Response to The Latest Q&A Livestream: Suggestions & Thoughts

Clerica

Hiya, BHVR! I'm a long-time player who originally played when this game first came out free on the Playstation Store, and came back around last year.

I'm not going to address any of the questions of "XYZ when?" because quite frankly, despite what the gaming community tends to say, you guys don't owe us constant updates and constant new content. I appreciate everything y'all do do. I'd rather address issues that were brought up, that you said you're working on solutions for, and hopefully make a suggestion or two that will help. I'll go in the order of the Q&A stream.

The hook struggle mechanic is a common complaint and for good reason. I have several friends who either don't play the game or have left the game because it takes away from their game experience that much. I do think a solution that would take relatively little work on your end is either switching it to "Hold Space to struggle" or "Press Space to give up". This provides such a huge benefit to the game without any sort of crazy or complicated solution, and it doesn't need to be a permanent thing, just a solution for now to placehold until a more creative and exciting solution can be putting into place. That being said, I like the idea of some sort of cinematic being put in place for second hook. Cinematics are hugely exciting and not only bring new players to the game, but bring old players back. I know I'm making a hella tall order here, but some sort of killer-customized cinematic with QTEs or decisions to make to survive second hook longer would take what is easily the worst part of the game and make it the best.

This is the main point I wanted to talk about and why I made an account specifically to come post on forums: long queue times fluctuating between killers and survivors. Have you considered having us, your players, solve the problem? You say you track all of this. Make that information available to us in a limited form. On the main screen, let us know which queue is longer: survivor or killer, and by how much. Don't give average queue times or anything; this tends to chase away players. E.G. "Oh, I'm not waiting fifteen minutes for a game, ######### that, I'll play something else." When in reality, they would wait that long when they didn't know. Instead, some sort of color-coding system. Green means queue times are very short, yellow means there's a small wait, orange means there's a longer wait, and red means incredibly long waits. I can't tell you, as someone who plays by herself as much as she plays with friends, how many times I log on not caring if I play survivor and killer, and I know there's a lot of solo players who feel the same way. I'm happy to log on, see which side needs people, and join it. Use your community to fix this problem instead of trying to fix it for them.

I think out of camp, slug, and tunnel, the most uncounterplayable one is camping. There's Borrowed Time, and that's basically it, and it doesn't work very well. A lot of times when someone has to go for a save with BT, the killer is right there. They either get pulled off before they finish the save, or they get hit before the BT'd person has a chance to move and intercept. You're right; there's a ton of perks to work against slugging and tunneling, but not camping, and I think that's the most frustrating for your player base. They want to feel that there's a way to counterplay a toxic playstyle. Whether that comes in the form of harsher score penalties for staying near hook for killers or new and creative perks to counterplay camping, is up to you.

I understand the frustration of sitting in queue for a long time, losing an offering, and getting kicked out of a game, not only without any rewards, but with lost offerings. When this happens in other games, those people are typically reimbursed what they've lost (offerings in this game), and they are put in the FRONT of the queue, meaning they get back into a lobby very quickly instead of having to wait the queue time all over again. I would love to see this implemented; people aren't getting undeserved rewards, but they also don't feel punished for something that isn't their fault.

Since you've asked for feedback on the Object of Obsession perk, I'll give it: you've taken it from a survivor harassing perk to a killer harassing perk, and that doesn't solve anything. I love the idea of this perk, but its implementation is lacking. The first part is a perfect change: if they see you, you see them. I hope this has some sort of audio notification. You didn't include for how long the Killer's aura becomes revealed to you. Is it the same amount of time they see you? I'm not sure that's entirely fair; the Killer knows they will see your aura and will look, whereas the survivor has to look around after reacting to it going off. I also think 40/35/30 is way too short. I will not have time to hide and/or get something done, before I'm revealed to them again. This makes it easy for the Killer to harass one person the whole game, tunneling and whatnot, and you said earlier in the stream that we aren't encouraging that, right? I think 60/55/50 would be a lot still, but significantly better.

In other games where grinding to have the same things as players that have played more or been here longer, there's a sort of handicap for new players where they are given things for reaching a milestone. This could be in the form of a random perk they do not have unlocked (similar to how it would be unlocked from the Shrine of Secrets) and given at certain player levels (becoming more and more infrequent as they level up) or given when they prestige someone (it would make prestiging more worth it), or even given when they accomplish something great like four iridescents in a game. Just something to delay the content overload scaring off new players that don't believe they have a chance in hell of ever making it to a place where they can compete.

That's all for my TED talk. Thanks for the stream. See ya in the Fog.

<3, Erica