The truth about SWF
First, the elephant in the room, SWF with comms will give an advantage compared to a solo q. This is a fact, indisputable, end of story.
BUT, that does not mean swf is the boogieman it's made out to be. The fabled toxic 4-man isn't really a problem. In fact, I find the opposite true, most 4-mans tend to goof off far more then a group of 4 solo's, making them easier to kill. They also play stupidly altruistic compared to randoms. Also the gen rushing death squads who know all the loops, are fairly rare. Will you get the occasional rude, stereotypical 4-mans? Sure, it's likely you'll run into many different play style's and players, toxic people among them.
In truth, most of the time SWF is just used as a excuse for a bad experience. I played badly? Gen rushing 4-man SWF. Got a rude person in post game chat? Toxic entitled 4-man SWF. Rarely, in my 1000 hours of playtime, have I seen that be the rule, not the exception.
So really, SWF doesn't need a change, it's fine as is. Could the solo experiance use some improving, yes, I believe so, but it doesn't mean the opposite is a problem.
Comments
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You're completely right that some people use the magic word "SWF" as a convenient excuse to immediately invalidate their loss, bonus points if they say "swf?" after a match when every player is a solo with a public profile + friends list.
I'd certainly like to see base survivors and killers changed to make the advantage less potent, but I don't really know how to do that besides giving more information to increase the potential efficiency solo players can employ. It's really the only remotely possible change besides SWF indicators and BP bonuses for playing with SWF, but I guess a lot of people will never realize that stuff like mechanical nerfs or the truly absurd ideas like removing SWF or trying to interfere with VOIP apps will quite simply never ever happen.
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Voice comm possibility is giving unfair advantage to these groups. Its giving them literaly free perks like Bond, Emphaty or Kindred coz SWF can easily tell others position on map or killer position near hook. Like playing vs survivors with 7 perks and more while killer has to choose carefuly 4 perks. Killer cannot have friend on voice comm that tell him positions of survivors and simulate some aura reading perks. Killers facing premade groups should have small buffs to counter-balance this perks imbalance.
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The way I see it, Survivor friends can never truly be removed or nerfed. At least 50% of survivors are in at least a 2 man swf, so it isn't healthy to alienate half the player base. The only way to achieve balance is to buff the base kit of survivors, to at least be on par with the information of swfs. Then we balance killers around this.
The only problem with this is I doubt bhvr would EVER go for this. They are content with releasing more and more content, all the while ignoring this glaring balance issue. Then they rework a map every 7 months and pat themselves on the back.
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Giving voice comms to solo players is an unfair advantage?
What is stopping one random solo Q survivor to just invite the rest of his team to a voice chat? I've seen people go the extra mile for that. On console, this happens a lot.
Killers do not have someone calling survivors out because they simply do not need them. As a Killer, you KNOW where survivors are bound to be, and that is generators. If the Killer was unable to see where Generators were located at, then this would be a different story.
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I rarely play with friends but when I do we just play for fun, we farm each other, we get each other killed and over all not take the game seriously, we are definitely NOT an organized SWF team, we’re barely a team.
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I just had an idea, how about attaching voice comms to the game, like, what if when survivors spoke into their mics, its literally said ingame. Eeehh thinking about it it has a flaw, it still screws over nonserious survivors, but i still feel being able to hear the survivors talking is a step in the right direction
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Purple rank queues as survivor are instant. My friend says red ranks take 5+ minutes. It's probably a ranking system thing (too easy to pip as survivor) and not a lack of killers. There's no way less than 20% of people playing are killers but there is super lots of ways less than 20% of red ranks are killers.
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Agree. Swf is not op, it's a game mechanic. People should be able to play with friends if they want.
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I dodged 4/5 games in lobby vs 3+ SWF, in lobby number five i gived up, complete Legion's mission and DC. I hope devs is proud about SWF problem.
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This whole post is verifiably false..pretending swf are rare is not true either..even when I play with my lower level buddies it is sad how easy it has been at times..easy setups to make killer pressure meaningless..rare or not the fact this issue exists is the problem and cannot be ignored
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"Swf problem"
They're just like any survivor except camping doesn't work on them.
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any other survs, with voice advantage.
