Game Balance vs Solo Queue
I've been playing for roughly five years now. The majority of that has been spent playing solo survivor. Unlike many people, I don't think the game is horribly balanced, despite how miserable solo queue is. I've seen enough gameplay from solid survivor teams to know that solo queue is not remotely representative of an optimal match.
To be clear, I don't blame survivors for struggling though. The solo queue experience is engineered in a way that pushes survivors into making mistakes, and makes it very challenging to recover when things start to snowball.
This is where I feel like the issue with the game's balance comes in. Survivors have historically had very strong perks, and maps that mostly favoured them. This gave the role of survivor some redundancy, meaning that when the average survivor team struggled, they had things to fall back on.
But you guys have slowly balanced the game around higher level survivor play, which isn't necessarily a bad choice. As killers at higher MMR also deserve a fair match. But as you have removed more and more redundancy from the survivor role, playing in solo queue has become more and more gruelling. If making a mistake is punishing for a strong survivor team, what does that do to a solo queue team?
I don't judge you guys for not being able to perfectly balance the game. If the game is balanced for the average solo queue match, killers at high MMR will have a miserable time. If the game is balanced for high level play, the average survivor experience is going to feel terrible.
But solo queue needs more attention than it's getting. Solo survivors have been slowly drip fed a meal of watered down perks, all whilst the kinds of killers that a solo team is likely to encounter have been getting basekit buffs, in an attempt to make those killers more threatening at high levels of play. It's no wonder that so many survivors are feeling burnt out at this point.
There should have been a basekit Kindred PTB months ago. It's such a small thing, that could benefit solo, and it's not even been tested yet, despite so many requests being made for it.
I'm not against buffing weaker killers, I'm all for it. But solo play needs just as much focus as weaker killlers do. The gap between a coordinated survivor team and the average solo team is getting bigger as time passes. That needs to be addressed before solo burn out reaches critical mass.
That's all I wanted to say on the matter. I wish you luck climbing this wall of text.
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