The Community has Spoken about SWF

if they REALLY broke rule #5, wouldn't most swf groups have received bans for it? why even mention that?

Appealing to the 3rd party software rule is a complete waste of time and keystrokes. Every game under the sun has some variation of that rule and it's obvious that it's "rule speak" for stuff like aimbots, wallhacks or anything like that. It's just assumed that using VOIP applications to talk to other people (including the ones you're playing with) is allowed in multiplayer games, same reason the apps are usually absent from anti-cheat whitelists because making them forbidden is considered as absurd as making it against the rules to run a media player in the background to listen to music or something.

Penalizing people doesn't work, but bonus BP and the like for killers wouldn't be any problem at all as that's the opposite of penalizing anyone. Some of those anti-SWF perks in that thread are just plain insane and assumes every SWF goes full depip death squad which is misinformed at best and straight up spreading of disinformation at worst.

I have no clue if the playerbase could sustain ranked + unranked queues. I personally wouldn't mind that if it did work without hurting queue times too badly, as I genuinely do not care about rank on either side.

@Watery Did you even read the Steam post? How could you not see it as a problem when people who use comms admit it how much of an impact it has over the game. Yes, not every swf group is a 4 man but that doesn't mean there is no impact. Nor is that acknowledging 2 or 3 man groups.

What was suggested in the post may not be perfect but it would be refined during development and tested.

To put my own input out there, the difference in difficulty at high rank between killers and swf is significant. Killers just wanna have fun (too).

Yes... I did read it.

I’m stating my opinion on the subject. I’m aware that some people see it that way, but look at it objectively. 

Voice communication programs are not cheating. It would happen regardless; there’s nothing that the devs have on the agenda for it, since it’s a balanced feature. 

All I did was ask if people have questioned whether or not it’s themselves, or they’re just blaming it on the game.

But let me be absolutely clear in saying this;

SWF doesn’t need to be changed. The solo experience should.

EDIT:Here’s Peanits data:

EDIT2: If you’ve noticed... Solo players take up fifty percent of the game. 

You get two survivors around 30 percent of the time. Three survivors ten percent of the time. You get killer less than ten percent of the time.

I don’t see the point is this whole nerf SWF movement when other issues need to be handled. It’s not an exploit, the devs have a DISCORD for this game that you can make a SWF in.

You honestly think that is "fun" for the killer to do though? Especially when you consider that the standard AND optimal perk set for killer almost always includes BBQ and Ruin/Thana anyway? Killers don't have enough perk slots to commit to 'working around it'.

SWF is a problem, and one of the few ways around it is for the killer to given a buff before the match begins to accommodate for the survivors' obvious use of comms during the match. Nerfing the Nurse with a new rework is only going to make this matter even worse (more frequent looping, more loops being added to maps, no ability to stop the loop for most killers bar Nurse).

Even Killers in red ranks are tired of having to do the same thing with the same killers game in, game out. Suggesting these perks sounds like nothing more than a cheap 'GiT GuD' comment from a hard survivor main to me, and I mainly play Survivor myself now due to how annoying it is to play Killer.

they have fog whisperers who stream dbd while doing voice comms in swf. they have proof of those guys doing it so why arent they banned? probably because it isnt cheating

 I just feel like there’s ways to go around it though. 

I get that SWF is annoying but the reason why I resorted to that data is because there’s different ways to look at it— but, I just wanted to say that it may not be the SWF’s fault; that’s all. I feel as if the changes aren’t necessary since you only encounter a certain survive with friends a certain percent of time; but I can understand your frustration. The only reason I think SWF nerfs aren’t necessary is purely due to the fact that they’re pretty rare; and what’s more, you can play around them. I didn’t really consider the user experience in the matter, and for that I apologize. 

For the most part, I just don’t... get the frustration, really. That’s all. I don’t see the point in changing something that can be worked around; I want the solo experience to be prioritized, rather. And with the frequency to the complaints of these SWF post, maybe there is some validity to them. I apologize for any frustration I may have caused; it was just me being rash.

You make SWF not ranked you are gonna have a bad time waiting at rank 1. I think most people are there

Half the lobbies are solo, but SWF have a much higher chance of survival than full solo group.Why do people never look at the stats in a complete manner?

SWFs have a high rate of surviving that scales with the amount of players in the swf. Now if you're working with a a proper team that should be what happens. The issues is that the game doesn't handle that sort of situation well. To that moderate amount of players who are in SWFs skew the game in noticeable way. It also tends to be bad for solo survivors as well as killers. Solo survivors sort of roll the dice on whether the people with them are actually going to help them and killers aren't really designed with having to deal with high levels of coordination between players.

Killers are limited in their responses and by default don't have the ability to break up coordinated teams in a short amount of time. Now the other side of the coin is that SWF has been a part of the game for a very long time and it isn't going anywhere. There is also no way for the devs to see whose going to be on comms and know what is being said. You can't dictate rules you can't enforce so that isn't changing.

So the question is what can be done in game to either bring solo players up or soften swf player advantage enough that the teams are on near equal footing with the solo players.

It doesn't have a high rate of survival. The data shows this. Even if you tried to rationalize the data, SWF would be concentrated only to the highest ranks and still be an even smaller percentage of the playerbase. We're talking about 1-2% of games here. Unless you'd like to imagine that half of 4-man SWF are automatically invincible squadettes.

The real discussion point is the actual prevalence of SWF and how much difference it makes.

If the case is true that SWF supposedly has skyrocket survival rates at high rank, and that high rank is dominated by SWF, does it really make sense that we get so much anecdotal data from people of all ranks (20-5) claiming SWF's advantage? How much of this problem is reality and how much is rooted in perception?

Is it worth it for BHVR to potentially disrupt the status quo to address a problem that influences potentially 1% of all games?

People are upvoting that thread basically as a protest now. And honestly to vent a little sometimes. I know I'm one of them lol.

But I don't think anything will come out of it. The devs had plenty of time to work on something and they chose not to. At least we're getting small changes over the years. Remember when exhaustion regen'd while running? Good times.

Just like when they showed the stats behind how many "people" run Self Care, this seems misrepresented.

Like, we are gauging the percentage of all players that play in queue sizes? You know that entire 50% probably plays with at least one friend at some point?

A better gauge would be to see how many LOBBIES are filled with each kind of player. This makes it almost seem like most matches have all solo players, which I just find hard to believe.

Of course, they give us the info as obscure as possible so that the echo chamber will keep going.

Besides, didn't like 2 years ago they said only 30% of players are solo players? Suddenly 20% more decided to drop all their friends?

What?

Besides, even just a two man squad upsets the balance, doesnt matter how little it actually happens. It still happens.