get 1v3s they can't possibly win because someone DCed on first down, but it only does that. That change didn't require killer buffs to compensate, and half a Kindred basekit wouldn't either, imo.

I think it's unfair to label everyone complaining as simply being bad players. Certainly some are, but the quality of an idea shouldn't come from those who argue for it, it should come from the idea itself.

But, even if we set aside the game-feel argument for a moment, there's still the balance idea. I don't actually agree that the game is balanced around bad players, it feels more like it's currently balanced around generally decent players who don't choose to play 100% optimally all the time, which is a different concept - there's a difference between default Claudette self-caring in a corner, and a decent player that likes doing archives and gimmick builds, after all - but the fact remains that balancing the game around even decent players means acknowledging the elephant in the room that is SWF.

Now, SWF is made into an unfair boogeyman a lot of the time, I won't deny that. Your average SWF is not an unbeatable menace that is guaranteed to give you a miserable game, and I won't pretend they are, but I will state the claim that the average SWF is still inherently affected differently by balance changes to even an above-average solo queue player. Regardless of exactly how skilled a player the game wants to be balanced around, they still need to push for solo and SWF being affected more equally by balance changes, because regardless of skill level they currently aren't.

It doesn't take skill to say "I have -insert teamwork based perk-" or "I'm going for the save", and so those two specific callouts need basekit equivalents for the whole game if balancing is going to be properly effective.

As for the efficiency on gens argument - this is a separate argument to the balance one, to be clear, and... I think you're maybe right, but I think you're exaggerating the effect of it. You don't exactly lose a ton of gen time when two people go for the same save because they didn't have Kindred-- it isn't nothing, and it'd add up if it happens more than once, but I would personally say I don't think it's game-changing. That is why it's a buff, btw, and not just a QoL change like that challenge tracker they added- I am open about it being a solo queue buff, I won't deny that. I just don't think it's a buff that means killers must necessarily be compensated in some way, because all it does is remove the hypothetical bottom of the barrel when it comes to match quality.

By which I mean- it won't make your average opponents actually better than your average opponents now, but it would raise the floor of how below average they can be, if that makes sense?

That's why I equate it to the bots- an early 3v1 shouldn't be considered a genuine advantage, but the absolute bottom of below-average resistance a team can put up. The bots are a buff in that they prevent this from being the bottom, but they don't actually raise the average. I'll grant they have less effect on the average match than solo queue buffs, because they won't even ideally be in the average match, but the overall principle remains the same. Getting an extra hook state or the opponents losing slight generator efficiency because nobody equipped Kindred shouldn't be considered a genuine advantage, it should be that bottom of the barrel; value you got because something went wrong, not because you played well or your opponents played poorly. If your opponents still play poorly, that info isn't going to help them still, so that's why I think it's an acceptable buff.

Regarding killer balancing, too, we're kind of at the point where there's not much that killers need in terms of sweeping basekit buffs. I think what BHVR would probably do is look at which killers struggle in response to any given survivor change, and look at tweaking them specifically in some way. I think that would be just as effective and acceptable as basekit changes, but I think people overlook that kind of thing in a sort of, one-for-one "they got something we should get something" kind of attitude, which I think is a little narrow-minded.

Any time, cordial discourse is why I joined the forums, lol.

"I think it's unfair to label everyone complaining as simply being bad players. Certainly some are, but the quality of an idea shouldn't come from those who argue for it, it should come from the idea itself."

That's why I said typically, not everyone. I agree it should be based on the ideas and not the people, which is what I try to always practice. I was more pointing out a correlation I noticed, not a causation. I don't feel like I've typically heard good arguments for why we should buff solo queue.

"it's currently balanced around generally decent players who don't choose to play 100% optimally all the time"

That's a fair stance and those players are close enough to the ones I was referencing that I could see a fair argument for that. I don't think our balance stances are too far apart.

"Your average SWF is not an unbeatable menace that is guaranteed to give you a miserable game"

I feel like this is a strawman many people throw at killers and like to pretend this is what most killers are saying when it's not. Most killers do not think this, they just think it's a massive unfair and unbalanced for advantage, which I would agree with.

"Regardless of exactly how skilled a player the game wants to be balanced around, they still need to push for solo and SWF being affected more equally by balance changes"

Unfortunately this feels like a near impossible task and even if it was would that be good? We already said the game isn't balanced around swf. So if were buffing both equally then swf, which already has a huge advantage, would still technically be getting even further ahead of its already existing lead. Ideally we'd want things that don't buff swf at all, but as said before, that's near impossible.

"You don't exactly lose a ton of gen time when two people go for the same save because they didn't have Kindred-- it isn't nothing, and it'd add up if it happens more than once, but I would personally say I don't think it's game-changing."

I actually disagree here, it is massive. Even one time getting off that extra survivor gave up nearly half an entire generator between running there and then back. That is huge. Now imagine if that happened more than once. That could literally be the difference between a win and loss.

"By which I mean- it won't make your average opponents actually better than your average opponents now, but it would raise the floor of how below average they can be, if that makes sense?"

I can see what you're saying and that's a fair point. I just see it inadvertently buffing many who are already over the balance line and pushing them further. If we could somehow hypothetically make it where it really was only the dead bottom then I could see that as being okay, even though I do still think it's just giving buffs to people that are losing because of skill and just giving them artificial wins they didn't necessarily deserve. That's a big hypothetical scenario though that I don't see as actually being achievable is the problem. How do we buff the bottom without buffing the others that don't need it?

"Regarding killer balancing, too, we're kind of at the point where there's not much that killers need in terms of sweeping basekit buffs"

This will be another point we're going to disagree heavily on. Like 90% of the killer roster needs buffs of varying degrees with like 50% of them needing large buffs. The core issue is map design however, so hypothetically if maps were correctly I would pull back on a lot of this, but I don't see those getting fixed as most their map reworks have been failures balance wise and they're still currently releasing brand new maps that already come out very unbalanced.

"but I think people overlook that kind of thing in a sort of, one-for-one "they got something we should get something" kind of attitude, which I think is a little narrow-minded."

People do this that's true, but this isn't where I'm coming from at all with my thoughts.

Kindred / Bond used to be standard 4+ years ago but there are so many diffent perks to choose from now.

Never once have I lost a solo queue game and been like, wow I lost that from lack of tools. It was either me playing badly or my team. Solo queues issue isn't a balance one.

They already have all the tools they need, it's just a lack of skill.

I absolutly disagree. It shouldn't be skill issue at all to counter the bad map design. Newbie players also would like to enjoy the game and win.

Also most of the killers nothing to do with it. How Amanda counter the map design in a chase with her power for example?

But you said that the problem is people not use killer's power well, since those should solve the problem of bad balanced maps. Or did I missunderstood something? Thats why I said that no, they not solve the problem, also not powers should be the answer for bad balance.