My idea about SWF
So... A little context I think will be necessary (sorry for the big text)
After three games yesterday, I was thinking some questions, about the survivors I met...
With my first game, when I see some nicknames of two survivors, I think they were together, in SFW, the other two in SoloQ... The game ended very badly for them, despite their attempts to block when I was carrying my prey, they all lost, with only 1 gen to go
The second... Despite a big doubt about cheating (impossible to catch up with survivors at times, I barely turned around when they were already at the other end of the map, and even by charging my strike, they managed to outrun me and gain 5/10 meters away and three gen pop in same times almost immediatly) I lost miserably, just one dead, they fled with teabag and mockery in chat, knowing that I had made the choice not to attack one that seemed AFK, my bad
The third... All the survivors were hooked twice, and zero gen had been done... I decided they could mostly get away, they really had no chance, they were also SFW, like the two previous cases
Where I'm coming from is very simple, when I'm playing killer, I still want some tension, some fun, not just going to a survivor, knocking them down, hooking, then going on another survivor, like a robot, but not stand no chance against them either
When I see that indeed, I have more difficulty facing the SFW, when there are 4 of them, despite my doubts for the second part, I tell myself that, in reality, BeHavior, can very well see certain details against them , they can see which tag, usually play together (since they can't be changed) as well as their escape rate
The problem is not the time it takes for a generator to be made, when you are a beginner, you blow yourself up, you are an expert, it is too simple for you, I rather wonder... What if, when the game detects that we are dealing with a certain type of team, this kind of SFW which infuriates many killers here on the forum, that they have additional generators to do to succeed in escaping, that they have more difficulty, depending on their skills, to pass the game(more times on gen, more difficulties to destroy or making boon, etc..)
It's just a theory, an idea that came to my mind, and, thinking about it, I tell myself that it wouldn't be bad, since for them, the difficulty stagnates, where the new ones struggle to understand all the mechanics of the game... A balance in this area, rather than punishing everyone, except those who need it
Comments
The issue with blanket approaches to SWF is that many of them aren't the death squads we all come to know and hate. Most of them are just streamers or a few friends messing around in chat while playing, and they're usually not even a 4 stack. Punishing them for how efficient players abuse the hell out of their advantages isn't exactly the best approach, which is why the focus should be on swf advantages directly, and limiting their bonus efficiency.
This is something that is purely an example, but lets say you limited perk loadouts between swf. We'll use Head On as an example. With Head On it is very often used as a means to prevent hooks, and double locker setups especially cause issues with this. Due to the amount of coordination involved with comms, it can be very easy to force lose/lose situations against the killer any time there is a double locker, or if they can communicate where they are going to go down and the nearest hook that is likely to be traveled to. Without being able to convey that information, the chance of exploitation is considerably less, which is why its not normally an issue. Therefore, Head On would be a perk that could be considered for a type of limitation (be it only one per swf, or none at all.) Alternatives would be to reduce the effectiveness of the perk, either through a longer "prep" time (maybe 5-6 seconds?) a shorter stun, a longer exhaustion amount, etc.
Flashlights are another example, as they again can be used to coordinate lose/lose situations (once again with lockers especially, funny enough.) Like with head on, it could have either similar limit/prohibition, or reduced effectiveness (maybe the blind takes longer, battery drains faster, etc.) They can be a bit more tricky though due to the fact they can be found in a match, so its important to focus any debuff decisions on the players themselves rather than the items.
There are a lot of other ways that im sure could be implemented to have a similar approach, but the bottom line is that any nerfs to SWF should be very specifically focused toward things that they are able to abuse beyond normal players, and shouldn't just be a blanket -20% action speed or anything hamfisted like that.
I appreciate the effort for once to not put all SWF in the same bag, it feels good to see that for once.
I'm not really on board with your ideas however. First of all, I don't think you could add more gens, first because depending on the matchmaking one more gen could turn things from manageable to impossible. Also, 4-men-SWF are not that common, and I feel bad for the random solo paired with a 3-man that logs into the game and sees "6 gens remaining", haha. Same with actions that would take longer : the solos would not understand why their counterparts are so inefficient.
