How to limit swf?
As the latest statistic shows, swf players do have a huge advantage over solo q players. These advantages come from matching builds and roles, voicecall, callouts and coordination.
Aside from comp players there is little that the average killer can do to stop these teams effectivly and the matches become stressfull and annoying very quick.
So when looking at the numbers the game needs a mechanic to even out the field.
The game knows when you play with others so it could apply more generator time per swf player. Another possibility would be to limit how many times certain perks can be used among the swf players (this forces the survivor to use other builds and avoids 4x adren etc).
Limiting the amount of items/add ons could also be a possibility as it really is game breaking to have multiple green toolboxes with brand new parts in a swf squad.
This would not only make the game more fair for everyone but also (and this is my favourite part about this idea) completly remove bully squads from the game.
It simply wouldn't be possible anymore to orchestrate with background player, ds, unbreakable and head on + 4 flash lights and map offering to purposly be toxic towards killers.
One last approach could be to simply tell the killers if he goes up against swf so he can mentally switch into comp mode or just dodge the lobby.
My final thoughts are that it shouldn't be possible to bring map offerings if you play with more then 1 friend. Reducing toxicity and making the game fair again is what it needs in my opinion as it feels quite inbalanced lately.
Comments
are you saying killers should just never be able to 4k? hatch is alredy there btw, so there is enough chances for the last one alive.
So you all DO understand that the current balancing is closest to "50/50" we can get, good.
Because i dont understand, on one hand people say "why not balance for 50/50" implying they think the current 60/40 is too killer favored just because the numbers look inbalanced but fail to take the asymmetrical part in the aspect. If we were to apply 50/50 to the same ruleset then the balance simply shifts much mor radically into the survivors favor. Thats where the 0-1k comes from because we have an average killrate at 2.5 right now, its kinda obvious if you lower the killrates and higher the escapes to a 50/50 level, then ofc that means less sacrifices per match. Even if its 1-2k on average that means wins are rare for the killer side.
Elanos gave a good insight on why it is 60/40 all though i dont get the second part of the post because its contradicting the first one.
I'm not sure if you would want to include the Killer in the proximity chat, but when the Killer isn't included there is zero reason for a 4man to use proximity chat instead of discord, and in my experience discord is more comfortable than game chat systems. I don't think including the Killer would be a good Idea, it would just lead to more toxicity.
For Duos or Trios the people they get matched with might not speak the same language. Sure, everyone talking english might be an option, but I think most people would just prefer to speak their language in a private call and just give occasional call outs to the randoms. Also, usually SWF do talk about more than just the game, I don't think the randoms necessarily want to be involved in that.
So I don't think people would prefer proximity chat over discord (and toxicity would obv be an issue aswell).
No I didn't say that. Inversely, as a horror game, I think the challenge should be on survivors to escape and the killers should be oppressive / intimidating / scary.
but then why are you unhappy with the current 60/40 balancing?
I also didn't say I was. I was questioning the user who said they are.
You can't "limit" SWF. Punishing people for playing with their friends is never the answer.
The overall escape rate for SoloQ is 40.34%, followed by Duos at 40.10%, Trios at 40.56%, and 4-mans at 43.09%. That means that there is, at most, a 3% difference overall. Duos escape 0.24% less than SoloQ, and Trios escape 0.22% more than SoloQ.
High MMR is where we start noticing a difference, but at that point survivors are basically Seal Team 6, and killers are employing every meta strat and perk to increase their chances of winning.
If you're someone who plays this game religiously for several hours a day, and wins 90% of the time, then you're probably high MMR. If you lose more than you win, however, you're likely in that middle bracket where you're playing against experienced players who play on a more casual basis. People who play more casually are likely to have a lower MMR than their skill would seemingly indicate.
oh XD my bad sorry
It doesn't mean wins are rare though. It could mean several 3-4ks, several 0-1ks, and a couple 2ks. Or it could be 2ks across the board. It could also mean a bunch of losses for one player but a bunch of wins for another. Balancing out overall to 50%.
I do agree that what we have with 4 man swf, at top MMR, is pretty close to a 50/50. That's if we go by behaviors stats. Which I am willing to do in this case, though I'd like to see them updated more often.
They can try things to help out the solo queue experience. I just think while there is only one game mode, and survivors can play how they want, that 60/40 is fine for everything else.
My issue here is that some people think a 4 man swf, at high MMR, should be brought down to that 60/40 level. When there is no real reason too. The thematic experience is pretty much gone at that point and the scare factor thrown out the window. So being close as it is to a 50/50 balance when both sides are trying their hardest, seems fine to me.
top mmr SWF is more like a 90/10 than anything, ofc people want it down. But it aint gonna happen anyway, there is no possible way, they would need to make special mmr rules for top 5% mmr but then again people would actually KNOW what mmr they have (roughly at least) and BHVR dont want that either.
