What if we removed hook timers?
First of all, this is not a suggestion but more of an idea for discussion.
There is already a mechanic that automatically kills survivors if everyone else is on a hook or dead. So what if the hook timers were removed all together. Survivors would still die after 3 hooks. There would still be a hurry to unhook because if you leave a teammate on a hook long enough for the killer to hook someone else, the killer would still be on a huge advantage because of 2 survivors being completely blocked from doing anything. If a survivor was on a hook when everyone else escaped they would die, but that already is the case, you can't even use Deliverance as the last survivor at the moment.
Only problem I can think of is if a survivor is left at a hook for the whole game, it would get very boring for them, but that could be solved by giving the survivor an option to kill themselves after staying on the hook for long enough.
By doing this camping and suiciding on hook prematurely would be completely gone without any big downsides I can think of.
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The devs tried a mechanic a while back where the first hook state lasted forever. It was determined that survivors were not pressured to unhook since their teammates would not die, while the hooked survivors were bored out of their skulls because they were doing nothing for long stretches of time. Since this is essentially the same idea, just "amped up" by making every hook state last forever, I don't see it working.
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Can you give me a source, I would like to see it. In the current state of the game I don't believe there wouldn't be pressure to unhook since the killer can still hook another survivor in the meanwhile. This makes it a huge risk because at that point if he slugged 1 other survivor and found the last one the game would be basically over.
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It was one of the first PTBs, I'm not sure which at this point.
The killer was able to hook another survivor back then as well, there was nothing preventing them from doing so.
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Well I would need to see it to judge it but the game is MUCH different right now than it was a few years ago. Also it takes people a month or two to even get used to a new killer, a change like this would take even longer than that to test properly. If you can think of any specific problems about it it would be nice to hear them though.
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Your idea removes the pressure on survivors to do anything but eoither rush gens or get chased if found.
Without the timer, theres no pressure on survivors to do risky things like going for an unhook.
Additionally, depending on how many gens get done before a rescue, or the average hanging time, hook suicides might even become more prevalent. They cant wait 45 seconds on a hook, why'd they be okay with hanging even longer?
This idea can probably be spun to be a huge buff for swf compared to solo. With only voicecomms giving certainity that you'd be rescued at all.
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This can’t work for many reasons but one of the most impactful being the fact 12 hook games aren’t possible anymore. This would set killers up to lose almost every game if not every game. Gen rushing would become massive if they never have to save their teammate until end game.
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If survivors decide to leave a survivor on a hook to do gens yes, gens would fly by, but if another survivor goes down and gets hooked now neither of the survivors can do gens because if one of them goes down the game may end. It would be a big risk.
If you are talking about 1 person being hooked and 2 people rushing the gens while the last guy runs the killer around, even then unhooking early would be better since gens would get done faster. There are very few cases where leaving a guy on hook and temporarily doing a 3v1 is the better choice.
That doesn't change at all with this, no killer relies on survivors being potatoes and leaving their teammates on hooks to get hook stages. You could still win games by slugging, you could still win games by hooking all survivors regardless of their stage, those wouldn't be affected at all.
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So the best solution is force a 4 hook game?
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You realize even right now the only way to not have to get 12 hooks is to hook all remaining survivors at once right? It's the same deal, nothing changes. I'm not proposing forcing the killer or the survivors to do anything. If survivors unhook normally nothing changes, if they don't unhook the killer may finish the game in 4 hooks and they would be doing a 3v1/2v1 half the game, so there is still pressure to unhook. This would only remove strategies like hook camping, suicide on hook to give hatch... both of which I believe are unhealthy for the game.
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Besides the other issues players mentioned, another problem could be if one "Bait" player with Object Of Obsession lets himself get hooked. Since he never advances hook state he can literally sit there calling out the killer's position for the rest of the team while everyone else rushes gens. Once the last gen is popped they can go back and unhook him so he'll heal from Adrenaline.
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Imagine how many broken keyboards and mouses would be there with infinite struggle phase.
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It most likely was the first PGE in September of 2016 "Slowed-down the Entity progression on the Hook if the Killer remained within a certain proximity of it."
I went over this issue a few days ago in this thread: https://bit.ly/3dh5lhA.
This was what I proposed: Entity's Displeasure: Hooked Survivors while within your terror radius and 10m of you have reduced death progression shortly after being hooked, while you're not in chase. Entity's Displeasure Is deactivated upon entering a chase, Entity's Displeasure will reactivate after spending a total of 10 seconds near a hooked survivor after exiting a chase. Entity's Displeasure is not in effect when two or more survivors are on hook or during End-Game Collapse.
The issue with removing hook timers comes down to pressure on the survivors. Killers need to be able to force survivors into lose-lose scenarios in order to disrupt and waste their time. Having no death progression on hook takes that way, as now at any time, when it's convenient, Survivors can just find the hooked man. Your proposal would probably increase tunneling more than anything, as now the first hooked survivor would become the priority. If you want to reduce camping overall, you'll have to make blatant camping sub-optimal to the point that it's not worth doing for 99% of killers. Additionally, as I have also stated in that thread, camped survivors need to be earning Altruism and Objective points while on hook (Altruism for distracting the killer, objectives for generators completed). That would at the minimum make being camped not feel like a complete waste of the Survivors time.
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