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It doesn't change how you need to play as killer much. Find survivors, down them, hook them, repeat.
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Some people are too quick to blame SWF for bad games. Solos can take hits for others and body block too. Run BT, DS, repair gens, and be toxic.
But teams of four good survivors do exists.
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Oh look at this dude, he defend SWF. I guess you never play solo Q, pleb.
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I have a thread about why I don't play solo queue. Bad teammates.
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It's no hard to check steam profiles before and after game for friend list.
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Also solo queue is a death sentence
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As a solo survivor, every once in awhile a killer would cry out toxic swf in chat. I would go through my teammates profiles and see they too were solo que. Some are just too quick to blame their loss on SWFs.
There are things that survivors do that are attributed to only SWF groups that solos do all the time.
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You can tell SWF members where is Ruin while you randomly found it in chase with a killer - fair.
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well i remember that the devs didn't want to put a voice chat option in the game so that the survivors wouldn't have a huge advantage but swf kinda defeats that whole purpose lol
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It's a ridiculous advantage to the groups that can/want to use it in such a way. It's the best perk survivors could possibly have and they don't have to spend a perk slot for it. It's Kindred and OoO for every survivor without downsides. Just because many SWFs goof off doesn't mean it's not completely broken when used efficiently.
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I'd like to know what killers have power in this game xD they are all, other than 2 or 3, weak
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I've run into many SwF on Xbox and not every single one is a OP monster Gen rusher. Hell, I've had a full SwF so bad, they went down in 2 minutes, and these weren't low ranked either. Killers are only as weak as you make them. People are quick to point the finger to 'Killers are weak', and I'm guilty of it myself in the past. But you just gotta adapt and try a different strategy. People seem to try constantly brute force against survivors, but let's face it, that never works well.
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As someone who sometimes goes SWF I can say that our level or co-ordination is.. Well, goes about as far as finding out if one if us in a chase(generally a 2-3 man SWF, very very rarely a 4 man) but I feel that SWF groups from my experience of both being in one and potentially being in a lobby with a separate one hasn't been too much of an issue or advantage (my group doesn't all make it out alive) however, solo survivors definitely need a way of communication or some kind of basekit to put that level of information on par with SWF groups.. The way I've been trying to do that is running Premonition + Empathy - I know when a killer is coming close, and if they're chasing an injured near me..
I don't think that voice comms for solos should be the answer though, as that would bring up other problems that can't be solved with a patch, like players with no mics or toxic solos using comms to abuse and troll teammates as well as the killer, and taking into account the people who like playing in silence without having to deal with potential mic spamming from randoms which you can't mute because it's in game. I know this last one applies to me, and as a result I wait for a friend group in certain games that have an in game chat, so we can go party comms instead..
That's just imo though
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Killers are weak, just because you beat bad players who are using swf doesn't mean anything other than they were just bad, good players using swf dominate most games, being able to communicate mid game is too strong against the killer especially since most killers are just bad
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This is not the case anymore, at least in my experience. My killer queues are less than 2 minutes around rank 8. Some as quick as 30 seconds. My survivor queues recently have been around 3 minutes solo, and like 5-10 minutes for SWF.
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SWF's is killing the game for killers on higher rank for ps4. Actually, it's more coms then sWF's, because it's so easy to create a party chat and invite everyone to it. That's the big elephant in the room. Sure, SWF can be strong, but when they have the ability to tell each other every move the killer makes, or say "Hey, the killers after me, so I'm gonna get him to chase me, and you 3 gen rush with super tool boxes." Or "Hey, I have a key, meet me here".That is a HUGE disadvantage that the devs refuse to acknowledge, and the surv base acts like it's perfectly fine, and gives them no advantage... When you have a good team of sWF's running coms, your chances are slim to none., and that's the problem....
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As a survivor that does SWF i can say that we goof off more than anything, but i do play more seriously as Solo or when I record for a video. I try and avoid being toxic because this is a game that should be enjoyed by all parties. TBH I really only do SWF because listening to my friends scream is very funny and every time im in a party with them I focus more on not dying of laughter than on not dying in game. Now for the genrushing part I have to say that when we all spawn in different sections of the map we don't ask where we should meet, we just work on the gen and talk about memes until one of us gets found. This will lead to genrushing but It's not like we're trying to be toxic about it. Now there's also a difference from PC to Console players (I'm PS4) and I can say that from videos I've seen on PC they seem to be more toxic than PS4. From the time's I've played killer I have never seen a toxic SWF.