There's no mental gymnastics. If the only thing stopping solos from crushing most killers is the matchmaking and lack of communication, then clearly swf which auto-includes both is like a super duper advantage.
Slow their gens. Others have suggested slowing their healing and stuff too. Just start with the gens. We discovered this years ago, that swf teams who know what they're doing can just hover around the killer, have 1 person on gens, and then as soon as they see they're starting to lose, all hop on the last gen or 2 and escape. The difference in swf and solo gen speed is undeniable. Like I've said, to all the people complaining survivors are "so weak," the only thing stopping solos from achieving swf gen speed is matchmaking. You get 4 survivors who know what they're doing instead of 1-2, you win pretty much automatically. Hence the solution to swf being a gen speed debuff. This is so obvious.
Be that as it may, they are wrong. And so are the people who gobble that up. A swf debuff is the solution to the "SWF OP" problem. This strategy they're currently using, to buff survivors until solo just does better until they're SWF-level, is not working. At all. It's why you see posts every other day, "Solo teammates, am I right?" You're never gonna give survivor enough buffs to where garbage players perform well, and even if you did, isn't that a bad thing? Matchmaking needs to be fixed, and the balance needs to be fixed, but neither are being addressed. The way you get the devs to address these things is to encourage these discussions, not shout down the handful of people saying it.
It's not punishing you for playing with friends. It's evening it out, since playing with friends "rewards" you so to speak. Just for playing with friends instead of solo. You get straight-up greater gen and healing efficiency by doing that. It's the killer who bears the punishment. They get, not even harder opponents, but a harder match facing the same opponents, and don't even get told.
I used to favor this balancing strategy, too. But they won't, they refuse to, buff the killers. So survivor's getting all these straight-up increases or "reworks," golden example being DS or Buckle-Up's change, and killers getting their own nerfs or "reworks" of a different kind, like Hag's traps or Pop/Pain Res, but everyone insists survivor always gets weaker and killer always gets stronger. It's really the opposite. Solo can work, as soon as the matchmaking gets fixed. Good survivors vs a good killer? Survivors win 9/10 times. That's why these broken perks survivors use are so strong, because SWF on average has the game sense to abuse them and become invincible. And the killer perks, which they need rather than want, like gen defence, mass aura perks, NOED/Rancor, etc, there's no reason for their getting nerfed. These perks are getting nerfed due to a lack of survivor skill, like of course they think Pain Res is OP because letting go of a gen takes too much thinking power, and these are the same people who completely fall apart as a team if 1 survivor gets hooked. 15-second chases, nobody's on a gen, spend all match healing with no healing perks or items, the works. Killers are a lot more reasonable in their complaints about the survivor meta. 1 DS stun costs you the whole game, with few exceptions. Getting hit by 2, those exceptions go as well. No killer, no matter how skilled or strategy oriented, can survive that disparity in momentum. They'd be playing for the 1k.
All this to say, because of the devs' refusal to make killer strong, or change up the survivor meta even a little, nerfing swf is 1 direction we could go in to fix the game.
Where would you say is the 90/10 coming from though? When I first started playing the game I would've probably called it a 90/10 all day long without even looking for any evidence. But these days I don't really see it that way anymore. I just see good players on both sides and both sides tend to win some/ lose some.
I think I see it different in that some people see swf as having a huge advantage over solo and I can agree with that part to some extent. What I don't agree with is that 4 man, high MMR swf having an advantage = swf is super strong. It just means they have a better chance than solo but doesn't mean they are going to stomp killers. Both sides can make mistakes and in many instances it may just mean that one side was better than the other or matchmaking went wonky.
Now, talking about individual killers is a different story. But there's a line between making some killers at high MMR viable, and keeping them fun for everyone else to play as or against. I feel the same way about any top tier swf being matched up against a killer wanting fun but that speaks more on the matchmaking and how it works.
At the end of the day though this is just what I play and see. I have no way of saying it's the reality of it just like I can't say your 90/10 is wrong. I can go by bhvrs stats but even those have lots of variables that can swing to each side.
From my own experience, there is 0 you can do as a killer when the 4man swf is communicating your position, even enough when they moderatly point it out they dont have to do it every second. By the time you reach their spot they have alredy started running away, you go back, same on the other side. Thats why i dont believe 4 man swf escape rate is as low as the polls show, but maybe not all 4 mans are communicating like that.
