Preventing Survivors From Unhooking You

Bastius123

So in the hopes of keeping this civil I won't even bother posting a tirade on how frustrating this game can be, and it doesn't matter which hole I'd love to shove a rusty shovel into when it comes to some players. Instead, I'll focus on more straightforward facts. More specifically, the facts that losing without any control over your loss is not only frustrating but an amazing reason to stop playing completely.

As a survivor, if you are injured and somebody is trying to heal you there is the option to prevent them from healing you. This allows you, for instance, to escape if you see a killer approaching while your teammate obliviously attempts to heal you. Technically speaking you are certainly able to prevent your ally from getting their BP for healing you but ultimately it grants you, the player, the ability to have some impact on your fate. Without this, you could end up being forced to die by a teammate while leaving you robbed of any agency. Therefore this is a good thing.

As a survivor, if you have been downed and somebody is trying to help you recover there is an option to prevent them from helping you get up. This allows you, for instance, to relocate yourself before another survivor attempts to get you up. Most certainly you're impeding their ability to immediately gather points from you, but in exchange you're given some control of the round and you're granted the ability to make decisions relating to whether or not you want to get up with the killer immediately coming up to you. Again, this grants you some degree of agency in your play and is thus a good thing.

Suddenly when we begin to discuss a player on the hook the tune very quickly changes. Why is it not possible to prevent a player from unhooking you when there's a killer immediately in front of the hook. Common arguments I've heard are related to stopping players from getting Deliverance, robbing players of blood points and being abuseable by those looking to suicide. In regards to preventing players for triggering Deliverance, if you go down immediately after getting unhooked then you aren't going to receive Deliverance anyways. Another thing to remember is other survivors are physical objects too and they aren't mind readers, so even if you think they should have been able to get away it doesn't necessarily mean that they could. Perhaps they didn't see the path you wanted, perhaps you were body blocking them when you unhooked them. Either way, when push comes to shove if a survivor feels they'll go down then why shouldn't they have the option to prevent their immediate death just because another player is fishing for Deliverance? In regards to the blood points issue, I point to the past issues. I've had matches where a killer had Nurse's Calling and teammates would constantly try to heal with little to no care. By preventing them to heal they had been robbed of Blood Points there too, but the trade off is that a player can control whether or not they're involved in unnecessary risks. Again, the more agency you have as a player the better. As for the idea that trolls would use it to get themselves killed, I again point to the other two states where players can spam cancel to prevent teammates from assisting them.

Every discussion I've seen on this topic often devolves into wishing that players could mark the killer while on the hook, or allow them to somehow share information with others for free. While the idea is appealing it's ultimately not that balanced, and I'm not advocating for kindred to be some built-in perk for all survivors for even a moment. Furthermore, as much as I hate hook camping killers and I find them to be a cancer that is both killing low ranks and going completely unpunished (I've already had three friends quit this game and even I've uninstalled myself a couple times over Bubbah + Insidious + Basement or similar boring/frustrating BS) but this isn't even an argument against killers camping the hook. The issue is purely in regards to whether or not a player should be granted a slightly greater degree of agency in how the round unfolds. Is there any reason whatsoever that a survivor on the hook, and only on the hook, suddenly is put into a situation where they can truly have no control over what they do? Is there any particular reason that allowing them to prevent being unhooked in completely disadvantageous situations is treated like such a tall request? If so, is there nothing that can be done to redress the situation? Again, while I don't want players to magically gain Kindred or Borrowed Time to address clueless players doing nothing but granting extra points to the killer I also don't like wasting five minutes of my time because others decided it was my time to die with nothing that I could do to prevent it. By the way, this only got more frustrating ever since the missions system was added. Between fellow survivors prematurely unhooking and killers opting to sit and watch you die from your first hooking I'm sick of spending money on a game that takes joy in forcing you to not play it.

tl;dr You can prevent others from healing you, you can prevent others from picking you up, why on earth can another survivor arbitrarily get you killed?

Bastius123

So it's an oversight then?