Comments

• Wow, I didn't expect such a negative reaction to something I've kinda felt was common sense, and also seems to have been recommended by some of DbD's biggest streamers including those who main killer…

  I guess I'll take these in order:

  • You can't show perks in lobby, people will dodge what they don't like
    • I think this risk is massively overblown for the benefit it could provide. We're in a game space where survivors DC in the first 60 seconds of a game because a teammate does a totem or chest instead of hopping on gens or if a teammate had No Mither. Maybe if they could see that said person had inner strength or hardened they wouldn't be so eager to dip - and if seeing that a person had no mither in the lobby would make people dodge, that's better than getting all the way into a match to have them DC. I see no reason not to at least TRY showing perks in lobbies and see if it truly has the horrible effect you're claiming it would or if it actually improves people DCing during matches.
  • Blindness/The Third Seal
    • Uhh… So Ultimate Weapon, Mindbreaker, and Septic Touch don't exist? Not to mention that MOST killers have a blindness add-on… And I mean, Knock Out /does/ still give blindness (to the person who got knocked down), and claiming that the status effect it gives other teammates is totally distinct from blindness because it has a 16-meter grace range seems disingenuous.
    • The truth as I see it is that very few people use blindness PRECISELY BECAUSE most survivors groups are SWF. That's not to say they're all 4-mans, it's not to say they're all OP, it's not to say they're too strong - it's just to say that in the case of blindness, nobody uses it because it, specifically, is useless against most teams. Even if they're not comp - calling out "I'm blind" or "I'm by shack" is NOT competitive. It's 12 year olds playing together with 30 hours in the game stuff. I NEVER said that we should balance the game around people in 4-man sweat lodges.
    • Nevertheless - I only play solo queue and killer, and my main killer is Ghost Face and I'm getting close to P100ing him and Dredge: I /know/ that plenty of killers struggle, especially against SWF's. Here's the thing though: I'm of the firm opinion that the reason that most of the killers I like can't be buffed is BECAUSE they're already so oppressive vs teams without information. I want to try and get every survivor team to have access to ROUGHLY the same information because otherwise certain powers, effects, perks, etc (much like blindness) will be too oppressive to be buffed and simultaneously too weak for most people to use.
  • Information for free
    • Look, being able to see your teammates perks, status effects, whether they're in terror radius, and whether they intend to go for the save or stay working on gens is NOT too much information. It's information that ANY SWF - again, not a competitive group, just a small group of friends who play the game for fun and suck at looping - will have access to. As long as the gap between SWF info and Solo Queue info is so wide, certain killers, powers, add-ons, and perks won't be able to receive the buffs and changes they need to be effective enough against a potential SWF group to be useful. Again, look at blindness: So many add-ons to use, NONE get picked. Blindness is pretty strong - I recommend when you see a lobby in which survivors slowly trickle in so you can be reasonably certain you have at least a couple solo queuers, run a shaman build and throw in the third seal instead of devour hope. Then try again when you think you have a 3-man and solo or 2 groups of 2. I bet even though it's very unlikely that those groups are super professionals you'll see a big difference in how much of a disruption blindness causes.
    • DbD was originally created with the ability to play with friends explicitly EXCLUDED from its design. As in during the intiial days they said they would not implement a 'SWF'-type feature because it would break the balance of the game. Everyone agreed. Then they added it anyways because it helps the game have longevity and we can all agree that's a good thing: The game needed to permit SWF if it wanted to stay relevant. All I'm asking is that we now acknowledge that we're in a game where SWF is more frequent than having 4 solo queuers, and we try to level the playing field between solo queue and SWF so that we can balance the game for all groups.
    • A final thought here: Information isn't going to make you better at chase, and chase is the main bit of skill expression as survivor in DbD. Giving survivors more information isn't going to stop the Sable from running straight ahead without looking backwards, getting cut off, and going down in 30 seconds. What information WILL do is help to ensure that if the rest of the team does poorly, it's not because they all went for the save because nobody knew if someone else was closer, or because they expected David to go for the save because they couldn't tell that even though he wasn't technically in chase he was still avoiding the killer within terror radius, etc. They'll be able to make effective decisions. It doesn't mean they WILL make effective decisions, but it at least gives more opportunity for skill expression and coordination. I want killer buffs - I especially want ghost face and dredge buffs - but that doesn't mean "anything that hinders survivors from doing well is good for killers". If you, like me, play weaker M1 killers then you should want solo queue and SWF to be made as close to equal as possible so that the devs don't see "Oh well your kill rate is high enough so we don't need to buff you" when really it's that you almost always kill solo queuers and almost always lose to any SWF (which is an exaggeration trying to make a point - killers should be good or bad against both SQ and SWF as equally as possible so that they can be buffed or nerfed accordingly).
  • Chat Wheel Vs Immersion
    • Really? Even if it were just symbols that popped up next to someone's portrait just like the current symbols for generator/totem/chest/etc? It would ruin your immersion more than the Castlevanie theme playing aginst Dracula, Billy's ridiculous 'BLARGH', the fact that the xenomorph is literally chasing you around a trash can and can't catch up, the fact that pyramid head is stunned because a block of wood was thrown on his head or was blinded through his helmet by a flashlight, chucky's constant foul-mouthed trash talk, teabagging and flashlight-blinding killers to make them look ridiculous, and a million other immersion-breaking features? I'm sorry, even if this really would be the straw that breaks the camel's back for your immersion in particular, I genuinely think it's for the benefit of the game's overall health, balance, and longevity.
  • Complicated Killers
    • On the one hand I agree - I certainly don't find Pinhead complicated. But I also have several thousand hours in the game, I play a lot of survivor as well as every killer (except ghoul), I watch streamers play and give commentary, I watch youtube guides on fun/meta builds, I read reddit threads, I try out PTB's, I know what every perk in the game does, if the devs released something that was complicated for players like myself (and presumably yourself as well), it would totally alienate newer players. That doesn't change the fact that Cenobite has never dropped below a 53% kill rate, and if you do play mostly solo queue (just like I do) then you MUST have noticed that solo queue groups struggle mightily in figuring out when/who should go for the box. That DOES NOT MEAN every solo queue group struggles against pinhead - there's more to him than just going for the box - it means that solo queue groups are going to have more instances where multiple people unnecessarily go for the box and stop working on gens or going for the unhook, AND they have more times when due to poor communication nobody goes for the box until it's too late. This isn't because solo queue teammates are bad - it's just obviously going to happen when you can't communicate. Level the playing field so that we can tell if Pinhead is winning because he's in a good spot or if he's winning because solo queue players can't coordinate.