I think it's a good idea for the game to notice which tags often play together and if they're good together, but maybe instead of adding additional objectives or handicaps into the game, just implement a "collective mmr" mechanic, where if you play solo, you have your own mmr, if you play SWF, your group collectively has one mmr, that starts off a bit higher from your individual mmrs because the game takes into account that you could communicate. Then, your collective mmr would adjust from escapes and deaths.
That way, if you're very good with your pals, you'll be matched with solo.s and a killer from your collective mmr level. Like this, no stray solo is thrown under the bus with more objectives to do or inefficient players.
That's just an idea though, but I think it would be healthy for the game without actually nerfing most SWFs !
That's why I said that the game should check the team in place to see its escape rate, if it is very high, to impose new limitations during the game, so as not to punish everyone (those who play with friends, or those just for fun)
For example, if the team accumulates more than 80% escape rate over a certain number of games (very easy to reach 80% escape rate when you start the game, unlike after XXX hours of play), and although during the game they have more generators to do, or they take longer
I'm sorry if I misspoke earlier.
Thats not a particularly good metric, because it would affect other players as well. 2 man SWFs are actually the most common in most of the breakdowns they've released in the past IIRC, and 4 mans are the least common. Not only that, but you can have a swf of good players who aren't even on comms, they might just be pairing up with people they know won't ragequit on first hook or anything like that. Its important to target why SWFs can break mechanics that solo players are considerably less likely to be able to, effectively putting in sanity checks to prevent exploitation.
With your proposed system it not only doesn't address the issues directly, it creates a large window for false positives to simply punish players who win frequently. That is particularly bad with how MMR works, because the higher the difference between opponents, the more it shifts due to the outcome. On top of that, escape rates are an extremely easy to manipulate variable, especially if the desired result is deflating them.
You made me laugh
Yes, I'm trying to "water down my wine" to think a bit about how to manage the thing, because it's true that when you look, once the difficulty curve is "tamed" well, it's above all mistakes that cause you to lose, if you are fully in the game, it becomes harder, that and the coordination
The concern of the MMR is that they should still rework it well... Because if it really worked, I wouldn't have had three diametrically different parts at this level, limit I had
My level
too powerful
Too weak
It's why I'm trying to find a solution, a kind of brainstorming without biting our noses
And making a system like "there are quick games and ranked games" isn't going to help either, because basically if people play, it's also for bloodpoints and iridescent shards, if we start making a system or, the only way to increase the power of these characters is in ranked... People will just leave, or stay in custom
However, I often have fun testing as a survivor, with all the skills and items, about healing or generators, and I can't do it as fast as them (knowing that I sometimes cast chronos to see how long it takes for the first generator to be made)
On this subject, yes, I agree with you, it would be necessary to find how they manage to abuse a mechanism which is not supposed to act in this way
BHVR have been very clear that they have zero intention to split queues (and would much rather combine them whenever humanly possible) so yeah, not much chance in seeing any type of opt out or separate queues there as you surmised. And yep, thats why I prefaced my ideas as purely examples of the overall design approach i reiterated, about targeting the problems directly. The examples were just, well, examples of the type of thought process that would go into those types of changes, as well as the ways they could be tailored to each individual issue as they are identified.
Its not even so much about the idea as it is about the approach, which is the big thing that the devs really need to iron out: Every time a nerf like Thana happens, all it does is ruin the perk for everybody except the two killers who got the disproportionate value from it. Every nerf because of nurse as an outlier turns that thing into something that only the nurse will even see as viable anymore. The focus just needs to be shifted on normalizing extremes within each variable instead of just lowering the entire variable so that just its peak is normalized. There are other avenues that could be approached as well, like "efficiency overheat" where doing gens too quickly could cause a delay before they could be worked on (even something like the killer getting a basekit version of deadlock that specifically works on gens being worked on by swf members) but obviously ideas like that start to need more fine tuning, and could even just have applications to the game at large (maybe if gens are done too quickly in too rapid of a succession, an item needs to be collected to be able to start repairing again) and could even be applied to the killer role as well (tunneling out the same survivor quickly makes the hook timer take longer, maybe it teleports them to a different hook, etc but doesn't apply said lenience to SWF members) in an attempt to achieve pairty.