Coherency isn’t a buff for standing near teamworks but is funcitonally a penalty for not being near teammates.
From a normal standpoint, if you actually seriously played these games, the idea behind it makes no sense. Because you ask yourself When do players split up?
Anyone who seriously plays these games, isn’t a toxic person with a head full of toxic drivel, then the answer is that in the tide series, and in coop horde generally, players split up because of
- a basic fundamental of horde games that you need to control territory so that you have space to fall back on, this is intuitive fundamental stuff at a high level of play that in many situations where the horde is coming in from multiple direction that you instantly get as much distance from your teammates as you can so that there’s a space between your backs that you control
- a very desperate situation where it’s chaos and people are going down, hordes and elites are pushing and dragging players all over the place (and Fatshark have decided this is a moment to place a penalty upon players)
- an act of intelligent teamwork, such as 3 players dealing with a difficult situaiton, maybe a boss, a player sees a chokepoint and a horde coming through it, and it’s a possible wipe if that horde comes through the chokepoint and so they go to try and plug that chokepoint (fatshark have decided to place a penalty on this player for doing an act of intelligent teamwork like this)
- an act of self sacrifice, similar to above but more desperate
- an intelligent spilt where the team splits in two
This idea of “coherency” makes no sense on any level. If you actually play games like this and appreciate these games it is a very difficult design decision to make sense of.
But if you think of something which has really nothing to do with these games, has nothing to do with the actual experience of playing these games, has nothing to do with how these games actually work, but you step into the toxic delusional fantasy world of someone who plays these games for a few hours, has no appreciation of them, has no idea how they work, is a toxic abusive control freak and got upset that other people didn’t do what they say, and goes on a forum and discusses how that “People are running ahead!” (they mean other players aren’t doing what they tell them to, they’re upset about their lack of control over other players), and if you imagine a situation as absurd that “game designers” actually took seriously toxic nonsense such as that from those who played the game for a few hours and was naturally just toxic and reported their toxic ideas of how everything is the fault of ohter players, and then tried to come up with a solution to toxic control freaks feeling upset that other people don’t stand next to them at all times, then you’d come up with something as asinine and toxic and anti-teamwork as “coherency”.
And it’s simply so insulting and infantilisng to put such a thing in your game, even if what it was trying to encouraged was actually “teamwork” instead of encouraging some sort of braindead corner camping type of “teamwork”; a grotesque imitation of actual intelligent teamplay, why would you ‘give a buff’ (introduce a penalty) for not hugging one another? Surely the very thing itself, if it were so superior, doesn’t need a buff, and if it were the wrong way to not play in such a way then you wouldn’t put a penalty on it. It’s this very strange obnoxious sort of Nudging attitude by Fatshark, there’s something very gross and obnoxious about such a design choice.