+5% repair speed bonus per solo player?
I was thinking about the solo versus swf gap in escape rates which historically is about +4% per extra person in a swf (i.e. +4% for 2 person swfs, +8% for 3 person swfs,, +12% for 4 person swfs) and how at the moment the escape rate is probably decent for full 4 person swfs but maybe slightly too low for full solo groups.
What if the game gave all all solo survivors a small, say, +5% repair speed bonus? So a full solo squad would each complete gens in about 85.5 seconds instead of 90 with no other bonuses, while swf members would take the normal 90 seconds. My thinking here is a lot of the increase in kill rates is driven by the 10 extra seconds per gen from before the rework, so splitting the difference for the solo players could maybe bring their escape rate up to roughly halfway between where it is currently and where it was pre-rework. I don’t think it needs to be a huge boost for solo players, just a tweak to get the escape rates up slightly for them.
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The issue is this creates clarity problems where the killer does not know the base repair rate. If you show they are solo, by extension, they will also know what is a SWF, and letting killers avoid SWF is an awful idea.
I don’t know that killers need that precise a level of clairty during an actual match. After all, as a killer I’m listening to the gen repair progress but I’m not all that invested in whether a gen is 90% versus 94% completed, all I really care about is knowing the gen is close to being done.
Example, if I see Discordance immediately proc at the start of a match, normally, I would have ~52.94s to get there if it’s 2 people/no toolboxes or gen perks/etc. If it pops in way less than that and then I see the two people run and one or both has a toolbox, that explains the disparity. If Tinkerer goes off, I know that means for one person, it will take ~X seconds. If it’s 2, then Y seconds, etc. While it is not 100% clarity, you can predict a lot based off things like this. For instance, PT will reduce a 2-person gen time from 52.94s to 46.04s.
I don't think on average SWF vs Solo is at a huge enough difference that solos need an actual handicap mechanic.
I understand what your saying but the difference with a 5% boost on one or both survivors if they pair up is going to be something like 3 seconds. Bonuses from toolboxes and such are going to far outweigh it so you’d still have a good idea if they were using them versus not.
The devs have actually said that they do want to give solo players a slight boost because of that balance gap. It’s why they announced in January early development of a HUD rework to help solo players out.
I wouldn’t be opposed to a PTB test run of the idea though. But I think solo can’t really be improved fundamentally unless the lack of information compared to SWF is addressed.
I agree, ultimately having better solo informational tools would be nice. The benefit to a repair speed boost is simply that it’s extremely easy to program and test compared to more complicated HUD and communications changes. It’s just a numerical change mostly.
Giving solo players some built in information tools to help decision making is a nice boost to solo queue games where better information about what each other is doing would have helped out. But it's not a handicap mechanic as SWF could technically still get use out of the HUD changes.
Devs were posting last week that while the absolute extremes of SWF vs Solo were a 15% difference (meaning worst SWF teams could be losing 15% more and best SWF teams could be winning 15% more), there wasn't a significant difference between SWF and Solo as a whole. Solo Queue has issues with getting matched with teammates who don't do anything (where a 5% boost to gen repair won't do anything) so I don't see giving solos a baseline faster gen repair is good for the game when good solo squads can still do just as well as good swf squads.
But they don’t do “just as well”, they do just slightly worse, and they do noticeably worse compared to full swfs. 4-5% extra escape rate per person in a swf is small but not zero (that’s where that 15% you mentioned comes from for four person swfs).
Good solo players don't exist, apparently.
Who said good solo players don’t exist?
No, nothing gameplay changing
Tho a perk like no mither giving extra BP would be nice
Survivor's can repair at 5% speed. it's called Deja Vu. It's pretty slept on if you wanna prevent 3 genning in solo q.
The 5% from Deja Vu is honestly pretty terrible.
Deja Vu itself is a fine perk, but gens are only highlighted for 60 seconds and you still have to move to reach a highlighted gen meaning you often have 5% repair speed for much less than 60 seconds. The only time you could possibly get full value is if someone else finishes a gen and the gen you are currently working on gets highlighted.
Agreed, I like Deja Vu personally but not because of the 5% speed boost but rather because of the information it gives at the start of the match.