Surv and Killer Balance

Realizing that SWF trumps everything makes these conversations so much easier. Every grade reset now, I make at least a little bit of an effort to push my solo MMR up (if it's working at all, idk), so that I get good teammates. Some have been really good recently, and others... getting stomped by Wraith, Pig, Myers so easily, you know.

Solos get trash teammates, killers get constant sweats (or bad survivors who get close matches via pure gen speed), and SWF gets to do whatever they want. Sometimes it costs them the win, but usually they just win anyway. "We let the whole team get slugged? That's okay, because of the Deliverance or Unbreakable we planned to bring!" Or coordinating to all stay on gens and dedicate 1 person for the last-second hook trade, which is the most efficient thing they can do against killer. And I think most SWFs just want to win, but some of them take the enormous difference in power between them and killer to be sadistic, and just stun and tbag the killer over and over. That's not "a strategy to make the killer mad," that's just being a jerk, off a power trip.

SWF not being touched is gonna be the death of this game, directly or indirectly. We've seen how effective it is to just never talk about their crazy advantage, and just let the masses of killer- and solo-mains go at each other over balance changes. One side will eventually quit en masse. If it's the survivors who do it, SWF will just fill the void and then cause all the killers to quit because they can't beat them. If killers leave first, then survivors including SWF will quit because the queues will become so long.

The easiest way to fix SWF is to give them a gen speed debuff. It's not "punishing people for playing with friends!", it's balancing the game in the name of fairness. Why should you playing with your friends, as it exists now, come at the cost of killers having unwinnable or unnecessarily sweaty matches vs SWFs who actually want to win? And I argue, if your situation is as you say, that you're "just trying to have fun with friends," why do you care so much about winning? Did you put together a SWF purely so you can win more, or you put together one of friends that like having fun together? Because it can't be both, and yet lots of people expect to have both, hence their disgust at a SWF nerf. This is not an unreasonable change, unlike the killer mains who say SWF should be banned. People should be allowed to play with friends, but I don't like that feature being an engine for unbeatable teams.

In a game with less broken stuff on the survivor side, this wouldn't be an issue. But right now the devs have a choice of fixing MMR or balancing survivors, and they're doing neither. And while I highly recommend fixing MMR so that people get put against fair opposition, that's only going to delay the inevitable, which is our current situation, that SWF with no drawbacks breaks the game. You can't simultaneously balance for casuals and competitive teams; it's as fruitless as we've seen. There's a reason you never see balancing towards casuals in other games, because it's an oxymoron.

Our playerbase is increasingly competitive. Why would you cater to casuals' every whim, when they don't even play the game efficiently, and leave competitive players in the dust? It's a similar argument I've made when buffing killers, or especially rejecting a proposed killer nerf. Old Engineer's Fang Pinhead, or "Forever" Freddy, or pre-nerf Knight weren't a problem for high level players. They'd laugh at those killers using that stuff, because it was an easy win for them. While nerfing those things wouldn't make killers perform a lot worse at low level, the same can be said about the opposite. Because low level killers aren't playing to their full potential, just like the survivors aren't, reverting the Engineer's Fang nerf, or the Freddy nerf, or the Knight nerf, wouldn't all of a sudden make those killers dominate at all levels. It would just give them a competitive edge, a fighting chance, against high level survivor teams. Taking away all of killer's slowdown and tools to cut down on chase time, doesn't mean that solo is now in a good place. You can literally see that. Because survivors haven't really had their meta changed up, haven't had a real nerf to gen time or healing, or had a SWF nerf, combine with the killer nerfs, high level killers are now having to play harder than ever for weaker results. I'll give props to some of the survivor base: they have adapted and gotten better, just like the killer players have had to adapt and git gud. But that only expands the power gap between killer and survivor, as I predicted. Meanwhile, the uncarryable solos you get matched with are still uncarryable, because in 500 hours they've learned nothing, and haven't improved at all. The experiment on balancing around that level has failed, devs.

So that's my proposition. Stop balancing around the non-strategizing, non-improving, increasingly entitled survivors, and give the top level their due. Stop looking at just the results. How hard did each side have to fight for that result? What perks are playable vs which perks are game-throwing? Did all the survivors get a worthy opponent, or did 2 of them get one, and the other 2 sunk the team because they're on a completely different level? Does SWF affect match results or does it not? You have to find these things to balance this game. Complaints? I don't have a cure-all for those. But doing this means less people feeling terminally hopeless that things will improve.

Right so it just so happens coincidently that the main topic talk killer majority hate going against just happens to have one of the highest killrates in the game? When BHVR say "people giving up doesn't effect kill rates" what is this specifically referring to? DC's, offing themselves on hook, standing still and just allowing her to down them? Because if all these factors are taken into account of not playing any effect into her high killrate stats then what is? On paper Skull Merchant isn't strong at all, has a lot of counterplay and has 0 anti loop potential, for the most part she is just an M1 who gains speed if the survivors mess up or gets an injure if again the survivor messes up. I guess in that sense killer haste buffs need nerfing because her ability boosts her speed a bit or you see people say "she injures people with no effort" so does Legion and Plague if anything they are easier. Again it comes under people don't know how to play against her to which point they just give up the moment they see her.

as somebody who recently got to Iri ranks I can tell you (I run discordance as I don’t have every perk yet) that every time I start chase discordance activates, without fail. It’s to the point where if I try to commit to a chase at least 2 gens pop by the time I’ve gotten a down, even with the survivor pre dropping at every loop.

Ranks have absolutely 0 impact on matchmaking, they are purely for the BP reward on the 13th of every month.