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Seriously?
How do you arrive at the conclusion only because it is not happening that often and most people are just too bad to do it, it is fine when it happens?
Honestly devs need to have a straight line for when they do adjust balance, balance happened to nurse due to very few god nurses and it has to happen to swf due to some few players as well. If not just ######### stop to pretend that balance matters at all.
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The truth about SWF:
survivor is 10x more fun when you're playing with more people.
That's it. That's the truth about SWF.
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Also 1000 hours pf playtime.
If the 4man is just memeing around and not playing optimally it's a win for me everytime. The real problem are the swfs that play seriously. You can't win them with any killer expect double cooldown nurse atm. And you need to be a god for that.
I vs those SWF roughly 1/40 games i think.
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"Toxic 4 man isn't a problem"
It's literally the biggest problem in this game. ######### troll hahahaha
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I play killer and survivor, next argument 🤔
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Actually far from it but go off
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Because killers other than 3 maybe 4 are just trash and the narrative is that survivors have the upper hand is still going on cuz it's true, yeah it's not as bas as it used to be but it's still bad. Hell they are only reworking doctor cuz survivors aren't having fun against him, even though he's still bad as a killer survivors>killers and if anybody can't see that then they are just a biased survivor main in my eyes
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So kill rates mean nothing? So good players getting consistent wins means nothing? Sure some aspects of the game are unfair but the game is far from survivor sided, even at high level gameplay.
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That's what I've never understood about the swf narrative. People act like 4 man swf is the majority of matches. When the vast majority are solo and 2 man swf at most. Add to that most swf are just wanting to have a chill game and joke around with their friends. Are the sweaty 4 man swf groups an issue? Yes. But I haven't seen a good solution yet.
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I feel as if some may have not quite got my point, so I'll elaborate. I do believe that having comms in SWF makes a large difference, it's not really debatable. There are very few 4-mans that are truly out to gen-rush(even though I hate that term) t-bag, flashlight and just generally ruin a killers experience. I've had just as many killers face camp, ebony mori first hook at 5 gens, as I've had SWF's clearly playing just to be toxic as possible. Both aren't fun, both are rare.
My point is that SWF is just used as an excuse, instead of really looking at the problems dbd has. Map design is bad on half the maps, if not more. Servers are inconsistent and q times can be awful, depending on rank and side played. Solo's can play well, and seem as if it may be a SWF. Data BHVR has released shows that 60-70% of players are solo or duo, across all platforms, again showing that everyone isn't getting the fabled toxic 4-man. Maybe you just got unfavorable tile spawns on a survivor sided map, and SWF or not, it was an uphill battle anyway, SWF is just an easy feature to place blame. Most groups just want to play with friends and chill, not be a seal team six trying to crush gens and humiliate killers, just as most killers don't face camp or mori. We just remember the bad easier than the good, and I feel a lot of people go in expecting it to happen. So if they get that one bad game, it becomes a self fulfilling prophecy.
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The only way to solve the issue, as I see it, is to integrate the comms as base feature. Alternative is to allow killers to opt out of matching with swf, but I've been told it would create more problems than solve.
The thing is - comms by default would bury the horror mood of the game once and for all. And that's not even touching the fact that 75% of people you'll match with will be annoying 12yo's screaming obscenities and cringy memes in broken english. That alone might override whatever benefit you might get from basic comms, but at least they can also make it so you could opt out of it. Then everything will be back where it started.
Personally, I prefer playing solo either way, even if it's detrimental to my survival. People are tiresome.
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And another point.
To me personally the thing that kills my desire to play more is not swfs, camping killers or any sort of bad matches. Mostly it's the aftermatch discourse / ingame taunting that does me in. I'm perfectly fine with playing a bad match, either dying three minutes in or not getting a single hook, but streams of insults, abuse and explicit disrespectful behaviour (regardless of my actual performance, keep in mind) is what makes me resent the community, and by extension the game.
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Yeah no.
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