  I also exclusively play solo queue as survivor, and I'm sorry to say but if you truly disagree with every point I've made then I firmly believe that either 1) You're misunderstanding what I want here or 2) You're lying.

  If it's the former, let me be super clear: I don't want these buffs to happen so that survivor generally gets stronger. Survivor is already quite strong and I hope killers, especially my dear Ghost Face and Dredge - get changes and buffs to compensate. I want these changes because as long as solo queue has limited access to information then certain types of killer powers, mechanics, status effects, and perks cannot be buffed because they're already too strong against teams with limited information, but also won't be used because they're too weak vs the average group.

  I will once again bring up blindness:

  We both agree that it's weak, hence why nobody picks it. I hope we both agree that it can't really be buffed - IE, you can't make it stop survivors from seeing the bubble when another survivor is hooked - STRICTLY BECAUSE then it would be too strong against teams that can't communicate through blindness. IF we lived in a hypothetical world where all survivors had voice chat, then even nooby survivors would easily counterplay blindness, and would do so automatically because it's just very natural to ask "Hey, can you pick me up" and then to respond "I can't see you" "Oh, I'm behind you near shack" and so on. So it's too weak for most killers to run against msot groups, but too strong to be buffed against other groups. THAT'S the thing I'm trying to avoid.

  SWF simply /is/ stronger than solo queue. It's not a subjective opinion, and it's not always by a tremendous amount, but one side has the opportunity to provide information to their team and the other side does not. Until that gap is lessened, some things are going to be super weak against SWF and super strong against Solo Queuers, and because most people play SWF, those things are always going to have a high chance of being very unsatisfying to play with or against.

  in Survivor HUD Update For Solo Queue? Comment by Luon August 21, 2025