But it doesnt really matter, swf is to stay anyway and i think the game was in a better state when killers still had some form of slowdown perks, gen speeds are a little bit too fast right now. But its definitly not as bad as couple of years ago
They never asked to gain the advantages that comes with being in a group, and they certainly dont deserve to be punished for it. If anything Solo Q should try to brought to that level as close as possible, and the game needs to stop being so hand holdy for both sides since a lot of players think theyre a lot better than they actually are.
Also on a side note, lets say they do implement a debuff. What happens with 2v8? Shouldnt killers also receive a debuff for wanting to play with a friend as well since they get the advantages of doing so?
Penalizing people for playing with their friends is not the solution. It already takes 90 seconds to complete a gen solo. In order to see any meaningful impact, you would need to change that to 120 seconds when playing against a SWF. This would result in kill rates going up across the board, and killers getting some heavy nerfs.
It is punishing people for playing with their friends, though. You're penalizing them on the basis that they are playing with their friends.
You are free to believe what you want, but the official stats come straight from bhvr themselves. As a reminder, the statistics are global and not isolated to one particular region. A 4-man SWF has an overall escape rate of 43%, which increases to 48% at high MMR.
Something to note about high MMR is that survivors are not playing casually. They're playing to win. They will employ every means necessary to that end. The same applies to killer. Nobody at high MMR is playing casually. The only thing someone at high MMR cares about is winning.
I'm a survivor main. I dabble in killer occasionally. I'm in the OCE Region, and games often feel very sweaty on account of the lower population despite being around average MMR. I care more about having a fun experience than I do about winning, and a fun experience for me is simply not being tunneled or camped.
and once again, the stats do not tell the full story. and im tired of trying to explain why. I'll just point at skull merchant at this point.
But the stats do tell the full story.
I'll break it down for you. Under the assumption the stats still hold true:
For the period of June 29 - July 27, there were 714,239 games recorded by Nightlight. Each of those games requires 4 survivors. That gives us 178,559 survivors. Of those survivors, we can reasonably assume that SoloQ and Duos account for at least 75% of that number. There are more 3-man swfs than there are 4-man swfs, so let's say that 3-mans make up 15% of that number, and 4-mans make up 10%.
That gives us 26,783 and 17,855 survivors respectively. That's 107,135 and 71,423 games respectively. If the escape rate is 42.46%, and 48.30% respectively at high MMR, then that means high MMR trios have escaped 45,639 trials. High MMR 4-mans have escaped 34,497 trials. You would need 223 High MMR SWFs (Note: That's 223 groups of four, for a total of 892 players) to throw just to make a 5% difference.
I would say I am a killer main and I am truly terrible. I absolutely want people to be playing with their friends. This is a video game and all. Don't lump all of us terrible killers into the anti-fun crowd! 🤣
At this point I don't even know what the argument is for nerfing SWF. The numbers prove that SWF isn't overpowered. I have been around long enough to remember when people said. "If they released high MMR data then it would prove how overpowered SWF is". Then they released high MMR kill rates which showed us that four man SWFs in the current balance LOSE more than they win. Now the goal posts have been moved and the mental gymnastics have gotten even more ridiculous. The most common narrative is that a four man SWF is unbeatable/unfair to the killer. How does this narrative make sense if these teams are losing more games than they win at the highest level of MMR? I could understand the argument if four man SWF had something ridiculous like a 75% escape rate.
Hi, I'm writing on behalf of the BBC as part of an initiative with BHVR and their forums to check that all DBD players have TV licenses.
You cannot escape us.
They should add a TV license enforcement officer as a killer, those guys are ruthless.I will also break something down to you.
Against skull merchant, just hypotheticly speaking because we dont have good enough data (killrates DO NOT tell anything at all) most people give up.
So if 8 out of 10 survivors just ragequit or give up and let themselves get hooked, skull merchant has an astronomicly high killrate but that doesnt show anything how well or bad she performs in an actual match. People that jump towards killrates are just using it for their own narrative but in reality its just that, a number that tells how many people got killed, it doesnt show how good or bad a match went in general.
Thats why the MMR is a total failure, an asymettrical game is far more nuanced than Escape vs. Sacrifice.
Also going by Nightlight stats does not even take every player into account lol.
My bad. I, too, am not that good a killer - at least in terms of using their abilities. So let me rephrase - one has to be even worse than a bad killer if they're upset at someone playing with their friends.
7% is huge tho, you want less than 5% for it to be considered equal enough and preferably less than 3% difference
That is installing malware tho. Cheat clients actively inject scripts and code into the server to bypass things, you dont check if a player has that software running, you check if that software is injecting it.
