Observations on 1v4 Flow vs 2v8

So 2v8 gave me some confidence to play Survivor in 1v4 again for the first time in a long time. I don't enjoy it as much, but it's been okay. It has made me really notice a huge difference between how matches play out between both modes though.

1v4

In my experience, a very common situation is that Survivors might get one or two generators done at the beginning of a match before the Killer finally catches up and downs one Survivor. After this point, the Survivors will complete maybe one more generator before everyone is killed or escapes through a hatch.

There's a very specific reason for this happening so often. When one Survivor gets hooked, a second Survivor goes to save them. That Survivor often gets seen and chased. So now a third Survivor heads out to save the first Survivor while the second is being chased. The first Survivor is now saved, but now the Second has been downed. The third Survivor starts to heal the first Survivor, but after hooking the second Survivor, the Killer finds the Survivors that are healing. Now the fourth Survivor gets up to unhook the second Survivor while the first and third are now being chased.

At this point, no one is working on a generator, and from then on the match becomes a game of rescue leapfrog and generators are never touched again.

Strategy Note

Obviously this isn't a very effective strategy, but at the casual level I play at it is very common (even when I play with friends). Part of that is because it's not a strategy. It's just the consequence of the natural instinct of not wanting to leave anyone behind. The point I'm trying to make, though, isn't how effective it is, it's how common it is, and how that compares to 2v8.

2v8

In hindsight, I think this is one of the reasons I enjoyed 2v8 more. In 2v8, even with another Killer, all the extra Survivors (and the cage mechanic) made it far more likely that there would be at least one person still working on generators even while the rescue team was circling the map (and it very often was only one person still working on generators in my experience).

I only had a couple of matches of 2v8 where the Killers had so much pressure that we basically never touched generators after the start. Now, I still only saw the Survivors finish all the generators in half or less of my matches, but the difference in having progress throughout the match made a huge difference in how it felt.

Final Thoughts

I don't have a conclusion or suggestion here. I'm not trying to speak for everyone or the balance of the game. I just wanted to share my experience and one reason I enjoyed 2v8 more than 1v4 that isn't inherent to it (the way being able to play with a second Killer is). I do wonder, though, if there's a way for 1v4 to psychologically discourage the rescue leapfrog from being the instinctive outcome for inexperienced players without dramatically affecting the balance of the game.

It really seems to me this is one of the biggest differences between low end and high end matches, because in the matches I play where this doesn't happen, the generators do get finished pretty quickly. But when it's either generators being completed quickly, or the pressure meaning they stall completely, it's going to feel bad for someone.