So no, you cannot ban discord, because guess what? People can just use their phones, or teamspeak, or skype, or use browser based comms. Or people who play on console can have parties where open mic is the default.
You do not neuter SWF in anyway, there are 5 killers who cannot deal with SWF properly (Myers, Pig, Trapper, Freddy and Doctor, Ghostface used to be here too before his buffs, he aint strong but he can manage). Everyone else has basekit mechanics that aid the killer more against swf than solo. Especially newer killers.
If you cant manage a swf, then you "abused" some mechanics that are hypersuccesful against soloq (slugging, tunnelling, proxy camping or just 4 gen slowdown perks) but has basically no effect against SWF.
SWF isnt really much of an issue, some killers just need tiny adjustments to manage (like Doc needs an addon pass and a slightly bigger basekit TR, Myers needs a stalk rework and 2 addons basekit, Trapper needs transparent traps, not dark ones (especially since every floor has been whitened), Pig needs gen slowdown if you are wearing a mask, and Freddy needs teleportation to gens even if they have been finished). But SoloQ, SoloQ cannot handle SM, Unknown, Singu, Knight, Xeno, Twins consistently. And handle doesnt mean win, it means being able to finish 3.5 gens on average.
because at the end of the day survivor bad killer good. Survivors are OP in a lot of peoples’ heads, despite what the evidence says. You have people in this conversation saying BHVR’s information is ‘wrong’ and ‘not the full picture’ and trying to illustrate the initial point I made: survivors are OP, they/SWF needs to be nerfed, survivor bad killer good. It’s all the same brain rot.
4-Man High MMR SWF's (ie, worst case scenario) escape a grand total of 5% more often than Solo Q.
Like you said, 5% is equal enough.
You believed the escape rate was wrong. I proved it isn't. What you're saying amounts to, "It's wrong because I said so!". Say less, my guy.
39% escape rate in solo q high mmr compared to 48% escape rate 4 man swf in high mmr is not 5% more escape rate tho.
4 man swf in high mmr have a 9% higher escape rate compared to high mmr solo q.
I definitely got confused with the 43% and 48% on high mmr SWF.
Also, that does kinda prove my point.
Solo Q is so abysmally weak, but even High MMR SWF's aren't doing well.
The amount of players in high MMR is so small compared to the overall playerbase that their escape numbers are imo a poor indicator of pretty much anything. Especially 4-mans, which would be the tiniest of the tiniest groups.
In the vast majority of trials these elite players are not encountered practically at all, and those that do are also those seldom seen epic killers. When the matchmaking functions these sweats should only get these sweats.
extreme measures!! lol
Im saying you are interprating things that arent there. You take these little numbers and use them for your argument even though these little numbers dont tell the full story.
well the playerbase is far too small for that sadly.
Behavior wouldn’t be able to know who was on a team and who was not. Discord is only one option. The people could be in the same room or on a cellphone call. Ask behavior to make rules against discord user and watch the retaliation. You’re asking for something that’s impossible.
They do tell the full story, though. What you're saying is that the stats are wrong because they aren't accounting for people giving up, but I just proved that you would need a lot of people giving up to make an impact on the statistics.
People remember games in which something negative happened far more prominently than they do games in which nothing negative happened. This leads to people believing a problem is more widespread than it actually is.
First we need to make people who SWF spawn on the hook, remove their ability to use perks, injured/broken all game, and also remove their ability to run, vault windows and pallets, and complete generators.
We must banish any people who dare play with their friends.
I think you're committing a common mistake with large data sets. Just because one portion of the data set might have a reason that is not the obvious one, does not mean that is true for all portions of the data.
Why is Skull Merchant have such a high kill rate? Is she that strong? No, people tend to quit against her.
Why is Doctor so low? Is he that weak? No, probably because he's used to farm Iri shards on Asian servers.
Why does self-care look like a meta perk despite many players never seeing it? Again, Asia, where it's viewed as meta.
You need a reason to back up why the data should not be taken at the most straightforward explanation. @Kaitsja breaks down the numbers a little bit, but you would need an unreasonable level of throwing to actually impact the numbers. A few percent? Possible, but unlikely more than that.
Someone else already commented that near 10% difference, but its also honestly such a simple fix:
Whenever someone is hooked, show all survivor aura's to each other.
When holding any emote button, trigger survivor instinct(aka, killer instinct, but for survivors) onto your teammates locations. So you have a general sense where they are without needing comms.
Those changes alone should drop the difference to 5%, which isnt perfect yet, but acceptable